*Collaborative* reputation protection

"The 'Protecting Reputations Online' video should be mandatory viewing for students," wrote/tweeted Bernajean Porter, an educator I admire, in Twitter this week. So I watched it (it's just under 3 minutes) – and was reminded of how collaborative reputation protection is these days. Because "digital" means social, young people are not acting all by themselves in a vacuum – they're sharing text, photos, and videos and, through them, talking about themselves and each other. That's the most important point in the video, I think: that there's a mutual dependency on and responsibility for each other's good name and reputation in social media. We truly are in this together – not just peers, but parents, educators, all of us. Nobody's operating in a vacuum in today's media. Tell your kids: "Your friends affect your reputation – you need their help in maintaining it and vice versa." Here are reputation-management tips and just-released research from Microsoft, and youth-specific resources from the American School Counselor Association and iKeepSafe.org.

MN mom expects $0 penalty for file-sharing

It has been a big news week for file-sharers, music fans, and copyright lawyers. Days after a judge reduced the file-sharing penalty for Minnesota mother of four Jammie Thomas-Rasset from $1.92 million to about $54,000, the recording industry offered to settle for $25,000, but Thomas-Rasset turned the offer down, CNET reports. "Sibley and Camara had already said that they planned to challenge even the lowered amount set by the court. Sibley told CNET last week they have always sought a $0 award." US District Judge Michael Davis had said earlier in his ruling that "the $1.92 million fine ... was 'monstrous and shocking'," the San Jose Mercury News reported. "Davis wrote in his ruling he would have liked to reduce it further but was limited in doing so. He said the new penalty is still 'significant and harsh'," but he denied Thomas-Rasset's request for a new trial. The $1.92 million in damages awarded the RIAA last summer "are eight times more than Thomas-Rasset ... was ordered to pay the first time she faced six record companies in court on claims that she downloaded more than 1,700 songs," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported last summer. "The judge granted a retrial after deciding that he had wrongly instructed the jury." The Star-Tribune added that, of the more than 30,000 suits brought by the RIAA against alleged file-sharers, Thomas-Rasset's was the only one to go to a jury trial, much less two such trials. Meanwhile, here's a thoughtful "letter" from a professional musician to a mom worried about her son's file-sharing, among other things distinguishing between privacy and file-sharing, and The Guardian recently declared "The strange death of illegal downloading." [See also a New Yorker interview with Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood on the "MP3 generation."]

'Sext education': US- and Canada-based resources

Citing new US figures showing that two-thirds of 8-to-18-year-olds own cellphones, Canada's CBC points to a new Web site designed to educate people about texting – textED.ca – "set up by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, in partnership with Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association." The CBC says it includes "sext ed," but I don't see much in the site specifically about photo-sharing, and there – slightly frustratingly – isn't a search box in the site that allowed me to search for "sext ed." But for parents there's an "acronictionary" with abbreviations and acronyms often used in text messages, and for kids there's a "Need help now" form, which they can fill out and which promises to get back to senders within 24 hours. From here in the US, PC Magazine's John Dvorak offers 7 reputation-protection tips that "can save your kids – and you – from a lifetime of online embarrassment" (offline too!). They cover everything from Twitter and Facebook to blogging and vlogging to video chat on Stickam (take special note of that last genre, parents – not a good place for kids in online stealth mode). See also ConnectSafely.org's "sext ed" and "Sexting: New study & the 'Truth or Dare' scenario." As for anti-sexting legislation, here's a commentary from Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use offering ways to adjust laws so as to help rather than harm youth.

[The new US data the CBC refers to is from the just-released Kaiser Family Foundation study I blogged about and linked to in "Major study on youth & media: Let's take a closer look."]

Sexism in sexting case?

A federal court of appeals in Philadelphia is expected soon to decide the first case about the criminal prosecution of teens for sexting. One side – that of George Skumanick, who in 2006 was district attorney for Pennsylvania's Wyoming County – argued that the DA "was trying to protect the teens from themselves and potential child predators." The other side, the ACLU, argued that "the prosecutor cannot accuse the girls of being pornographers under the guise of protecting them from pornographers," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Two of the photos involved depicted two 12-year-old girls in their underwear; a third photo in a separate situation, depicted a 16-year-old girl nude from the waist up. [In this case's first trial, in March 2009, US District Judge James M. Munley "sided with the ACLU and issued an injunction that blocked Skumanick from bringing charges, declaring that the photographs were not child pornography under Pennsylvania law," Law.com reports.] After learning that the photos were circulating, the school confiscated some phones and turned them over to the DA's office. "Interestingly, none of the classmates who distributed the photos received letters from Skumanick. Only the girls who appeared in the photos were threatened with child porn charges," writes the ACLU in its blog. "If the DA did in fact regard these photos as pornographic, why not file distribution charges against the boys? A clue may be found in their argument before the 3rd Circuit. In narrating the case, their attorney explained how, after the girls were photographed, 'high school boys did as high school boys will do, and traded the photos among themselves'.

"The boys who traded the photos bear no responsibility and require no re-education," the ACLU blogger writes, referring to a letter Skumanick sent the girls' parents threatening prosecution if the girls didn't take a "five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like 'what it means to be a girl in today's society'." Only the girls were threatened with felony charges and sex-offender registration. It was one of the Third Circuit judges who raised "the central question" of the case, the blogger concluded: During arguments, Judge Thomas L. Ambro said, "Should we allow the state to force children, by threat of prosecution, to attend a session espousing the views of one particular government official on what it means to be a girl?"

