Can the social Web be policed?

In "Cyber-bullying cases put heat on Google, Facebook," Reuters points to increasing signs around the world that people want to hold social-media companies responsible for their users' behavior. "The Internet was built on freedom of expression. Society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused. And major Internet companies like Google and Facebook are finding themselves caught between those ideals," it reports. Back before social networking, when people harassed or fought merely over the phone, people didn't hold phone companies accountable for settling the disputes. In the US, the Communications Decency Act extended that "safe haven" to Internet service providers, and courts have included social-media companies in that category ever since.

Here's the view from Australia, where the Sydney Morning Herald reports some cruel defacement of tribute pages in Facebook have gotten Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to consider "appointing an online ombudsman to deal with social networking issues." [Maybe that's where we're headed: countries having ombudsmen able to decide if complaints in their countries should be "escalated" to their specially appointed contacts at social sites at home and abroad? But what about sleazy social-media operations that fly under the radar or refuse to deal?]

Certainly it's understandable that people expect more from social network sites than they do from phone companies because bullying is more public and harder to take back, but is the expectation logical? That's an honest question, not a rhetorical one (please comment here or in the ConnectSafely forum), because what does not seem to be different in this new media environment is how arguments and bad behavior get resolved: by the people involved. It may take time with complaints sent from among tens and in some cases hundreds of millions of users, but fake defaming profiles and hate groups do get deleted by reputable social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. Deleting the visible representation of bullying behavior, however, doesn't change much. Bullies can put up new fake profiles as quickly as – often more quickly than – the original ones can be taken down.

Of course we should expect companies to be responsible and take such action, but can we reasonably blame them if doing so has no effect on the underlying behavior? What court cases like the one in Italy against Google executives for an awful bullying video on YouTube that the court felt wasn't taken down fast enough (see the article in the Washington Post above) illustrate are: humanity's struggle to wrap its collective brain around a new, truly global, user-driven medium where the "content" is not just social but behavioral – and the full spectrum of human behavior at that.

If you do, please comment, but I know of no real solution to social cruelty on the social Web as yet except a concerted effort on the part of the portion of humanity that cares to adjust to this strange, sometimes scary new media environment by adjusting our thinking and behavior. That includes teaching children from the earliest age, at home and school, social literacy as well as tech and media literacy (social literacy involves citizenship, civility, ethics, and critical thinking about what they upload as much as download) – as well as modeling them for our children. Can it be that universal, multi-generational behavior modification is not just an ideal, but the only logical goal? What am I missing, here?

Helping kids gain from adversity: Inspiration for parents, teachers

I just listened to Aimee Mullins's just-posted TED Talk of last October and thought to myself anyone who loves teaching, young people, and the power of the human spirit would resonate with this. Aimee is an actor, athlete, and model (full bio here) who has not merely overcome and pushed through the adversity of being born without fibula, or shin bones, but used that adversity to find and bring out her in-born potential. She talks about not long ago bumping into the OB-GYN who delivered her in her home town in Pennsylvania and hearing about how, because of her career, he tells his medical students, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise and if given just a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve." She adds, "If we can change the current paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to achieving ability or potency, we can release the power of so many more children and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community" – the abilities each child has. She later adds something I think my friend Lenore Skenazy over at FreeRangeKids.com, kindred spirit Tanya Byron in the UK, and a whole lot of other parents would appreciate: "Our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity but preparing them to meet it well."

Mullins says something important about technology and social networking too (which I feel would resonate with the authors of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out). After reading the dictionary definition of "disability" to the audience, she said: "Our language hasn't allowed us to get caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology." She lists some examples, among them "social-networking platforms [which] allow people to self-identify, to claim their own description of themselves so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing." Think about this in light of bullying and cyberbullying, where kids identified by others as "handicapped" in any way are often the targets. Social media can help remove or at least delay the labels bullies exploit, giving children some much-needed space and peace for identity exploration. Mullins puts it so eloquently: "Maybe technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset." Don't miss the talk, including the lines Mullins quotes from a 14th Persian poet at the end.

