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For example, miniDV cameras are not only among the new tools of self-expression, but the very act of creating personal videos with friends and creating events and key themes to shoot have become key aspects of entertainment in and of itself. To this generation, playing music via your cell phone, and movies and TV shows via your iPod are a given. Emailing is considered too old-school by many, whereas texting is outpacing cell phone calls. These things also go hand-in-hand with changes in online shopping patterns, top website preferences, communication and blogging patterns, and new habits for using social networks—not to mention the tremendous changes in preferred social networks and profile page usage patterns in general. These things are changing the paradigm of how the businesses of entertainment, communication, retail, marketing, advertising, and branding have been done in the past.

Unfortunately, as more companies pour big money into expanding their new media marketing components, as many people have discovered, the Field of Dreams theory (“if we build it, they will come”) certainly doesn’t apply when it comes to reaching savvy youth today. Popping up a site (or social network for that matter) no matter how cool it is means nothing if you can’t reach the market it’s intended for. This Report, therefore, also includes a great deal about how young people find out about new websites, communicate with others, and other forms of grassroots networking.

Overall, the Digital Lifestyle Youth Culture Profile Report 2008 not only reveals traits by target demographics, but also the growing generation gap occurring even within this generation.

They are now developing a Web site to help educate their peers on the same issues and plan to visit elementary and middle school students this year to pass on Internet safety messages. Students also created individual blogs this week. "We're trying to develop youth to be leaders in the city and the state and the nation and the world. With the Internet, it's not just local," said Akua Goodrich, the program's director who helped found the Power Unit for Motivating Youth, an after-school and mentoring program in the city. "We have to prepare them to be safe and help spread the message."

"When you're a kid, you don't want to listen to an adult who doesn't know what you're going through," she said. "You're much more open to listen to your peers talk to you. It's more interesting."

Remember that nothing is temporary online. The virtual world is full of opportunities to interact and share with people around the world. It's also a place where nothing is temporary and there are no "take-backs." A lot of what you do and say online can be retrieved online even if you delete it — and it's a breeze for others to copy, save, and forward your information.

Mark your profiles as private. Anyone who accesses your profile on a social networking site can copy or screen-capture information and photos that you may not want the world to see. Don't rely on the site's default settings. Read each site's instructions or guidelines to make sure you're doing everything you can to keep your material private.

Safeguard your passwords and change them frequently. If someone logs on to a site and pretends to be you, they can trash your identity. Pick passwords that no one will guess (don't use your favorite band or your dog's birthday; try thinking of two utterly random nouns and mixing in a random number), and change them often. Never share them with anyone other than your parents or a trusted adult. Not even your best friend, boyfriend, or girlfriend should know your private passwords!

John Gay, a police officer for the Cheyenne Police Department in Wyoming, volunteered at the request of Windsor High School principal Rick Porter to speak to students at two assemblies about the dangers of predators surfing social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook.Gay shared how he could pull pictures off of Windsor High School students who had their own MySpace and Facebook pages. Nordic’s daughter, Shaylah, was one of the students Gay singled out to the point where Shaylah left the auditorium in tears.

Shaylah said Gay showed the other students her phone number, read her blogs and comments out loud.

He kept on picking at her and picking at her and picking at her and everyone said, ‘That’s harassment,’ ” Weakland said.

While there is nothing inherently dangerous in the sites themselves, there is the risk that teens could use microblogs to reveal personal information or engage in a relationship with someone whose intentions are less than honorable. And like any other form of communication, the door is open for a teen to take risks such as talking about sex with strangers (albeit in relatively short bursts) or getting together with someone they meet through a microblog.

Hiring managers like Johnson say an increasing number of job hunters are just too casual when it comes to communicating about career opportunities in cyberspace and on mobile devices. Thank-yous on paper aren't necessary, but some applicants are writing e-mails that contain shorthand language and decorative symbols, while others are sending hasty and poorly thought-out messages to and from mobile devices. Job hunters are also using social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to try to befriend less-than-willing interviewers.

But the story line here is a miscarriage of justice at best -- even erroneously describing file sharing as a city crime punishable by up to two years in prison.

The purpose is basically to educate kids -- middle school and high school-aged about how the justice system operates and about what really goes on in the courtroom as opposed to what you see on television," said Lorri Montgomery, the center's communications director.

The piracy story has two plots. One is of the file sharer's grandmother fighting eminent domain proceedings to keep her house while Megan the criminal file sharer deals with the charges against her

Dave Crenshaw discussed his latest book, The Myth of Multitasking. Crenshaw makes a strong distinction behind “background tasking”—reading a magazine while waiting in line, for instance, or listening to music while coding—and “switch-tasking.” Most of the time, when we talk about “multi-tasking,” we’re actually talking about the very costly practice of “switch-tasking.” Every time you switch your attention from one place to another—even from one browser window to another—you take a significant hit to your focus

Switch-tasking, he definitively proves, causes you to execute each task more slowly than you would otherwise, with more errors

pecifically, what can parents, teachers, and employers do to help their kids, students, and employees focus their attention more effectively? As a kid, student, and employee myself, I have to say that I believe the solution is emphatically not to limit access—at least not for older teens. Rather, I think the key lies in laying out the facts and discussing strategies. Information overload and the allure of infinite access, after all, are challenges that affect everyone with an internet connection—not just young people. And, though writing a stellar book report might not be a cause compelling enough to warrant total focus, every young person will at some point find a pursuit worth paying attention to. Maybe it’s writing short stories; maybe writing music. Maybe it’s making art. But when that pursuit comes along, they’re going to want to know how to firewall their attention, focus their efforts, and—for once—stop switching.

Cyber bullying conducted at school allows school authorities to more easily impose discipline. The use of school equipment to cyber bully also makes a stronger legal argument for action by the school. And if the student e-mails offensive speech to school or downloads it at school and then distributes it, the school is in an advantageous position regarding disciplining the student. However, speech created at home—such as the creation of a Web site—affords greater legal protection for cyber bullies.

“The problem with the approach that web speech created at home can—if accessed at school—become school speech that can be regulated is the very nature of the Internet. Once something is created and placed on the Internet, the author loses control over who can access the speech and where it can be accessed.”

ead teachers are being advised to draw up new rules on mobile phone use amid a growing number of cases of what is now known as “cyber-bullying”. In many secondary schools, over 90% of bullying cases are through text messages or internet chatrooms. It is hoped that the rules about mobile phone use will protect children from abusive texts, stop phones going off in class and prevent mobiles being taken into exam halls.

Although the majority of kids who are harassed online aren’t physically bothered in person, the cyber-bully still takes a heavy emotional toll on his or her victims. Kids who are targeted online are more likely to get a detention or be suspended, skip school and experience emotional distress, the medical journal reports. Teenagers who receive rude or nasty comments via text messages are six times more likely to say they feel unsafe at school.

The problem is that bullying is still perceived by many educators and parents as a problem that involves physical contact. Most enforcement efforts focus on bullying in school classrooms, corridors and toilets. But given that 80% of adolescents use mobile phones or computers, “social interactions have increasingly moved from personal contact at school to virtual contact in the chatroom,'’ write Kirk R. Williams and Nancy G. Guerra, co-authors of one of the journal reports. “Internet bullying has emerged as a new and growing form of social cruelty.'’