"That guy who sits across from you every day in class is so cute."
"Oh I know. He's single, did you know? He's a junior and he lives off campus. He's a psych major and he listens to the same music as me."
"You've talked to him?"
"No. I Facebooked him. We have, like, four friends in common."
Sound like a familiar conversation?
Though some college students dub Facebook "sketchy" because of the ease with which it allows other students to access their personal information, many students find Facebook's capabilities useful.
"You can find out who's in your classes or shares interests with you. It's also a good way to keep in touch," junior Elad Cohen said.
College students like Cohen aren't the only individuals who find sites like Facebook useful: Online social networking sites have also attracted high-school and junior-high-school students.
And Facebook isn't the only site that furthers the online social networking phenomenon: Sites like Friendster and MySpace provide the same features as Facebook, but are available for those outside college communities.
"It's addicting," said Carmen Alingod, a 17-year-old high school junior from San Antonio, Texas. An avid user of MySpace, Friendster and the high-school version of Facebook (yes, it exists), she said that the ability to "connect" with others on such sites is what attracted her to them.
Alingod shrugged off concerns about the privacy issues raised by the sites, pointing out that "friend" requests from strangers can be easily denied. She said that it's "interesting" to find out more about friends' friends through their profiles.
"I don't think we'll ever grow out of it," Carmen's friend Inez Saenz added. While social networking sites may be just a passing fad for some, they are a generation-defining necessity among some sectors of the teenage crowd: "It was under maintenance earlier today and we got mad," the girls laughed.
Susan Alingod, Carmen's mother, is also the mother of a 13-year-old son. She said that she, "like most parents," was initially "scared" for her children because some social network site users only use pseudonyms to communicate. On such sites, neither she nor her kids actually know with whom they are
interacting.
"As a parent, there's only so much I can do," she said. "I can't monitor them 24 hours a day. At some point, I just have to let them go and hope they're not going too far."
But how far is too far? Facebook extended its site to high school students, and teenagers as young as 14 can sign up for a MySpace account. But children younger than 14 have signed up for the site by saying that they are older.
"My friends and I just said that we were 14, even though we're not, so we could get on MySpace," said 13-year-old Maggie Henry of Brooklyn, New York. "The only reason I use it is because I have a lot of friends who I would have otherwise fallen out of touch with who use it."
These abuses raise the question of whether or not these sites - which give often unsuspecting kids the ability to both share information and connect with virtually the entire online community - are fundamentally dangerous for children.
"Sites like that are inherent in the Internet. Kids can also be stalked through message boards, chat rooms or AOL profiles," sophomore Dara Kanowitz said.
Tufts Associate Sociology Professor Paula Aymer said that it is "almost impossible" to prevent children from getting online. "There are responsibilities that societies have. But how can you manage the Internet?" she asked.
Though social networking sites caution users against sharing personal information, many of their young followers do so anyway in the hopes of expanding their social network - or simply for curiosity's sake.
Dangerous ramifications for naive adolescents became evident last fall when a young Virginia teenager named Taylor Behl was murdered by a man she was presumed to have met through MySpace.
Although parents have long been able to set tracking devices on their computers, today's youth have found several ways to get around them by merely using their "approved" social network. Additionally, there are MySpace groups that cater to such behavior as anorexia, bulimia and self-mutilation.
However, with 43 million members, it is doubtful that MySpace's popularity will wane anytime soon. In fact, the site was just acquired by media giant NewsCorp, a business venture that, as MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe said in a recent CNN interview, "will help us expand more quickly around the world."
DeWolfe expressed his intent that his site would continue to be "user-friendly," pointing out some of its benefits in addition to its "trendiness." A paraplegic user named Jesse Billauer uses the site to raise funds for his charity foundation, and many users logged into the site to keep in touch during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
