Mobile Web's arrived

"The mobile Web is here, and it's huge," reports Chris O'Brien in the San Jose Mercury News. This from a reporter who started covering telecommunications in 1999 and heard at countless mobile industry trade shows that "next year is when the mobile Internet really takes off." As evidence, sure there's the iPhone nearing its goal of selling 10 million unites, the coming new, non-business-y versions of the BlackBerry, Google's new Android OS for mobile phones, and the "countless developers rushing to build new applications" for phones. "But more than anything, my recognition of this moment is based on personal experience." He got the BlackBerry curve and "I've been completely shocked at how indispensable it's become and how it's changed the way I work and communicate," and he's not a gadget freak and this isn't his first BlackBerry. This one's his mobile computer, where he manages all his email in odd moments, reads his news, comments on friends' profiles, sends his Twitter tweets, posts to his blog, snaps and sends loads of pictures, and - through GPS-enabled software called Telenav - finds the nearest ATM or coffee spot wherever he is. Add game-playing, which is not on Chris's list, and you're looking at how our kids use phones. Good filtering between their ears is increasingly the best online-safety "application." See also "Tweens are into phones", with Nielsen Mobile research showing that 26% of US 8-to-12-year-olds owning cellphones (46% using them) and 77% of US 13-to-17-year-olds owning them.

Online harassment or bullying?

Does online harassment become cyberbullying when it's repeated aggressive behavior? Is it bullying only if it's related to a child's experience at school? Are insults posted in social-network profiles harassment while posting of compromising photos of a peer constitutes bullying? These are tough questions still being debated. What does seem to be emerging is the sense that "bullying" is more severe (causing more emotional distress and potentially involving physical threats) than "harassment." Ultimately, the definition may be as much about the victim as the perpetrator - how capable he or she is of shrugging off the mean behavior. Justin Patchin, co-author of the new book Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard, emailed me about my post on defining cyberbullying last week. He posted a thoughtful response in his own blog at Cyberbullying.us, suggesting that online harassment may by default included the repetition factor just because mean posts and images can be re-posted and shared on the Web and mobile devices. About linking online bullying to offline life, "we agree that those incidents that have proven most hurtful typically involve a personal relationship (the target knows the offender in real life)," Professor Patchin writes. "That doesn’t mean, however, that we should simply disregard those behaviors that are carried out among “strangers” online. They too can result in harm." Absolutely! I also think technology can be used not only to express an existing power imbalance between harasser and victim but also to help *create* the power imbalance a would-be bully wants to set up. While we're on the subject, check out this Las Vegas Sun editorial about how some Nevada schools are intelligently working with student activists to address online harassment in the context of violence and intimidation and to teach conflict resolution. The Sun's editors commend Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE), a national organization that has nearly two dozen chapters in Nevada (here's more on SAVE).

Turning music biz upside down - again

First there was iTunes selling single tunes at 99 cents a pop; then you could rent digital songs for a monthly subscription; now there's the way of MySpace, with free tunes "brought to you by...." (right, advertising). The new MySpace Music just launched . With it, the Washington Post reports, the free tunes "can be played only on personal computers connected to the Internet.... Anyone who wants to transfer a song to a portable device like Apple Inc.'s iPod will have to buy the music through Amazon.com Inc.'s year-old downloading service, which sells songs for as little as 79 cents apiece." The music sold via MySpace won't contain DRM-style copy protection, which makes it more share-able - as MySpace leverages what the social Web is all about: sharing stuff with your friends. The site lets its users create "an unlimited number of playlists containing up to 100 songs apiece, a sharing concept similar to music services already offered by Imeem and Last.fm," the Post reports. Warner Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and EMI Music are all participating, as are Sony ATV/Music Publishing and The Orchard. Independent labels (representing about 9% of the US digital-recorded music market) want in too, apparently. The Financial Times reports.

The ISTTF: Chicken or egg?

"ISTTF" stands for Internet Safety Technical Task Force, the result of an agreement last January between 49 state attorneys general (minus Texas) and MySpace. The emphasis is on the word "technical," because the attorneys general basically charged the task force, of which I'm a member, with reviewing technical solutions to online youth risk - "age verification" technology being their stated predetermined solution of choice. Why? Because they're law enforcement people. They deal with crime - not all these other subjects that have come up in online-youth and social-media research - so they probably feel that this is all about crime and technology, so some technology that separates adult criminals from online kids, or that somehow identifies every American on the Web, is what will make the Internet safe for youth.

The problem is, we now know - via a growing body of research - that young people's use of technology for socializing is not limited to MySpace, to social networking in general, or even to the Web. Youth don't even focus on what technology or device (phone, chat, blogs, IM, Skype, computer, Xbox Live, Club Penguin, World of Warcraft, etc.) they use when they're socializing. They just communicate, produce, and socialize. So the "problem" is not technology. We're dealing with behavior, learning, adolescent development, social norm development, and identity formation, here. What technology is going to give adults (those who want it) control over that, or somehow sequester American youth into American sites that are compelled to verify ages, or separate adults and children across the entire universe of increasingly mobile, device-agnostic communications, media-sharing, and social activity?

Besides, we also know now that only a tiny percentage - well under 1% - of US youth are at risk of being victimized by the kinds of crimes the attorneys general put the Task Force together for, and this minority is, unfortunately, already at risk in "real life." Technology probably doesn't have much of a chance at curing the age-old struggles of troubled youth - certainly not ID verification technology.

The other thing we know, though we adults don't think about it a whole lot, is that the "problem" is changing - fast (it actually won't be that long before our teenagers are parents!). Because nobody's brains are fully developed till their early 20s, teens need our input, but so do we need theirs. For the most part, youth understand what's happening with tech and the social Web, they're the drivers of it, they're changing (growing up), and technology is changing faster than we can keep up with it, so we don't have anything close to a static "problem" to get a fix on, much less to fix.

