MySpace 'backdoor' closed

The day that Wired magazine reported the availability of a "backdoor" to photos on some MySpace users' private profiles, the site sealed the door, MySpace said. It's an example of how the Net industry and the media, at odds on the surface, actually work together to protect users. Though Wired said "the glitch emerged last fall," it didn't report on it till January 17, the day MySpace said the "feature" - a way of allowing users with private profiles to make their photo albums available to friends, MySpace said - had been dropped. Private profiles of any change can no longer make their photos public. Don't be surprised, however, if reports of the bug continue to circulate, because not every blogger does fact checking.

World of Warcraft passes big milestone

The world's biggest multiplayer online game just passed the 10 million player mark, Yahoo Games reports. World of Warcraft has a "population" greater than Sweden's and Israel's, it adds. "Warcraft players number more than 2.5m in North America, while Asian subscribers account for the majority of the remainder."

High school classes in videogame design?

That's what the Ohio Supercomputer Center is promoting, the Cleveland Morning Journal reports. "The process of creating a video game involves reading, comprehending, doing math and physics, plus problem solving to make the game's characters and other features function realistically," the Center says, adding that getting high school students involved in the process gets them hooked on math and science. "Video game design isn't just for entertainment; similar 'games' are used in medical training," editorializes the Morning Journal, citing an Associated Press report. The Orlando Sentinel tells the story of one such class at Edgewater High School in Orlando. "Now offering a four-year track in digital design, the program hopes to reach students who may show great promise in art and other creative pursuits in addition to the basic math and science skills," according to the Sentinel. In Trenton, N.J., Giancarlos Alvarado is designing a videogame called Earthquake Terror: After Shock with his fifth-grade students, game news site Kotaku.com reports. While we're on the subject, here's a library now loaning out videogames: the Guilderland Public Library. The Albany Times Union reports that the library sees videogames as "a gateway to other library materials, such as strategy guides and books that introduce teens to careers in programming."

MySpace, Facebook support NY law

The headline was that New York introduced a new anti-predator law. The news was that Facebook participated with MySpace and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in the announcement. The law would, as a condition of parole, prohibit convicted sex offenders from accessing social networking Web sites, from accessing pornographic content online, and from communicating with anyone under the age of 18 over the Net, Dow Jones reports. Offenders would also be required to disclose their email, IM, and chat screennames and other Internet contact info with law enforcement and social sites so the sites can block them. Both MySpace and Facebook have worked with attorneys general for some time, but this is the first time they've appeared together at a major announcement by an attorney general and may preface Facebook's participation in the technical task force announced by 49 state attorneys general and MySpace on January 14. Laws similar to the legislation New York announced today have been passed in 11 states including Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Virginia.

Shimon Peres: Use social-networking sites

At Israel's Holocaust memorial today, the country's very high-tech 84-year-old president asked students representing 60 countries, "Who here has heard about Facebook?" the Associated Press reports. "Nearly all in attendance raised their hands. 'You can fight anti-Semitism using social networks, like Facebook,' he continued." President Peres has his own blog and Web site but not (yet?) a social-networking profile. The AP adds that Peres met with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.

Analog adults, digital kids clash

One night recently there was a light snowfall in the Washington, D.C., area and some high school students apparently felt they should have a snow day. When it didn't happen, one high school senior reportedly took it upon himself to get on the phone and call his school system's chief operating officer to find out why school wasn't shut down for the day. The COO's wife picked up the phone. She was "understandably miffed about the invasion into her private sphere, yet she returns fire with a shockingly disproportionate blast of rage," the Washington Post reports. But of course in these days of the user-driven Web that wasn't the end of it. According to the original Post story on the subject, the COO's wife called the student back and left a message that berated him "for using the home number and told him to 'Get over it, kid, and go to school!' [The student then] posted an audio link to his Facebook page, and a friend uploaded the message on YouTube. Within days, it was played tens of thousands of times on the Web and aired on national news." Both action and reaction are understandable and neither can fathom each other's perspective - one is hyper-public all the time and never not accessible via cellphone, social Web site, IM, etc., and knows no lines that might be crossed; the other actually has a "home phone" probably wired to a wall and another kind of line that was very definitely crossed by a young person she'd never met. The really tough part is, "she could not have imagined that her righteous tirade would be enshrined on the Web and on Page One of The Washington Post." It's getting harder to react badly to a situation in private, but having said all the above and published the story, the Post does say that "even today, most teens wouldn't dare call a school administrator at home." Columnist Marc Fisher adds that this kid was out to push buttons. What's different now is that he really did get a lot of attention.

Remixes & mashups: Study on fair use

Teachers who deal with media think a lot about it. Parents of video producers and bloggers do too. So does everybody trying to understand the impact of the social Web on traditional media, including artists and the recording industry. What am I talking about? A part of copyright law that generates a lot of understandable confusion: "fair use." "Fair use is quite tricky because courts address it on a case by case basis after someone is sued. There is no list of what constitutes fair use," writes University of California, Berkeley, social-media researcher danah boyd. She's blogging about a just-released study, by media and legal scholars, that really advances the public discussion: "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video" at American University's Center for Social Media site. The study gives examples of "a wide variety of practices - satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups) - all of which could be legal in some circumstances," the Center says. Danah adds that the authors "try to assess which way the courts might fall, depending on practice. They also offer potential defenses that creators can make if they were sued in an attempt to build best-practices principles." This is valuable material for any family or classroom discussion or debate about fair use and intellectual property in the age of digital media and the participatory Web, when this discussion has never been more important (see "The age of remixes, mashups"). For an online debate on fair use, see the arguments of Columbia law professor Tim Wu and NBC Universal general counsel Rick Cotton in this New York Times blog. See also MIT professor Henry Jenkins's book, Convergence Culture (Henry's at HenryJenkins.org).

'Growing Up Online': Discussion needed!

It's the best piece of journalism I've seen about the online experiences of youth in 10 years of following this subject. It's actually representative of teens' use of the Net and the research we now have on it. If you haven't seen it, consider watching PBS Frontline's one-hour documentary "Growing Up Online" (it can be viewed online at your convenience here). I have a few soundbytes in it, but I'm recommending it not for self-promotion (when I did the interview with Frontline last July, I had no idea how it would be used for a program to air six months later), but because it advances a vital discussion in American society - how teens can use the social Web to their benefit, not their harm. Parents can't really help them with that until we begin to understand how they're using this technology, and Frontline's treatment actually helps.

Some of the experiences the documentary portrays are extreme - particularly Ryan Halligan's suicide and his father's moving account of piecing together how it happened - and others are just challenging, but they challenge the public in an intelligent way. The stories also illustrate a lot that is normal about adolescence, online and off, and what kids' online lives reveal, certainly more publicly than ever, about adolescence as it always has been (maybe we need to ask ourselves what part of what we're seeing in social sites is new).

