Gen F's workplace

Not sure why, but this is the first reference I've seen to "Generation Facebook" - though it could be used interchangeably with "Gen Digital." But whatever they're called, but the point being made in this Wall Street Journal blog is that the people who've never known life without the Internet will be changing the workplace, which means the workplace will be very different for their younger siblings when they're ready to enter it - and on and on - parental and school "control" of social media notwithstanding. Baby boomers might call some of these 12 features "written into the social DNA of Generation F" subversive, but what's subversive now will soon be normative. You've got to read blogger Gary Hamel's descriptions of all of them, but some of the 12 are: "Intrinsic rewards matter most," "Users can veto most policy decisions," "Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it," "Resources get attracted, not allocated," "Intrinsic rewards matter most," and "Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed."

100 million+ Spore creatures

Timely news, in light of the very viral "pig sniffles" subject, as CNET put it: Thanks to the Spore Creature Creator there are now more than 100 million such creatures in the wild. And the Creature Creator launched less than a year ago, USATODAY's Game Hunters report. If you want to do your own fact checking, go to Sporepedia for the exact number.

Where 160-character texts (& tweets) come from

A year ago, US cellphone users (not just teenaged ones, who sent a lot more) sent an average of 357 texts per month versus an average of 204 voice calls, the Los Angeles Times reports, but how did they arrive at 160 characters for the max length of text messages? Well, it was an interesting thought, research, and experimentation process that started with a guy in Bonn, Germany, named Friedhelm Hillebrand back in 1985, when "the guys who invented Twitter were probably still playing with Matchbox cars." Hillebrand was "chairman of the nonvoice services committee within the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a group that sets standards for the majority of the global mobile market." That group decreed that "all cellular carriers and mobile phones ... must support the short messaging service (SMS)," the Times reports. Hillebrand, it adds, was also the man who discovered the pipe or channel for all those texts, "a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks."

The role of betrayal in sexting

Well put: "A brokered trust leads to broken trust when those photos are sent into the ether," writes Ellen Goodman in a column about sexting in the Boston Globe. The vast majority of those naked photos are sent to romantic partners, experts say, with "a guy saying, 'You don't trust me? You won't send me a naked picture?'" And what happens later that can lead to serious psychological and legal trouble (the wider sharing of those photos) is often about betrayed trust. Little of this is new - photography (remember Polaroids at parties?), brokered and betrayed trust in relationships, sexism (betrayed girls get called sluts while the betrayer gets to go ruin someone else's reputation). What is new is the *extra* unintended exposure (party Polaroids could possibly be obtained, ripped up, and tossed). That exposure is mostly bad. Goodman led with the bad part - high-profile cases of teens being subjected to truly nasty peer behavior or overzealous prosecutors or both (Vermont, Utah, and Ohio are all trying to reduce the possibility of criminal charges for sexting, the Globe reports). But the one ray of light is that there's a national discussion about the need to "Trust but verify," adjust laws and apply them appropriately, and "raise the social penalty for being a certified creep."

Texting sex education

"Why do guys think it’s cool to sleep with a girl and tell their friends?" is one of the (easier) questions North Carolina teens have texted to the Birds and Bees Text Line, a project of the Durham-based Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina. "Within 24 hours, each will receive a cautious, nonjudgmental reply, texted directly to their cellphones, from a nameless, faceless adult at the Campaign," the New York Times reports. The answer - from staff member James Martin, 31, married and dad of a toddler - was: "Mostly it’s because they believe that having sex makes them cool. Most guys outgrow that phase." The Times cites epidemiologists and public health experts as saying that sex education in the classroom is "often ineffective or just insufficient," and North Carolina has the 9th-highest teen pregnancy rate in the US. Certainly, teens are much more engaged in education delivered through their cellphones! But of course the program is not without controversy (though the Campaign hasn't received complaints from parents yet) - some opposing organizations recommend that parents turn off texting altogether on their kids' phones so they can't access the hotline. Pls see the Times for details, info on other such programs in the US, and examples of much tougher questions, among them: "If I was raped when I was little and just had sex was it technically my first time when I was raped or when I recently had sex?" James Martin got it while getting ready for bed. "He read it and sat down abruptly. His wife asked what was wrong. He wrote three drafts. An hour later, he texted back: 'Your first time is whatever you make it. There is no ‘right’ answer: I believe your first time can be many things (good, bad, fun, embarrassing, wonderful) but it should never be nonconsensual. Your first time is the first time you choose to have sex, not when some horrible person forces you.'"

