Gen-M: A Dad's Encounter with The Vortex of Facebook

A mom I know asked her 15-year-old daughter recently about her math homework. The teenager, not exactly sure what was due when, replied that she'd "Facebook" someone for the assignment. Why not use the telephone? the mom wanted to know. Her daughter rolled her eyes at that one.

Where I live, just outside Washington, Facebook.com is both noun and verb, the unchallenged colossus of adolescent communication that works like the telephone, the back fence, the class bulletin board (and, at times, the locker room), all rolled into one virtual mosh pit. In other towns, MySpace.com plays the same starring role. In both cases, they have legions of parents pulling out their hair.

Here's why: those online social networks have become, almost overnight, booming teen magnets exerting an almost irresistible pull on kids' time and attention. Though both sites are only two years old, MySpace is the No. 2 most- trafficked spot on the Internet; Facebook is No. 7, right behind Google. MySpace is open to anyone with an e-mail address; Facebook requires members to be affiliated with a college or a high school, which is why it's the preferred virtual reality in my household.

Created by a Harvard student, Facebook started out as a digital version of those little photo guides of incoming college freshmen and quickly expanded to include the student bodies of more than 2,100 colleges. Last fall, high schools were invited to join, and now Facebook has 7 million members. Like all secret societies, it has its own language, passageways and handshakes. You can "poke" a friend--sort of like a wink or a wave--without saying much more. You can check the "pulse" to see what movies, books and music are topping the charts at your school. You can post pictures of yourself and your friends, and there's a nifty feature that allows kids to create specialized subgroups of Facebookers who share hobbies, obsessions great and small or inside jokes. And then there's "the wall," which may be Facebook's most distinctive feature. It's the place on every member's site where friends can post messages, have conversations and just generally keep up. The wall makes sense in one respect: it's easy and fun to spot an incoming message. But in another it's curious: you can peruse the postings of everyone else at your school. Which means the wall is one of those giveaway clues about Generation M: teenagers think their lives are private just so long as their parents aren't tuning in.