66% of teens text, only 8% tweet: Study

Though adult blogging remains steady, teen blogging has decreased by half since 2006 – from 28% of teens then to 14% now, according to a Pew/Internet report released yesterday. Eleven percent of Americans 30+ maintain a personal blog right now, Pew adds. Blogging by 18-29-year-olds has decreased, too, but not by quite as much: from 24% of that age group in 2007 to 15% now. Social networking continues to grow – 73% of teens use social sites now (compared to 47% of adults), up from 55% in 2006 and 65% last February – but Twitter use among teens is not high. Only 8% of 12-to-17-year-old Net users use Twitter, compared to about a third of 18-to-29-year-olds (the age group that uses Twitter the most). Compare that teen Twitter use to virtual worlds (about the same) and texting (a whopping 66%). Moving from media to devices: 75% of teens and 93% of 18-to-29-year-olds have cellphones. It's not surprising to parents, I think, when Pew says that, "in the past five years, cellphone ownership has become mainstream among even the youngest teens." That's where the biggest growth has been: "Fully 58% of 12-year-olds now own a cellphone, up from just 18% of such teens as recently as 2004."

Adults' status updates on the rise: Study

If anybody considers Twitter and other status-update tools all about self-exposure (I don't, but glad to "talk" with you about that in Twitter, Facebook, email, or the ConnectSafely forum), and consequently all about youth, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has evidence to the contrary - just out today. It found that "one out of five Internet users now say they use Twitter or some other service to share status updates about themselves, or to keep tabs on others." That's from a survey of adult Internet users - 2,200 of them. The 19% who now use status-update services is up from 11% last April. Here's more in a Wall Street Journal blog.

Surfing by phone: Significant growth

Seems it's only a matter of time before Americans are accessing the Net via phones as much as on computers. And certainly, Web access is coming to the cellphone of a kid near you! A just-released survey by the Pew/Internet Project found that 56% of US adults have accessed the Internet wirelessly - via laptop, mobile device, game console, or MP3 player, and about a third (32%) have used a cellphone to access the Net "for emailing, instant-messaging, or information-seeking." That figure for phone-based access is up one-third since December 2007, "when 24% of Americans had ever used the Internet on a mobile device." On a typical day, Pew adds 19% of Americans use the Net from their phones - 73% growth over 16 months.

What does increase teen girls' risk online

A new study in the medical journal Pediatrics found that "a history of childhood abuse and use of a provocative online identity increase the risk that girls will be victimized by someone they meet on the Internet," CNN reports, and a key factor in reducing risk is "the presence and influence of caregivers." and a key factor in reducing risk is "the presence and influence of caregivers." Nothing unprecedented about these findings, but they confirm what the full body of online-safety research, gathered by last year's Internet Safety Technical Task Force, shows. This study, led by Jennie G. Noll of the Cincinnati, Ohio, Children's Hospital Medical Center, is one of the first I've seen to add avatar appearance to screennames as a way people can intentionally or inadvertently indicate sexual interest to people they "meet" online. As CNN put it, "girls are more likely to experience online sexual advances or have offline encounters if they have previously been abused or have a provocative avatar." The study "looked at 104 abused [those who had suffered neglect, physical abuse or sexual abuse] and 69 non-abused girls ages 14 to 17," 54% white and 46% minorities. Among these girls, 40% "reported experiencing sexual advances online" and 26% "reported meeting someone offline after getting to know the person on the Internet. Abused girls were much more likely to have experienced both, the authors found." Pew/Internet senior researcher Amanda Lenhart later commented that the study in Pediatrics confirmed previous research but left out some other risk trouble spots we need to be aware of - that kids with histories of mental illness and family conflict are equally at risk online. Thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this study out.

Sex offenders in social sites: Consider the facts

The only way we can have solid, progressive parent-child and public discussions about children's online safety is if we can keep the facts in mind when we read the latest news about predators in Facebook and MySpace - facts based on consistent, peer-reviewed academic research about online risk. So here are the key facts to keep in mind:

Not all children are equally at risk of Net-related sexual exploitation (see "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies" from the US's Internet Safety Technical Task Force, with a summary of all child-online-safety research to date).

A child's psychosocial makeup and family environment are better predictors of risk than the technology he or she uses (also from the ISTTF report).

The kids most at risk offline are those at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim" and the ISTTF report).

Sexual exploitation as a result of Internet activity (much less social networking) is statistically rare - "too low to calculate in the two national samples we conducted," the Crimes Against Children Research Center has told me.

