West slow to take on Net addiction: Psychiatrist

Nine computer games are purchased every second in the US; two-thirds of Americans, or around 200 million people, play videogames; 2% of US gamers, or about 4 million people, "are heavy users" averaging around 40 hours of play a week; and 66 million (a third) play around 20 hours/week. That's data cited by Jerald Block, an Oregon-based psychiatrist, in British cultural and political magazine The Standpoint. He's writing about Internet addiction, "or the more accurate and general term Pathological Computer Use (PCU)," which he says is "not an established diagnosis but one that might be included in the next version of the mental-health diagnostic guidebook, the DSM-V," which will be out in 2012. A doctor in the US or Europe would probably not know what to do with the information that you're spending 40+ hours a week playing videogames. "Dealing with such matters is not part of our training," Dr. Block writes. "In Asia, however, you would probably get a psychiatric diagnosis. Because doctors in Asia … recognise excessive computer use as a serious issue." Block goes on to describe what PCU patients' symptoms and behaviors are like from a physician's perspective, including a description of what virtual-reality "cybering" can now be like and addicts' unsettlingly, progressively blurry distinction between reality and virtual reality.

But all that's about diagnosis, he writes in his conclusion. Treatment is an entirely different, very difficult proposition. "The uncomfortable truth is that our treatment strategies [worldwide] for this malady are inadequate and often fail. Until we learn more or have better clinical tools, our best approach may be to work on prevention." [See also "'SIGNS' of Net addiction: Interview."]

'Law 'n' order' in virtual worlds

It's a fledgling concept, but there are some interesting community-policing efforts afoot in virtual worlds such as Second Life, VZones, World of Warcraft, and mobile-phone-based Cellufun for mobile phone users, the Washington Post reports. For example, "in World of Warcraft, a popular online fantasy game, a character who is acting out runs the risk of being attacked by a group of self-appointed sheriffs. While the avatar doesn't face official penalties, the interference from other players can deter future crimes." In one of Worlds.com's worlds, users created a novel sort of virtual scarlet letter: "an animated bird that drops an unpleasant [virtual] substance on the heads of outlaws, known as 'griefers' in virtual-world lingo." There needs to be a flip side too, of course. I love the way London-based Childnet International put it recently: "Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It's about ... using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same" (see this item) - an important focus for parenting and schooling going forward along the lines of "an ounce of prevention," "a stitch in time," etc., etc.... Speaking of which, virtual world safety expert Izzy Neis recently blogged about how a kids' world itself will be used to teach civility. She wrote that Dizzywood.com for kids 8-12 was "selected by the YMCA of San Francisco to enhance the youth program’s technology curriculum ... to reinforce its program emphasis on activities that promote values such as caring, honesty, respect and responsibility."

Hi5 socializing for mobiles

The difference between Hi5.com's social-network site for the cellphone screen and those of MySpace and Facebook, CNET points out, is that Hi5's mobile edition 1) "openly targets" people around the world who primarily use mobile phones, not computers, to socialize, and 2) launched in 26 languages. CNET says Facebook and MySpace's mobile editions are designed more as supplements to their Web browser-accessed sites. Point No. 1 above makes particular sense for Hi5's Latin American market, if comScore's international social-networking data is to be believed. ComScore's recently unveiled data showed a 1,055% increase in traffic for Hi5 between June 2007 and this past June. Here's my summary of the comScore report. Here, too, is some context on the growing MoSoSo, or mobile-social-networking, phenomenon from the Christian Science Monitor.

Facebook the movie

I wonder if Facebook folk are a little nervous. TV writer Aaron Sorkin has set up his Facebook profile, introducing himself this way: “I've just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I've started this page," says writer Aaron Sorkin on his Facebook page. "(Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more internet savvy than I do and she's been dead for 33 years.)” But this technophobe's a quick study, right? A Facebook spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times that Facebook hadn't agreed to cooperate with any filmmaker so far, but it's flattered by the attention. Here, too, is coverage at the Times of London and Wired.

150+ virtual worlds for youth now

If anyone had doubts about rapid growth in the virtual-worlds sector of cyberspace, this should clear them up. There are now more than 150 virtual worlds - either open now or in development - targeting people 18 and under, up from around 100 just last April, according to Virtual Worlds Management (VWM). [The full list is at that link, though the definition of "virtual world" seems to be broad - I noticed one site that's largely avatar chat, not a whole "world."] "In all there are 95 youth worlds currently live. Another 68 are in concepting, development, or testing phases. Tweens' worlds (for ages 8-12) lead at 88 of the 150+, kids' (7 and under) come in second with 72, and teens' third with 60. Disney alone has nine in development, VWM reports. The New York Post cites eMarketer research showing that estimate that "more than half" of all online youth 3-17, or about 20 million young people "will visit virtual worlds by 2011, up from 34%, or 12 million, this year." Here's some analysis about the VWM report from its authors. I noted a comment in it about virtual worlds "aging with their users" from Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online, a world targeting 13-to-18-year-olds. He told VWM that 30% of Gaia users were now 18+ and the site had, "accordingly, grown a little edgier" (inevitable, undoubtedly, but something for parents to be alert to, with kids and adults sharing an online community). It's logical that people wouldn't suddenly drop away from a site targeting youth just because they turned 18.

For a whole range of man-on-the-street views of virtual worlds, see this fun video from Global Kids in New York, or read coverage of a conference in youth learning in virtual worlds last fall from CNET. See also my recent item on ways kids have found to game the system in virtual worlds, sometimes for the purposes of cyberbullying.

