Adult MySpace mugged by teens

A 22-year-old Florida man was mugged at gunpoint by two teens who allegedly posed in MySpace as an 18-year-old woman, The Register reports. When 22-year-old Earnest Evans “arrived at their agreed rendezvous, Evans told police, the two girls approached him and asked to borrow his phone. Once he had handed it over to one of the girls, the other held a loaded gun to his head and demanded his wallet and money,” according to The Register. The girls reportedly have been charged with armed robbery and carrying a concealed weapon, and a 21-year-old man who was also on the scene has been “charged with furnishing minors with firearms.”

LunarStorm challenges its peers

LunarStorm, a social network reportedly used by 90% of Sweden’s high school students, has started its international rollout in the UK, and UK CEO Matt Colebourne challenged his fellow social networks in an interview he gave The Register. He said his company monitors its network for potentially illegal activity but doesn’t get into the morality issue. However, he said the pedophilia threat is “very small” - “the biggest problem, he says, is not the most high-profile, but is bullying by the peer group,” according to The Register, which adds that LunarStorm targets only 17-to-19-year-olds (though it can’t stop people younger or older from registering as 17-19).

The age of over-exposure

If not the age of surveillance, certainly the age of over-exposure is dawning. And USATODAY writer Janet Kornblum highlights the fact that kid photogs and videographers are major contributors to this ongoing reality show that is American life – “featuring themselves — and anyone else they see along the way,” unthinkingly without permission, of course. Right now, all these images stored in “government databases (taken from places such as traffic cameras and satellite images) … [and] on the computers of our friends, our neighbors and family and in the databanks of Internet companies that host photo sites … are relatively benign because technology doesn't yet allow us to search through images,” according to USATODAY. But of course that’s changing, and we and especially our kids are going to have to get a lot smarter about the taking and sharing of images. And watch out, the headline of a New York Times story this week is “Video Catching Up to Photos When It Comes to Sharing." It explains the basics of video-sharing by email and home and Web “broadcasting” via services such as PIXPO.com, HomeMovie.com, Snapfish.com, YouTube.com and Metacafe.com.

Protect kids from themselves?!

Here’s a parent who gets it: the Houston Chronicle’s Loren Steffy. He worries about sexual solicitations of kids online, but “I also believe that it's easier to teach children to protect themselves from others than it is to protect them from themselves. Here's what worries me about Myspace more than cyber predators: Written words are permanent. Writers learn early on, sometimes the hard way, that words are permanent and they are judged by them. To kids posting on Myspace, such concerns seem laughable. Yet we may well see Myspace sites posted on courtrooms of the future, routinely reviewed as part of the corporate hiring process or even cited in political campaigns: 'My opponent once wrote that...'." We are already seeing blog and social-networking posts used as evidence in courts. Steffy continues: "I keep coming back to this point, and the New York Times ran a front-page story about it, so let’s talk about it now at the BlogSafety.com forum – it’s time to hear from fellow parents about it! Any wisdom you can share about “teaching kids to protect themselves from themselves”?

'Blog Early Blog Often'

Did you know that’s what Bebo stands for? Well, that’s what its founders Michael Birch and Xochi Birch came up with after they bought the site’s domain name, The Observer reports in “How to make 80 million friends and influence people." They originally intended to make the site for 30-somethings but quickly found out that there’s no controlling what Web 2.0’s drivers will cotton to, and they are not 30-something. The Observer goes in-depth on the some 25 million-member Bebo, noting some very interesting things (e.g., that Michael Birch believes SN is rapidly becoming a utility like file-sharing, rather than a destination, which I’m seeing too). And here’s an interesting anecdote: Birch told the Observer that a Beboer in Ireland (where it’s “a cultural phenomenon” told him that people in the Beboer’s small town weren’t getting along. But after a lot of them happened to join Bebo and got to know each other virtually, there was an unprecedented “community spirit in the town pub.” Bears out what we’re seeing about the way teens use MySpace – mostly as the digital version of and hangout for their real circle of friends.

Downside to 'myspaceWatch'

MyspaceWatch is a simple tool barely in the “parental controls” category that monitors people’s use of just the one social network (it can’t help with kids’ accounts at Xanga, LiveJournal, MyYearbook, Hi5, etc.). As CNET points out, it’s free for monitoring one profile, $6 for up to five, and it only has 30 paying members (the rest of its 3,800 members use the free version). It’s really just a convenience tool, because it sends parents alerts about what they can see anyway on MySpace, its 24-year-old creator Alex Strand told CNET. The disturbing downside of a service like this is that anyone can use it. “Half of MySpacewatch members are parents, Strand estimates, while the other half are primarily people who monitor a friend's MySpace profiles, or their own. Despite some worry that MySpacewatch is used by predators to watch kids pages,” Strand told CNET he hoped not but didn’t know. Meanwhile, other MySpace-focused services KidQuery.com and Singlestat.us have folded for legal reasons, CNET adds.

Net-savvy Boys & Girls Club

Faced with the decision to ban after-school social networking or not, a San Francisco Boys & Girls Club went with not. There’s a story behind this that CNET tells. After “two teenagers from rival schools used MySpace after school … to ‘cyberbully’ other kids,” the Mission District BCGA decided to join a few other Bay-area Boys & Girls Clubs in banning MySpace. Then the Mission District youth center changed its mind. Somehow, it got what a lot of politicians don’t yet see – that, on the user-driven Web, rules, bans, and laws only really reach those willing to comply, whether they’re kids or corporations. This is true with music file-sharing too, that noncompliant young people, Web sites, and companies (both in and outside the US, of course) find work-arounds. The Mission District’s BCGA’s tech director told CNET that they realized their young members would just log into MySpace elsewhere, so better to educate them about how to use the site safely – as well as establish rules for safe use and human monitoring of online activity. If I can editorialize here, that’s the safer choice for teen social networkers, whether parents, youth centers, or governments are making the decision.

Texas teen: How much of a case?

