Transatlantic predator panic

It kind of surprised me seeing this coming out of Britain, that "the specter of the predatory pedophile is everywhere." I thought it was everywhere only here in the US, where we've had a predator panic going for some time and it has subsided somewhat (see "Predator panic," which I wrote back in May 2006). It doesn't surprise me, however, that this good question is coming out of the UK (in the same BBC blog post): "Have we got our response to child sex abuse in proportion? Or ... are we in danger of destroying the very thing we aim to protect - a trusting relationship between adults and children?" I wish blogger Mark Easton had answered or at least expanded on that theme. Instead, he makes a different but related valid point about the sheer numbers of child abusers ("The NSPCC [National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children] estimates that at any one time, 1 million children are suffering sexual abuse") and how most are people the children know (and still more are never found out). But I do think that question about society's response deserves serious consideration on both sides of the Atlantic. Heightened fears lead to strong reactions, often overreaction, which reduces trust and communication between parents and children. When parents act out of fear and get categorical, teens tend to seek even more distance from them than normal adolescent development would call for and go "underground," where - not necessarily but possibly - they could be at greater risk. I think working through the risks and adult fears together, openly and calmly, is a more effective approach at both the household and societal levels.

Benefits of social networking: Study

In what Science Daily calls a "first-of-its-kind study" of teen social-networking practices, researchers at the University of Minnesota looked low-income, 16-to-18-year-olds in 13 urban schools in the Midwest. It found that - contrary to reports of a high-income/low-income digital divide - 94% use the Internet, 82% go online at home, and 77% had social-network profiles. "When asked what they learn from using social networking sites, the students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, being open to new or diverse views and communication skills." They're editing and creating content, designing and laying out pages, creating "original work like poetry and film," and "practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology," the researchers said, adding that social network sites "offer tremendous educational potential." Though directed at educators, I thought this point from study author Christine Greenhow just as useful to parents: She "suggests that educators can help students realize even more benefits from their social network site use by working to deepen students' still emerging ideas about what it means to be a good digital citizen and leader online," Science Daily reports. Here's a video interview with Dr. Greenhow.

Social-networking manners

A Telegraph columnist understandably asks, basically: What's wrong with this picture - a stuffy old publisher "identified in the popular mind with ... the appropriate usage of pudding forks and cheese knives" writing rules for polite social networking? But somebody at Debrett's must have a profile in MySpace, Bebo, or Facebook. They're pretty good rules, actually - except maybe for the one that says you're supposed to always use a phone or card to wish a friend happy birthday, not a comment on his/her wall. However, Washington Post writer Kim Hart, blogged this question: "When it comes to maintaining relationships, do social networks let us 'cheat' a little too much?" She was writing about a just-released survey by the Consumer Internet Barometer finding that "common pet peeves among social-networking regulars include 'lack of manners'." Debrett's five "golden rules" are at the bottom of this other Telegraph report on the subject. It'd be very interesting to ask a teenage focus group what's missing. And the Telegraph columnist's right, of course, that "codes of behaviour emerge from the users [of social sites], and are constantly modified by them." It's just that some older users don't always want to wait that long.

What makes good digital citizens?

The answer at Digizen.org points to the next phase, I think, of all our efforts in online safety: "Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It's about building safe spaces and communities, understanding how to manage personal information, and about being Internet savvy - using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same." That helps me think about how to teach children accountability for their behavior online. If they begin to see online environments as communities they're helping to shape so that they have a stake in appearance, atmosphere, and outcomes of activity within them, they'll simply act more accountably. Maybe disinhibition and anonymity become less problematic when users are citizens as much as socializers. Digizen.org, a report from UK-based Childnet International, looks at social networking with this potential in mind. The report examines the risks but also how the social Web is "being used to support personalised formal and informal learning by young people in schools and colleges." The site defines social networking and links to a pdf comparison chart of seven social network sites. An equally important section of the Digizen.org site addresses cyberbullying, with advice on how to "embed anti-bullying work in schools" and some powerful video teaching tools.

GPS: Matching ads to phone users

"We’re in the midst of a boom in devices that show where people are at any point in time," the New York Times reports. The devices - cellphones, mostly - not only show people where people are (as in parents tracking kids) but also show advertisers where people are. In effect. Cellphone users can opt to allow the information about their location to inform software in the phone what advertising would be relevant to the user at that moment. Groups have raised consumer privacy issues, and providers of the ad-targeting software (at least some of them) seem to be factoring those concerns into it. With one such product, CitySense, users opt in (e.g., for ads that tell them where everybody's going for pizza or music near them) - and "opt in" means it isn't there by default - to the service and "if they want to purge their data, they can do so at any time," according to the Times.

