Media sharing's upside, downside & advice on what to do about it

Why do people share innermost thoughts, unretouched photos, and rants and what they ate for lunch in texts, photos, and blogs? And why is this not just a narcissistic passing fad like streaking or something, a baby boomer, someone who grew up with mass media, might ask? Consider this: "In part, it is the very human need to be heard and to connect with others. It is the desire to make a difference, to influence the world around us.... And it is the ongoing quest for authenticity in a world governed by image." That was from The Nielsen Company's Pete Blackshaw in a talk he gave for the Children's Advertising Review Unit last month. [I agree. I think authenticity-seeking is one of the forces behind social media's momentum, probably in more concentrated form where young people are concerned.]

Interestingly, while some are calling it a major media shift, Blackshaw called social media a movement, as he cited the cellphone's contribution to it: "Mobile devices represent a major impetus behind the social media movement, driving part of the 250% audience increase for the year ending February 2009."

Two governments and a whole lot of other adults, however, are concerned about the downside of this media-sharing, user-produced epoch that's upon us. Canada's Privacy Commissioner has a site for youth headed: "myprivacy. mychoice. mylife," including "mycontest": Canada's 2009 "My Privacy and Me" national video competition. The Australian government launched a campaign aimed at youth whose centerpiece is the downloadable brochure, "private i: Your ultimate privacy survival guide." For the parent-child team, I agree that "the privacy conversation starts before the cell phone or the Club Penguin account," as the Togetherville blogger writes. The blog then reprints CommonSenseMedia.org's great tips for avoiding oversharing, but the originals are here. And the NYLawBlog cuts right to what people need to know about a possible outcome of nasty oversharing: "What you need to know about defamation and Web 2.0."

Two related links are: "Not actually extreme teens" (about the need to be always-on teen "PR machines") and "Social networkers = spin doctors (I hope)."

Another kind of filtering needed too

Apple retail stores aren't the only places employing tech "geniuses." Libraries are too. The Internet has turned out to be a "major tool" not only for patrons but librarians as well, saving space, making library resources accessible at home, and bringing more patrons to the library, Michigan's Saginaw News reports. Research that the Saginaw News cites indicates patrons are figuring out that librarians are better than anyone at information filtering. "With their training, librarians are more adept than the average citizen at using search engines to locate and decipher reliable data. [Librarian Gail] Parsons notes her experience helps her discern valid sources and recognize biases." The need for those filtering skills has never been greater - not only for being good scholars and media consumers but also for safe, productive use of technology (phones, the Web, virtual worlds, videogames, media players, etc.). Parents and educators, too, play vital roles in this filtering education. Media-literacy teaching at home and school can be aimed at critical thinking not only about 1) incoming information but also about 2) incoming communication - from everybody, friends or not. It also needs to move beyond what's coming in to include 3) outgoing behavior and communication from a child, via text, images, voice, and video (see "Good citizens in virtual worlds, too"). About Nos. 2 and 3, children can be taught to ask themselves questions like: What's this person really saying to me - is this a form of manipulation? Am I being fair to this person if I IM this about him - would I want him to say this about me? Should I send a photo around with this person in it if I don't have her permission? Will posting this video of me possibly embarrass me in the future if I can't take it down and someone could copy and repost it anytime?

Musicians' view of teen social networking

Come enter, here's my world
Closed off from pain and cold
Come enter, come inside
A secret place of light
'Cause in this world I'm rid of you,
You can't get through

Those are lyrics from a song entitled "Digital Deceit" by Netherlands-based band After Forever. A rare artistic depiction of teen social networking, it's part of a concept CD "about a family with serious issues," wrote researcher Daniel Cardoso in an email to me. Most of this song represents the voice of the daughter, who is "taking refuge in her Internet persona," said Daniel. You may recognize the other voice in the lyrics, that of the adults around her….

Stop dreaming and wake up
Your silly world is not what's real
This world of fake friends
and computers - digital deceit

What struck me immediately about the teenage voice in this song is how it resonates with the latest research in the US about the teens who are most vulnerable to exploitation on the social Web (see "Profile of a teen online victim"): Online "I'm beautiful and all my friends would say the same … the queen of her own world … another me, not someone insecure and strange / My father's will in here, it doesn't mean a thing / And I don't fear his violent rage" (here's a video of After Forever performing the song in YouTube). By the end of the story, however, this teen sounds too grounded to move toward victimization (for more on this CD as a whole, click to this sidebar on my server).

I was fortunate to have met Daniel Cardoso at an online-safety conference held in Lisbon last week by MiudosSegurosNa.net (Portugal's pioneering online-safety organization) and sponsored by Portugal Telecom. The conference was an unprecedented opportunity for the country's biggest Internet provider, children's advocates, research community, law enforcement, and government to compare notes on an important subject. Daniel is a researcher as well as Webmaster for EUKidsOnline Portugal, directed by Prof. Cristina Ponte at the New University of Lisbon (EU Kids Online is a huge ongoing research project involving research in 24 countries).

