*Social* media literacy: The new Internet safety

In talks and sound bytes over the past year, I've been saying that - for the vast majority of online youth - digital citizenship is the new Internet safety. And indeed digital citizenship is HUGE, for the very reason that behaving aggressively online more than doubles the risk of being victimized (see "Good citizens in virtual worlds, too"). Still, that's really only the half of it. Media literacy is the other half. I haven't been saying that "digital citizenship + media literacy = online safety 2.0" because it's such a mouthful, and it's important to keep things simple and focused. But media literacy is huge too, because critical thinking about incoming ad messages, compliments, group think, etc. is protective against manipulation and harm.

Now it's time for a remix. Old media literacy is about what we consume, read, or download. We still need that - more than we ever have in this fast-paced age of information overload. But on the participatory Web of social producing and creative networking we also need social media literacy. I have spent some time in and been influenced by NewMediaLiteracies.org, the work of MIT media professor Henry Jenkins, colleagues and students, building on Jenkins's foundational 2006 white paper, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture" (see also my coverage of it in '06).

If you watch the video on NewMediaLiteracies.org's home page or look at the basic skills of new media literacy, I think you too will see that digital citizenship is there - perhaps partly under "Negotiation" ("the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms") and partly under "Collective Intelligence" ("the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal"). But maybe it should be its own skill. Doesn't it make sense to fold it in there?

More importantly, I think the critical skill, "Judgment" ("the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources"), needs to be redefined. That's the old media literacy definition. Critical thinking on the participatory Web needs to be about what we upload, post, produce, and behave like as much as what we download, read, watch, and passively consume. If social media literacy involves that kind of critical judgment, as well as digital citizenship (a first stab at a definition might be: the ability to function, act, communicate, and collaborate in community appropriately, civilly, ethically, and productively), then I propose that....

Social media literacy = online safety 2.0

Or am I being too reductionist? Do you prefer:

Digital citizenship + social media literacy = online safety 2.0?

Please weigh in, with a comment here or in the ConnectSafely forum or via email: anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Related links

I really like the Center for Media Literacy's vision for 21st-century literacy - "the ability to communicate competently in all media forms as well as to access, understand, analyze, evaluate and participate with powerful images, words and sounds that make up our contemporary mass media culture" - but, coming from an online-safety perspective, I think the definition needs to go beyond competency to include social media literacy, ethics, and NewMediaLiteracies.org's list of skills.

From the Byron Review, quoted the other day in a Telegraph blog's "Teenagers online": "Research is beginning to reveal that people act differently on the internet and can alter their moral code, in part because of the lack of gate-keepers and the absence in some cases of the visual cues from others that we all use to moderate our interactions with each other. This is potentially more complex for children and young people who are still trying to establish the social rules of the offline world and lack the critical evaluation skills to either be able to interpret incoming information or make appropriate judgments about how to behave online." Exactly!

Professor Jenkins's barriers to full participation in the participatory culture, which parents and teachers can help youth overcome: Besides simply not being able to participate because of lack of Internet access ("The Participation Gap"), they are "The Transparency Problem" ("the challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world") and "The Ethics Challenge" ("the breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants") - see "Participation: Key opp for our kids."

Undercover Mom in ClubPenguin, Part 2: Let's get this party started!

by Sharon Duke Estroff

I have to admit I’m pretty darn cute. My avatar, ChillyLily437, that is. I’m plump, perky, and very pink. Only one more hurdle to jump before I can make my cybersocial debut on Club Penguin: an emailed permission slip from my parents.

Rather than submitting my real email address (this is a stealth operation after all!), I open up an alias email and have the CP powers-that-be send the consent form there. Within milliseconds my new inbox is flashing with a message informing me of "my child's" Club Penguin registration, I’ve clicked the requisite activation link, and my undercover snowball is officially rolling.

Mom Break: Okay, I promised myself I wasn’t going to put my mom hat back on until at least Day 3. I mean, what’s the good of going undercover if you keep taking off your disguise? But PLEASE! Does Club Penguin really think that this parent email permission click deal is a viable safety measure? I created an alias email account in, what, two seconds? Our digital native offspring could easily do the same. I’m not saying that my child or your child would use a fake parent email to gain access to Club Penguin or a similar social network site. Or that one of their friends would use a fake parent email to grant Club Penguin access to every kid at school. I’m just saying….

So you may be thinking, "What’s the big deal? Club Penguin is not MySpace or Facebook, it’s a kid-oriented website for heaven’s sake." But that’s precisely my point. The target market for social network sites like Club Penguin is ages 6 to 14 (more realistically 6-12, as few teens would be caught dead on such a “babyish” cyber-hangout). These are not teens, but elementary-aged children who need consistent parental presence, supervision, and direction in their lives. The ease with which kids can sidestep Club Penguin’s parental consent process - one of the Web site's most basic safety measures - represents but the tip of a very precarious iceberg indeed.

Next week: "Snow Day"; here are my intro to Undercover Mom and Part 1 of Sharon's series.

Oz to scrap mandatory filtering

Public opposition to the Australian government's plan to mandate Internet filtering has been growing, but this week the plan "has effectively been scuttled," the Sydney Morning Herald reports. after a senator withdrew support for the scheme. "The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has consistently ignored advice from a host of technical experts saying the filters would slow the internet, block legitimate sites, be easily bypassed and fall short of capturing all of the nasty content available online." Among those opposed to his plan were consumers, lobby groups, ISPs, corporate IT people, Save the Children, the political opposition, and "even the conservative Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who famously tried to censor the chef Gordon Ramsay's swearing on television." A national survey unveiled this week found that "only 5% of Australians want ISPs to be responsible for protecting children online and only 4% want Government to have this responsibility," the Morning Herald added. [For background, see "Oz filtering update," January 2.]

Guide to Facebook privacy features

What users do with their own and others' content is just as big a privacy concern on the social Web as what a responsible social network site does with it. Certainly terms of use need to be looked at, but so do your own privacy options, people! Even privacy features can't offer total control over what people do with your content, but they can help a lot - for example, they can keep it so that the photos in your MySpace or Facebook profiles (as long as they're not copy and pasted elsewhere) can't be searched with Google, Yahoo, and other search engines out on the Web. So take advantage of the degree of control privacy features give you. Here's a video tutorial for Facebook's users by my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid, and here are little instructional videos for MySpace and Xanga too at GetNetWise.org. But remember, as Larry put it in his CNET post, "regardless of how you configure your privacy settings, there is a reality of the social Web that can't be configured away. Any digital information that is posted can be copied, captured, cached, forwarded, and reposted by anyone who has access to it."

