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Online Diaries
"Some teenagers post accounts of their drunken escapades, forgetting that their parents could easily read all about it."
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By Natalie Streiter
Recently, the Weblogging or "Blogging" movement on the internet has exploded into the mainstream. With sites like MySpace, Facebook, Xanga and LiveJournal, millions of people are publically posting personal stories, replacing the former, more private type of diary or journal keeping. Youth Radio's Natalie Streiter tells us why she thinks people should be more cautious when casting the personal into the public eye.
The classic vision of a diary is a small book kept under lock and key that contains a person's secrets. Nowadays, teens have chosen to trade in the keys and locks for publicly viewed internet pages. You don't need to go snooping through your older sister's room to find her hidden journal anymore. All you have to do is log onto the internet. Online journal communities such as LiveJournal, MySpace, and Xanga now have millions of users logging on every day to report to their loyal readers: what they had for breakfast, or what that hot guy at the local coffee shop said that was so funny.
I have found online journaling as a great way to keep up with friends who have gone off to college. The problem is that these sites are public. Some teenagers post accounts of their drunken escapades, forgetting that their parents could easily read all about it. Parents are also able to read about teen's sex lives, their drug use, or whatever else teens feel the need to tell the unknown masses with internet access.
I think that teenagers should practice a little more discretion when talking about their personal lives, especially when the information they reveal online can stay in cyberspace forever. I doubt they really want their kids to read about their exploits years from now.
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