Help with cyberbullying on YouTube

Say you're 15, care greatly about a particular environmental cause, and use your YouTube account to vlog (video blog) about it in an earnest way that triggers some really nasty comments on your page. What do you do? YouTube has some tips it blogged with just that scenario in mind, linking to the National Crime Prevention Council's new anti-cyberbullying campaign, Circle of Respect, which came up with the scenario and illustrates it here. The tips are good, basically saying: 1) Delete the comments and consider blocking the user; 2) Report hate speech (comments on race, gender, or disability); 3) If physical threats (which are illegal) are involved, talk with a trusted adult about whether to call 911; and last but far from least: 4) Be respectful yourself – treating others with civility is protective. I base that on a finding published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine in 2007: that aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of victimization. For a much more thorough guide to parenting in the video age, see kid-tech expert Warren Buckleitner in the New York Times. [Meanwhile, the Italian government is getting considerable flak for proposing new Web-video rules that would require users to get clearance from the Communications Ministry before uploading their videos to sites like YouTube, The Standard reports.]

Related links

Our "Top 10 Safety Tips for Video-Sharing" at ConnectSafely.org

"Parents face a new frontier: Setting electronic limits," with some individual family strategies in the Washington Post

Why "soft power" parenting works better here in NetFamilyNews.

Thankful for new media & what they're teaching us

Here in the US, this is kind of, partially a week of reflection and thanksgiving, as many of us shop, cook, travel, cook some more, and feast and some of us try to keep it really simple. But for the reflection and thanksgiving part, treat yourself to this enriching example of participatory media, a video by Michael Wesch and his students (the main one on this page). Then treat yourself to Professor Wesch's whole playlist on the right-hand side of that page. These students of anthropology – of humanity, really – understand social media from the inside out, so this is efficient, fun, joyful, profound, unsettling, mixed-media learning for us people who grew up in the profoundly different mass-media era.

In 12 years of writing about youth and tech, I have not seen a better resource for parents, teachers, police, and policymakers working in the youth and online-safety or 21st-century-learning spaces (pls see Related links below for teaching and parenting resources). [I've seen many, many great resources, mind you, but nothing quite as moving in the social-media space as this one.] Young people deserve to have their parents and teachers informed. And we all deserve exposure to the care and quality of thought that went into producing and presenting this 55.5-minute video that was presented at the US Library of Congress June 2008 (months later Wesch was named Professor of the Year; see his brief acceptance speech here). It's a global picture, which is essential, I think, given the nature of new media, and naturally it's not entirely a pretty picture – some viewers may find parts of it disturbing. But what picture of humanity is entirely beautiful? What's important is the humanity.

I think Mike Wesch understands cultural shifts, media shifts, and human beings well for two reasons: 1) his own shift from 18 months' anthropological field work in a remote (Iron Age?) village in Papua New Guinea to teaching the anthropology of social media in and with YouTube in 21st-century Kansas and, 2) as his talks and sound bytes indicate, he loves working with people and seems to have a way of bringing out the best in them – even when the picture is grainy. You'll get that in his playlist.

Related links

Parents, here's why we need to understand new media: Prof. Henry Jenkins at the University of Southern California says it's because social media "weren't part of the world of our childhood," and "now we're in a space where we're dealing with stuff our parents never had to deal with.... But we have to be open to the new ... there's much more valuable stuff here [online] than risky stuff.... At the end of the day, they need us to be informed about this. They don't need us looking over their shoulders; they need us watching their backs.... We have to recognize that they're going some place we never went and that's what's exciting and what's terrifying about the present moment," he says. [Thanks to CommonSenseMedia.org for linking to this clip at the MacArthur Foundation site.]

Teachers, if you wonder how Prof. Wesch uses new-media tools in his classes, he describes how (both in his huge undergraduate anthropology classes and small graduate-level digital ethnography classes) in a talk he gave at the University of Manitoba a little over a year ago. You can read a description of how the class is set up here, with an insightful comment below it from Bryan, a teacher of 9th- and 10th-graders, about how social-media tools can be used at those grade levels.

