Don’t you speak Sext? About half of the 13-19-year-olds in America do. Add a still picture or video taken in the shower and you have all the ingredients you need to publish what used to be a very private moment.

The Chicago Tribune reported:

“In the last five years, the time that America’s 8- to 18-year-olds spend watching TV, playing video games and using a computer for entertainment has risen by 1 hour, 17 minutes a day, the Kaiser Family Foundation said. Young people now devote an average of 7 hours, 38 minutes to daily media use, or about 53 hours a week — more than a full-time job. “What surprised me the most is the sheer amount of media content coming into their lives each day,” said Kaiser’s Vicky Rideout, who directed the study. “When you step back and look at the big picture, it’s a little overwhelming.” The numbers zoom even higher if you consider kids’ multitasking — such as listening to music while on the computer. That data show young people are marinating in media for what amounts to 10 hours, 45 minutes a day — an increase of almost 2.25 hours since 2004.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation study attempts to quantify what we all know from our personal experience: We live in a connected world. This is not news at all. Even the amount of time spent with the devices doesn’t seem newsworthy. But there are a few items here that we might take a moment to think about.

First, there is no socio-techno divide. Technology is seamlessly woven into the fabric of the lives of every “Born Digital,” that’s kids born after 1989. You can no longer ask, “Should we get little Johnny a cell phone?” The question now is, “Which cell phone is best for little Johnny?” You can’t “protect” or “shield” kids from technology — it is a pervasive force in our culture. And, perhaps most importantly, you cannot alter how people’s behaviors will evolve with technology, you can only seek to understand it and make both the upside and downsides known.

I’m sure some of you will push back on the last point. After all, in our society we use the rule of law to regulate harmful acts and even harmful tools. You need a license to drive a car, buy a gun (in most States), you need a prescription to legally purchase drugs, you must have attained the age of majority to purchase tobacco products and alcohol. We even have child pornography laws to protect our children from sexual predators. I’m stating the obvious, most of us are completely aware of the laws surrounding the doing of life. You shouldn’t drive drunk. You shouldn’t break the speed limit. You shouldn’t download music or movie files you don’t have rights to, etc.

The problem is that police rarely come to your home and arrest you for file-sharing and you have to get caught to get a speeding ticket. When a 15-year-old girl sends a video of herself, naked and doing seductive things, to an 18-year-old boy she hardly knows, what should happen? She has broken any number of child pornography laws. So has he. What to do?

Moving on, if you are paying for your teen’s cell phone, should you have the right to read (and decode) the opening paragraph of this article? What would you do with the information? Would you listen to that conversation if it were a voice call? Would you eavesdrop if the conversation took place on your living room couch?

There was a “sexual revolution” in the 60’s. It was a decade of transition. Hippies, transformed into Disco Queens, LSD went out of vogue, Cocaine became the coin of the realm, each subsequent decade had its own kind of revolution. The 21st century finds its teens empowered with media tools — and they are using them in extremely social ways.

Before you can find a solution, you need to identify that you (all of us) have a problem. It’s a simple one best described by my favorite George Bernard Shaw quote: “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” In this case, teens are the social media professionals and we are the lay public. Do you speak 14-year-old? Perhaps it’s time to learn.

We’ve seen so many fake post-apocalyptic images, it’s hard to fully comprehend the pain and anguish that the people of Haiti must be experiencing. I’ve been out far and wide with two quick, easy ways for you to help. If you’ve got a cell phone, pick it up now and text Haiti to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross through mGive. mGive has waived all of their transaction and licensing fees as have the carriers.

Now I’d like you to help me think about something. What kinds of tools were most needed in Haiti right after the earthquake? What technology could still function? What services could be provided? Is there a way to earthquake-proof a technocracy?

The cell towers have collapsed, as have many buildings. Electricity is out. No water, no sewage removal, no garbage removal, very little food. With basic social services unavailable, with no ability for a central government to communicate … what would you do? By the time you read this there will be thousands of relief workers and all kinds of gear landing on the island, but what would have been important in the immediate situation.