ClubPenguin's newest competition

The New York Post calls it competition for Disney's kid virtual world, but it looks a whole lot more like competition for MGA Entertainment's Be-Bratz.com, the online world for Bratz doll fans, and Mattel's BarbieGirls.com (all three so very pink and purple - girls do like other colors!). The new kid on the block is ZwinkyCuties.com, now in beta testing and launching in mid-September, the Post reports. Interestingly, founder Barry Diller told the Post that his company, IAC, created ZwinkyCuties after "turning away thousands of users who attempted to register for [its two-year-old teen site] Zwinky.com, but didn't meet the site's age requirement of at least 13 years old." Like ClubPenguin, ZwinkyCuties will be subscription-based, not advertising-based (unlike at Zwinky.com, where teens users "purchase virtual currency on an a la carte basis using credit cards and PayPal accounts"). For insights into what sometimes goes on in kids' online worlds, see "Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users."

Facebook controlling 'wall spam'

Yup, yet another new term for malware on the social Web. "Wall spam" is comments on your Facebook wall purporting to be from a friend but which usually contain a link to some bad Web page that puts malicious code on your PC. The term "rose to notoriety earlier this month, when members started noticing the phenomenon, and security firms started flagging worms that were spreading via Facebook members' walls," CNET reports. Facebook appears to be on top of it (see this from the Washington Post). But tell your kids that, if they have a friend they haven't heard from in a long time and/or who just became a very bad speller, don't click! Better first to contact that friend by IM, phone, email, etc., and ask if s/he posted that comment.

Register to vote on Xbox Live?!

Thanks to a partnership between Rock the Vote and Microsoft, registration in Xbox Live started this week, the BBC reports. Having also worked with MySpace to grow the number of youth voting, Rock the Vote aims to register 2 million voters via the Xbox gaming community by this fall. The BBC adds that Xbox Live had 12 million subscribers in 26 countries by last May (the latest figure available). Incidentally, someone in our ConnectSafely forum asked about parental controls for Xbox Live; here's the link I gave him to Microsoft's page on "Family Settings" for the gaming community.

Public humiliation or Net-safety ed?

It appears that student online-safety education took a harsher tone in Windsor, Colo., recently. The principal of Windsor High School apologized that "some of the ways" John Gay, a Cheyenne, Wyo., police officer, approached his presentation about Internet dangers "offended, embarrassed and are hurting some of our kids," Windsor Now reports. Two accounts of what happened in an all-school assembly - Officer Gay's and that of the father of one of the students present "and a lot of other people in Windsor ... don't match."

What isn't in dispute is that the officer used the social-network profiles of students at the assembly as examples of material that encourages predators, his language was sexually graphic beyond references to rape, and one of the students left in tears. She told the paper that Gay showed the 500-student audience her phone number and "read her blogs and comments out loud." Gay told the paper that he "apologized for causing [her] any grief, but he said he would never apologize for the way he presents his material because of the seriousness of the crimes." Her father's account was that, after the officer asked her to identify herself in the assembly and she raised her hand, Gay displayed her profile and told the students she could be "raped and murdered" because of how accessible her content was. The father added that "Gay gave the example of a girl in another state who had been targeted on MySpace, and the girl was taken to an empty warehouse, was raped and shot dead," according to Windsor Now. Because she'd apparently put her phone number in her profile, Gay called her cellphone from the stage to "see if she'll come back." The father told the paper he "had no problem with the topic of the assembly, and that he doesn’t want to see [the principal] lose his job over this."

The Denver Post reports that the principal "essentially backs up" Officer Gay, and teachers present at the assembly "corroborated Gay's version of events." [Here's Denver's Channel 7 News on this story.]

The officer's presentation in Windsor was not unique. Windsor Now reports that Gay "travels to schools and has talked to 4,000 to 5,000 people, mostly kids." And I remember reading of a similar singling-out-specific-students methodology used in social-networking-safety assemblies in Ireland.

The story raises plenty of questions about online-safety ed. Even if the consensus is that teens need to "wake up" to online risks, is that best done by making an example of one child among his or her own peers? And if the answer is yes, what should the tone of that exposure be? Humiliation is one of bullies' goals for their victims. An instructional tone or approach that comes anywhere close to bullying is modeling the very behavior that online-safety advocates are trying to teach youth (and adults!) to avoid. Empowering youth to think critically about what they see and post online and to be respectful of self and others - in other words, to be good citizens online as well as offline - will go much further toward keeping kids safe online than humiliating them in front of their peers.

But it'd be great to get your views - in the ConnectSafely.org forum, where two police officers have already commented.

Related link

"Online safety as we know it: Becoming obsolete?"

GPS-enabled mobile-socializing trend

Interesting to get the Australian perspective on what looks to be a worldwide trend: "Experts say the 'killer application' for mobile social networking - the ability to access social networks such as Facebook and Bebo on mobile phones - will be the ability to use the global positioning software now found in phones to help cyber-buddies meet at-real life locations," Australian IT reports. The tech news site says, though phone-based social networking is very new in Oz, it's "growing at such a rapid rate it has become a key driver of mobile Internet use in the past six months." It cites a mobile marketing executive as saying he spends more than half his cellphone time on social-networking sites, which he thinks will become commonplace for everyone within two years. MySpace says that, worldwide, it "attracts 1.9 million mobile users a day." Meanwhile, Japan is already there. In that country, "the mobile Web is [already] bigger than the PC Web," the Washington Post reports, but home-grown companies may do better in the mobile space than US-based ones, as has been the case with Japanese social networking on the Web.

Yahoo's social-mapping service

This can be like micro-blogging without saying a thing – Yahoo's new Fire Eagle geolocation service reports your physical location via blogging or social-network sites you choose to allow access to it, CNET reports. For example, if Twitter signed on as a partner, it could announce where you are whenever you post to Twitter, and the same for MySpace or Facebook. I don't think they're partners yet, but this is where things are headed: the marriage of GPS, or location pinpointing, and socializing on the fixed and mobile Web. It has security and privacy implications for users, of course. Fortunately, Fire Eagle says you have to turn the feature on, not just at sign-up. Every month is asks if you still want to share your location via the specific sites you allowed originally. It also lets users choose how granular the info is – I'm in San Francisco, or I'm at a specific street address in San Francisco. And users can shut it down for specified periods of time. It certainly spells the need for alertness when making choices about how accessible one's location info should be!

