Bill Thompson @ BBC
An employee who forgot their password to log in to the corporate network would probably get a withering look from the support staff as they grovelled to have it reset.
By contrast it seems that young people who forget their MySpace logins are just as likely to make a new account as fret over their lost friends or painstakingly constructed homepage decorations.
I've seen this myself with my daughter, who has been through more user accounts, social sites and e-mail addresses than I could even begin to keep track of and seems to see nothing unusual in abandoning a profile because it doesn't feel right any more.
Recent work by US-based social media researcher Danah Boyd, one of the more astute observers of network behaviour, indicates that it is a more general attitude.
Her observations of young net users have led her to believe that "many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places", and she has noted that for young people an online profile is "not seen as something to build an extensive identity around, but something to use to talk to friends in the moment".
more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6234663.stm
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