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‘You’re (digitally) grounded!’

08-Sep-10

Instead of grounding their kids for bad grades or behavior, more and more parents are taking away the cellphone, laptop, or Xbox, the Washington Post reports. ” In a report earlier this year that captured part of the trend, 62% of parents said they had taken away a cellphone as punishment,” it adds, citing data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The article tells of how Ian, then a high school sophomore, lost his cellphone and Facebook privileges after getting a report card that “contained letters of the alphabet that were not A, B or C.” He was digitally grounded even over the winter holiday break (which led to a lot more emailing and voice calls from the home phone). His next report card showed a 3.25 grade average, according to the Post, which relates a lot more family stories. None of this will surprise, I’m sure, but it’s kind of nice confirmation, other families’ experiences are always fun to read about, and I like that the article shows how individual all this is. We need to work from the kid-out, not from the news headlines-in where family tech policy is concerned! [See also "One family's tech policy," Don't just take away the Xbox: Psychiatrist's view," and why soft-power parenting works better where technology's concerned.]

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A smart dad on teaching daughter media lit

07-Sep-10

Tshaka Armstrong, the dad behind a southern California tech-parenting help business called DigitalShepherds.com, clearly has put a lot of thought into teaching his daughter traditional media literacy in a very current way (I say “current” because it’s media lit customized as you go – based on his daughter’s current celebrity favorites – and “traditional” because it’s critical thinking focused more on what’s incoming than outgoing). Speaking of sexualized pop culture in general, Armstrong writes: “There were the Vanessa Hudgens nude cellphone pics, there was A Night In Paris and the Kim Kardashian and Ray J sex tapes. Rihanna had nude cellphone pics, as well as some gal who was part of one of P. Diddy’s girl groups.” With a healthy dose of realism, he adds that “kids talk, so even if you keep these things off your computer and off your TV, your kids will find out about them.” Exactly.

Certainly “it’s ‘good PR’,” he says, referring to young celebrities acting out sex-object roles as they head into adulthood, wanting “be taken seriously by directors for roles which may get a PG13 rating or better.” Ok, good for the celebs, bad for “trying to raise emotionally healthy girls.” Here’s the best part, the real media lit training that I hope increasingly goes on in homes as well as schools (where it obviously can’t be as explicit, but it can and must be done because critical thinking about what we’re posting and uploading as much as consuming and downloading in today’s user-driven media environment is protective as well as empowering):

“What I’ve done at various stages,” Armstrong writes, “is speak to my daughter about what she’s seeing take place, speaking with her very candidly about what she’s hearing. I’ve spoken to her about these celebs becoming women and wanting to be sexy and how the world watches that and puts it on public display. I’ve made it a point to talk to her about how that’s a media phenomenon and not something that works in ‘real life.’ Girls who share their sexuality like that are labeled ‘easy’ or sluts in school. Very few girls want to be like the girl that the whole football team has run through unless it’s glamorized on TV somehow…. I know that if I’m not real with her, I’m ultimately crippling her and forcing her to get her reality somewhere else.” He goes on, and reading his whole post is worth your while, fellow parents, if you’re struggling for the right words.

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Craigslist deletes adult section

06-Sep-10

Here in the US, online classifieds service Craigslist removed its “Adult Services” section on Saturday, though the hundreds of reporters and bloggers who, within a couple of hours, had covered the development, were not sure if it was permanent (as of this writing, there was no statement on the site’s official blog). Seen by youth advocates, human rights activists, and US state attorneys general as a positive development, it could also spell a false sense of security, because on the user-driven social Web there are always workarounds, regardless of what providers do. As security and privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian tweeted, “Which unmoderated section of Craigslist will prostitution move to? Casual Encounters? My vote is ‘Skilled Trade’.” The BBC reports that “last year the San Francisco-based company removed its ‘erotic services’ section and replaced it with a fee-based adult category in response to pressure from 40 state attorneys general.” Then last month, the Washington Post ran a paid ad “from two women appealing for the closure of the adult services section. One said she had been forced into prostitution at the age of 11, with the jobs organised through Craigslist,” according to the BBC. And just last week 17 attorneys general sent Craigslist a letter saying women and children would “continue to be victimised in the market and trafficking provided by Craigslist,” it added. Here’s PC World on “What’s Behind Craigslist’s Censorship?”

