Md. students seek cellphone rules change

Cellphones are banned from Montgomery County (Md.) schools, but there's still plenty of texting going on in the classroom. So, since texting is so inextricable from their lives now, the students - led by Quratul-Ann Malik, a high school senior - are taking a resolution before the county school board, asking it to allow high school students to use cellphones during lunchtime, the Washington Post reports. "A Facebook group to promote her cause attracted 1,200 members in three days." But she faces "entrenched opposition," not only in Montgomery County. There and in nine surrounding counties, cellphone rules are pretty archaic, "written when few students carried cellphones and 'text' was not yet a verb. Today, they are difficult to enforce. The main problem is texting, which has supplanted talking and note-passing as the distraction of choice in many classrooms." I recently talked with some university law professors, who felt there was no way they could ask students to put away distracting technology in their classes. They said they need to embrace it - not as purely social or "distraction" tools, but as learning tools - and they are beginning to. Here are just two professors who are using social media to great advantage, Michael Wesch at Kansas State University and Jason Jones at at Connecticut State University. I know college and high school are very different environments, but progressive thinking occurring at both secondary and post-secondary levels will spread - though not far, maybe, before Qurantul-Ann graduates (if she hasn't already).

Cellphones in cars

This is definitely good fuel for family discussion - why the National Safety Council recently "called for a nationwide ban on the use of cellphones while driving, citing overwhelming evidence of the risk of injuries and death from driver distraction," as reported in a commentary at the Christian Science Monitor. Or why California "banned texting behind the wheel and, along with several other states, prohibits the use of hand-held phones while allowing drivers to talk with hands-free devices." But even hands-free phone conversations in cars have been found to be risky. Because the risk is not where hands are (or aren't), it's in where the mind is. If the mind is elsewhere while driving, talking is risky even when both hands are free. Research at the University of Utah found that drivers talking on cellphones "performed no better, and by some measures worse, than drivers who were legally drunk," commentator Myron Levin adds. Meanwhile, 80% of cellphone owners make calls while driving, and nearly 20% send text messages, Levin cites a Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. survey as finding. I'm thinking the discussion is only partly about phone in cars. There's a broader, deeper discussion about "presence" that needs to really kick in worldwide. We could talk with our children about how, when we're fully present in what we're doing any given moment - in a car driving, in a classroom listening to a teacher, or on the phone listening to a friend working through something, etc. - then the tools we use (cars, ears, phones) are more likely to be constructive and the experience more likely to be both safe and meaningful.

Is 'sexting' a teen trend?: Study

Just how pervasive is 'sexting,' the nude-photo-sharing by cellphone that seems to be happening a lot? I've seen reports of the practice in more than a dozen US states, New Hampshire the latest one (see this). A new study tried to get a handle on just how much this is happening, if not why. The survey, commissioned by the nonprofit National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com, found that "about a third of young adults 20-26 and 20% of teens say they've sent or posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves, mostly to be 'fun or flirtatious'," USATODAY reports, adding that "a third of teen boys and 40% of young men say they've seen nude or semi-nude images sent to someone else; about a quarter of teen girls and young adult women have. And 39% of teens and 59% of those ages 20-26 say they've sent suggestive text messages." All this in spite of the fact that nearly three-quarters of these young people (73%) "said they knew sending sexually suggestive content 'can have serious negative consequences'."

As for the why question, that 73% finding didn't surprise me - I suspect most teens know full well this is risky behavior. But since when did awareness of risk stop risky behavior among teens or in any way reduce the cachet it often has for them? Then there's the brain-development factor, explaining why risk assessment is a primary task of adolescence. Neurologists tell us the frontal cortex, the impulse-control, executive part of the brain, is in development till everybody's early-to-mid-20s. Generally speaking, their brains just aren't there yet, where fully understanding the implications of their actions is concerned (why caring adults need to be a part of the online, tech-enabled part of their lives).

There are also the realities of technology and sexual content. In her coverage of the survey, Jacqui Cheng of ArsTechnica suggests this is the next phase of the long-standing phenomenon of inappropriate content in email - "since the age of 12, my inbox has been filled with inappropriate photos of people, whether I wanted to see them or not," she writes. That sounds a little extreme to me, but sex-related spam has been around almost as long as email and does seem to be at least part of the wallpaper of online life. In the journal Pediatrics, researchers at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center wrote in 2005 that "exposure to online porn might have reached the point where it can be characterized as normative among youth Internet users, especially teenage boys. Medical practitioners, educators, other youth workers, and parents should assume that most boys of high school age that use the Internet have some degree of exposure to online pornography, as do girls."