How to protect from defamation?

That's an unanswered question where the social Web's concerned. Social sites seem to have more protection from US law than their users have right now. A little-known section of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) is what protects - rightfully, I think - Internet service providers and social-networking sites from liability for what's posted by users of their services, reports ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in his column in the San Jose Mercury News. It's a little like the way the phone company is not held liable for the nasty things people sometimes say to each other when using its service. [What's different about the social Web, of course - and what makes it much harder for victims or parents not to blame the service provider - is that what users say to or post about each other is public, so the damage can be amplified, reposted, searched for, and perpetuated.]

Anyway, US law so far protects the service provider. The only thing that protects users from each other is the customer service departments of the more responsible social sites, or service providers. For example, MySpace takes down harassing imposter profiles, once it goes through its own internal process of proving that someone's being victimized by someone else who set up a profile impersonating the victim. (It's not always easy to prove what people claim is happening online - sometimes people will say they're being victimized to get someone else kicked off the site, or kids pose as parents to get other kids' profiles taken down.) Not even sites' Terms of Service really protect users, according to a researcher I spoke with recently, who said that sites' Terms are more guidelines than enforced rules. In any case, whether or not Terms of Use are enforced depends on the site.

There are sites like JuicyCampus.com, where victimized users are just out of luck. Larry writes that, when he visited JuicyCampus recently, "the second most prominent post [he found on the home page] read: "paul [his last name, deleted here, was in the post] is a _______ piece of ____ [expletives deleted] who is a closet gay that gets drunk and fools around with other guys secretly." As mean and possibly libelous as that is, Larry writes, the site "can't be touched.... In theory, 'paul' could try to take action against the person who wrote the statement," but JuicyCampus would have to help him find who made the statement. US federal privacy law (different from CDA) prevents any site from revealing the identity of one user to another without a subpoena or other court-issued document. JuicyCampus, though, actually helps people who make such statements stay anonymous, Larry reports, by advising them to use a search engine to find services "that offer free IP-cloaking" (hiding the IP number associated with their computers for anyone trying to find them). Besides, speech like that seen in JuicyCampus, may be hateful and defaming, but it isn't necessarily criminal - it's more along the lines of cyberbullying (not that this doesn't make it less damaging).

With no real recourse, what are victims and their advocates (e.g., parents) to do? This is a discussion that the industry, consumer advocates, and legal experts need to have (or continue!). But all that's at the macro, societal, level. Obviously, there's much that can be done at the micro – household – level, as well as at school. We all need to be helping young people with whom we have influence to think just as critically, alertly, and ethically about how they behave online as they do offline. Nothing should ever take ethics out of the mix. The relatively lawless social Web demands ethical behavior more than anywhere.

The message to our children is: Anonymity and disinhibition change nothing. Not being able to see the other person you're talking to or about is all the more reason to think of that person as a fellow human being. I've never liked the term "cyberspace" because "cyber" suggests robotics. The participatory Web is not alien territory populated by robots – it's another place where human beings hang out.

Your thoughts on this are most welcome – post them in our ConnectSafely.org forum or email them to me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

How people use the Web

People's favorite things to do on the Web are: using search engines, checking email, watching and sharing video clips, and social networking, in that order. That's what Forbes.com seems to be saying in "What Are People Actually Doing on the Web?" On No. 3: "There are plenty of sites devoted to the art of, well, lollygagging. Take YouTube, Americans' sixth-most-hammered site, with 75 million unique visitors last month, each of whom spent an average of one hour per visit." As for that fourth pursuit, "to be sure, social networking is still a youthful pursuit - Generation Y (ages 18 to 28) is nearly four times as likely to frequent such sites as are the 29-and-over population - but the speed at which this phenomenon has taken hold is breathtaking. Consider that back in July 2005, "Thefacebook" ranked No. 236 on Nielsen's list, with nearly 4 million unique visitors. By last month, the social networking site - now called simply Facebook - had scaled its way to No. 16, with over 34 million uniques [visitors]."

Tinker Bell on a phone near you

For socializers too young to drive, mobile phones are lifelines, and Disney has fresh plans to capitalize on that fact. Reporting on this, Forbes cites Multimedia Intelligence figures showing that "the US had more than 16 million teen mobile subscribers in 2007, up 12% from 2006." Forbes adds that Walt Disney Internet Group estimates that more than half of US 10-year-olds own phones, and Disney wants to "'own' those mobile customers." Last year Disney launched its own site for phone screens. Now it plans to sync that mobile site with its Web sites and next month debuts "a registration system that will allow users to access their Disney.com profiles automatically via their cell phones. A digital storefront - a one-stop online market for purchasing Disney games, ringtones and wallpapers - will follow," Forbes reports. (Parents, these purchases will bear added to the family cellphone service bill.) Other plans: phone-to-phone (another kind of P2P) instant messaging with a profanity filter, a downloadable "Fairy Friend" aimed at girls who like caring for a Tamagotchi-like Tinker Bell; a Pirates of the Caribbean downloadable mobile game in which players can earn virtual coins they can spend at Disney.com; and GPS capabilities by which users can detect friends at Hannah Montana concerts and "automatically send them exclusive content, such as a new song" (let's hope they contact only real-life friends at concerts!). Forbes doesn't mention financial and other parental controls that could help keep costs and contacts under control. Meanwhile, CNET reports that "Disney wants to socialize with parents, too."

Top cellphone picks for students

Yes, it has come to that: cellphones among back-to-school supplies (though maybe not on school administrators' lists!). "All cell phones are not created equal, and some are better suited for students than others," CNET reports. CNET editors picked a quiver of phones that, in various ways - e.g., full QWERTY keyboard, organization tools, multimedia features – are suited for students.

