Flirting your way to sex offender registration.

Ok. So I admit: Sending naked pictures of yourself to someone you like (like, like-like; not just like) goes a bit beyond an extended hug after class or sitting on someone's lap during study hall.

But it's not felonious. And it's definitely not worthy of sex offender status.

With all the talk in the last decade of pushing various technological boundaries (web 2.0, nanotechnology, genomics, and yes, cell phones) we still rarely get to talking about the secondary boundaries affected by such technological innovation. Unless, of course, a hot-button social issue (read: political wedge issue) is involved, in which case let the ill-informed adventures in spin begin. As in: "Genomics sounds like cloning!" (No. It doesn't. You don't know what you're talking about.) Or, the less common refrain: "Nanotechnology is the birth of Big Brother!" (Well. Yeah. Ok. Mayyyyybe.)

Along these lines, I've recently come across several articles and stories referencing the notion that today's young people are less concerned with privacy than previous generations (privacy is trying so hard to become hot-button, it's cute -- like a puppy trying desperately to climb a staircase), and placing the blame for such lowered fences on Facebook, MySpace, and other such sites. To me, this seems either just plain wrong, or misleadingly incomplete. Facebook, for example, faced an uproar from its "millennial generation" users when it opened the site first to non-college-affiliated users, and then again when it opened the site to anyone. In response, it instituted significant user-directed privacy controls over who can see which elements of your profile. I suppose it's an unanswered (to my knowledge) empirical question to what extent these controls are put to use. But in my anecdotal experience, almost everyone uses them to some extent.

So the younger generation, it seems to me, is not less concerned with privacy than previous generations -- today's youth just have more opportunity to be more open to more people. This doesn't mean they don't value their privacy. Had their parents (who, let's face it, were pretty damn open with their opinions, feelings, and sexuality) been able to share an hour-by-hour "status" accounting with hundreds of friends, I expect they would have. They just couldn't.

But now the constraints of technology have retreated: Hundreds of people now know my favorite books. Boy, do I feel invaded. No. Wait. I don't. But not because I'm not concerned with my privacy. I never cared who knew my favorite books. I'd have gladly told anyone who asked. (People rarely did, for the record -- in fact, I can count on one hand (maybe one finger) the number of people who have commented on my Facebook favorite-books list, which suggests that the level of narcissism involved in maintaining, say, a Facebook profile is disturbingly staggering. But that's another post for another day).

And I fully believe my parents would have too. The difference is not in the level of personal willingness to be open with various aspects of oneself. The difference is in the technological ability to be open. There's no new conception of something-like-the-thing-called-privacy-we-once-cared-so-much-about being cultivated by Facebook. It's the same old conception (the same old ethical bounds) being construed via newly-relaxed technological boundaries.

Which brings me to my point, finally: It's wrong to label naked-picture cell-phone swapping among consenting teenagers as "criminal behavior." It's no more criminal than that "trust me?" game where one person in a group slowly moves a hand up another's thigh while asking the two-word query until the second person responds, if ever, with a "no." (No one else played that? Really? Oh.) You might not want your kids doing either of those things. I get that. All I'm saying is, the cell-phone thing isn't a behavior of a radically different sort than anything we've seen before. It's on the same spectrum. If Polaroids weren't so clumsy and expensive, this would have been happening long ago. (And, really, claiming it's child porn is just silly. I understand why society doesn't want 50-year-olds looking at naked 15-year-olds. But it's not clear to me why other 15-year-olds shouldn't be.)

Whether you, as a parent or school administrator or Congressperson, likes that it's happening, it's just flirtation. Maybe teens shouldn't sit on each other in study hall. Maybe they shouldn't play spin the bottle. And maybe they shouldn't exchange naked pictures of themselves. But criminalizing the first two seems nuts right off the bat. And criminalizing the third is just as insane. It's wrong. And it won't work anyway (see: abstinence-only sex education).