News for the Week of March 30, 2008
A new study that suggests a growing comfort among Americans with social-networking teens and chat rooms tops tech news this week...
Growing comfort with teen social networking
Americans have a "growing comfort level with young people using Internet technologies such as social networking sites, chat rooms and email," according to a new study from the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee (CICAC) and 463 Communications. The nationwide survey found that 27.7% of Americans said social networking and chat should be restricted to adults, down from 35.3% of people surveyed in an identical study in 2007. As for access to email, 14.7% said people should be adults in 2007, compared to 2.4% now, and for general Web surfing, the numbers were 17.4% last year and 4.2% now. "Despite an evolving comfort level with youth use of the Internet, the survey revealed significant concerns with social networking technologies. For instance, a significant majority of those surveyed, 63.2%, believed that children under 16 years old should not have use social networking sites and chat rooms," the CICAC reports. Many US-based social-networking sites have a minimum age of 13; MySpace's is 14.
Females rule the social Web
According to research by the people behind reputation lookup site RapLeaf.com, "young women are much more active on [social-networking] sites than young men," writes RapLeaf.com's CEO in a blog post about the findings. And for people above 30, men - especially married men - aren't even joining social networks. With the notable exception of LinkedIn.com usage and VCs in the Bay Area friending everyone on Facebook, married men are not hanging out on social networks. Married women, however, are joining social networks in droves. In fact, women between the ages 35-50 are the fastest growing segment on social networks, especially on MySpace." They're not just socializing, though, they're also producing media (text, graphics, photos, etc.) and decorating profiles and pages. It's not that young men don't spend every bit as much time in front of a computer - sometimes more - but young men, he says, spend those hours more in "videogames such as World of Warcraft, first-person action games," and offshore poker sites, where they can actually win and lose money.
The Pew/Internet project released similar findings last December (see "Boys & girls on Web 2.0" and "Teens rule the Web").
In other news...
- Social-networking profiles: Inaccurate impressions. A University of Texas researcher has found that social-networking profiles don't give very accurate pictures of their owners. "Psychology associate professor Samuel Gosling and collaborator David Evans created You Just Get Me, a Facebook application and Web site, to determine how well people understand each other by looking at a personality profile," reports the UT's Daily Texan. You Just Get Me users answer 40 questions about their personality and then compare their answers to how other users view them. Users rate each other based on first impressions, such as how lazy, ingenious, quiet or rude a person seems." Interestingly but not surprisingly, the researchers also found that the project teaches its subjects something about how well they understand themselves.
- Staging fights for Web video-sharing. It has become "an Internet rage for teens and young adults," the Chicago Tribune reports (story picked up by RedOrbit.com). And - judging by the popularity of other negative adolescent uses of cellphones (see last week's feature on naked photo-sharing) - it could be true. The Trib leads with the account of five 8th-graders huddled around a camera phone watching "video of a fake fight they staged in a bathroom at Benjamin Middle School. They had filmed multiple rounds of a shoving match ... and planned to post it on YouTube."
- Laptops in school ok? You've probably heard of school laptop programs, and some schools now expect students at least to have access to computers at home. But do you ever wonder how useful (or not) it is for high school students to take their laptops to school? Marian Merritt, Symantec's Internet Safety Advocate and mother of an 8th-grader, wondered just that and put some good thinking about it down in her blog the other day. Marian also asked some colleagues, including me, if we'd seen any research on it, so I turned to my friend and tech educator Anne Bubnic with the California Technology Assistance Project (CTAP) for her experience with school laptop programs. Click here to read about what Anne had to say.
- India to ban SNS? Could be an April Fool's joke on the part of India-based Tech2.com, but the site reports that India's Home Affairs Ministry is considering banning overseas-based social-networking sites and requiring domestic ones to "maintain records of all user activity including 'change of status, profile picture, favorite sitcoms etc.'." Here's the part that's suspicious in comedic terms: "Intelligence operatives are of the belief that Jehadi terror cells could work out a sophisticated system of communication by 'throwing sheep' at each other using a site such as Facebook.com whose servers the Indian government cannot access." Foreign sites such as Google's Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and LinkedIn would be blocked by a government directive to Indian Internet service providers. Popular India-based social sites the story mentions include BigAdda.com, Yaari.com, and Minglebox.com. If all this is serious, other government certainly will be watching to see if this kind of control over the participatory Web is possible, but I have a feeling teen users would find workarounds.