The story of the Texas 14-year-old who is suing MySpace, News Corp, and her alleged assailant for sexual assault is a tragic one, but there are indicators it’s not a strong case (see my earlier “Teen suing MySpace”). “In total, the suit seeks damages of $30 million. But … insofar as the suit names MySpace and News Corp. as defendants, it is on shaky ground,” writes University of Washington law professor Anita Ramasastry in FindLaw.com. “The girl’s damages may, in practice, be limited to those she can recover from [19-year-old alleged assailant Pete] Solis himself.” The professor looks at several assumptions and current law, but “on the topic of responsibility for the fates of underage customers,” she points to a tragic case in Seattle in which seven people, including two teenagers, were shot in a shooting spree at a party after an all-ages rave. “Should the club that hosted the rave be responsible for the harm that followed at the separate after-hours party? Similarly, should pen pal clubs, and newspapers that publish personal ads, be penalized if predators exploit their services to lie about their age and/or engage in harmful behavior?” Ramasastry continues: “One reason to say no is that it may be unfair to put these institutions in the position of policing their users' activities in places the institutions don't control” (please see her article to get the connection). An editorial in the UK’s The Register makes a similar point in The Register’s unique style.

New Net-safety laws mulled

Lawmakers are vowing to take legislative action against child exploitation online, CNET reports. “At a hearing [Tuesday] before the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, politicians served up a dizzying slew of suggestions about what kind of new federal laws should be enacted. The ideas were all over the map,” but new anti-child-porn legislation seems to be top-priority, CNET adds. The article describes some of the other ideas lawmakers are talking about: e.g., outlawing some hotlinks; monitoring what Americans are doing online; a child-porn database and associated ISP filtering, as in the UK; ISP records of who’s assigned what IP address; “search and destroy” bots on P2P networks; restricting Webcam use; regulating search-engine advertising; and a government definition of child pornography.

Cut 'n' paste plagiarism

In-class oral exams and essay writing are replacing term papers as a way of assessing student knowledge, the Los Angeles Times reports. Why? I’m sure you guessed: the Internet makes it so easy for students to plagiarize or purchase ready-made papers. Term papers still exist, of course, but “teachers who still assign long papers — 10 pages or more with footnotes and bibliographies — often require students to attach companion essays that describe every step of their research and writing.” Even so, teachers still do their own Web research for “borrowed” phrases and use plagiarism-detection software to dig them up. Such software indicates that “about 30% of papers are plagiarized, either totally or in part,” according to the L.A. Times, which adds that one such program, Turn It In, “evaluates 60,000 submissions a day.”

P2P 1 year after Grokster

By “Grokster,” I mean the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last year involving Grokster and other defendants in the file-sharing case. The San Jose Mercury News takes a look at what’s happened with P2P over the past year. One thing we’ve learned over the past year of unabated P2P activity worldwide, is that shutting stuff down sends Internet users underground, making their activities tougher to police. A very apt model for the current social-networking discussion in Washington, as lawmakers – with the Delete Online Predators Act working its way around Capitol Hill – look to do some censoring. “File sharing, most of which is illegal, continues to grow. Nearly 10 million users worldwide simultaneously clicked into peer-to-peer technology last month - 12% more than May 2005,” the Mercury News reports citing research from L.A.-based BigChampagne, which monitors file-sharing traffic.

More social-networking niches

Just this week, two more stories on new, more vertical-interest SN sites: AOL’s new action-sports site, Lat34.com, “billed as a kind of MySpace for 12-to-34-year-old male BMX-riders and snowboards,” Reuters reports (the San Diego Union Tribune and many other news outlets covered it too). Then there’s the new safety-conscious niche, but one site eSchoolNews mentions is Whyville, which is more online game world (or edutainment) than social network (see my “Alternate-reality school?”). Another service in this niche, though more purely about entertainment, is Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, which Tim O’Reilly blogs about here. I guess it’s possible, though, that social networking could be more like a game to 8-to-12-year-olds. Maybe that’s entirely appropriate. But another example eSchoolNews points to is the kid-blogging/social-networking startup Imbee.com (see my coverage). Oh, and another niche site I just read about in the sidebar to an Observer article on social networking, though it looks like it’s been around for a while and is only now being called a SN site (we’ll be seeing a lot of this label-morphing): Gaydar.co.uk, “the No. 1 gay bar in cyberspace, with 1 million UK subscribers and 3.5 million worldwide.” There’s more on the “nichifying” at ClickZstats.com.

Pentagon to peruse social networks

While the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism monitoring activities are in the news, we might as well look at the social-networking angle: “New Scientist has discovered that the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks,” the London-based magazine reports. By monitoring the social networks, NSA, New Scientist says, can connect people and groups better than with mere phone logs. “Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or ‘degrees’ separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.”

ISPs help in child-porn fight

Five of the US’s biggest Internet companies have announced they will help the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) build a database of child porn images as a tool in the fight against child pornography. AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, EarthLink, and United Online (which runs NetZero and Juno) have formed a coalition and together pledged $1 million to develop the database “and other tools to help network operators and law enforcement better prevent distribution of the images,” the Associated Press reports. The database is expected to be in place by year’s end, and the ISPs will probably scan images associated with IMs and emails sent by their users against the database and report offending ones to the NCMEC, but the details are still a bit fuzzy. “AOL chief counsel John Ryan said the coalition was partly a response to US Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales' speech in April identifying increases in child-porn cases and chiding the Internet industry for not doing more about them,” according to the AP. Here’s the New York Times’s coverage.

Social networks keep morphing

Nobody knows better than parents that the only constant is change. That goes for social networking as well as kids, the people who are evolving it and the Web more than any other group of people. The blog of ZDNET’s Dan Farber points to some new sites and developments in this youth-driven space. “In the last few days, I have heard about KickApps, a 'white box' social networking platform; iBloks, a 3-D environment for sharing and playing with rich media and games; MOG, a music-based social network; Markaboo, a new social bookmarking service; Boompa, MySpace for car enthusiasts, as the TechCrunch blog reports; NooZ, a news aggregation service with social features (voting, commenting, sharing, etc.) for the MySpace crowd; and Q121.com, a new social networking site for cell phones.”

Marketers are certainly seeing the power shift, so don’t parents need to consider the implications: “There is a massive shift to empowered people expressing their individuality - a trend of ‘mass individualism’,” writes digital marketing consultant Bob Schwartz in Manhattan Beach, Calif. And Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Buzzmetrics in Cincinnati writes at ClickZ.com that, “as a parent with a blog dedicated to my kids, you can bet our huge stash of diapers I'm asking hard questions about how much information we make public on the Web…. Thanks to the MySpace wake-up call, parents and just about everyone else are learning a lot more about how the Web really works.”