One family's tech policy

One last gem from the Fox-Wiseman podcast that I blogged about last week in "Clicks & cliques" and that, if it isn't already, should be searchable on the Web as text. Toward the end of the interview, Fox asks Wiseman to share her own family technology policy (Wiseman's kids are 6 and 8). Here it is:

"Technology can be really fun to use, and it gives us incredible access to the world, but it is a privilege not a right, and because it is a privilege, you have the responsibility to use it ethically. What using technology ethically looks like to me is that you never use it to humiliate, embarrass ... or misrepresent yourself or someone else, never use a password without the person's permission, never share embarrassing information or photos of others, put someone down, or compromise yourself by sending pictures of yourself naked, half-naked or in your underwear. Remember that it is so easy for things to get out of control. You know it, I know it. So I reserve the right to check your online life, from texting to your Facebook page, and if I see that you're violating the terms of our agreement, I'll take your technology away until you can earn my trust back. This is my unbreakable, unshakeable law."

See also: "'Soft power' works better: Parenting social Web users."

Facebook's orders of magnitude of change

In six years Facebook has gone from being a social utility for students of a single northeastern US elite university (a sort of directory+community where Harvard students could find and socialize with each other) to a social utility for nearly 400 million people of multiple ages, languages, and walks of life worldwide (FB passed its sixth birthday last Thursday).

My theory is, that fairly spare original design as a utility made it less flexible for individual users but more flexible for users as a whole – in other words for the changes that going from mere hundreds to hundreds of millions would entail. A pretty bare-bones social utility (like Twitter, too, as opposed to MySpace, which was always more of a self-expression tool than a social utility) is simply a person's social network visualized. [If this makes no sense, pls let me know or post your own theory in comments below.] "In its latest redesign, Facebook is playing up applications, games and search," USATODAY reports. That makes sense to me, because apps and games are one way users can customize their FB experience, and search becomes paramount simply because of the challenge of finding someone among 400 million users – but also grows the tension between those concerned about privacy and those who want to be found by old friends and long-lost relatives. For those concerned about privacy, by the way, here's a very handy how-to article: "The Three Facebook [privacy] Settings Every User Should Check Now": the ones concerning who can see what you share (updates, photos, etc.), who can see your personal info, and who can search for and find your FB profile with Web search engines.

PBS Frontline's 'Digital Nation': Presenting our generation with a crucial choice

Seems to me, Gever Tully's Tinkering School would be the perfect antidote for all the concern about kids and digital media expressed in PBS Frontline's "Digital Nation" – hands-on problem-solving, lots of tools, collaboratively learning by doing, giving kids time to work the problem, celebrating and analyzing failures, teaching that success is embedded in the process (watch his TED Talk about this). The thing is, so much of that sort of tinkering is being done by kids using the very digital media and technologies that are the focus of our fears. But more on that in a minute.

This time, Frontline, which airs on PBS this Tuesday night, is depicting the personal explorations of Digital Nation's writers themselves, those of Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff, both parents. Last time, in 2008's "Growing Up Online," the stories were more those of the documentary's subjects. It's as if Dretzin, the producer of both Growing Up Online and Digital Nation, was shaken by what her reporting turned up in the last project. Thoughtful journalist/anthropologist that she is, she went in-depth and looked at all sides of those teens' stories, presenting the most balanced picture I'd seen anywhere to that point, having interviewed leading social-media researchers such as C.J. Pasco and danah boyd for depth and perspective.

In Digital Nation, at least the preview version I saw this past weekend, it seems the main story is two parents' concerns. We're on a 90-minute journey with them, wending our way through skillfully told vignettes (about everything from a South Korean boy at videogame-addiction camp to the US Army's shopping-mall-based videogame arcade/ recruiting center to a corporation's daily multinational staff meetings in a virtual world) and thought-provoking interviews, again with top academics (e.g., MIT's Sherry Turkle, USC's Henry Jenkins, Arizona State's James Paul Gee, educator Katie Salen, Emory's Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, and Marc Prensky, who coined the term "digital natives"). Important, if not particularly new, questions are raised – for example, about multitasking, etiquette, addiction, alienation, and the blurring of virtual and real.

Documenting an angst-ridden point in history?