Social Web interoperability: Potential risks

Every now and then we hear the term "interoperability" held up as some sort of holy grail of online socializing, but parents might want to know that it's not necessarily all upside. It allows not only for uniform screennames and password across multiple sites but also for sharing mini applications, such as photo slide shows, across various sites. The problem is, some sites are "safer" or show more corporate responsibility than others, and it's not easy for users – especially teens acting spontaneously – to be aware of how well many sites protect their privacy, for example. And they may have a safe, manageable sense of community with real-life friends on one site but be sharing content on another with an entirely different community. Interoperability first arrived on my radar when instant messaging was the new "killer app" and AIM users wanted to IM with MSN Messenger ones. Now there are movements afoot such as OpenSocial aimed at creating interoperability among social-network sites. Friendster.com, an early player on the social Web now much more popular in Southeast Asia than the US, is the latest social site to join Google's OpenSocial, the Associated Press reports. Other participants in OpenSocial are Yahoo, MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, Google's Orkut, and Bebo, the AP adds.

Microblogging: Heads up

It might be interesting to ask your kids if they're Twittering these days ("microblogging" is the generic term if they're using a service other than early entrant Twitter). Microblogging is basically a blow-by-blow account of one's life, sent via phone or Web site. Kind of hard for some non-digital natives to imagine doing ("so very narcissistic" is the dismissal I've heard, or "why would my friends care if I'm at such-and-such a conference or the grocery store?"). Well, some adults and a lot more young people do want to know and share up-to-the-minute activities and thoughts. It's a form of intimacy and presence that express highly connected friendship, manifest in Facebook newsfeeds and prolific phone texting (for a bit more on intimacy, see "Fictionalizing their profiles"). However, as with all technologies, there's a potential downside along with the upsides, and youth don't always think about the former. "There is the risk that teens could use microblogs to reveal personal information or engage in a relationship with someone whose intentions are less than honorable," writes my co-director at ConnectSafely, Larry Magid in Yahoo!Parents. "By default, Twitter messages can be seen by anyone, so if you want privacy you need to go into Settings and click 'Protect my updates' to make sure only people you approve can see what you type. Otherwise anyone can 'follow' you and see what you enter." Please see his piece for more on this. See also "The text version of hanging out" and "Do you Twitter?"

Teen fashion blogs: Creative outlet

A New York Times style writer reads these teen fashion blogs and "weeps," according to the sub-headline. "Meet the next generation of style bloggers. They might not be able to drive yet, but their fashion sense is so incredible, it's actually intimidating," Elizabeth Spiridakis writes. Ten years ago, teen fashionistas would pore over their issues of Vogue. Now they have their own readerships. Spiridakis points out a number of them in her article. "These sites are part of a developing sense of fashion and self, today's equivalent of doing your hair 20 ways before bedtime. Only you use a digital mirror." And your audience is part of that mirror, posting comments and possibly shaping your fashion sense. This is participatory creativity, learning, maybe even career development. For more on teen design and artistry online, see this in the New York Times last February and this on the study behind these findings.

Psychologists on videogame impacts

A series of studies about videogames presented at the just-ended American Psychological Association convention pointed to more positive than negatives. According to an article in the Hartford Courant, researchers suggested that "video games can be powerful learning tools - from increasing the problem solving potential of younger students to improving the suturing skills of laparoscopic surgeons. One study even looked at whether playing "World of Warcraft," the world's biggest multiplayer online game, can improve scientific thinking." A Wired blog on the findings cited one presenter as saying, "The single-best predictor of [a surgeon's] skills is how much they had played video games in the past and how much they played now." It also said gamers of different ages approach videogames differently. For example, younger gamers focus more on planning and problem-solving, while teens focus more on the "here and now." Here's more in-depth coverage from the psychologists at PsychCentral.com. Meanwhile, the Nintendo Wii is still the top-selling game console. Nintendo sold 555,000 Wii systems last month, compared to PlayStation 3's 224,900 units and Microsoft Xbox 360's 204,800, USATODAY reports. Here's the ESRB on "what parents need to know about videogames," courtesy of the Lynchburg (Va.) News & Advance.

Be sure they're real friends!

Tell your kids not to feel bad if they fall for fake friend requests in a social-networking site. After all, some of the smartest computer-security professionals have fallen for them. What's important is that they know to be alert. Accepting new friends indiscriminately is really becoming bad news, SecurityManagement.com reports. The article says two top network security executives conducted an experiment, creating "fake profiles of prominent computer security professionals" on several social-network sites, and then sending out "plenty of friend requests to other security experts. They were so astounded by the results they presented to the Black Hat hacking conference" in Las Vegas this week. "Each time they lured in more than 50 new friends within 24 hours. Some of those people were chief security officers for major corporations and defense industry workers."

The latest technopanic

No comparative study has been done, but - having recently traveled around the world for 10 months and talked with people involved with children's online safety in a number of countries - I can tell you more than impressionistically that no country has experienced an extended technopanic about predators on the social Web quite the way the US has. The facts about online predation have been misrepresented in the US news media and by politicians purporting to champion child protection while fanning fears that not only draw attention away from rational consideration of both the problem and solutions but also potentially put youth at greater risk. How? Fear causes the kind of overreaction that breaks down parent-child communication at a time when it's most needed - when kids can easily go "underground" in various ways, further from the informed, non-confrontational parental support that really can help them have positive online experiences.

Fear and hype also delay rational discussion out in the public arena. We are way behind the UK in even holding meetings on social-networking-industry best practices, much less drawn up a list (as the UK Home Office has). I would love to see a comparative multi-country study on child-protection measures, but there is other, more important social-media research to be done too.