Twitter going mainstream

Mainstream among young adults, mostly, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project (teens off the study's radar, but they microblog in other ways). Twitter, the most popular service for microblogging or status updating, and other such "have been avidly embraced by young adults," Pew says - nearly a fifth (19%) of US 18-to-24-year-olds and a full 20% of 25-to-34-year-olds now use such services to send "short updates about themselves, their lives, their whereabouts ... moods," personal, professional, national, and international news. Citizen journalism is a key component of microblogging online. But what seems to be the No. 1 attraction is that Twitter is "an inconspicuous way of staying in touch with the passions, obsessions of your friends, colleagues, and experts," as described by author and professor Howard Rheingold in this "Why does microblogging matter" slide show. Pew adds that Twitter use is "highly intertwined" with blogging and social networking, and its users are a very mobile bunch, accessing the social Net a lot from mobile wireless devices. And "mobile" is the operative word for teens, for whom texting = microblogging. Meanwhile, as for mobile social networking, the number of people who access MySpace by phone has quadrupled in the past year to 20 million, the service's CEO Chris de Wolfe said in a keynote at Europe's mobile industry trade show last week, InformationWeek reports. [See also "A (digital) return to village life?"]

Social networking 'infantilizing' users' brains?

The social-networking backlash is taking a new form as we move past the predator panic's peak. A fresh sign of digital-non-native uneasiness about the social Web concerns its neurological and psychological impact. Oxford University neuroscientist and Baroness Susan Greenfield made headlines today with her comment that social network sites are "infantilizing the brain," reminding her "of the way that 'small babies need constant reassurance that they exist'," as quoted in The Guardian, The Daily Mail, a New York Times blog, and many other news outlets. Among other things, these social-media critics seem to think that "real life" and online socializing are entirely mutually exclusive, when research shows that - among teens, at least - online socializing is very grounded in their offline social lives. Times blogger Robert Mackey is more analytical than the British reports, thankfully, pointing out what appears to be a very superficial understanding of how social sites are being used. I'd dearly love to hear Dr. Greenfield and Dr. Aric Sigman (whose comments appeared in the BBC's "Online networking 'harms health'" last week) debate social media researchers Mimi Ito at Stanford University and danah boyd - or Canadian author of Born Digital, Dan Tapscott, who says, yes, digital natives' brains are being wired differently, but that's a positive (see Yahoo Canada). Cross-disciplinary study of what's happening in a medium whose uses and users are as diverse as humanity itself would be good! [I loved the readers' comments under the Times blog, one of which was: "Let’s give this an honest headline, shall we? 'Two Neuroscientists Hypothesize Social Networking Bad, Offer No Data'"! Your comments would be most welcome too - in this blog, in our ConnectSafely forum, or via email - anne(at)netfamilynews.org)!]

Growing civility on the Web?

That's what Lee Rainie, director of the Washington-based Pew Internet & American Life Project, is seeing on the Web, he told the Boston Globe: Social norms that mitigate offensive behavior are developing. "There is a quiet but growing movement to forge a truce in what [Rainie] calls 'an arms race of name-calling' on the Web." Despite "the buckets of venom [that] still flow across the Web every day," as the Globe put it, and "whereas a few years ago online insults would lead to an escalation in a war of words, the evolution of the Web has led to an informal code of conduct in online communities such as livejournal.com or in social-networking sites like Facebook. People who sling invective online are dubbed 'trolls'," the Globe quotes one online communications specialist as saying, "and are either ignored or told to get lost," according to Simmons College's Amanda Voodre. She told the Globe that younger Net users are seeing through those stabs at provocation, which defeats the whole purpose of a whole range of juvenile behaviors, from flaming to harassing to bullying. It's partly a matter of just "getting it" - digital natives being seasoned enough in online communications that they just roll their eyeballs at comments from predators and jerks - and partly good media-literacy education, which teaches critical thinking about what's uploaded as well as downloaded (for example, see "How social influencing works").

Stark contrast: 2 social-media stories out of Oz

Livewire, a social network site for youth with disabilities and chronic illnesses, just launched in Australia to help them have a more normal sense of friendship (less fixated on their disabilities) than they may be able to have offline, Reuters reports. Aiming to serve the some 450,000 Australians aged 10-21 "currently living with a serious illness, chronic health condition or disability ... Livewire recruits members from referrals through it's parent organization, the Starlight Children's Foundation, and through hospitals that treat disabilities or chronic cases." Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald quotes a Melbourne youth worker as saying cyberbullying in Australia had reached "epidemic proportions." He called on the government to change laws to give police more powers and "said in recent weeks a 17-year-old high school student jumped to his death off the West Gate Bridge after reading death threats online." It's possible we need to focus more on civil behavior and citizenship education offline and early detection online than on crime and prosecution. At least in the US, police have always had the authority to deal with physical threats in any venue.

Recruiting soldiers with videogames?

Some may find this disturbing (I do, because it somehow seems more intrusive than just producing yet another shooter videogame called America's Army): One way the US Army is recruiting young people is by putting sophisticated videogaming stations - essentially war-game arcades - in shopping malls. The Open Education blog puts a thoughtful twist on this, linking to NBC News's report from one of these recruiting stations at Philadelphia's Franklin Mills Mall. But before any young person buys into this sophisticated form of advertising, I wish he or she could first see Canadian photographer Louie Palu's portraits of US soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. These amazing faces captured by Palu - one of The Aftermath Project's 2009 grant winners - reflect his focus "on the emotional and psychological issues faced by soldiers who return from war and the long-term effects they deal with as they try to reintegrate into their families and society" (The Aftermath Project is "a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict").

Court rejects CA's videogame law

California's became the latest state videogame law to be deemed unconstitutional in a federal court. The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Friday that "a California law restricting the sales and rental of violent video games to minors and imposing labeling requirements is too restrictive and violates free speech guarantees," Reuters reported. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the court declared the law unconstitutional "because even the most graphic on-screen mayhem is free speech, and there's no convincing evidence it causes psychological damage to young people." Though one of the bill's sponsors, State Sen. Leland Yee, urged officials to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, Reuters reported that the three-judge panel's unanimous opinion "could have a far-reaching impact on efforts by other states to establish mandatory video game labeling requirements."

Undercover Mom in ClubPenguin, Part 1

The first installment of contributor Sharon Duke Estroff's inside look at kids' virtual worlds (here's last week's intro)....

by Sharon Duke Estroff

The first time my eight-year old asked me how to spell "penguin," I felt a wave of pride (a spelling bee champion in the making!). The second time I just felt curious (hmm, an Antarctic unit at school?). But the third time - in the midst of a playdate with his best bud, no less - I felt a touch of concern (what are those kids up to?!). "Penguin?" I asked hopefully, "as in Mr. Popper's Penguins"?