Social-networking friends in ads

The industry term is "behavioral ad targeting." What it means is, advertisers are tracking young social networkers' (and everyone else's) online behavior the better to persuade them to "sell" the companies' products to their friends. "Internet start-ups out to crack the problem of advertising on social networks are developing ad technology that can analyze which people are most influential to their friends on social networks so that they can target those people with pass-it-on messages about Apple's latest iPhone or The Incredible Hulk movie," CNET reports. Widgets, those little applications that social networkers install in their profiles, are the key. Startups such as SocialMedia Networks and 33Across use them to figure out, with a mathematical algorithm, which friends are most important to the person with the profile - to decide which friends should be in a banner ad on the profile. Interesting: using math to qualify friendship. Anyway, here's CNET reporter Stefanie Olsen's example: "Instead of a banner advertising The Incredible Hulk movie, a social banner would ask which of your close Facebook friends, among a short list, you'd like to invite to see the movie. Or a social banner might inform you that a friend Jim just ranked Iron Man with three stars, and it might ask to 'click here to buy tickets at Fandango'."

Felony charges for teen hackers

Two high school seniors in California were charged with "breaking into their school late at night and using stolen log-ins to hack into its computer system and change their grades," eCommerce Times reports. One faces a maximum sentence of more than 38 years for "34 felony counts of altering a public record, 11 felony counts of stealing and secreting a public record, seven felony counts of computer access and fraud, six felony counts of burglary, four felony counts of identity theft, three felony counts of altering a book of records, two felony counts of receiving stolen property, one felony count of conspiracy and one felony count of attempted altering of a public record." The other student faces a maximum of three years for "one felony count each of conspiracy, burglary, computer access and fraud, and attempted altering of a public record."

Here comes social gaming

There's hearts, checkers, chess, Texas hold 'em, Dolphin Olympics, a form of Scrabble, and on and on. Which - if you're a game aficionado - can make the social Web a 24/7 party (it can also give young gamers 24/7 access to communities of players of all ages, but more on that in a moment).

"Online social gaming has been around for years, available on Yahoo and other sites. But its popularity is surging, piggybacking on the success of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and other social networks," the San Jose Mercury News reports. There are now business conferences gathering the corporate players and advertisers in the social gaming space. Kongregate.com alone has more then 4,500 games, the Merc adds, and "more than $30 million in venture funding has been invested in Silicon Valley start-ups that specialize in social games." This is distinct from the multibillion-dollar digital gaming industry dominated by Electronic Arts, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, it adds. The difference between social gaming and the "old" kind is that you're interacting with people, not software (multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft-type worlds and the real-time chat of Xbox Live always did involve real-people contact). Interacting with people adds mostly fun and unpredictability but also an element of risk that gamers need to be alert to, if a game is associated with chat and other means of non-game communication with other players.

Social gaming, kid-style

Virtual worlds are social-gaming environments for kids, and they're multiplying like rabbits. The BBC calls this "boom time for virtual playgrounds." "Worlds" such as Webkinz.com, ZooKazoo.com, and ClubPenguin.com and services such as AddictingGames.com are "places where your children can interact with other children, and they are becoming a central part of the business plans of the people who make TV programs, toys and cereal," the New York Times reports.

Disney's newest world is "Dgamer," part virtual world and part social-networking site for kids, accessible via computer or Nintendo DS, the Washington Post reports. The Post says Dgamer gives parents a lot of control by allowing them to sign up for various levels: "At the most basic level, they can only message one another with preselected words and phrases. On higher levels, they are allowed more freedom, but there are filters for profanity." But the service is free, so it's not clear how parents could control kid workarounds. Dgamer joins Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars, and recently acquired ClubPenguin. "According to research firm eMarketer, 12 million kids between ages 3 and 17 will regularly access virtual worlds this year. The firm expects that figure to rise to 20 million by 2011."

Worlds to watch for

Coming in the next six months or so, according to the New York Times piece: Spore (which will be playable via computer, phone, or NintendoDS), BarbieGirls.com, World of Neopia (Neopets' world), LegoUniverse, and PixieHollow.com (to go with Disney's soon to be released animated film Tinker Bell).

Downsides & how to deal with them

There are many positives involved in online gaming, we see in the research: e.g., the collaborative action in World of Warcraft guilds, individual and collective strategic thinking, thinking under pressure, and the informal learning associated with group activity involving multiple ages.

But there are downsides too, usually associated with the real-time chat around online gaming. For example, Doof.com, a brand-new UK-based social-gaming site. Have its creators thought about what parents might think about their kids participating when they read this heading on its About page: "Connect with Friends and Strangers," under which is listed Doof's "Private Messages" feature?