Yearbooks or MyYearbook.com?

MyYearbook.com, the social-networking site started by teenage siblings on their spring break, is in comScore Media Metrix’s Top 6 SN sites but has only just started making money. “Jostens, which sells yearbooks, class rings and other scholastic memorabilia … reported $348.5 million in yearbook sales in 2005,” the Associated Press reports. By comparison, MyYearbook.com just started bringing in money - about $40,000 a month with strategically placed banner ads on its site.” But the AP cites one high school student who prefers the free online “yearbook” and plans to get all his friends to establish accounts on the site. He wants a “living” yearbook that friends can use to stay up-to-date on each other’s lives rather than something one puts on a shelf and never looks at again. Most of the site’s users are high school students, but about 30% are in college, the AP reports, unlike Facebook, the vast majority of whose users are at colleges and universities.

Teen filmmakers' online opps

We read about all the everyday writing experience teen bloggers are amassing; the same is happening with young videographers, veejays, and filmmakers. The Minneapolis Star Tribune tells the story of 15- and 16-year-old Anthony Hernandez (15) and Dustin Gillard (16) of Austin, Minn., whose 10-minute video “Anywhere USA” focusing on illegal immigration “was chosen as the grand prize winner in a national contest sponsored by CSPAN (see StudentCam.org). “Making movies has become a favorite pastime for many teens,” the Star Tribune reports. “Armed with digital cameras, film editing software and limitless imaginations, they're riffing on everything from gay marriage to gun control. And their films are debuting at local youth film festivals and on such internet sites such as www.youtube.com.” Meanwhile, in the Los Angeles Times editorializes about how it looks like the music industry may take a different approach with YouTube (kind of the new Napster) than the way it dealt with Napster. “Some labels and songwriters are looking for a way to turn online video into a profit center.” And CNET reports that one label, EMI, is “courting” YouTube and other video upload sites to help it fight piracy.

'Party patrol' has changed

With teen communications tools (IM, phone-texting, comments in profiles) silent now, parents have fewer cues about busy teen socializing. But it does help to be on your child's friends list. "On MySpace, users can send out a bulletin to everyone on their friend list - potentially hundreds of people - that shows up on all their friends' home pages. Students also post messages to each other that may mention parties," the Seattle Times reports. "Parents also need to monitor social networking sites such as MySpace after parties are over," the Times cites one online-safety expert as saying. "Pictures of illegal activities or provocative dress" can be a problem later, when college admissions officers or prospective employers are checking out teen profiles too (the Seattle Times's source is Nancy Willard, director of the Eugene, Ore.-based Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use). Another silent communications tool, instant messaging (which 90% of teens and young adults use), doesn't work the same way, but at least parents can IM their kids when they seem to be very focused on their computer screen and ask what their weekend plans are!

MySpace's privacy upgrades

MySpace users – regardless of age – will be able to make their profiles private, Reuters reported. “Members over 18 years old [will] have to know the email or first and last name of any 14- to 15-year-old member whom they want to contact,” according to Reuters, or rather 14- and 15-year-olds who register as being of those ages. There is no age verification in place on social-networking sites, because – though the technology exists – there is no national-level information on US minors for age-verification technology to check (e.g., adults’ drivers licenses and financial info), I learned this week at a conference on social-networking policy held in Washington, D.C., by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. According to the New York Times, MySpace “will also stop showing advertisements for certain products — like online dating sites — to those under 18.” At the NCMEC conference, MySpace also said that soon, probably within weeks, its users of all ages will also have the option to go completely private and unsearchable. We at NetFamilyNews, BlogSafety.com, and SafeKids.com see this as a double-edged sword – privacy is usually a good thing on the social networks, but it would be hard for parents to find and check in on a child’s completely private profile. That can be a downside for parents, schools, and law enforcement people who monitor MySpace to protect kids and others (see “Shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting” in ArsTechnica.com).

Social-networking 'spear phishers'

We hear an awful lot about predators on the social Web, but much less about problems that are expected to affect a whole lot more users – worms, malicious hackers and data miners. The San Jose Mercury News zoomed in on “spear phishers”: “criminals who send masked messages to a small number of people that appear to be from someone they know, as well as other, more general scams.” Orkut, a Google project that’s very popular in Brazil, has been with a worm gathering financial info and passwords, and earlier this month MySpace users were subjected to a phishing attack trying to steal their account info. Last fall, MySpace, the Mercury News says, MySpace was “ Last week, Orkut was hit with a worm seeking financial information and passwords. In early June, an instant-messenger phishing assault on My Space users tried to steal account information. One vulnerability is that MySpace allows users to insert HTML code in their profiles – code they often get out on the Web, sometimes from questionable sites that may be generating code that does more than it’s advertised to do.

Summer camps' social-network fears

Camps have concerns this summer about campers’ and counselors’ photos in social-networking sites, the New York Times reports. “They worry about online predators tracking children to camp and about their image being tarnished by inappropriate Internet juxtapositions — a mention, say, of the camp on a site that also has crude language or sexually suggestive pictures.” The Times quotes a camp insurance provider as saying this is probably camps’ biggest worry this year, as they consider banning digital cameras and requesting that all references to their names be removed from profiles and blogs, including one camper who reportedly created a profile just to keep in touch with other campers involved in summer theater. And one camp said it brought in a child psychologist for two days to talk with campers about making good decisions.

Free filtering for Oz families

The Australian government plans to provide free Web filtering to every family in the country, CNET reports. The program is expected to cost $86 million. If Internet service providers offer their customers server-based filtering (instead of software installed on individual computers), they’ll get reimbursed. CNET adds that “almost no ISPs currently offer any kind of content filtering.” It'll be interesting to see how this affects Australian kids' social networking.

Online kids & personal boundaries

Can your kids be grouped in here: “With personal lives dominated by gadgets, young people are paying more attention to their virtual worlds than the real one.” That’s the email tease to a USATODAY story that leads with: “Julie Beasley looked out her window one morning and saw a teenager changing clothes in the middle of the street.” The story quotes psychologists as saying our kids are a generation with different concepts of privacy and “personal boundaries” than previous generations’. Is that your experience too, parents, or does every generation of parents think its children are more [fill in the blank] than ever before? Here’s something to think about, though: USATODAY says MIT psychologist/sociologist Sherry Turkle “believes [this generation’s] infatuation with technology will lessen, and people will be better able to balance the real and the virtual parts of their lives.”

