Cheers everyone, I hereby de-lurk. I think this discussion is interesting, because this conflicted relationship between academia and the press is something I’ve personally experienced from both sides: As a journalist trying desperately to get scholars to speak in a manner which could be communicated to a general, non-academic public, and as an academic opening the newspaper and finding myself quoted saying exactly the opposite of what I thought I had said. Needless to say, both experiences are extremely frustrating. Personally I thought the Post article was quite good, compared to most newspaper stories. Frankly I think academics should be happy whenever the general public takes an interest in our work, rather than complain about reporters’ lack of scientific accuracy. Scholarly precision and comprehensive elaboration is good for a lot of things, but not necessarily for reaching out to a wider public at their breakfast tables. To prove my point, the controversy made me go back and read danah’s excellent blog essay to see for myself what all the fuss was about. I never got around to reading it before since it is a little on the side of my own field of research. Now I am glad I did, as I found it very interesting! Looking at the popularity of certain local SNS's here in Norway, in particular among the youngest teens, I find myself asking whether language and culture barriers contribute to a similar effect to that which danah describes, in non-English language areas: Facebook for the older, higher educated crowd, and national SNS's for the younger/lower-class teens? Has anyone done research on that? Regards -- Anders Sundnes Løvlie Research fellow Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo (+47) 40 45 04 85 a.s.lovlie@media.uio.no folk.uio.no/anderssl