Cyberbullying & bullying-related suicides: 1 way to help our digital-age kids

How do we help our children maintain some detachment from the drama, sometimes cruelty, of school life? This, I think, is the central question of online safety, if not child development, in the digital age. It has just become national news that 15-year-old Phoebe Prince of South Hadley, Mass., and very recently of western Ireland, committed suicide January 14 because of fellow students' social cruelty online and offline, in and out of school, according to ABC News and the Boston Herald. Last month the country learned of 13-year-old Florida student Hope Witsell's suicide last fall (I posted about that in ConnectSafely's forum here).

Detachment from 'The Drama'

Each of these cases is highly individual, but what they all seem to have in common is the 24/7, non-stop nature of the harassment the teens faced – the tech-enabled constant drama of school life turning into 24/7 cruelty. Phoebe's and Hope's tragedies indicate an urgent need for all of us to help our children come up for air, to maintain some perspective about the "alternate reality" of school life, especially in the middle-school years.

Technology mustn't be the focus of either blame or solution development because it's not the source of the problem; social cruelty is. But technology – if not used with a sense of perspective or balance – can "tether" a child to the cruel behavior. I get that word from MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who refers to today's communications tools (the social Web, cellphones, etc.) as "tethering technologies" in her paper about "The Tethered Self." She discusses how they remove us from our physical surroundings. I think their constant use can also affect our sense of context psychologically too – everybody's, not just kids', but adolescents have a lot to deal with just developmentally, so perspective can be extra helpful to them.

We hear a lot that we need to think about the implications of giving our children mobile devices that make them as available to their peers as they are to us. But let's look at one of the implications: Kids' and their peers' moment-by-moment mood changes, blow-by-blow gossip, and good and bad behavior mutually accessible as long as their communications devices are on. In other words, constant drama – often heightened by kids who enjoy fueling it, whether for entertainment, as a prank, or out of malice.

How we can help

What we don't hear enough is that there are ways we – parents, school personnel, police, and policymakers – can help our kids and teens. We can help them...

Get perspective and maybe a little mental detachment from peers as well as "the drama"

Do the identity exploration that's a key task of adolescence as themselves," as individuals, and not only or always in relation to their peers

Have a little time for reflection

Realize the importance of self-respect and know they have our respect.

In other words, we can help them to be able – when needed – psychologically to disengage just so they can think straight and actually see that their life is not that drama at school or online, and they are never the person any bullies could ever make them out to be.

Tampa-area schools are discussing (I think much-needed) parent-notification rules, the Tampa Tribune reports and Massachusetts lawmakers are "stepping up efforts to pass an anti-bullying measure," the Boston Globe reports. These are important pieces of the puzzle, but I hope that school officials, legislators, and parents 1) don't create policy and law based solely on the worst tragedies and 2) do help children learn how to maintain perspective, self-respect, and respect for others amid the info and behavioral overload of the digital age. This is the protective nature of social-media literacy and citizenship – the new online safety.

Related links

Whether or not they all make sense for your family, at least some of Marian Merritt's 7 household tech-use rules (at the bottom of her post) can help parents help kids keep "The Drama" under control. Merritt, Norton's Internet Safety Advocate, is blogging about the Kaiser Family Foundation study on US 8-to-18-year-olds' media use – I posted about it here.

Youth (and parent) mentor Annie Fox helps a girl having suicidal thoughts: "For teens: What can I do about these rumors?"

How the social Web helps stop suicide (in The Daily Beast) and an example of suicide averted, thanks to social networking

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline says peers are the best source of referrals to the Lifeline, usually via social network sites, especially MySpace – not a toll-free phone number – but that number is 1-800-273-TALK. The Lifeline coordinates the work of more than 100 toll-free help centers around the US, getting calls and cases to the center nearest the person needing help, and help not just for suicidal crisis, but depression, domestic violence, and all sorts of needs (more people need to know about that).

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"

ConnectSafely.org's "Tips to Help Stop Sexting"

China requires filtering in schools

Perhaps a sign that there are more and more computers in the schools of this giant developing country that has more Internet users than the US has population, China is now requiring Net-filtering in schools. "According to the Ministry of Education, local education departments and schools should guide students in different age groups to 'properly handle cyber world' and encourage them to report any suspicious websites" as part of its anti-porn campaign, DigitalJournal.com reports. The basic difference between this development in China and the US's school filtering is a law passed in 2000 (the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA) that required schools receiving federal "e-rate" technology subsidies to employ filtering. I was surprised that the Chinese government, well-known for its Net censorship skills (when my family was traveling there in 2008, we couldn't access our travel blog on what was then a very new blogging service called Vox.com), was only now instituting school filtering – which is why I think this is more a sign of better tech and other resources in Chinese schools than an oversight on the government's part. China may be "catching up" on the sexting front too: Digital Journal cites China's Xinhua news service as reporting that "China Mobile, the nation's largest mobile network carrier, said sending mobile porn, either through photos or messages, could have the phone number revoked permanently." As for those Net-use numbers, the San Jose Mercury News reports that China has 384 million Internet users. "The number of people going online by mobile phone rose 106% [last year] to 233 million" (8% of whom access the Net only by phone).

Help with cyberbullying on YouTube

Say you're 15, care greatly about a particular environmental cause, and use your YouTube account to vlog (video blog) about it in an earnest way that triggers some really nasty comments on your page. What do you do? YouTube has some tips it blogged with just that scenario in mind, linking to the National Crime Prevention Council's new anti-cyberbullying campaign, Circle of Respect, which came up with the scenario and illustrates it here. The tips are good, basically saying: 1) Delete the comments and consider blocking the user; 2) Report hate speech (comments on race, gender, or disability); 3) If physical threats (which are illegal) are involved, talk with a trusted adult about whether to call 911; and last but far from least: 4) Be respectful yourself – treating others with civility is protective. I base that on a finding published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine in 2007: that aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of victimization. For a much more thorough guide to parenting in the video age, see kid-tech expert Warren Buckleitner in the New York Times. [Meanwhile, the Italian government is getting considerable flak for proposing new Web-video rules that would require users to get clearance from the Communications Ministry before uploading their videos to sites like YouTube, The Standard reports.]