Social *activism* networking for teens!

We're seeing a trend you might call niche social networking. There’s the whole passel of family blogging, photo-sharing, and networking sites, a few examples of religion-based social networking, the social sites revolving around specific music genre, and our own BlogSafety.com (social networking for parents who want to talk about social networking!). Today a very interesting new category: social networking for social change. The category’s first site: YouthNoise.com, a project of Save the Children (here’s their press release. This is an exciting development, don’t you think? “YouthNoise launches with more than 113,000 registered users from all 50 US states and more than 170 countries worldwide and averages approximately 3 million page views per month, which is comparable to the most popular teen Web sites. A recent study demonstrated that participation in YouthNoise yields a 25% increase in volunteering and a 90% increase in the global awareness of users from ‘modestly aware’ to ‘highly aware’."

Louisiana videogame law on hold

A federal judge in Baton Rouge “granted a temporary stay on a new Louisiana law signed last week that would outlaw the sale of violent video games to children under 18,” eCommerceTimes reports. The videogame industry’s trade association and the Entertainment Merchants Association both challenged the law, which “calls for a fine of $2,000 or one-year prison term - or both - for violators.” The law’s opponents told the court thatsimilar laws had been struck down in six other jurisdictions over the past five years on constitutional (free-speech) grounds.

Teen suing MySpace

In the first lawsuit we’ve seen against MySpace by a teen user, a 14-year-old in Texas is suing MySpace for $30 million, saying she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old she "met" on the site, the Associated Press reports. According to MTV News, the Austin girl “alleges that Pete Solis, a 19-year-old from Buda, Texas, obtained her phone number after pretending to be a high school senior and a member of his school's football team in his MySpace profile.” MTV News has more details. In their case against MySpace, the girl and her family say the site doesn't do enough to protect underage members. Solis and MySpace’s parent company News Corp. are also defendants in the case. In its response, MySpace said it's "committed to the safety of its members" and encourages teens to use the Web safely.

Exploring identity online

"Cyberspace offers a bevy of tempting opportunities to pretend to be who you're not. Yet teens don't typically go online to deceive others but to confront their own identities," reports ScienceNews.org in its look at the latest research about online teen behavior. The article leads with some disturbing discussion-board "conversation" about self-hurting techniques. This is certainly not just about social-networking, which is only the latest form of online community. But marginalized kids can find the wrong kind of "support" on the social networks too. Parents need to know about this, because – as one child psychologist told us recently – because young people engaging in self-destructive behavior can be very secretive. And Web sites that are "pro-ana" (for anorexia) or about pro-cutting definitely don't broadcast themselves. As for what kids find there (in this case, the self-injury board analyzed in a study done at Cornell University): "Many postings provided emotional support to other members. Participants also frequently discussed circumstances that triggered self-mutilation…. Some message senders detailed ways to seek aid for physical and emotional problems, but others described feeling addicted to self-injury. More ominously, a substantial minority of messages either discouraged self-injurers from seeking formal medical or mental help or shared details about self-harm techniques and ways to keep the practice secret."

RIAA might sue less

That's my take-away upon seeing that the recording industry is saying illegal file-sharing has been "contained." RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol said the industry's P2P problem isn't over, but online music sales are "thriving" and file-sharing is "flat," USATODAY reports. "The RIAA has sued just over 18,000 individuals for sharing songs online, with 4,500 settling for about $4,000 per case. Album sales are still down — about 3% this year. But Bainwol says digital sales — up 77% — make up for the shortfall." A San Jose Mercury News blogger interviewed an analyst who offers some possible explanations (some with tongue in cheek) for what looks to be a major strategy shift. Across the pond, Sweden's justice minister said his government might legalize file-sharing and, to compensate music companies, impose a surcharge on broadband Internet service, Sweden's English-language news service The Local reports.

Social networking for kids 9-14!

But don't be dismayed - this is not MySpace for 9-to-14-year-olds. California startup Industrious Kid is about to launch Imbee.com, a safe social-networking service for kids. This is actually big kid-tech news, the first product I've seen of its kind and a great idea (NetFamilyNews doesn't have the resources to properly test software and services, but I always want to alert you to new ones with good thinking behind them). Based on a run-through of product and parental-control features and a long conversation with Industrious Kid, Imbee.com does two things: 1) It gives budding online socializers a safe place to blog and socialize, and 2) it gives parents on-the-job training (with teachable moments) in parenting on this highly participatory, kid-driven phase of the Web we all face. If a parent is lucky enough to be embarking on this journey with a 9-year-old instead of a teenager, here is some real help. What I like about Imbee.com, from what I can tell so far, is that it supports parent-child communication, demystifies social networking for parents, and looks to be an interesting, viable product for kids. (I'm pretty sure on that last one – I need to try it out on my 9-year-old - but the point is I as a mom *want* to; I've been wanting to get him a safe email-type tool of his own to talk with his buddy in Chicago, but until now nothing grabbed me.) The Industrious Kid presentation convinced me that this product, for once, is not about controlling kids, like so many "solutions" that have come down the pike; it's about giving kids the tool for self-expression and socializing that MySpace is but with age-appropriate safeguards. Check it out – you can take Imbee's parent tour on Imbee's home page (bottom right-hand corner).

Alternate-reality school?

