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

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As a social-networking tool, these sites have become almost indispensable. But they have their darker passages too. When students began posting pictures of themselves at parties holding a beer and leaving messages that were hurtful, defamatory or demeaning, schools began considering ways to regulate the speech on the site. Some high schools have officially banned Facebook as well as MySpace activity during the school day and discouraged kids from spending time on those sites after hours. Colleges can't begin to enforce such bans, but many have groups studying how to control bad behavior or have issued guidelines. And they have discovered a powerful incentive for improving digital deportment, informing students that a variety of employers admit they check applicants' Facebook pages for clues to their personalities before making job offers. "Most of the people who use Facebook," says the company's marketing director, Melanie Deitch, "realize that anything you post there is public information."

A few cases of online friendships that turned violent or even homicidal have pressured social-network sites to provide better security for their members. Facebook recently overhauled its privacy settings to give members tighter controls over who sees what.

But to me the bigger worry with those sites isn't so much the privacy or security issues, though those are real enough. It's the sheer amount of screen-sucking time they consume in lives that are already overscheduled. Being a teenager is one enormous exercise in time management. Watching my kids try to juggle school, homework, sports, music lessons and sleep, I sometimes think my life is easier than theirs. That's partly because I have some tools they lack, but it's also because I think I know an abyss when I see one. Facebook is one giant time vortex--a black hole of chatter--and for many kids it's hard to find an exit. Under its influence, 90 minutes of homework ends up taking four to five hours, says Dr. Alan Goodwin, principal of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md. Those sites are "a huge distraction."

At our house, we haven't banned Facebook entirely. Instead, we've had a lot of conversations about what is appropriate speech and then checked to make sure those conversations stuck. And we've tried to restrict Internet access during homework hours. I say "tried" because I'm sure my 15-year-old knows several ways around all the password protections I set up in recent months. (In trying to erect one barricade a few weeks ago, I accidentally deleted half his homework for a semester. That was a fun day.)

Facebook reports its members spend an average of 18 minutes on the site each day. I asked my son last week if that number sounded right to him. You know what he did? He just rolled his eyes at me.