If you're wondering about After Forever's music, the band itself says it's hard to categorize. In its MySpace profile, it says it "has never pinned itself strictly on any given style. They have the obvious combination of metal and classical themes, but can just as easily implement rock, pop, industrial and progressive styles into their songs." The songs I've heard on this concept CD (including this other, climactic, one), sound like rock opera to me, maybe partly because they're part of a story.

Daniel kindly sent more info on the CD - Invisible Circles - as a whole. You'll find it and lyrics of "Digital Deceit" here.

'Teens rule the Web'

That was just one (the Washington Post's) of an interesting range of headlines about the latest Pew Internet & American Life study about US 12-to-17-year-olds online. The Post's reporter blogged about how "teens continue to lead the pack in creating content on the Web." The San Jose Mercury News reported that "More teens move their social lives online." The Associated Press and USATODAY took the boy-bites-dog angle - that good, ol'-fashioned (land-line) phones and face-to-face conversation are still valued by US teens communicating with friends. Internet News zoomed in on the "super-communicators" part: "Representing 28% of teenagers, super-communicators are those kids who use every technology to communicate that is available to them, including landlines and cell phones, social-networking sites, text messaging, instant messaging and, as a last resort, email." The study was picked up internationally, of course, including in Mumbai, India, at the TechShout blog. Here are some key findings:

"Publishing" as conversing: 41% of teens who are on social networks said that they routinely use those sites to send messages to their friends. When teens blog, post videos, etc., they're "looking to start a conversation as much as they are trying to promote their own creative output," Internet News reports.

Privacy - 66% of teens with social-networking profiles limit access to their pages; 77% of those who post photos "restrict access at least some of the time." Pew's study released earlier this week found that adults are less concerned about privacy protection than teens.

64% of online teens in general "engage in at least one type of content creation," up from 57% in 2004.

"Girls dominate most elements of content creation," according to Pew/Internet.

Blogs, girls; videos, boys - 28% of online teens have created a blog (up from 19% in 2004), and almost all of the new ones are girls'; while 19% of online teen boys had posted video, compared to 10% of girls.

27% manage their own Web site.

39% post photos, videos, and other artistic content; 54% of girls and 40% of boys have posted photos.

Ultimate photo-sharing on phones

Young digital socializers will love this: sending social-network-based photos to friends' phones. CNET's CTIA (mobile phone industry trade show) blog reviews MySpace and Facebook versions. It really sounds like a 2-platform utility that gets one's media moving from phone to Web and vice versa. In this and its WebWare blog, CNET looks at this - the 3Guppies widget - which, if installed on your Facebook or MySpace profile, will allow visitors to "grab all the pictures and videos on it and send them to their own phones." It also sends music from your profile to your phone (and on to your friends), and WebAware says a user doesn't have to know much about his/her phone to use the phone version. The MySpace version, once associated with the profile owner's phone number, can automatically upload photo, video, and text from phone to profile. Photos and - to a degree - music can be edited with this little software app, CNET says, so ringtones can be created from MP3 files. Lots of convenience and potential for self-expression, here, but also a tool to be wary of for teens into online self-exposure. [Virgin Mobile has quite the ringtone-producing tool, too, CNET says in a separate review, and here's a bunch of other widget and micro-app reviews from the CTIA show at CNET.

Jail time for a film clip?

Tell your kids not to mess around with digital cameras in movie theaters. A 19-year-old in the Washington, D.C., area went to see Transformers at her local movie theater with her boyfriend. She told the Washington Post she was enjoying the movie so much she thought she'd shoot a 20-second clip to show her 13-year-old brother how good it was. While she was doing so, two police officers order the couple out of the theater confiscated the digital camera, and charged the college sophomore "with a crime: illegally recording a motion picture," the Washington Post reports. She told the Post that it was her birthday and the two had borrowed the camera from a relative to "make [birthday] memories," so she happened to have the camera when they went to see the film. She "faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 when she goes to trial this month in the July 17 incident." The Post adds that copying a movie in a theater "is a felony under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, punishable by up to three years in a federal prison," and several states have anti-piracy laws in addition to the federal one.

