Interesting take.

For me, I experienced similar vibes and have basically maintained a few personas.

There is real me, and that's the typical things one would do online as a "real" person.

There is hobby / game me.

And there is activist me.

Way back when this was all ramping up as the masses came online, I had high speed service and access to a lot of tech, so I had setup a couple rooms in my house with good workstations, and one right in the living room.

Wanted to surf with my kids, not knowing how this was all going to go, and I wanted a work area, so that's what I did.

One artifact of that was having lots of kids in my home. They could show up, connect stuff, get online, use the machines, game. Was fantastic. I learned a ton from them, and what I mean by that wasn't technical, it was social, the nature of people, how things will be for them growing up largely, or now completely digital natives.

My kids got online to surf the web, chat, game.

Neopets was a huge thing, and I had a ton of fun doing that with them.

We all learned another thing and that is if you can't spell, or don't understand a URL, you are going to get exploited or shown Pr0n! Taught the kids to stuff it into Google, and use the "did you mean?" function. Worked great, cut way down on experiences that were inappropriate for them. And on that note, I made two rules:

One, no taboos. The family shall discuss it, whatever the fuck it is. Gotta have somewhere to do that, right? Or, if that is not an option, you just know the young ones will go where it is an option, and that's how other people end up raising your kids.

The other was bring it to me, whatever the fuck it is. I don't want to have to find out and chase things down. That, coupled with #1 made for a pretty great online experience for the family.

I found the role play and creation of personas they did fascinating! I didn't have this, but for the usual role play experiences, acting, playing D&D games, pretend. They would game each other, other people, and at one point I really felt for some poor boy who thought he was chatting up a group of girls, all of whom were my oldest daughter!

When I asked why, she said she didn't trust him, so... yeah.

That incident aside, the play was amazing!

As things began to solidify into the mess we've got today, I was there to advise them to partition things off. Keep personas to play, do, build, explore as always, but also establish and maintain you as a thing.

That chat happened as my oldest son setup a MySpace where he proclaimed he was all about the very best ass! LOLOL. I still chuckle as I talked about the implications with him. Just in time too, as the girl he would end up with as a real keeper missed that era by a few months! Other things, showing bong hits, talking about minor violations of the law, speeding, and such all tend to add up.

They've cleaned house and are fine for the most part.

Sorry to ramble, there are a few takeaways:

Having the ability to invoke and build a persona online is a powerful way to explore socially. One can make choices, see them play out, get the value out of it all and really benefit without any real consequences. Of course, that can be bad too, depending on those choices and what is being learned, explored.

Teens today tend to work differently than pre-digital natives do. They know they are being tracked and use all sorts of insider language, jokes, phrases that communicate in dual form: One form is for general consumption, the other is meaningful to a smaller, private'ish group. People who came up differently will simply take the convo private or use some other means.

All of us pre-Internet people had a childhood very different from the ones people have today. We could make mistakes, and mistakes were treated like mistakes too. Parenting happened, apologies made, work done, that sort of thing happened to atone for damage caused.

Today, everyone has a record going back to their beginning and that record is likely to endure! I am not the only one who will tell you how thankful I am those records on me evaporated with both the people passing and the paper not being scanned or input into the systems today. The stuff we did!

I wonder about smart kids hacking. Truth is, they should just like any of us did, but they need to be more careful than we were too. Doing that with that "real" person record carries a lot of risk and judgement. Anonymity is necessary here. Same as other things, there is good and bad and we need to deal with that as people, but we should not just enforce being real on everyone all the time.

What I like to do is manage my "real" online identity. I don't put everything there. Sharing is case by case, and I just don't feel that vivid sharing so many do makes a lot of sense, unless one wants to embrace that and make a living of it, or share with people they are close to. No clear lines there, and the default is much broader with more implications than most people would prefer if they really had a chance to talk it through some and express their concerns.

Really, we are living with the result of a big land grab, and the law, society and tech have collided, leaving us this mess to clean up.