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Continuing decline in child sexual abuse

03-Sep-10
CACRC chart

The text is pretty tiny, so can you see that it's the blue line that indicates the
decline in child sexual exploitation.
(Source: UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center)


In a talk we ConnectSafely folk give, we have a slide with the question, “Has the growth in young people’s use of the Internet correlated with a rise in sexual abuse against children?” We follow that with an emphatic “no” and a chart from the Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC) at the University of New Hampshire that actually shows a 51% decline in child sexual victimization in the US from the birth of the Web to 2006 (we hope this eases parents’ fears amid a lot of misinformation about “predators” and focuses attention on what the research actually shows about youth online risk). Now we have an update from the CACRC, which shows the trend continuing. The Center has just reported that the latest figures from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System’s latest data (2008’s) “add to an already substantial positive long-term trend.” The 2008 data show a 6% decline in “substantiated cases of child sexual abuse” over the previous year, adding up to a 58% decline between 1992 and 2008. [Here's the CACRC's Web page on the longer-term picture.]
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Youth online risk: Accurate reporting

02-Sep-10

It’s always refreshing to see solid reporting where online kids and parenting are concerned! The main takeaway from this Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune article is that, yes, social media represent a new challenge for parents, but we can usually handle it just fine and here’s how. It tells of how a local couple with six children of ages ranging from 6 to 19 – all but the youngest of whom “have a cell phone with Internet access” – feel they can deal with most of it but can always ask their eldest to explain anything they don’t understand.” The only thing the dad and the reporter aren’t too clear on was what happened in the Megan Meier case (see this blog post of mine). But the advice from an expert the reporter interviewed – Sue Dowling of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation – is top-notch, and I hope parents will read it all. For example, though she certainly understands parental fears of online predators, she cites academic research showing that the risk is very low to most kids, those who don’t actively engage in risky online behavior such as talking about sex with strangers in a variety of places online or exhibit other known risk factors in their offline lives (see this Fact Sheet from the Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC) at the University of New Hampshire). We learned in our work on the Internet Safety Technical Task Force that not all young people are equally at risk of sexual exploitation, those who are most at risk online are those most at risk offline, and a child’s psychosocial makeup and home and school environment are better predictors of risk than any technology he or she uses.

The school environment part is huge – that and how its members treat each other is the biggest predictor of the online risk that affects the most kids: cyberbullying. But they’re just as much predictors of young people’s wellbeing offline; they can hardly be separated, which is why behavior, not technology, is the main issue. Stay tuned for more next week….

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Facebook passes up Orkut in India

01-Sep-10

Though Twitter’s experiencing the fastest growth in India, Facebook moved passed Google’s Orkut into the No. 1 slot for social networking there, with 20.9 million visitors in July, a 179% increase over July 2009, reports IBN Live in India, citing comScore findings. Twitter grew 239% year over year, while Orkut grew just 16% in India this past year. According to IBN Live, “more than 33 million Internet users aged 15 and above visited social networking sites in India, representing 84% of the total Internet audience. While India’s total Internet audience grew 13%, social networking usage rose 43%.” All this makes India No. 7 for worldwide social networking, following the US, China, Germany, Russia, Brazil, and the UK, in that order. [Social networking is now Americans' No. 1 online activity, Nielsen reported in August (see my post about it).]

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iPads at school

31-Aug-10

It sounds like iPads-at-school isn’t ready for prime time yet, but Fraser Speirs, a school tech director by day and Mac software developer by night, has successfully launched a program at his private school in Scotland and chronicled his experience here. Speirs is pioneering an iPads program at Cedars of School of Excellence, a private K-12 school in Greenock, Scotland (about 26 miles west of Glasgow). In his latest entry, Speirs declared the first day of school a success. “I’d love to tell you a story of techno-heroism in which I saved the day from certain disaster, because that would make a great story. Instead, like all the best flights, today was calm to the point of almost a wee bit dull.” In a few iPad-related classes, he ran the secondary-level students through “a quick tour of the iPad,” including text selection and Cut/Copy/Paste; spelling and keyboard autocorrect; the basics of Pages and Keynote (word-processing and presentation software), saving and reading PDFs in iBooks; and sending and receiving documents via email. Here’s a bit of coverage at ArsTechnica and CultofMac.com.

Related links

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Back-to-school shopping on cellphones

31-Aug-10

Retailers like JCPenney, Sears, and Kmart hook us by suggesting we send them a text for special sales and discounts, the Washington Post reports. But while “Sears and Kmart promoted a mobile app that allows shoppers to order merchandise and have it shipped to a nearby store [and] American Eagle gave away free smartphones to anyone who tried on jeans … many retailers are still waiting to see whether mobile shopping will pay off after the novelty wears off.” [They've gotta be researching the sophistication and staying power of mobile retail in Japan, from where I just returned!] Here are some early-adopter numbers on US mobile retail from Deloitte which the Post cites: some 29% of consumers saying they’ll use their phones to “power through their back-to-school shopping lists”; about 38% of them intending to check prices via their phones; and 30% looking for discounts that way. It helps that, according to Nielsen, some 25% of US cellphone users have smartphones, up from 16% last year. Last year’s $1.2 billion mobile shopping market in the US last year is certainly fueling some serious experimentation too, according to the Post.