Might make sense, since – as ABC News reports - 96% of boys and 78% of girls play videogames on a regular basis (that's from a Journal of Adolescence study). CNET write Stefanie Olsen looks at whether virtual world games are the future of the classroom. She lead with how "this summer, as many as a million virtual kids could catch an infectious virus known as Whypox, causing them to break out in red welts and spout 'Achoo' whenever chatting with friends." Only virtually, though. She's talking about a game, sort of, a multiuser virtual environoment (MUVE) called Whyville, which has a population of about 1.6 million 8-to-12-year-olds. MUVEs are "a genre of software games created to inspire children to learn about math and science, among other subjects." In other gaming news:

* Sexual role-playing game. ABC News reports that the new "Naughty America: The Game" is "poised to go where few games gone before: the bedroom." It's a multiplayer online game that combines " one-on-one chat functions, player profiles and multiplayer dating games with options to interact both online as well as in the real world." Its makers say they're working on age verification for the online version (doesn't sound like they've got it set up yet).
* OK law challenged. As with at least a half-dozen other states' laws, the Entertainment Software Association immediately challenged a just-signed Oklahoma law that prohibits stores from selling M-rated games to minors and requiring them to check IDs as with alcohol and tobacco sales, the OK University Daily reported.
* Gamemakers clueless? CNET ran a report on gender issues from the Sex in Videogames conference.
* Ad growth expected. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on how huge product-placement advertising is going to be in videogames: huge.

Social Web: Only the start

Social networking isn't going anywhere, parents. That's the basic parental take-away from the Global Internet Summit in Laguna Beach, Calif., this week: The social Web, with all its faces – from social networking to blogging to media-sharing – is "poised to shape [the] Web's future," CNET reports. "Social networks such as MySpace.com are already challenging traditional portals. MySpace, for example, has surpassed MSN and AOL by measure of monthly page views … and its traffic equals roughly 75% of Yahoo's, the No. 1 site on the Web," CNET added, citing remarks by Safa Rashtchy, managing director and senior analyst at investment firm Piper Jaffray. MySpace had 50 million visitors in March. Not that these monster Web 2.0 sites or anyone else knows how they'll turn their huge traffic numbers into comparable revenues, but it's a safe bet they'll figure it out. Meanwhile, this week comScore MediaMetrix released its latest social-networking figures, with MySpace the Web's 7th most high-traffic site (after giants such as Google, eBay, and Yahoo). May's Top 6 SN sites were MySpace.com, Classmates.com, Facebook.com, YouTube.com, MSN Spaces, and Xanga.com, respectively.

'Mosquitotone' on your kid's phone?

Have you heard about this ringtone yet? Mosquitotone is a ringtone that most adults can't hear, and it's propagating among teen cellphone users wordwide as we speak. Reportedly it all started with a shopowner broadcasting this sound outside this store to repel teen loiterers who apparently were scaring off customers. "The original Mosquito device is a small black box that looks like a speaker and emits pulsating sounds at a frequency around 17 kilohertz -- a range that is audible to relatively undamaged young ears but generally harder to hear for those older than 20," the Washington Post reports. The Post discusses how it went from there to a wildly popular line of subversive ringtones that do a great job of getting back at the original concept. The Post quotes a school security officer as saying he could see it becoming a problem in the fall, when a lot of kids will be "running to the bathroom" to answer their phones, which will be ringing in class under teachers' radar. Here's the New York Times's coverage.

'MySpaceMail - not email, thanks'

A lot of parents could tell, but research now shows that "for the first time, teen email use is dropping - apparently in favor of more 'instant' alternatives," IM-ing, MySpace mail and posting, phone texting, the San Jose Mercury News reports. Some kids who do have email accounts say they got them just so they could sign up for a social-networking account. Even IM growth is slowing, compared to MySpace mail. ComScore Media Metrix found that, in April teen email use nationwide dropped the same month in 2005, since February, teen e-mail use nationwide has been dropping compared with a year earlier. "Even though the average time spent online by teens increased 11.6% from April 2005, to 22.5 hours a month, time on Web mail declined 9%.... Total IM users increased only 1%, while the number of teen users declined 8% - in part, some experts say, because of the rise of MySpace, which allows users to send comments and messages to each other." What's interesting, here, is that MySpace is a separate "universe." If adults don't have an account, they can't contact their child through it – different from being able to IM or email a child through "old-fashioned" channels.

Patches, zombies, etc.

More than 60% of Windows computers have been turned into zombies, ZDNET reports, and a lot of those are home PCs. Zombies are computers that have been taken over by malicious hackers who use them to send out zillions of spam messages or to launch denial-of-service attacks that shut down Web sites (often in extortion schemes). PCs usually get hijacked when owners click on links in emails or IMs that download worms or viruses carrying Trojan software that allows remote PC manipulation. The latest PC security risk is malicious Web sites that send your computer spyware and other "malware" automatically when you click to them from a Web search engine (people need to be careful what they click on from search engines now too, not just emails and IMs). The BBC reports on that. Meanwhile, Microsoft Tuesday released it biggest bundle of security patches of 2006, the Washington Post reports - 12 security updates "to fix at least 21 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and other software, including 12 flaws Redmond labeled "critical." PC owners, if you haven't automated patching, go to WindowsUpdate.com (patches can help keep your PC from becoming a zombie). Meanwhile, CNET reports that phishing attacks and botnets (the networks of zombie PCs that malicious hackers manipulate) are outpacing law enforcement.

Young & uber-connected

First there was Generation X, then GenY, and now it's GenTech, as CBS News puts it in some of the best, most balanced coverage I've seen yet on our ultra-connected teens. We, CBS says, are "adult culture," kind of a new way to describe today's generation gap, since baby boomer moms and dads had unimaginably minimal options for socializing as kids: in person, by phone, and in writing (on paper). There is no leveling off of teen socializing online, of course: 24% more teenagers are online now than four years ago, CBS reports. One article in the CBS series is about MySpace, reported by its writer, Sean Alfano, *from* MySpace. Note one observation from a mom on MySpace about her teen MySpacer – that her daughter was kind of processing her feelings and issues on MySpace first, that things could come out more in person *because* of that process (it wasn't clear if the mom was monitoring her daughter's MySpace use, but she was a member herself). Another mom said her son Matt (15) was learning "the responsibilities attached to speaking your mind," and Matt told Sean that "he appreciated his mom checking on him to make sure he does nothing stupid," though he would tolerate no censorship of his "R-rated" profile. You can get to all pieces in the series from that first link in this item.

Teens & terrorist charges

It's becoming widely known that teens act out in social-networking sites. As I reported last week, police in Dallas know there's a difference between gang members and gangsta wannabees in MySpace. Still, in this post-9/11 era, charges are escalating. "Schools cracking down on students who plot violent attacks against classmates and educators are increasingly turning to a new form of prosecution: charging the suspects as terrorists," USATODAY reports. "Typically, students involved in such crimes are charged with offenses such as conspiracy, attempted assault or making bomb threats. But prosecutors say state legislatures now allow them to get tough — with charges that permit longer sentences — to prevent attacks such as the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., which left 15 people dead, including the two teenage gunmen.