The vast majority of teens - 91% - use social sites to keep in touch with friends they see frequently (mostly at school), not strangers ('07 Pew/Internet study).

The offenders in the vast majority of child sexual abuse cases are not strangers to their victims (multiple sources).

Despite the establishment of one or more public profiles of "teens" (fake profiles) on MySpace by the Pennsylvania attorney general's Child Predator Unit, "there has apparently not been one successful sting operation initiated on MySpace in the more than two years during which these sting profiles have been in existence" (see "Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context").

Even one case is far too many, but parents deserve to know that - no matter how many news reports they read about predators in social network sites, including this week's - the risk of online kids being exploited by a stranger in such a site is statistically extremely low, and even more unlikely for healthy teens with engaged parents. Parents may find it helpful, too, to read such reports critically - maybe with their online teens, asking them about their own experiences, if any, with strangers in social sites and what they do about them.

Consider, too, the possibility that there may be other interests in addition to children's safety involved in criticizing a whole body of research and keeping predator fears fanned, including political and financial interests (see Washington policy analyst Adam Thierer's commentary and this New York Times article quoting the CEO of a company with significant financial interests in promoting the adoption of age verification of online kids, a serious privacy issue). As CNET blogger Caroline McCarthy put it, "Shock-and-awe press tactics aren't the way to go, especially because threats on the Web are much more complicated than they may appear."

Friending Mom or Dad?

I had a feeling that at least some of social networking's growth had to do with parents joining to learn about this huge presence in their kids' lives. Now the Pew Internet Project has some data at least on grownups, if not parents. "The share of adult internet users who have a profile on a social-networking site has more than quadrupled in the past four years - from 8% in 2005 to 35% now," Pew reports. A few interesting observations from Social Computing Magazine's coverage of the Pew study: Like teens, adults use social sites to communicate with people they already know (89%), and most have profiles in multiple sites (51%). Among US users 18+, MySpace is twice as popular as Facebook (50% compared to 22%). Here's the breakdown by age on who has social-network profiles: 75% of people 18-24; 57% 25-34; 30% 35-44; 19% 45-54; 10% 55-64; 7% 65+. Here, too, is Business Week's coverage, and the Washington Post talks about job-hunting with social sites.

Videogames not just child's play

Videogames certainly aren't just for kids. That's the key take-away from a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, finding that more than half of US adults play videogames. [Another Pew survey I covered in September found that 97% of US 12-to-17-year-olds do.] People 65+ are no slouches where videogaming's concerned: Nearly a third of people 65 and up play games everyday, Pew found, while only 20% of all younger players do so everyday. Younger players prefer gaming consoles (e.g., PlayStation or Xbox), older ones prefer computers, which are the most popular gaming devices - 73% of adult gamers play with computers to play games, compared with 53% consoles, 35% cellphones, and 25% portable gaming devices. Here's coverage in a Washington Post blog, and the San Jose Mercury News has a shopper's guide to the latest videogames.

US teens' gaming highly social: Study

Digital gaming is virtually universal and very social among US teens, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found in a study it released today. "Fully 97% of teens [99% of boys and 94% of girls] ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games," Pew reports. As for the social aspect of digital gaming, 65% of teens play with other people in the room; 27% with people online; and 82% play games alone, but 71% of those also play with other people. "The gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement," Pew says in its press release.

In other key findings, 80% play five or more types of games and 40% eight or more (e.g., racing, action, shooter, rhythm, puzzles). The respondents' top 5 games were, respectively, Guitar Hero, Halo 3, Madden NFL, Solitaire, and Dance Dance Revolution. "The average rating for teens’ favorite games is just above a Teen rating," and nearly "a third of teens play games that are listed as appropriate only for people older than they are," but the average game rating for all the teens surveyed was an E10+ rating." Ninety percent of parents say they always or sometimes know what games their kids play. As for civic engagement, this was an interesting observation by the authors: "Teens who take part in social interaction related to the game, such as commenting on websites or contributing to discussion boards, are more engaged civically and politically." "Computer games drive social ties" was the BBC's headline and "Can games make your kid a better citizen?" was MSNBC's.

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. What we all know about online youth now from a substantial and growing body of research suggests it's time to reassess. We 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.

Consider the first of nine myths about "digital natives" (online youth, basically, people who've never known life without the Internet) put forth by Profs. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser at a conference at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center: "Myth #1 - The online world presents a wholly new and completely different set of issues for youth we must address" (the ninth complements it: the myth that digital natives are a homogeneous group). [Even homogeneously speaking, research shows that young people themselves are getting smarter all by themselves about privacy and reputation management online (Pew/Internet data summarized in "Teens rule the Web").]