"No," my son clarified. "As in Club Penguin. Sam wants to show me his igloo and we can't get to the Web site." My second grader's age of digital innocence had come to an end, and we both dove headfirst into junior cyber-social world.

I do mean both of us. Because after my son went to bed that night (giddy with excitement over the creation of his penguin alter ego, or "avatar"), I opened a Club Penguin account of my own, officially kicking off an ultra-eye-opening, slightly chilling undercover mom investigation.

While Club Penguin may be a current "it" site for kids (so much so that Disney bought it in 2007 for $700 million), it's hardly an only. Rather, it's part of a rapidly expanding new genre of child-oriented virtual world - part social networking, part online game, part Saturday-morning cartoon - that millennial kids are all over like peanut butter on jelly. There are currently more than 150 of these sites either live or in development. By next year, projects Nic Mitham, CEO of UK-based K Zero, a virtual-worlds consulting firm, 150 million children will be members of said (for more on this, see this).

Perhaps the best way to describe the virtual world experience is, it's like tumbling down Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole. One minute you’re sitting in front of the computer and the next you're in the middle of a virtual ski village complete with simulated snow tubing, swanky alpine shopping, and a cyber-disco.

Unlike traditional videogames, where even the most screen-addicted kid recognizes a distinct separation between himself and the animated character he’s maneuvering with his joystick, your virtual world avatar is you - your virtual self. My Club Penguin avatar is a hot pink-clad go-getter named ChilyLily437 (not to be confused with ChillyLily1 through ChillyLily436). I have my own digital igloo, wardrobe, and penguin posse; I sunbathe, snowboard, and work odd jobs. I even pick up my daily cup of joe at CP's version of Starbucks. All in a perpetual state of social overdrive.

I'm not sure what I expected to find during my two weeks of undercover penguinhood; but whatever it was, I didn't find it. In fact, the brave new world of children's virtual socialization was - for better and for worse - nothing I expected it to be. In the coming issues of Net Family News, I explain what I mean by that as I document ChillyLily437’s adventures. The observations I make will be subjective, of course, but I’ll do my best to ground my reflections (which I'll call "Mom Breaks") in sound research (in the manner Anne Collier). My hope is that this information will help us millennial parents begin to grasp the subtleties and complexities of the digital childhood - along with the impact of social media on our children’s present and future well-being - so that we may begin to find our way along this winding, uncharted parental path.

Next Week: Undercover on Club Penguin Day 1 - Let’s Get this Party Started!

Web courseware raising good Qs

Are they a) learning aids, b) Cliffs Notes lookalikes, c) intellectual property theft, d) none of the above, or e) all the above? One thing's for sure: open courseware projects and sites are universal. They range from MIT's famous OpenCourseWare, putting all coursework on the Web for free, to RipMixLearners, a wiki for sharing class notes and other courseware at University of the Western Cape in South Africa, to the largely US Ivy League-focused FinalsClub.org with class notes and study groups. And so many others, e.g., Course Hero, Knetwit, PostYourTest, Koofers, blogged about in the Digital Natives blog. Some of the content - for example, problem solution keys and old exams - raise healthy ethical questions that lend themselves less to yes/no answers than to excellent, class and family discussion. The blogger, a science major, wonders, for example, "if the availability of solution keys feed a kind of 'get the answers and the answers only' kind of mentality – an unhealthy focus on the solution rather than the process.... Canny students can usually find the solutions online, whether in freely available old exams/problem set solutions or more involved digging through archived course sites.... Say I find the instructor’s solution manual to my math textbook online – is it okay for me to use it? To copy my homework? To check my homework? If it’s freely available online, am I really taking advantage of an unfair edge? But there's also, arguably, the karmic payback, when it comes to an exam and one hasn’t really learned the material."

NJ to address bullying of gay students

The New Jersey Governor's Commission on Bullying will soon be looking into bullying, particularly against gay students, and what schools are doing to stop it, the Daily Record reports. Commission chair Stuart Green "said gay students are perhaps the most vulnerable when it comes to bullying, and that schools have not done enough to address the issue.... School officials have been saying for a couple of years that they have just begun to deal with gay and gender identity issues, long after other diversity issues had been addressed." The commission will consider what educational programs and teacher training are needed and - pointing to the online part of bullying - "whether school officials should do more to punish actions that take place outside of school but have an impact on the classroom, as allowed by state law."

Social networking growth in India

India has a population of 1.1 billion, out of which a mere 19 million people visited social network sites this past December, comScore reports. Still, social networking growth was significant last year: 51% overall. Google's Orkut, popular in Brazil, is No. 1 in India too, at 12.8 million visitors in December, an increase of 81% over the previous year. Facebook, at 4 million December visitors, is No. 2 (150% growth). Indigenous sites bharatstudent.com (88% growth) and ibibo.com were in 3rd and 5th places, respectively, but ibibo lost ground, traffic-wise, between Decembers 2007 and '08. In 4th place, San Francisco-based Hi5.com had the highest year-on-year growth at 182%. Meanwhile, the Times of India reports on the Internet as "a great social research tool."

Facebook's about-face on terms of use

Facebook was smart to go back to its previous terms of use while it conducts this terms-of-use-updating experiment in a spotlighted Petrie dish in what seems like the middle of Mumbai's Victoria Station at rush hour (see CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "Update on Terms"). And this is indeed a giant (global) societal experiment, as we the people (the content producers and distributors) and they the companies (the content co-distributors and hosts) - not to mention policymakers and other overseers and observers - figure out who is responsible and to what degree for protecting the content producer, aka user. Because the social Web is largely a user-produced and user-controlled medium, clearly (to me, anyway) the responsibility is shared. Educating users about that is a challenge all by itself, witness the general lack of close attention to privacy options (see "10 privacy settings every Facebook user should know"), but factor in developing teenage brains learning impulse control and shared responsibility at the same time, and the user-protection challenge grows significantly (see PBS Frontline's "The Teenage Brain").

I said Facebook's smart in my lead up there because, in going back to its previous terms-of-use version, it's buying time for the process of folding user input into the new terms' development process and this giant experiment is also about user (and societal) education. It needs time. There are factors involved that only a few of the privacy bloggers are writing about (e.g., author Daniel Solove), including the tension between consumer privacy pressures and those from law enforcement to hand over as well as retain user data after users have closed their accounts. But time is short, too. Though this social and media experiment - and consensus-building in general - take time, Facebook doesn't have a whole lot, given the climate outside the Petrie dish. The predator panic recently brought into perspective by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force is a good illustration of how worst-case scenarios and fears tend to eclipse the public discussion about the social Web - to the detriment of child safety (see the New York Times and my post on that). Why to the detriment? Because kids usually want to get far away from scared, worked-up parents; they go "underground" online, where parents aren't in the mix. Never the best scenario. [Thanks to UK privacy researcher Tara Taubman for pointing out a few of the links below.]