So what's a "technopanic"? It's "a moral panic over contemporary technology," as Alice Marwick at New York University ably describes it in "To catch a predator? The MySpace moral panic." Several points in Marwick's conclusion deserve highlighting: 1) "While online predators do not represent an epidemic or socially significant problem, child pornography and child abuse are important social issues that require attention. However, they are not caused by minors using MySpace, and preventing children from using social-networking sites will do nothing to end these problems"; 2) Inaccurate "negative coverage of technology frightens parents, prevents teenagers from learning responsible use, and fuels panics, resulting in misguided or unconstitutional legislation"; and 3) "Prohibiting teens from using MySpace will not prevent them from using the site, and instead will dissuade them from talking about any problems that occur. Taking a nuanced, informed, and gradual approach to the social integration of new technologies will do more to lessen harm and improve responsible user practice than a panicked, emotional response." [See also a video report in eSchoolNews: "Online safety: Dispelling common myths."]

Parents' videogame concerns

"Parents are more concerned about their children’s exposure to video games than alcohol, violence and pornography," according to in-site polls at WhatTheyPlay.com. The site gathered responses from "nearly 3,000 respondents in two separate polls," its press release said. One of the polls asked parents "what they’d be most concerned about their 17-year-old child indulging in while at a sleepover." They said they'd be more concerned about "their child smoking marijuana (49%) and playing the video game Grand Theft Auto (19%) than [about] watching pornography (16%) and drinking beer (14%). In this case unfamiliarity breeds contempt: The site's press release offers some perspective on this from Cheryl Olsson, author of Grand Theft Childhood, as saying that "To some parents, video games are full of unknowable dangers. While researching for Grand Theft Childhood, parents we spoke with in focus groups often bemoaned the fact that they didn’t know how to use game controls - and felt unequipped to supervise or limit video game play. Of course, parents don’t want their children drinking alcohol, but that’s a more familiar risk." Here's coverage in the Los Angeles Times and a commentary on the study in Red Herring.

For media students & young video producers

Two weeks ago I mentioned Stanford Prof. Laurence Lessig's comment about the impact on young people from knowing that remixing media, a way of life for them, is technically illegal. "That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting," he said in a speech. Now American University's Center for Social Media has advice for video makers in the form of a Code of Best Practices for Fair Use. And here's the test for when it is and isn't "fair and legal to use other people's copyrighted work to make your own.... Take this tour of remix culture classics [it's a great remix video they've put together], and use the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video to make your own decisions." Great fodder for a media literacy or law class!

UK data on youth meeting strangers online

"One in five British children has met a stranger they first encountered online," the BBC reports , citing a survey from British identity-verification company Garlik. "As many as one in four 8-to-12 yea- olds ignore age restrictions to use social-networking sites." Bebo and Facebook have a minimum-age requirement of 13 and MySpace of 14. In its coverage, The Guardian.

UK data on youth meeting strangers online

"One in five British children has met a stranger they first encountered online," the BBC reports, citing a survey from British identity-verification company Garlik. "As many as one in four 8-to-12 yea- olds ignore age restrictions to use social-networking sites." Bebo and Facebook have a minimum-age requirement of 13 and MySpace of 14. In its coverage, The Telegraph zoomed in on what parents are doing about it: "The research shows parents are taking matters into their own hands with three-quarters snooping on their children online. One in four parents admit to secretly logging on to their child’s social networking page, while the same number have also set up their own page to spy on their kids." This got a lot of coverage in the UK. Here, too, is The Guardian.

Social networking's very global growth

While social networking may've reached the saturation point in North America, at just 9% growth among people 15+ over the past year, worldwide it has grown 25%, according to June traffic figures from comScore. Social networking's growth was highest in Africa and the Middle East at 66% from June 2007 to June 2008; Europe was next at 35%, and Latin America a close third at 33% (Facebook grew 1,055% in Latin America, 6/07-6/08). ComScore put the global social-networking total at 580.5 million visitors, compared to the world's total number of Internet users, 860.5 million (11% growth over June '07). The numbers for individual social-network sites were interesting too: The world's top 7 sites, in terms of June 2008 unique visitors, are Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo, and Skyrock Network, respectively. Facebook grew 153% globally to 132.1 million visitors; MySpace grew just 3% (to 117.6 million), and 3rd-ranked Hi5 had the second-highest growth rate of 100% to 56.4 million visitors. The six largest social sites, including Google's Orkut, are all US-based, though Orkut is much more popular outside the US (it's huge in Brazil) and Friendster in Southeast Asia. No. 7, the music-and-blogging community Skyrock Network, is No. 1 in France and based in France (it had 21 million visitors in June). Here's the Machinist (Salon.com columnist) on one possible explanation for social sites' popularity: persuasive technology.

Congess eyeing online privacy

Seasoned bloggers, social networkers, and mobile-phone Twitterers pretty much know their lives are very public, but they're also concerned about their privacy, the New York Times points out. "Those same questions of data collection and privacy policies are attracting the attention of Congress, too," the Times reports, so lawmakers are doing some information-gathering: "On Aug. 1, four top members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters ordering 33 cable and Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Comcast and Cox Communications, to provide details about their privacy standards. That followed House and Senate hearings last month about privacy and behavioral targeting, in which advertisers show ads to consumers based on their travels around the Web. One apparent result, the Wall Street Journal reports, is that "Yahoo Inc. said it will allow users to stop receiving targeted ads based on factors like what Web pages they visit or other ads they click on." The Journal added that "Google, Microsoft and a number of Yahoo's competitors already allow customers to opt out" of such ads.

CA's cyberbullying legislation

A California law that's "close to passing" would spell suspension or expulsion for students who bully online or on phones, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. "The measure by Assemblyman Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Torrance, passed the Senate Monday on a 21-11 vote. It goes back to the Assembly for consideration of Senate amendments and will be sent to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger if passed." The page in the Chronicle links to the full text of the legislation.

