(2) Overly worried about girls: My opinion (based on observations as a parent of a teen boy and conversations with my friends who parent girls and boys) is that girls often mature so much earlier than boys, it’s really that parents are afraid that their 15 year old daughter really *is* grown up in some fundamental way and so will be much more tempted to “leave childhood” if they meet a stranger than their son.

But I do agree with your comment that the burden of anxiety is propagated via girls, also.

(3) Privacy: Since kindergarten (1997), every year my son has had to not only listen in class but personally sign a paper for school that describes the horrible dangers of being online and that he agrees to never give certain types of information out. Assuming this experience is typical, all memory of using the internet has been with the understanding that it’s public. He never had to “realize” that his conversations could be seen by others, it was deeply embedded in the whole experience of being online.

A friend of mine who teaches “media literacy” (if that is the correct english term) pointed out that one reason for that could be an ingrained need of children and teens to be interesting. In a way asking everyone to “please be interested in what I do”.

Small children do this by repeating “mommy! look!” a thousand times or as long as it takes for mom to turn her head. Teens seek attention in other ways, be it showing photos of themselves or revealing mundane things we consider private. Adults put up blogs and strive to be remarkable.

(1) Online predation is more likely to be directed toward young women than young men. We are still predominantly a hetrosexual and male-agressive society. This suggests that the overwhelmingly dominant mode of predation will be M seeking F. Certainly all the other permutations happen, but I would suggest that they happen less, and that girls are at greater risk of being approached.

(2) If a physical meeting occurs with a potential predator, males will in general have better resources available to defend themselves physically than will females. There is still a strong cultural norm that suggests that a male should be competent to fight and capable of self-defense. For females this is at best an emerging norm. There are still a lot of “helpless women” out there (of all ages) who don’t consider that it is their responsiblity to become physically competent to fight off an attacker. Plus, the diffetences in strength between men and women remain a biological reality. Admittedly this can be neutralized, but only at the additional cost of specialized self-defense training and/or weaponry.

I certainly understand and sympathize with the ideal that a person should be respected for the contents of their mind and soul, irrespective of their gender. However, gender differences and their behavioral and social consequences remain real for all that.

-Steve

It used to be safe to assume that only your peers would see your profile, because MySpace was essentially a teen phenomenon to which parents were oblivious. That day has passed.

It sure would be interesting to do research on how many kids allow their parents onto their freinds list, and the issues surrounding that choice.

-Steve

Pew Internet’s research has always been about understanding the user’s perspective on their behavior, rather than trying to get at a “true” (and I might ask whether we all might have trouble coming to a satisfactory definition of what true is) read on a particular behavior or action.

So Monica is right, we aren’t measuring unconscious online flirting, only conscious flirting activity; but our final research goals are also quite different.

Currently, my PhD student is examining Myspace and is not finding so far that men flirt more than women. But then she is not simply asking: Do you flirt online.

Also, many teenagers are communicating online with people they know offline.