Certainly we hear Rushkoff when he says "we need to know if we're tinkering with something more essential than we realize ... what it means to be a human being." But we also hear from scholars who have been studying that question very closely for years that, with societal and technological change, some things have always been lost and some gained. Prensky says on camera that "we confuse the best ways of doing something once [in our past] with the best ways of doing something forever." That's what so many of us are doing. Perhaps Dretzin and Rushkoff are Everyman, or Everyparent, and Digital Nation is documenting a point in history – here in the middle of this profound media shift Earth is experiencing – when we're fearing and mourning what's being lost a lot more than we're seeking and considering what is being gained.

Did the writers really hear James Paul Gee, when, in their interview with him, he told of how, in virtual worlds and multiplayer games, young people function in teams in which "everybody is an expert in something but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else's; they know how to understand the other person's expertise so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world"? That's what happens for home-schooled students and the teacher members of the Cognitive Dissonance guild in World of Warcraft – and with students at school on curriculum-grounded "quests" in an educational virtual world called Quest Atlantis developed by the University of Indiana School of Education.

Did they hear Gee when he said we have two school systems now – traditional school, fixated on delivering content via textbooks, and the informal school system of social media, where kids are problem-solving, researching, producing, etc. on their own because social media are largely blocked from schools?

How about Katie Salen – professor, director of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design, and executive director of the Institute of Play – when she suggests on the show itself that seeing young people's game-based learning and play only through the lens of our old media environment, where virtual worlds didn't exist, may be somewhat myopic for us and limiting for our children? (See "From chalk 'n' talk to learning by doing" about Quest to Learn, a new school of which the Institute of Play is a founding partner.)

Stick with 'chalk 'n' talk' or open our minds?

For our children's sake, we really need to dig past the legitimate but relentless, visceral, and politically correct questions with which all parents and mass-media natives struggle and seriously consider what these scholars are saying. And not only them! I can't wait to see what Digital Nation's producers come up with next, now that the work of more than two dozen social-media scholars – Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out – has been released by MIT Press. It's a mother lode of stories about how young people learn in and with new media.

Which brings me back to tinkering. I got that word from Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation Yes, who presented a workshop about it at Educon, a tech educators' conference, this past weekend. Reading through her past posts about it, in addition to references to Gever Tully, I found a profound 10-minute video interview with John Seely Brown, visiting professor at USC and former director of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), about using digital technology to bring collaborative "tinkering" back to school. Digital Nation, please look into this next!...

Collaborative tinkering & social capital for kids

In the interview, Brown said: "I think we're moving into quite a different kind of world, one in which change is omnipresent, where we're beginning to find ways to bootstrap our own knowledge, tinker with ideas around us, find things we don't know, ask good questions, and be open to criticism." He calls for peer-based, collaborative learning, "because, from the sharing you begin to see how other kids use what you just created. Kids learn from each other as much as from an authority or mentor."

Brown talks about how to make school responsive to the pace of change and suggests thinking of schools in terms of "distributed communities of practice," which digital-technology learning tools allow. "With these powerful tools with which to craft things, tinkering has really come back big time.... This networked world is an open-source world, where I can make something, pass it back to the community, and have that community do new things with it." This is not just a shift for media or even education, but for identity and self-worth: "In earlier decades, a lot of kids grew up thinking, I am what I'm wearing, how I dress, what my parents own; my identity came from those material possessions. Just maybe we're entering a world where ... a sense of identity starts to get constructed for myself based on what I have done, what I have created, and others have built on, passed on to others, and they have been able to do wondrous things with as well. A whole new sense of reputational capital and social capital is on the move...."

Related links

"digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier" - the show's main page (the full 90-min show can be watched online right now here)

A review of Digital Nation by media professor Henry Jenkins (who appeared in Digital Nation and taught at MIT for 20 years, until moving to USC six months ago) offering a different take on "killer paragraphs" and multitasking MIT students (including his own)

The perspective of Duke University English professor Cathy Davidson, who wrote a book about the 19th-century panic over the destructive effect of novels on children

"PBS documentary questions tech and our future," by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid

"Are you an Internet optimist or pessimist?: The great debate over technology's impact on society," by Adam Thierer

Of "Dangerism" at The Tinkering School blog

"Net safety: How social networks can be protective," where I blog about how James Paul Gee's Digital Nation interview got me to thinking about how what I call "the guild effect" – or online community social norming and self-policing – will be an increasingly key element of online safety going forward