Related links

Our "Top 10 Safety Tips for Video-Sharing" at ConnectSafely.org

"Parents face a new frontier: Setting electronic limits," with some individual family strategies in the Washington Post

Why "soft power" parenting works better here in NetFamilyNews.

Texting good 4 spelling & reading: Study

In a study of students' texting habits, the British Academy British Academy found no support for the "negative media and public speculation" around young people's texting. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports, "the kids who used more 'textisms' – abbreviations such as “plz” (please) and “l8ter” (later) [shouldn't that be "l8er"?] – showed higher scores on some spelling, phonetics, reading comprehension and other English language competency tests." The study's authors are Coventry University psychology Profs. Beverly Plester and Clare Wood. In three separate studies of groups of 60-90 8-to-12-year-olds, they found, among other things, that 1) "the proportions of textisms that kids used in their sentence translations was positively linked to verbal reasoning; the more textspeak kids used, the higher their test scores" and 2) "the younger the age at which the kids had received mobile phones, the better their ability to read words and identify patterns of sound in speech." [See also "Major study on youth & media: Let's take a closer look"]

28 students suspended for cyberbullying

A Seattle middle school recently suspended 28 students for involvement in a Facebook page that put down another student, the Seattle Times reported. I'm not sure what suspension does to stop cyberbullying, but I was glad to read that 1) the hate page probably wasn't on Facebook for more than 24 hours and that 2) "school staff talked with [the suspended students] and their parents, and the principal plans to hold assemblies for students and meetings for parents to discuss appropriate and safe Internet use." Here's UPI's coverage. [See also "School cyberbully wins free-speech case" and "The power of play: Cyberbullying solution?".]

'21st-century statecraft' at home & school

Live on the Web, I was just listening to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton's call for 21st-century statecraft (as well as the need to protect free expression online) and couldn't help but think about how much we need to respect, teach, and model good citizenship at home and school (here and in every country) – using the media kids use and love – in order to realize Secretary Clinton's vision for Internet freedom. She spoke of the need to "create norms of behavior among states." Absolutely, but we need to start here at home, promoting and modeling norms of good behavior online and in homes and classrooms using the social (behavioral) media and technologies where so much kid behavior occurs now. I just reviewed a major study, the Kaiser Family Foundation's, about how much youth are using media, and while some are appalled at the time spent with media, are they thinking about how so much of that usage is outside of school, because we block social media and cellphones from school – leaving young people completely on their own to work out social norms? What a missed opportunity! Secretary Clinton also called on us to focus on the needs of youth. Doing so must include understanding how they use media, not just how much. Let's begin now consciously to model and teach the good digital as well as real-world citizenship and "statecraft" that will be protections to free speech, our countries, and most especially our children – at school, in virtual worlds, and all the other places where they spend time. [See also "Digital risk, digital citizenship" and "From users to citizens."]

Major study on youth & media: Let's take a closer look

With its fresh, sweeping look at the media lives of US 8-to-18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation's just-released "Generation M2" is a tremendous service to parents and educators – but also a subtle disservice. The latter, because it looks at kids' and teens' experiences with today's media through the lens of yesterday's, the mass-media culture we adults grew up in. "The story of media in young people’s lives today is primarily a story of technology facilitating increased consumption," the authors write, even while a growing body of research shows that the youth-media story is actually more about sharing, playing with, and producing media, individually and collectively, than consuming it. But more on that in a moment. First, the findings....

1. The data

As "one of the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information on the amount and nature of media use among American youth," this is also Kaiser's third such study (the first two were done in 1999 and 2004), so it shows usage trends. "Generation M2" also zooms in on individual media and devices, behaviors such as multimedia multitasking, and gender and ethnicity differences in the data. Here are some highlights:

Nothing but more (almost): Youth media consumption has grown from 6:21 hours/day five years ago to 7:38 today, and they now "pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes of media content into those 7.5 hours a day." The breakdown: Movies and print, 0 growth; 47 more min./day for music/audio; 38 more min./day for "TV content"; 24 more min./day with videogames; and 27 more min./day on computers (though I'm not sure why computers are called media, when they're more delivery devices). Age-wise, the biggest media-use growth spurt is "when children hit the 11-to-14-year-old age group," when total media use goes up a whopping 4 hours a day (from 7:51 for kids 8-10 to 11:53 for those 11-14).

Much more mobile: All that growth in media use was "driven in large part by ready access to mobile devices like cell phones and iPods," according to the study's press release – cellphone ownership for 8-to-18-year-olds went from 39% to 66% and iPods and other music players from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players. Of course parents know that kids spend more time doing everything besides talking on their cellphones (games, music, photo-sharing, video-viewing, etc.: 49 min./day; talking 33 min./day). This study did not consider texting a form of media use, it says, but it did find that people in grades 7-12 spend an average of 1:35/day texting.

"Parental control": About 30% of youth "say they have rules about how much time they can spend" with various media. But children who do have rules at their house spend almost 3 hours less time with media a day than those with no rules.