This is not really a rhetorical exercise. I’m trying to imagine what type of technologies need to be invented and deployed to enable a society (which is dependent upon technology) to function when a catastrophic event disables the normal doing of life: specifically in the critical 24-48 hours before help could arrive.

I took a look at Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project to see if there were insights that might apply. The OLPC project assumes that electricity is scarce, the computers mesh together so that they don’t require a central server. The firmware includes some robust programs that will function without crashing such as, email, file transfers, etc. Would this help people communicate in the aftermath of an earthquake?

I looked at some solar messenger bags that charge during the day and have small LED lamps in them. The inside covers of the bags are made of reflective material so that they can be used as a good source of light. Having lots of these around would certainly help. There are hundreds of items that have been created that might solve some of the most emergent problems faced by a catastrophe. But very little, if any, high tech solutions were available in Haiti. Just getting supplies from the airport to the people is an overwhelming task — could technology have helped and, if so, what kind?

Moving forward, if we think a month into the future … after basic human services and law and order are restored — how do we get the civilization back? Where is the data? Where is the art? Where is the history? Where is the institutional memory? Haiti is an island nation. It is not replicated elsewhere on Earth. How do we get it back?

Before we get started there is one thing you need to understand. When you buy a Kindle (Kindle 2 or Kindle DX) you are buying into the Amazon Ecosystem. This means that you are agreeing you let Amazon completely control your legal, legitimate, files.

This is both a strength and a weakness of Kindle e-readers. The concept of an e-book is not well understood by anyone. Do I have to lend you my Kindle to lend you a book on my Kindle? Can I let you “use” or “borrow” my file? The answer to these questions is a resounding, “No.”

However, you can register up to six Kindles on one Amazon account with one credit card. This entitles you to share books between all of the Kindles on the account. It also will wreak havoc with your Amazon recommendation engine. Having four to six different readers buying books from your Amazon account pretty much defeats all of Amazon’s ability to recommend new books that are individually appropriate.

Here’s an important note: Even though you can share books between Kindles on the same account, you cannot easily, wirelessly, share periodicals between them. It requires you to go to your Amazon Kindle Page and do some serious gymnastics with your mouse. Many clicks, many times.

If the inconvenience of several clicks, several times is too bothersome for you, you can purchase multiple subscriptions. For example if you have four people in your family with Kindles who each want the NY Times you would each have to pay the $13.99/month subscription fee at 55.96/month for all four kindle owners in my family adding up to almost $700 for the entire year. Ouch!

The Kindle 2, which is the second generation Amazon Kindle, has a 6″ screen and is about the size of a 8″ x 5″ book. You may think that the small screen is a disadvantage, it isn’t. The Kindle 2 is the perfect size for your briefcase or for your handbag, and, it’s very easy to hold. You can easily type on the keyboard without putting the unit down. This is a plus. And, although it is not an instantly obvious difference, the numbers each have their own keys.

The newer Kindle DX has a 9.7″ screen and it is much bigger, about 10.5″ x 7″. It’s heavier, and it’s very hard to hold with one hand. The keyboard requires you to use the alt key to type numbers. So there’s almost no way you can type on it without putting it down. If you like to annotate your books and papers, this is an issue.

People make a big deal out of the fact that you can set the Kindle DX to auto-rotate the screen (like an iphone). The bad news here is that it chews into your battery life and, worse, if you are reading at an angle, you may accidentally flip the image. So, in practice, it’s a feature you will never use.

If you seen the Kindle 2, you know that it has control buttons on each side of the unit where your thumbs naturally fall. The bigger Kindle DX only has buttons on one side. This really becomes an issue when you need to rotate the screen.

