Today's Ypulse Guest Post is from Holly Rotman. Holly is the senior web editor of eSPIN.com and eCRUSH.com, and she has been the author of Advice Girl, a teen dating advice column, for four years. Remember, if you have an idea for a Ypulse Guest Post and work in youth media or marketing, get in touch about participating.

The Tricky Taboos of Teen Online Behavior

When I was a teen, AOL chat rooms were the center of the online universe for people my age. I had five different screennames - each with a different alter ego - that let me chat, flirt and say things to strangers I would never say in real life. Were any of the "teens" chatting back with me really adults? Maybe. But I was a smart kid. I never revealed my identity to strangers, and if anyone creeped me out, I blocked them or just closed the window.

But this was back in the early '90's, before "To Catch a Predator," before every local news station ran sensationalized stories about MySpace every night. All the recent hype has had two effects: parents are hyper-aware of the dangers teens face online (53% think online predators are a threat, according to Annenberg) -- and so are their kids. Social networks like MySpace, Bebo and (my employer) eSPIN have links to safety pages all over the place, and 77% of teens (according to a recent Pew study) keep at least some of their online profiles private.

Yet even as teen savvy increases, only a brave few of us are comfortable admitting that, well, as long as they're safe about it, chatting and flirting online can be great for teens. Flirting, especially, feels like dangerous ground. But once we acknowledge that teens are doing it, and we understand why they're doing it, it doesn't seem like such a bad thing:

1. The virtual world can be the perfect training wheels for the "real" world. Teens who chat online discover what works and what doesn't in the dating game, preparing them for socializing with their real-life crushes. It's a social learning tool that's safe from face-to-face rejection.

2. Teen social life tends to reward the "preps" and ostracize unique personalities. The Internet can connect those teens with like-minded people they might never have met at school.

3. Online, teens can try out new identities without social consequences. Of the 3.5 million teens on eSPIN, nearly 500,000 identify as gay or bi. Some of them may be closeted in real life and turn to the Internet as a place to feel comfortable in their skins. Logic says there's lots of identity skipping going on -- preppy kids donning goth makeup, introverts gunning for Internet fame -- role playing they might never do in their real lives.

4. The Internet is still safer than the real world. Predators can find teens in person too - and so can bullies, creeps and lecherous peers. Unlike on the Internet, escape from those real-life evils isn't as easy as Control-Q. (In fact, interacting with similar people online can prepare teens for uncomfortable offline situations in the future.)

But just like you wouldn't take candy from strangers, the virtual world isn't safe for teens unless they take precautions. They need to realize that every single person they talk to might be lying, and they need to protect their private lives and contact information. They must know when to block, when to quit out and when to unplug. If you're a parent, equipping your kids with this knowledge is a smarter policy than staying out of the way or assuming that they don't do that stuff online anyway.

If you run a site where teens can interact, you have responsibilities, too:

- You must maintain as safe an environment as possible. (In eSPIN's case, that means blocking teen profiles from adults and vice versa, prescreening user-submitted content, and prohibiting contact information on profiles and in correspondence. With no personal info to share, it's a true "virtual reality" setting where conversations aren't meant to be taken offline.)

- You must give your users an easy way to speak up if someone's creeping them out.

- You must provide all the privacy teens want. Most teens (89%, according to Pew) don't want to share their full names with strangers online. Let them block their names, and then some.

As a Ypulse reader, you already know how valuable a tool the Internet can be for teens -- but as an adult, you might shy away from any teen online activity with well-known negative consequences. Yes, there are horror stories of what can happen to teens online if they're too honest, too fearless, too vulnerable. But those stories are the extremes. It's time to recognize teen online interaction as the valuable tool that teens have always known it is.

Posted by anastasia