For U.S. teenagers, life is an open Web log

By Tom Zeller Jr. The New York Times - Technology - International Herald Tribune: "Melissa Paredes, a 16-year-old in Lompoc, California, maintains a Web site where she writes poetry, posts pictures and shares music. So when she was mourning her stepfather, David Grabowski, this year, she reflexively channeled her grief into a multimedia tribute.

Using images she collected and scanned from photo albums, she created an online slide show, taking visitors on a virtual tour of Grabowski's life: as a toddler, as a young man, at work. A collage of the photographs, titled "David Bruce Grabowski, 1966-2005," closes the memorial.

"It helped me a lot," Melissa said in an instant message, the standard method of communication among the millions of American teenagers who, according to a study released on Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, are rapidly becoming some of the most nimble and prolific creators of digital content online.

For all of its catharsis, Melissa's digital eulogy is also a story of the modern teenager. Using the cheap digital tools that now help chronicle the comings and goings of everyday life - cellphone cameras, iPods, laptops and user-friendly Web editing software - teenagers like Melissa are pushing content onto the Internet as naturally as they view it.

"At the market level, this means old business models are in upheaval," said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew project. "At the legal level, this means the definition of property is up for grabs. And at the social level, it means that millions of those inspired to create have a big new platform with which they shape our culture."

According to the Pew survey, 57 percent of all Americans 12 to 17 years old who are active online, about 12 million people, create digital content, building Web pages, sharing original artwork, photographs and stories and remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. About 20 percent publish their own Web logs.

That reality is now inextricable from the broader social, cultural and sometimes, as in Melissa's case, deeply personal experience of being a teenager. And it is one that will have profound implications for traditional managers of content, from big media companies and libraries to record labels, publishers and Hollywood.

From school libraries and living rooms, millions of teenagers are staking out cyberterritory in places like MySpace.com, Xanga.com and Livejournal.com, where they construct their individual online presences, often to the chagrin of parents and schoolteachers, who have belatedly discovered whole nations of teenagers churning out content under their noses.

"Ever since 3rd period today, I now know that I have sex appeal," Krista, a 15-year-old bass player from Fresno, California, who enjoys dirt bikes, surfing and skating, wrote on her personal Web site at Xanga. "It rox!"

It is that kind of enthusiastic self-revelation that has prompted parents and school districts to begin monitoring - and in some case banning - sites where teenagers have taken up residence.

Last week, Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta, New Jersey, banned students from posting on MySpace.com and similar sites, citing concerns that students were unwittingly revealing too much information about themselves to potential cyberpredators. And in September, Hopkinton Middle High School in Contoocook, New Hampshire, sent e-mail messages to parents warning them about sites like MySpace.

But the Pew survey seems to suggest that the concern over the dangers of adolescent activity online, while perhaps well placed, is a mere cul-de-sac in a larger landscape where a new generation, armed to the teeth with digital sophistication, is redefining media on its own terms.

"The more kids are involved with digital content creation, the more thinkers will emerge that will eventually produce tomorrow's innovative products," said Brendan Erazo, a 15-year-old student at Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, Florida, who mixes and publishes his own Christian-themed dance tracks under the name DJ Xsjado at the Kids' Internet Radio Project (projectkir.org).

Most teenagers online take their role as content creators as a given. Twenty-two percent reported keeping their own personal Web page, and about one of every five said they remixed content they found online into their own artistic creations, as composite photos, edited video productions or, most commonly, remixed song files. The survey shows "the mounting evidence that teens are not passive consumers of media content," said Paulette Rothbauer, assistant professor of information sciences at the University of Toronto.

"They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it," she said.

Rothbauer calls this kind of engagement "emancipatory" because "it helps young people fashion their own identities, on their own terms, using whatever content they choose."

Of course, that includes proprietary content, which remains something of a fuzzy concept among teenagers.

For instance, among the teenagers surveyed who said they had some experience downloading music files, 75 percent thought it was "easy to do" and "unrealistic to expect people not to do it."

On the upside for the recording industry, youths are migrating to paid music sites, and about half said they thought that downloading and sharing copyrighted material without permission was generally wrong.

But roughly the same number said they did not care about copyright.

"There's still a long way to go, but we have undoubtedly come a long way," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America. "To reach this increasingly tech-savvy generation, we must continue to adapt and appeal to their consumption patterns. And music companies are doing just that."

Whether bloggers like Brendan and Melissa consider themselves to be in the vanguard of change, however, is an open question. Many of them say they are just tinkering with the toys that the digital revolution has put before them.

"I taught myself how to use the Internet," Melissa said of her Web site and her photo slide shows, "so basically it was just a step-by-step process that clicked into my head. I just read directions, and that's how I set it up. Pretty simple.""