Understanding emo

A music genre is now also a teen social group that's often targeted by bullies. "On LiveJournal… one of the top blogs is called 'Die Emo Kids'," the Toronto Star reports. According to the Chicago Tribune, mood swings and therapy are now cool, and both the emotions and an almost stylized neediness are readily depicted on social-networking sites. "You can find the ever-more-youthful emo trend in cities and suburbs. And it has spread, thanks to the Internet, faster than you can type, 'Seeking desolate landscape populated by preteens.'… You can Google 'emo' and find step-by-step pictorial guides for 'emo makeovers.' That is, how to transform a geeky guy with a pencil tucked behind his ear, working at a copy store, to a 'bona fide emo boy' … shown dying his hair black, ditching the smile, slipping on a black T-shirt and scarf and, in the final photo, putting razor blade to wrist, from which something red is spilling." Besides the bullying and cutting, another risk the Tribune cites is kids swapping prescriptions the way they used to swap Twinkies for chips in school lunches. Don't miss the insights into all this from Trib source Michael Lacocque, school counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, "who has been working with 7th graders for much of his professional life." (Now kids as young as 12 are experimenting with being emo.)

Teen reputations, jobs at risk

The two biggest risks for kids on social networks are cyberbullying (among young teens) and reputation tarnish for high school and college students. Teens need to become their own spin doctors in this age of overexposure - fast. "Researching students through social networking sites [is] now fairly typical," reports the New York Times in a front-page article Sunday. "Many career counselors have been urging students to review their pages on Facebook and other sites with fresh eyes, removing photographs or text that may be inappropriate to show to their grandmother or potential employers. Counselors are also encouraging students to apply settings on Facebook that can significantly limit access to their pages." The Times points to one new graduate who was passed up for a summer internship because of "interests" listed in his online profile such as "'smokin' blunts' (cigars … stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex.… It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done." High school students' experiences with summer jobs and applying for college admission will be no different, if their profiles and blogs aren't already being searched for "background checks." It has never been more important for social networkers to think before they post. If they're in denial about how public these sites are and not using privacy controls, they need to come out of it. (Parental caveat: Privacy features also reduce parents' ability to monitor social networkers, which is why parent-child communication is also more important than ever.)

Teen lured to Mideast

A 16-year-old Michigan girl somehow persuaded her parents to get her a passport, then flew to the Middle East to meet a man she "met" in MySpace, the Associated Press reports. She "left home without notice." After not returning her mother's calls to her cellphone, her disappearance was reported, and the Tuscola County [Mich.] Sheriff's Department "contacted the FBI, which was able to trace the teen to a Wednesday flight from New York's Kennedy International Airport to Tel Aviv, Israel, with a stop in Amman…. US officials persuaded her to return home from Amman [Jordan]," according to the AP, which added that the girl apparently contacted the man about three months ago. Whether or not the girl initiated contact, a key take-away for parents is that the vast majority of these "traveler" cases are consensual – the child is not forcibly abducted, but rather persuaded or "groomed" to go meet the predator. In the case reported by the AP in February then believed to involve "up to seven" Connecticut girls (12-16) allegedly sexually assaulted by men they'd had contact with in MySpace, all the girls told police the sex was consensual (see my coverage). To understand how the "persuasion" works (and make sure your kids are alerted to manipulation), see "How to recognize 'grooming'" and "How social influencing works."

Gamemaker's settlement with FTC

Last year several lawmakers asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into hidden sexually explicit content in Grand Theft Auto. This week, the FTC released its report and the news of a deal with GTA's makers. "When the scandal [about GTA's hidden "Hot Coffee" mod] broke in July 2005, the game's publishers, New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software and Rockstar Games, agreed to change the rating to AO [Adults Only] and subsequently incurred $24.5 million in costs due to returns of the game," CNET reports. "Under the terms of Thursday's settlement with the FTC, Take-Two and Rockstar Games agreed to 'clearly and prominently disclose on product packaging and in any promotion or advertisement...content relevant to the rating.' Any violations would mean hefty fines." For NetFamilyNews coverage, see "Grand Theft Auto's X-rated content?" and "Videogames turning point."

Texters: Future pro writers

Here's a concept: "With their mouths largely shut but their laptops and flip phones open, teenagers' bedrooms are beginning to sound like the library." Seriously, text is far and away today's hottest communications medium, a USATODAY report indicates. So parents concerned about teen blogging and social networking may appreciate a definite upside, expressed beautifully in a sidebar to the USATODAY piece: Today's teens may not be talking, but they're writing regularly and eloquently. Amy Goldwasser, a Manhattan-based freelance editor and writer who's about to submit to publishers a collection of essays by teenage girls from across the USA, says the 1,500 submissions she has received about "life and death and God" are fluid, articulate and intimate." Could people in the publishing industry say that about us when we were teenagers? Here's an in-depth piece about Australia's avid teen texters in the Sydney Morning Herald.

AllofMP3.com: Illegal?

Lots of digital-music news this week. Much of it centers on a story about a little Web music store with global-sized impact. Russia-based AllofMP3.com, which has long purported to sell tunes that were legal but very cheap, "could jeopardize Russia's long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization," according to the New York Times. "Operating through what music industry lobbyists say is a loophole in Russia's copyright law, AllofMP3.com offers a vast catalog of music that includes artists not normally authorized for sale online — like the Beatles and Metallica," the Times reports. "The songs are sold by the megabyte instead of individually, and an album of 10 songs or so on AllofMP3 can cost the equivalent of less than $1, compared with 99 cents a song on iTunes." Those AllofMP3 songs also come with no DRM, or copyright protection, an added incentive for music customers. For some time the site has been *kind of* legal middle ground between "expensive" mainstream music retailers and free but illegal file-sharing. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that British record companies would be suing AllofMP3.com. In other major digital-music news, the BPI, which represents UK record labels, announced that British music fans UK music fans "no longer face the threat of prosecution for copying their own CDs on to PCs or MP3 players, as long as the songs are only for personal use," the BBC reported. "Consumers would only be penalised if they made duplicates of songs for other people."

