Today's SHOCKING Blog Facts About Teens and Blogs

Hi, folks -- hope you had a pleasant and/or productive long holiday weekend. Right now, I'm up to my eyeballs on stuff that I have to catch up on, but I wanted to mention today's shocking blog fact, brought to you by the Washington Post:

Not only may some teenage bloggers reveal too much personal information when they blog -- they may also exaggerate when they blog.

This juicy tidbit comes in the context of an article about how some DC-area schools are starting to get wise to teen blogging, and how they're starting to apply restrictions on blogging. [free registration required, use BugMeNot.com if you need to]

Now, this is very much not a new thing -- just about every week, you'll see a news article about how some young person has gotten into trouble because of his or her interactions on a teen-oriented blog or social networking site like Facebook or MySpace.

And I've also written previously about how some schools have tried to ban blogging.

From the Post article:

* Officials were "shocked and amazed" to see how many students use Facebook (not new)
* Beyond the regular fears of cyberstalking and sexual predators, parents and administrators are concerned how college admissions officers and future employers will react after reading about some blogged exploits (not new)
* Sidwell Friends School in DC (also known as Chelsea Clinton's alma mater) has prohibited students from using their school e-mail address to sign up for Facebook. (This is new. Facebook, the student social networking site, requires the use of a school .edu e-mail address to sign up -- they also recently launched a version of the site specifically for high school students.)

The article primarily focuses on the steps being taken at tony private prep schools like Sidwell, Barrie and Georgetown Day, though also mentions Fairfax and Arlington County public schools.

Now, the article also goes into some of the motivations for teens to blog (they're not all that different from the reasons why anyone would have a personal blog), as well as some of the pressures bloggers face to try to be interesting or outrageous when they blog -- either to keep up with their peers, or just to get noticed. Call it image control, if you will:

"Experts, and teenagers themselves, say that much of what is on the sites is made up.

Teenagers often act online in ways they wouldn't off-line -- bullying each other, posing in underwear, using foul language or sporting guns and Ku Klux Klan hoods.

Increasingly, many teenagers feel pressured to show themselves doing more risque things, even if they are not actually doing them. Aftab cited an example of girls who had blogged about weekends of drinking and debauchery, while in reality they were coloring with their younger siblings or watching old movies with Grandma.

"Even if you weren't out drunk and partying on the weekend, you have to pretend you were," [Parry Aftab of Wiredsafety.org] said. "Maybe parents should be relieved."

Personally, I wouldn't rely on this - it kind of ranks up there with "That's not mine, I was just holding it for someone else," but it does add a level of plausible deniability.

Thanks -- Joe