Teens' online friends = offline friends: Study

Fresh evidence this week that most teens use the Web to socialize with their "real life" friends - "people they already know rather than strangers who might turn out to be predators," USATODAY reports. A study of students in grades 9-12 by University of California researchers "will be presented at a meeting of the Society of Research in Child Development" this week, and similar findings were "published last year in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology." Among the former's key findings: For 44% of youth surveyed, using social network sites "had no effect on their relationship with their friends and 43% said it made them closer; 5% had "friends known only from the Internet."

Online teens: Snapshot by numbers

A whopping 93% of US teens (12-to-17-year-olds) are online, Pew/Internet's Mary Madden told NPR recently. That's up 20 percentage points from the 2000 figure for online teens in the US. Not surprising to most of their parents, the "frequency and intensity" of their Internet use is "also increasing, such that most teens are online every day," Madden also told NPR, and "a majority of teenagers who go online maintain one or more profiles at social-networking Web sites."

SN profiles: Inaccurate impressions

A University of Texas researcher has found that social-networking profiles don't give very accurate pictures of their owners. "Psychology associate professor Samuel Gosling and collaborator David Evans created You Just Get Me, a Facebook application and Web site, to determine how well people understand each other by looking at a personality profile," reports The Daily Texan at UT. You Just Get Me users answer 40 questions about their personality and then compare their answers to how other users view them. Users rate each other based on first impressions, such as how lazy, ingenious, quiet or rude a person seems." Interestingly but not surprisingly, the researchers also found that the project teaches its subjects something about how well they understand themselves.

UK: Less homework & TV

Homework and TV-watching are both losing out to social networking among British 15-to-19-year-old media consumers, a new survey found. Citing the 2008 "Digital Entertainment Survey," The Guardian reports that "21% of teenage girls and 10% of teenage boys watch less TV than more because they are using social-networking sites," and "nearly a third of 15-to-19-year-olds are doing less homework.

Videogamers & the 'game of life'

Parents of gamers (and gamer parents) might be interested in a thoughtful piece in the Ottawa Citizen by education technology Prof. Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Referring to the perception gaps between gamers and politicians and between gamers and people over 35, Professor Steinkuehler cites Pew Internet statistics ("more than eight out of every 10 kids in America have a game console in the home and over half have two or more") indicating that we might want to bridge this divide that she straddles. "I talk to parents, teachers, librarians and other professors about the social and intellectual value of gameplay. And I talk to game players and designers about why education is important and how research on learning might have something important to say about how games are designed and experienced." Here are the intellectual practices gaming involves which she studies: "collaborative problem solving, reading and writing practices that use highly specialized language, scientific habits of mind such as hypothesis testing and revision, skills in information and communication technology (IT literacy), and argumentation." Steinkuehler says that "such practices are the mainstay of online gameplay. Together, they form that 21st-century skill set so crucial to democratic success." She also talks about online games as "third places" or useful "hangouts" (see "Digital hangouts" posted in this blog Monday). And speaking of videogames, the Washington Post just profiled "the new face of videogames" on Capitol Hill, Michael Gallagher, the Entertainment Software Association's new president, who keeps a Nintendo DS in his suit coat pocket.

Online victimization: Facts emerging

It was great to see the Associated Press's "Net threats result of kids' online behavior." It means newspapers and broadcast media worldwide just may run this story, and more parents will be getting facts instead of scary messages based on ignorance, politics, well-intentioned guesswork. Here are some facts we have now:

Fact No. 1: Posting personal info online isn't actually what makes kids most vulnerable to predators. "Rather, victimization is more likely to result from … talking about sex with people met online and intentionally embarrassing someone else on the Internet," the AP reports. The first form of aggressive behavior - talking about sex with strangers online - is about predation, the second about harassing or cyberbullying, which affects a great many more teens (about one-third of all online youth, according to the latest Pew/Internet study - see this).

Fact No. 2: "Online victims tend to be teens with troubles offline, such as poor relationships with parents, loneliness and depression" (see "Profile of a teen online victim"). The kids most at risk online are already risk-seekers and -takers in real life.

Fact No. 3: A lot of sexual-victimization cases happen at the hands of peers, not adults, the AP reports, citing the work of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. It also cites a 2004 study by the CACRC finding that, even when offenders are adults, they "generally aren't strangers, and pedophiles aren't luring unsuspecting children by pretending to be a peer."