Digital Nation interview: My thoughts on parenting our digital-age kids

The reality TV of school: Helping our kids with tech-assisted 24/7 school drama

My review of "Growing Up Online" two years ago – maybe a little biased; it's good I wasn't interviewed for Digital Nation

'21st-century statecraft' at home & school

Live on the Web, I was just listening to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton's call for 21st-century statecraft (as well as the need to protect free expression online) and couldn't help but think about how much we need to respect, teach, and model good citizenship at home and school (here and in every country) – using the media kids use and love – in order to realize Secretary Clinton's vision for Internet freedom. She spoke of the need to "create norms of behavior among states." Absolutely, but we need to start here at home, promoting and modeling norms of good behavior online and in homes and classrooms using the social (behavioral) media and technologies where so much kid behavior occurs now. I just reviewed a major study, the Kaiser Family Foundation's, about how much youth are using media, and while some are appalled at the time spent with media, are they thinking about how so much of that usage is outside of school, because we block social media and cellphones from school – leaving young people completely on their own to work out social norms? What a missed opportunity! Secretary Clinton also called on us to focus on the needs of youth. Doing so must include understanding how they use media, not just how much. Let's begin now consciously to model and teach the good digital as well as real-world citizenship and "statecraft" that will be protections to free speech, our countries, and most especially our children – at school, in virtual worlds, and all the other places where they spend time. [See also "Digital risk, digital citizenship" and "From users to citizens."]

Major study on youth & media: Let's take a closer look

With its fresh, sweeping look at the media lives of US 8-to-18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation's just-released "Generation M2" is a tremendous service to parents and educators – but also a subtle disservice. The latter, because it looks at kids' and teens' experiences with today's media through the lens of yesterday's, the mass-media culture we adults grew up in. "The story of media in young people’s lives today is primarily a story of technology facilitating increased consumption," the authors write, even while a growing body of research shows that the youth-media story is actually more about sharing, playing with, and producing media, individually and collectively, than consuming it. But more on that in a moment. First, the findings....

1. The data

As "one of the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information on the amount and nature of media use among American youth," this is also Kaiser's third such study (the first two were done in 1999 and 2004), so it shows usage trends. "Generation M2" also zooms in on individual media and devices, behaviors such as multimedia multitasking, and gender and ethnicity differences in the data. Here are some highlights:

Nothing but more (almost): Youth media consumption has grown from 6:21 hours/day five years ago to 7:38 today, and they now "pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes of media content into those 7.5 hours a day." The breakdown: Movies and print, 0 growth; 47 more min./day for music/audio; 38 more min./day for "TV content"; 24 more min./day with videogames; and 27 more min./day on computers (though I'm not sure why computers are called media, when they're more delivery devices). Age-wise, the biggest media-use growth spurt is "when children hit the 11-to-14-year-old age group," when total media use goes up a whopping 4 hours a day (from 7:51 for kids 8-10 to 11:53 for those 11-14).

Much more mobile: All that growth in media use was "driven in large part by ready access to mobile devices like cell phones and iPods," according to the study's press release – cellphone ownership for 8-to-18-year-olds went from 39% to 66% and iPods and other music players from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players. Of course parents know that kids spend more time doing everything besides talking on their cellphones (games, music, photo-sharing, video-viewing, etc.: 49 min./day; talking 33 min./day). This study did not consider texting a form of media use, it says, but it did find that people in grades 7-12 spend an average of 1:35/day texting.

"Parental control": About 30% of youth "say they have rules about how much time they can spend" with various media. But children who do have rules at their house spend almost 3 hours less time with media a day than those with no rules.

TV leads in more ways than 1: "TV remains the dominant type of media content consumed, at 4:29 a day," and 64% of 8-to-18-year-olds "say the TV is usually on during meals; 45% say it's on "most of the time"; 71% have a TV in their bedroom; 50% have a videogame console in their room. The authors did say that this latest study found for the first time that TV-viewing on *TV sets* went down 25 min./day between 2004 and '09, but TV-viewing on other devices more than offset that decline: 24 min./day online; 16 a day on MP3 players; 15 a day on cellphones. "All told, 59% (2:39) of young people’s TV-viewing consists of live TV on a TV set, and 41% (1:50) is time-shifted, on DVDs, online, or mobile.]

