By chance, I happened to catch an NPR report last week telling how kids have figured out how to remove 'Kryptonite' bike locks using a Bic pen for 5 seconds ... and I realized that information like that travels like wildfire through the teen population, but never makes it to most adults. In fact, the problem is quite general. If it's important (or interesting) to you to know what teens are doing, and thinking about, these days--if you're a parent of one, for instance, or soon to be--then wouldn't it be terrific to have a single web site that you could periodically check for information (collected articles, URLs, photos, etc) about teen life and its preoccupations of the moment? Such a site would probably be quite popular enough to pay its own way with advertising, one would think.
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As a person who was recently a teen, I can tell you that, among teens, this would be wildly...unpopular.
If you want to know what's hip, watch television commercials. If you want to know what parents should be looking out for, well, television commercials are filling that gap, too.
If you want something you can sit back and read, there's any number of magazines and books that will be happy to tell you exactly how to raise your kids, from Reader's Digest to Focus on the Family publications.
The best solution? Ask them. Ask them what they love. Ask them what they hate. If necessary, be intrusive.
I guess you can even add "comments on whynot.net" to the list of places happy to tell you how to raise your kids.
For the record, the kryptonite exploit (which has been known to some for a long time) is in the news lately because videos demonstrating it have started to circulate on the web/blogosphere -- not, as this report apparently claimed, just among the "teen population". Parents feel out of the loop on some things just because they don't get around as much on-line.
I also have to say that any site that purported to unlock the secrets of the teen mind would probably fail miserably. It would be full of wrong information, information that was right but went instantly obsolete, and overall it would just make parents think they understand something about teens when they really still wouldn't.
People, just TALK to your kids, dammit..
I'd modify the last comment by saying "Talk to them, and LISTEN to your kids." Parent/teen "communication" is all too often in only one direction.
Had three teen-age kids, somehow managed not to kill them. Glad I'm done with that. Did I do a good job as parent? I dunno, they're not junkies or dead or in jail...