All the stories have something to teach us. The story of Jessica/"Autumn Edows" has a great deal to say about adolescents' exploration of identity online and how it affects their development to good or bad effect. I would love to ask a psychologist about Jessica's exploration of an entirely different kind of life by having an online persona completely different from her "real world" one. Certainly many adults would find Autumn's photos shocking for a 14-year-old girl, but if they thoughtfully compared hers to the equally risqué snapshots of her peers all over the social Web, they'd see something quite different going on - but distinctions can be made only thoughtfully, once we get past the shock of seeing teenage life more exposed to the public, including to us parents, than it has ever been. As hard as it was for Jessica and her parents, it could be argued that her experience was healthy, maybe necessary for her, although - if this were a different, more reckless or self-destructive child and because her experiment was so public - her experience could've been dangerous.

Jessica's story, thankfully, had a positive ending. So did that of Sara, who told her parents about her secret anorexia and got help after her interview with Frontline. The "ending" of the story of Evan Skinner and her four teenage children in small-town Chatham, N.J., was mixed. We meet a loving, well-informed mother who maybe overreacted a little to scary news-media hype about social networking and, out of a sense of duty to her community, put her son in a very difficult position at school, which temporarily hurt their relationship. We don't know how they're working it out - thank goodness for them we don't - but we are fortunate to be exposed to the questions both generations in that story raise: What are a teenage child's privacy rights and needs (online and off)? How "in their face" should parents get in order to protect their kids, and how risky is their Internet experience anyway? How can a parent tell how risky it is? How activist in a child's school community should a parent be about student online activities in which her child is involved - how does it affect the child? At one point Evan, the mother, tells Frontline that when her son is social networking he's "edgy." She seems to view social networking as causative, when she might consider that it's the socializing, not the framework for it, that causes the edginess. Or maybe having Mom constantly breaking in on his online conversations - in the kitchen, where she requires him to be when he's online - is what makes him edgy. Small questions to us, maybe, but not so small to teens.

No clear answer to any of these questions is put forth in this documentary. There isn't one. A single solution - a sort of "pill" for teens' online safety - would be like a pill for risk-free adolescence. The answers and solutions change with each child and family and change as each child matures. And pediatricians tell us we can't and shouldn't try to remove all risk from their lives, since the risk assessment is how they develop their prefrontal cortexes, the impulse-control, "executive" part of their brains that isn't fully developed until their early 20s.

The program has a few gratuitous dramatic elements - the music, the almost cliche sonorous narrator's voice. But the stories it tells are representative of the complex challenge, and the questions it raises are essential to a progressive public discussion that moves from fear to rational thought and folds in all the forms of expertise we've always called upon for healthy adolescent development - not just that of law enforcement, the Internet industry, and online-safety advocacy, but also the expertise of parents, educators, child psychologists, researchers, social workers, and teens themselves.

Come to our online forum at ConnectSafely.org to talk about these issues and tell your friends, your kids, and their friends to come too. Let's keep the discussion going!

Related links

Of the show, Totally Wired author Anastasia Goodstein writes, "What I felt was missing from the documentary were the teens who are close to their parents and share pieces of their online lives with them, whether it’s what they write on their blog or even playing a video game together.... I also wanted to see some positive examples of how teens are using the internet to create social change, show off their creativity or launch their own businesses...." I agree. Frontline should turn this into a series!

In the show, there's also the thought-provoking part of the chapter about how teens' technology and online lives spill over into school. Tech educator Doug Johnson in Minnesota has a thoughtful post about this in his blog: "Engage or entertain?"

Columnist Joanne Weintraub's review of the program in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"'Growing Up Online' and still bored" at Mother Jones.

Teen-distributed child porn in Pa.

One student at Parkland High School in the Allentown, Pa., area started a group on Facebook called "Parkland ... Where Pornstars Are Born." He's referring to two photos taken two months ago - one a naked photo of a girl taken by the girl herself and the other of another girl engaged in a sex act with a boy taken by someone else - that circulated around the school via cellphone, the Associated Press reports. "Authorities began investigating about two weeks ago after some students notified school administrators," the AP adds. It says a district attorney said that at least 40 students believed to have received the photos on their phones won't be prosecuted. Police have been trying to stop their circulation, but students the AP interviewed said the distribution has gone well beyond Allentown - "to Temple and Harvard universities, to a high school in Bethlehem, even to someone in Oregon." I doubt the girl who took the self-portrait knew the distribution of her photo (or that of the other girl) was potentially a federal felony. "About 3,200 students are enrolled at Parkland, a perennial football powerhouse that draws students from three largely wealthy townships outside Allentown." Here's coverage from the Allentown Morning Call and here's a letter from Parkland High School to parents.

Teen-distributed child porn in Pa.

One student at Parkland High School in the Allentown, Pa., area started a group on Facebook called "Parkland ... Where Pornstars Are Born." He's referring to two photos taken two months ago - one a naked photo of a girl taken by the girl herself and the other of another girl engaged in a sex act with a boy taken by someone else - that circulated around the school via cellphone, the Associated Press reports. "Authorities began investigating about two weeks ago after some students notified school administrators," the AP adds. It says a district attorney said that at least 40 students believed to have received the photos on their phones won't be prosecuted. Police have been trying to stop their circulation, but students the AP interviewed said the distribution has gone well beyond Allentown - "to Temple and Harvard universities, to a high school in Bethlehem, even to someone in Oregon." I doubt the girl who took the self-portrait knew the distribution of her photo (or that of the other girl) was potentially a federal felony. "About 3,200 students are enrolled at Parkland, a perennial football powerhouse that draws students from three largely wealthy townships outside Allentown." Here's coverage from the Allentown Morning Call and here's a letter from Parkland High School to parents.

Teen-distributed child porn in Pa.

One student at Parkland High School in the Allentown, Pa., area started a group on Facebook called "Parkland ... Where Pornstars Are Born." He's referring to two photos taken two months ago - one a naked photo of a girl taken by the girl herself and the other of another girl engaged in a sex act with a boy taken by someone else - that circulated around the school via cellphone, the Associated Press reports. "Authorities began investigating about two weeks ago after some students notified school administrators," the AP adds. It says a district attorney said that at least 40 students believed to have received the photos on their phones won't be prosecuted. Police have been trying to stop their circulation, but students the AP interviewed said the distribution has gone well beyond Allentown - "to Temple and Harvard universities, to a high school in Bethlehem, even to someone in Oregon." I doubt the girl who took the self-portrait knew the distribution of her photo (or that of the other girl) was potentially a federal felony. "About 3,200 students are enrolled at Parkland, a perennial football powerhouse that draws students from three largely wealthy townships outside Allentown." Here's coverage from the Allentown Morning Call and here's a letter from Parkland High School to parents.

Teen-distributed child porn in Pa.