Which leads me to the chicken/egg question. The first day we heard at least a dozen presentations by purveyors of various technologies, many of them focused on verifying either ages (very hard with US minors, who under federal privacy law have very little verifiable personal information in public records) or identities. By the end of the day I couldn't shake off the unnerving picture of a roomful of baby boomers (digital non-natives, including me) - many of whom barely understand the "problem," much less the full picture of young social Web participants, and some of whom stand to gain a great deal from selling the Task Force on a particular technology for nationwide adoption - trying to assert control over the unruly social Web. The understanding is growing, not least because the Task Force has a research advisory board as well as a technical one, and the former is right now completing a review of all research on youth online safety to date - the first of its kind. This is brilliant! So what's wrong with this picture? Seems to me the research comes first, then - as we understand the problem - we begin to look at what the solutions should be.

The second day we heard from a Rochester Institute of Technology sociology professor with a background in law enforcement. It's an important study (I'll blog about it more next week) because it looks at Internet use by more than 40,000 Rochester-area students all the way from kindergarten up through 12th grade, and it offered the Task Force insights into the peer-on-peer, noncriminal but negative and sometimes unethical and illegal side of the online-safety question. But youth were referred to in an extremely negative adversarial way, first- and second-graders referred to as "perpetrators" and "offenders." For example, the "four types" of middle-school "online offenders," he said, are "generalists, pirates, academic cheaters, and deceiving bullies." As useful as the data is, I don't feel this is productive language to use when trying to change behavior or inspire children about digital citizenship (see my description of an amazing such project at Bel Aire Elementary School in Tiburon, Calif., here).

So there you have one person's (rambling) perspective. There are others available now - that of Adam Thierer of the Washington, DC-based Progress & Freedom Foundation and a more radical one from CNET blogger and Berkman fellow Chris Soghoian. [The Task Force is hosted and chaired by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.]

Your views are always welcome - in our forum here, posted in this blog, or via anne[at]netfamilynews.org. With your permission, I love to publish your views for the benefit of all readers.

Federal judge allows students' suspension

The 10-day suspension of two eighth-graders in Pennsylvania school was in response to their creation of an imposter MySpace profile representing their principal "as a pedophile and a sex addict, among other things," ArsTechnica.com reports. In its coverage of the ruling, the Student Press Law Center reports that US District Judge James "wrote in his opinion that the arguments fell into three categories: 1) Were Snyders’ First Amendment rights violated by the school?; 2) Were the district’s policies unconstitutionally vague and overbroad?; 3) And did the school violate the Snyder’s parental rights?" He answered all three in the negative, saying the oft-used Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District was about the censoring of political speech not the "lewd and vulgar" speech in the fake profile. "Munley instead analyzed Snyder’s speech under three different student speech rulings by the US Supreme Court," according to the Student Press Law Center, in particular "Bethel School District v. Fraser, which said public schools could 'prohibit the use of vulgar and offensive terms in public discourse" and "Hazlewood School District v. Kuhlmeier, which said 'educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of speech so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate, pedagogical concerns.” An attorney for the ACLU said the judge "failed to recognize that a school cannot restrict a student's speech 'anywhere it is uttered' simply because it's vulgar and targets a school official."

Research: Great cross-pollination

This really makes sense: a new research lab that brings together experts in technology, sociology, physics, economists, psychologists, and social media - even digital ethnography - doing both quantitative and qualitative research. Microsoft is establishing this research lab in Cambridge, Mass., at a time, I think, when interdisciplinary work has never been needed more. So far the facility "has a team of 33 researchers, students and interns ... from MIT, Harvard, Stanford University and Hebrew University," Computerworld reports." One project lab director Jennifer Chayes describes is the development of "math models that account for [digital ethnographer danah boyd's] observations [through thousands of interviews with teen social networkers] about the way social networks are layered, and that there are different kinds of friendships." We can only hope Microsoft will share findings that would advance public discussion and understanding.

Landlines out the window?

Well, not quite, but the number of people abandoning landline phone service is rising, especially among youth. JupiterResearch found that 12% of Internet users don't have fixed phone service and almost two-thirds of the 12% are between 18 and 34, the New York Times reports. Another 12% "indicate their intent to replace home phone service with exclusive cellphone use during the next 12 months," the Times adds. Still, fixed phone use is still pretty high: 70% of Net users still have fixed lines in their homes provided by a phone, 15% have fixed phone service from a cable company, and 3% from an Internet service provider.

Flight attendants want filters

US flight attendants really don't want to become the porn police of the sky. Leaders of the US's flight attendants' union (representing some 19,000 airline workers) including American Airlines flight attendants, asked AA "to consider adding filters to its in-flight Wi-Fi access to prevent passengers from viewing porn and other inappropriate Web sites while in-flight," CNET reports. Several airlines are testing wireless access right now. CNET adds: "The truth is that it hasn't been a major problem on flights thus far. In fact, American Airline's spokesman Tim Smith told Bloomberg that the 'vast majority' of customers already use good judgment in what's appropriate to look at while flying versus what's not."

Battle of the MMOGs?

With "MMOGs," I'm referring to massively multiplayer online games, and the "battle" that's shaping up is between 10 million-member World of Warcraft and just-launched Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. USATODAY says the newcomer might "siphon off" some of WoW's success, but there's probably room - if not in players' schedules, then - in the huge and growing MMOG market for a lot of new games. A few facts about MMOGs in general and WoW in particular: The US market alone (WoW has players in many countries) is "expected to amount to about $800 million this year," up from $700 million last year and $332 million in 2004," USATODAY reports, citing data from market researcher DFC Intelligence. WoW players spend $40-60 up front to buy the game's software, then $15/month to play. Warhammer is published by Electronic Arts and was created by Mythic Entertainment. [See also this item about when WoW passed the 10 million mark (about a quarter of those players are in North America).]

More bloggers in hot water

Bloggers are getting more attention from lawyers, these days. They're "starting to receive legal letters when they upset someone with enough money to hire a media lawyer," the Financial Times reports, and "defamation, offensive messages, incitement, compromising intellectual property, linking to illegal websites, and inaccurate reporting can all get you into hot water, regardless of whether you are a blogger, journalist, publisher or an e-mail user." This is an opportunity for all of us - parents and young people - to learn more about their free speech rights. "Just 5% of internet users are clear on their legal rights and responsibilities when posting comment online," the FT cites a law firm's research as showing. The study found that 77% of bloggers are "uncertain or unaware of where the law stands."

