Bondage and bonding online (Op-Ed by David Brooks in NY Times)

We run a family-friendly blog here at Connectedness, with the occasional wink. So my first reaction on sampling the world's most popular online social network, MySpace, was "how can I report on this?" (Well, actually that was my second reaction, but we'll leave my first reaction for another time, another blog.)

So here comes David Brooks to the rescue, following up last month's story on human capital with a thoughtful NY Times Op-Ed piece on MySpace ("Bondage and Bonding Online"). He concludes with a split decision:

1. Today's young people are happy, wholesome, and amazingly community-minded, and the online smut is just a way of demarcating an adult-free social space.
2. Today's prolonged adolescents are filled with earnest desires for meaningful contact, but live in a culture that has provided them with no vocabulary to create these sorts of bonds except through cleavage and vodka.

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