One student at Parkland High School in the Allentown, Pa., area started a group on Facebook called "Parkland ... Where Pornstars Are Born." He's referring to two photos taken two months ago - one a naked photo of a girl taken by the girl herself and the other of another girl engaged in a sex act with a boy taken by someone else - that circulated around the school via cellphone, the Associated Press reports. "Authorities began investigating about two weeks ago after some students notified school administrators," the AP adds. It says a district attorney said that at least 40 students believed to have received the photos on their phones won't be prosecuted. Police have been trying to stop their circulation, but students the AP interviewed said the distribution has gone well beyond Allentown - "to Temple and Harvard universities, to a high school in Bethlehem, even to someone in Oregon." I doubt the girl who took the self-portrait knew the distribution of her photo (or that of the other girl) was potentially a federal felony. "About 3,200 students are enrolled at Parkland, a perennial football powerhouse that draws students from three largely wealthy townships outside Allentown." Here's coverage from the Allentown Morning Call and here's a letter from Parkland High School to parents.

Net causative in UK teen suicides?

"At least seven" teenagers in Bridgend, South Wales, have committed suicide recently, the Times of London reported this week, calling them "copycat suicides" and linking them to the teens' social networking. The Guardian, however, reported that both the coroner and police in South Wales "downplayed suggestions that they were investigating an internet 'suicide chain'" as reported in "the tabloids." They said they've taken one of the deceased girls' computer to "build up a picture of what happened" rather than investigate any particular Web site. The coroner, who told The Guardian that "the number of suicides in the area had been increasing 'year on year' over the past three years, also said social-networking sites are "global, so why would they cause an issue in Bridgend in particular?" The Net may've had a role but not a causative one, the Times suggests in its article - maybe a role more like that of traditional media. It cites University of Bristol professor David Gunnell as saying that "research had shown a connection between reports of suicide in the media and copycat deaths, and it was likely that discussions of suicide on websites would have a similar effect."

Grownups' encroachment

Young people are increasingly uneasy about how much adults are moving in on their "technological turf," the Associated Press reports. "Long gone are the days when the average, middle-aged adult did well to simply work a computer. Now those same adults have Gmail, upload videos on YouTube, and sport the latest high-tech gadgets." The story makes it look like a conscious thing on the part of teens to stay a step ahead with the latest technologies. A big problem for teens, the AP suggests, is that their social-networking profiles necessarily have to become a "watered down version" of their online selves. If widespread, this is a sign that this latest teen "hangout" - something that all teens need, a space away from adult observation - may need to be replaced with a new one. Who knows what that will be? If you have guesses, pls comment below or in our forum over at ConnectSafely.org.

High school classes in videogame design?

That's what the Ohio Supercomputer Center is promoting, the Cleveland Morning Journal reports. "The process of creating a video game involves reading, comprehending, doing math and physics, plus problem solving to make the game's characters and other features function realistically," the Center says, adding that getting high school students involved in the process gets them hooked on math and science. "Video game design isn't just for entertainment; similar 'games' are used in medical training," editorializes the Morning Journal, citing an Associated Press report. The Orlando Sentinel tells the story of one such class at Edgewater High School in Orlando. "Now offering a four-year track in digital design, the program hopes to reach students who may show great promise in art and other creative pursuits in addition to the basic math and science skills," according to the Sentinel. In Trenton, N.J., Giancarlos Alvarado is designing a videogame called Earthquake Terror: After Shock with his fifth-grade students, game news site Kotaku.com reports. While we're on the subject, here's a library now loaning out videogames: the Guilderland Public Library. The Albany Times Union reports that the library sees videogames as "a gateway to other library materials, such as strategy guides and books that introduce teens to careers in programming."

Xbox Live hacks

It's a security heads-up for users of Microsoft's gaming community Xbox Live (and a good story). Well-known, obviously highly skilled gamer "Colin Fogle gained widespread acclaim in gaming circles after posting a video showing how it was possible for a Halo 3 player to shoot and kill himself with his own sniper rifle," The Register reports. For that feat, the game's makers gave him (or his game character, rather) a special piece of virtual armor, after which his Xbox Live account was stolen three times. According to The Register, "he was suddenly logged out [and] when he tried to log back in, he got error messages saying his password didn't match his user name." The problem, here, is the hijackers can in this way obtain not only the special piece of virtual armor, but also credit card numbers, address, and info used to log into other Microsoft-type accounts (e.g., Hotmail, IM). What the hackers frequently do, The Register adds, is call the toll-free number and pretend to be the account's owner, providing the Xbox Live ID and ask for one bit of info (e.g., address), then call back later and ask for more (e.g., phone number) until they have enough info on the person "to convince a support person they are the rightful owners of the account." Be careful out there, gamers.

The MySpace experiment

Parents and teens aren't the only ones dealing with MySpace's image. Advertisers and MySpace itself are too. Last week the big story was MySpace as a corporate citizen. This week, a snapshot of where MySpace is as a business too - somewhere between "the chaos that is comfortable to many MySpace residents and the neatness that appeals to consumer product companies [advertisers]," as the New York Times put it. Just as in the corporate citizenship space, where MySpace has to strike a balance between keeping youth safe and sending them all to another site in the US or overseas without the safety precautions MySpace does have in place, so it juggles the "chaos" of customization that users love and advertisers hate (or that scares advertisers seeking association with a squeaky clean or at least predictable ad environment). The story illustrates the multidisciplinary challenge of a medium largely produced by its users. By multiple "disciplines," I mean parenting, marketing, copyright law, law enforcement, education, constitutional law, and so on. Advertisers and parents used to be able to count on media that the media companies, the content producers - not the consumers - controlled. Now the medium for advertisers' messages and parents' young content producers and socializers is a mix, some of it "professional content" owned and controlled (somewhat) by the media companies but most of it owned and produced by its own consumers (even the professional content gets sliced, diced, mixed, and mashed up by the Web's young producers). And the experiment grows, as MySpace moves from being a social site and a record label to being an incubator for Web startups. For details, check out this latest snapshot of a very complex picture at the Times.

Game worlds: Growth economy

The virtual economy is strengthening - for gamers, anyway. This is a business story, but of interest to us parents because it offers indicators of where the industry's going. Electronic Arts will soon be offering the next version of its popular Battlefield Heroes game for free, the New York Times reports. You heard right - it will be downloadable for free. EA will make its money on advertising and in-game sales of virtual gear - weapons, clothing, etc. This is not a big leap of faith, of course. EA tested the approach in South Korea, "the world’s most fervent gaming culture," according to the Times, which adds that "in 2006, the company introduced a free version of its FIFA soccer game there ... [and] signed up more than 5 million Korean users," generating more than $1 million a month in virtual-objects sales. [See also "Virtual money, real income" and "Converting virtual cash to real."]

