News for the Week of October 01, 2006
Of course one of the top teen-tech stories this week was about teen pages and congressmen instant messaging on Capitol Hill, in particular former Congressman Mark Foley in what has quickly become known as "the Foley scandal" (see CBS News). Two brief take-aways for parents: 1) Note that Foley was not a stranger to those pages, so "don't talk (or IM) with strangers" doesn't really work with teens (see "Non-stranger danger" and "Net crimes against children: Reality check"); and 2) IMs aren't captured and recorded (unless key-logger monitoring software is installed on the computer where it happens), so a lot of confidential conversation can happen in IM, and parents need to talk with their kids about who they're IMing with. Talking is far better for keeping open communication going with our online kids than surreptitious monitoring.
Another top story was "friending" (and "de-friending") on the social Web...
The friending part
In an in-depth, eye-opening article recently, USATODAY looked at one kind of MySpace use: "friending," leading with Brittnie in Columbus (17), who has 5,036 friends. Some - probably high school "queen bees" or wannabes - would see this as a sign of Brittnie's social status, others (including her peers) as ridiculous or even "creepy," as one of the article's teen sources puts it, given how many people on that list Brittnie actually knows. A lot of people see it as another kind of online game that doesn't necessarily represent anything in real life (and one that can turn sour if No. 7 in your Top 8 friends is in your real life and feels she should be No. 1). Because even this aspect of MySpace is very individual. For example, writer Janet Kornblum mentions one person with 1,327 friends who says she has "standards" for who's on her list - such as no bands or films (who can also be "friends") whose content you don't actually like, or no friends who post sexually suggestive photos or videos. But as involved as friending is, it would be simplistic to believe this is all there is to social networking.
'Defriending' is tricky!
It's a lot easier to friend, young people are finding out. A lot of people are nervously making all this up as they go along because, as a 27-year-old social networker told the Boston Globe, online society really hasn't developed social norms yet for adding people to, positioning them on, and deleting them from friends lists, and the social sites aren't offering etiquette advice. Friendster.com, one of the oldest social sites, is sometimes also called "Acquaintancer" and "Dumpster" by users, the Globe reports. One user has 126 people on her friends list and doesn't entirely know if she knows them all. "Her Friendster account is part of a group called 'Somerville'," according to the Globe, "meaning that anyone in that group profile is connected to her as a 'friend' and has access to her page. [She] - who uses Friendster to keep track of former roommates, neighbors, and childhood friends who are no longer in her daily life - is thinking of sending a news bulletin on Friendster to let her contacts know she's going to clean up her friends list and explain why."
In other news...
- Explicit high school gossip, threats. As of this writing, police in the Athens, Ga., area were searching for the person who anonymously posted on a MySpace profile sexually explicit gossip about dozens of high school students. "The site, which was up on MySpace between Sept. 1 and 9, was a 21st-century version of a bathroom wall," the Athens Banner-Herald reports. "The writer - who claimed to be female in an online profile - posted a long list of relationships and supposed sexual encounters of dozens of students." The Associated Press this week reported that "since gossip isn't a crime, the sheriff's report lists the offense as distributing obscene materials to minors." In a separate case and another Georgia high school, a freshman boy posted his MySpace page a "hit list" of people he wanted to harm, the Athens Banner-Herald reported. The 15-year-old boy "was charged early Thursday morning with making terroristic threats" and taken into custody.
- Malware on MySpace & other social sites. It's a growing problem, and of course the more traffic a site gets, the more attractive it is to the creators of deceptive bulletins and "poisonous banner ads," as PC World puts it. ArsTechnica cites a just-released study finding that "83% of adults on social networking sites . admit to downloading unknown files from user profiles, despite not being sure about their contents." The percentage of teen users would be interesting to know. The PC World report leads with the experience of MySpace user Robyn who got a bulletin from a friend inviting her to check out some new photos. "She new the friend in real life, so she went ahead and clicked the link" and got her PC infected. Tell your kids to be very careful about what they click on in IMs, and the same goes for social sites. Another thing to be alert about is boxes that pop up saying "you have to sign in to do that," when people are already signed in. That's usually a hack that steals people's user names and passwords. PC World says that one in every 600 pages on the social networking sites "hosts some form of malware" (spyware, Trojan software code, etc.), and goes on to tell social networkers how to defend themselves and their computers from "money-minded malware authors."
- New anti-gambling law. "On a Black Monday for the online gambling industry, companies that operate Internet betting sites and payment systems lost billions of dollars in market value after the US government moved to criminalize the processing of online wagers," the International Herald Tribune reports. Over the weekend Congress passed a law "that would make it a crime to use credit cards or online payment systems to make bets over the Internet." The US is "by far" online gambling's biggest market, according to the Herald Trib. President Bush is expected to sign the law in a couple of weeks. In light of this development, you may be interested in the story in this site about a 19-year-old who has been putting himself through college playing poker online.
- Wal-Mart out of SN, Army isn't. It kind of goes to show you can't fool social networkers. Wal-Mart's stab at a social site called "The Hub" has ended. "The site, temporarily launched this summer as a promotion for the start of the school year, aimed to copy Myspace et al by encouraging 'hubsters' to set up their own personalised Web pages," e-Consultancy reports. Maybe Wal-Mart should've established a profile at MySpace instead, as the Army and Marines have (see the Asia Times). It'll be interesting to see how military recruiting on the social Web goes. The Army plans to reach parents, too, according to the Asia Times commentary, through AOL, "where it will launch "a social networking site for parents."