Smart phones in New York

Pretty soon it'll be like this everywhere, not just New York City, with people walking nominally forward, relying for navigation largely on other senses besides eyes: "As night settled in," says the New York Times editorial writer about watching passers by from a sidewalk restaurant, "I could see the glow of the screens shining upward on the faces of their owners.... Were they Twittering? Following their GPS? Checking their stocks? Reading their email? Texting a friend? Playing Cash Bandicoot? [huh?]...." Writer Verlyn Klinkenborg cites one unnamed source as saying that, by 2011, there will be 5 billion people using these cellphone-cum-computers on the planet. Whoa. A slightly modified scene from The Matrix comes to mind - all these meandering smart-phone users whose real lives are in a other places in addition to where they are on sidewalk. It's like teen social lives today, occurring simultaneously in a whole bunch of places: where they are physically, on the Web, on their cellphone, and maybe in World of Warcraft, Teen Second Life, or Xbox Live.

P2P healing in cyberbullying case

We hear so much in the news about teen meanness and harassment toward each other online that it's quite amazing to find a national story about kindness. In the case of Olivia Gardner, the kindness came from two sisters in a nearby town, Sarah and Emily Buder in Mill Valley, Calif., who read in the newspaper about how Olivia was being bullied and wanted to help, they say in their MySpace video. The in-school bullying of Olivia started, unbelievably, after she had an epileptic seizure. "Then someone started an 'Olivia Haters Club' on the Internet with pornographic emails," MSNBC reports. Her mother couldn't help - she told MSNBC that no words of comfort helped. It was thousands of letters, starting with messages of support from Sarah and Emily, that started Olivia on the road back from near-daily suicidal thoughts to healing. The letters came from all over the countries, not only with messages of love and support but also stories of how the writers too had been bullied. The result of all this is a new book from HarperCollins, Letters to a Bullied Girl: Messages of Healing and Hope, by Olivia Gardner, Emily Buder, and Sarah Buder. [For experts' advice on the online kind of bullying, see the books Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age, by Patricia Agatston, Susan Limber, and Robin Kowalski, Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats, by Nancy Willard, and a book coming out this month: Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying, by Profs. Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin.]

Troll exploits: Critical thinking needed

There are two kinds of troll victims, actually: those who are directly and cruelly tormented by trolls and those who are manipulated into contributing to the attacks. That's one of my takeaways from an insightful New York Times Magazine article about people who use the Internet to attack, in depraved ways, other people who are emotionally vulnerable. Trolls steal identities, torment with 24/7 phone calls, and fictionalize profiles and credit records, for example, putting a "fabricated narrative of [a person's] career alongside her real Social Security number and address" in hacked databases or public blogs.

As an understated photo caption reads, trolls have "a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online," and that disdain is expressed in manipulations of the second kind of victim - emotionally involved observers. Writer Mattathias Schwartz uses the Meghan Meier suicide case as an example.

A troll with whom Schwartz spent time - Jason Fortuny, who was a victim himself as a child - sees his exploits as human-behavior experiments, Schwartz writes. One of his experiments in manipulating the public was the "Megan Had It Coming" blog in which Fortuny posed as Lori Drew (the mother who created the profile of a fictitious boy which reportedly led to Megan's suicide) and wrote cruel posts about the girl after her death. The blog posts drew some 3,600 angry reactions from people throughout the US. That's the other, though much less victimized, kind of victim: unwitting subjects of troll experiments who can became virtual vigilante mobs and do exactly what the instigators would like them to do. Fortuny's blog "was intended, he says, to question the public’s hunger for remorse [revenge, maybe?] and to challenge the enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan’s town after her death." I'd say this is a sub-moral of the troll story and another reminder of the growing importance of critical thinking in a relatively anonymous medium.

Toward the end of his article, Schwartz asks a good question: "Is the effort to control what’s said [and done online] always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?" [Among other things, don't miss Schwartz's reflection on what's to blame for this behavior and what can or should be done about it - e.g.: "Ultimately, as Fortuny suggests, trolling will stop only when its audience stops taking trolls seriously."] In any case, what we see online, sometimes in the most trusted places, must very often be taken with a grain of salt - so that, at the very least, we (and our children) are not taken in like zombie computers by people motivated to do harm.

Perspective from across the Atlantic

I had an email conversation about this with friend and researcher Daniel Cardoso with EU Kids Online's Portugal research team in Lisbon. Here's some of his critical thinking:

"In dealing with trolling, we can't forget about the importance of free speech. And trying to erase any input from the trolls is not only dangerous, but counter-productive (since they can always regroup someplace else).... Maybe one day trolling will wane, but bullying and cyber bullying won't go away magically. People are people on the Internet ... and people trying to hurt others will always abound. The Internet is the great 'projector.' It empowers good people and bad people by projecting their actions far beyond the physical barriers, and far beyond any physical constraints. In the end ... only the community can decide when it has had enough of trolling....

"So let us look at trolls. Do we find a homogenous group? I doubt it. I think we're more likely to find people with very different agendas collaborating for the sake of their end results.... [The phenomenon] is just too new, and people seem to think that it's too different. Maybe when we start seeing that with great powers come great responsibilities, we'll be more careful.... The most dangerous trolls are those with more power - more technical expertise. But that's just like anywhere else. A robber with a gun will always be more dangerous than a bare-handed one, in theory.... The Internet brings with it the potential to do in different ways the same old things, I think. So there will be an 'Internet way' to deal with the issue, but not an 'Internet way' to make it go away, since the Internet didn't start it."

Related links

A New Yorker profile of a master manipulator in real life, "The Chameleon" brings new meaning to the term virtual reality (thanks to Andy Carvin for pointing this piece out)

"Videogames can't be blamed for humanity's problems" at CNET

Middle school cyberbullying a federal case

A mean conversation about a middle-school peer is videotaped off school grounds, is uploaded to YouTube, and suddenly their school's administrators have to figure out what to do about it. "Citing 'cyberbullying' concerns, school administrators [in Beverly Hills] suspended for two days the student who uploaded the video, without disciplining others in the recording. The suspended student sued the school district in June in federal district court in Los Angeles, saying her free-speech rights were violated," the Los Angeles Times reports. The Times cites one legal expert as saying that, unless the school shows evidence of "substantial disruption of school business" by the video it doesn't have much of a case.