Here are other reports and commentaries worth reading:

Audio interview with both Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly by CNET/CBS tech analyst Larry Magid (Larry is also my co-director at ConnectSafely.org)

A lawyer's view on Facebook's 180 and how enforceable terms of use are anyway (Maxwell S. Kennerly in Philadelphia)

University of Wisconsin information studies Prof. Michael Zimmer's very critical view of Facebook's process

Internet consultant and blogger David Silversmith on the technical and monetary realities and then "plain old reality"

The Guardian on how people definitely do read the "fine print" in social sites (vs. grocery store loyalty cards)

Coverage at the Washington Post and New York Times.

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force report

FTC's new behavioral-ad guidelines

The Federal Trade Commission has just issued guidelines for behavioral advertising, a practice in which a marketer targets ads at a person or group based on their online activities, the San Jose Mercury News reports. The guidelines say Web sites must disclose to their users the data they're collecting on their activities "and give them a chance to opt out" of the data collection. "Privacy advocates immediately criticized the guidelines, which rely on the online advertising industry to regulate itself, as failing to adequately protect consumers. The four nonbinding principles laid out in the 48-page report are for industry self-regulation and "do not have the force of law," the Mercury News reports.

Facebook, terms of use & privacy

The biggest news over the holiday weekend besides the economy was the buzz about Facebook's recent terms of service update. Facebook said it was all about consolidating and clarifying "what people could and could not do" on the site (see CEO Mark Zuckerberg's blog), but the ruckus raisers said it was about what Facebook could and could not do with users' content, CNET's Caroline McCarthy reports. I think the update and the ensuing flap are much more about what users can do with and for their privacy - and society getting used to a bottom-up, user-driven, user-controlled medium. Here are two important takeaways on user privacy: 1) If you want to delete your own account and all the personal info therein, you can certainly do so, but Facebook can't automatically delete information you post in other people's profiles (because it's on their wall, not yours); 2) if by using Facebook you "license" the site in effect to own and share your content, its use of your content is subject to how you set your privacy settings, so users need to pay attention to and proactively set those privacy options; and 3) that last point is even more true now that Facebook Connect "allows users to 'connect' their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site" and Facebook of course cannot control or protect user info in other sites. In his blog post, Zuckerberg wrote, "There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with."

Virtual helicopter parenting

We've all heard of helicopter parents, people who hover a lot over every aspect of their children's lives. Well, now there's some hovering happening in cyberspace too, with parents setting up social-networking profiles and attempting to friend their children and all their friends. It's a bit much, and it can get creepy too (and not just from a teen's perspective), when the result is like insisting on being present at their social circle's every hangout. Author/blogger/parent Sharon Cindrich has a great list of tips for guarding against parental Facebook faux pas - "a few basic rules for parents" of social networkers. The overall rule of thumb, I think, is to try to think about how our teens would feel about having a friend's mom's every tidbit of workday and PTA "news" on their "wall" all the time. Check out Sharon's blog for some very good reasons for not letting this happen - and finding a happy medium between helicopter and fly-by parenting.

Mom undercover in kids' virtual worlds

How would you like to go in-world and experience ClubPenguin's igloos, icey games, and penguin pizzeria first-hand (well, almost first-hand)? You can, if you haven't already, with ChilyLily437, aka writer, former elementary teacher, child development expert, and mom of four (ages 6 to 16) Sharon Duke Estroff in this month's issue of Good Housekeeping. Her article, "I Was an Undercover Penguin: What One Mom Learned in Her Journey Through Kiddie Cyberspace - and What Every Concerned Parent Needs to Know," "even spurred some very positive changes to the ClubPenguin Web site following its release," Sharon told me.

While writing the article last July, Sharon called me for an interview, and I interviewed her back! I didn't want to wait six months for those insights into elementary-school kids' behavior on virtual playgrounds, which Sharon found pretty much mirrors what happens in real-world schoolyards, hallways, classrooms (when the teacher's not looking), family rooms, and backyards (see "Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual world users"). This is the grade-school version of social networking, and these are just additional - digital - environments for growing up, playing, expressing oneself, being a friend, testing boundaries, working out social norms, and exploring identity.

That interview last summer was the start of many fun conversations that 1) revealed a shared philosophy about youth, parents, and social media and 2) got us to thinking we should collaborate! So I'm pleased to announce a new series for NetFamilyNews: weekly installments from Undercover Mom about her experiences with fellow avatars of all sorts - "eye-opening guided tours through some of the most popular cyber-locales" of today's elementary school-aged kids. "Expect a balanced perspective and practical advice," Sharon writes, "as we delve into this uncharted parenting terrain together." This brings a new kind of balance to NetFamilyNews too, because my coverage has always been a little more focused on tweens' and teens' experiences with social media than those of 4-to-10-year-olds.

Avatar anthropology

Undercover Mom is not a spy, though. She's really a cultural anthropologist in kid virtual worlds, one with nearly 20 years' experience as a schoolteacher and educational consultant and 16 years' experience as a parent. "My intent is to give parents an understanding of what it means to be a child in the digital age," Sharon wrote me, "to help bridge the gap between digital natives and their parents with insights into the subtleties and complexities of digital childhood - not from the point of view of the media, which is perpetually hyperfocused on the dangers of Internet predators and online porn, but through the eyes of a fellow engaged parent focused on the well-being of the whole child."

Related links

"200 virtual worlds for kids"

"Good citizens in virtual worlds, too"

New digital citizenship primer for parents: Raising a Digital Child, by Mike Ribble At Kansas State University

"New sites & services for kids, tweens, teens"

Another new site along the lines of NewMoonGirls.com and AnnesDiary.com: "GirlAmbition integrates tweens to Web," reports WESH TV in Orlando, with lots of screenshots from AppScout.com.

MN might ban sex offenders from social sites

Minnesota state legislators want to help social network sites keep predators off their sites. A committee of the state House of Representatives approved legislation this week that would prohibit any registered sex offenders from "logging on to sites like Facebook or MySpace," Minnesota Public Radio reports. "Participation in Web-based chat rooms would also be banned," the public radio service added, which would not be a bad thing, since - based on Pennsylvania's experience, anyway (see "PA case study: Social networking risk in context") - most sexual contact between sex offenders and minors seems to happen in chatrooms. Minnesota legislators say that, if it passes, the law would actually help keep offenders from going to social sites in the first place - "state officials could warn sex offenders about the ban in a regular notification of prohibited activities."

