Do today's blogging teenagers have no sense of shame?

When my children come home from school, their preferred form of chilling out is logging on. While the younger one contents herself with designing a cyber-home on The Sims simulation game (in spooky imitation of what her mother is doing in the embodied world), the older one makes straight for MySpace. There she chronicles her life and times.

I can't be sure because I haven't looked (unless you count the time she left it open on her father's computer), not only because I know I'd find it disturbing, but also because she'd hate me to.

Here's the paradox: She and her friends are happy to parade the intimacies of their lives to everyone except those who, on a day-to-day basis at least, live closest to them and have known them longest.