Back to teen-produced content, NBC's Today Show covered the sexting survey in light of a story concerning video-sharing on the Web even though nudity was not involved....

Fast-food & other pranks: Why?

Risque behavior recorded in video-sharing or social-networking sites is not about the Web or technology so much as it's about age-old teenage pranks and dares. The latest high-profile example involved three bikini-clad girls who - apparently influenced by a YouTube video of a similar "exploit" at Burger King - "bathed" in a KFC dishwashing tub as re-recorded by NBC's Today Show. The difference here, of course - and where new technologies do have a role - is how extremely public these antics can become.

"Well, first let's look at the why," writes a mobile-communications blogger, pointing to another factor in all this self-exposure: our sexualized culture. "These girls have grown up on-screen, be it in home movies or MySpace profiles." Here's the most interesting part of the post: "Their lives are lived in the story - the telling and the showing. They also think that their value lies in their bodies. This is part of pop culture. Heck, it's almost an honor for actresses to pose for Maxim, Playboy and the like. But also keep in mind that girls probably don’t intend for these to go public (though they will, of course…)." Several thought-provoking points, there, including that last one about some video "actors" thinking they're just playing to their own circle of friends, not potentially everyone on the Internet and for virtually all time (there's more reflection on this at YPulse).

There's an inherent, important contradiction there, too - just acting out for one's friends but with the potential for overnight YouTube fame lurking in the back of one's mind. Being sex objects in a sexualized culture is only one possible element. Reality TV's insta-fame has been suggested as a likely factor, too. "Kids are getting all these messages saying, 'Expose, expose, expose'," social-media and digital-youth researcher danah boyd told me when I was researching our 2006 book, MySpace Unraveled. "If you don't, your friends will expose you. We're all living in a superpublic environment, getting the message that you have more power if you expose yourself than if someone else exposes you." A master of managing her superpublic is Taylor Smith, 18, described by the New York Times as "the most remarkable country music breakthrough artist of the decade." Is her very smart, open PR strategy what some teens are emulating (or vice versa!)?

For more about this pressure on teens to self-expose as always-on, one-person PR firms, see "Not actually 'extreme teens'."

Cellphone to be No. 1 access tool: Study

By 2020, the mobile phone will be the main tool for connecting to the Internet for most of the world's people, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's latest "Internet Evolution" study. "The study asked a group of 'Internet leaders, activists and analysts' to forecast what they expect to be the major technology advances of the next decade," the Washington Post reports. Two other interesting predictions concerned social tolerance and virtual reality, and the experts polled seem to have felt just as uncertain as the rest of us about what impact connective technology will have on human relations and social tolerance: "The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness." Their prediction about virtual reality lines up with teens' approach to tech for some time: "divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations."

Landlines out the window?

Well, not quite, but the number of people abandoning landline phone service is rising, especially among youth. JupiterResearch found that 12% of Internet users don't have fixed phone service and almost two-thirds of the 12% are between 18 and 34, the New York Times reports. Another 12% "indicate their intent to replace home phone service with exclusive cellphone use during the next 12 months," the Times adds. Still, fixed phone use is still pretty high: 70% of Net users still have fixed lines in their homes provided by a phone, 15% have fixed phone service from a cable company, and 3% from an Internet service provider.

A teacher on texting

High school teacher Allison Cohen asked 90 of her students about their texting practices where school and academics were concerned and then wrote about it. But in this insightful article at bNetSavvy, you'll not only find her students' views but also hers and those of fellow teachers as well. If parents have concerns about cellphone abuse at school, do check this out.

Web service for masking phone nos.

