I just read a fascinating thought from Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic this month about why teenage girls read:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a

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Check out my post today on Decoder, the blog of The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. I’ll be guest blogging there for the next week or so.

http://decoder.drugfree.org/

And that includes just about everybody in the age-group, apparently. A recent survey released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds 99 percent of teenage boys say they are gamers. About 94 percent of girls say the same.

The happy news is that teens playing video games are not the solitary and dark people we may imagine or fear. In fact, this Yahoo news report on the study, says:

If any kids are reading this, here’s the part that should really win

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Hmmm. How to punish teen vandals without having a crime appear on their “record”? The AP reports that the New Smyrna Beach, Fla., home of Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy was vandalized two weeks ago by teenage girls. They used fire extinguishers, eggs and running water to damage the 87-year-old’s home. Cathy requested the girls not be charged with a crime, but he did want them to learn a lesson. As a result, they were banned from playing video games and watching TV.…

I have a new and longreaching goal when it comes to technology in our family life: nonjudgment. Here’s why.

Several weeks ago, a friend and I attended a seminar on parenting and technology. The leaders opened up the evening by asking audience members to pose their questions up front, so the questions could be answered during the presentation. I was totally blown away by the intensity of the questions. In fact, three-fourths of the parents who raised their hands actually had very small questions but very large, impassioned rants that surrounded them. As…

According to Wired Campus, social networks may be the perfect media for matching college students with roommates.

Tulane University recently announced a partnership with RoommateClick, a service that allows incoming students to select roommates through a closed social network.

RoommateClick provides about 10 colleges with customized roommate-choosing networks, where students fill out a questionnaire regarding their living habits (cleanliness, smoking, etc.) and provide profile photos and other open-ended profile information about themselves. Students can then search the closed network to choose roommates if they don’t wish

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 I just came across an interesting project, Digital Youth, at the University of California Berkeley. Here’s an excerpt from a post on the influence of digital media on shopping by project team member Danah Boyd:

I had just finished giving a talk about youth culture to a room full of professionals who worked in the retail industry when a woman raised her hand to tell me a story. It was homecoming season and her daughter Mary was going to go to homecoming for the first

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