Here's the spring 2009 work of Wesch's class - a 6-min. video they created out of the class's "trailers," or spring semester projects (each student produces one) - and one of the trailers.

This month YouTube named Wesch its Curator of the Month. He explains all that here.

My previous piece on Wesch, August 2008: "Watch this video, parents"

1 billion videos viewed (a day)

That's what co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley said as he marked the third anniversary of YouTube's acquisition by Google, the San Jose Mercury News reports. He added that YouTube is seeing more demand for longer format videos, meaning movies and TV shows. "In August, for example, YouTube said it would add clips from Time Warner programming such as 'Gossip Girl' and 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show'. The deal allowed Time Warner to set up individual channels and sell ads to accompany the clips, with YouTube taking a share of the revenue." But just as important as figuring out the revenue stream, I think, is the need for this giant, unwieldy, all-thing-to-all-users site to figure out how to foster more of a sense of community (or communities) which adds a measure of security and well-being and protects both the community and its users from abuse as users feel they're stakeholders in community well-being. Call it inside-out online safety.

25 billion+ videos viewed

That was just this past August in the US, according to comScore's latest figures - yet another online video-viewing record. More than 10 billion of those views were on Google sites, with YouTube representing 99% of Google video traffic. In terms of people, "161 million US Internet users watched online video during the month, the largest audience ever recorded," comScore Video Metrix reports. The rest of August's Top 5 video-sharing locations were Microsoft Sites, Viacom Digital, Hulu, and Fox Interactive (MySpace). Now, for a little context, check out Clive Thompson in Wired on "How YouTube Changes the Way We Think" (and converse).

YouTube now No. 4 on the Web

Online video is just huge and growing. YouTube is now the fourth most visited site on the Web, globally, according to Mashable.com, citing comScore figures for this past July. YouTube had 120.3 million viewers in July, over one-third of the US population, and in that one month, they watched 8.9 million videos. "What may be more shocking is the average number of videos per viewer: 134.9. That’s nearly five YouTube videos per day." Here's The Guardian on how peace recently broke out between YouTube and the music industry. And here's TheJournal.com on how one teacher made the case for using YouTube at school.

Calling all student videographers!

The buzz has already started for President Obama's announcement of the "I Am What I Learn" video contest. I saw a couple of my favorite educators tweeting about it just now and want you to know too: "On September 8, the US Department of Education will ask students to respond to the President’s Back to School challenge by creating videos, up to two minutes in length, describing the steps they will take to improve their education and the role education will play in fulfilling their dreams," the DOE says on its placeholder page. Here's the White House's info page. Hmm, will schools will have to stop blocking YouTube now? For great examples of already-completed student video projects, see "Young practitioners of social-media literacy" (doing homework the dog just can't eat!).

Online video: More amazing growth data

The growth of US Web video-viewing is pretty phenomenal. We viewed 13.5 billion online videos this past October! Not "million" - "billion"! That's a 45% increase over October 2007, according to comScore's latest figures. ComScore measures by the companies that own the sites - so Google topped the list (its YouTube represented 98% of its video-viewing traffic) at 5.4 billion videos viewed (39.7% share). The rest of the top 10 video sites were more clumped together in traffic numbers, the only surprise being Hulu.com's rapid rise to the No. 6 position. Here are the US's 10 biggest video-viewing providers, going down from Google: Fox Interactive Media (mostly MySpace) at about 520 million (3.8%); Yahoo Sites 363 million (2.7%); Viacom Digital 305 million (2.3%); Microsoft Sites 286 million (2.1%); Hulu 235 million (1.7%); Turner Network 228 million (1.7%); Disney Online 127 million (0.9%); AOL 123 million (0.9%); and ESPN 105 million (0.8%). BTW, amateur video producers with the most viewers at YouTube are now "earning six-figure incomes from the Web site," the New York Times reports, because of the ads YouTube puts with them (it has a revenue-share program). See the Times for examples.