A teacher on texting

High school teacher Allison Cohen asked 90 of her students about their texting practices where school and academics were concerned and then wrote about it. But in this insightful article at bNetSavvy, you'll not only find her students' views but also hers and those of fellow teachers as well. If parents have concerns about cellphone abuse at school, do check this out.

Tweens are into phones

If you want some data to back you up when your middle-schooler tells you that "Everybody has a cellphone," Forbes.com has some. Citing Nielsen Mobile research, it reports that "46% of US tweens (ages 8 to 12) use cellphones, but only 26% own them" and about 20% are using parents' hand-me-down phones. The 20% who don't own them borrow them from Mom or Dad. "About 50% take their parents' phones more than three times a week." Nielsen says that 8.5 is the average age when kids start borrowing parents' phones, and 10 or 11 is when they start owning their own. Ages 13-17 is when "phone use soars," with about 77% ownership in that age range. And how is the bill footed? Family plans: 65% of tweens. Prepaid, pay-as-you-go plans: 30%. "By age 18 to 24, most pay for their own mobile usage."

'Cyberbullying' better defined

This is important, people, because we've heard the one-third-of-US-teens-have-been-cyberbullied figure a lot (I've shared it too), and it's not in the best interests of online youth for the now-subsiding predator panic to suddenly now turn into a cyberbully panic. It's not that the one-third figure, arrived at by two highly credible sources (Pew Internet & American Life and Profs. Patchin and Hinduja) is wrong, of course; it's that "cyberbullying" really needs to be more clearly defined. Are all those kids actually bullied?

"In many cases, the concept of 'bullying' or 'cyber-bullying' may be inappropriate for online interpersonal offenses," write researchers at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC) in the Journal of Adolescent Health. "We suggest using 'online harassment,' with disclaimers that it does not constitute bullying unless it is part of or related to offline bullying. This would include incidents perpetrated by peers that occur entirely online, but arise from school-related events or relationships and have school-related consequences for targets."

To understand more about online harassment and to what extent it could be bullying, the study's authors - Janis Wolak, Kimberly Mitchell, and David Finkelhor - looked at "the characteristics of harassed youth, online harassment incidents, and distressing online harassment," based on whether the harasser was someone known in real life or online only.

The authors found that "9% of youth were harassed online in the past year," 43% of them by known peers and 57% by people they met online and did not know in person.... Most online harassment incidents did not appear to meet the standard definition of bullying used in school-based research and requiring aggression, repetition, and power imbalance."

So, note those key characteristics of bullying to look for:

1) related to "real life"
2) not just aggression, but repeated aggression
3) a power imbalance.

"Only 25% of incidents by known peers and 21% by online-only contacts involved both repeated incidents and either distress to targets or adult intervention," the authors found. Just looking at that first number, that's 25% of the 43% of the 9% - a pretty small number of actual cyberbullying victims.

So when we see data showing large numbers of such victims, it's good to be aware that they can include random and even mild incidents of harassment that don't really cause stress - and could just be someone in a bad mood one afternoon who feels like acting out. "Cyberbullying" deserves to be taken with a grain of salt. In any case, teaching young people citizenship of both the real-life and digital sorts will help mitigate any behavior that falls into that large category.

[The CACRC article was published a year ago last August - apologies that I missed this one, probably because of overseas travel at that time.]

Related links

From Forbes, the very well reported article, "How to Stop Cyber-Bullying"

"Why kids don't tell on cyberbullies"

"Cyberbullying grows bigger and meaner with photos, video"

"Online bullying should be a criminal offense," Canadian teachers say (I wonder if their US counterparts agree)

"Internet program teaches harms of bullying to elementary students" in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Standing up to cyberbullies," Q&A with Mike Donlin, who "manages federal technology programs and cyberbullying education and prevention efforts" for the Seattle public schools

In School CIO magazine, a three-part series and primer on online harassment with the very unfortunate headline of "Terror in the Classroom" - Parts One, Two, and Three.

"P2P healing in cyberbullying case"

Letters to a Bullied Girl: Messages of Healing and Hope, by teen authors Olivia Gardner, Emily Buder, and Sarah Buder

Cyberbully.org and the book Cyberbullying & Cyber Threats from the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use

CyberbullyHelp.com from Patricia Agatston, Susan Limber, and Robin Kowalski, the authors of Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age

Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard, a new book from Profs. Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin.

9 parts of digital citizenship

These make complete sense ("complete" as in comprehensive, too). The nine elements grew out of a three-year PhD dissertation project by educator Mike Ribble at Kansas State University. Mike defines "digital citizenship" as "the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use." The nine elements are Digital Etiquette (I think I'd use the broader term "ethics," which includes standards of conduct); Digital Communication; Digital Literacy (sub-categories might be media literacy and behavioral critical thinking); Digital Access ("full electronic participation in society," Mike writes, but I'm not sure "electronic" is the best word); Digital Commerce; Digital Law ("electronic responsibility for actions and deeds" - I'd delete "electronic" and include taking responsibility for a basic understanding of digital law); Digital Rights & Responsibilities ("those freedoms extended to everyone in a digital world"); Digital Health & Wellness ("physical and psychological well-being in a digital technology world"); and Digital Security (self- and collaborative protection of one's data and equipment). [Ribble describes all of these in great depth on that page.] I think twice wherever anybody puts "electronic" or "digital" in front of "communication," "ethics," etc. because of the disappearing distinction between digital behavior and the real-life kind, certainly as young people experience it. Hey, ethics is ethics, right? [Thanks to Anne Bubnic of the California Technology Assistance Project for pointing this page out.]

Web service for masking phone nos.

