News for the Week of July 27, 2008
Should parents (and other adults) take what they see in young social networkers' profiles at face value? Both news reports and research show that's not a good idea...
Fictionalizing their profiles
Six UK newspapers recently ran a story about a teenager's "wild party" that her mother said never happened. It was a bit of fiction lifted from the girl's Bebo profile. First there was an invite sent out promising "the party of the year" for her 16th birthday, CNET reports. "Subsequent posts on Jodie Hudson's Bebo account spoke of underage drinking, sex acts, and violence that occurred at the celebration." The papers said 400 teens showed up and encountered "chaos." Jodie's mother, Amanda Hudson, wrote the newspapers that there was no underage drinking, no sex, no violence, and no stealing, despite what her daughter posted in Bebo. She's "suing for defamation and breach of privacy."
What research shows
The above case is a perfectly timed illustration of a point London School of Economics Prof. Sonia Livingstone makes in her latest study, "Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers' use of social-networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression" in New Media & Society (June 208).
"It should not be assumed that profiles are simply read as information about an individual," the social psychology professor suggests. Referring to one of her research subjects, Livingstone writes: "Jenny, like others, is well aware that people's profiles can be 'just a front.' For several of the participants, it seemed that position in the peer network was more significant than the personal information provided, rendering the profile a place-marker more than a self portrait." Some teens have several profiles on various social sites, some with the peer group more on display than the profile owner.
My takeaway
There's no reason to overreact to a superficial surf through a bunch of social-networking profiles - even those of our own kids' peers. In many ways their profile fabrications are good. They're...
- Protective - only real-life friends, not creeps, know what is and isn't true, which means strangers who try to contact them have zero credibility and usually get ignored.
- A safe way to explore identity and social relating, which is part of adolescent development
- A creative outlet with instant audience (mostly their friends and creative collaborators), something aspiring writers of the past could only dream about - see the last sentence of this item on the California-based Digital Youth research project.
In other news...
- Briton wins social-site libel case. This is a social-networking legal first. A British high court awarded a man named Mathew Firsht 22,000 pounds (nearly $44,000) in damages from a fake profile and group about him on Facebook, according to a report in MSNBC. The group, called "Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?", and imposter profile reportedly were created by a former school friend. The profile contained "false claims about [Firsht's] sexuality, religion and political views, the Financial Times reports.
- Videogame program for libraries. You just may be seeing more videogame play at a public library near you. "The American Library Association has announced a new project funded with a $1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation" to study how videogame play improves literacy skills and create a "tool kit that libraries across the country can use to develop gaming programs," the Arizona Daily Star reports. One of the librarians charged with developing the program told the Star that she's seeing "growing evidence that games in general, from the traditional board versions to electronic and online ones, support literacy and 21st-century learning skills." Meanwhile, the Charlotte, N.C., public library is offering free workshops in videogame design, the Charlotte Observer reports. Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune asks, "Should libraries stock videogames?".
- Teen Second Life too safe? You don't see this in the news too often. Liz Lawley, mother of a 14-year-old and director of the social-computing lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology, told PC World that she's "strongly against some of the restrictive methods used online to segregate adults from children in an attempt to protect kids from predators. On Second Life, for example, she can't interact with her son because he has to be in the teen grid and she has to be in the adult grid," which means she can't learn about how he uses technology and he can't learn from her in real time how to function in "a social context." Lawley said she feels "shutting down sites or trying to shut out people won't solve the problem of sexual predators." Education will, she said.
- Another kind of filtering needed too. Apple retail stores aren't the only places employing tech "geniuses." Libraries are too. The Internet has turned out to be a "major tool" not only for patrons but librarians as well, saving space, making library resources accessible at home, and bringing more patrons to the library, Michigan's Saginaw News reports. Research that the Saginaw News cites indicates patrons are figuring out that librarians are better than anyone at information filtering. The need for those filtering skills has never been greater - not only for being good scholars and media consumers but also for safe, productive use of technology (phones, the Web, virtual worlds, videogames, media players, etc.). Parents and educators, too, play vital roles in this filtering education. Media-literacy teaching at home and school can be aimed at critical thinking not only about 1) incoming information but also about 2) incoming communication - from everybody, friends or not. It also needs to move beyond what's coming in to include 3) outgoing behavior and communication from a child, via text, images, voice, and video (see "Good citizens in virtual worlds, too").
