News for the Week of May 27, 2007
An important story for parents and teens this week was about the very real possibility of overexposure on the social Web...
Unwanted attention
Photos of and lewd comments about high school track star Allison Stokke, 18, are "plastered across the Internet," the Washington Post reports, and this week newspapers and blogs nationwide have covered this social-Web phenomenon (a Google News search Wednesday turned up about two dozen newspaper stories). This is all unwanted attention for Allison. "After dinner one evening in mid-May, Stokke asked her parents to gather around the computer," according to the Post. "She gave them the Internet tour that she believed now defined her: to the unofficial Allison Stokke fan page [http://www.allisonstokke.com - since taken down at her request], complete with a rolling slideshow of 12 pictures; to the fan group on MySpace, with about 1,000 members; to the message boards and chat forums where hundreds of anonymous users looked at Stokke's picture and posted sexual fantasies"; to the imposter profile on Facebook (which it immediately deleted on notification)." All the notoriety has been tough on her and her family. First Allison tried to ignore it, then she told her coach she wanted to figure out how to get it all under control. Within a few weeks, after a Yahoo search of her named turned up 310,000 results, she decided control was not a possibility.
Possible strategy
The takeaway: It helps to be a nationally ranked pole vaulter (attention all star athletes and persons of accomplishment of any sort), but notoriety good and bad can happen to anyone now on the user-driven Web. The solution? It can help to be proactive. We can't control what others post, but we can post positive content about ourselves — in our own profiles and blogs — thus doing our own "spin control." ""The secret to burying unflattering Web details about yourself is to create a preferred version of the facts on a home page or a blog of your own, then devise a strategy to get high-ranking Web sites to link to you," the Times reported two years ago, by getting all your friends to link to you and posting comments in others' blogs and pages that link back to yours. Sounds like a lot of work, but it could be fun and it's better than what a future athletic recruiter or employer would otherwise find! See also "Kids: Budding online spin doctors" and "Your kids: What people see online".
In other news...
- Mis-labeled sex offender. It was bound to happen simply because technology is imperfect: the first mislabeled "sex offender" blocked by MySpace. This story in ABC News illustrates how hard it is to verify adults' identities, much less minors, and how the best of intentions can have unintended negative consequences. Jessica Davis in Colorado was mistakenly identified as registered sex offender Jessica Davis in Utah by MySpace's Sentinel Tech sex-offender detection technology. So MySpace sent her the Colorado resident "an email that began, 'It has come to MySpace's attention that you are a registered sex offender in one or more jurisdictions.' The note ended with an email address saying Davis had 14 days to appeal." She did. Sentinel Tech apologized.
- Social-computing studies. It's a good thing University of Michigan now has a graduate program in social computing. "After years of worrying about how much time freshmen spend on Facebook, schools are incorporating the study of social networking, online communities and user-contributed content into new curricula on social computing," the Wall Street Journal reports. Programs like this, it adds, tend to draw students with psychology, sociology, and communications degrees as much as from computer science. Another example: a communications professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology receiving a grant last month for "nearly $150,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop a course in social media."
- Facebook's big plans. As Windows came to be the platform for all PCs, Facebook aims to be social networking's platform, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced. What he meant was, allow other businesses like widget makers and marketers to come in and add to users' experience fun little functionalities Facebook can't create all by itself, Fortune magazine reports. Social functionalities, of course. Fortune gave examples: "Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show. Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked.." The outcome, the New York Times reports, "is expected to be a proliferation of new tools and activities for Facebook's 24 million active users, who have largely been limited to making online connections, sharing photos and planning events."
- Young chief technology officers. Or maybe that should be families' chief information officers. Because of their Net literacy, young people are increasingly becoming their families' top product researchers and online shoppers, the Christian Science Monitor reports. "Three-quarters of students between the ages of 8 and 14 say they have completed an online transaction, according to a national survey released May 9 by Stars for Kidz." The Monitor adds that nearly 25% of kids shop with their parents' credit cards, 26% use gift cards, and 8% use their own credit card. "Almost half say they help with electronic transactions because their parents are 'clueless' online" and a third help because parents don't have time to shop." But parents turn to their kids for a lot of other tech skills — from learning about sites like Wikipedia and YouTube to editing and printing digital photos to finding directions for parent drivers. The Monitor quotes experts as saying this development is great for children's developing self-esteem and independence, and I think it fosters healthy and necessary parent-child dialogue about constructive use of the Net.