The Net effect

Just why do we need to think before we post and text? A logical question your kids may be asking you. Here's a possible answer: because...

online socializers and media sharers have invisible audiences

those audiences could be small or huge (tough to tell)

those readers, viewers, friends, acquaintances, potential ex-friends and employers can copy, paste, do just about anything they want with our content in other places online and on phones that we may never even have heard of

what we post and share is out there pretty permanently and can probably be found - indefinitely - with a search engine

and we can't really be sure of how private it is.

These conditions, some very familiar to many of us but neatly packaged by social media scholar danah boyd in her just-released PhD dissertation, is what I call the "Net effect." It's how digital media and technologies change the equation - even though much of the behavior (adolescent or adult) is age-old. As danah (who lower-cases her name) explains, the different contexts in which we used to speak and behave - e.g., home, school parking lot, Xbox Live, classroom, Thanksgiving Dinner - are all mashed up. According to the New York Times, "much of the danger lies in the fact that, increasingly, our 'friends' on social networking sites are actually a mix of people - friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues - with whom we would normally share only a piece of our lives." This is one of the real "online safety" issues for 99.9% of online-youth population (and about that many adults) - a better umbrella term is probably "digital citizenship" or "online safety 2.0." It's about growing up with the Net effect in place, for example, as the Times put it, "learning how not to share." Find out how Sarah Illman - who, when she graduates this spring, "will be among the first Canadian university students to have lived her entire post-secondary academic career on Facebook" - managed all this in the Toronto Globe & Mail article.

Digital body art

A great metaphor for the Net effect on digital natives' lives is used by the University of British Columbia, which has a whole Web site about the "digital tattoo," with a tutorial on how to "Protect," "Connect," "Learn," and "Work" with the Net effect. Here's how UBC explains it: "Just like a tattoo, your digital reputation is an expression of yourself. It's highly visible, and hard to remove. Explore how your online identity affects you, your friends, your school and your job - for better and for worse - and how to make informed choices." I found out about this resource in a Toronto Globe & Mail article, "Chances are your kids are savvier online than you think."

Virtual, real 'Global Sim' class

Ever thought of doing a non-virtual sim of the world, a mini Planet Earth, in a football stadium? Prof. Michael Wesch did. It's his Anthropology 204 class at Kansas State University, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Actually, his class's World Sim is in a giant rodeo arena, not a football stadium. It's designed "to push students to stop asking, 'What’s going to be on the test?' and to contemplate bigger questions: Why are some people poor and some rich? How does the world work?... to create an environment where students can expand their capacity for empathizing with and loving those who are different from them." The sim's also a big mashup of virtual and real-world spaces and tools (wiki, digital video, big arena, people), with student collaboration and decisionmaking (40% of the sim's rules get jettisoned at the end of each course to make room for the next class's rules development) - also a simulation of how young people use social media and mash it all up with the rest of their lives. Do not miss another class of Wesch's on the anthropology of YouTube (see "Watch this video, parents").

Teens best adults on privacy

At Facebook, 60% of teens use privacy controls compared to 25-30% of adults, a sitepoint blog cites Facebook numbers as showing. Computer Associates offers some confirmation with a recent study finding that "79% of teens aged 13-17 who are members of a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook protect their profiles from the general Internet in some way (i.e., only allow friends or friends of friends to view their information), according to the blog. The study also found something not so surprising: that teens "are very likely" to post photos of themselves online. That may be why they're more careful about privacy. Good news!

JuicyCampus: Good bye, good riddance

Citing tough economic times as the reason, gossip site JuicyCampus has shut down. "I'm not shedding any tears for [founder Matt Ivester, who made the announcement]," my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid writes at CBSNEWS.com. "What he refers to as 'lighthearted gossip of college life' was, in many situations, vicious innuendos, hateful messages, and downright lies. In covering the site ... I saw postings that went so far as to call someone a willing slut and publish her cell phone number and address," he says. Let's hope a similar cyberbullying opp - the little social-network app Honesty Box - meets a similar fate. If anybody knows of any downside to losing these venues for anonymous comments about peers, pls email anne(at)netfamilynews.org, and I'll consider publishing their points.

Pact for solid social Web safety measures in Europe

This is timely news for global Safer Internet Day (today): 17 social-media companies across Europe have struck a deal with the European Commission to put in place safeguards for young social networkers by April, The Guardian reports. US-based Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are among the signatories. [Brief editorial comment: this is much more viable an agreement than trying to impose age verification on sites based only in a single country, which is what the US attorneys general are pushing for and which the EC has already ruled out as a solution for safer social networking.] Safeguards include prominent "report abuse" buttons; under-18 profiles private by default; clear, prominent privacy instructions; under-18 profiles not searchable; and keeping underage users (usually under-13s) from setting up accounts, reports paidContent:UK (MySpace and Facebook already have these in place). "The agreement brings a number of small sites into line with their bigger rivals - signatories also include Bebo, French video website DailyMotion and Habbo Hotel, the popular virtual world for children," according to the BBC, which adds that the safety measures are similar to those in the British Home Office's best practices guidelines, put forth last April (see this item). Meanwhile, Commission today kicked off its first cyberbullying-awareness campaign with a one-minute video (see the top of this BBC piece). [Another brief editorial comment: More evidence of online-safety enlightenment in Europe while a step forward here - the Internet Safety Technical Task Force's report released last month - is being discredited by the state attorneys general.]

Teen's alleged online sex scam

Of course the worst news gets the most coverage - more than 500 news outlets in the US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, India, Australia, and Bosnia Herzegovina, among other countries, turned up in a Google News search on this. But there is something to be learned even from this sex extortion story about an 18-year-old in Wisconsin, described by a "shocked" friend to a Wisconsin radio station as a "goody-two-shoes kind of guy" but accused of "posing as a female on Facebook in a plot to trick at least 31 male classmates into sending nude pictures of themselves and then using the images to blackmail them into performing sex acts, The Register in the UK reports. The takeaway is that even when the site you use is all about socializing with friends in "real life" - which is usually a pretty good protection measure - don't develop a false sense of security. Not everyone is on the up and up even in real life. The other takeaway: that this, as The Register put it, is just "the latest graphic example of the heap of trouble waiting for naive teens who send sexually explicit images of themselves over the email or text messages. Last month, six high school students in Pennsylvania were charged under state child pornography statutes for sending and receiving nude images of each other using cell phones. Last year, a 15-year old girl was arrested on felony child pornography charges for allegedly sending nude pictures of herself to classmates."