Media use & grades: With the caveat that the study "cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades," the authors write that 47% of heavy media users ("the 21% of young people who consume more than 16 hours of media a day") say they usually get "mostly Cs or lower," compared to 23% of light users. ["Light users" are the 17% who consume less than 3 hours/day.] Book reading held steady over the past five years at about 25 min./day, but magazine and newspaper reading are both down ("from :14 to :09 for magazines and from :06 to :03 for newspapers").

Favorite Net uses: In terms of time, social networking unsurprising topped the list (74% of people in grades 7-12 have profiles), but – surprising to me – they spent only 22 min./day at it, followed by gaming (17 min.) and checking out video sites (15 min.).

Girls & boys: Girls spend more time than boys in social sites (:25 vs. :19), listening to music (2:33 vs. 2:06), and reading (:43 vs. :33), but not by all that much. The real gap shows up in game playing and video use: console games (:56 boys vs. :14 girls), computer games (:25 vs. :08), and sites like YouTube (:17 vs. :12).

2. Removing the mass-media filter

So are we looking at all this data largely from the context of the media environment we grew up in, where media were consumed, professionally produced (much of it for entertainment), and government-regulated? As we read, are we worried that new media are just a waste of our kids' time, a distraction, or even a potential health problem (Kaiser's study appears in its "Media & Health" practice)? The Kaiser report is riddled with the words "consume" and "consumption," when really what youth do so much more with media now is blog, share, post, text, discuss, remix, and produce, often collaboratively, as mentioned above. As sweeping as this study's scope was, a study about their consumption is only a small part of today's youth-media equation.

The report refers to "screen media" vs. "print media," when what can appear on that Net-connected screen is virtually all traditional media as well as the new, user-generated kind – because the Internet increasingly mirrors all of human life, the behavioral parts (from bullying to mentoring) as well as the consumables (from great literature to research to frat party photos) and creative productions (photos, tunes, videos, podcasts) are there too. Yet, when referring specifically to young people reading text on the screen, the report cites "the latest advice column on a fashion website or a classmate’s posting on a social networking site," not peers' blog posts, videos or other creations.

This study wasn't about the informal learning going on in social media, but that needs consideration in the context of youth media use. [A question asked in the 1999 Kaiser study – about whether time spent using the computer was mainly entertaining, killing time, or learning something – was in fact dropped for the next two studies (see pp. 46 and 47).] It's important to keep in mind that extensive research into how youth use social media at home, in school, and in after-school programs shows that a lot of learning, not just entertainment, is going on in their media use. In its 2008 report, "Living and Learning with New Media," the Digital Youth Project found that, "by exploring new interests, tinkering, and 'messing around' with new forms of media, [youth] acquire various forms of technical and media literacy.... By its immediacy and breadth of information, the digital world lowers barriers to self-directed learning." In a paper on videogame-based learning, Digital Youth Project lead investigator, Dr. Mimi Ito, wrote last fall that "online groups mobilizing through games like World of Warcraft, [alternate-reality game] I Love Bees, or [virtual world] Whyville have demonstrated the possibilities of new forms of collaborative problem solving and collective action which exhibit properties of scientific inquiry."

Probably since the beginning of modern-day-style adolescence, parents have had to adjust to unnerving new kinds and uses of media, but today's media shift is an order of magnitude different: Not only is it mobile, multimedia, multidirectional, user-produced, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one; it's all mixed up with traditional, professionally produced media in the same "place" – the Internet, via proliferating devices – and it's social and behavioral (see "Youth, adults & the social-media shift"). It's asking a lot of us adults, so there's a strange need for both patience (with ourselves and each other as we adjust) and urgency (to hurry up and adjust!). There's also a need to be alert to mass-media biases in what we read about youth and social media and open to the positive as well as negative implications.

Related links

"Kids pack in nearly 11 hours of media use daily," by my ConnectSafely co-director, Larry Magid, at CNET and his audio interview with the study's director Kaiser Family Foundation vice president Victoria Rideout, where she makes 2 interesting points: 1) how hard it is to categorize kids' media use when it's so fluid (it would be a lot easier if the study were youth-centric, not media- or tech-centric), and 2) how most of kids' media use right now is what might be called passive and non-productive (which is no surprise when we block social media from school and leave them on their own in new media – see "School & social media: Uber big picture").