Back-to-school tech

Electronics retailers really like this time of year. Notebook computers, which usually represent three-quarters of all computer sales (desktops 25%), represent 80% of computer sales this time of year, CNET reports. "This year there should be a 25% increase spread across July and early August," CNET cites NPD Group figures as showing. Still, back-to-school sales should be more modest this year than last because CNET reports that the US marketed is pretty saturated with laptops these days. Check out the article for updates on Apple's rumored Macbook update and the "Netbook" being made by more and more manufacturers on the PC side.

Wi-fi in the sky

Starting next summer, Delta passengers will be able to surf the Web as they fly, the Washington Post reports in "WiFi nearing takeoff." JetBlue and American are close on Delta's heels. On Delta flights, WiFi "will be available for a $9.95 flat fee on flights of three hours or less, and $12.95 on longer flights," according to the Post. Probably won't happen much, but there may be a little extra seat-shuffling for flight attendants if parents find their kids next to people viewing content they feel is inappropriate. But of course DVDs have been on board for some time.

Dismissal urged in Megan Meier case

Twelve law professors and several Internet civil liberties organizations say that a conviction in the federal case against Lori Drew in the suicide of Megan Meier would have the effect of "criminalizing the everyday conduct of millions of internet users." An amicus brief submitted for the group concluded: "Megan Meier's death was a terrible tragedy, and there is an understandable desire to hold the Defendant somehow accountable for it, if Defendant's conduct was as alleged. But a dangerously overbroad construction of the CFAA [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act] would criminalize the everyday conduct of millions of internet users. The novel - indeed, unprecedented in the history of the CFAA - interpretation ... advanced in the indictment cannot be squared with the plain language of the statute, its legislative history, and the constitutional requirements that criminal statutes provide citizens fair notice, avoid vagueness and comport with the First Amendment." They urge the Court to dismiss Drew's indictment. Here are the Electronic Frontier Foundation's press release on the position and the amicus brief itself in pdf format. For background, here's my original post on the Meier case.

Videogame for visualizing healing

A just-published study in the journal Pediatrics involving 375 cancer patients aged 13-29 in the US, Canada, and Australia found that their playing a game called Re-Mission "led to better compliance with their medications and more confidence in fighting the disease," redOrbit.com reports. The study's lead author in the Netherlands, Dr. Pamela Kato, told Reuters that the results are important because adherence to treatment is a major problem in that age group. According to redOrbit, Re-Mission, developed by the nonprofit HopeLab in Redwood City, Calif., is about "a microscopic 'nanobot' named Roxxi [who] travels through the bodies of characters with cancer, blasting away cancer cells and bacteria with a firearm of chemotherapy and antibiotics."

Mental health care in virtual worlds

An academic paper out of Italy and the Netherlands describes "immersive e-therapy," a hybrid therapy in clinical psychology that occurs in both virtual-world and physical-world settings. Authors Alessandra Gorini, Andrea Gaggioli, and Cinzia Vigna "suggest that, compared with conventional telehealth applications such as emails, chat, and videoconferences, the interaction between real and 3-D virtual worlds may convey greater feelings of presence, facilitate the clinical communication process, positively influence group processes and cohesiveness in group-based therapies, and foster higher levels of interpersonal trust between therapists and patients." They also look at "challenges related to the potentially addictive nature of such virtual worlds" and "questions related to privacy and personal safety."

Social sites: Teen 'confessionals'?

The focus of Forbes's profile of MyYearbook.com is how it can monetize this "freewheeling chatfest," I guess after it burns through the $13 million round of venture capital it recently received. But it's the lead of the article that I found arresting: Forbes writer Emily Schmall tells of a 14-year-old MyYearbook user's story of self-mutilation in the site: "Her 1,240-word piece is illustrated by a photo of an arm lined with scars. More than 400 people commented on the piece 24 hours after it was posted July 10." Very rarely do the most popular bloggers on the Web get 400 responses to a post, much less a 1,240-word one. Among other things, then, MyYearbook is a safe and anonymous place for teens to talk about huge, life-affecting secrets. "Confessional" seems too dismissive. [See also "Fictionalizing their profiles."]

P2P online-safety ed program

By "P2P," I mean by peers, for peers, and I'm referring to the logical idea of teen-communicated online safety ed, not the adult-taught kind - though it starts with young adult trainers. What's even more intelligent about the LEO Project in Syracuse, N.Y., is that it's really leadership training with online citizenship and safety folded in (safety in a holistic sense, involving critical thinking and behavior that protects reputation as well as well-being), the Syracuse Post-Standard reports. "LEO" loosely stands for "The Leadership, Education and Etiquette - On and Offline," and it's a project of Power Unit for Motivating Youth, a Syracuse after-school and mentoring program co-founded by a school district staff member, Akua Goodrich, who told the Post-Standard the program's about developing youth leadership in "the city and the state and the nation and the world" simply because the Internet's not just local. In one four-day class, 26 "ambassadors" who are high school students learn about "cyber safety and social networking issues as well as peer-to-peer marketing and career preparations. They are now developing a Web site [as well as individual blogs] to help educate their peers on the same issues and plan to visit elementary and middle school students this year to pass on Internet safety messages." It seems to me this is the kind of program that gets closer to reaching more at-risk youth (since research shows it's the young most at risk offline who are most at risk online - see "Profile of a teen online victim").