Web video's hot

Web video is quite the trend, and not just for online youth, though young people are on the lighter side of video-viewing. Three-quarters of all 18-to-29-year-old Net users in the US have watched videos online, and 60% of all US Net users have, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, citing a just-released study by the Pew Internet & American Life project. A fifth of Net users watch videos online "any given day" (one-third in the 18-to-29 category), the Associated Press reports. "On a typical day, 19% of US Internet adults watch some form of video. News ranked first and comedy second overall." Younger ones go for humor, older Web video viewers prefer news. "Half of video viewers ages 18-29 watch clips on YouTube, and about 15% cite MySpace. Only 7% turn to a cable or network TV site," according to the AP. But in spite of YouTube's popularity and all the homemade stuff on it, most video viewers - more than 60% - still prefer professionally produced video. High-speed Net access is a factor - 74% of broadband users watch or download online video, Pew/Internet found. Here's the Pew study.

MP3 Barbie

Is it the Barbiepod? She has just as many outfits as the Barbie your mom knew and loved, but she's probably more appealing to the little female digital natives running around your house. Because she's a music player, and when her feet are plugged into the docking station, "she unlocks pages and pages of games, virtual shops and online chatting functions on the BarbieGirls.com Web site," the New York Times reports. This is kind of the tao of Webkinz, the new way to both market and sell "Web-enabled products" to Web-enabled kids. "Instead of asking young Web surfers to punch in their parents’ credit card numbers, BarbieGirls.com and other sites are sending customers to a real-world toy store first. Some of these sites (like the Barbie one) can be used in a limited way without purchasing merchandise — the better to whet young appetites - but others, like the popular Webkinz site, are of little or no use without a store-bought product or two (or three, or a dozen)." Then there's SpotzGirl.com, which allows users to design their own jewelry, picture frames, etc., with Spotz that are like charm-bracelet charms or buttons (the button maker can be purchased for $24.99 at a real-live store). Both sites are about personal expression - decorating oneself, site characters, and/or spaces.

How teens use tech

Teenagers say they only use email when they're communicating with adults. To them, "real" email is a feature of a social-networking site. "To hear the teen panelists tell it … e-mail will be strictly the domain of business dealings," reports CNET's Stefanie Olsen, referring to panelists at this week's YPulse Mashup conference in San Francisco. They were Asheem Badshah, a teenaged president of Scriptovia.com, an essay-sharing site that launched this summer; Martina Butler, host of the [well-sponsored] teen podcast Emo Girl Talk; Catherine Cook, president of MyYearbook.com and soon-to-be freshman at Georgetown University; and Ashley Qualls, president of WhateverLife.com, creators of layouts and graphics for MySpace profiles. So how are they communicating? A whole lot by texting on cellphones. "In the last six to nine months, teens in the US have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80% of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging." Many teens also use multiple social sites ("Badshah said that to subscribe to only one social network means losing out on friendships with people who are active on other rival social networks"). [If a teen reads this, tell us if you agree/disagree with this or the article I link to here - sorry you have to use email (anne@netfamilynews.org)! ;-) But you're totally welcome to post in our forum, though: BlogSafety.com, soon to relaunch as ConnectSafely.org.]

myNBC for TV fans

It's a social site for networking by fans of shows like "Heroes," "The Office," and "The Biggest Loser," a New York Times blog reports. Some analysts think it'll be successful, other think NBC should focus more on getting its content onto existing social networks - on "taking their programs to where people already are." I think, on this very fragmented medium called the social Web, both are right. I'm right now at the YPulse Mashup (conference) about "Totally Wired Teens" and hearing social media researcher danah boyd say that it's going more the way of "mobility" than "immersion" for online teens (fluid movement among multiple sites, media, technologies, and devices rather than immersion or brand/site/tech loyalty). I agree, so I think "mobility" means engaging with other "Heroes" fans in more than one place online. [For a great commentary on what happened at the Mashup, see PBS blogger Rob Glaser's report.]

Young music fans choosing vinyl

Go figure. Just when we thought that music downloads had pretty much killed off CDs, The Guardian reports that, "in a rare case of cheerful news for the record labels" there's a "vinyl revival" afoot in the UK (and quite possibly in the US too). It says two-thirds of all UK singles in the UK now come out on in the 7-inch record format, "with sales topping 1 million. Though still a far cry from vinyl's heyday in 1979, when Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes alone sold that number and the total vinyl singles market was 89 million, the latest sales are still up more than five-fold in five years." The Guardian adds that it's not unusual to young people to buy records even with nothing to play them on. It quotes an industry analyst as saying they'll buy the digital version to listen to and the record as art, something tangible in their hands, maybe as a memory of a great concert. Another sign that today's media sharers (as opposed to mere consumers) don't abandon sites, formats, technologies, etc., they just fold new ones into the mix.

Cyworld's 'video studio'

The social networking service that started in South Korea and launched in the US last summer is kicking video-sharing up a notch. Social Computing Magazine reports that it has launched its “Video Studio and Plaza, a forum for members to upload, edit, mix and share videos or photos.” With this feature, social producers or video sharers can use effects like “slow motion, cross-fades, color enhancements, and special effects.”