With household rules or in family discussion, parents might consider advising their gamers to make sure that...

Chat sticks strictly to game-related topics, nothing personal

No private one-on-one chat with people unless about it's just about the game and they tell a parent about it

They turn off their headphones or stop chatting if the trash talk gets to be too much

They come talk to you if anyone starts getting too abusive or tries to get uncomfortably close or overly friendly.

Kids need to know that getting lots of compliments can potentially be worse than trash talk and other abusive online behavior. Flattery can be one form of online grooming (see "How to recognize grooming," "Police on gaming community risks," and "How social influencing works."

Virtual worlds are by definition highly immersive. So parents may also want to be alert to signs of obsessive play. Besides the risk factors involved in real-time communication, there are concerns about something called "videogame addiction." Here's the US News & World Report's focus on younger gamers in this area (see also "'SIGNS' of Internet addiction."

Related links

"Are ads on children's social networking sites harmless child's play or virtual insanity?" in The Independent

"Fair game? Assessing commercial activity on children’s
favourite websites and online environments" from Childnet International and the UK's National Consumer Counsel

"Building social currency in online games" at ClickZ.com.

"Notable fresh videogame findings" at NetFamilyNews

US's high court on virtual child porn

The Supreme Court has upheld criminal penalties for promoting, or pandering, child pornography, the Associated Press reports. "The court upheld part of a 2003 law that also prohibits possession of child porn.... The law sets a five-year mandatory prison term for promoting, or pandering, child porn. It does not require that someone actually possess child pornography" and it replaced an earlier law that - according to Fox TV law columnist Lis Wiehl - required prosecutors to prove that the images were of "real" children, not digitally altered or morphed images, when "the 'real' children (aka victims) involved in child porn are almost impossible to find, let alone produce as witnesses at trial." In related news, New York State Attorney General announced that major US Internet service providers would block sources of child porn, the Washington Post reports, but the announcement created confusion as the ISPs later clarified that they weren't blocking anything (when free-speech advocates spoke out) - just "enforcing their own longstanding terms of service by agreeing not to host sites and newsgroups known to contain child porn," reports ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in his column on this at the San Jose Mercury News. Meanwhile, France "is joining at least five other countries where Internet service providers block access to child pornography," the Associated Press reports.

MySpace, Facebook: Basic differences

MySpace is a lot about self-expression and Facebook more about exchanging personal news and information among friends, according to a thoughtful analysis in VentureBeat.com, though somewhat biased toward Facebook. The distinction goes back to the two sites' origins. Back in 2005, MySpace was likened to a mashup of an alternate-reality game, online nightclub, music community, and teenager's bedroom that could be redecorated whenever the spirit moved (see "MySpace the new MTV"). VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon says that, unlike Facebook, MySpace is "a place for people to live out their fantasy lives online," which he acknowledges is quite a generalization but works where it concerns teens using the site to explore identity, as well as online media-producing and graphic design (see "Teens rule the Web" and "Social media gender gap"). Facebook's origins are well known and quite different: It was a college social utility defined by students' need to know more about a roommate, potential date, etc., where people were quickly busted if they fictionalized info about themselves. "If they provided fake information, their friends from across the hall would simply leave comments saying so on their profile pages," Eldon writes. Both can certainly be useful in many countries - one can see the value of a social utility in other countries, within local circles of friends and to keep in touch with friends who've emigrated or to stay in touch with people they've met from other countries. Eldon's analysis describes this well (and my own experience overseas in recent months bore this out). Here, for example, is the view of social networking from Kenya.

Using the Net at home: International data

Internet use certainly isn't growing the way it used to! "The UK held steady in active home Internet users in the month of April," Clickz.com reports, citing research from Nielsen Online. But in many other countries active Internet use from home was down, including in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the US. By percent of population, Italy (7.29), France (3.40), and Spain (2.29) saw the greatest losses. Active household use in the US was down 0.78% in April.

Dealing with cellphone spam

Are your children getting text-message spam on their cellphones (or are you) - those annoying messages that you can't delete without opening them and that you, not the sender, pay for? Well, there's hope, or help, rather, David Pogue at the New York Times reports. AT&T and Verizon Wireless let you block spam messages. Sprint and T-Mobile "don't go quite as far," Pogue writes, "but they do offer some text-spam filtering options." In his Circuits column, he explains how cellphone spamming works and where to find each cellphone company's spam controls. See also Forbes on "Cellphone Addiction" (more about grownups, though).