This is an interesting tech tool pointing to a growing safety need, but it poses a problem where online kids are concerned. I'm referring to the age-old problem of technology: that along with its many positives, there are downsides, and everybody gets more out of the positives when alert to the downsides too. So here's the new service: BeeMask.com, which allows people using online chat to "take it to the next level," so to speak - move from text chat on the Web to voice chat on the phone without giving out their phone numbers. How it works: 2 people in a chat room go to BeeMask.com and register (give the site their phone numbers instead of each other). If they're already registered, they just agree in the chatroom on a common word (like a temporary password, "talk2ya"), then go to BeeMask, both type that word into the box, and "when the second Beeword is entered, a phone call is connected between your real-life phones," according to the site's FAQ . Great for two adults who just want to talk but aren't quite ready to give out phone numbers - a safety feature, in fact. Not so great if someone with bad intentions thinks a child might be more easily compelled to give out further info in a voice conversation.

Top cellphone picks for students

Yes, it has come to that: cellphones among back-to-school supplies (though maybe not on school administrators' lists!). "All cell phones are not created equal, and some are better suited for students than others," CNET reports. CNET editors picked a quiver of phones that, in various ways - e.g., full QWERTY keyboard, organization tools, multimedia features – are suited for students.

Smart phones in New York

Pretty soon it'll be like this everywhere, not just New York City, with people walking nominally forward, relying for navigation largely on other senses besides eyes: "As night settled in," says the New York Times editorial writer about watching passers by from a sidewalk restaurant, "I could see the glow of the screens shining upward on the faces of their owners.... Were they Twittering? Following their GPS? Checking their stocks? Reading their email? Texting a friend? Playing Cash Bandicoot? [huh?]...." Writer Verlyn Klinkenborg cites one unnamed source as saying that, by 2011, there will be 5 billion people using these cellphone-cum-computers on the planet. Whoa. A slightly modified scene from The Matrix comes to mind - all these meandering smart-phone users whose real lives are in a other places in addition to where they are on sidewalk. It's like teen social lives today, occurring simultaneously in a whole bunch of places: where they are physically, on the Web, on their cellphone, and maybe in World of Warcraft, Teen Second Life, or Xbox Live.

Texting for parent avoidance?

That's according to an executive in Disney's US mobile-phone division: that kids will let parents' calls go to voicemail, then text Mom or Dad about what's up, CNET reports. They prefer texting to talking with parents (and friends) "so that they can continue doing other things like play video games with friends." Check out the texting numbers CNET's Stefanie Olsen reports, citing C&R Research in Chicago: "The average teen generates between 50 and 70 text messages a day, or as many as 18,000 a year." Nearly 50% of US 10-to-13-year-olds and 83% of teens own cellphones.

Middle-schoolers arrested for nude photos

Four sixth- and seventh-graders in Alabama were arrested for taking and sending nude photos of themselves with their cellphones. The two boys and two girls "were charged with possession of material harmful to minors, a misdemeanor," the Birmingham (Ala.) Press-Register reports, adding that "the law was intended to prevent copies of hardcore pornography from sitting on the same shelves as Sports Illustrated and Newsweek magazine." A police officer told the Press-Register that adults convicted of "similar crimes" face sentences of up to a year in a jail and a fine of up to $10,000, but these students "will likely face punishment ranging 'from probation to a correctional program like a boot camp'." As much of a nightmare as this case is for the students and their families, at least the students weren't charged with the federal felony of distribution of child pornography, a terrible possibility of which parents and teens really need to be aware (see "Teen-distributed child porn" and a similar case in Pennsylvania). [Thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this story out.]

Cellphone planet!

Literally cellphone planet: "The human race is crossing a line. There is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth. From essentially zero, we've passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years," the Washington Post reports. "This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history," and the projection is 4 billion cellphones by 2010, moving on to 5 billion afte just a few years beyond that. Why? It's very flexible portable sociability (texting, talking, social networking) - even more portable than IM-ing and Web-based social networking, and look how those two technologies have taken off! The Post cites the view of Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, that sociability is "the essence of the human species."

Right age for cellphones?

The age group more and more parents are asking about is 8-to-12-year-olds, "the fastest-growing segment of the US cellphone market," the Houston Chronicle reports (already, 72% of 13-to-17-year-olds have mobile phones). The Chronicle cites experts as saying that, generally children around 10 or 11 can handle responsible use of a cellphone. But it really does depend on the child. Some of the signs of responsibility the Chronicle suggests are whether a child can remember to: charge the phone, turn it on before going out without prompting, and follow both family and school rules associated with cellphone use. Downsides to consider are: the bills kids can "rack up ... through texting and downloading songs" (remember to either to use your cellphone company's flat-rate, unlimited texting add-on or have it turn off texting altogether); unwanted calls and messages from peers or adults you don't know ("but kids shouldn't automatically ignore calls from numbers they don't know because it could be a parent themselves that's stuck and calling from another phone"); and "phones may give children privacy that parents don't necessarily want them to have." Very helpful things to consider. [NetImperative.com recently published a survey on how mobile social networking works, but the site has been having some server issues, apparently, so this link may not work.]

