Lord of the Flies

Have you seen these social networking sites for kids?  Just as Facebook has evolved into the domain of middle-aged women  looking for old boyfriends and posting family photos, sites like Webkinz, Toontown, Club Penguin, and Roblox now have kids interacting with others in virtual worlds.

What's interesting is how many kids, when given the chance, transform these seemingly safe and innocent places into competitive, social-pressure-filled, more "mature" themed zones, often using codes that adults cannot readily recognize.  The designers program filters, safeguards, and activities to insure  a safe experience for children, but these are only partly successful, as kids form their own words to substitute for  swears to get by filters/censors, engage in more mature activities like "dating" (and are very competitive and combative about it), and find ways to be mean to each other.  Assuming that these are kids on such websites, a worrisome assumption for parents, when left to their own devices more often than not the experience degrades into the law of the jungle, where some strangers may demonstrate kindness and cooperation, but many will bully and destroy, form cybergangs, and chat trash.

How ironic that these social sites are just the opposite, exposing kids to antisocial behavior and keeping kids away from real kids outside of the lcd screen.