This is an interesting tech tool pointing to a growing safety need, but it poses a problem where online kids are concerned. I'm referring to the age-old problem of technology: that along with its many positives, there are downsides, and everybody gets more out of the positives when alert to the downsides too. So here's the new service: BeeMask.com, which allows people using online chat to "take it to the next level," so to speak - move from text chat on the Web to voice chat on the phone without giving out their phone numbers. How it works: 2 people in a chat room go to BeeMask.com and register (give the site their phone numbers instead of each other). If they're already registered, they just agree in the chatroom on a common word (like a temporary password, "talk2ya"), then go to BeeMask, both type that word into the box, and "when the second Beeword is entered, a phone call is connected between your real-life phones," according to the site's FAQ . Great for two adults who just want to talk but aren't quite ready to give out phone numbers - a safety feature, in fact. Not so great if someone with bad intentions thinks a child might be more easily compelled to give out further info in a voice conversation.

Cellphone-thief 'torture'

Instead of "big brother" technology, we might want to call this "annoying little brother" technology, where you can spy on and torture anyone who makes off with your cellphone. The only problem is, your kids might want to get their phones stolen so they could play mind games with the thief, it seems, as I read this description of "Maverick Secure Mobile," to be available first on Nokia phones, a New York Times blog reports. Here's how it works: After the phone's stolen and all the boring encryption and data transfer to the phone of a family member, the fun/torture can go like this: You'll be able to see all the calls and text messages the thief makes and/or you’re your phone and listen in on his conversations. "Then, when you get really exasperated, you can make the phone play a blaring siren. Just when he is about to toss your screaming phone in the trash, you can send him a text message with your name, location and, if you want, a reward for returning the phone." The software, now in beta, will be available first on Nokia phones.

Ever more mobile social Web

Like our children now, we in the future may have so many people in our phone address books that we'll need help remembering where we met them. At least that's what Yahoo's new social app for phones seems to illustrate, as just-unveiled oneConnect expands its market from young early adopters to us. "The centerpiece is a tab called Pulse, where it integrates Facebook, Twitter and other networks on to the same page. That's where you can see the latest status updates and photos uploaded, and with one click you can get to that person's address card. On the address card, it lists how you know that person, through Facebook or MySpace, for example," the Washington Post reports. For now, it's only for the iPhone. That was just one of the social features announced at the latest CTIA trade show. Verizon Wireless unveiled SocialLife, allowing users "to view messages, approve or deny friend requests, post comments or photos, and update status or profiles on their mobile phones," the Post reported separately. SocialLife, at $1.49/month, "works with MySpace, AsianAve, BlackPlanet, FaithBase, GLEE, LiveJournal, MiGente, Photobucket, Rabble and MTV Tr3s. SocialLife costs $1.49 a month." Verizon Wireless also has a deal with Facebook called "Ringback Buddies," with which Facebook users can browse, buy and manage their ringtones from within Facebook and view their friends' favorite music (and buy it) to play when those friends call. Finally, an email company, Visto, announced its "living address book." Basically it puts all your social networks into one place on your phone. "The service includes Yahoo!, AOL, Google Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Photobucket, and sends out notifications of new pictures, posts, and other events from your favorite contacts."

Cellphones for social status: Teen survey

A nationwide survey of US teens found that they feel "cell phones have become a vital part of their identities," CNET reports, citing the survey of 2,000 13-to-19-year-olds by Harris Interactive and sponsored by CTIA, US cellphone carriers' trade association. "They also believe that they can gauge a peer's popularity or status by the phone he or she uses." Phones outrank jewelry, watches, and shoes as social-status signs, teens said. About 80% of teens carry a cell phone, double the percentage in 2004, and "almost half" having one is 'key' to their social lives. Other key findings: Respondents said they spend almost the same amount of time texting as talking, and 47% said their social life "would end or be worsened" if they could no longer text; 57% "credit mobility for improving their quality of life; 52% view phones as a new form of entertainment; 80% say their phone provides a sense of security while on the go, confirming the cellphone has become their mobile safety net when needing a ride (79%), getting important information (51%), or just helping out someone in trouble (35%). As for social mapping: "Ironically, while only one in five (18%) teens care to pinpoint the location of their family and friends via their cell phone, 36% hate the idea of a cell phone feature allowing others to know their exact location." Here's the study press release.

Facebook plugs security hole

The security issue was people being able to view some members' private photos using the mobile version of Facebook and the Firefox browser, CNET reports. "Basically, someone who knew the serial number of a Facebook user, which is easy to get, and knew a trick for rejiggering the URL, could see private photos of that user," according to CNET. Facebook says it fixed the flaw within hours of being notified. It also plans soon to launch a program to verify the security of third-party applications (those mini applications users download to add games, slideshows, playlists, and other features to their profiles) - an update, apparently, over the statement from a Canadian consumer privacy group in the Toronto Globe & Mail that Facebook wasn't "doing enough to screen third-party developers to ensure they're not phishing for information or trying to commit identity."

US teens' gaming highly social: Study

Digital gaming is virtually universal and very social among US teens, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found in a study it released today. "Fully 97% of teens [99% of boys and 94% of girls] ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games," Pew reports. As for the social aspect of digital gaming, 65% of teens play with other people in the room; 27% with people online; and 82% play games alone, but 71% of those also play with other people. "The gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement," Pew says in its press release.

In other key findings, 80% play five or more types of games and 40% eight or more (e.g., racing, action, shooter, rhythm, puzzles). The respondents' top 5 games were, respectively, Guitar Hero, Halo 3, Madden NFL, Solitaire, and Dance Dance Revolution. "The average rating for teens’ favorite games is just above a Teen rating," and nearly "a third of teens play games that are listed as appropriate only for people older than they are," but the average game rating for all the teens surveyed was an E10+ rating." Ninety percent of parents say they always or sometimes know what games their kids play. As for civic engagement, this was an interesting observation by the authors: "Teens who take part in social interaction related to the game, such as commenting on websites or contributing to discussion boards, are more engaged civically and politically." "Computer games drive social ties" was the BBC's headline and "Can games make your kid a better citizen?" was MSNBC's.