FBI agent's practical advice

The headline on this interview in the Houston Chronicle states the obvious, but its subject - FBI Agent Randall Clark of the Houston Area Cyber Crimes Task Force - does not. This online-safety expert is clearly basing his message on reality, not fears. He says things borne out in the research of people like Dr. Finkelhor (see above): "The first thing that [parents] need to know (is) what the real threat is. A lot of parents think if their child's profile is online that someone will come in and attack them. The predator will go through the grooming process first," and if our kids know not to respond (and most online kids do), there can be no grooming process (see "How to recognize grooming"). Always ask your child first what he's up to online. [News-media generalizations work less and less because a child's social-Web experience is what she makes of it; it's a reflection of her and her social life - very individual.] If your child's evasive or secretive about who he's talking with online, there could be a problem, and you need to get more involved. "Parents need to understand that their child might be actively trying to deceive them. One of the things I actively advocate is that you have got to keep an eye on your child online. You can't let them have their computer in their room. You have to check up on them. You have to visit the sites they visit." If you have the sense that she's being manipulated or influenced by someone she doesn't know in "real life" and who may be an adult, it might be good to call your local police and the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (CyberTipline.com or 800.THE.LOST). But when the Chronicle asked Agent Clark if young people should be banned from social sites, he said, "I don't think so. Social networking sites are not evil. Just like anything else, they can be misused."

'TMI' online

Too Much Information online is becoming a widespread, cross-generation social dilemma, not just a teen online-safety issue (in fact, giving out personal information in itself isn't the safety risk we all used to think it was - see this). For example, your teenaged child just reported details of last night's parent-child argument in her blog; a friend posts a comment in his profile about your mutual past that you don't really want your students or current employer to see; you just mortified your college-age child by calling and mentioning that you noticed in her Facebook profile that "she joined an online discussion group called 'Heavy Drinking''; or "remember that day you called in sick? Your friend just posted pictures of you at the beach that day. Your boss got the story." Some of the above are from a highly readable, slightly unnerving USATODAY piece on TMI. The good news is, both MySpace and Facebook - which together represent nearly 90% of US social networking - are about to add tools that will allow users to keep the online versions of their personal and professional lives separate.

Growth in sex-addiction cases

In doing some investigative reporting, the BBC recently surveyed 43 sex and relationship therapists and found that almost 80% of them are "seeing an increase in the number of men suffering from sex addiction," it reports, and 74% said "it was becoming increasingly common to see excessive use of Internet pornography as a problem in relationships." Over in the US, a study in this month's issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research found that US "college students, including young women, are far more accepting of pornography than their parents," USATODAY reports. "Most young women in the study said they personally did not use porn, but nearly half said viewing X-rated material was an acceptable way to express sexuality. Only 37% of the fathers and 20% of the mothers surveyed agreed." According to the study 86% of the young men surveyed reported having viewed porn in the past year (compared to 31% of young women), and 20% said they viewed it every day or nearly every day (compared to 3.2% of young women).

Party photos: MN teens suspended

More than a dozen students at a Minnesota high school were disciplined recently for party photos in a social site. They were suspended from sports and other extracurricular activities for allegedly posting photos in Facebook in which "they are either in the company of those consuming alcohol or holding alcohol themselves," KARE-TV reported. "The ACLU says there are concerns about schools mining through student profile pages but that what happened at Eden Prairie isn't a surprise." ACLU executive director Charles Samuelson told KARE that the students' rights weren't violated in this action because of the school's stated policy of zero tolerance for drug or alcohol consumption by students participating in sports or extra-curricular activities. If those students end up going to University of Minnesota-Duluth, social-networking-related policy goes a step further, KARE reports. UM-Duluth's athletic department "requires its student athletes to sign a statement saying they understand that if they choose to create a MySpace or Facebook profile, that profile is subject to review at any time, for any reason." The University of Minnesota is Facebook's second-largest network of users in the US, KARE adds.

'Grooming' by phone too

Online safety news that appeals to fears is counter-productive, so I hope the US news media will approach cellphone safety more intelligently than they did predation on the Web. But, as with the Web, parents do need to be aware of the downsides to this other very useful communications tech too. CNN reports that, according to law enforcement, cellphones were used by a teacher and 14-year-old student in a case in which she allegedly developed the relationship with and had sex with the boy on school grounds. So many of us get our kids cellphones so we know where they are and they can call us when they need us. Certainly we will and should keep doing that, but we need to know there are other uses for those phones, from very rare uses such as the case above to teen pranks and bullying that can be very destructive in their own way. "A New York mom, who requested anonymity because her kids don't know about her surveillance, said she uses software to regularly check her children's e-mail and online activity on the home computer. But she also gave her kids cell phones that have texting and photographic capability. Asked why she doesn't scrutinize the phone the same way she snoops on the computer," she told CNN she hadn't really thought about it. Just something to think about and discuss with our kids. A discussion point might be "How to recognize grooming." The CNN article also goes into the subject of "grooming" - predators' insidious process of gaining a child's confidence overtime, citing the work of Betsy Ramsey, who "has spent 20 years working with child and female victims and chairs the DeKalb County Domestic Violence Task Force in Georgia."

Where online kids' worries lie

A quick snapshot from a UK researcher halfway through her cyberbullying study: Well-known psychologist Tanya Byron told the Oxford Media Convention that "children are more worried about being bullied in cyberspace than any threat from paedophiles," the Financial Times reports. On pedophiles, she quoted one girl as telling her, "We kind of know who the creepy people are and what they say, and we kind of ignore them." The research shows that, "although children were adept at exploiting the ignorance of their parents about the internet and gaming, many would prefer to be able to talk to their mother or father about their online lives," the FT added. None of this sounds any different from what we're seeing and hearing on the western side of the Pond.

US social networking: Fresh numbers

Here's a fresh snapshot of where and how much Americans are social networking. Hitwise just announced its latest figures, finding that - out of Hitwise's group of 53 leading social sites - MySpace averaged 76.35% of all US visits last year. Next came Facebook.com, Bebo.com and BlackPlanet.com with 12.57%, 1.24%, and .87% respectively. As for the number of visits in a single month (December), MySpace received 72% of them, Facebook 12.57% (with a 50% increase in traffic over December '06), and Bebo 1.09%. There were huge traffic gains outside the Top 3 too, though: MyYearbook.com, popular among teens and founded by teens, had the biggest "gain in market share" last month, Tekrati.com reports, with a whopping 407% increase over December 2006. Facebook and Disney's popular kids' "social network" increased 51% and 48%, respectively.

