I’m planning a night at the Oscars. By my reckoning, it should happen around 2010.

A budding Hollywood star, Bridgit Mendler, has emerged in my family. At only 15, she’s won a leading role in The Clique, a film based on the popular teen novels of Lisi Harrison.

Exciting stuff in a bloodline whose only prior notoriety was the publication of the Massachusetts Conveyancers’ Handbook (With forms) in 1984.

Professionally, it’s also fascinating to watch how Warner Brothers builds an audience while the film is in post-production. Besides the official website and IMDb, the cast and author spread the buzz via personal websites, blogs, Facebook and YouTube presences.

It’s the right way to do it: Three-quarters of U.S. teens are avid social networkers, and 45% contribute content to these self-perpetuating virtual environments, according to Yankee Group’s Anywhere Consumer 2007 US Teens and Technology Survey.

For Bridgit and her generation, the concept of separating private, public, real and virtual existences is increasingly nonsensical. But at what human cost?

I’m reminded of Gertrude Stein’s comment on her Californian home town: ‘The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn’t any there there.’

And the dissolution of boundaries also worries me. In 1999, Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy famously said privacy was dead.

More a casual irrelevance to today’s teens.

But in Gertrude Stein’s time, unlike Bridgit’s, you never got tagged on JailbaitWait.

If you’re in any doubt about lurking dangers for our young, take a look at what Robin Blake, head of media literacy at UK communications regulator Ofcom has to say.

In a new report on social networking among children, Ofcom found that 41% of British children do not use privacy settings, but only 30% of parents know that their children’s profiles are open to view by anyone online.

Now that’s sobering stuff.