Videogame sales growth

Sales of videogame software and hardware reached $1.12 billion last month, up 37% from a year earlier, Reuters reports. Grand Theft Auto 4 was the best-selling title for the month, according to market researcher NPD, and is the year's top-selling game so far. Meanwhile, an Australian research found that "playing videogames for hours on end may be bad for your health, but ... it doesn't mean you are a lonely nerd and won't damage your social skills," Reuters reports. In his coverage of the study, CNET blogger Don Reisinger reports that 15% of gamers surveyed "were identified as 'problem gamers' who spend more than 50 hours a week playing games ... but only 1% of those respondents had poor social skills and shyness." [See also "Grand Theft Auto 4's realism all bad?" and "Grand Theft Childhood?".]

MySpace's redesign

It's a lot more than a facelift, USATODAY reports - more like a major overhaul. The US's biggest social network site this week unveils "a spanking-new interface, heightened security, availability on mobile and instant-messaging services - and the ability to create categories of friends at work, school and family, among dozens of other new features," according to USATODAY. Calling it a "global redesign," Reuters says "MySpace will change its home page, navigation, profile editing, search, and MySpaceTV player facilities," with more changes coming later in the summer. The aim is simplicity, so this development probably doesn't change much for parents. Teens already figured out MySpace long ago; this is for the holdouts - probably, too, for people who preferred Facebook's more utilitarian look and feel (though the irony is that's changing a little with all the mini applications Facebook people are adding to their profiles). Here's Business Week on what it describes as MySpace's ultimate plan: "to be a gateway to the Internet—and go head-to-head with Yahoo and Google."

Facebook, MySpace neck and neck globally

MySpace is still No. 1 in the US, but Facebook caught up to MySpace's monthly traffic worldwide in April with 115 million visitors, PCWorld reports, citing research by comScore (the International Herald Tribune reports that MySpace has reached 118 million registered users). "Myspace has maintained similar traffic numbers for the past year, but Facebook has grown from less than 40,000 unique monthly visitors in April 2007" to the 115 million" a year later. In the US, MySpace's unique visitor figure for April was 72 million, compared to Facebook's 36 million. Here's TechCrunch's coverage too. Meanwhile, the social-networking concept is quite the juggernaut: The European Parliament is developing its own social-networking site, The Telegraph reports, and the UK's House of Lords is on YouTube.com, the Associated Press reports.

Online safety as we know it: Becoming obsolete?

The headline may seem a bit inflammatory, but it's a sincere suggestion coming from 10+ years of observing and participating in the online-safety field. What we all know about online youth now from a substantial and growing body of research suggests it's time to reassess. We know, for example, that...

Young people make little distinction between online and offline and move constantly and fluidly between the two, with the focus more on the activity (socializing, schoolwork, listening to music, or all the above) than on the device or "place" where it's occurring.

The Internet has increasingly become a mirror of "real life" - what kids do online is not about technology, it's about life, child and adolescent development, functioning in community, at-risk behavior, critical thinking, and media literacy.

It's the young people at risk offline who are most at risk online, so expertise in adolescent at-risk behavior is necessary to the discussion.

Consider the first of nine myths about "digital natives" (online youth, basically, people who've never known life without the Internet) put forth by Profs. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser at a conference at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center: "Myth #1 - The online world presents a wholly new and completely different set of issues for youth we must address" (the ninth complements it: the myth that digital natives are a homogeneous group). [Even homogeneously speaking, research shows that young people themselves are getting smarter all by themselves about privacy and reputation management online (Pew/Internet data summarized in "Teens rule the Web").]

So, we might ask, should online safety be a separate field or discipline with unique safety expertise concerning some monolithic group called online youth? Certainly the Internet can augment and perpetuate problems in young people's lives in unprecedented ways, but research is showing that the substance of the problems is rooted in those real lives, not in a specific technology. It has to do with adolescent development and behavior much more than with technology. In fact, a great many types of expertise are becoming essential to the discussion - from neurologists on the teenage brain to psychologists on adolescent risk assessment to school counselors and administrators right in the trenches of gossip-cum-bullying blogs and cellphone photo-sharing. Sometimes we need to consult experts in constitutional law and computer forensics too (a dean of students once wisely had a computer forensics cop show students in a school-wide assembly how they're not as anonymous online as they think).

Where people with experience in online safety can help (in this transition time before the "digital natives" are parents and professionals themselves) is by...

Educating the public that online safety and well-being is not separate from "real life" and needs the same accountability.

Educating the public about how the Internet affects real-world actions or comments: how it can perpetuate them, reproduce or compound them, make them searchable, and bring unknown, unexpected audiences to them (see social media researcher danah boyd on this in an interview at AlterNet.org).