So, we might ask, should online safety be a separate field or discipline with unique safety expertise concerning some monolithic group called online youth? Certainly the Internet can augment and perpetuate problems in young people's lives in unprecedented ways, but research is showing that the substance of the problems is rooted in those real lives, not in a specific technology. It has to do with adolescent development and behavior much more than with technology. In fact, a great many types of expertise are becoming essential to the discussion - from neurologists on the teenage brain to psychologists on adolescent risk assessment to school counselors and administrators right in the trenches of gossip-cum-bullying blogs and cellphone photo-sharing. Sometimes we need to consult experts in constitutional law and computer forensics too (a dean of students once wisely had a computer forensics cop show students in a school-wide assembly how they're not as anonymous online as they think).

Where people with experience in online safety can help (in this transition time before the "digital natives" are parents and professionals themselves) is 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.

My model for the clearinghouse approach is Netsafe in New Zealand. Providing online-safety education for all New Zealanders (youth, parents, schools, community organizations, companies, policymakers), Netsafe is an independent nonprofit organization with an active board membership representing New Zealand's Education Ministry, educators themselves, judges, corporations, parents, students, social workers, police, and New Zealand's Police Youth Education Service, Internal Affairs Dept., and Customs Service. Yes, Netsafe's an online-safety education organization working hard at the preventive end like many organizations in the US, but it also works at the remedial end, getting problems that come up to the right kind of help. An example of its clearinghouse role is in its direct relationship with New Zealand's two main mobile carriers' customer service departments, helping them get abuse calls about phone-based bullying and other problems to the right experts - sometimes parents, social workers, counselors, and school officials, not just law enforcement.

Probably no single organization in the US, with its population of 300 million (vs. New Zealand's 4 million), can handle all that Netsafe does nationwide in its country. The US's National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) - with its CyberTipline working at the remedial end and NetSmartz working up front at education and prevention (intelligently focusing more and more on safety in general, not just the online kind) - is certainly going for this more holistic approach. But our society is still too focused on the crime and law enforcement part of the "problem," and our online-safety field is still dominated by lawyers and law enforcement. Certainly society needs to keep addressing crime online, but the online-safety field - though maybe not quite obsolete - needs to reflect the breadth of young people's use of the Internet and all related devices and technologies, positive as well as a negative.

Comments, arguments, and other views on this from parents, educators, counselors, and other adults working with online youth would be most welcome in our ConnectSafely forum or via anne@netfamilynews.org.

Related links

Myths about "digital natives" from Profs. John Palfrey, director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Urs Gasser at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland

Justine Cassell and Meg Cramer at Northwestern University's Center for Technology and Social Behavior write in an executive summary: "We argue that the current moral outrage and national panic over the risks of victimization faced by girls on the Internet has nothing to do with risks faced by girls on the Internet" in their essay "High Tech or High Risk: Moral Panics about Girls Online."

Here's what John Palfrey blogs about the Cassell/Cramer and other essays in the new book Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected (MIT Press).

More findings in researchers' "Stories from the Field" at the Digital Youth Research project at University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

Teens' definition of writing...

...does not include all the texting, IMing, blogging, and commenting they're constantly doing online, and yet they're writing all the time as they compose phone text messages, IMs, blog posts, and comments in social-networking sites. This disconnect between what they're doing and their perception of it is a very interesting finding from a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Why does the disconnect matter? Because there's a debate going on among adults - parents, educators, etc. - about whether all this writing is hurting their formal writing and, just as importantly, Pew says in its description of the report, "because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them." The study "looks at teens’ basic definition of writing, explores the various kinds of writing they do, seeks their assessment about what impact e-communication has on their writing, and probes for their guidance about how writing instruction might be improved." Meanwhile, any writer will tell you that the two most important activities for aspiring professional writers are writing a lot and reading a lot. Here's coverage from The Times of London and CNET.

Half of us search for ourselves...

