News for the Week of February 19, 2006
MySpace in particular and social-networking sites in general dominated kid-tech news this week, but with fresh insights from a widely covered study at Northwestern University...
Blogging's upside and downside
Most of the coverage of the Northwestern study of 68 randomly selected teen blogs zoomed in on what its authors said about blogging's risks. New Scientist magazine, however, led with the man-bites-dog part of the story: "Instead of steering them away from their computers, parents should recognise that teenagers sharpen important social skills online, say psychologists and anthropologists studying internet behaviour." One of the study's authors, David Huffaker, "thinks the blog format enhances [teens'] understanding of how to build a narrative," according to New Scientist. The Oregonian had a similar lead, reporting that these social scientists are saying to parents, "Just chill. The kids are doing just fine, thank you."
The headline at Medindia.com, a healthcare portal in India, though, was more like US ones in recent months: "Teens need to exercise caution while using online blogs." Medindia cited some of the study's other findings, bearing out parental concerns: "The blogs, equal samples from male and female teens [average age about 15], were studied minutely, to reveal that nearly 70% opened up with their real names," 61% with contact information, some 30% linking to their personal home page, 44% giving IM contact details. About 50% had "stories about love affairs, infatuations, sexuality debates and homosexuality opinions"; "71% also discussed school topics, homework, grades and stuff along with music preferences."
Other academics are looking at the upside: Jodi Dean, a political science professor at Hobart and William Smith College told the Finger Lakes Times that today's highly scheduled kids, not allowed to "just hang out" as they were 20 years ago, now do so online, relatively safely. This is how they "develop socially" now, outside of the influence of the home "in an age when children's lives are regulated down to the last soccer practice." The Times also cites the law enforcement view of social-networking sites an "incredible tool for sex offenders," with Dean countering that "out of the millions of interactions made online each day, contact with pedophiles is statistically insignificant."
Clearly, the large, more general social-networking sites like MySpace (despite its music focus) have many constituencies (which is probably why some teens migrate to MyYearbook, Tagged, and other more specialized sites). Just in the coverage of the past week, there are the high school students communicating within their peer groups, mostly about what's happening at school; artists seeking notice and fans; people who just crave attention (but maybe didn't make it onto "American Idol"); young people trying on different personas or acting out fantasies in a self-discovery process (with feedback); and people seeking a kind of superficial, emotionally "safe" contact with a huge, diverse group of people. [For more examples of the latest coverage, please see the latest issue of NetFamilyNews.]
In other news...
- MySpace to get safer. That's what its parent, News Corp., is promising, the Wall Street Journal reports. "News Corp. plans to appoint a 'safety czar' to oversee the site, launch an education campaign that may include letters to schools and public-service announcements to encourage children not to reveal their contact information." The site aims to be the industry leader in safety, the Journals adds. Other measures the company's considering: blocking links from MySpace to explicit photos stored on other sites; restricting access to groups like "swingers" to people 18+; blocking search terms predators might use to locate users; and somehow encouraging users 14-16 to restrict access to their profiles to people they know.
- The Web 'hang-out.' Forget the mall. The Internet is becoming a favorite hangout and "destination" in its own right, according to the latest research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "Some 30% of Internet users go online on any given day for no particular reason, just for fun or to pass the time." Which makes hanging out just for fun tied for third (with getting the news) in favorite online activities. First and second are email (52% of Net users do this on a typical day, Pew says) and using a search engine (38%). Fun and news both got 31%.
- 14-year-old cyberstalker. Usually in the online-safety area we read about cops catching 40-something men posing as teenagers to "groom" them. But this MySpace-related story is about a 14-year-old posing as a 40-year-old to scare a peer. It's a cyberbullying story. According to the Mail Tribune in southern Oregon, investigators were preparing to subpoena MySpace for user records after a girl reported a "string" of threatening "electronic messages, escalating to phone calls and notes.... They purported to come from a 40-year-old single, white man in Medford who had an account on MySpace." But then the teen who made the threats confessed. She was expelled from the school both girls attend.
- Apple's 2 worms, security flaw. Suddenly, Mac security is looking a whole lot more complicated. The worms, both discovered last week, are basically harmless, the second even called a "proof of concept" worm. But the security flaw, discovered this week, is being called a serious one by both the BBC and the Washington Post. Here are ZDNET and the BBC on the worms, and here's Apple's Security Updates page.
- Phone as fashion statement? Actually, "fashion statement" is too shallow – tech choices are becoming more like identity statements. The New York Times article on 3G phones (that connect to the Web and play music and video) starts out by saying "gadget freak" Greg Harper is less than impressed with 3G phones and suggesting that Sprint, Verizon, and Cingular should probably be worried. The thing is, Greg looks a lot older than a teenager, and I have a feeling teenagers will be quite a bit less judgmental about the phones' functionality, and the phone companies know it. Just look at Helio, a South Korean phone company, now in L.A. too, has struck a deal with News Corp. to bring MySpace-enabled, multimedia phones to US teens and young adults, Information Week reports.
