News for the Week of February 11, 2007
A new study about teens' exposure to online pornography itself got a lot of exposure in the tech media. Here's what they found...
Online porn: A new reality!?
Exposure to porn on the Web may now be a norm of teenage life. But let me quote the researchers exactly, with some important advice they pair with this finding: "Exposure to online pornography might have reached the point where it can be characterized as normative among youth Internet users, especially teenage boys. Medical practitioners, educators, other youth workers, and parents should assume that most boys of high school age that use the Internet have some degree of exposure to online pornography, as do girls.. Frank direct conversations with youth that address the possible influences of pornography on sexual behavior, attitudes about sex, and relationships are needed." That's from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC) in their just-released analysis in the journal Pediatrics of a 2005 study. [Here's TechNewsWorld's coverage.]
The analysis shows that unwanted exposure to porn has been growing. The CACRC reports that 42% of US 10-to-17-year-olds said they'd been exposed to online pornography in the past year, and 66% of that group "reported only unwanted exposure." Thirteen percent went to X-rated sites on purpose, but a much larger number, 34% were exposed to online porn they didn't want to see (up from 25% about five years before this survey), due to things like pop-up ads, spam email, clicking on unintended search results, or misspelling Web addresses the browser window. [The authors did say that not all unwanted exposure was inadvertent; in some cases, curiosity leads kids to X-rated sites, and then they find the exposure is unwanted. Peer pressure can be another catalyst - the fact that kids are encountering porn at "friends' houses" showed up in the data.]
Limiting exposure
Parents should know, though, that "this accidental access is really quite avoidable," says Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use. For some simple porn-avoidance tips all kids (and grownups) should know, please click to the latest issue of NetFamilyNews.
The new online-safety challenge
The key new issue is that, on Web 2.0 - driven so much by youth socializing online - a growing proportion of the porn is user-produced. The challenge now, for parents, children's advocates, and everyone else who cares about constructive use of the Web by youth, is not just how to protect young people from porn operators and predators but, in essence, how to protect them from themselves and each other! Teens themselves will need to be part of the developing teen-protection equation for the youth-driven social Web.
In other news...
- Lots of security patches from Microsoft this month, ZDNET reports - "12 bulletins with patches for at least 20 vulnerabilities in a wide range of widely used software products. Six of the 12 bulletins are rated "critical," Redmond's highest severity rating." A number of the patches address vulnerabilities in Word and Explorer, none are patching any problems with the new Vista operating system upgrade. Windows users should definitely get them all - manually through Windows Update or by automating patches on the family PC.
- Mobile-socializing numbers. Many of the photos and videos on MySpace and YouTube reportedly originated on cellphones. So it's only a matter of time before the socializing, too, happens on phones. Here are some of the first figures I've seen. "A number of new media research firms predict that social media is likely to be the tipping point for mobile video adoption," TVWeek.com reports. "Research firm eMarketer recently reported that mobile social communities - a grouping of like-minded people interacting on cellphones - should grow from 50 million users worldwide today to 174 million in 2011." But while growth is being seen, US usage is still relatively small. "By the end of the third quarter of 2006, the United States counted about 5.1 million mobile video subscribers, double the number at the end of the first quarter," according to TV Week, citing Telephia research. See also "Mobile socializing: Accelerating change".
- International child-porn bust. "Nearly 2,400 suspects from 77 countries allegedly paid to view videos depicting [child] sexual abuse online," the Associated Press reported. Within 24 hours of receiving a heads-up about some of the videos an Austrian network administrator who'd stumbled upon them in a routine scan, "investigators recorded more than 8,000 hits from 2,361 computer addresses" in all those countries, including the US. The lead investigator said his team believes "the videos were shot in Eastern Europe and uploaded to the Web from Britain. A link to the videos was posted on a Russian Web site, which is no longer in operation, and hosted on a server in Austria. Some of the material was free, but the Russian site charged $89 for access for a 'members only' section." The article points out that, even with the size of this group, finding this activity is needle-in-a-haystack work.
- Videogame health benefits. Some benefits to videogaming are beginning to pop up here and there in the news media. The one concerning eyesight, for example got a lot of coverage: "People who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved their vision by about 20% percent," NBC6 TV in South Florida cited researchers at the University of Rochester as finding. And The Dartmouth looked at whether videogamers and couch potatoes had a lot in common. It depends on how you play them, the paper reports, especially Wii Sports for Nintendo Wii (you choose whether to just wave your hand or get your whole body involved). Certainly Wii boxing and Wii tennis don't replace their real-life counterparts, but they do get heart rates up. The article also looks at NBA Live and DDRMAX2 (Dance Dance Revolution) for PlayStation2. Meanwhile, the Wii is outselling the PlayStation3 in Japan these days, CNET reports.