Scams aimed at social networkers

It's the digital version of boy-cries-wolf, and it's a shame, because social network sites via computer or cellphone are a great way to broadcast a friend's (or one's own) real call for help. I remember a story a year or so ago about a journalist who was jailed in Egypt, shortly thereafter to be released because his text messages mobilized friends to get the US Embassy involved. I'm sure most social networkers are smart enough to distinguish between real calls for help and what happened the other day to friends of Bryan Rutberg, though they were scammed pretty convincingly. MSNBC tells of how Bryan's profile was hacked so that a bulletin was sent to his friends saying he's been held up at gunpoint overseas and had no money to get home. Responses to test messages sent to the person posing as Bryan were convincing enough that one friend sent money. I would definitely not hurt to sit down with social networkers at your house and go over three solid tips for social-networking malware avoidance from ComputerWorld.

MySpace's PR problem

MySpace's image problem is partly everybody's problem. It says something about how we view teens - and how willing we are to accept the complexity of teens-on-the-social-Web and our unprecedented inability to assert control in this space. Though the headlines suggest otherwise, this story is not just about crime. It's more about growing up more publicly than ever and maybe a bit of denial on our part that it's the heightened exposure that's new, not the adolescent behavior, and that that exposure - like everything in this picture - is both good and bad. But let's drill down a bit....

1. The myths we develop

Increasingly, the Web is a mirror of all of human life - not just a communications technology or a global collection of hyperlinked documents or even a channel for individual and collective self-expression. So what we're seeing, learning, worrying, and mythologizing about teens in "real life" is directly related to their online experiences as well.

In "The Myth of Lost Innocence," New York Times commentator Judith Warner describes the experience of two Philadelphia sociologists and specialists in teen sexual behavior, Kathleen Bogle of La Salle University and Maria Kefalas of St. Joseph's University. Even though "teens are, in truth, having sex less and later than they did a decade or two ago," Warner reports, Bogle and Kefalas have "had to struggle mightily to get people out of their 'moral panic' mindset, and make them understand that teens are not 'in a downward spiral' or 'out of control'." People "just don’t believe you," Bogle and Kefalas told Warner. The same is true for anyone trying to present the big picture of online teens. In the current moral panic about predators, the fact that overall child sexual abuse has declined by 51% since the Web took off (between 1990 and '05), according to the National Data Archives on Child Abuse & Neglect), and the fact that Internet-related abuse is well below 1% of the overall child-sexual-exploitation figure get drowned out in 1-millimeter-deep reporting about 90,000 predators having been deleted from among some 150 million MySpace profiles. [No one knows, much less reports on, the more important question of whether those profiles led to any communications with teens or how teens deal with them (delete, ignore, block, or reply?). In fact, there have been zero reports that any of those 90,000 offenders have been prosecuted for illegal contact with teens on MySpace (and that would be covered if it happened). For a sample of what we do know about predation risk, see this.]

Meanwhile, amid all the numbers-out-of-context noise, parents, counselors, educators, and social workers can't hear or don't know where to listen for the signals they do need to hear. As Warner puts it, "details concerning exactly which children are suffering, flailing or failing, and in what numbers, and how and why, and what we can do about it – are lost."

In focusing on worst-case scenarios and making them the reality of all online teens, we do parents a disservice and teens a double disservice - by selling them short and distorting the picture of teen social-networking in the eyes of those with authority over them. See also "Chances are, your kids are savvier online than you think" in the Toronto Globe & Mail and New York Times health reporter Tara Parker-Pope's "The Myth of Rampant Teen Promiscuity."

2. How did we get here?

MySpace has become the subject of this kind of hyperbole-fueled, negative myth. Having watched its emergence as a vibrant social and media-sharing tool and music community from mid-2005, I've puzzled over how MySpace got from there to here - how it has come to be almost demonized in the eyes of the adult population, or the portion of it that views the social site through either a strictly law-enforcement lens or that of an adult with no interest in trying to understand social networking in young people's terms.

Its first full year as a Fox Interactive property, 2006, was telling. MySpace found itself, I later told Business Week, in the middle of a "perfect storm" of parental concern development. The converging conditions were:

Its sudden arrival out of nowhere (only as far as parents and other adults - including reporters - were concerned, and adults did not understand this social-networking thing).

Its exponential, viral growth that year (a story that a lot of uncomprehending reporters were compelled to write, well before there was any known social-media research to cite).

A high-profile news story out of Connecticut about a police investigation into whether "as many as seven teenage girls" had had sexual encounters with men they'd met in MySpace. It was a tipping point (see my commentary on that, 2/3/06). Though similar stories have been rare since then, this Connecticut one led to Fox hiring former federal prosecutor Hemanshu Nigam as its chief security officer and turned state attorneys general into social-networking watchdogs (Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, co-leads the AGs' Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking that created the Internet Safety Technical Task Force on which I served).

The launch of Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series, which in no way represented risks to youth on the social Web or even child sexual exploitation in general, but distorted associations were made (see "Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check").

DOPA and a mid-term election. All the above made for great stump speeches about championing child protection, an uncontroversial way to garner votes, and the ill-conceived Delete Online Predators Act, which never reached the Senate but passed the House with an overwhelming majority (maybe partly because voting against it would've somehow looked in the voting record like a vote for predators?). The law would've done more to delete teens from social-networking sites at school than to "delete online predators" (see this item).

Interestingly, though, the clouds of that perfect storm started gathering much earlier on - right at the beginning, in fact. Besides the lifelike picture she paints, I'm seeing in danah boyd's account of what drew teens to MySpace, in her doctoral dissertation, that the site's roots in the music scene have a role in the challenge it faces today too: "Most early adopter teens were attracted to MySpace [in 2004] through one of two paths: bands or older family members. Teens who learned of MySpace through bands primarily followed indie rock music or hip-hop, the two genres most popular on MySpace early on. While many teens love music, they are often unable to see their favorite bands play live because bands typically play in 21+ venues. MySpace allowed these teens to connect with and follow their favorite bands.... Given its popularity among musicians and late-night socialites, joining MySpace became a form of subcultural capital.... Early adopter teens who were not into music primarily learned about the site from a revered older sibling or cousin who was active in late-night culture. These teens viewed MySpace as cool because they respected these family members.... While teens often revere the risky practices of [older nightclub and concert goers], many adults work to actively dissuade them from valuing them. By propagating and glorifying 20-something urban cultural practices and values, MySpace managed to alienate parents early on."