New Facebook worm

Tell Facebook users at your house to be very alert when social-network friends seem to say they've just got to check out this or that video. That scenario happens all the time - which is why it's used by social-engineering hackers to infect social networkers' computers. Where the new worm comes in is an extra step for which users need to be on the alert. The way it works is, they get a link supposedly to a video, CNET reports. That takes them to a Google page where they read that, in order to view the video, they need to click to download some code or an app. Clicking on that link installs Trojan software. The link on that page, however, isn't really a Google link. CNET explains why and how Google pages are being used. Though the problem will probably be fixed by both Google and Facebook shortly, this is a good illustration of why social networkers should never blindly click around - especially when there's a cool video in the offing.

What are online video viewers like?

They're pretty young, for one thing. Though 13-to-24-year-olds represent only 15% of Internet users, they make up 35% of "active online video viewers," according to a new Forrester Research report cited by eMarketer.com. These active viewers "are highly engaged with online video, paying attention to longer programming and the ads that run with it," Forrester says. I'm sure they're among the Web's most active video producers too. For more on this, check out the charts on eMarketer's summary page.

YouTube bans violence-inciting videos

YouTube has changed its content guidelines and now bans videos that involve "inciting others to violence," the Washington Post reports. Last May Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) "issued a bipartisan report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs staff that described how al-Qaeda created and managed its online media," then wrote a letter to YouTube's parent Google "demanding that the company 'immediately remove content produced by Islamic terrorist organizations from YouTube'." YouTube only removed some of them but "refused to take down most of the videos on the senator's list, saying they did not violate the Web site's guidelines against graphic violence or hate speech." A policy review reportedly ensued, with YouTube telling the Post that the senator had "made some good points." Meanwhile, in The Guardian, a commentator calls for better self-regulation by social Web sites, saying that waiting for users to flag material that's offensive or violates site terms isn't enough. "The right direction is for there to be intelligent, independently-set but industry-agreed, standard practices, procedures and guidelines for companies to adhere to. The alternative is individual organisations at best doing what they feel is right; at worst doing as little as they can to avoid denting their margins."

Online video's huge numbers

This gives us a feel for how Web video-viewing happens to be coming along: Americans viewed more than 11.4 billion online videos for a total duration of 558 million hours this past July, comScore reports. Another way of looking at it: More than 142 million US Internet users each watched an average of 80 videos per viewer. A few more interesting findings:

75% of all US Net users viewed online video.

The average viewer watched 235 minutes of video.

91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos per viewer).

51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8 videos per viewer).

The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.

As for kid stuff in this category, a snapshot from Disney: Its Disney.com site's July video traffic - 186.7 million video streams - "broke its all-time online video record," the company announced, a 39% increase over June. Hmm, did it have something to do with school being out? Disney says it had a lot to do with High School Musical 3, the Jonas Brothers, and Miley Cyrus. [See also "Watch this video, parents."]

Direct video-uploading on MySpace

Now MySpace users can do what amounts to live video blogging. As CNET explains, direct video-uploading means "you can now sit in front of your Webcam, navigate to MySpace, and hit a 'record' button, blab on incessantly about how the Jonas Brothers are ruining American youth, and you've got yourself a piece of Web video." YouTube and other video-sharing sites have this too, but "the real advantage" where MySpace is concerned is that these little video blog posts can be embedded in your profile and comments and pointed out in bulletins to friends, CNET says. The online-safety aspect of this is that users might make a nasty verbal slip about someone or reveal some intimate part of their thinking or anatomy and .... well, guys, this is a live recording. I think it can be deleted (and not embedded) later, but that's something every user will want to check out in advance, right?

Watch this video, parents

If you want to understand...

who digital natives are and what they're doing online

how community is experiencing a rebirth online

how identity-exploration can be a collective experience and how that can be therapeutic

and maybe even why YouTube is the No. 1 site among 2-to-11-year-olds for video viewing (see this)

...pour yourself a tall glass of iced tea or something and watch "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube," presented by Kansas State University anthropology Prof. Michael Wesch's last month at the US Library of Congress. Just click on the title, then hit the little "Play" button in the middle of the picture of the two tiny brothers, and I suspect you'll find - as I did - that you'll actually enjoy becoming more digitally enlightened in this way. I guarantee that, if you have kids and they're online, they'll appreciate your taking the time.

