Social networking kids out of the safety zone

THE Mark Zuckerberg film reminds us of Facebook's less than noble origins.

SOCIAL networking has become the bon mot of our times, a phrase that oozes affability, cleverness and connectedness in an online age. Kind of like old-fashioned social inclusion, social justice, social capital, social responsibility, and social so on, social networking has an air of something good.

Think again. Or even better, look again. Social networking is just another clever marketing tag. Parts of it are benign. And other parts are repugnant. If more parents spent more time looking a little closer at what their children are doing online, they will discover that social networking often hides a darker, not so friendly, reality.

Some will start screaming about reactionary technological Neanderthals who just don't get what one pundit called the "early middle internet age". Sure, every generation of parents has its own concerns about new influences on a younger generation. Sure, often the fears are ill-founded. Rock music didn't corrupt kids in the 1950s. Feminism and the counterculture didn't wreck homes in the 60s. That said it's worth checking whether every social, cultural and technological advance is serving our children well.

The Social Network is a good place to start. Released last week in Australia, this outstanding film is a fast-paced, chatty, depressing, funny glimpse at how and why Facebook was founded.

The opening conversation sets the scene for the Facebook story. When Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend, she tells him: "You are going to go through life thinking girls don't like you because you're a nerd. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart, it's not true. It will be because you're an asshole." Returning to his dorm, Zuckerberg posts this online: "Erica Albright is a bitch."

That night he creates Facemash, hacking into the university's protected databases, extracting private photographs of female students, lining them up in twos and asking students to rank the hottest. After Harvard shuts the site as an egregious breach of privacy, Zuckerberg, with the help of one of his few friends, Eduardo Saverin, sets up thefacebook.com, where students can sign up, post personal information, list their relationship status and connect online.

The movie paints Zuckerberg as insecure and awkward around girls, quietly desperate to do "something substantial" to get noticed by one of Harvard's clubs. Envious of the good-looking Winklevoss twins, both champion rowers and members of an elite Harvard club, who first approach him, together with Divya Narendra, about creating a site called Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg strings them along, creating computer codes for his Facebook site aimed at campus students. He would later settle litigation with them. He is disloyal to good friends such as Saverin, who is shafted from the Facebook business and ultimately paid out in an undisclosed settlement.

The screen version of Zuckerberg, with all the hallmarks of Asperger's syndrome, becomes the personification of an online world where normal social interactions between people are replaced by new levels of narcissism, online bravado, the insincere pursuit of "friends", the new practice of "unfriending" and the search for online fame and gratification.

While the real Zuckerberg has said the movie is just a bit of fun, it's clear enough that the social networking site was founded on less than fine motives. The brilliant boy who couldn't get into an exclusive Harvard club created his own not-so-exclusive club and became president. The awkward boy who couldn't break into Harvard's social scene went out and created his own online social world.

Later in the movie, when Zuckerberg approaches his former girlfriend, Erica sums up both the boy genius behind Facebook and the wider zeitgeist of social networking when she says, "It's as if every thought that tumbles through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared."

Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook Inc who once called his customers "dumbf . . ks" for handing over their private information, is now listed as richer than Rupert Murdoch and Apple's Steve Jobs. Of the more than 500 million people on Facebook, millions are children discovering the parent-free zone of social networking.

Facebook can certainly be a harmless zone where you swap photos, arrange parties and share gossip. But it is also the first stop for cyber-bullying for the simple reason that everyone is on it. And this is the fast-paced, relentless, anonymously vicious, very public version of bullying, a world away from the old schoolyard variety.

And, of course, social networking is bigger than Facebook. Take a look at formspring.me, a site that "lets you and your friends ask questions and give answers about anything and everything". Thanks to Zuckerberg, you can sign up as a Facebook member.

In fact, this is a site for those who want to bully and be bullied. It chills the blood with its frenzied incoherence. Posting anonymously, kids aim inane, nasty attacks at other kids with machinegun speed and complete disregard for the damage caused. Schools advise their students to stay away. But hey, this is the internet. Cautions, especially from pre-internet age adults, are thrown to the wind by young, curious minds eager to explore the new, largely uncontrollable world of social networking. Block one site one minute and another pops up the next minute.

Or check out tumblr.com, an online blog site where teenagers, often girls, pour out their hearts to a steady stream of strangers who egg them on with comments and praise. Instead of drawing on those around them for love and affection, or putting their private thoughts into a diary tucked under their bed, teenagers are seeking out salvation from strangers where insincerity has become the driver of social networking.

In cyberspace, no-responsibility friendships mean you click on and off at your own pleasure. Add the sites together for a toxic cocktail where teens search out abuse from formspring and then seek affirmation and acceptance from Tumblr.

Most teenagers have been immersed in social networking since it started. Having known nothing else, they are learning about relationships, trying to form their young identities, some harming their sense of self in this new online world.

If adults want to use these sites, that is their own business. But when young children are doing so, it's up to the adults around them to try to teach them that social networking is not always so social. By all means celebrate the brilliance of people such as Zuckerberg. But at the same time, parenting just got a whole lot harder.