Having just successfully reassured another group of parents that the internet won't eat their young, listening to CNN's clueless American Morning anchor attempt to pin this one on MySpace and YouTube really irritated me. She basically asked the victim's mother if MySpace would now be persona non grata at home,...

I've been noodling over yesterday's MySpace announcement since, well, yesterday. While I applaud any effort to make the site safer for teens, there is an aspect of all this that feels forced. Whenever industry reacts to the threat of legislation or regulation, vs. being proactive early on, the measures...

I read Jon Fine's column about the insane growth of TMZ and couldn't help but ponder what this expanding obsession with celebrity screw ups means to youth culture. According to the article, "In September, TMZ.com notched 10.5 million unique U.S. visitors, dwarfing its entertainment-news rivals. In fact, the site,...

Dove is back with its latest "Campaign for Real Beauty" film Onslaught and a new press release about a new initiative attempting to address the fallout of all this beauty advertising to women and girls. From their...

Anyone who doesn't know who Vanessa Hudgens is, does not have a tween in their lives or is not tuned into pop culture. She's the female star of Disney's hugely popular High School Musical franchise, and last week,...

I grew up in Nashville, TN. Nashville is not the "deep south," and it has become much more diverse since the 80s with different immigrant populations settling in the area, but I still remember that distinctive form of southern racism. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of racism to go...

Nothing taps into the spirit of youth rebellion more than when a corporation uses its power (and army of lawyers) to sue a young person. Whether the company is technically right or wrong, the fact that they are suing "the little guy" inherently paints them in a negative light. I've...

I began my career in youth media working at a non-profit magazine for girls called Teen Voices in Boston, MA. In addition to publishing the magazine, we ran youth programs for at-risk low income girls. This was right around the time MTV's Real World was going to film in...

Yesterday a production assistant for a national talk show got in touch to ask if I would be interested in talking about teen pro-ana or mia sites. It turned out they changed the topic (to "Rainbow parties" and kids who make "cheese" by mixing Tylenol PM and heroin),...

My first roommate at Antioch College really missed her best friend. She missed her so much she would make tape recordings talking about her day and mail them back home to Minnesota or one of the M states. This was in addition to constantly hogging the payphone in the dorm...

I know I'm about to sound like the stereotypical Gen Xer when I say you can learn from menial labor. I've written about this on Ypulse before, how the hot sweaty days I spent making bagels at 15 were character building. The latest labor statistics are showing that less...

MySpace discovered 29,000 registered sex offenders on its service and has deleted them. This is every parent's worst fear about the service -- that it is teeming with predators looking to make contact with the kids and teens who have profiles. The good news is that MySpace has been...

I recently co-authored a white paper for a think tank called New Paradigm tackling the common perceptions or misperceptions of "The Net Generation," i.e. young people 13-20. One of characterizations we examined was that "they don't read newspapers and are focused on their own myopic concerns and culture, and...

Virtual worlds used to be the stuff of science fiction. They came into being with video games and have now gone mainstream so even non-gamers can party in MTV's virtual Laguna Beach or buy real estate in Second Life. For tweens and teens, all the world's an igloo...

Teens have always experimented with drugs without their parents' knowledge -- at a park, in a car or at a party. Sometimes even at home, right under their noses. Because this generation of teenagers has grown up chronicling their lives online, and because the internet reflects what teens have always...

Yesterday afternoon I received an email telling me Antioch College would be closing because of financial difficulties but that it planned to try and reopen an undergraduate program in 2012. My first thought was guilt. I thought about the alumni mail asking for money I recycled or the phone...

If Boomers had the internet and documented the Summer of Love with photos of "loving the one you're with" or blog posts about experimenting with psychedelics, would they have been hired?

That's the crux of this Wall Street Journal article about the reality of this generation living their...

I remember watching the VH1 "documentary" on the connection between rock, rap and porn more than a few years ago -- the program showed how porn stars were beginning to appear in mainstream music videos. This trend has been continuing for the past several years and has been well...

Will having Obama or Rudy or Hilary as your friend on MySpace or Facebook or monitoring John Edwards Twitter feed make young people more likely to vote? This is really the first big "election 2.0" (AdAge.com, reg. required) and sites...