This takes us back to my first points about 1) how behavior, culture, and perceptions offline are mirrored online, and 2) how myths develop out of fears and too much emphasis on the negative part of a phenomenon, which is only a fraction of the reality. Which brings me to the final factor I've seen in MySpace's PR problem: the development of the online safety field itself. The field got its start in and is still dominated by law enforcement and its expertise - all those good people in local police departments and state Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces giving Internet-safety talks in schools about criminal activity in chat, instant messaging, on cellphones and on the Web. Law enforcement people are experts in crime, not adolescent behavior and development (so should they really be giving talks about cyberbullying?), and the latter, certainly not crime, is the lionshare of what's going on with and among teens in social network sites - good, bad, and neutral. What's happening with teens on the social Web is infinitely more about adolescent development than about technology or crime.

Yes, we need to teach children how to keep away from predators of any form, online and offline, but the public discussion has to broaden to reflect reality, from the negatives - the full spectrum of online risk (including noncriminal bad behavior like bullying and harassment) - to all the rest, teen online socializing in general. As for the dark side, even one exploitation case is too many but, for perspective, it helps to keep in mind that what the attorneys general are talking about - social-networking-related crime involving minors (see Newsweek) - represents only a fraction of Internet-initiated sexual crimes against minors, and the latter figure itself, the Crimes Against Children Research Center tells me, "was too low to calculate" in two national samples it used in studies on child sexual exploitation (for more context, see this).

3. MySpace's child-protection record

At my last check of Google News, nearly 900 news outlets around the world ran reports this week that MySpace "evicts," "boots," "deletes," etc. 90,000 predators (the headline at India's Techtree.com was "No space for sex offenders on MySpace"). For brevity, the headlines are in the present tense, of course (I used to write headlines at a newspaper), but the present tense suggests this just happened this week.

What MySpace wrote in a letter to Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina about all this offers another perspective that rarely gets play in the news media:

"Some reports wrongly suggested that there are 90,000 RSOs [registered sex offenders] on MySpace today. This is wildly inaccurate and irresponsible. All 90,000 profiles were removed from MySpace upon discovery and preserved for law enforcement investigations. Such inaccurate reports send the message to other sites that they will be publicly criticized and punished for taking similar steps to protect teens online. While much is being made of the increase in the number of RSOs removed from MySpace since the inception of our program, the fact is that as long as the program is working, the aggregate number of RSOs removed will increase - it is a cumulative number representing all of the profiles deleted over time. The program has been a tremendous success: not only have 90,000 RSOs been removed from MySpace, but MySpace has seen a 36% reduction in RSOs attempting to access the site year over year."

Concerned parents may be interested in this lengthy bulleted list of child-safety steps MySpace has taken on the site, at its headquarters, and in Washington. But short of shutting down its site (which wouldn't "help," because there are zillions of social network services, tools, and technologies provided by businesses worldwide), MySpace or any other social-media business couldn't possibly bar all hurtful or criminal activity from its site - anymore than the phone company can keep people from having any arguments on the phone. Technologies, good business practices, and laws may be able to help keep users safer, but they can't change human behavior or nature. That takes education.

Related links

John Palfrey, author of Born Digital: a print interview in ComputerWorld, a video interview at CNET, and a YouTube video of a keynote he gave at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which he directs

Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital: a video interview on YouTube

Larry Magid and me: 2006 was also the year I met and first interviewed danah boyd, who was a source for our book published that year, MySpace Unraveled: A Parent's Guide to Teen Social Networking.

Google-brand social mapping

Google just launched its version of social-mapping called "Latitude." It reportedly works on a lot of phones, not just Google's own Android, and people get the little app by going to Google's page on the subject, typing their mobile numbers into the box and getting a text message from Google with a download link in it, ComputerWorld reports. "The idea is you install Latitude on your cell phone and invite your geeky friends to do the same. Then they can see exactly where you are on a Google Map on their phone or the Web, and you can see them. Feel like hiding from the world? Tweak the privacy settings and you disappear. Or you can just X out certain friends when you're no longer feeling so friendly toward them." So if it sounds a little invasive, good, that means you'll work through the privacy features (and help your kids do the same). In fact, it's so easy to get that you might want to talk with your early adopters right up front about privacy features and why they're important. Latitude is not new, though. Three-year-old Loopt, also in Mountainview, Calif., is a pioneer in the social-mapping space, and particularly in user safety and privacy. Coverage in Forbes and CNET too.

Another imposter profile

Our ConnectSafely forum gets reports of these all the time - posing as someone else, including fictional people, is not unique to any social site or technology - but this case is particularly ugly. "Eighteen-year-old high school student Anthony Stancl is accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves," CNET reports. He then proceeded to blackmail them, saying he's post their images online if they didn't have sex with him. At least seven of the boys did. Here are two early cases of imposter profiles that came to my attention, involving what I'd call "extreme cyberbullying."

Digital dating abuse

Sexting (sending naked photos of oneself or peers) is one form of it. Other forms: nonstop text messages from/to a boyfriend or girlfriend (or anyone), a digital form of stalking; sending around unbecoming photos or videos of someone via phone or Web; hacking into a peer's profile and cruelly misrepresenting him in comments that look like they're coming from him; or posting mean comments to someone in her social network profile or via an app like "Honesty Box." "The behaviors can be a warning sign that a teenager may become a perpetrator or a victim of domestic violence," reports the New York Times, citing the view of the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund. In fact, the Fund, a public-awareness nonprofit, calls this "digital dating violence," not just "abuse" (it can also be called "cyberbullying"). If not physical, it certainly can do violence to people lives, including the lives of young people who send nude photos of "themselves." For example, this month six high school students in western Pennsylvania were charged with child pornography, three girls with distribution (for taking and sending nude photos of themselves) and three boys with possession, a commentator at CNET reports. The Minneapolis Star Tribune today reported that "all but one of the students accepted a lesser misdemeanor charge, partly to avoid a trial and further embarrassment." But they were charged with serious crimes, and two Florida teens fared much worse in 2007 (see "Teens' child-porn convictions upheld"). "Whatever the outcome, the mere fact that child pornography charges were filed at all is stirring debate among students and adults," according to the Star Tribune. Law professor Mary Leary wrote in the Virginia Journal of Law and Policy last summer that, though prosecution in such cases shouldn't be mandatory, it "should remain an option for the state."