PC security wars: Good!

Microsoft's OneCare is shaking up the whole field of PC security, and that's great for family PCs. It's not to say that viruses, phishing attacks, and other pests are going away overnight, but it does spell better, cheaper, more family-friendly protection, according to CNET. "A number of companies, including perhaps unexpected ones such as AOL [with its "Total Care," coming this summer], are readying security and maintenance packages for home computers, following Microsoft's launch last week of Windows Live OneCare." If you have not one single clue about which way to go with this growing number of options, you are not alone! Here's a handy chart CNET has prepared, comparing PC care products available right now. It doesn't do quality comparisons but it does say whether they have features like antivirus, antispyware, antiphishing, firewall, backup, and even "safe Web searching." See also this transcript of a conversation between Washington Post PC security reporter Brian Krebs and his readers about the latest security threats and what to do about them.

Gangs in social-networking sites

Not too surprisingly (because social networks are just a reflection of our culture), "gangstas" are showing up on these sites. The Dallas Morning News reported that is not just gang members but also "wannabees" acting out (posting photos of themselves displaying gang symbols, holding weapons, and partying) bragging about their exploits on social-networking sites. Police investigators are reporting this, but it's great that they're also reporting that some of it's a big act. "Many of the Web postings come from kids who merely want to imitate the gangster image, which is not illegal, investigators say." But parents, get this: "They add that they have to take the sites seriously because some of the postings come from serious gang members and many of the 'wannabes' can become real dangers." Just another clear reminder of how important it is for us to help our kids think through the implications of their behavior in digital public spaces.

Parent poll on Net safety

Where their kids' use of the Internet's concerned, parents' greatest fear is sexual predators, a new study by CommonSenseMedia.org found. "Still, they perceive other dangers to be more likely to occur: 80% are concerned about sexual predators online; 39% think that they are likely to happen to their kids, according to the study press release. Among media in general, the Internet is seen as the most risky - 85% of parents thinks so, vs. 13% for TV. In other findings:

Other concerns after sexual predation are kids' exposure to values parents don't agree with (72%); kids' exposure to ideas they're not ready to see (70%); lack of outdoor time (71%), computer viruses (76%), and experimentation with porn (55%).

82% said there was "no excuse for not knowing enough to protect your kids."

98% said they trust their own instincts where the Net's concerned.

53% of parents say their kids have accidentally found inappropriate content in a Web search.

70% know their kid’s email password, vs. 52% for the IM password

78% feel social networks are not a safe way for kids to meet new people online.

Here's coverage of the study at USATODAY and the San Francisco Chronicle. CommonSenseMedia now has an Internet-safety Web site too.

Parents, public service & the Net

Parents in public service have a new publicity worry to add to their lists: having their parenting experiences disseminated in social-networking sites. The Rockford (Ill.) Register Star tells the story of a school board president whose daughter had a party that got out of hand. The mom/school official had to end it early. But the kids partied on in cyberspace. "Details of her daughter’s party got onto the Internet via the popular Web site MySpace. Party attendees chatted online about how [the school board president's] daughter may have gotten into trouble with her parents and that partyers were drunk." The result was a police visit to their home "to determine if charges against anyone were warranted. While authorities said charges don't appear necessary, school board president Kalchbrenner now wonders if punishment is already being doled out." She wondered if her position (which she has served in since 2001) meant her family was subjected to more scrutiny than most families and who would, in the future, be willing to serve under such conditions.

Phishers' fake MySpace

PC security researchers have discovered another MySpace-related phishing attack (stealing personal info), The Register reports. In this case, it's a link sent in an instant message to AIM users. People who click on the link are connected to a fake MySpace page telling them to log into their MySpace account. When they type in the information, it's collected by the phishers, and victims are forwarded to a real MySpace page. The phishing scam also sends a cookie to victims' computers which stops the fake page from displaying again (so victims don't become suspicious about being tricked). Tell your kids to be careful about what they click on in IMs – to be sure the IM is coming from a friend, and even so to start a new conversation with that friend and ask him or her if s/he sent the link.

Online dating, fraud & the law

There are some themes, here, that might be of interest to parents of social networkers (especially those who use online dating sites!). Online news magazine Slate.com recently looked at the state of online dating. Kind of an older, earlier version of social-networking (though Slate includes MySpace in this category), it has a similar, possibly greater, level of fantasy associated with it. "Everybody is blond and skinny in cyberspace. And that can be a problem. Consider the number of marriages ending because one of the parties just met their one true love on Yahoo Personals," says Slate, suggesting that people don't want this aspect of "e-commerce" regulated because they like the fantasy, the privacy (courting in the privacy of one's own home), and the anonymity. "Heavy regulation would mean that the blurry lines between reality, fantasy, and wishful thinking would be patrolled and enforced by cyberlove cops" – even though there have been some pretty shady practices. Slate elaborates.

Cyberbullying & social networking

It describes a few particular vicious cases (including one mom finding out about an egregious attack on her 13-year-old daughter from her 17-year-old son) but tries to provide perspective. "Although largely harmless, the boom in social networking sites has been accompanied by the spread of 'cyberbullying,' a trend that some experts believe is fast getting out of hand and may be being exaggerated in the UK by Bebo's focus on schools [Bebo has 4 million users in Britain]. In a recent Microsoft survey of 500 UK 12-to-15-year-olds, more than 1 in 10 (11%) said they had been bullied online." Research into digital bullying has only just begun in the US, but USATODAY reported on a small study of 65 girls aged 15-18 that showed how mobile bullying is getting. Presented at a meeting of the American Educational Research Association, it found that "self-identified female bullies most often text-messaged harassment by cellphone, preferring it nearly 2 to 1 over email, Web sites and instant messaging. About 45% had been victims of cyberbullying." Bullying's victims, of course, are not kids. A 14-year-old student in suburban Chicago faces felony harassment charges for "threatening the life of a school official on MySpace.com," the Associated Press reported this week.

