News for the Week of October 29 2006
As social-networking sites multiply, so do articles about parenting their most avid users. This is great. It means the coverage is no longer just about sexual predation (there are other, non-criminal risks we all need to be discussing). So the reporting is getting more granular and helpful to parents. Here's a sampler of the latest:
Parenting social networkers
The Sun-Herald in Mississippi led with the experience of 15-year-old Amanda Morris, who checks her MySpace profile about four times a day and whose mom checks it about once a month. In the same article, the Sun-Herald tells the sad story of another teenager who was expelled from school for having a handgun in her car because, she told school authorities, "she feared being physically attacked by a group of girls who recently posted threatening messages on MySpace" - an extreme example of cyberbullying that we're probably going to hear more about in the coming months, as a risk of online socializing (in IM and phone texting as well as Web sites) which will affect a great many more kids than predators gets increasing coverage. Another good sign: The same day the Sun-Herald also ran a clear-headed, balanced commentary about social networking by Chloe Harvill, high school student and member of the paper's teen advisory board.
All aspects of tech parenting
Wall Street Journal Work & Family columnist Sue Schellenberger looked at "How Young Is Too Young When a Child Wants to Join the MySpace Set?"; Business Week earlier looked at social sites for the "sandlot set"; and the Washington Post more generally considered "Mom vs. the Machines". In "Experts cite need for online parenting," the Cape Cod Times focuses on parents' general bewilderment with the social Web, and across the country the Tucson Citizen looks at teen socializing online from a southern Arizona perspective. The Vancouver Sun, in the land of what is reportedly western Canada's most popular social-networking site, Nexopia.com, in July went very in-depth on the social Web's attraction for youth and how grownups of all perspectives (parenting, law enforcement, advocacy, etc.) are handling it. Here's some good thinking in the Sun's article: "The problem, say the experts, isn't one to be solved by unplugging the computer... Just as you can't wrap your kids in cotton wool and keep them locked at home for fear they'll face risks if they go out in the real world, the answer isn't to try and lock them out of cyberspace." See also Wired News's "Teens Online: Not a Freak Zone".
In other news...
- Messy time for music - on all fronts, it seems, from not knowing what player tunes will play on to not knowing what is and isn't legal. In "simpler times," one pretty much knew the file-sharing networks were virtually all illegal. Now sites like MySpace and YouTube are both threat and opportunity to the music industry, the Washington Post reports. MySpace, on which more than 3 million bands and musicians have profiles, announced this week it would now "identify and block copyrighted music from being uploaded" by users, CBSNews.com reports. "If an infringing file is found it will be removed and if the user is a repeat offender, he or she could have their profile deleted." Meanwhile, "the CD is dead," a music industry CEO said in a recent speech, the CBC reports, and the Washington Post ably illustrates.
- Legalization vs. democratization. YouTube this week purged all video from Comedy Central, including clips from "YouTube stalwarts like 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,' 'The Colbert Report' and 'South Park'," the New York Times reports. "A week earlier, nearly 30,000 clips of TV shows, movies and music videos were taken down after the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers cited copyright infringement." But a couple of days later, Comedy Central clips reappeared on YouTube after their owner Viacom signed a deal with YouTube, a media blog reported. Who knows what these purges will do to the "People's Republic of YouTube," as the Los Angeles Times recently put it in an in-depth article on this "great leap forward in the democratization of pop culture". Will the Google acquisition shut down this latest iteration "people power"? Examples in the L.A. Times.
- 'Ads' on the social Web. Remember the old AT&T Friends & Family program, where you got a better rate if you get others to sign up? Well, the concept, a form of "viral marketing," is now used in social-networking sites. One example, cited by the New York Times: "Chase has a promotion on Facebook that implicitly uses a person's friends to endorse its credit cards. When people join the Chase '+1' group on Facebook, they see a list of their other friends who have joined the group. The program gives members points when they do things like apply for a card and get others to sign up." Another Web 2.0-style "ad" is for Axe deodorant on MySpace - part of a campaign about "Gamekillers" - "people who get in the way of a seduction, like a guy with a British accent who gets all the attention. The pitch is that Axe helps men stay cool in the face of the Gamekillers," the Times says. People could post complaints and tips about Gamekillers on the Axe profile whose "online host was Christine Dolce, a busty model who was already a celebrity thanks to MySpace, where she has accumulated more than a million friends." The Times says 74,000 MySpacers have added the Axe profile to their friends lists. I wonder how many teenagers identify with the cool guy undeterred by Gamekillers or cultivate Gamekiller skills or who aspire to being the next Christine Dolce. In any case, it's probably all a big game to most teens exposed to these campaigns.
- Social 'scrapbooking': It could also be called multimedia blogging. Facebook's new "Share" feature "allows its 11 million users to collect scraps of published content from affiliated sites -photos, news, videos - and paste these items on their own...pages," Reuters reports. It's an easy way to do what so many of us do - link to and comment on what we see on the Web, except many of us adults just send URLs in emails so someone has to take the extra step of clicking to the Web page and finding what we're emailing about. Any site that links to Facebook can participate, but to kickstart the "scrapbooking," Facebook has partnered with the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, NBC Sports, PhotoBucket.com, StupidVideos.com, GameSpot.com, The Onion, CollegeHumor.com, etc. Another new product in the social scrapbooking category is Vox.com. It makes multimedia blogging much easier and offers lots of privacy levels is Vox.com. In a single blog or online journal, you can choose what post or even "asset" (a photo, a video, a chunk of text, etc.) can be for family only, for a wider group of friends, totally public, etc.