Certainly nobody's saying kids should completely relax about posting personal info about themselves. It's common sense that the more discreet they are the less info there'll be to use against them. But the reality is, sharing - thoughts, media, experiences - is what today's very social, user-driven Web is all about, and a lot of parents can breathe easier knowing that posting personal info online is not as high-risk as once thought.

So what we are saying is that it's time to look at the facts we now have and adjust our child-protection strategies accordingly at home, in schools, and in policymaking. We need to…

…think of our online kids less as victims and more as participants on the participatory Web, of which they are the key drivers.

…think more in terms of online citizenship than online safety. Good citizenship includes safety; knowing that aggressive behavior puts kids at risk, we see that ethical behavior protects them.

When Web participants become cybercitizens, with a sense of responsibility toward fellow participants and their collective space, the social Web will be a safer, better place for everyone on it.

Related links

• The study the AP refers to, published last February in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine: "Internet Prevention Messages: Targeting the Right Online Behaviors," by Michele L. Ybarra, Kimberly J. Mitchell, David Finkelhor, and Janis Wolak
  
• "New approach to online safety suggested," by SafeKids.com's Larry Magid, posted in BlogSafety.com 2/10/07
  
• "Cyberbullying in the US: Fresh insights"
  
• "Profile of a teen online victim"
  
• "Predators vs. cyberbullies"
  
• "Responsible social networking: Mounting evidence"
  
• "Net-related crimes against kids"

Social stuff taking over Web - worldwide

Wherever you are in the world, parents, your teens’ social networking seems to be here to stay. Online video and social networking are outpacing all other uses of digital media worldwide, according to international market researchers Ipsos, and social networking “is quickly becoming the dominant online behavior globally." In terms of frequency of visits to social sites, South Korea leads the way, followed by Brazil, China, Mexico, US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, France, Japan, and Russia. “While 20% of regular Internet users worldwide had visited a social networking site in the previous 30 days, the figure was 55% in Korea and 24% in the U.S.,” according to MediaPost.com’s report on the Ipsos study, “The Face of the Web.” And this study was just of people 18+. As for the UK, Nielsen/NetRatings has a more granular picture: MySpace is “well in the lead with 6.5 million UK users, compared with 4 million for Bebo and 3.2 million on Facebook,” the BBC reports, but the latter two are growing there much faster and could quite possibly catch up to MySpace in the fall, the BBC cites Nielsen as saying. Then there’s time spent: MySpace users “spent an average of 96 minutes on the site in May,” compared to 152 minutes for Bebo users and 143 minutes on Facebookers.

Teens' videogaming time: Study

Teen boys and girls who play videogames spend less time on reading and homework than those who don’t play videogames, a new study found. The videogame players, however, “did not spend less time than non-video game players interacting with parents and friends,” according to the study in the July issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, ScienceDaily.com reports. The latter is *partly* good news for healthy development: "Particularly during adolescence, when social interactions and academic success lay the groundwork for health in adulthood, there is concern that video games will interfere with the development of skills needed to make a successful transition to adulthood." The survey respondents were given diaries in which they logged time spent playing video games, interacting with parents and friends, reading and doing homework, and engaging in sports and “active leisure.” Here’s Reuters’s coverage. Meanwhile, if you have an avid videogamer at your house, s/he may’ve already found this press release about how people can make $120/hour testing videogames: added incentive not to do one's homework?

US parents on kids' media: Study

Two-thirds of parents are very concerned about the amount of inappropriate content US children are exposed to, but they’re mostly talking about other people’s children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s just-released study, “Parents, Children & Media." Only 20% of parents say their own children are seeing a lot of inappropriate content. The study included a national survey of more than 1,000 parents of kids 2-17 and six focus groups with parents held around the US. In other findings, 65% of parents say they closely monitor their kids’ media use and only 18% say they should be monitoring more (16% say it’s not necessary to monitor their kids’ media use). Where the Internet’s concerned, about 75% of parents “check what Web sites their children have visited, and even more look at how kids are profiled on MySpace and who's on their Instant Message ‘buddy lists’,” USATODAY reports in its coverage of the study, which quotes lead Kaiser researcher Victoria Rideout as saying parents feel they’re getting on top of their kids’ Internet use (yet KNX Radio’s headlines was “Study Shows Many Parents are Clueless when it Comes to their Kids and the Internet”). Kaiser also found that 59% of parents say the Internet is “mainly a positive force in their children’s lives”; only 7% say it’s “mainly negative.” And 73% of parents say they “know a lot about what their kids are doing online,” Kaiser found.