YouTube bans violence-inciting videos

YouTube has changed its content guidelines and now bans videos that involve "inciting others to violence," the Washington Post reports. Last May Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) "issued a bipartisan report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs staff that described how al-Qaeda created and managed its online media," then wrote a letter to YouTube's parent Google "demanding that the company 'immediately remove content produced by Islamic terrorist organizations from YouTube'." YouTube only removed some of them but "refused to take down most of the videos on the senator's list, saying they did not violate the Web site's guidelines against graphic violence or hate speech." A policy review reportedly ensued, with YouTube telling the Post that the senator had "made some good points." Meanwhile, in The Guardian, a commentator calls for better self-regulation by social Web sites, saying that waiting for users to flag material that's offensive or violates site terms isn't enough. "The right direction is for there to be intelligent, independently-set but industry-agreed, standard practices, procedures and guidelines for companies to adhere to. The alternative is individual organisations at best doing what they feel is right; at worst doing as little as they can to avoid denting their margins."

Hateful game gets global press

From the news coverage I've seen, it's not worth the media attention it has gotten (and here I am giving it some, tho' hopefully with a little perspective). I'm referring to an extremely offensive downloadable arcade-style game called "Muslim Massacre," reportedly created by a 22-year-old Australian man, Eric Vaughn, "known online as 'Sigvatr'" (see News.com.au in Oz). "The game begins with audio from George Bush speeches, edited together to sound like a condemnation of Muslims." This story, which may say more about how Americans are viewed from other countries, has been picked up worldwide - probably Vaughn's marketing plan. The Guardian's headline in the UK is, "More evidence that satire doesn't transmit over the interwebs," and the subhead: "A game in which your 'task' is to 'wipe the Muslim race from the face of the Earth' has, predictably, got people wound up" (interesting use of the word "race"). On this side of the Pond, FoxNews.com reports that the game "has caused international outrage." PC World's "Game On" columnist Matt Peckham says it's not worthy of the label "parody" which some online commenters are giving it; "it's just tasteless," probably also not worth being dignified by a ban.

The Spore metaphor

A perfect illustration of the mix of positives and negatives - mostly positives - that is the user-driven Web: the debut of Spore. There's a whole lot to Spore - entertainment, education, strategy, creativity, savagery.... And everything's represented in its media story: a gamemaker's (Will Wright's) world-class creativity; old-style mass-media marketing; social Web viral marketing; and users' creative ways of playing with marketing features - creativity that producer Electronic Arts had in mind and creativity it definitely did not have in mind.

In Spore you start as a microbe but you also play God and create whole worlds. Part of its genius is creator Will Wright's collaboration with evolutionary biologists and other scientists in developing the game (don't miss this fascinating New York Times piece about that science/entertainment cross-pollination, including the video on that page). In Spore, Scientific American reports, "gamers must make crucial decisions that affect the entire world in which they operate, and must then deal with the consequences of their actions. Whereas the Sims series [designed by Wright too] focuses on what happens in societies created by gamers, Spore also gives control over the evolution of an entire universe."

In the "Give Them an Inch, They'll Take a Mile" Dept. of the user-driven Web, there were the unintended consequences of Spore's pre-debut marketing tool, Creature Creator. MSNBC games editor Kristin Kalning reported that in among all the creative little organisms spawned by users of this free activity were some that violated Spore's Terms of Service: "fantastical creations of a less imaginary, more [humanly] anatomical nature" created by "pervy 13-year-olds" (developmentally speaking), Kristin wrote, and falling into a new category dubbed "sporn" (EA says it takes these illicit creatures down upon notification but of course EA has to depend on the Terms of Use and customer-service departments of other sites such as YouTube for deletions in those sites). I suspect EA may wish at times that all creature creation were tied to the actual game, where its storyline has a role to play in creature development.

Meanwhile, "there were over 400,000 creatures on SPOREpedia," the creature showcase, Kristin reports, "coming in at a rate of 1,000 per minute."

MSNBC's Kristin had fun creating three creatures herself, "my favorite being Jinx, named after my cat. It’s blue and spotted, with wings (my creature, not my cat). It has 'palmwalker' feet, a fierce bark and horns to ward off enemies. I enjoyed making it do the hippety hop." A tech educator friend of mine is already using the Creature Creator in his classroom. He reported on Twitter this week that he just installed it "on my 26 lab PCs. Can't wait to see what the kids do with this thing!"

Related links

In MTV's Multiplayer blog, Will Wright's reaction to Spore reviews

"'Spore': The evolution of gaming" in USATODAY

Mobile Spore ... for iPod and phones

Spore's own FAQ

Piracy fear campaign

Fear tactics persist in the education of youth and parents about digital issues. This time the "be afraid" message is echoed by the National Center for State Courts, Wired blogger David Kravets reports. In this case it's packaged into a 24-page leaflet in the form of a comic book which is being distributed to 50,000 students nationwide. One of the storylines is about how "criminal" teen file-sharer Megan's grandmother has to "fight eminent domain proceedings to keep her house while Megan ... deals with the charges against her." The story goes that Megan had learned "to download music from a friend. About 2,000 downloads and three months later, a police officer from the fictitious City of Arbor, knocks on her door, and hands her a criminal summons to appear in court." In fact, Kravets reports, "criminal copyright infringement is when somebody sells pirated works and not sharing on a peer-to-peer network. And it’s the federal government, not local cities, which prosecute the criminal cases." For perspective on this issue, see "Cyberethics: Downloading Music from the Internet" from University of Missouri-based eMINTS and "Young People, Music & the Internet" from London-based Childnet International.

Google Street View fear campaign

This campaign falls into the large "Predators" category of national anxiety. I'm referring to StopInternetPredators.org's campaign against Street View, the new photographic part of Google Maps. The organization is calling it "an entirely new threat to our families and children." We feel strongly that parents' fears about kid safety need to be reduced and understanding increased, so I'm pointing out a comment from my ConnectSafely co-director, Larry Magid, who wrote, "I admit, there may be some privacy concerns as a result of Google taking pictures of homes and businesses around the country but StopInternetPredators.org’s campaign to highlight child safety concerns over Google’s ‘Street View’ strikes me as absurd.... There is plenty of research [though there are many indicators now that people aren't that interested in facts, unfortunately] to show that trolling online for victims is not the way predators typically find young people to exploit. In about 80% of child sexual abuse cases, the victims and the perpetrator know each other in the real world.... If anything, campaigns like this actually increase danger to children by alarming people unnecessarily and distracting us from dealing with real risks."

