Going for the overkill?

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If you thought teens burnt the midnight oil only to study for impending exams, you are sadly mistaken. For many, the virtual space offered by social networking sites exerts such a magnetic pull that teens stay up all night reading posts on the walls of their ‘friends’.
While parents fret about the grades, teens believe in taking the ‘chill pill’.
“I frankly don’t understand the fuss made about us spending time on networking sites. We youngsters need some space too,” says Vishwanathan H., a 17-year-old who spends nearly three hours on Facebook every day.
The world may have shrunk to a global village due to social networking. But youngsters seem keener to interact with unknown people than those at home.
“I hate being disturbed when I am on Facebook. I have never been so obsessed about anything,” says Shweta J., a college student.
Acceptable boundaries of communication too seem vague and subjective.
“Most of my friends find it ‘cool’ to display funky photographs and chat with people they would probably never meet in their life,” says Aparna K.
There have also been cases when parents have tried monitoring the online activities of their kids, only to be rebuffed.
“My daughter has about 908 friends on Facebook. But she outright rejected my ‘friend’ request and I was extremely hurt,” says the parent of a 19-year-old.
According to Arundhati Swamy, counsellor, teens often post nasty comments on the walls of people they dislike which results in the public humiliation of those at the receiving end.
“More often than not teens don’t disclose anything to their parents when things go wrong due to indiscriminate social networking,” she further adds.
For some, however, sanity still prevails.
“I don’t exclusively devote time to networking because I am really busy with other activities,” says 15-year-old Mahathi Kannan.
Anushka Narayan concurs and further adds, “My dad is on my list of friends on Facebook and I don’t have any problem with it.”