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AOL’s two new, easy-to-use safety tools

30-Aug-10

Not many Internet companies know more about parental controls than AOL, which has been providing a range of them longer than I’ve been writing about youth and tech (since ‘97!). So I was interested to hear that AOL was releasing two very Web 2.0 tools, one free, the other $9.99/month. First the free one:

1. Safety Toolbar

This light little software app, which AOL says takes about a minute to download, is designed to be easy on families as well as their PCs. Another plus is that it’s one of those smart new parental “control” products that are as much about conversation as control, requiring openness on everybody’s part (see this on “soft power” parenting ). Kids know the software’s in place (the toolbar can’t be hidden) and parents know where kids have been on the Web. Features include customizable filtering with two levels to choose from (the G-rated one linking only to sites human-reviewed for kid-appropriateness and a less strict one more appropriate for teens); safe search (that adds a new safety layer on top of the filters provided by Google, Bing, and other search engines); kids’ Web activity reports that parents can have emailed to them or view from the toolbar; and a passworded on/off switch right in the toolbar. Right now, the tool works on Windows XP and Vista computers and, even though free, has no ads.

2. SafeSocial

A new study by AOL/Nielsen found that 29% of kids would unfriend their parents on Facebook if they could get away with it (the study also found 76% of FB-using parents say they’ve friended their kids). Well, now AOL has come up with a way for parents to keep tabs while giving kids and parents that option and reducing teen embarrassment levels. It’s offering a new tool called SafeSocial that lets you monitor your children’s social networking without friending them on Facebook.

This is another light tool that promotes parent-child conversations. To use SafeSocial to monitor a site, parents need to know the email addresses their kids used to set up their accounts on all the social sites you want to monitor (AOL says the product currently monitors 20 social sites, including Facebook and MySpace). It doesn’t log their every keystroke like more heavy-handed, “traditional” monitoring products – which may be needed if your child’s very uncommunicative and you feel s/he’s at risk in some way, but which could otherwise overwhelm you with teen communications you don’t want or need to see. Rather, it’s a convenient way to get a feel for how your kids are presenting themselves online. Because it monitors only their public Web activity, SafeSocial falls as much into the new reputation-management category as it does the filtering and monitoring categories of parental tools.

By “convenient,” I mean it flags activity parents would want to know about: social site friends registered as adults (do they have mutual friends with your child?), key words indicating risky activity, problematic photos your kids have posted or in which they’ve been flagged, etc. Where text is concerned, there are two levels of alerts. References to violence or suicide fall into the “severe alert” category, where an immediate email is sent to the parent, separate from the standard activity report. For more details, here’s the product’s FAQ, and here’s AOL’s parental-controls page.

If there are lingering doubts that teens could entertain fairly strong feelings about parental “friends” in Facebook, click over to MyParentsJoinedFacebook.com, which gets “at least 20 embarrassing submissions a day from despondent teens,” the Los Angeles Times reports. If these two posts don’t bear out AOL’s research for you (Mom: “…didn’t want to be one of those parents who embarrass their kids on Facebook (because I love you so much sweetie pie)” or Mom: “Dad thinks you look like Cher Please change photo fast”), then maybe slightly more overt advice from fellow parent Sharon Cindrich in “Parental Faux Pas on Facebook” will help.

Anyway, you can tell I really like the sound of these products (which unfortunately are not yet available for Macs), because communication and informed parenting are baked right into them. I only wish software could ensure that conversations about kids’ online well-being were ongoing and mostly easygoing.

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Media-loaded brain ‘breaks’: Reality check

27-Aug-10

Sociality- or media-loaded, digitally enhanced intervals in lines, on the bus, at the gym may not actually be brain breaks after all, and in fact may be depriving us (and our kids) of the kind of down time we and our brains really need. Technology like smart phones, iPods, and Kindles “makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive,” the New York Times reports. “But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.” Good food for thought, ironically! But the headline – “Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime” – is misleading, if you really think about it. It’s actually, we, not the devices, who may be depriving ourselves and our kids of time for reflection and learning, depending on how we choose to employ those devices. Last spring I wrote about the breathers and reality checks our children need as they – like everybody else, but in the middle of the intensity of their adolescent development – negotiate today’s online+offline, 24/7 exposure to life’s big and little, local-to-international dramas but, for them, especially school-related social drama. Sure, life is changing amid the constant availability of all forms of media, including the media we’re producing ourselves, and this requires a certain level of acceptance so we can get on with figuring out how to deal with the media shift constructively and help our children do so too. But the very 24/7 accessibility of tools for staying “productive” or entertained calls for more critical thinking, not less, and how can we expect our kids to value reflection and independent thought if we don’t demonstrate for them that we do? Just a thought. ;-)

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