Online video's huge numbers

This gives us a feel for how Web video-viewing happens to be coming along: Americans viewed more than 11.4 billion online videos for a total duration of 558 million hours this past July, comScore reports. Another way of looking at it: More than 142 million US Internet users each watched an average of 80 videos per viewer. A few more interesting findings:

75% of all US Net users viewed online video.

The average viewer watched 235 minutes of video.

91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos per viewer).

51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8 videos per viewer).

The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.

As for kid stuff in this category, a snapshot from Disney: Its Disney.com site's July video traffic - 186.7 million video streams - "broke its all-time online video record," the company announced, a 39% increase over June. Hmm, did it have something to do with school being out? Disney says it had a lot to do with High School Musical 3, the Jonas Brothers, and Miley Cyrus. [See also "Watch this video, parents."]

Direct video-uploading on MySpace

Now MySpace users can do what amounts to live video blogging. As CNET explains, direct video-uploading means "you can now sit in front of your Webcam, navigate to MySpace, and hit a 'record' button, blab on incessantly about how the Jonas Brothers are ruining American youth, and you've got yourself a piece of Web video." YouTube and other video-sharing sites have this too, but "the real advantage" where MySpace is concerned is that these little video blog posts can be embedded in your profile and comments and pointed out in bulletins to friends, CNET says. The online-safety aspect of this is that users might make a nasty verbal slip about someone or reveal some intimate part of their thinking or anatomy and .... well, guys, this is a live recording. I think it can be deleted (and not embedded) later, but that's something every user will want to check out in advance, right?

Microsoft's age-verification concept

Microsoft has created a euphemism to go with its age-verification plan: "digital playgrounds," where kids get digital ID cards so they can hang out in adult-free places online. It's part of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative that has involved other companies in a consortium aimed at tackling the Internet identity problem. The problem is "how to make the Internet safer not just for children, but also for adults wanting to conduct business, make transactions, and communicate with the confidence that the people they are interacting with really are who they say they are," CNET reports. What makes it so tough to solve is the need to authenticate people's identities without jeopardizing their privacy - especially children's, whose personal info is protected by US federal law. "Under the [Microsoft] scenario related to children, digital identity 'cards,' or credentials, could be based on either national identity documents created at birth or on identity documents schools use to determine age and identity for school registration, with parental permission. The data could be limited to age and proof of authenticity, and the credentials should be encrypted and require use of PIN numbers. As Internet News points out, dozens of other companies and groups will be presenting their proposed solutions to the Internet Safety Task Force later this month. [See also "Age verification: Key question for parents," "UK data security breach & kids," "Social networker age verification revisited," and other items on the subject.]

Videogames: 'Hotbeds of scientific thinking for kids'

They may be "tuning out of science in the classroom," as a Wired News commentary puts it, but gamers are still learning and (avidly) practicing science, Prof. Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found in a soon-to-be-published study, "Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds." She and her co-author, Sean Duncan, "downloaded the content of 1,984 posts in 85 threads in a discussion board for players of World of Warcraft. What did they find? Only a minority of the postings were 'banter' or idle chat. In contrast, a majority - 86% - were aimed specifically at analyzing the hidden ruleset of games. More than half the gamers used 'systems-based reasoning - analyzing the game as a complex, dynamic system. And one-tenth actually constructed specific models to explain the behavior of a monster or situation; they would often use their model to generate predictions. Meanwhile, one-quarter of the commentors would build on someone else's previous argument, and another quarter would issue rebuttals of previous arguments and models. These are all hallmarks of scientific thought," according to commentator Clive Thompson. The study will appear in the Journal of Science Education & Technology next spring. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that, for the first time in two years, game sales growth has slowed to single-digit.

E-coupons new in the UK

Family coupon clippers may be interested in this news. The British just got coupons - digital ones, that is. Only they're not called coupons across the pond. These are called e-vouchers. The VoucherCodes site says users can "simply enter a code into the checkout of participating [online] stores to receive an instant discount." You probably already know of some US ones: e.g., RetailMeNot.com, UltimateCoupons.com, CoolSavings.com, FatWallet.com, etc., etc.

Multitasking myths

A new study has found that multitasking during homework can slow things down but doesn't harm the performance of an academic task. "Students who send and receive instant messages while completing a reading assignment take longer to get through their texts but apparently still manage to understand what they’re reading," Education Week reports, citing the study by psychology Prof. Laura L. Bowman at Central Connecticut State University. For the research, students were divided into three groups – one that did no IM-ing while reading an assignment; one that answered IMs first, then did the reading; and a third multitasking group that chatted in IM while reading. "The third group took about 15 minutes longer than the other two groups to complete the reading - roughly 50% more time than the other two groups took. See also what "digital native" blogger Diana Kimball says about other recent research on the subject and what to do about "switch tasking," one of the types of multitasking discussed in The Myth of Multitasking, by Dave Crenshaw: "The key," she says to parents, "lies in laying out the facts and discussing strategies.... Writing a stellar book report might not be a cause compelling enough to warrant total focus, every young person will at some point find a pursuit worth paying attention to. Maybe it’s writing short stories; maybe writing music. Maybe it’s making art. But when that pursuit comes along, they’re going to want to know how to firewall their attention, focus their efforts, and - for once - stop switching." She says limiting teens' Net access doesn't work.

