News for the Week of June 15, 2008
In this week's news, a look at the future of online safety education...
Online safety as we know it: Becoming obsolete?
The headline may seem a bit inflammatory, but it's a sincere suggestion coming from 10+ years of observing and participating in the online-safety field. Experts know, for example, that:
- Young people make little distinction between online and offline and move constantly and fluidly between the two, with the focus more on the activity (socializing, schoolwork, listening to music, or all the above) than on the device or "place" where it's occurring.
- The Internet has increasingly become a mirror of "real life" - what kids do online is not about technology, it's about life, child and adolescent development, functioning in community, at-risk behavior, critical thinking, and media literacy.
- It's the young people at risk offline who are most at risk online, so expertise in adolescent at-risk behavior is necessary to the discussion.
So, we might ask, should online safety be a separate field or discipline with unique safety expertise concerning some monolithic group called online youth?
Where online safety experts can help
In this transition time before the "digital natives" are parents and professionals themselves, people with experience in online safety can help by:
- Educating the public that online safety and well-being is not separate from "real life" and needs the same accountability.
- Educating the public about how the Internet affects real-world actions or comments: how it can perpetuate them, reproduce or compound them, make them searchable, and bring unknown, unexpected audiences to them (see social media researcher danah boyd on this in an interview at AlterNet.org).
- Serving as information clearinghouses and connectors to the right kind of expertise for predation, bullying, eating disorders, substance abuse, etc. The help we could point teens and parents to might be at customer service departments of Web sites, virtual worlds, or mobile phone companies; school administrators; certain specialists in law enforcement; legal advisers; social workers; psychologists; and so on.
- Dealing with cellphone spam. Are your children getting text-message spam on their cellphones (or are you) - those annoying messages that you can't delete without opening them and that you, not the sender, pay for? Well, there's hope, or help, rather, David Pogue at the New York Times reports. AT&T and Verizon Wireless let you block spam messages. Sprint and T-Mobile "don't go quite as far," Pogue writes, "but they do offer some text-spam filtering options." In his Circuits column, he explains how cellphone spamming works and where to find each cellphone company's spam controls. See also Forbes on "Cellphone Addiction" (more about grownups, though).
- For youngest Web users, YouTube beats Disney. We're talking about the Disney Channel Web site, here, not the Disney Channel on TV, but this is still interesting: Among 2-to-11-year-olds, YouTube was No. 1 for online video viewing and Disneychannel.com a distant second, reports CNET, citing Nielsen figures. For YouTube, the number of 2-to-11-year-old visitors in April was 4.1 million; for Disneychannel.com, it was 1.3 million. NickJr was also on the list, but note that MySpace - whose minimum age is 14 - was too. So was Google Video. "On average, the kids watched 51 video streams from home during April, spending almost two hours on video clips. That usage outstrips the average of nearly 75 million adults [44 video streams and 1 hr, 40 min] who regularly view video clips at sites like ESPN.com and CNN.com," CNET reports. I agree with reporter Stefanie Olsen where she writes: "Slightly disturbing, the site with the highest concentration of 12- to 17-year-olds, or 44% of this age group, was Stickam.com, a hub for live Webcams of people in their bedrooms." For more on Stickam, see "Social networking unleashed," the kind without monitoring, customer-care staffs, and safety czars and "Parents, be aware of Stickam."
- Videogame sales growth. Sales of videogame software and hardware reached $1.12 billion last month, up 37% from a year earlier, Reuters reports. Grand Theft Auto 4 was the best-selling title for the month, according to market researcher NPD, and is the year's top-selling game so far. Meanwhile, an Australian research found that "playing videogames for hours on end may be bad for your health, but ... it doesn't mean you are a lonely nerd and won't damage your social skills," Reuters reports. In his coverage of the study, CNET blogger Don Reisinger reports that 15% of gamers surveyed "were identified as 'problem gamers' who spend more than 50 hours a week playing games ... but only 1% of those respondents had poor social skills and shyness."
- MySpace's redesign. It's a lot more than a facelift, USATODAY reports - more like a major overhaul. The US's biggest social network site this week unveils "a spanking-new interface, heightened security, availability on mobile and instant-messaging services - and the ability to create categories of friends at work, school and family, among dozens of other new features," according to USATODAY. Calling it a "global redesign," Reuters says "MySpace will change its home page, navigation, profile editing, search, and MySpaceTV player facilities," with more changes coming later in the summer. The aim is simplicity, so this development probably doesn't change much for parents. Teens already figured out MySpace long ago; this is for the holdouts - probably, too, for people who preferred Facebook's more utilitarian look and feel (though the irony is that's changing a little with all the mini applications Facebook people are adding to their profiles).
