News for the Week of June 10, 2007
This week in kid-tech news: "stalking," a common practice on the social Web that isn't all bad. Parents, however, probably want to know about it...
Online 'stalking,' for good or bad
"Stalking" isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds. Say you're single and someone lines up a blind date for you. You'd want to find out a little about him, right? So you "stalk him," as the digital natives put it. To many social networkers, it's a fun, innocuous sort of "background check," to see who a person's friends are, where her tastes lie, what she talks about, etc., and definitely what she looks like. Stalking has even become a bit of a cottage industry, the Associated Press reports.
For example, 19-year-old Jared Kim, got the idea for Stalkerati.com at a backyard BBQ when his sister wanted to know who some guy was who had asked her out. Their geeky group of friends, who had all brought their laptops, "immediately turned to their keyboards to do a little cyberstalking," according to the AP. So "Kim had a thought: Why not write a program that searches all the social-networking sites at once and creates a profile of the person you're searching for?" Within a couple of months it had 10,000 visitors a day, the AP says (Kim also writes about this on his About page). Stalkerati was so much on the map, in fact, that MySpace noticed and blocked it as a security problem for its users (they had to give Stalkerati their MySpace passwords to use the info-gathering service). Facebook apparently allows it, but this, social-networking, version of "stalking" was practically coined in Facebook.
The (way) downside
Of course there is the better-known darkside of stalking, and it can be truly awful online as much as in real life (and often there's no clear line between the two) — for example, see this post in our BlogSafety forum about a long-term stalking situation that has, reportedly, involved malicious hacking and threats of physical harm. And the Boston Globe tells the story of one online-harassment victim whose lawyer argued that social networking "encourages stalking-type behavior."
Some takeaways
Clearly (to me, anyway), like many other aspects of this increasingly user-driven medium, stalking on the social Web is neither all bad nor all good. Its effects are closely tied to the intentions of the "stalker." There's a greater onus on stalkers, gossipers, etc. to think about the impact of their behavior because they can't see the impact — there's no body language, no facial expression. Experts call it "disinhibition," and it's a significant factor because it removes from interaction an element of humanity that softens edges and ends arguments. The anonymity of the Net seems to broaden the spectrum from really destructive to really useful, and users need to find and stay in the middle ground if they don't want "harmless" gossip, pranks, and "stalking" suddenly to turn on them.
In other news...
- Online spin control. There's an interesting ongoing debate on news sites around the Web about what the digital natives are doing to their reputations and future job prospects with all this public blogging and social networking. At first glance I thought this USATODAY column was just another commentary about how doomed teen social networkers' reputations are. Then I got to the part with some good advice (maybe I'm just biased because it's like what I've been saying). USATODAY's Andrew Kantor writes, "It pays to go on the offensive and take some control over what people see about you online." Toward that end he concludes that "when a comment about you on a small blog is the first thing people see when they search for you, you need to spend some time on your cred." Tell this to your kids and have them read "Overexposed teen", a compelling example. See also a commentary from the Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry, linked to in "Growing up in public", looking at whether today's online youth really will "pay the price for youthful indiscretions."
- Cellphone monitoring on steroids. It's a little chilling, but maybe some parents feel they need to go to these lengths to protect their cellphone-using chilling. I can see parents using a product like this openly as a tool for solving a cyberbullying problem that might include calls and text message to a child's cellphone. It's called Flexispy, and it's downloadable monitoring software for cellphones. The Thailand-based company's tagline is "Protect Your Children. Catch Cheating Spouses." According to its press release, the software "has already been used successfully worldwide to bring to light to extramarital affairs, disloyal employee activities, and to protect children from predators and SMS [phone text] bullying. It "runs invisibly in the background and can only be accessed using a secret code." It "automatically records all incoming & outgoing SMS messages, calls, emails and tracks the device location" and uploads all this to a Web site the "spy" can access.
- Outfitting their penguins. Some kids and tweens are obsessed with the virtual care, feeding, outfitting of their penguins, Webkinz, Neopets, etc. — not to mention furnishing their igloos and other spaces. In many cases, kids just have to amass points by playing lots of games in these sites, in which case the "cost" is screen time, a lack of healthy, active outdoor time, and something marketers aim for: serious brand loyalty (e.g. from playing games sponsored by cereal companies and driving virtual cars placed by automotive sponsors). Common Sense Media recently ran a commentary for parents with tips on how to turn these online activities into "value-able" discussions about how to be wise spenders (and savers).
- Real-time (very) mobile dating. For some singles, apparently, going to a Web site and emailing back and forth before actually meeting someone is way too cumbersome. With the MeetMoi cellphone service, one can receive a potential date's profile (that of a person who's selected by MeetMoi for his/her physical proximity) via text message and set up an encounter minutes away. The Wall Street Journal calls this "instant Internet dating," which can update you on nearby prospects as you move around. Zogo's another such service, and the giant Web-based Match.com is adding this mobile capability to its service. Another example, Fast Flirting, "allows users to sign into a virtual 'lobby' where they can select a flirting partner based on factors such as age and location" for $3 a month. It's new but there's a market, the Journal says - 3.6 million US cellphone users having "accessed a dating service from their mobile phone in March." But for it to really take off, of course, the market will also need to feel safe. There are safety mechanisms in place on many services (e.g., MeetMoi shares profiles without revealing actual location — users do that) but, if teens are using them, parents might want to ask if they've tried such services and are taking advantage of safety features.
