Embrace MySpace.com as a teaching tool.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Elizabeth Pownall For The Register-Guard

Our generation of fully wired teenagers is considered by some sources as `Generation @." This young generation multitasks easily between IM, text messaging and MySpace, all on Blackberries, cell phones and computers. This fully wired, technologically fluent generation has a very different perspective than that of their parents.

While we supplement our lives with the Internet, teenagers mainline it for their social lives. Being fully wired brings on the benefits of the Web, which many of us are still figuring out. We are "so yesterday," as our teenagers move rapidly into tomorrow through cyberspace.

MySpace.com is the biggest online benefit to which our teenagers have access. It's a social networking Web site where visitors can post personal profiles and blogs, form groups through an internal e-mail system and share photos, music and videos. Launched in January of 2004, MySpace is now reportedly the third most viewed Internet site, outranking both Google and E-Bay. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace for $580 million in 2005, and now the site is the undisputed big daddy, owning 50 percent of the market share, 10 times more than any rival site. MySpace had 65 million users in April of 2006.

Although MySpace has an age restriction - no one under 14 years old is permitted to have a site - it is more like no one without access to a computer can have a site. MySpace is now the central online social network for middle school students. They go there to hang out, to chat with friends, to contact people they otherwise don't talk to at school. Hanging out in MySpace is considered just as social as hanging out in person.

Many of the problems related to MySpace involve the amount of personal information teenagers put up in their sites. Such information can allow them to be easily identified by cyberstalkers and predators, or vulnerable to cyberbullying. There have been high-profile situations involving teens and predators, and while My- Space is working to keep up with the issues, the genie is out of the bottle. Two years ago, nobody, including its creators, had any idea what My- Space would become.

While no social network can fully guarantee that predatory behavior will be fully blocked, educators and youth mentors can assist our teenagers in learning more street-wise, or in this case computer-wise, behavior. It takes a lot more than parents to be involved in this. Teens listen to each other, to older teens and to teachers who level with them. The conversation we need to be having around MySpace is very similar to the conversation we needed to have about AIDS in the 1980s (and still need to have): Everyone needs to be talking about it with the intention of helping our middle-schoolers navigate this new life, rather than scaring them away from it or going into denial. MySpace is not going away.

Eugene resident Nancy Willard, executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, believes we have to move beyond a fear-based Internet safety education to more empowerment-based education. Willard is the author of a soon-to-be-published book, "Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens: Helping Young People Use the Internet Safely and Responsibly," which will have an accompanying booklet for teens.

Willard suggests that we focus our efforts on providing middle-schoolers the knowledge and skills to navigate the Internet and handle the inherent risks, such as learning how to discern the relative safety and trustworthiness of people they meet online, and how to protect personal matters such as financial identity, intimate information, location information, etc.

We have a golden opportunity facing us with MySpace, because it offers us all, as a community, the chance to work with our teenagers in this area of cybersafety and social networking. Internet safety workshops tend to be geared toward adults, but they will be a lot more effective if they are delivered directly to the teenagers themselves.

Schools and youth leaders have as much responsibility as parents, if not more, in helping our kids navigate social online networks. It is in school, through their mentors and their peers, that young teenagers learn much of what they need to know about life today. We hurt our teenagers by refusing to educate them. Our youth are the Generation @. As a community, let's meet our youth on their level by empowering them with skills and safety strategies as they grow into their own fully wired generation.

Elizabeth Pownall of Eugene is a licensed professional counselor intern and the mother of two teenagers. More information is available from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use at CSRIU.org, WiredSafety.org, blogsafety.org, and netfamilynews.org.