News for the Week of October 08, 2006
Google's acquisition of YouTube was all over tech news this past week, and I'll get to that (see "In other news"), but there's an interesting trend to highlight in youth-tech news:
Social networks: Powerful change agents?
A young person with a heartfelt idea and access to 100 million people on a social-networking site can help change the world now. Bich Ngoc Cao was an employee of MySpace, and it was because of her that the site (now with more than 100 million people and 3 million bands registered) launched its Rock for Darfur campaign this week, the Washington Post reports. Rock for Darfur, whose logo was designed by Cao's younger brother, an art major, aims to raise money and awareness for the situation in western Sudan, where "more than 400,000 are dead so far, and more than 2 million Sudanese have been displaced by the Arab Janjaweed militia in what the United Nations has called an ethnic cleansing campaign against black Africans." Bich Ngoc Cao had been interested in the crisis in Sudan, took a class on the history of genocide at the University of Southern California, and then last spring "traveled from her home in Los Angeles to Washington for the rallies on the Mall," according to the Washington Post. "When she returned home, she approached her employer to figure out if they could do something for the cause." Who knows what might happen in Sudan if other social sites join in, then join up with other activists pushing for an end to the genocide?
Social activism on social networks is blossoming. Other projects include YouthNoise.com, a social network that's entirely about social consciousness and activism and was founded by Save the Children, and a new one: Stand Against Violence. It's a campaign of ROCK SAFE, the safety awareness and social activism arm of MyCityRocks.com, which is a network of city-based, arts-focused social sites that got its start as HoustonRocks.com. Performing bands and musicians are a big part of the Stand Against Violence campaign's local rallies. This is a trend to watch, people: social networks as agents for change and humanitarianism.
In other news...
- Google + YouTube. Google's acquisition of YouTube could be a step forward for youth online safety on the hugely popular video-sharing site. It'll probably take longer for YouTube to hire a full-time "online-safety czar," as News Corp. did not long after it acquired MySpace, because copyrights and intellectual property are the No. 1 controversy of this high-profile deal. "The purchase was announced after the two companies reached several licensing deals with media companies, which could help ease concerns about copyright violations on YouTube," the Wall Street Journal reports. But being acquired by a public company usually lends a measure of corporate responsibility, and children's online safety will probably be part of the equation at YouTube too. YouTube does not screen the thousands of videos people upload to it daily, and Google Video says it does (see Google's page on video content). The Wall Street Journal reports that YouTube's purchase price is $1.65 billion, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt indicates in the article that the social-networking aspect of YouTube (users create their own profiles) was part of its attraction for the search giant.
- Contact with strangers. About 900 US 14-to-22-year-olds nationwide were asked if they use social-networking sites, and about 60% said yes. About 40% of those social networkers, both male and female, said yes when asked "whether a stranger, not known to them or their friends, had ever contacted them online without their consent in order to get to know them." The researchers asked if they'd ever actually met strangers offline. "Only 3.3% of young people who use social-networking sites reported such meetings. However, the survey did not ask about the purpose of these meetings, which may well have had nothing to do with sexual predation," reports the Annenberg Public Policy Center in its paper on the study, adding that "the rates of stranger contact are remarkably similar for males and females." Notable also: "The rate of such meetings [3.3%] was actually quite comparable to those who do not use social-networking sites, 2.9%, a statistically nonsignificant difference. Given that online stranger contact is more likely on social -networking sites, it appears that the contacts made on these sites are somewhat less likely to result in offline meetings than those that occur because of other Internet uses, such as instant messaging, chat rooms, or dating services," the researchers found.
- Who's social networking? If anyone thought it's just teenagers, there are fresh numbers to clear that misconception up. Web traffic measurer comScore looked at the top four social sites' traffic in August and found that MySpace and Friendster "skew older," and Xanga has the youngest users. ComScore led with the finding that more than half of MySpace users are now 35+, and I was interested to see that Facebook has just about as many users in the 35-54 age group as in the college- age group (28-24) - 33.5% and 34%, respectively. As for the youngest users, 12-to-17-year-olds made up 11.9% of MySpace's traffic, 14% of Facebook's, just 10.6% of Friendster's (whose minimum age is 16), and 20.3% of Xanga's. "MySpace.com has the broadest appeal across age ranges," says comScore, with 40.6% of its users 35-54 and 11% 55+.
- Videogame wars. The "war on terrorism" is being fought in the world of videogames too. First there was "Quest for Saddam," now there's a "Quest for Bush," which allows players to assassinate the US president. "Quest for Bush is a 'mod' - or modification - of the 2003 game Quest for Saddam by California-based Petrilla Entertainment. The company sold about 3,000 copies of the game," the Washington Post reports. The anti-Bush game, released by the Global Islamic Media Front, "a radical organization that has ties with al-Qaeda," is "the latest - and most extreme - addition to a small but growing list of Islamic videogames, monitored by the Defense Department and much blogged about in gaming circles."
- Socializing all over the Web. This is something we've been saying in online-safety talks, and it's good to see other people making the point: Social networking is all over the Web, certainly not limited to the site your child's peer group hangs out in. "The trend tabbed 'social networking' is vastly broader than MySpace, and its components are quickly being incorporated into hundreds if not thousands of Web sites, ranging from autos to music and even shopping," reports PopMatters.com.