Serving as information clearinghouses and connectors to the right kind of expertise for predation, bullying, eating disorders, substance abuse, etc. The help we could point teens and parents to might be at customer service departments of Web sites, virtual worlds, or mobile phone companies; school administrators; certain specialists in law enforcement; legal advisers; social workers; psychologists; and so on.

My model for the clearinghouse approach is Netsafe in New Zealand. Providing online-safety education for all New Zealanders (youth, parents, schools, community organizations, companies, policymakers), Netsafe is an independent nonprofit organization with an active board membership representing New Zealand's Education Ministry, educators themselves, judges, corporations, parents, students, social workers, police, and New Zealand's Police Youth Education Service, Internal Affairs Dept., and Customs Service. Yes, Netsafe's an online-safety education organization working hard at the preventive end like many organizations in the US, but it also works at the remedial end, getting problems that come up to the right kind of help. An example of its clearinghouse role is in its direct relationship with New Zealand's two main mobile carriers' customer service departments, helping them get abuse calls about phone-based bullying and other problems to the right experts - sometimes parents, social workers, counselors, and school officials, not just law enforcement.

Probably no single organization in the US, with its population of 300 million (vs. New Zealand's 4 million), can handle all that Netsafe does nationwide in its country. The US's National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) - with its CyberTipline working at the remedial end and NetSmartz working up front at education and prevention (intelligently focusing more and more on safety in general, not just the online kind) - is certainly going for this more holistic approach. But our society is still too focused on the crime and law enforcement part of the "problem," and our online-safety field is still dominated by lawyers and law enforcement. Certainly society needs to keep addressing crime online, but the online-safety field - though maybe not quite obsolete - needs to reflect the breadth of young people's use of the Internet and all related devices and technologies, positive as well as a negative.

Comments, arguments, and other views on this from parents, educators, counselors, and other adults working with online youth would be most welcome in our ConnectSafely forum or via anne@netfamilynews.org.

Related links

Myths about "digital natives" from Profs. John Palfrey, director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Urs Gasser at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland

Justine Cassell and Meg Cramer at Northwestern University's Center for Technology and Social Behavior write in an executive summary: "We argue that the current moral outrage and national panic over the risks of victimization faced by girls on the Internet has nothing to do with risks faced by girls on the Internet" in their essay "High Tech or High Risk: Moral Panics about Girls Online."

Here's what John Palfrey blogs about the Cassell/Cramer and other essays in the new book Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected (MIT Press).

More findings in researchers' "Stories from the Field" at the Digital Youth Research project at University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

Educational social network site?

Not long ago Dale Ferrario was working at Sun Microsystems and wanting to figure out how to help young people learn about technology in a way that was relevant to them. He asked himself questions like how to combine social networking with learning about technology in a safe online environment. So after 20 years, he quit Sun and started a nonprofit social-networking site called FreshBrain.org, the Saratoga (Calif.) News reports. The site gives 13-to-18-year-olds "the chance to explore and create through activities and projects, such as changing the image of the Mona Lisa by putting a new face on it, creating a video game or social networking to start a small business. Students can learn to create a Web site or design a computer game or mashup. They can learn the inner workings of software programming, graphic design and more. Each of these areas includes contests with prizes such as an iPod and T-Mobile phones.

10 mobile social networks

The number alone is significant. And more mobile social networks (or services for phone-based socializing) are mentioned in the reader comments below this item in ReadWriteWeb.com. They're the services that want to be "the MySpace of the mobile Web," as Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb put it in another post. Twitter's not even on that list of 10 - is that because they're distinguishing between mobile (cellphone) blogging and mobile socializing (I think there's a fine line between the two, but maybe that's because I'm following the advice of author/professor Daniel Solove and trying to think less in terms of binaries such as online vs. offline, blogging vs. socializing, private vs. public and thinking in more granular ways)? Why is the growing number of phone-based social services significant? According to Perez, "InStat is predicting that by 2012, there will be nearly 30 million 'millennials' [Gen Y-ers or people born between the mid '80s and the mid-'90s] in the US using a mobile social network of some sort, and a ComputerWorld report confirms that, worldwide, that number will soar to 975 million by 2012." Any "millennials" in your family are quite likely to be among them.

