I liked Peggy Orenstein’s column in last week’s New York Times Magazine so much, I posted about it on TechSource:

I wonder if Peggy Orenstein ever got a letter (or several letters) from someone she was hoping to gracefully lose touch with. Or had a friend who called her parents, trying to find out where she moved after college. Maybe she wished for an “ignore” button. More likely, she grumbled to a friend and continued pursuing her adult identity.

Orenstein’s thoughtful essay in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the impact of online living on the creation of an adult identity has shown up on twitter a few times and (natch) on Facebook. For those of us who joined social networks as adults, the question of how to navigate the often-dreadful tweens, teens and twenties online seems huge and difficult.

However, it seems like adults are the only ones perplexed at the meta-level. For Orenstein’s six nieces headed off to college, asking what it’s like to be a teenager with a Facebook account is probably like asking how they plan to handle coming of age with cell phones- it’s just part of their lives. Navigating the waters to adulthood is nasty, tricky business, regardless of the tools at our disposal.

The rest is over at ALA’s TechSource blog.