Social Networking Among Teens

"Living and Learning with New Media: digital Youth Project" and "Talk to Teens" assignment gave me valuable insights on how teens today use social network, video sharing sites, online games, and gadgets like iPods and cellphones. The researchers' finding was pretty interesting in that teens use online networks to extend the friendships via instant messaging, cellphones and social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace, while adults tend to use those for networking purposes on top of friendship.
The teens that I talked to for "Talk to Teen" assignment also mentioned that their whole school is on Facebook, so if they don't use it, they're pretty much disconnected from their peers. As the researchers found out, the majority of youth use new media to stay connected and extend existing friendships.
Today's Teens are so called "Digital Natives", and their use of new media is no longer a surprise. In teaching and working with these teens, adults - parents, public and school librarians- will need to shift their focus from concerns to building and creating positive educational opportunities.

I understand that many adults are worried about wasting time online, texting, and also negative contents on the net -violence, sex, drug, crime, etc. No society is free of them, and technology will keep advancing and advancing, influencing how teens and also adults communicate among themselves.
Adults can't just sit back and criticize the harmful effect of new media. What's harmful is inaction or inability to work on it, say, media literacy.