News for the Week of June 11, 2006
Social networking was back in the news big time this week, featured in an Internet summit in California, a major series on CBS News and its Web site, on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, and in a just-released study of teen communication tools...
Monitoring MySpace
That's what increasing numbers of job recruiters and admissions counselors are doing, according to a significant New York Times report. "Researching students through social networking sites [is] now fairly typical. Many career counselors have been urging students to review their pages on Facebook and other sites with fresh eyes, removing photographs or text that may be inappropriate to show to their grandmother or potential employers. Counselors are also encouraging students to apply settings on Facebook that can significantly limit access to their pages." The Times points to one new graduate who was passed up for a summer internship because of "interests" listed in his online profile such as "'smokin' blunts' (cigars...stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex.. It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done." High school students' experiences with summer jobs and applying for college admission will be no different, if their profiles and blogs aren't already being searched for "background checks."
Young and uber-connected
First there was Generation X, then GenY, and now it's GenTech, as CBS News puts it in some of the best, most balanced coverage I've seen yet on our ultra-connected teens. We, CBS says, are "adult culture," kind of a new way to describe today's generation gap, since baby boomer moms and dads had unimaginably minimal options for socializing as kids: in person, by phone, and in writing (on paper). There is no leveling off of teen socializing online, of course: 24% more teenagers are online now than four years ago, CBS reports. One article in the CBS series is about MySpace, reported by its writer, Sean Alfano, from MySpace. Note one observation from a mom on MySpace about her teen MySpacer - that her daughter was kind of processing her feelings and issues on MySpace first, that things could come out more in person because of that process (it wasn't clear if the mom was monitoring her daughter's MySpace use, but she was a member herself). Another mom said her son Matt (15) was learning "the responsibilities attached to speaking your mind," and Matt told Sean that "he appreciated his mom checking on him to make sure he does nothing stupid," though he would tolerate no censorship of his "R-rated" profile. You can get to all pieces in the series from that first link in this item.
'MySpaceMail - not email, thanks'
A lot of parents could probably already tell, but research now shows that "for the first time, teen email use is dropping - apparently in favor of more 'instant' alternatives," IM-ing, MySpace mail and posting, phone texting, the San Jose Mercury News reports. Some kids who do have email accounts say they got them just so they could sign up for a social-networking account. Even IM growth is slowing, compared to MySpace mail. What's interesting, here, is that MySpace is a separate "universe." If adults don't have an account, they can't contact their child through it - different from being able to IM or email a child through "old-fashioned" channels.
Social Web: Only the beginning
Social networking isn't going anywhere, parents. That's the basic parental take-away from the Global Internet Summit in Laguna Beach, Calif., this week: The social Web, with all its faces - from social networking to blogging to media-sharing - is "poised to shape [the] Web's future," CNET reports. "Social networks such as MySpace.com are already challenging traditional portals. MySpace, for example, has surpassed MSN and AOL by measure of monthly page views . and its traffic equals roughly 75% of Yahoo's, the No. 1 site on the Web," CNET added, citing remarks by Safa Rashtchy, managing director and senior analyst at investment firm Piper Jaffray. MySpace had 50 million visitors in March. Not that these monster Web 2.0 sites or anyone else knows how they'll turn their huge traffic numbers into comparable revenues, but it's a safe bet they'll figure it out.
In Other News...
- Windows patches, zombies, etc. More than 60% of Windows computers have been turned into zombies, ZDNET reports, and a lot of those are home PCs. The latest PC security risk is malicious Web sites that send your computer spyware and other "malware" automatically when you click to them from a Web search engine (people need to be careful what they click on from search engines now too, not just emails and IMs). The BBC reports on that. Meanwhile, Microsoft released a bundle of security patches this week, the Washington Post reported - 12 security updates "to fix at least 21 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and other software, including 12 flaws Redmond labeled "critical." PC owners, if you haven't automated patching, go to WindowsUpdate.com.
- 'Mosquitotone' on your kid's phone? Have you heard about this ringtone yet? Mosquitotone is a ringtone that most adults can't hear, and it's propagating among teen cellphone users wordwide as we speak. Reportedly it all started with a shopowner broadcasting this sound outside this store to repel teen loiterers who apparently were scaring off customers. "The original Mosquito device is a small black box that looks like a speaker and emits pulsating sounds at a frequency around 17 kilohertz -- a range that is audible to relatively undamaged young ears but generally harder to hear for those older than 20," the Washington Post reports. It went from there to a wildly popular line of subversive ringtones that do a great job of getting back at the original concept. Here's the New York Times's coverage.
- Teens & 'terrorist' charges. It's becoming widely known that teens act out in social-networking sites. As I reported last week, police in Dallas know there's a difference between gang members and gangsta wannabees in MySpace. Still, in this post-9/11 era, charges are escalating. "Schools cracking down on students who plot violent attacks against classmates and educators are increasingly turning to a new form of prosecution: charging the suspects as terrorists," USATODAY reports. "Typically, students involved in such crimes are charged with offenses such as conspiracy, attempted assault or making bomb threats. But prosecutors say state legislatures now allow them to get tough - with charges that permit longer sentences - to prevent attacks such as the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., which left 15 people dead, including the two teenage gunmen.