Ed campaign on sexting in Oz

Not at all surprising (because what are borders or continents, where social technology's concerned), the New South Wales government is educating its teens about the risks of sexting too. "The government has produced a fact sheet for schools, parents and young people to warn about the possible lifetime consequences of the growing practice," the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The NSW minister of community services told the Morning Herald that her department "had received reports of girls as young as 13 sending sexually explicit images to their boyfriends' mobiles, which are then passed on to other friends." Like in the US, youth are being warned that the practice is illegal. Interestingly, there's nothing in either the article or the Community Services Department's Fact Sheet on Sexting about the risk to children of being convicted for producing, possessing, or distributing child pornography, as can happen in the US (though there are efforts in some US states to take criminal prosecution off the table). The NSW Fact Sheet refers to the risks of "public humiliation, cyberbullying, or even sexual assault." For US-style info on sexting, check out our tips at ConnectSafely.org. Meanwhile, the Australian federal government has appointed a Youth Advisory Group of 305 11-to-17-year-olds to "advise the Government on strategies to tackle online bullying," NEWS.com.au reports.

Where will online teens go next?

Some of us are watching to see if, now that so many parents are joining Facebook, teens will migrate somewhere else (see this post, suggesting that mobile texting might be a sign of diversification vs. mass migration). In her YPulse blog, Anastasia Goodstein just asked a good (related) question: "Should Large Social Networks Give Teens Their Space Back?" Teens have always needed to have hangouts of their own, away from parents (online too, now). I posted a comment to that effect at YPulse but want to blog about this too because I think the social network space is in a bit of a transition right now, and parents and teens might want to think together about and weigh in on this.

Where online socializing's concerned, I can see merit to both sides of the debate - on one hand, that teens deserve their own space and should have their own social network sites and, on the other, that it's more "normal" or reflective of the "real world" for sites, worlds, and games such as MySpace, Facebook, and World of Warcraft not to age-segregate.

Some social sites and services - such as YourSphere.com, Teen Second Life, and a forthcoming service called "My Secret Circle" - make segregation an actual safety feature, but I think segregation for safety will slowly be replaced by segregation by interest - people sharing interests such as fairies (as in Disney's PixieHollow), slopestyle skiing (as in NewSchoolers), or teens who aspire to be professional writers (as one teen told me is her reason for spending time on YourSphere). Segregation by interest brings a measure of safety with it, I believe, but you may be asking why I think segregation for safety is losing steam....

Because it's a response to the predator panic teens and parents have been subjected to in US society, not to the realities of youth on the social Web. What nearly a decade of peer-reviewed academic research shows is that peer-to-peer behavior is the online risk that affects many more youth, the vast majority of online kids who are not already at-risk youth offline (see the 12/08 Internet Safety Technical Task Force report's Executive Summary). Segregating teens from adults online doesn't address harassment, defamation, imposter profiles, cyberbullying, etc. It may help keep online predators away from kids (even though online predation, or abuse resulting from online communication, constitutes only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation, according to UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center), which is a great outcome, but it's not enough unless all that parents are worried about is predators. A long-winded way of explaining why I think age segregation is losing steam: the facts are emerging, and parents, schools, policymakers, and businesses will increasingly respond to reality rather than hyperbole (call me an idealist, but isn't this the way it works?) - please post if you disagree.

So my vote's with diversification. Teens will simultaneously: 1) continue to diversify their platforms and channels for socializing (social sites have lost a percentage of teens' social/leisure time to texting on phones, but I think also to a lesser degree to massively multiplayer online games and gaming communities like Xbox Live and Sony Home); 2) stay in the giant, general-interest social network sites just because that's where everybody is and these really are social utilities that for teens have replaced email, chat, IM, etc. as separate social tools; and 3) also increasingly hang out together in vertical sites and other quiet corners of the Web where parents aren't around.

As for Anastasia's question about whether the giant sites should give teens their space back? I don't know about should because I'm sure she'll agree the business question is would they? And the answer is no, because their massive-traffic business models won't allow it. The logical question is where the social Web's natives and early adopters will choose to go not just to hang out, but to do the amazing array of things they use the fixed and mobile social Web for: keeping in touch, comparing class notes, designing, software writing, fiction writing, commentary writing, video producing, being entertained, job seeking, marketing, activism, solidarity - generally just the digital version of living. The answer to that, necessarily, is a vast and growing number of social media and technologies. I don't think it's going to be a giant monolithic thing like social networking again. But I definitely could be wrong about that. Please tell me if you disagree, especially if you know what the next big thing is!

Related links

"Living and learning with social media: Many American youth are embracing a wide array of social media as part of their everyday lives," a talk given by social media scholar danah boyd at Pennsylvania State University

For some background on social networking in general: "The Life and Death of the Social Network: The Glory Days Are Over"