58% clueless about social-networking

Well over half - 58% - of 13,000 people surveyed in 17 countries said they don't know what "social networking" is, Chicago-based research firm Synovate found. Respondants' ages were 16 to 65. More than a quarter of them, 26%, are actually members of social networking sites, MediaPost.com cited the study as showing. And the most socially connected country? The Netherlands at 49%, according to a ZDNET blog post about the study, followed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE - 46%), Canada (44%) and the US (40%). As for knowing what social networking is, the Dutch topped that list, too, at 89%, followed by the Japanese (71%), and Americans (70%). Where risks are concerned, "overall, just over half the respondents who are members of social networking sites (51%) agreed that online social networking has its dangers. Brazilians were the most nervous" at 79%, followed by Americans (69%) and Poles (62%). "Least concerned are Indians [19%]. Nervy networkers’ biggest concerns were lack of privacy (37%) closely followed by lack of security for children (32%)." ZDNET, which got the number wrong in its headline, nevertheless has a great chart showing the 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-ranked social site in each of the 17 countries. I love the unpredictable diversity: Facebook is No. 1 in Canada, France, Serbia, and South Africa; MSN Spaces in Germany, Taiwan, and the UAE; and MySpace in Bulgaria and the US.

5, er, 6 new 'worlds'

More signs of where virtual worlds are heading. The new "worlds" (defined loosely as such by Virtual World News) are a service that blends social networking and a virtual-world-like (3D) online environment; two new MMOGs (massively multiplayer online game), one for peer-to-peer learning and one sort of like a World of Warcraft with a twist; a 3D-world feature for the Web browser; and technology that turns a digital camera aims into a tool for "merging the virtual and real worlds." They're being unveiled at the TechCrunch conference this week (you can watch presentations live on that Web page). In TechCrunch50.com, I watched the presentation by a founder and two young users of a sixth world, Tweegee.com, a soon-to-be-launched competitor to ClubPenguin that claims to be safe and have features not found in any other kid sites. There are so many of these popping up - Tweegee's not even on Virtual Worlds Management's list of 150 live and developing worlds for youth (see this).

Virtual Worlds field trip

One of the most interesting comments made at the second-annual Virtual Worlds Conference I attended in L.A. this week was from Jon Landau, producer of Titanic and of a project-in-progress called Avatar. Landau said, "I grew up being taught to worry about 'big brother'; with the Internet we have to worry about little brother." I don't think anybody else heard that quite as acutely as an advocate of children's online safety would. Not only is little brother watching, little brother (of any age, basically everybody on the user-driven, fixed and mobile network) is commenting, uploading, producing, entertaining, collaborating, socializing, and exploring identity, as well as creating imposter profiles, gaming the game system, sending nude phone-snapped photos, etc. We're dealing with a new set of blended conditions, with online life not just mirroring "real life" but changing it as well, in subtle ways we don't yet fully understand.

One thing that's clear from the research but was confirmed (in my head, not yet by speakers) everywhere I turned at the conference: digital ethics and citizenship have to be central to the discussion as we learn how to negotiate this new space where – definitely for kids, in any case - the line between online and offline is fading. Learning how to behave ethically in community whether digital or physical is central to children's well-being online, right now and increasingly as we move forward.

Really exciting projects are going on in and with virtual worlds in schools around the US and world. Check out the collaborative work between schools in California, Japan, and Australia at PacRim Exchange; with libraries in Teen Second Life and youth librarians of the Eye4You Alliance; on virtual islands for public school students (Ramapo Islands) in Teen Second Life; and in Second Life and New York City with nonprofit Global Kids, which aims to help "transform urban youth into successful students as well as global and community leaders" (I want to zoom in on some of these powerful projects in future posts).

I spoke with a northern California principal, Patti Purcell of Bel Aire Elementary School, about Bel Aire's six-week pilot project teaching students digital citizenship "in-world" and in the classroom with the help of children's virtual world Dizzywood. Patti told me she felt students needed a space where they could actually practice what they learned in character education, which has long been part of the curriculum. One lesson was in collaborative tree-planting. Dizzywood co-founder Scott Arpajian told me certainly any child can plant a tree in Dizzywood, but the "game" is designed so that planting gets "exponentially faster [and a lot more fun] when they help each other out." Students are given time to explore the virtual world (they're given "agency," a sense of place and ownership in-world), but the experience is structured too, with in-world activities always followed by classroom discussion. "Graduation" included presentations by the students before an audience of parents who were very interested in how character ed was taught in a virtual world. Patti said, "It's very empowering for a 10-year-old to be able to explain their space to a group of adults." Two other cool elements: students participate in creating their own code of ethics, and Scott told me Dizzywood lets them look "under the hood" - learn about how Dizzywood's techies and graphic designers create its activities and habitat (something aspiring designers and software engineers would be fascinated with).

A few general virtual-world-industry themes I picked up on (signs of where things are headed): not making users download special software, but bringing virtual environments to them right through their Web browsers; whether kid virtual worlds should "grow up" with their users (as has happened with about 10% of Whyville.net's users, now in college); predictions of a merging of social networking and virtual worlds; your avatar going wherever you go on the Web (not locked into a single virtual world); and other signs of interest in or movement toward interoperability.

Going to this conference was a déjà vu kind of experience for me. Though it wasn't just about kid products and services, it felt a lot like Jupiter Media's "Digital Kids" conferences in the late-'90s: a very young industry trying to get a fix on metrics, markets, and competition folding in lots of start-ups, a handful of well-established B2B and B2C companies (Whyville.net, There.com, Second Life, Multiverse) and one or two old, giant media players (e.g., Disney) barreling ahead, seemingly announcing a new "world" about every six months (Pirates of the Caribbean, ClubPenguin acquisition, PixieHollow.com, forthcoming Cars world). Lots of numbers were tossed around (some admitted by the speaker to be educated estimates because research is limited): a current 100 million+ virtual-world residents worldwide, 75% between the ages of 8 and 24, with virtual worlds "about to collide" with the Web's 550 million social networkers worldwide, and a current $1.5 billion market in virtual goods (e.g., weapons in World of Warcraft, clothes and furniture in Second Life). One number that has been researched – by the conference's organizers – is that there are now more than 150 virtual worlds for youth 3-17 either available or in development (see this post).