Keeping kids' phone bills down

"Australia has one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership in the developed world among children," the Sydney Morning Herald reports, so its Communications and Media Authority issued some tips to help keep kids' cellphone costs under control. Developed with the help of London-based Childnet International, suggestions include considering pre-paid phone services with built-in limits, using providers that track use between billing periods, using services that block extras like Internet access. For more suggestions, see "Ask these questions first" at the bottom of the Morning Herald article. The paper cites one expert as saying this can be a good opportunity for early family discussions about budgeting time and money. Children as young as five have mobiles in Australia.

Cellphone parental controls available

It was a gleam in some early adopter parents' eyes back in 2004 when I first wrote about phone controls; now a reality. Today AT&T launches a service that might make for a little more cellphone-related family harmony: "Smart Limits" for $4.99 a month. "Many parents want their children to have access to cellphones for safety reasons, but they don't want them making or receiving non-emergency calls during the school day, chatting away all the shared family-plan minutes or bloating the bill with text messaging charges," AT&T told the Associated Press. "The functions, ranging from call blocking and hour limits to text message and download allowances, will be set through a website. Calls to or from a parent's number can be made to override the restrictions, and calls to 911 can be made anytime." Smart Limits also includes filtering if Web access is within the AT&T phone network (it won't work on an iPhone or when any phone is using a wi-fi hot spot for Web browsing outside the company's network). Here's the Detroit Free Press's coverage, which says about 79% of US 15-to-17-year-olds have cellphones.

Oz parents don't want phone ban

In spite of some incidents of phone-based bullying, parents in New South Wales, Australia, don't want schools to ban cellphones, Australian IT reports. In a six-month period to April this year, NSW government schools filed more than 25 reports to police about serious incidents [of violence] filmed by [students using] video-equipped phones." Still, the education minister there said that "such cases were in the minority and that most parents wanted their children to carry phones with them for safety reasons." The government, he added, had no plans to impose such a ban.

Phone monitoring on steroids

It's a little chilling, but maybe some parents feel they need to go to these lengths to protect their cellphone-using chilling. I can see parents using a product like this openly as a tool for solving a cyberbullying problem that might include calls and text message to a child’s cellphone. It’s called Flexispy, and it’s downloadable monitoring software for cellphones. The Thailand-based company's tagline is "Protect Your Children. Catch Cheating Spouses." According to its press release, the software “has already been used successfully worldwide to bring to light to extramarital affairs, disloyal employee activities, and to protect children from predators and SMS [phone text] bullying. It "runs invisibly in the background and can only be accessed using a secret code." Flexispy Light "automatically records all incoming & outgoing SMS messages, calls, emails and tracks the device location" and uploads all this to a Web site the "spy" can access. The "pro" version does all that and offers "the ability to secretly switch the phone’s microphone on from any other phone; thereby listening into the target’s surroundings."

Texting's cost for teens

What a bummer – having to work over summer vacation not to make money but to pay off one’s text-messaging debt. That’s what 17-year-old Sofia in the Washington, D.C., area faces because of a $1,100 monthly cellphone bill for 6,807 text messages last month, and her parents’ plan included only 100 free text messages, the Washington Post reports. “Forget minutes. It's all about the text allowance. It needs to be supersized, now that instant messaging has leapt from the desktop to the mobile…. Think it, text it, keep it short, have to have it,” the Post adds. Now, anyway, since texting teens is nothing new in Saudi Arabia or the Philippines, much less Europe and the rest of Asia. Last month Verizon Wireless "introduced an unlimited texting plan because even its highest bundle of free text messages - 5,000 a month - wasn't enough” for teens, according to the Post. It tells of a group of teens heading to Morocco with no phones, and of a mother wondering how they’ll deal with communicating the old-fashioned, face-to-face way.