'Cloud filtering'

It does seem to give new meaning to the term "big brother." Zscaler cloud filtering is a filtering service for companies (maybe in future school networks, ISPs, whatever?) that intercepts all traffic coming in from or going out to the Web and "scrubs it" for content (and presumably communication) that violates company policy or is a security risk, the New York Times reports. What sounds more big-brother-ish than usual about it is that, first, it gives network managers "extremely granular controls over how their networks can be used. Detailed restrictions can be set over what kind of sites employees can visit and when they can visit them." For example, social networking could be blocked for one group of users and not another. Second, it monitors the "overall habits" of users on the network, so that subscribers can compare the habits on their networks to those of other corporate Zscaler subscribers.

Watch this video, parents

If you want to understand...

who digital natives are and what they're doing online

how community is experiencing a rebirth online

how identity-exploration can be a collective experience and how that can be therapeutic

and maybe even why YouTube is the No. 1 site among 2-to-11-year-olds for video viewing (see this)

...pour yourself a tall glass of iced tea or something and watch "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube," presented by Kansas State University anthropology Prof. Michael Wesch's last month at the US Library of Congress. Just click on the title, then hit the little "Play" button in the middle of the picture of the two tiny brothers, and I suspect you'll find - as I did - that you'll actually enjoy becoming more digitally enlightened in this way. I guarantee that, if you have kids and they're online, they'll appreciate your taking the time.

If you want to know a little more before you invest the 55.5 minutes, here are some highlights:

Why YouTube? It's a force and a fixture in many people's lives worldwide. If the 3 major TV networks broadcasted 24 hours a day, every day for the 60 years they've been broadcasting, they would've produced 1.5 million hours of programming. YouTube has published more than that in the last six months, Dr. Wesch said. People post 9,000 hours of video a day (another way to say it: 200,000 three-minute videos a day) - most of them meant for fewer than 100 viewers.

Linking what? The Web is increasingly about "linking people, not information."

Not trivial. The experimentation with video, identity, and collaboration going on in YouTube is courageous ("your bedroom as the most public place on the planet") - with many unknowns, including audience and what happens to one's very personal work and exploration. It's also global. Note the hero of "Free Hugs" worldwide at 35:35 minutes into Wesch's talk.

Not isolating. "New forms of community" have developed in this global video-sharing, and with them "new forms of self-understanding," Wesch said.

Ok to stare. Yes, viewing some of self-exploration videos seems a little voyeuristic, and there are some cruel comments and reactions, but this also happens: people experiencing "a profound, deep connection" free of social anxiety and other constraints of "connecting" in "real life" - because they can stare at the person in the video, study his face while he's talking on camera, while he's taking that leap of faith in humanity by putting himself out there.

Sexy images. Very often the sexy titles and screen shots (called "flash frames") that present videos are not what parents and other newcomers think (they're not presenting x-rated videos). They're about serious or funny completely innocuous videos. Representing them in a "sexy" way is a way of gaming the system. Their creators are just trying to get their videos noticed and watched so they'll rise to the top of the list (YouTube's home page) and so get noticed even more so they'll become famous or they'll raise awareness for their cause.

"Era of prohibitions." Don't miss Stanford Prof. Laurence Lessig's message (at about 46:15 min. in) about the impact on youth of knowing that remixing media, a way of life for them, is technically illegal in this "era of prohibitions": "That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting," Lessig said. We can't stop our kids from playing with digital media, he said, we can only send them underground, where we can't learn about what they're doing. Parent and Prof. Liz Lawley at the Rochester Institute of Technology echoes this below (in "Social networkers want more privacy options").

This is the kind of presentation that recharges, nourishes, keeps you going and going and going as you try - in the area of youth online safety - to maintain a balance of three needs: to alert parents to the risks that do exist, to mitigate fears and encourage (when "be very afraid" is so often the message to parents), and to communicate all the good, important growth and learning that's going on as young people use media that so many adults don't really understand.

Related links

"An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube," the talk he gave at the Library of Congress, June 2008

MediatedCultures.net, Professor Wesch's site (blog, bio, video portfolio, and intro to his students) - "Reasons Why We Tube" may answer more questions you have, as it explores and summarizes the 370 video responses Wesch's class got to "Why do you tube?"

The Wired Campus column about Wesch in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Author, tech-publishing entrepreneur, and pundit John Battelle's interview with Michael Wesch

Two resources Dr. Wesch recommended at the end of his Library of Congress talk: 1) AnthroVlog, the digital video research blog of Dr. Patricia Lange at the University of Southern California, and her paper, "Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube" and 2) the work of MIT graduate student Kevin Driscoll, particularly "Thanx 4 Da Add: How Soulja Boy Hacked Mainstream Music" and got a major-label contract from a base in MySpace.com.

Two stories show YouTubers' rants can go only so far. 1) Trying to be funny, maybe, a frequent YouTube ranter known as "Trashman" was arrested by federal agents this week for claiming to have told "Gerber employees to lace baby food with cyanide," CNET reports. 2) In "Wife's rant on YouTube falls foul of judge," The Guardian reports that "a British actor who took her battle against her millionaire husband to the internet, posting videos that lambasted him on YouTube and gained an audience of millions," was ordered to leave her New York home by a judge who ruled her behaviour was 'spousal abuse'."

Heads up: New worms in MySpace, Facebook

Any social networkers at your house should be aware of the "Koobface" worms, which can turn household computers into remotely controlled "zombies." Computer security firm Kaspersky Lab reports that the worms work this way: A MySpace or Facebook user gets a message or comment from a friend whose computer has already been infected. The messages contain text such as "Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street"; "Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet"; "Hello"; "You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam"; and "Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments and many others." Inside the messages or comments is a link YouTube (with a ".pl" extension), supposedly to a video clip. "If the user tries to watch it, a message appears saying the user needs the latest version of Flash Player in order to watch the clip. However, instead of the latest version of Flash Player, a file called codesetup.exe is downloaded to the victim’s machine; this file is also a network worm" that probably not only sends the same message to everyone on your child's friends list but is capable of turning that computer into a "bot" that becomes part of a "botnet" that malicious hackers use to commit crimes such as denial-of-service attacks.