For youngest Web users, YouTube beats Disney

We're talking about the Disney Channel Web site, here, not the Disney Channel on TV, but this is still interesting: Among 2-to-11-year-olds, YouTube was No. 1 for online video viewing and Disneychannel.com a distant second, reports CNET, citing Nielsen figures. For YouTube, the number of 2-to-11-year-old visitors in April was 4.1 million; for Disneychannel.com, it was 1.3 million. NickJr was also on the list, but note that MySpace - whose minimum age is 14 - was too. So was Google Video. "On average, the kids watched 51 video streams from home during April, spending almost two hours on video clips. That usage outstrips the average of nearly 75 million adults [44 video streams and 1 hr, 40 min] who regularly view video clips at sites like ESPN.com and CNN.com," CNET reports. I agree with reporter Stefanie Olsen where she writes: "Slightly disturbing, the site with the highest concentration of 12- to 17-year-olds, or 44% of this age group, was Stickam.com, a hub for live Webcams of people in their bedrooms." For more on Stickam, see "Social networking unleashed," the kind without monitoring, customer-care staffs, and safety czars and "Parents, be aware of Stickam."

US's top 5 social network sites

The US's top 5 social network sites in terms of visitors in April (the latest figures available) are MySpace, Facebook, myYearbook, Bebo, and BlackPlanet, in that order, according to Web traffic research firm Hitwise. Interestingly, this was also the ranking order for the sites in terms of returning visitors and time spent on the sites. MySpace's April market share was 73.82%, Hitwise said, followed by Facebook (14.8%), myYearbook (1.33%), Bebo (1.09%), and BlackPlanet (0.98%).

MyYearbook: US's fastest-growing social site

It seems to fly mostly under the radar where adults and conventional news media are concerned but, according to Web traffic measurer Hitwise, myYearbook.com is now the third-ranking social network site in the US. That's according to Hitwise's figures for share of visitors this past April. My guess is, the site's smart to stay focused on high school-aged users. Founded in 2005 by siblings Dave and Catherine Cook when they were high school students, myYearbook is also the fastest growing social site, PhillyBurbs.com cites HitWise figures as showing, with market share growth of "426% in the past year alone. Visitors to myYearbook.com spent more time on the site than they did on the two leading social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook. The average visit was 32 minutes and 54 seconds for myYearbook, compared to 29:54 for MySpace and almost 21 minutes for Facebook." Favorite features among its users, according to myYearbook, are "'Match,' which enables them to make new connections online; 'Battles,' where members battle for 'Best Looking' or 'Cutest Couple'; 'Pimp,' an all-out profile customization tool with all the glitters and animations anyone could ever want; and 'myMag,' where young people sound off on issues like anorexia, cliques, relationships, and the fashions and foibles of their favorite celebrities." The site added "Video Battles" and "myMag" last July.

New iPhone: A parent's view

The last time I checked, there were almost 2,000 articles worldwide in Google News about the very cool, $199 smart (3G) iPhone just unveiled by Apple's Steve Jobs. I'll bet not one of them offered a parent's-eye-view of this product. But the view is clear across these relatively uncharted waters: the pressure is on, parents; a whole lot of young cellphone users will want one. The reasons: it's cheaper, they'll argue (than the first iPhone at $399), and "you'll be able to find me anytime," a smart teen will tell you, "because it has GPS technology." What they probably won't tell you is that, with it, they - the ultimate multitaskers - can surf the Web and do mobile social networking twice as fast as on the old iPhone (the new one "runs on AT&T's high-speed network using 3G technology," the Washington Post reports), so they can watch video, get directions to parties, etc., "even when they're on a call," Apple marketing says. Also attractive to teens, who really like to download and mess around with software applications and games on phones, in social sites, and on the Web in general, my ConnectSafely co-director and CBS News tech analyst Larry Magid reminds me, will be the iPhone's App Store (some of the apps will be free, Apple says). Here's Larry's piece on the new iPhone at CBSNEWS.com. Avid music and video sharers may prefer the 16 gig $299 version, but they might keep that wish to themselves in case it lessens their chances of getting an iPhone at all, right?

Then there's the safety question: What parents also need to know, though, is that this and other 3G phones are basically mini Net-connected computers that go everywhere with their users. With one significant difference: this little mobile computer's movements can be tracked. With GPS technology, you can pinpoint your kids' locations, as they'll tell you, but so can their friends (with social-mapping services such as loopt) and - potentially - non-friends, if they're using a social-mapping service and aren't careful about giving their numbers out to and keeping friends lists restricted only to their real-life friends. We are clearly way beyond putting filtering and other parental controls on a single family computer plugged into a wall in a high-traffic area of the house.

The iPhone does come with parental controls, the Seattle Times reports, but I couldn't find any specifics on them yet at Apple.com. The phone has to be used with a two-year AT&T service contract, and AT&T and the other major US carriers also have parental controls, but parents will need to check with AT&T to see if its service's controls work with the iPhone's. To see what controls are available from the major cellphone companies, click to "What Mobile carriers need to do for kids" (see also our forum ConnectSafely's "Cell-Phone Safety Tips"). [See also the New York Times on how 3G or smartphones are taking off and how 71% of women make the decision about their family’s wireless choices, including phones and service plans. (Smartphones require data plans that can cost $30 or more a month.)]

