Vast Network or Small World?
While reading, I found this posting about Blogging v. Journaling where Will talks about the fact that Journaling on Xanga like teenagers do is not blogging with thoughts and ideas and possibilities and links and citations. Agreed. (But I still think there is value in Journaling. It gives people the opportunity to think and be introspective and write -- even just freewriting. But there are definately hazards involved with teenagers journaling about their entire lives on the internet. And those hazards tend to give blogging in general a bad name. That's bad.)

The most facinating thing to me was reading the article that he links to.

I click on it and see the word Wichita. Oh Great. Bad news from Kansas. Only to realize that not only is this place where I used to live but one of the schools I used to go to on a weekly basis to have lunch with the kids from my church and volunteer in the library. And another school they mentioned is one I subbed at.

The article is scary. It talks about teens putting everything out there on the internet. If I was a parent reading that I would say no way. And thats too bad. Because there are more uses for all blogs than just serving as an online diary. And blogging shouldn't get a bad name (and all blogging tools should not be blocked by school computers) because of some potential bad uses.

At one point in the article, a teen said that "parents should respect boundaries." Do these teens realize how open and out there the internet is? It is there where everyone can see it.

This is how it happens:
Original Xanga posts ---> Bloggers/Journalers Discussed in Newspaper Article ---> New Jersey Educator and Blogger Reads Newspaper Article ---> Blogger and Future Educator who used to live in Kansas and now lives in Texas reads blog post of New Jersey Educator and reads Newspaper Article.

And knowing who I know in Kansas it would take me no time to find out more. So, teens, these things can travel the US. Yes, the "Internet is an amazingly vast network." But its also a very small world.
- posted by Alicia @ 1:22 PM