TV leads in more ways than 1: "TV remains the dominant type of media content consumed, at 4:29 a day," and 64% of 8-to-18-year-olds "say the TV is usually on during meals; 45% say it's on "most of the time"; 71% have a TV in their bedroom; 50% have a videogame console in their room. The authors did say that this latest study found for the first time that TV-viewing on *TV sets* went down 25 min./day between 2004 and '09, but TV-viewing on other devices more than offset that decline: 24 min./day online; 16 a day on MP3 players; 15 a day on cellphones. "All told, 59% (2:39) of young people’s TV-viewing consists of live TV on a TV set, and 41% (1:50) is time-shifted, on DVDs, online, or mobile.]

Media use & grades: With the caveat that the study "cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades," the authors write that 47% of heavy media users ("the 21% of young people who consume more than 16 hours of media a day") say they usually get "mostly Cs or lower," compared to 23% of light users. ["Light users" are the 17% who consume less than 3 hours/day.] Book reading held steady over the past five years at about 25 min./day, but magazine and newspaper reading are both down ("from :14 to :09 for magazines and from :06 to :03 for newspapers").

Favorite Net uses: In terms of time, social networking unsurprising topped the list (74% of people in grades 7-12 have profiles), but – surprising to me – they spent only 22 min./day at it, followed by gaming (17 min.) and checking out video sites (15 min.).

Girls & boys: Girls spend more time than boys in social sites (:25 vs. :19), listening to music (2:33 vs. 2:06), and reading (:43 vs. :33), but not by all that much. The real gap shows up in game playing and video use: console games (:56 boys vs. :14 girls), computer games (:25 vs. :08), and sites like YouTube (:17 vs. :12).

2. Removing the mass-media filter

So are we looking at all this data largely from the context of the media environment we grew up in, where media were consumed, professionally produced (much of it for entertainment), and government-regulated? As we read, are we worried that new media are just a waste of our kids' time, a distraction, or even a potential health problem (Kaiser's study appears in its "Media & Health" practice)? The Kaiser report is riddled with the words "consume" and "consumption," when really what youth do so much more with media now is blog, share, post, text, discuss, remix, and produce, often collaboratively, as mentioned above. As sweeping as this study's scope was, a study about their consumption is only a small part of today's youth-media equation.

The report refers to "screen media" vs. "print media," when what can appear on that Net-connected screen is virtually all traditional media as well as the new, user-generated kind – because the Internet increasingly mirrors all of human life, the behavioral parts (from bullying to mentoring) as well as the consumables (from great literature to research to frat party photos) and creative productions (photos, tunes, videos, podcasts) are there too. Yet, when referring specifically to young people reading text on the screen, the report cites "the latest advice column on a fashion website or a classmate’s posting on a social networking site," not peers' blog posts, videos or other creations.

This study wasn't about the informal learning going on in social media, but that needs consideration in the context of youth media use. [A question asked in the 1999 Kaiser study – about whether time spent using the computer was mainly entertaining, killing time, or learning something – was in fact dropped for the next two studies (see pp. 46 and 47).] It's important to keep in mind that extensive research into how youth use social media at home, in school, and in after-school programs shows that a lot of learning, not just entertainment, is going on in their media use. In its 2008 report, "Living and Learning with New Media," the Digital Youth Project found that, "by exploring new interests, tinkering, and 'messing around' with new forms of media, [youth] acquire various forms of technical and media literacy.... By its immediacy and breadth of information, the digital world lowers barriers to self-directed learning." In a paper on videogame-based learning, Digital Youth Project lead investigator, Dr. Mimi Ito, wrote last fall that "online groups mobilizing through games like World of Warcraft, [alternate-reality game] I Love Bees, or [virtual world] Whyville have demonstrated the possibilities of new forms of collaborative problem solving and collective action which exhibit properties of scientific inquiry."

Probably since the beginning of modern-day-style adolescence, parents have had to adjust to unnerving new kinds and uses of media, but today's media shift is an order of magnitude different: Not only is it mobile, multimedia, multidirectional, user-produced, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one; it's all mixed up with traditional, professionally produced media in the same "place" – the Internet, via proliferating devices – and it's social and behavioral (see "Youth, adults & the social-media shift"). It's asking a lot of us adults, so there's a strange need for both patience (with ourselves and each other as we adjust) and urgency (to hurry up and adjust!). There's also a need to be alert to mass-media biases in what we read about youth and social media and open to the positive as well as negative implications.

Related links

"Kids pack in nearly 11 hours of media use daily," by my ConnectSafely co-director, Larry Magid, at CNET and his audio interview with the study's director Kaiser Family Foundation vice president Victoria Rideout, where she makes 2 interesting points: 1) how hard it is to categorize kids' media use when it's so fluid (it would be a lot easier if the study were youth-centric, not media- or tech-centric), and 2) how most of kids' media use right now is what might be called passive and non-productive (which is no surprise when we block social media from school and leave them on their own in new media – see "School & social media: Uber big picture").

"If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online" in the New York Times, or did that headline writer mean watching TV, as the study actually suggests? The Times reports that "the study’s findings shocked its authors," then cites the view of Boston pediatrician Michael Rich that it's "time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment."

"Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project"

"Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-olds"

"Youth, adults & the social-media shift" here at NetFamilyNews

Haiti relief from kid virtual worlds

As we mention in our VW safety tips, some worlds offer opportunities for charitable giving in the "real world" – even for up-to-the-minute relief efforts like Haiti's. For example, Sony's FreeRealms.com offers $10 donations for Haiti with purchases of specific virtual goods in-world; GaiaOnline.com "is matching up to $10,000 in donations to the Red Cross and setting aside a dedicated forum for discussing and coordinating relief efforts by its users"; and Sanrio's HelloKittyOnline.com "is gearing up for a guild-based event asking teams to craft virtual goods in a race to build up a donation to Doctors Without Borders and an aid effort to Haiti," VirtualWorldNews.com reports. Other charitable teen and kid worlds are MyYearbook.com (whose users have donated $250,000 so far), WiglingtonandWenks.com, and Xeko.com. Meanwhile, Haiti's only film school, Cine Institute, is now rubble, but its "young filmmakers have been tirelessly been documenting" the earthquake's, tech education pundit Derek Baird blogs. They've been using social media to share eyewitness reports via Twitter, Vimeo, and the institute's own site, Baird adds. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, N.Y., this Friday, there will be a very "real world" Haiti Solidarity Benefit organized by students at Global Kids and the High School for Global Citizenship.

