9th graders' Lively protest

"It's free expression in a dignified, a powerful and a passionate manner," a School Library Journal blogger reports, referring to Digiteens' protest against the impending shut-down of Lively avatar chat by its parent, Google. The Digiteens are Camilla, Ga., 9th-graders whose goal, they say in their protest blog, "to teach digital citizenship to students via an easy to use 3D virtual world that is easily accessible to people who do not have a lot of bandwidth or good computers and allow schools to create [online chat] rooms at minimal or no expense." The protest has gotten some viral support around the world (see these from the Philippines and Hong Kong). The project received some, to me, surprising flak in the comments section of this ReadWriteWeb post about it, to which the Digiteens' teacher, Vicki Davis, responded in her own blog.

Googles deals with sex chat on Lively

Last week I wrote about Google's launch of Lively avatar chat, ending with a caveat that seems to apply to so much of the social Web: that there were sex-related chat rooms in the Popular Rooms list. This week CNET reports the same: "Despite some injunctions to the contrary, sexual overtones are creeping into" Lively, with the qualification that "a little snooping around revealed some evidence of borderline rooms, but nothing as risque as shows in the more permissive realm of Second Life" (which does have ratings so those who want to can avoid sex-related virtual locations). Google told CNET it's taking complaints about these seriously and is "working to remove them." I think this is an example of one of the points Oxford University professor Jonathan Zittrain makes in his book The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It - that users' abuses of user-driven services make them less attractive to mainstream users and could have the effect of stigmatizing them or sending the mainstream increasingly to "safer," more controlled services ultimately to the detriment of what's good and constructive on the participatory Web (that may not be his main point, but it was one of my takeaways from a talk he gave).

Live chat in social sites

It sounds like a cross between Facebook, Second Life, and Habbo Hotel, and it's coming soon to a Facebook profile near you, the New York Times reports. It says there are several products in the works, but one such "turns a flat profile page into a three-dimensional live chat room. Users choose characters to represent themselves from a list of preternaturally handsome avatars ... and proceed to one of a dozen environments, like a gothic urban warehouse or seaside villa. With videogame-like precision, they can then navigate that virtual space, which may feature their Facebook photos hanging from the walls and a YouTube video playing on a widescreen TV. Up to 15 others can choose avatars and enter the same room at the same time for text-based live socializing." When I first read this, I thought, "oh no," because online chatrooms are notorious for virtual sexual encounters and starting points for potential teen victimization. "Characterized by names like 'Single and Looking,' they often devolved into noisy chaos," the Times reports, or worse. That darkside is possible here, too, if avatars can wear risqué clothing or be put into sexual poses, but teens looking for this can find it already on the Web. Here's the latest on Facebook's new instant-messaging feature from CNET.

Avatar chat's downside

For some teens it's harmless fun, for others IMVU.com's chat-by-avatar (an animated character that represents you online) can be pretty explicit. How good or bad the experience is depends on the user, and there are some sexually exploratory teens in the site mixing it up with adult users (there has been a lot of discussion about this in our ConnectSafely.org forum). Here's the first news story I've seen about its darkside for teens, a pretty grainy, local story at TheDay.com in Connecticut in which a police investigator logged into a teen user's account and found links to avatars engaged simulating sex. Here's a review of IMVU at the IMSafer blog, which also mentions the risqué clothing on many female avatars, most of which seem to have body shapes that even Barbie would fantasize about. [IMVU is the second site reviewed in the IMSafer post; the first is another site with a definite downside for teens: Webcam site Stickam.com.]