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.