Insights into teen social networking

By Wesley Fryer On March 9, 2008 · · 4 Comments

Kudos to Kristin Hokanson for her recent post “RE Social Network Sites-An Open Letter to the Superintendent” and the out-of-blogosphere advocacy she is leading and sharing. I need to do some offline writing of letters to the editor and our local superintendent, following the lead and example of Kristin.

In her post, she linked to this excellent video on YouTube by Vanessa Van Petten titled “For Parents: Why do Teens Use Social Networking Sites?”

The author of this video writes the blog “Teens Today with Vanessa Van Petten: Exposing the Net Generation… A Gen Y Perspective on Teens and Parents” and is the author of the book “You’re Grounded!: How to Stop Fighting and Make the Teenage Years Easier.” It’s good to hear a Gen Y perspective like this on the benefits and value of social networking. I’ve added this to my blog page of “Videos for Professional Development” under the social networking category, and at the bottom of my resource wiki page for safe digital social networking.

Thanks to Charlene Chausis for alerting me to the original letter which the superintendent in Kristin’s school district sent home to parents as well as Kristin’s excellent response.

I wish I was also presenting at COSN tomorrow on social networking, but I’m glad to see several others are. It will be interesting to see what they have to say. Hopefully they’ll present a balanced view, and include perspectives like that of Vanessa in the above video.

Technorati Tags:
youtube, myspace, socialnetworking, teen, teens, networking, safety, internet, internetsafety

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes' free newsletter. Check out Wes' video tutorial library, "Playing with Media." Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..

4 Responses to Insights into teen social networking

Kristin Hokanson says:

March 10, 2008 at 4:33 am

Wes-
Am looking forward to following your CoSN experience, please let us know if there are any sessions being ustreamed or live blogged if for nothing else, to add to our resource banks! While many think I am overreacting citing that after all kids don’t belong on MySpace at school.. I think that there are many important lessons about “working on line” that we–the over 30s learned on the job and our kids will miss if the only experience they have in these virtual environments is outside of school in often unsupervised situations. Enjoy the conference!
Wesley Fryer says:

March 10, 2008 at 5:13 am

I am going to Ustream both my sessions this afternoon (bandwidth and connectivity permitting. I will BMOB just in case so chances are good I’ll be able to do this. I’ll announce on Twitter prior to the start. My 10 year old son is going to be my production engineer and videographer again, as he was yesterday. 🙂
Vanessa Van Petten says:

March 11, 2008 at 10:43 pm

Hi!

Thanks for posting my video, I have tons of articles about why we (teens) use social networks and how parents should approach the subject to keep us safe! Here is one of the articles:
http://vanessavanpetten.com/2008/02/13/what-are-kids-doing-on-facebook-myspace-and-other-social-networking-sites/
Inah, Turning Winds says:

March 28, 2011 at 8:38 am

Very informative video. I’m a parent, so I guess you can say that sometimes I really do question why my teen is so engrossed with these social networking sites. Now I do know some of the valid reasons for it, and I’m thankful that you finally told us in behalf of most teens. Although honestly, even if I trust my teen about being responsible online, I still often remind her to be careful about what she posts online and even checks if she does listen. It’s still best I think to limit their internet use, until they’re old enough to handle their social networking accounts. Thanks for the share.