How teens use social network sites: Clear insights

For some of the clearest, most significant insights yet into how young people use digital media, consider watching footage from "From MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth," a forum recently held at Stanford University. Hundreds of hours of observation and interviews with young people around the US by more than 20 researchers are represented in the presentations. They're on the second video in the group, introduced by Mimi Ito, one of the principal investigators of the Digital Youth project. Their work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Try to watch all the way through to Ito's meaty summary at the end of the second video.

Of particular interest to parents concerned about teen social networkers' safety are findings by C.J. Pascoe mentioned by Dr. Ito, for example that: "Contrary to common fears, flirting and dating are almost always initiated offline in the traditional settings where teens get together and extended online. Her work clearly shows there's a strong social norm among teens that the online space isn't a place to find new romantic partners, but a place to deepen and explore existing offline relationships." Exceptions: marginalized teens "whose romantic partners are restricted for cultural or religious reasons" and gay and lesbian teens (the latter are "not reaching out online for random social encounters but using the expanded possibilities online selectively to overcome limitations they're facing" in their offline social networks); and the very small percentage of teens most at risk of sexual exploitation (see "Profile of a teen online victim"). You'll probably appreciate too, as I did: Heather Horst's findings on teen use of social sites and digital meeting within the context of the family; Ito's comments on the two forms of teen social networking, friendship-driven and interest-driven; danah boyd's insights into the friendship-driven side and Dilan Mahendran's fascinating examples of interest-driven, collaborative digital media making. They all indicate that there is a growing intelligence among teen social media producers about audience: "What they make is inextricably linked to who they make it for and with. They're making media for niche networked publics, not the undifferentiated public of mass media."

Just because they crave attention?

Why do teens post such personal information online for all the world to see? The burning question of the first decade of the 21st century, perhaps - at least for parents and other digital non-natives. I'm late in pointing you to this, but "Exposed," a recent cover story of the New York Times Magazine looks at "oversharing" in the full, seemingly unedited story of Emily (Gould) the 20-something compulsive blogger. Her story suggests that the answer may partly be the reality TV phenomenon ("that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges," aka random readers); genetics ("some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others ... technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale"); a twisted concept of free speech acted out ("I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted"); and crying out for attention. I agreed with her when she wrote: "I don't think people write online exclusively because they crave attention."

In any case, overexposure phenomenon is probably not going away - partly because diaries and journals will never go away and partly because the audience (or the imagined audience) certainly won't. As Emily told a Times reader in a Q&A the paper later published, "It's probably a pretty safe bet that people will continue to make mistakes online - after all, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so besides themselves. This is the best and worst thing about the blogosphere," she continues, referring to its readers. "Other people's mistakes, which is to say, their impulsively revealed thoughts and opinions, can be fascinating."

Though there is pressure on young people to express themselves digitally, this doesn't mean oversharing is what social networking is all about and it doesn't mean all children will. The way teens express themselves online is highly individual. It also might help parents to know that privacy is no more black & white where personal blogging's concerned than is life itself. Emily refers to an important book that points this out: "I'm reading an interesting book right now about reputation and the Internet by Daniel Solove, and in it he posits that we've traditionally thought of privacy as a binary: private vs. public. He thinks that we should begin to think of degrees of semi-privacy, in terms of both self-regulation and legal regulation." And teens reportedly are already thinking in terms of degrees of privacy as well as of fact and fiction. For them, the latter isn't binary either: they add degrees of privacy by fictionalizing parts of what they present of themselves (see "Online aliases" and "Social networkers: Thinking about privacy").

But back to Emily's reference to "self-regulation." Isn't that where parenting comes in? Teaching (and hopefully modeling) self-regulation, as our rules for them are replaced by the trust they earn? It's not so much about shutting the blog or a compulsion down, maybe, as it is about providing perspective on privacy and self-respect. What has much more lasting value to them is helping them think about how broad their audience may actually (or ultimately) be, what image they're presenting of themselves now and when people encounter their content in the future, and how little control they have over what can happen to comments once online.

Related links

Author and professor Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation

"The social Web's digital divide"

"Say Everything" in New York magazine

"The 'naked generation?'"