Related links

"ClubPenguin's newest competition"

"Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users"

"Here comes social gaming"

"Xbox Live with avatars"

"Benefits from having virtual selves"

Virtual World News

Kid-driven community 'newspapers'

The big city dailies could be a little discouraged. The Club Penguin Times "is more widely read than the New York's Daily News, the Chicago Tribune or the Dallas Morning News. And it's not even 3 years old," the Los Angeles Times (bravely) reports. Assuming all penguins in Disney's kid virtual world read the CP Times, its circulation is 6.7 million. And this is user-generated journalism. The paper "attracts 30,000 daily submissions from children, who pose questions to Dear Abby-inspired 'Aunt Arctic,' compose verse for the poetry corner, tell a joke or review a party or event." Someone should do a comparative study of kid virtual world papers. Possibly a precursor to Club Penguin's paper is the Whyville Times of Whyville.net, which launched way back in 1999. Yasmin B. Kafai, a professor of learning sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, told the L.A. Times that the Whyville Times "provides a mixture of standard newspaper features, such as TV reviews, along with reader-submitted essays. Such digital forums can promote literacy, Kafai said, because they encourage kids to do it on their own, without prodding from teachers or parents."

Stealth surfing further enabled

Parents who rely on browser history to keep an eye on kids' Web-surfing habits might want to know that stealth browsing is getting easier - at least for Windows PC families. Internet Explorer 8, now available in beta, "lets users surf without having a list of sites they visit get stored on their computers," CNN reports. "The program also covers other footprints, including temporary Internet files and cookies, the small data files that Web sites put on visitors' computers to track their activities." USATODAY says "anonymous Web browsing ... may be the most attention-grabbing feature in the new Beta 2 release" of Explorer 8. The good news for parents using the light, browser-history form of monitoring is that, when Windows Vista "parental controls are activated, InPrivate Browsing is disabled," Microsoft says on its corporate page about this new browser feature.

Silently advertising to teens

This is advertising that in some case kids (or their parents) possibly unthinkingly pay to see. And - they're on an unlimited-text-messages - it's probably a good idea for everybody to be aware of. As the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times reports in "Retailers know texting is the totally best way to reach teens," "sale alerts, fashion tips and sweepstakes giveaways" have definitely moved from email to cellphones. " JCPenney, surfer/skate shop Tilly's and Beall's department stores all text-messaged sale alerts and offered downloadable ring tones and cell phone games as part of their back-to-school promotions this year." The Times says that "just around the corner" are ad techniques like stores sending text-message special offers to their "club members" who pass by with GPS-enabled phones and store signs with bar codes that, when captured with a shopper's picture phone, provide full sale info on the phone by text or voice. On the other hand, MediaPost.com reports that US 12-to-17-year-olds "are not particularly receptive to mobile ads. In fact, the relative simplicity of their phones and the fact that nearly 70% of teens need their parents to pay the bill ... makes them poor campaign targets."

Silently advertising to teens

This is advertising that in some case kids (or their parents) possibly unthinkingly pay to see. And - they're on an unlimited-text-messages - it's probably a good idea for everybody to be aware of. As the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times reports in "Retailers know texting is the totally best way to reach teens," "sale alerts, fashion tips and sweepstakes giveaways" have definitely moved from email to cellphones. " JCPenney, surfer/skate shop Tilly's and Beall's department stores all text-messaged sale alerts and offered downloadable ring tones and cell phone games as part of their back-to-school promotions this year." The Times says that "just around the corner" are ad techniques like stores sending text-message special offers to their "club members" who pass by with GPS-enabled phones and store signs with bar codes that, when captured with a shopper's picture phone, provide full sale info on the phone by text or voice. On the other hand, MediaPost.com reports that US 12-to-17-year-olds "are not particularly receptive to mobile ads. In fact, the relative simplicity of their phones and the fact that nearly 70% of teens need their parents to pay the bill ... makes them poor campaign targets."

Important decision on fair use

It was an important decision for all those digital video producers and YouTube users out there. The Los Angeles Times called a San Jose federal court decision last week "a victory for fair use." Judge Jeremy refused to dismiss a lawsuit that a Pennsylvania woman filed after Universal Music Publishing forced YouTube to remove a video of her children cavorting to an old Prince hit," the Times reports. "But it may prove Pyrrhic, as the judge expressed doubt that the woman would ultimately be able to prove her case." According to PC Magazine, the judge said that "content owners must consider 'fair use' before sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices." The case was about a 29-second home video depicting little kids dancing in a kitchen to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy."

Students' online free-speech rights

Law Prof. Mary-Rose Papandrea at Boston College recently looked at "all of the various justifications for limiting juvenile speech rights" - including the in loco parentis doctrine and Tinker's material disruption test - and "concludes that none of them supports granting schools broad authority to limiting student speech in the digital media." In "Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age," she advises that, instead of making punishment or the restricting of digital speech, schools' primary approach should be to "educate their students about how to use digital media responsibly." Her article will appear soon in the Florida Law Review.

Everybody's 'digital dossiers'

Most people have no idea how many details of their lives are out there on the Net - copious detail, increasingly easy for anyone to find and put together. "These data points, some publicly accessible, others safeguarded to various degrees by companies and agencies that collect and store this data 'make' Andy's identity - as it forms, even before he himself begins to shape it," starting with the sonogram that goes into hospital records and the details behind a newborn's bar-coded bracelet. "Andy" is just a name pulled out of the air by the producers of a video on our "digital dossiers." The video is a project of the Digital Natives group at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "Andy's digital dossier will even grow after his death - photos or videos of the funeral, RIP messages on MSN Messenger, or as Facebook status posts. Andy probably never knew how large his dossier was. How aware are you of the digital tracks you leave behind?" the producers ask. At the end of it are some resources for further information about the digital tracks we leave just about everywhere we go, online or offline. Here's a description in the Digital Natives blog.

US tweens prefer to be online

US kids now prefer the Web to television, the New York Times reports. It cites research from search marketing firm DoubleClick Performics showing that 83% of US 10-to-14-year-olds spend an hour or more a day online, compared to 68% of children in the same age bracket who watch an hour or more a day of TV. Interesting note about social networking among members of this age group (most underage for popular social-network sites' Terms of Use): "Performics reported that some corners of the Internet were more popular with the children than others. While 72% of the children online belonged to a social networking site (usually MySpace), 60% of them said they rarely or never read blogs."