Malicious widgets

You've heard of malicious Web sites - sites people go to by mistake which upload malicious software to their computers. Well, now social networkers need to be aware of malicious widgets. [Widgets are those mini applications people use to add fun and functionality to their profiles - e.g., a slide show, a music playlist, a map of where they've been, reviews of favorite books, a personal avatar, code that lets people call your cellphone from your profile, a blood alcohol content calculator (citing Andonomics data, Forbes reports that, "on Facebook alone, users have installed nearly 13,000 widgets approximately 765 million times").] "Secret Crush" is an example of a malicious widget - a rather mild one that's an indicator of what's to come, experts say. "Disguised as a legitimate 'Secret Crush' request" that tells a Facebook user that another user finds him or her attractive, PCWorld reports, what it really does is "secretly install an adware program made by Zango after it has been successfully downloaded." PCWorld says some 3% of Facebook's nearly 60 million users have downloaded it and, of course like all widgets, it's viral. "The Secret Crush program also tries to lure people who download the file to pass it along to other Facebook members they know." This is called "social engineering," coming up with just the right words, whether scary ("your account has been compromised") or compelling ("check out this cool party video"), to trick people to click or download. Malicious widgets are especially insidious, because "once people have been pushed into installing an application, it's easier to ask for more information to get them to finish the install," PCWorld points out. Phishers and malicious hackers too are increasingly relying on social engineering to steal money and identities. Which means it's increasingly imperative to help our kids develop their mental filters so they get better and better at detecting and blocking malicious social engineers.

Another example on the social Web is a worm on Google's Orkut social site (very popular in Brazil) apparently designed by a non-malicious hacker to show users how social networking can be "dangerous" even if they don't click on something. What it does is send some Orkut users "an email telling them they had been sent a new scrapbook entry - a type of Orkut message - on their profile from another Orkut user. They only had to view their profile to become infected by the worm, which added them to an Orkut group" called "Infected by the Orkut Virus," PCWorld reported in another article. There there's the latest security story: "Using a hacked MySpace profile, online criminals are trying to trick victims into downloading a malicious Trojan Horse program by disguising it as a Microsoft update, PCWorld also reports. Finally, here's the UK's VNUNET's look-ahead on "cyber-gangs."

Video sites' traffic way up

Nearly half of US Internet users have been to sites like YouTube, and use of video-sharing sites has grown 45% just in the past year, according to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. What's more, the BBC cites new Nielsen figures showing that some video-sharing sites' traffic has doubled since the US writers' strike started at the end of October. "In September and October, Crackle[.com] enjoyed an audience of 1.2 million users, which doubled to 2.4 million," the BBC reports, and "YouTube's audience was up 18% in the two months after the strike started." Not surprisingly, it's youth who are driving the upturn, with 70% of people under 30 using video-sharing sites, Pew found, with more and more creating as much as viewing. "Some 22% of Americans now shoot their own videos, with 14% of them posting at least some of that video online," the BBC adds. Here's Internet.com's coverage, and here's a Los Angeles Times editorial citing other studies with similar findings.

MySpace & 49 attorneys general: Agreement

Two years of negotiation between MySpace and the US's state attorneys general culminated in an announcement today that they'd reached an agreement on "Key Principles of Social Networking Sites Safety." Not all that I heard as I listened in on the press conference is new (MySpace has implemented dozens of safety measures and programs in the past year, including a 24-hour hotline for law enforcement). But a few new social-Web safety developments were announced, and the agreement is a victory for collective thinking and action appropriate to this medium and against the litigation that the attorneys general had been threatening. Here are the new developments I heard, some useful:

Agreed-upon principles for social-networking safety that may actually lead to consensus on industry best practices (e.g., high responsiveness to abuse reports, rapid deletion of underage profiles and blogs, cooperation with law enforcement, etc.). We hope other social sites will participate, as the attorneys general said they're encouraging the sites to do.

Rapid response & other measures. MySpace's announcement that it would implement a new customer-service protocol for better responsiveness to abuse reports, as well as new technology to enforce the site's minimum age (14), default privacy settings for 16- and 17-year-olds (already in place for 14- and 15-year-olds), and new technology to detect and delete links to porn sites from MySpace users' profiles.

A proposed email registry that would allow parents to send MySpace and other participating sites their children's email addresses, which would be blocked when the kids try to set up accounts with them. This has limited value, if I heard it right, since it's so easy for kids to get new, free email addresses at so many sites (e.g., Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail) which they can use without telling their parents.

A technical task force to explore age and identity verification. Among the participants will be Internet companies, law enforcement, and online-safety organizations, I heard. This is good - it puts the onus for exploring this concept on a broad spectrum of stakeholders, not just one social site. Judging from what I heard of the hour-long press conference, though, there is still little demonstrated understanding among the attorneys general of the privacy risks involved in verifying minor's ages and identities. They're right that the technology isn't rocket science. The problem is what the technology needs in order to work: a nationwide database of children's ID info that verification technology can scan. Federal law protects US children's privacy, to the extent that even your child's school has to obtain your permission to print his address and phone number in a directory just for your school community. It's a good law. Identity thieves love getting their hands on minors' ID info. That's why there was such an uproar when a security breach in the UK jeopardized the personal information of half the population and "virtually every child in Britain" (see this item). A possible alternative is verification of all adults on the social Web, but there are privacy issues there, too.

Social Web-wide. The attorneys general present at today's announcement - Connecticut, North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania - are asking other social-networking sites besides MySpace to join the task force and make certain safety measures standard. This reflects a growing awareness that these issues are at least Web-wide, if not worldwide (understandable, though, since these are state attorneys general, not federal law enforcement). There are so many spots on the social Web based in other countries if kids really want to go into stealth mode and beyond the reach of any industry best practices the US might establish.

Texas's was the only state attorney general not to sign the agreement. In a letter to MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe, General Greg Abbott wrote that signing would be "misperceived as an endorsement of the inadequate safety measures contained therein," CNET reports. Nothing short of a "reliable age verification system" would protect children, he wrote. He may be right about the problem, but not about the solution. It'll be interesting to see if the new technical task force can come up with a killer-app that can satisfy attorneys general, privacy advocates, and parents all at once!

Here's an interview about today's announcement with MySpace/Fox Interactive chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam, conducted by CBS News technology analyst and ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid.

Within a couple of hours of the press conference, there were more than 500 news reports on this in Google News. Here's a sampler: The Associated Press, the Financial Times, and the Los Angeles Times. See also a comprehensive analysis by Adam Thierer, senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation in Washington.

Related links

"Social-networker age verification revisited"

"Sex offenders on MySpace: Some context"

"Verifying online kids' ages: Key question for parents"

'Teenage hell': What to do

What is it going to take to convince teens of how important it is to think about the impact mean behavior can have online? For example, just annoyed with a high school friend, three teens "placed an ad in [the 15-year-old's] name soliciting sex with men, listing his home phone number," the San Jose Mercury News reports. They also somehow "hacked into his MySpace profile" and changed it to say he was gay. People answered the ad at his house, reaching his is sister and mom. "Mortified, angry and distraught," the boy dropped out of school. The article cites the view of some school officials who say they're not sure the Net is increasing the amount of bullying, but rather that it's providing a "paper trail." Young people just don't realize that they're not as anonymous as they think they are. And that's exactly what can help them think before they're mean online. For example, the Mercury News refers to the shock felt by "some students at one San Jose middle school who created a MySpace 'slut list' of 23 girls and asked viewers to submit comments. Within 36 hours the site was shut down, and the culprits discovered." As for the boys who took out the abusive ad above: Working with police, officials at their school them found them out. They "were tried and sentenced to probation and community service. They also had to write an essay about the pain they caused."