"Growing up in public"

"Nude photo-sharing: Q from a family that's been there"

"Generation Y has its own ideas of what privacy is" in the Naperville [Ill.] Sun

Latin America's social Web

Hi5.com is No. 1 in Latin America's social-networking scene, according to fresh figures from comScore, and social Web use as a whole is growing fast there. The number of unique visitors for the region has grown "from 53.6 million unique visitors last June, to 61.6 million this past April" (the latest figure available), VentureBeat.com cites comScore research as showing. Hi5 had 12.8 million visitors in April, "about a quarter of its 45 million monthly visitors around the world." Facebook (whose worldwide user figure for April was 116.4 million compared to MySpace's 115.7 million) was the fastest-growing SNS in the region and had 7.7 million Latin American visitors in April. One possible explanation for Hi5's popularity might be its linguistic tailoring for individual markets - e.g., "two new Spanish versions, for the Argentinian and Castilian dialects, with more dialect translations to come." It also launched a Brazilian Portuguese version in March to compete against [Google's] Orkut." Other growth sites to watch are Sonico, Batanga, and Vostu (for people to create their own social sites), VentureBeat reports. Having said all that, VentureBeat adds that blogging is still more popular than social networking in Latin America, with blogging services such as WordPress, Blogger, and local platforms "larger than Hi5 or any of its competitors," and mobile social networking is exploding (66% of Latin Americans own mobile phones, compared to the worldwide average of 46%).

Europe to legislate social networking?

The EU's Internet security agency is calling for legislation "to police social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace," InfoWorld reports. The director of the European Network and Information Security Agency said that social sites are "useful social tools," but suggested that EU law needs to cover photo-sharing online because "currently there is no need to get a person's consent in order to post a photo of them." He also said more public education is needed about how social networking works, pointing to the problem that "many people don't realize that it's almost impossible to erase material once it has appeared on the internet."

Teen rape suspects plead guilty

Four suspects ages 17 and 18 "pleaded guilty to raping a Seattle-area girl who later identified two of her attackers on her MySpace page," United Press International reports. The 16-year-old victim of the assault, which occurred last fall, met offline with the four after communicating with them online and was assaulted "on a darkened road." UPI adds that "the girl later described what had happened on her MySpace page," after which police "obtained a search warrant to capture email messages about the incident exchanged among the suspects."

1 in 5 Oz youth cyberbullied

Twenty-two percent of Australian youth have been harassed or bullied online, according to Australia's annually Youth Poll. Even so, "the internet plays a critical role in the lives of 15-to-20-year-olds, with 64% having a social network site, The Age cites the survey as finding. The 22% cyberbullying figure compares to about 33% in the US (for more US data, see "Cyberbullying: Clarity needed"). Not unlike in the US, probably, "body image was a major concern to 54 percent of the [Australian] youths surveyed, 46 percent of whom knew someone who had committed suicide or tried to do so."

Finding bog snorkelers in MySpace

Well, this isn't just about finding bog snorkelers (for the great unwashed, I'll get to what it is in a moment). It's about how easily journalists and other users of search engines (maybe parents too) can find people in any social-networking site. The article in Journalism.co.uk shows how easily reporters can search social sites for case studies and background info and how easily that can turn up the most specific details about people's lives. Within 10 minutes the writer -who'd set out to "find private information" about someone under 16, including where s/he could be found - "was able to find the mobile number of a 15-year-old girl in South London, the address where a 17-year-old waitress is employed in Kent," etc. The article shows how to do advance searches, for example for "pro-ana" sites (supporting anorexia) or bog snorkelers, preferably in a general search engine such as Google, not in the social site itself: "If you are doing research on the fury caused by pro-anorexia sites on the web then you will find only a handful of 'pro-ana' ... references using Bebo's search tool. But more than 170 Bebo pages can be found in Google using this search string: site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo 'pro-ana'." For "bog snorkeling," 120 results in MySpace were turned up with this string: site:myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction "bog snorkelling". As for what bog snorkeling is, it's a competitive sport - sometimes combined with running and mountain biking in a new kind of triathlon - see this page in Wikipedia for more.

Court rules on student's blog post

A federal appeals court ruled that a high school in Connecticut did not violate a student's free-speech rights by disciplining her because of a blog commented posted from her home. The reason, reports the Hartford Courant, that "her blog post 'created a foreseeable risk of substantial disruption' at the school." The student was barred from serving as a class officer and speaking at graduation. The Courant added that the court "stopped short of declaring how far schools can go in regulating offensive Internet speech made off campus." Here's my

Court rules on student's blog post

A federal appeals court ruled that a high school in Connecticut did not violate a student's free-speech rights by disciplining her because of a blog commented posted from her home. The reason, reports the Hartford Courant, that "her blog post 'created a foreseeable risk of substantial disruption' at the school." The student was barred from serving as a class officer and speaking at graduation. The Courant added that the court "stopped short of declaring how far schools can go in regulating offensive Internet speech made off campus." Here's my original post about the Avery Doninger case."