Since I spend about 90 minutes a week with a large group of high-school students, I get to spend time picking their brains about the ins and outs of culture and the vast teenage wasteland. Even with myspace being “so wicked awesome” and pervasive, I’d guess that 50% of the high-schoolers I know don’t even use the Internet. At all.
This is astounding to me. We’re not talking about nonagenarian Luddites. I’ve been out of high school for nine years now. I am and early adopter (read: freaky nerd boy), but I used the internet all four years. This is the mid-nineties we’re talking about. I’m dumbfounded.
I imagine that this is a pretty good representation of the general population (the number of teenagers on the ‘net certainly isn’t any lower than the rest of people). I like numbered observations lately, so here we go.
- If you don’t have an email address right now, there’s an issue. I know you aren’t reading this if you don’t have an email address though (about 30% of my high-schoolers have email addresses).
- If you don’t have a website right now, you’re slowly being left behind (100% of my teenagers who use the web have a website – as long as you count their MySpace profile).
- The transparent nature of the web is dangerously beautiful. Parents need to be concerned. Parents need to visit the websites of their kids. Parents need to build their own websites that are appropriate, responsible, and that their friends and colleagues know about. So do you.
- Go do it now. You can do it for free. I don’t care if it’s MySpace, Squidoo, Blogger, or WordPress.
No, really. Go do it now. There’s a strong chance that every last soul reading this article has a site (of some sort). Print it and give it to your siteless friends.