Although you can transfer word documents and PDF files to either Kindle through Amazon, you can attach the larger Kindle DX to your computer and drag a PDF file right into the document folder. If you are going to read a lot of PDF files on your Kindle, you should seriously consider the Kindle DX. Not because of the native PDF support, oddly enough: but because there is really no zoom control for PDF’s and you will need the larger screen to read them.

Which to buy? I have both. If that’s not an option for you, the smaller Kindle 2 is a wonderful, dedicated e-reader. It’s priced right and you won’t be too sad in a few months when new models come out with more features. The Kindle DX is expensive and doesn’t have enough additional features to justify its price tag, unless you are a heavy PDF user.

Interestingly, the survey found that 61 percent of the kids who sent Sext messages said they were pressured into it, and if that’s not bad enough, 29 percent said that they have sent naked pictures to someone online, that they don’t actually know in real life. This is a problem in everyone’s digital life and I have some suggestions.

First, I think it’s important to understand the technology. This may make you roll your eyes. But, do you think Tiger Woods really understood that the voice mail he left (that we’ve all heard) was a digital recording of his voice? That it was recorded on someone else’s device and that he no longer had control of it?

A little history: As you know, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph back in 1877. What you may not know is that the early phonographs could both record and playback (very much like a modern day voicemail system). Edison liked to demonstrate his phonograph by allowing people to speak into the machine and then playing the recording back for them. However, the technology was outside almost everyone’s conceptual understanding. Up to that point in history, the only thing that could mimic the sound of one’s voice was a ventriloquist, so people thought it had to be a trick. Clergymen came to pronounce it “the devil’s work” and to discredit Edison.

But here’s the really fun part. Edison used to charge people 25 cents to try to “fool the machine.” A person who spoke Latin (a dead language) would speak Latin into it and, of course, it would speak Latin back to the person. People wondered how Edison was able to teach a machine to speak Latin. A person would speak Chinese into the machine and it would speak Chinese back to them. Again, people would wonder how the “Wizard of Menlo Park” taught the machine to speak Chinese. People simply did not understand the concept of a recording.

That was then, it’s the 21st century. What was Tiger thinking? Didn’t he understand that he was making a recording? Understanding the technology may help you think about how you want to start the conversation with your kids.

All of the mobile devices we’re talking about are digital. They are little computers. When you send a txt message you can think of it as a word processing document that is automatically stored and delivered. The only problem is, you don’t know where it is stored and who it will ultimately be delivered to. The same goes for digital pictures. Cameraphone or digital camera, the image is uploadable and downloadable. And, once you press send, you can never get it back. No matter what you do, no matter who you know, and now matter how hard you try. These are computer files, and they are as easy to share as music and video and pictures you upload to Facebook.

I saw a very effective demonstration that one parent did for their 16 year old daughter. At her Sweet 16 party, during the obligatory photomontage, they showed a picture of her in the bathtub at age 6 months. She was naked, of course. Her friends giggled. She was mortified. The next day, her father asked her, if there were any other pictures that would embarrass her if they were displayed at the party? That pretty much ended the issue.

There is no technological solution to this issue. But there is a very reasonable parenting solution. When my kids were little and it was time to cross the street, I asked them to hold my hand as we crossed. We’ve all done this with our kids. But that wasn’t the only thing we did. We instructed them to look both ways. We discussed the consequences of crossing a busy street without looking. We didn’t do it once, we did it almost every time we crossed the street with them. And we did it for years. As they got older, there were some streets we could cross together without holding hands, but even with a certain degree of autonomy, if we came to a very busy street, hands were held.

One day … one very important day they were allowed to cross the street by themselves. This day did not just happen. The trust was earned over a protracted training period under our very watchful eyes.

We don’t want to stop anyone from using and exploring new technology. But kids should not be allowed to “play” with power tools, and that’s what these devices are. They are digital tools that make permanent records of how we use them. As parents and school administrators, it’s up to you to make this simple fact sink in. You can’t have one short chat about it, you need to hold their “digital” hands and make sure that they understand the danger of publishing content about themselves and others that can never be unpublished.