The cost of cellphone service choice?

If people at your house think the Nexus One phone is cool, they're right, but they still need to think twice about various costs. The new Google phone is a pricey option to begin with: $539, "not including service fees by T-Mobile, Google's first service partner" if untethered from a T-Mobile service fee, the Washington Post reports. But if the buyer changes his or her mind and wants to end service early, the penalties "could amount to $550 in early equipment return and contract cancellation fees," the Post adds (not mentioning that T-Mobile does have a month-to-month plan with no termination fee, but probably higher-cost up front). This when the FCC is reviewing early termination fees at Verizon Wireless. Part of the cost of choice and being an early adopter, but he or she will want to make the adoption long-term! Another possible disincentive for parents looking at phones for their kids is Nexus One's lack of parental controls right now (this will change as apps proliferate for the phone). Speaking of third-party apps, there's soon-to-roll-out software from Taser for "a variety of smart phones" that will allow parents to see just about everything incoming and outgoing from a child's phone, described by ConnectSafely.org's Larry Magid at CNET, asking if using it would be overparenting. Here, too, is a Common Sense Media video on how to set the parental controls Apple put on the iPhone and iPod Touch. [Meanwhile, ReadWriteWeb.com cites a Gartner projection that mobile app stores will make $7 billion this year, up from $4.2 billion last year (even with about 80% of apps offered for free. Apple's App Store represents about 99% of the app biz right now.]

Haiti mobile-relief update

The Red Cross reports that $22 million had been raised via cellphones for Haiti earthquake relief (about a fifth of the $112 million in total donations), the Washington Post reports. The previous cellphone fundraising record was a mere $400,000.

Haiti mobile-relief update

The Red Cross reports that $22 million had been raised via cellphones for Haiti earthquake relief (about a fifth of the $112 million in total donations), the Washington Post reports. The previous cellphone fundraising record was a mere $400,000.

Social Web's help for Haiti

With emails from President Obama, tweets in Twitter, and cellphones sending “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief," fixed and mobile social media are raising millions for Haiti earthquake relief. Yesterday (1/14) may've been "the biggest day for mobile giving to date, CNET reports, adding that Facebook said its users "have been posting more than 1,500 status updates a minute containing the word Haiti." The New York Times reports today that "the American Red Cross, which is working with a mobile donations firm called mGive, said Thursday that it had raised more than $5 million this way" and "nearly $35 million" in general by Thursday night, "surpassing the amounts it received in the same time period after Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami." This is an important media story for classroom and dinner-table discussion, but parents and teachers will also appreciate this "teachable moment" for new media literacy. Because, unfortunately, "with any urgent call for donations often comes a rash of scams that can pilfer cash or result in identity theft," another CNET post warns. The article offers advice for applying critical thinking to texted, posted, and tweeted solicitations – and so does the FBI.

Moderator wisdom: Virtual worlds' youth-safety experts

Virtual worlds are a red-hot topic these days, probably because of their rapid growth and the US Federal Trade Commission's report on their content (see "Related links" below). I can think of two more reasons to add: ConnectSafely's brand-new safety tips for parents (shameless plug, links below) and insights from master virtual-world moderators in a recent 3-part series on the subject at ShapingYouth.org and in a white paper, "How to Moderate Teens and Tweens," at eModeration, London-based provider of community management in 31 languages.

Three points – one each about moderating kids, tweens, and teens – really leaped out at me as I read these contributions (just a sampler of the insights in them), and I think parents will find them helpful:

1. Two types of virtual-world moderators: In Part 3 of Shaping Youth's series, eModeration describes how virtual worlds are evolving, as illustrated by moderation techniques: The more traditional silent moderator "stays in the background, blocking offensive material from participants, warning users, defusing confrontation and reacting to abusive or illegal behavior. The second and increasingly popular type is the in-game moderator, who actively participates as a character or avatar ... encouraging children to explore and try new things and have as positive experience as possible, but stay safe and secure while doing so.” Gazillion Entertainment's director of user engagement Izzy Neis describes the former as the "elephant in the corner"; eModeration compares the latter to the fun, engaging host of a kids' birthday party. I think the latter type – because kid users tend to look up to this cool, fun "older avatar" – presents a tremendous opportunity for modeling civil behavior and good in-world citizenship.

2. Tween VW behavior is as dynamic as the real-world kind. Moderators are finding that, just as tweens move back and forth between children's play and playing at being adults in the real world, they do the same in virtual worlds. EModeration's Littleton quotes Neis as saying, "It's not always one or the other – often tween users balances between the two, depending on how their day went, or what escapism they need, or what reinforcement/acknowledgement they crave. They're taking the experiences they've had, applying imagination and exploring new territory (mainly adult situations)." She says virtual worlds see "the same playground problems kids have every day: bullying, heartache, betrayal, etc." That's why it's just as important, as we say in our VW safety tips, for parents to talk with their kids about what's going in their virtual worlds as what's going on at school. But moderation in all things (no pun intended). Kids also need some space. Virtual worlds, Neis says, "provide an outlet and a chance to develop other aspects of their personalities [which] they feel unable to explore during real life for fear of rejection, or sometimes they're just trying something to try it - an opportunity to fail without physical consequence.”