Online vigilantism in China

The largely online (but sometimes offline) vigilantism we're seeing in the US (with Perverted-Justice.com, smaller groups, and individuals) is nothing compared to the very "real world" Chinese version. The Chinese call it "Internet hunting," according to a New York Times report that leads with the story an "an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of the country's most popular Internet bulletin boards from a husband denouncing a college student he suspected of having an affair with his wife." The story ended with "total strangers forming teams that [within days] hunted down the student, hounded him out of his university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their home. Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack." Comparisons are being made between Internet hunting and frightening mobs taking "justice" in their own hands during the Cultural Revolution (China's marking its 40th anniversary this year). Check out the Times piece to see what Beijing and local authorities are doing about it.

MN's twist on game legislation

Most state laws about violent videogames involved fining retailers if they sold adult videogames to kids. Minnesota's new law fines kids. Just signed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the law, SF 785, "imposes a $25 fine on minors who purchase games rated M for Mature or AO for Adults Only," GameSpot.com reports. "The bill is scheduled to go into effect August 1, but it could be pushed back or struck down entirely. The Entertainment Software Association [this week] announced its intent to file suit against the state." Meanwhile, you'll be hearing more about violent and sexually explicit videogames from federal lawmakers. They've "resurfaced on politicians' agenda as the November election draws near, " CNET reports, and "a US House of Representatives committee on consumer protection says it will hold a hearing … later this month, with a focus on 'informing parents and protecting children' from the alleged dangers of those types of games." And the BBC had a story on Christian game development, reporting that "later this year Left Behind Games will release Eternal Forces, an action packed story set in a New York landscape where soldiers take on demons. There's no blood and a no cursing rule - curse and your energy level drops. The makers hope it will be the first title to take Christian gaming mainstream."

YouTube's upgrade

Nearly every day a star is born on YouTube.com, Reuters reports. It's like an interactive, online "American Idol," with much less buildup and much lower production values. Examples of YouTube idols: "Anthony Padilla, aka "smosh," now semifamous online for lip synching the Pokemon theme song, and littleloca, who fans recently outed as an out-of-work actress, but who presents herself on YouTube as an 18-year-old Latina living in East Los Angeles." But the news is, YouTube just got more personalizable. It unveiled a major upgrade with "channels," allowing users "to create playlists that can be shared with similar-minded fans." Half of the site's visitors are under 34, and they watch 50 million videos a day on it, Reuters adds.

Teen 'phisher' arrested

This case could fall under cyberbullying and/or ID theft headings – Japan's first phishing case involving a minor. Japanese police arrested a 14-year-old in Nagoya "on suspicion of fraud," Agence France-Presse reported. He allegedly created a Web site (a "phishing site") that looked like a popular game site and, in that site, captured the email addresses and other personal info of 94 people. Police say he used the information to threaten the people if they didn't send him nude photos of themselves. Parents, tell your kids to be wary of phishing in popular social-networking sites – specifically, of prompts to log in again. This has been reported to happen MySpace: Someone logs in as usual, then a screen pops up prompting you to log in again, which people sometimes do unthinkingly. That "log-in" steals your username and password and can potentially take you to a Web page that can download malicious software code onto your computer.

Game addiction & escapism

"Unable to pass tough university entrance exams and under intense pressure from his parents to study harder, 20-year-old Kim Myung gradually retreated to the one place where he could still feel invincible," reports the Washington Post. That's online alternate-reality games, it adds, not saying which one Kim was into (he gained 10 pounds over four months of subsisting on a bowl of instant noodles a day). "Sociologists and psychiatrists have identified South Korea as the epicenter" of "a game addiction problem … in many industrialized nations… in part because young people here suffer from acute stress as they face educational pressures said to far exceed those endured by their peers in other countries. The country opened its first game-addiction treatment center in 2002, according to the Post, and "hundreds of private hospitals and psychiatric clinics have opened units to treat the problem. Last month, Korea launched a "game addiction hotline." Meanwhile, Europe's first game addiction clinic is scheduled to open next month, Hexus.Gaming reports. It'll be an eight-bed residential unit in Amsterdam, according to the BBC.

Family-networking sites

Move over Martha, here comes a whole passel of family-networking sites. Martha Stewart's may be more about networking around crafts, entertaining, décor, cooking, etc., than about parenting, but there's a lot of what might already be called 2nd-generation social-networking competition beating her to the Web. "Since January, nearly a dozen family-networking portals have launched in test version, including Ourstory.com, Zamily.com, Amiglia.com, Families.com, Famoodle.com, Jotspot Family Site, Cingo.com, FamilyRoutes.com, [Minti.com] and Famundo.com," CNET reports. CNET also mentions the about-to-launch LiveHeritage.com, a "free facial recognition site offering photos and genealogy" features. Like MySpace, they're multimedia, allowing collaborative blogging, photo- and video-sharing, and calendar-sharing, but with more emphasis on (and user interest in) privacy. Then there are all those parenting groups on MySpace itself – see my "Parents on MySpace," 3/10.

NYC schools' tough phone rules

The controversy around New York public schools' strict cellphone policy is growing. "Although most school districts across the country ban the use of cellphones in the classroom, New York has for years been a notch stricter. It mandates that students not even have cellphones - or other electronic devices - in their pockets or backpacks," the Los Angeles Times reports. The ban was pretty much ignored until last month, when "Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg endorsed bringing portable scanners randomly into city schools to find unauthorized objects." Los Angeles schools allows phones if they're turned off and kept in a pocket, purse, or backpack except before and after school and during breaks. Some New York parents "say that if the mayor and schools Chancellor Joel Klein don't budge, they will send their children to school with the phones anyway and risk occasional confiscation, trusting local school officials to continue the 'don't ask, don't tell' practice that seems to have been in place over the years."

Espionage/counterespionage at home

We hear about monitoring software in the online-safety space, but we don't read much about it *in context* - with the countersurveillance being done by kids. The Washington Post takes a very anecdotal look at both sides of the story. Monitoring digital natives is not easy. They know stuff: like changing the text and background on a monitor to blue and black "making it harder … to read the screen from across the room"; setting IM preferences to "invisible" so parents can't tell they're online; turning GPS-enabled phones off; making MySpace profiles (and searchable personal info) partially fictitious; neglecting to mention home-school connection parts of school Web sites; etc. But parents, though digital immigrants, are learning the ropes, USATODAY reports, learning to check blogs and to IM them to come down to dinner. One mother of five told USATODAY that "communicating over a screen has helped her and her son step out of their customary roles" and see each other as people.