News for the Week of March 9, 2008
In youth-tech news this week, a look at a Web site that facilitates campus gossip - and the surprising reaction of several students.
JuicyCampus: Is there an upside?
Is it that the online gossipmongers think it's just a joke? JuicyCampus.com, where students can "slime" each other, may have one upside: The site could be a good talking point for parents and teens to discuss what is and isn't ethical treatment of peers online. "The content on JuicyCampus is identical to the banter heard in dorm rooms for centuries. But now the whole planet can listen in, including those being maligned, even as the speakers' identities are better protected than ever," the Washington Post reports. The site does not take responsibility for its content and is probably protected by the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which courts to date have found to shield Internet service providers from liability for the content that users post. "If the offending post is about you, too bad," the Post adds, quoting site info as saying, "JuicyCampus does not remove content. We encourage you to shift your point of view...."
Some surprising reactions
What surprised Post reporter Marc Fisher was this: "Not one of the students I spoke to who has been named on the site as sexually promiscuous saw any purpose in trying to silence the site."
The article mentions one University of Virginia student who'd been "named on the site as sexually promiscuous" and who didn't really want to know who named her as such but does worry "that having her name on the site could jeopardize the job she just landed with a government agency. She wishes the site didn't exist but says nothing can be done...."
Fisher spoke with Lauren Tilton, president of U-Va.'s student council. "Students are more used to this kind of information being out there than the parent generation," Tilton says. "It's the nature of the Internet."
In other news...
- Gangs on the social Web. Teen gang members use social-networking sites as much as other teenagers. What social networkers and their parents might want to be aware of is how gangs recruit new members online and off. Johnny Vance, a probation officer in Ohio, told the Dayton Daily News the "5 Hs" that tend to make kids most vulnerable to gang overtures: when they're "helpless," "hopeless," "hungry," "homeless," and "hugless." Just like youth who are at high risk for sexual exploitation, "it's a breakdown in communication within the family that leads to youngsters getting into the gang life," according to the Daily News.
- UK: Less homework & TV. Homework and TV-watching are both losing out to social networking among British 15-to-19-year-old media consumers, a new survey found. Citing the 2008 "Digital Entertainment Survey," The Guardian reports that "21% of teenage girls and 10% of teenage boys watch less TV than more because they are using social-networking sites," and "nearly a third of 15-to-19-year-olds are doing less homework."
- India: Support, advice from social sites. In India, a "small but growing number" of the millions of users of Orkut and Facebook are using the social sites for advice and support, Sify.com reports. "Social-networking sites are increasingly taking the shape of the new age online 'agony aunt'," kind of the British term for a "Dear Abby." Sify sites the experience of Sarath, who is looking out for a kidney donor for himself and turned to a social site for advice about the process. "The popularity of such networking sites turning out to be the agony aunt can be gauged from the hundreds of help communities that have been set up, be it from complex issues like kidney transplants, blood cancer to much smaller issues like teenage heart breaks," Sify adds. What I hope Indian and all other young people do is think critically about the responses they get and seek out second and third opinions online as much as they would offline (see, too, and interesting blog post, "How will rural India deal with social networking?" - especially the bold comments at the bottom about the place of mobility and diversity of personal relationships in social networking). The negative side of seeking advice online, of course, is when at-risk youth get reinforcement for destructive behaviors such as cutting, eating disorders, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts.
- Cellphone planet! Literally cellphone planet: "The human race is crossing a line. There is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth. From essentially zero, we've passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years," the Washington Post reports. "This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history," and the projection is 4 billion cellphones by 2010, moving on to 5 billion after just a few years beyond that. Why? It's very flexible portable sociability (texting, talking, social networking) - even more portable than IM-ing and Web-based social networking, and look how those two technologies have taken off! The Post cites the view of Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, that sociability is "the essence of the human species."