3. The delicate balance between over- and under-moderating teens: An experienced moderator in the UK, Amy Rountree, told Littleton that “moderating [youth] 16+ communities is about balance." She says that, if virtual world rules and moderators are too heavy-handed, users go elsewhere. If the moderation's too easygoing, both the company and its users are at risk. This echoes what we say at ConnectSafely.org about safety on the social Web: If parents are too controlling, kids – who have many workarounds and access points – tend to go "underground" to sites parents may've never heard of, to friends' houses where rules are more lax, to establish alternate "stealth" profiles and accounts parents aren't aware of, etc., etc., all of which spells even less parental input and guidance. Kids are safer when parents, like moderators, find the balance between "over- and under-moderating" and keep the communication lines open (see also "'Soft power' parenting works better").

Note Tamara Littleton's bottom line in her white paper: "Our view is that if you [a virtual world company] are inviting teens or tweens into your online space, you are in effect throwing a huge round-the-clock party for them. And what parent in their right mind would send out invitations worldwide, then leave the keys to the liquor cabinet with their 15-year-old and go away for the weekend?"

Related links

ConnectSafely.org's virtual world safety tips for parents of kids and teens, and tech policy expert Adam Thierer's review of them

"Virtual Parentalism," by Washington & Lee University law professor and dad Joshua Fairfield – the first of three parts at the Tech Liberation Front blog

Crisp Thinking's thinking on VW safety: SocialMediaPortal.com's interview on "detection and analysis of inappropriate online behavior" with Rebecca Newton, head of safety at Crisp Thinking, a provider of moderation technology for virtual-world companies

Shaping Youth series on moderating kids, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

"How to Moderate Teens and Tweens" by Tamara Littleton, CEO of eModeration

The FTC's "Virtual Worlds & Kids: Mapping the Risks"

My virtual world news roundup last month last month

Virtual world numbers

"Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world Users"

From comic-book panic to sexting panic

Compare sexting to the comic book panic of the 1950s, a thoughtful commentary in the Boston Globe suggests. "Huh?" you might say? Yes, back then, "a broad swath of the United States was convinced that crime and horror comic books were turning the nation’s children into murdering, raping monsters. Hearings were held, and eventually federal authorities pressured publishers into creating the Comics Code, an industry standard that neutered what had been a vibrant, eccentric - and yes, oftentimes provocative - form of American art." Hmm, isn't it interesting that each previous moral panic seems to have happened just long enough before the current one that the current generation of parents has no memory of it, and therefore lacks the kind of perspective that would help protect us from "the outrage industry" that exploits parental fears? Must be a conspiracy! Writer Jesse Singal continues: "We’re wired to be protective of our young, so it will always be much easier to convince people that children are at risk than to argue otherwise. That’s why these moral panics rage through the country at regular intervals. In the 20th century alone, marijuana, rock music, Dungeons & Dragons, Satanic cults, and first-person shooters have all seized the minds of American parents. And yet each successive generation graduated to adulthood largely undecimated." Actually, this is good. It's an opportunity for parents to practice the critical thinking that protects us against group think and fear-mongering, so we can teach our children critical thinking from experience! [See also "Why technopanics are bad."]

Tech-induced mini generation gaps?

That's what the New York Times's Brad Stone has noticed, citing examples like his only-just-verbal 2-year-old calling his Kindle – a device he says he's not completely sold on – "Daddy's book." But even 9- or 10-year-olds wouldn't call it that – it wasn't ubiquitous enough when they were "growing up." Now all sorts of Kindle-like handheld readers are coming out. They – the Alex, the Que proReader, the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid, the tablet Apple's supposed to announce soon, and the "smartbooks" aimed at teens I blogged about earlier – were all over the Consumer Electronics Show floor in Las Vegas this past week, Stone and Nick Bilton report in another article. But, to the generational question, I wouldn't call them mini generations just because the term itself suggests solid starts, stops, and gaps that I'm not seeing, even at my house, with five years between two teenage and almost-teenage kids. The whole construct doesn't allow for all the individuality and diversity so evident in young people's (and everybody's) use of new media and technologies. I think kids' tech use has more to do with their interests (and those of their friends, of course) than their ages, and I'm seeing more social flow across age groups in this generation than in mine. I guess what I'm saying is that it's not the technology that dictates kids' tech use so much as the kid who uses the technology (and not entirely either way). If that was clearer than mud, argue with me – here or in the ConnectSafely forum!

And as for these new "books," I don't care what devices we get into school, but we do need to get social media into school, pre-K through 12, all classes – to narrow the gap between formal and all the informal learning kids are doing with social media outside of school, make school more relevant and interesting to students, and get school doing for social media what it has done for books for hundreds of years: guide and enrich students' experiences with them (see "School and social media: Uber big picture"). I'm pleased to see others saying this too now. Here's Nicholas Bramble in Slate: "Schools shouldn't block SNS." [See also "From digital disconnect to mobile learning" and "School & social media."]

