Fledgling star reporters in kids' virtual worlds

The people who help protect kids in virtual worlds have noticed an interesting trend: More and more kids are posting news, cheats (workarounds), and pictures from their favorite online worlds and games in their own blogs. "Essentially, the kids act as reporters for the virtual world by taking screenshots of parties and events in addition to reporting on various issues," writes Chase Straight in the blog of Metaverse Mod Squad, a virtual-world moderation company. It adds that these young bloggers – who are, in effect, co-creators or -producers of these worlds – are also skilled in creating and posting videos from in-world (or "machinima"), including music videos and tutorials or how-to's for in-world activity. "Some kid bloggers have developed such a large following that emerging virtual world sites have entered into financial partnerships with them in order to reach their fanbase. Their star power and celebrity status have inspired other children to create blogs of their own, hoping to attract the same level of readership." [See also "Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users" and our "Undercover Mom" series by NFN contributor Sharon Duke Estroff.]

Regular, micro & now 'slow blogging'

First there was fast food, then slow food. Now, instead of mere blogging, there's slow blogging, the New York Times reports - more reflective blogging. Clearly, blogging is a maturing medium. It's diversifying. "Some slow bloggers like to push the envelope of their readers’ attention," not unlike just about all bloggers, who start out with enthusiastic high-frequency posting that they later find hard to sustain. What's even harder to sustain when the frequency goes down is "stickiness" - when posts aren't daily, readers get out of the habit of checking in. Which may be one explanation for the popularity of the Huffington Post: "With about 50 new posts a day," it's more like a daily newspaper - high frequency and a little something for everyone. Besides the maturing of the technology itself, another factor is tech segmentation. There are new technologies for "fast blogging" or "micro blogging," e.g. Twitter, in which you can link to longer posts in a blog, but you're under no obligation to say much. And Twitter has secondary technologies such as Twitter news feeds that automatically announce to your Twitter followers when you've posted. This layer is like a blend of blogging and instant messaging. I know, I know. You might be asking, "Where does it stop?" Maybe nowhere. ;-) BTW, there's fresh thinking too, now, on a similar movement: fast (global) retail to slow (more local) retail. [See also "30 Days to Being a Better Blogger."]

Just because they crave attention?

Why do teens post such personal information online for all the world to see? The burning question of the first decade of the 21st century, perhaps - at least for parents and other digital non-natives. I'm late in pointing you to this, but "Exposed," a recent cover story of the New York Times Magazine looks at "oversharing" in the full, seemingly unedited story of Emily (Gould) the 20-something compulsive blogger. Her story suggests that the answer may partly be the reality TV phenomenon ("that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges," aka random readers); genetics ("some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others ... technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale"); a twisted concept of free speech acted out ("I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted"); and crying out for attention. I agreed with her when she wrote: "I don't think people write online exclusively because they crave attention."

In any case, overexposure phenomenon is probably not going away - partly because diaries and journals will never go away and partly because the audience (or the imagined audience) certainly won't. As Emily told a Times reader in a Q&A the paper later published, "It's probably a pretty safe bet that people will continue to make mistakes online - after all, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so besides themselves. This is the best and worst thing about the blogosphere," she continues, referring to its readers. "Other people's mistakes, which is to say, their impulsively revealed thoughts and opinions, can be fascinating."

Though there is pressure on young people to express themselves digitally, this doesn't mean oversharing is what social networking is all about and it doesn't mean all children will. The way teens express themselves online is highly individual. It also might help parents to know that privacy is no more black & white where personal blogging's concerned than is life itself. Emily refers to an important book that points this out: "I'm reading an interesting book right now about reputation and the Internet by Daniel Solove, and in it he posits that we've traditionally thought of privacy as a binary: private vs. public. He thinks that we should begin to think of degrees of semi-privacy, in terms of both self-regulation and legal regulation." And teens reportedly are already thinking in terms of degrees of privacy as well as of fact and fiction. For them, the latter isn't binary either: they add degrees of privacy by fictionalizing parts of what they present of themselves (see "Online aliases" and "Social networkers: Thinking about privacy").

But back to Emily's reference to "self-regulation." Isn't that where parenting comes in? Teaching (and hopefully modeling) self-regulation, as our rules for them are replaced by the trust they earn? It's not so much about shutting the blog or a compulsion down, maybe, as it is about providing perspective on privacy and self-respect. What has much more lasting value to them is helping them think about how broad their audience may actually (or ultimately) be, what image they're presenting of themselves now and when people encounter their content in the future, and how little control they have over what can happen to comments once online.

Related links

Author and professor Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation

"The social Web's digital divide"

"Say Everything" in New York magazine

"The 'naked generation?'"

"Growing up in public"

"Nude photo-sharing: Q from a family that's been there"

"Generation Y has its own ideas of what privacy is" in the Naperville [Ill.] Sun