If you want to know a little more before you invest the 55.5 minutes, here are some highlights:

Why YouTube? It's a force and a fixture in many people's lives worldwide. If the 3 major TV networks broadcasted 24 hours a day, every day for the 60 years they've been broadcasting, they would've produced 1.5 million hours of programming. YouTube has published more than that in the last six months, Dr. Wesch said. People post 9,000 hours of video a day (another way to say it: 200,000 three-minute videos a day) - most of them meant for fewer than 100 viewers.

Linking what? The Web is increasingly about "linking people, not information."

Not trivial. The experimentation with video, identity, and collaboration going on in YouTube is courageous ("your bedroom as the most public place on the planet") - with many unknowns, including audience and what happens to one's very personal work and exploration. It's also global. Note the hero of "Free Hugs" worldwide at 35:35 minutes into Wesch's talk.

Not isolating. "New forms of community" have developed in this global video-sharing, and with them "new forms of self-understanding," Wesch said.

Ok to stare. Yes, viewing some of self-exploration videos seems a little voyeuristic, and there are some cruel comments and reactions, but this also happens: people experiencing "a profound, deep connection" free of social anxiety and other constraints of "connecting" in "real life" - because they can stare at the person in the video, study his face while he's talking on camera, while he's taking that leap of faith in humanity by putting himself out there.

Sexy images. Very often the sexy titles and screen shots (called "flash frames") that present videos are not what parents and other newcomers think (they're not presenting x-rated videos). They're about serious or funny completely innocuous videos. Representing them in a "sexy" way is a way of gaming the system. Their creators are just trying to get their videos noticed and watched so they'll rise to the top of the list (YouTube's home page) and so get noticed even more so they'll become famous or they'll raise awareness for their cause.

"Era of prohibitions." Don't miss Stanford Prof. Laurence Lessig's message (at about 46:15 min. in) about the impact on youth of knowing that remixing media, a way of life for them, is technically illegal in this "era of prohibitions": "That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting," Lessig said. We can't stop our kids from playing with digital media, he said, we can only send them underground, where we can't learn about what they're doing. Parent and Prof. Liz Lawley at the Rochester Institute of Technology echoes this below (in "Social networkers want more privacy options").

This is the kind of presentation that recharges, nourishes, keeps you going and going and going as you try - in the area of youth online safety - to maintain a balance of three needs: to alert parents to the risks that do exist, to mitigate fears and encourage (when "be very afraid" is so often the message to parents), and to communicate all the good, important growth and learning that's going on as young people use media that so many adults don't really understand.

Related links

"An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube," the talk he gave at the Library of Congress, June 2008

MediatedCultures.net, Professor Wesch's site (blog, bio, video portfolio, and intro to his students) - "Reasons Why We Tube" may answer more questions you have, as it explores and summarizes the 370 video responses Wesch's class got to "Why do you tube?"

The Wired Campus column about Wesch in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Author, tech-publishing entrepreneur, and pundit John Battelle's interview with Michael Wesch

Two resources Dr. Wesch recommended at the end of his Library of Congress talk: 1) AnthroVlog, the digital video research blog of Dr. Patricia Lange at the University of Southern California, and her paper, "Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube" and 2) the work of MIT graduate student Kevin Driscoll, particularly "Thanx 4 Da Add: How Soulja Boy Hacked Mainstream Music" and got a major-label contract from a base in MySpace.com.

Two stories show YouTubers' rants can go only so far. 1) Trying to be funny, maybe, a frequent YouTube ranter known as "Trashman" was arrested by federal agents this week for claiming to have told "Gerber employees to lace baby food with cyanide," CNET reports. 2) In "Wife's rant on YouTube falls foul of judge," The Guardian reports that "a British actor who took her battle against her millionaire husband to the internet, posting videos that lambasted him on YouTube and gained an audience of millions," was ordered to leave her New York home by a judge who ruled her behaviour was 'spousal abuse'."