Signs of dating abuse

Intrusive behavior like 24/7, high-frequency texting can be one of the warning signs, but the underlying issue is control. The New York Times cites a study last July in the Archives of Pedatrics and Adolescent Medicine, which found that "more than one-third of the 920 students questioned were victims of emotional and physical abuse by romantic partners before they started college." It seems to me one of the most important things to tell our kids is that - no matter how flattering possessiveness, jealousy, and constant attention may feel - too often these behaviors are much more about control than love. Not every household has or can enforce rules about when cellphones, laptops, and connected game consoles are turned off, but such rules can not only help regulate usage; they can serve as back-up when a teen needs a reason to ask for some space. I hope it never gets this far for anyone reading this, but here are some signs of dating abuse in the Times article: Victims "are more likely to engage in binge drinking, suicide attempts, physical fights and sexual activity. And the rates of drug, alcohol and tobacco use are more than twice as high in abused girls as in other girls the same age." See also "How social influencing works."

My avatar's talk

I - or I should say my avatar Anny Khandr - recently gave a talk about "Online Safety 2.0" in Second Life to fellow members of the International Society for Technology in Education, kindly captured as machinima (virtual-world video) by educator Marianne Malmstrom, aka Knowclue Kidd. Two other kind cohorts and enablers were rockstar educators Kevin Jarrett in New Jersey and Peggy Sheehy in New York. They were and are very gracious about helping me navigate both the technology and ISTE's islands in this - to me - pretty magical virtual world (what I find magical are fellow avatars' seemingly bottomless kindness and patience and what the tech education part of it has to teach about the gift economy, which, as defined in Wikipedia as a modus operandi "in a culture or subculture that emphasizes social or intangible rewards for solidarity and generosity: karma, honor, loyalty or other forms of gratitude"). This is by no means a polished talk, but rather a great experiment in sharing real-world ideas with real people from all over the country who have gathered their digital representatives (avatars) in the same beautiful virtual space. Though my delivery wasn't, the rest of it was - for me - very cool. Stay tuned for parent talk, which my very clue-filled friend Knowclue will be "filming" me giving soon.

Sex offenders in social sites: Consider the facts

The only way we can have solid, progressive parent-child and public discussions about children's online safety is if we can keep the facts in mind when we read the latest news about predators in Facebook and MySpace - facts based on consistent, peer-reviewed academic research about online risk. So here are the key facts to keep in mind:

Not all children are equally at risk of Net-related sexual exploitation (see "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies" from the US's Internet Safety Technical Task Force, with a summary of all child-online-safety research to date).

A child's psychosocial makeup and family environment are better predictors of risk than the technology he or she uses (also from the ISTTF report).

The kids most at risk offline are those at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim" and the ISTTF report).

Sexual exploitation as a result of Internet activity (much less social networking) is statistically rare - "too low to calculate in the two national samples we conducted," the Crimes Against Children Research Center has told me.

The vast majority of teens - 91% - use social sites to keep in touch with friends they see frequently (mostly at school), not strangers ('07 Pew/Internet study).

The offenders in the vast majority of child sexual abuse cases are not strangers to their victims (multiple sources).

Despite the establishment of one or more public profiles of "teens" (fake profiles) on MySpace by the Pennsylvania attorney general's Child Predator Unit, "there has apparently not been one successful sting operation initiated on MySpace in the more than two years during which these sting profiles have been in existence" (see "Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context").

Even one case is far too many, but parents deserve to know that - no matter how many news reports they read about predators in social network sites, including this week's - the risk of online kids being exploited by a stranger in such a site is statistically extremely low, and even more unlikely for healthy teens with engaged parents. Parents may find it helpful, too, to read such reports critically - maybe with their online teens, asking them about their own experiences, if any, with strangers in social sites and what they do about them.

Consider, too, the possibility that there may be other interests in addition to children's safety involved in criticizing a whole body of research and keeping predator fears fanned, including political and financial interests (see Washington policy analyst Adam Thierer's commentary and this New York Times article quoting the CEO of a company with significant financial interests in promoting the adoption of age verification of online kids, a serious privacy issue). As CNET blogger Caroline McCarthy put it, "Shock-and-awe press tactics aren't the way to go, especially because threats on the Web are much more complicated than they may appear."

Stalking texters, sexting monsters: A bit of help

You wouldn't think that the guy who made "Extreme PB&J Sandwich Making" would be an excellent source of advice on establishing digital boundaries. But YouTube and post-YouTube star Brandon Hardesty delivers brilliantly in his 4.5 minute video "What If" in ThatsNotCool.com. If your kid even knows someone who knows someone who's getting pressured by a peer to send nude photos of him or herself via cellphone, you might appreciate watching Brandon playing the roles of Mom, Dad, guidance counselor, and boyfriend as potential confidants in a situation like this. You might also love the quite fruity "Pressure Pic Problem," providing a slightly less agnostic perspective than Brandon's. I did. ThatsNotCool.com is brilliant too. It's co-created and -sponsored by the Family Violence Prevention Fund, Ad Council, and Office on Violence Against Women "to address new and complicated problems between teens who are dating or hooking up — problems like constant and controlling texting, pressuring for nude pictures, and breaking into someone's email or social-networking page." Besides the videos, which make for great family discussion talking points, there are "Call-Out Cards" with little messages like "I appreciate your concern for my location EVERY TWO MINUTES" that can be downloaded, emailed, or sent to MySpace or Facebook friends and annoying acquaintances. There are also a discussion forum where people can give and receive advice from peers and a Help section where they can reach out for professional help. BTW, for a bit of context: Nielsen Mobile reports that a typical US teen sends and receives more than 1,700 text messages a month (that's more than 50 a day).

Email for kids: If? When? How?

Is someone at your house begging for his or her very own email account? Maybe because "all my friends have one"? The question usually comes up before middle school, when "everybody" is getting IM accounts and cellphones too, as - developmentally - the social scene kicks into gear. As kid virtual worlds get increasingly ubiquitous, though, adding another social outlet, the pressure to get any single communications tool may ease somewhat. In fact, pretty soon kids won't even care about email addresses because it seems most teens only use email when communicating with adults (they prefer messaging via social-network sites). We'll see (nobody's researched this yet, as far as I've seen). Anyway, in case you'd like to see a bunch of other parents' views on this question, there was a lively debate (in Comments) over at Slashdot about giving kids email accounts and how (it is "news for nerds," after all, so there's some great stuff about proxy servers and technical means of spam avoidance), as well as some interesting evidence of different parenting schools of thought (don't be surprised by the one or two off-color comments, though they're much in the minority). We didn't feel rushed to get our 10-year-old one - it seemed more a necessity as we were traveling overseas, so he could keep in touch with friends independently. Now that he's 11 and we're back in the States, he hardly ever checks or uses it and, interestingly, IM seems to have been replaced by Google Chat and phone texting as the primary social tools of 6th graders. Would love to get fellow parents' views on electronic communications, kid-style - via anne[at]netfamilynews.org, or in our forum at ConnectSafely.org.