…or someone else in Web search engines, according to the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The exact figures are 47% searching for ourselves, up from 22% in 2002, and 53% searching for others. The findings "reflect how people are sharing more and more of their lives on the Internet, as well as how Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace are encouraging users to post their home videos, photographs and personal profiles online, including data ranging from their favorite movies to their cell phone number," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. In other findings, some 36% of us have searched for someone we've lost touch with and 9% have "dug up information on someone they were dating." In its coverage, the Associated Press reports that teens are "more likely than adults to restrict who can see their profiles … contrary to conventional wisdom." In other findings, some 36% of us have searched for someone we've lost touch with and 9% have "dug up information on someone they were dating," according to the Chronicle. Note that 60% of us are not worried about how much information about us is online, sixty-one percent "have not felt compelled to limit it," and 38% use privacy controls. The Pew/Internet study - "Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency" - is here.

Teens & stranger contact: New study

Researcher Aaron Smith likens the Internet to a park, mall, or any other public space, where most of teens' encounters with others are fine, but some can be scary or risky. "Just 7% of online teens have ever had an interaction with a stranger that made them feel scared or uncomfortable," though nearly a third (32%) "have been contacted by someone with no connection to them or any of their friends," according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's press material about Aaron's data memo (and Pew's latest study).

The uncomfortable contacts - which the study found girls have more than boys - aren't terribly surprising, the study says, however, since a full 49% of social-networking teens "use these sites to make new friends." Also not surprising, the Associated Press's coverage suggests, "because Pew counts as 'stranger contacts' comments left on photo-sharing sites and requests to become friends at social-networking sites." It just may be the case, Aaron adds, that teens "see some level of unwanted contact as a known downside" of social networking - "a relatively minor 'cost of doing business' in this environment."

The behaviors the Pew study found to be "associated with high levels of online stranger contact" are: having a social-networking profile, posting photos online, and using social sites to flirt.

Parents, you may want to note that it's the child's intention that is key, here. The study found that "teens who use social-networking sites to flirt are more likely to be contacted by people they don't know … although a similar effect is not seen in teens who use social-networking sites to make new friends." This finding is consistent with another emerging fact in online-safety research - that it's the teens who are seeking out risk in life in general who are more at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim").

Interestingly (and consistent, it appears to me, with research at the Crimes Against Children Research Center - see "New approach to safety education suggested"), Pew found that "there is no consistent association between stranger contact and the types of information posted in a profile" (e.g., first or last name, school name, email address) and "no statistically significant association between stranger contact and having a public profile (letting everyone see your profile instead of just friends).

The study also found that despite the media attention social sites have drawn, they aren't the sole source of uncomfortable online encounters. Aaron wrote that "despite popular concerns about teens and social networking, our analysis suggests that social networking sites are not inherently more inviting to scary or uncomfortable contacts than other online activities."

One other key point parents may find interesting: Monitoring software on computers teens use at home "seems to be more effective than filtering software in limited contact with strangers online," the study found. In his analysis Aaron later points out that that may be because parents who install monitoring software tend to be more engaged in their kids' online experiences than those who install filtering (teens know many workarounds for accessing blocked sites, whether via proxy servers or connecting outside the home).

Related links

The page with a link to the full, four-page data memo, "Teens and Online Stranger Contact," in pdf format.

"Online victimization: Facts emerging"

"Social-networking dangers in perspective"

"Profile of a teen online victim"

"New approach to safety education suggested"

Teen social networkers' safety practices

Good news about teen safety practices on the social Web this week – surprisingly good to adults persuaded by the very negative hype about social networking in the news media this past year. A just-released study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that "the majority of teens actively manage their online profiles to keep the information they believe is most sensitive away from the unwanted gaze of strangers" and other adults, including parents, of course. "Less than 10% of teens say they're actually presenting … their first name and their last name on their profile," Amanda Lenhart, the study's lead author, told Larry Magid in an interview for CBS News. "Add on to that their city or town and the name of their school and the number drops even lower. So it's a very, very, very small number of teens who are actually posting info that can really allow them to be identified online." Other key findings in the 55-page report: "Some 55% of online teens have profiles…. Of those … 66% say their profile is not visible to all Internet users." Of those who do have public profiles, "nearly half (46%) say they give at least some false information. Teens post fake information to protect themselves and also to be playful or silly." The study also reports that 32% of teens receive some kind of online communications from strangers, but not necessarily on a social-networking site. Amanda pointed out that "stranger" can mean a variety of things, from bands to unknown friends of friends to people with bad intentions. Sixty-five percent of respondents said they ignored or deleted those contacts; 21% "responded so they could find out more about the person"; 8% responded to say "leave me alone"; and 3% reported the contact to a trusted adult. There were dozens of news stories covering this around the world by the end of its release day. Here's the Associated Press in the Sydney Morning Herald.