The video-driven Internet

It's really the user-driven Net, but all those users out there are viewing, producing, and uploading more and more video. The lead of this article says a lot: "Video may have killed the radio star, but it doesn't have to kill the Internet." CNET reports that Internet service providers are scrambling to figure out how to keep up with all the "video-driven bandwidth demand." Demand grows as household use of broadband grows. The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently reported that 55% of US households now have broadband connections, up from 47% a year ago. CNET cites ComScore figures showing that "Americans are currently watching upward of 10 billion videos online a month" and reports that that's only the beginning. The rest of the piece is about what service providers are working on as they figure out how to support our habit.

For youngest Web users, YouTube beats Disney

We're talking about the Disney Channel Web site, here, not the Disney Channel on TV, but this is still interesting: Among 2-to-11-year-olds, YouTube was No. 1 for online video viewing and Disneychannel.com a distant second, reports CNET, citing Nielsen figures. For YouTube, the number of 2-to-11-year-old visitors in April was 4.1 million; for Disneychannel.com, it was 1.3 million. NickJr was also on the list, but note that MySpace - whose minimum age is 14 - was too. So was Google Video. "On average, the kids watched 51 video streams from home during April, spending almost two hours on video clips. That usage outstrips the average of nearly 75 million adults [44 video streams and 1 hr, 40 min] who regularly view video clips at sites like ESPN.com and CNN.com," CNET reports. I agree with reporter Stefanie Olsen where she writes: "Slightly disturbing, the site with the highest concentration of 12- to 17-year-olds, or 44% of this age group, was Stickam.com, a hub for live Webcams of people in their bedrooms." For more on Stickam, see "Social networking unleashed," the kind without monitoring, customer-care staffs, and safety czars and "Parents, be aware of Stickam."

Online video of teen's beating in FL

A terrible video of six teenaged girls beating a peer has sparked nationwide discussion on where blame should be placed for the behavior and the video, which police said they put on the Web. According to a local paper, The Ledger, the beating was vicious and remorseless and the situation complicated, involving a group of cheerleaders, one of whom (the victim) - reportedly a troubled teen and honor student, who was not living at home and on probation at the time of the incident - allegedly had been trash-talking the other girls in phone text messages and on MySpace. The six other girls retaliated by setting up the 35-minute beating for videotaping with a couple of boys serving as lookouts outside the house where it occurred. They then reportedly either uploaded or linked to the video from profiles in MySpace and YouTube (MySpace and YouTube both told InformationWeek that the footage had not been uploaded to their sites, which could mean it was linked to from elsewhere on the Web). "The girls ... ranged in age from 14 to 17. All have been arrested and charged with felony battery and false imprisonment," according to The Ledger, and doctors are hoping the victim, who was still recovering from a concussion a week after the beating, would fully regain hearing and vision on her left side. MySpace and YouTube are reportedly working with law enforcement on investigations. The local sheriff told The Ledger that "investigators suspect there were as many five video clips of the incident taken by more than one camera," and they'd so far only been able to track down one of them. Here's a discussion NPR aired with bullying expert Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes.

Video sites' traffic way up

Nearly half of US Internet users have been to sites like YouTube, and use of video-sharing sites has grown 45% just in the past year, according to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. What's more, the BBC cites new Nielsen figures showing that some video-sharing sites' traffic has doubled since the US writers' strike started at the end of October. "In September and October, Crackle[.com] enjoyed an audience of 1.2 million users, which doubled to 2.4 million," the BBC reports, and "YouTube's audience was up 18% in the two months after the strike started." Not surprisingly, it's youth who are driving the upturn, with 70% of people under 30 using video-sharing sites, Pew found, with more and more creating as much as viewing. "Some 22% of Americans now shoot their own videos, with 14% of them posting at least some of that video online," the BBC adds. Here's Internet.com's coverage, and here's a Los Angeles Times editorial citing other studies with similar findings.

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.