Missouri cyberbullying: Case not closed

There have been two new developments in the tragic cyberbullying case in Missouri that broke last November (see "Extreme cyberbullying"): 1) Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are looking at charging the adult neighbor who created the imposter profile that led to the Missouri teen's suicide, the Los Angeles Times reports. "Prosecutors in Missouri said they were unable to find a statute under which to pursue a criminal case." The US Attorney's Office in L.A. believes it has jurisdiction because MySpace is based in Beverly Hills, and - creatively, the Times cites a legal experts as saying - the L.A. prosecutors are exploring charges involving federal wire fraud and cyber fraud because the woman "defrauded MySpace" by creating the imposter account, the Times cites anonymous sources as saying. The First Amendment could be a big hurdle for them, but if they're successful, the case could be groundbreaking because of all the fake profiles people create all over the social Web, for both benign and malicious reasons. 2) The other development, online vigilantism, is described in depth in the Washington Post. Wanting to avenge Megan's death, people have "combed public records online to post photos of Lori and Curt Drew along with heated messages demanding they be held accountable. Satellite images of the house were also posted, along with the Drews' address and phone numbers, and details about where each worked.... What lawmakers couldn't or wouldn't do, virtual vigilantes quickly did," the Post reports. Also at the Post, see this online discussion of the Megan Meier case between readers and Daniel J. Solove, associate law professor at George Washington University and author of "The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet. Its insightful last Q&A is about virtual mobs and online shaming.

Imposter profiles: Ongoing problem?

We don't see that much about them in the news media, but we certainly do in ConnectSafely.org, and MySpace even has a dedicated email address for reporting them: imposterreport@myspace.com. CIO magazine says imposter profiles aren't going away anytime soon in "Fake Social Networking Profiles Still Big Problem, But Don't Expect Social Networking Sites to Care." Leading with the story the New York Times broke about the impersonating Facebook profile of assassinated Pakistan People's Party's leader Benazir Bhutto's son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, CIO reports that social sites tend to take a reactive approach to fixing this problem. Because social sites rely on advertising for revenue, it adds, they "don't want to make it hard for people to start pages." Until they do, it's smart to view social-networking profiles with a grain of salt. One way to check a profile's authenticity, CIO points out, is a free service called claimID. It "allows users to keep a 'link résumé' of all the sites they use and maintain. If a user found a friend's MySpace page, for instance, he could check the link with his friend's link résumé to ensure it's real."

UK's top social sites

With Britons so keen on social networking (recent Ofcom research found 1 in 4 logged into a social site at least 23 times a month!), the UK's Computing Which? consumer magazine recently took the subject on. It tested the "10 most popular sites [in Britain] for ease of setting up and using the site, the range of features, and the way the sites protected privacy and security, including how easy it is to remove personal details," The Guardian reports. The highest mark - 79% - went to Bebo, "used predominantly by the 13-to-24-year-old age group ... for "working hard to encourage responsible networking." Next in line, respectively, were Facebook (74%), MySpace (67%), Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces (65%), and Friends Reunited (62%). "Saga Zone - aimed at the over-50s - and BBC Talk were both given a maximum five-star rating for their performance" and discussion groups, The Guardian adds, and "Flickr proved to be the best in the special-interest category, scoring five out of five for both performance and ease of use."

'Semi-permeable classrooms'

Educator and blogger David Jakes uses a term from his day as a biology teacher to describe how a classroom can safely be turned into a "learning community" that's neither closed nor completely open to the outside world. "I’m interested in building skills in students that will make them successful when they ultimately join wide-open learning communities. I’m teaching them how to read blog posts, how to collaboratively create content in wikis, how to comment appropriately, how to manage RSS feeds, and how to manage content resources with social bookmarking tools. I'm teaching them how to operate in a community. And I’m teaching them all about safety." I wish all my children's teachers approached technology this way!

Oz to filter Web content nationwide

The Australian government is about to implement a nationwide Internet filtering program. New laws go into affect January 20 "imposing tougher rules for companies that sell entertainment-related content on subscription internet sites and mobile phones," the Herald Sun reports. The Australian Communications and Media Authority says adults won't be affected by the restrictions, which will require Internet service providers to access "free of pornography and other inappropriate material to houses and schools," content providers to check that young people of the correct age are accessing content designated for that age, and chatrooms to get "professionally assessed to determine whether [their] 'likely content' should be restricted," the Herald Sun and Agence France Presse report. Here's an opposing view from a US-based tech policy blog. Meanwhile, the porn filter the Australian government is pinning its nationwide filtering program to has been found by British researchers to be faulty, Australian IT reports. Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory, "said the innovative blocking system CleanFeed, devised by British Internet service provider BT, could be circumvented in a number of ways." Later this week, Australian IT published an editorial saying the government's anti-porn plan needs revamping.

Socializing online, on phones in Japan

It's huge in Japan, where Mixi.jp is the No. 1 social-networking site and the No. 2 site in general (after Yahoo), Forbes reports. But even Mixi's computer-based social networking is facing growing competition not so much from other Web social sites as from mobile-based social networking. "This year, for the first time, the number of mobile users accessing Mixi's browser-based mobile system outweighed the number of visitors who have PCs." And the phone socializers are younger than the computer-based ones, Forbes adds: "58% are under 25, compared with 43% of Mixi's PC users." Mixi's mobile competition is "Mobage-town," (Japanese shorthand for "mobile gaming town"), which doesn't even have a presence on the Web. Mobage-town users "send their avatars through a series of games, linking up with friends and competing for bragging rights. The free service has its own currency and pages where users can buy various gewgaws for their avatars." Forbes says the service claims "50% penetration among Japanese teens" and 8 million users.

Online 'friending': Nothing that new

A commentator who used to be a "pre-Facebook teen" makes an excellent point about today's social networking: Things haven't changed much since pre-social-Web days. "Categorizing and ranking friends existed long before these social-networking sites came around," writes L.A.-based writer and editor Sara Libby in the Christian Science Monitor. "Adults baffled by the proliferation of MySpace and Facebook are confusing themselves by viewing the use of these sites as a completely new and foreign phenomenon. Kids who network with friends online aren't affecting their ability to create real, face-to-face friendships any more than typing a term paper affects their ability to address a postcard by hand. Kids are still kids. Online networking is just an updated version of collecting choice yearbook signatures or, in my case, wearing a friend's picture on a T-shirt," Sara says, referring to the "buddy shirts" of her high school years. "It became a status symbol to invite the most popular people from the team to take a buddy pic with you, then to wear that shirt around school. The cooler the people in your picture, the more impressive the shirt was." Now it's online "friending" that allows public display of teens' social status.