State senator wants to criminalize teen sexting

US states are all over the map where sexting legislation is concerned. While Vermont decriminalized sexting by minors, Indiana is considering a law that makes it a juvenile crime. WTHR TV in Indianapolis reports that, in order to send Indiana children the message, "Do not sext," state Sen. Jim Merritt (R) is working on a law that would make texting sexually explicit messages and photos a juvenile violation." "Senator Merritt says other similar sexting bills will likely be filed as well and he would like to eventually see adults included under the law too." Texas A&M psychology professor Christopher Ferguson sent a great response to the Indianapolis Star in a Letter to the Editor: "I share Merritt's concerns about responsible teen behavior and the potential risks of sexting. However, criminalizing sexting is the wrong response as it only harms teenagers who engage in this behavior more rather than teaching them responsible behavior." The real solution, Ferguson writes, is "increased education," including adding the subject of sexting to sex-education classes in schools. I agree. Or at least health class – not some sort of non-contextual, government-imposed add-on to the curriculum called "Internet safety" aimed at covering the whole gamut of risks online. That's almost like trying to teach a course on all the risks of life, since the Internet increasingly mirrors it, and have we thought about how well students will respond to a class focused on all the negative consequences of using the media and technologies they find so compelling?!

Let's teach constructive use of media and technology in context. When children learn history or social studies, they learn about community, citizenship, social justice – a natural place to include online community and digital citizenship. When learning
writing and composition, classes discuss plagiarism and academic ethics, the place where online-style, copy-and-paste plagiarism needs to be covered too. Sexting has its right place largely in discussions about adolescent sexual development. If malicious intent is involved, then sexting needs to be discussed in the context of bullying, including cyberbullying, for which many schools have programs. In any case, education is the key. I was encouraged to see that the Associated Press led its coverage of a recent sexting survey with a quote from a 16-year-old saying he probably wouldn't send a sext message again, knowing that sexting could bring felony charges (see this). [Here's earlier coverage on what other states have considered.]

The decade of the social Web (fixed & mobile)

The '00s were when Web 2.0 hit – the increasingly mobile social Web, from desktops to laptops to gameplayers and smartphones, that spelled a media makeover as radical as the printing press did nearly 500 years ago. Why so radical? Well, maybe people felt the realtime one-on-one conversations of the telephone were just as radical in their time, but now we're talking realtime multi-directional, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, multimedia, user-produced and professionally produced, un-regulatable conversations and productions and environments all through the same "pipeline" and appearing on multiple, often mobile devices of all sorts and sizes. Robert Sibley of the Ottawa Citizen asks if what I just described is good, quoting Samuel Morse quoting the Bible when he tapped out the first message by telegraph in 1844, "What hath God wrought?" As radical as this shift we're experiencing is, if God hath wrought it, I think it wasn't the media so much as change itself that He or She wrought, since change is truly the only constant. The current change in media and technology will certainly change us, as media shifts always have, but the changes are always both good and bad, for example the ability to photograph and share with distant grandparents a kid's hockey goal or a brand-new-baby photo in realtime is enabled by the same technology that instantly mass-distributes the nude photo of a minor who could later be prosecuted for producing and distributing child pornography.

This is a scary juncture in media history, as we collectively figure out how to preserve the good and mitigate the bad things about it, but it also presents – impels, really – a tremendous opportunity for us to pool all our forms of expertise and find solutions in the collaborative way these complex problems call for. It's also calling upon us to develop unprecedented critical thinking skills, the kind that grasp the implications of behavior (ours and others') as much as content, because media are social, or behavioral, now. If we can answer that call and collaborate in a more multi-disciplinary way then ever before, civilization might actually advance because of new media.

Some people, however, seem to think this juncture is just unprecedentedly bad – especially where youth are concerned. In his long, reflective essay, Sibley cites the view of Emory University Prof. Mark Bauerlein that social networking teens "never grow up," remaining "narcissistically embedded in 'gossip and social banter' instead of attending to the knowledge they need to be mature and responsible adults." There is actually a lot of opposing evidence that social media are not just about "gossip and social banter" to youth - see this three-part interview with Stanford University cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito by author Howard Rheingold.

But if you feel youth indeed are growing up more slowly, author Po Bronson agrees. In a Newsweek blog post, he suggests, however, that the fault lies in our over-protectiveness, not in social media. He cites the view of author Joe Allen that "our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time." Bronson's referring to Escaping the Endless Adolescence, by Drs. Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen.

Hey, you can see from my essay yesterday that I worry, too, about the impact on youth of portable, 24/7 exposure to the drama of adolescent social lives, but I think it's way too easy to blame the technology and I also worry – a lot – that all this fearing of or, at best, adjusting to, the new media environment by us adults is causing this regrettable over-protectiveness of our kids and distracting us from doing our job, parenting, which includes helping our children develop the most protective filter they'll ever have, the one that'll be with them wherever they go for the rest of their lives and improves with age: the software between their ears!

Related links

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant?"

"'Continuous partial attention...'"

"School libraries: Vital filter developers"

8-year-old's new media-style 15 min. of fame

YouTube and an 8-year-old boy have gotten a whole lot of citizen marketing in the past few days – plus coverage in big-name sites like The Guardian, NPR, and the Washington Post. Salon.com called "Lukeywes1234" (the boy's YouTube screenname) "The littlest YouTube sensation." Though nothing like the Susan Boyle story (but this is just a kid who never appeared on US or UK national television), it's still about the tao of fame and sometimes power on the social Web, and its particulars are that a boy below the minimum age in YouTube's terms of service established an account; posted some goofy vlog (video blog) videos of himself; had a handful of subscribers that grew quickly, with the help of either 4chan (as cited in all mainstream media reports) or eBaum's World (explained here and mentioned in comments under The Guardian's story); ended up with some 15,000 subscribers before YouTube deleted his account; and is written up in major news outlets in several countries. The deletion of his account reportedly angered Europe-based online underground troll or prankster group 4chan, which in protest declared yesterday (1/6) YouTube Porn Day, threatening to embed porn into family-friendly videos on YouTube, as it did last spring (see this, but don't worry: Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams trawled YouTube "all day for examples [of 4chan's porn], and it's a lot easier to find real porn just about anywhere else").