Teen-distributed child porn

This is a nightmare I wish we could help all children avoid: Last fall in the state of Georgia, 15 high school students aged 15-17 were identified as victims in what is basically a child-pornography distribution case. The distributors were their classmates, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) reported this week. In interviews with the victims, local and state law enforcement discovered that a group of male students had been sharing pornographic images of themselves and encouraging female classmates to do the same. "According to investigators, some girls were peer-pressured into taking inappropriate images of themselves and sending them to the boys. Others complied with the boys’ requests for pictures because they had crushes on the boys. Many of the girls suffered from low self-esteem or did not understand the seriousness of the situation because 'everybody is doing it.' Few realized their images were being circulated throughout the school and, in one case, traded with a suspect in the United Kingdom. In another case, one of the boys was charging students at the school $25 to view graphic images of one of the female victims. As of this writing, investigators have tracked down hundreds of images, and at least one video, involving these victims." The investigation continues - the police don't think they've identified all the victims yet - and "it is undecided at this time what criminal charges, if any, will be filed." NCMEC says investigators hope the case will spark discussion about Internet safety.

This case may not be as extreme or unusual as we'd like to think: Within 24 hours of receiving this report from the National Center, I received an email from a parent in another state. She was asking for advice because a group of teen girls she knew of were "being pressured into sending nude pictures of themselves to male classmates." I suggested she contact NCMEC (800.843.5678). [See "Self-published child porn," which I posted in mid-2004 and this similar story from India in 2005. Here's the NCMEC's report on the Georgia case.]

Tech first aid for '08 & onward

Filtering, monitoring, and other parental-control technology can be useful items in the family Internet first-aid kit, depending on kids' ages and maturity levels. But the most effective, always-age-appropriate tools these days are information and communication - as kids' knowledge of workarounds and malicious hackers' use of social engineering grow. Ideally, parents and kids are working together to develop children's mental filters in three areas - online safety, cybercitizenship, and computer security - folding both kids' tech literacy and parents' life literacy into the discussion.

Online safety and citizenship overlap, because now, as Internet access becomes ever more available beyond the home, young people's best protections online and off are critical thinking and intelligent behavior. We all hear so much about "predators" in the news media, but a lot of the "predation" or sexual solicitation targeting teens comes from peers or young adults and a lot of it has always been called "flirting." Aggressive behavior toward others online (mean gossip, dissing, acting out, seeking out risk for its own sake, talking with people they don't know about sex) puts the aggressor at greater risk, research is now showing - at risk of being cyberbullied as well as sexually exploited (see "New approach to online-safety ed suggested"). We need to think of our children less as potential victims and more as participants in this space, calibrating our parenting and online-safety messaging to the social Web.

Please don't misunderstand: Pedophiles seek out kids online, but they can't hurt your child if he or she doesn't respond. It's the kids "looking for trouble" - those most at risk offline - who are most at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim").

So ongoing communication about the importance of thinking critically about what kids say and how they act and react online is the most vital element in the first-aid kit (household or classroom). Another need: media literacy and being smart about what they click on and download - checking out widgets before they add them, analyzing the source and value of info encountered online, asking a friend if s/he really sent a link or attachment before clicking, researching a product before buying it online, checking out someone's profile before adding him as a friend, deleting weird comments and blocking the creeps from commenting again. Parental critical thinking needs to be in the kit, too, as parents ask questions appropriate for their own children's maturity levels - whether Mom should require that she knows everyone on a child's friends list or Dad should be on that IM buddy list, whether or how much to monitor a profile, whether parents help set preferences in an application or privacy features for a social-networking profiles, etc.

Here are some basic articles to include in the kit for developing mental filters: "How social influencing works," "How to recognize grooming," "If Gandhi had a MySpace profile," and this week's "Social networkers = spin doctors." As for computer security, that's essential too, and here are 7 clearly written steps to that end from Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegoraro. And if you feel a child is immediately at risk of victimization, contact your local police and CyberTipline.com (or 800.843.5678) at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Social networkers = spin doctors (hopefully)

Let's hope a growing number of young social networkers understand that, on the social Web, personal communications is pretty much public relations. In "Net users are becoming their own reputation managers," a CNET commentator provides a good reminder. What our parents shared in private diaries, letters and phone conversations and we shared in all the above plus emails, our children are sharing in (hopefully not wholly public) social-networking profiles and blogs. "This radical transparency lets more and more Internet users nurture their image, manage their privacy, stage their public appearances, and distribute carefully chosen content to their circle of online friends," writes the commentator in an upbeat way. What I'm hoping is that young social Web users whose brains are still in development (see this at the National Institute of Mental Health) are aware of this "opportunity" and that they actually have less control over what they post than this commentary or social-networking sites would have them believe (once something's posted, for example, current "close friends" who may not always be so in future can copy and later paste it harmfully in a place well beyond the author's control). The writer does point out a recent Pew/Internet finding that people are becoming more aware of their digital footprint (see this on the study). Anyway, spin "control" is becoming, if not a survival skill, essential reputation protection. [See also this Wired piece on "microcelebrity" and "Very public binge drinking."]

The social Web & 2007-'08

This past year was "when the Internet's potential as a transformative force expanded. This was the year we understood that the Internet is more than just another medium. It is an emerging society," reported the Times of India in an editorial, "The Year of Facebook." I agree that 2007 was the year we all saw the social Web take off, we began to see its potential for good, and we heard a whole lot about its downside. But the editorial seems to contradict itself where it says the Internet is "an emerging society" while earlier saying that "it's an extension of the physical world." Maybe it's both, but I think - for youth - it's more the latter, and adults can learn a lot from watching how young people "live" online (see "Oral culture online" and "The social Web Petri dish"). Australian IT looked at Google's Zeitgeist 2007 (the search engine's survey of billions of Web searches to determine "what's been on our collective consciousness") and reports that "7 out of the 10 hottest topics which triggered Internet queries during the year involved social networking" (the Zeitgeist is here). "A Top 10 list compiled by the world's most-used search engine includes British website Badoo, San Francisco-based Hi5, and Facebook." Also in the Top 10 were video-sharing sites YouTube and Dailymotion, Disney's ClubPenguin.com, and virtual world Second Life. As for MySpace, Australian IT adds, "one in every four US residents uses MySpace, while in Britain it is as common to have a profile page on the Web site as it is to own a dog." As for 2008, there's good and bad ahead too - see "Tech trends in 2008" from San Jose Mercury News columnist Dean Takahashi.

2008: Whose info is whose?

One of the things we'll all need to sort out on the social Web is what content belongs to who. Is your profile your content or that of the service hosting it? Are your friends' comments in your profile your content, theirs, or the host's? Sound complicated? It is. But it needs to be worked out in order to meet another need people are voicing: "data portability" or social-networking interoperability. "There is a crying need for some open and standardized format to allow social Web users to manage and move their data around," reports a San Jose Mercury News blog. "The data that your 'friends enter about themselves? Well, they've shared it with you, but is it yours to export? And since you've entered into an agreement with Facebook to voluntarily add information to Facebook's database, does the company have some kind of claim as well, (not to mention some obligation to prevent one of your "friends" from exporting your contact information without letting you know)?" These are not just copyright or content-ownership questions, they're privacy ones. Great fuel for family discussions on how information we post can not only get away from us but also may no longer be "our" info.

Generation gap on copyright, P2P

When New York Times tech writer David Pogue gives talks on copyright law and ethics he has a little interactive segment where he describes lots of situations involving copying songs, CDs, DVDs, broadcast movies, etc., and asks for a show of hands from people who think this or that situation is ok, Pogue writes. He's illustrating all the shades of gray - or at least people's perceptions of the shades of gray - of copyright rights and wrongs. "Recently, however, I spoke at a college. It was the first time I'd ever addressed an audience of 100 percent young people. And the demonstration bombed.... I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids' morality alarm. They listened to each example [of what he usually finds some people saying is wrong], looking at me like I was nuts." That there might be something wrong with file-sharing, etc., simply does not compute. But there isn't just a generation gap here, of course. There's also a reality gap: the media industry's reality vs. that of its increasingly digitally literate customers. Speaking of that, in a new move to combat piracy the IFPI (the global equivalent of the US's RIAA), is "asking European lawmakers to require Internet service providers to use filters to block" file-sharing, the New York Times reports.

The 'IWWIW' generation?

"I definitely think [technology] is a divider," Jane Buckingham told Rachel Abramowitz at the Los Angeles Times, "and it's something that will continue to be a divider. If you don't text message, if you don't twitter, it will change your day-to-day reactions. I don't think [technology] is horrific and negative. At some point, technology will become so integrated into our lifestyles, we won't notice it, but right now we feel its presence a lot." Buckingham is founder and head of The Intelligence Group, which interprets the consumption interests and patterns of Generation Y for marketers (who pay $2,500 a head to listen to her), the Times reports. That's a key point I'd like to highlight here: We parents notice technology; our children really don't. We know when we're online. Our kids do, yes, in that they're using a tech tool to communicate or socialize, but they don't make the distinction we do between online and offline. They don't think about it as they socialize. So right now, as Jane Buckingham says, "technology is a divider" between the generations. I disagree, though, that it will continue to be for the very reason that it is being "integrated into our lifestyles." It won't be a divider between our children and their children when they have them. Something new will divide those generations, I suspect. Kind of like something else Buckingham talks about, which I think divides us and our kids: the access they have to things, each other, info, etc. Buckingham's "mantra" for our children's generation, Abramowitz reports, is "I want what I want. I want it when I want it. And I want it how I want it," or "IWWIW," the acronym at the top of Buckingham's PowerPoint presentation. Kind of depressing, when you consider that's what marketers are paying big bucks to hear so they can go out and create advertising messages for our children that "say" our product/service will satisfy those very "legitimate" consumption needs. (I think I'm sounding very old. Maybe it's the turn of the year.)

Videogame misconceptions

This news story about Wisconsin legislation to put a tax on videogames reflects the widespread misconception in the US that videogames are a "kids thing." That's how the bill's author, state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, described them to WISC-TV. The motivation is good - to raise money to have youth "who commit non-violent crimes" tried in the juvenile system. "Currently, 17-year-olds are treated as adults," according to WISC-TV. The only problem is, videogames aren't a kid thing, actually. "The average videogame player is 33 years old," according to Entertainment Software Association research, and PC World blogger Matt Peckham points to the same data in asking, "Is there any way we could put an age cap on the tax? You know, since you say it's a 'kids-kids' thing, which pretty obviously means you're not talking about the ESA's '67% of American heads of households play computer and video games' statistic. I assume 'heads of households' means adults (not kids), but maybe I'm out on a limb there." Tongue firmly planted in cheek, Peckham likens a videogame tax to a cigarette one, putting a stigma on a product that probably doesn't deserve it. But taxing videogames is also about as effective as fining retailers for selling age-inappropriate games to minors, since "the average age of the most frequent game buyer is 38 years old," again according to ESA research. "In 2007, 92 percent of computer game buyers and 80 percent of console game buyers were over the age of 18." Here's one more notable statistic for anyone overly influenced by all the news media coverage about violent videogames: "85% of all games sold in 2006 were rated 'E' for Everyone, 'T' for Teen, or 'E10+' for Everyone 10+." [Here's the ESA's page on third-party research.] The really violent games are rated "M" for Mature or "AO" for Adult Only. Before anyone buys a game, it always helps to check a game's rating either on its packaging or at the ESA's game ratings site, ESRB.org.

Young adults biggest library users: Study

Americans 18-30 are public libraries' biggest fans. "And people are going to libraries not only for the Internet-enabled computers there but also for library reference books, newspapers and magazines," reports the Associated Press, citing a new study by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew/Internet director Lee Rainie told the AP that this age group is the generation that saw libraries going from book repositories to "information hubs," with database-accessing computers alongside reference bookshelves. Still, the findings were a surprise after an authoritative Benton Foundation report 10 years ago, which said 18-to-24-year-olds were the people least likely to view libraries as important. "That generation [now 28-34 in age] now uses libraries to solve problems at half the rate as the current 18-30 set, the new study found," the AP reports, adding that in the 10-year time period since the Benton report, library Internet access "has grown from about 44% of public libraries to more than 99%." But I suspect increased library connectivity is only part of the explanation. Internet literacy does not spell media literacy. My theory is that media literacy and critical thinking are needed in proportion to Net literacy. In other words, the more access young people (and all of us) have to information the more they need guidance from experts in media literacy, or information navigation (aka librarians).

More Web playgrounds coming

Stories about kids' virtual worlds are becoming perennial because children 6-10 appear to be a growth market. Twenty million children are expected to be virtual-world members by 2011, up from 8.2 million right now, according to eMarketer figures cited by the New York Times. This latest article paints a pretty good landscape. There's Disney's new “Pirates of the Caribbean” world for kids under 11, with "worlds on the way for Cars and Tinker Bell, among others. Nickelodeon, already home to Neopets, is spending $100 million to develop a string of worlds. Coming soon from Warner Brothers Entertainment, part of Time Warner: a cluster of worlds based on its Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera and D. C. comics properties." I was glad to get an update from this piece on Neopets' protections for kids under 13 (in compliance with the US's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA): "Neopets restricts children under 13 from certain areas unless their parents give permission in a fax. Several Neopets employees patrol the site around the clock, and messaging features are limited to approved words and phrases."