Now there are nearly 250 tribute videos to Lukeywes1234 on YouTube, which has made little of all of this (but gotten lots of publicity). A YouTube spokesperson told Andy Carvin at NPR that this was just another day in the life of YouTube.

As Salon's Williams, concludes, "A boy puts up videos of himself, shot by his grandma, posturing as hero, and in the process actually becomes something of an unlikely hero. Why? Probably because, along with laughing at the amateurishness of the whole enterprise, people feel a real sense of fondness for a sweet kid goofing around with his computer." Hope so. If it's not about a bunch of juvenile adults and/or idealogues creating a lot of drama at the expense of a sweet kid. None of the coverage says how the kid has handled insta-fame (which is probably good, they're leaving him alone!) or whether the adults in his life are offering some love and perspective on all this. The online safety issue most on my mind these days is how we help all kids – not just famous ones – find time for reflection and independent thought amid the increasingly 24/7, reality-TV drama of schoolkid life (MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle writes compellingly about “the tethered self” here).

2010 social Web snapshot: Nielsen & Pew

Last year, the time Americans spent social networking grew 277%, Twitter grew 500%, and the average US worker spends five hours a moth visiting social network sites at the office. Oh yeah, and Facebook is the No. 3 site for Americans 65 and older (smart grandparents). All this is according to Nielsen's Fact Sheet 2010. As for general Internet use (not just the social part), Nielsen says there are about 195 million active users in the US, 160.3 million of them broadband users. It says broadband penetration was 93.3% at the end of last year, up 16% from 2008. Pew/Internet, however, just released some more conservative numbers showing that "74% of American adults (ages 18 and older) use the Internet – a slight drop from our survey in April 2009, which did not include Spanish interviews. The breakdowns for Net use by age and ethnicity, respectively, are: 18-29 (93%); 30-49 (81%); 50-64 (70%); and 65+ (38%); and white, non-Hispanic (76%); black, non-Hispanic (59%); and Hispanic, English- and Spanish-speaking (55%). Pew also found that household broadband penetration is at 60%, "a drop that is within the margin of error from 63% in April 2009," and that "55% of American adults connect to the internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via their laptops or through their handheld device like a smart phone."

US's mobile Web: Data snapshot

Here's the picture, courtesy of Nielsen: The number of US mobile phone users aged 13+ right now is 223 million. The number of mobile Web users is 60.7m (up 33% from 2008 and expected to double by the middle of next year). Compare the 60.7 million to the number of active Internet users – some 195 million – and it looks like the number of mobile Web users is about a third of fixed Web users right now. Within 18 months, Nielsen figures there will be three times as many mobile Web users, or about 120 million. An example of mobile Web use is video-viewing on phones. That growth is pretty exponential too: About 7% of cellphone users view video on their phones now (about 15.6 million), growing to a project 90 million by mid-2011. [One more interesting factoid: 21% of US households are cellphone-only now, Nielsen says, meaning no landlines.]

Big sign of increasingly mobile Web

If anyone had any doubts about how big the mobile Web will be, Google's release of its Nexus One phone should erase them. It's part of Google's "careful plan to try to do what few other technology companies have done before: retain its leadership as computing shifts from one generation to the next," the New York Times reports. And this shift is computing, shopping, gaming, info-gathering, communicating, photo-sharing, learning, teaching, producing, etc. on smart phones. Some pundits have been calling this "Web 3.0" (and I'm not sure what else Web 3.0 would look like). According to Nielsen, about 18% of mobile phones were smartphones last year (up from 13% the year before, and a projected 40-50% of mobile phones sold this year will be smart phones. It'll be very interesting to see how much competition Nexus One will give the iPhone, the rival it's clearly going after. Certainly, smart phone manufacturers have the youth market in mind (see this on a hybrid of the netbook and smartphone aimed at teens).

Juvenile predators: New study

Much has been reported (often with hype and inaccuracy) about “pedophiles” or “predators," with people thinking these terms only refer to adults. But a new study released by the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention offers quite a reality check. "It is important to understand that a substantial portion of these offenses are committed by other minors who do not fit the image" those terms tend to conjure up, according to the report, "Juveniles Who Commit Sex Offenses Against Minors," by David Finkelhor (director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire), Richard Ormrod, and Mark Chaffin. Here are some key findings:

More than a third (35.6%) of those known to police to have committed sex offenses against minors are juveniles (though "juvenile sex offenders account for only 3.1% of all juvenile offenders and 7.4% of all violent juvenile offenders").

"Juveniles who commit sex offenses against other children are more likely than adult sex offenders to offend in groups and at schools and to have more male victims and younger victims."

"Early adolescence [particularly ages 12-14] is the peak age for offenses against younger children. Offenses against teenagers surge during mid-to-late adolescence, while offenses against victims under age 12 decline."

One out of eight juvenile offenders – are under 12.

7% of juvenile offenders are females.

"Females are found more frequently among younger youth than older youth who commit sex offenses. This group’s offenses involve more multiple-victim and multiple-perpetrator episodes, and they are more likely to have victims who are family members or males."

77.2% of juvenile offenses committed by females occur at home and 68.2% of such offenses committed by males occur at home.

Several intervention strategies have already been proven effective in reducing recividism among child and teen offenders, and this was encouraging:"Researchers found that one brief treatment for preteens reduced the risk of future sex offenses to levels comparable with those of children who had no history of inappropriate sexual behavior."

The only reference to the Internet in the report is the recommendation that it be used to get "prevention and deterrence messages" to youth.