"If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online" in the New York Times, or did that headline writer mean watching TV, as the study actually suggests? The Times reports that "the study’s findings shocked its authors," then cites the view of Boston pediatrician Michael Rich that it's "time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment."

"Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project"

"Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-olds"

"Youth, adults & the social-media shift" here at NetFamilyNews

Social Web's help for Haiti

With emails from President Obama, tweets in Twitter, and cellphones sending “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief," fixed and mobile social media are raising millions for Haiti earthquake relief. Yesterday (1/14) may've been "the biggest day for mobile giving to date, CNET reports, adding that Facebook said its users "have been posting more than 1,500 status updates a minute containing the word Haiti." The New York Times reports today that "the American Red Cross, which is working with a mobile donations firm called mGive, said Thursday that it had raised more than $5 million this way" and "nearly $35 million" in general by Thursday night, "surpassing the amounts it received in the same time period after Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami." This is an important media story for classroom and dinner-table discussion, but parents and teachers will also appreciate this "teachable moment" for new media literacy. Because, unfortunately, "with any urgent call for donations often comes a rash of scams that can pilfer cash or result in identity theft," another CNET post warns. The article offers advice for applying critical thinking to texted, posted, and tweeted solicitations – and so does the FBI.

FTC's milestone report on virtual worlds

This is pioneering stuff on the part of the US government. The Federal Trade Commission today sent to Congress its close study of 27 online virtual worlds – 14 for children under 13 and 13 aimed at teens and adults – looking at the level of sexually explicit and violent content and what the VWs were doing to protect children from it. I think it's important for parents to keep in mind when reading the study or just the highlights here that "content" in virtual worlds means user-generated content (which is why, in "Online Safety 3.0," we put so much stress on viewing children as stakeholders in their own well-being online and teaching them to be good citizens in their online and offline communities). Here are some key findings:

The FTC found at least one instance of either sexually or violently explicit content in 19 of the 27 worlds – heavy (sex or violence) in five of them, moderate in four, and "only a low amount in the remaining 10 worlds in which explicit content was found."

Of the 14 VWs for kids under 13, 7 contained no explicit content, 1 had a moderate amount, and 6 had a low amount.

Nearly all the explicit content found in the kids' VWs "appeared in the form of text posted in chat rooms, on message boards, or in discussion forums."

The Commission found more explicit content in VWs aimed at teens or adults, finding it in 12 of the 13 in this category, with a heavy amount in 5 of them, moderate in 3, and a low amount in 4 of the 13.

Not just text: Half the explicit content found in the teen- and adult-oriented virtual worlds was text-based, while the other half appeared as graphics, occasionally with accompanying audio.

The report goes into measures these 27 VWs surveyed take to keep minors away from explicit content, including "age screens" designed to keep minors from registering below a site's minimum age (what the FTC calls "only a threshold measure"); "adults only" sections requiring subscriptions or age verifications (see "'Red-light district' makes virtual world safer"); abuse reporting and other flagging of inappropriate content; human moderation; and some filtering technology. "The report recommends that parents and children become better educated about online virtual worlds" and that virtual-world "operators should ensure that they have mechanisms in place to limit youth exposure to explicit content in their online virtual worlds." In the two pages of Appendix A (of the full, 23-page report + appendices), you'll find a chart of all the virtual worlds the FTC reviewed. [See also my VW news roundup last week and "200 virtual worlds for kids."]

This is a great start. As purely user-driven media, virtual worlds are a frontier for research on online behavior. The FTC was charged by Congress "merely" with determining the level of harmful content, not behavior – I really think because adults continue to think in a binary, either-or way about extremely fluid environments that are mashups of content and behavior. Where is it really just one or the other, what is "content" in social media, and how do we define "harmful"? We also need to define "virtual worlds." Some of these properties are largely avatar chat, some are games (with quests), some are worlds with games but not quests in them. Still, we've got some great talking points and very useful data to build on.

Not just digital natives & immigrants!

It makes sense that news media reports about how youth use technology are both produced and consumed through adult lenses. Many news reporters grew up in a very different (mass media) environment, as did a lot of parents, educators, and other news consumers. So we're seeing and participating in a distorted picture of social media and how youth use them if we're viewing young people's use through the traditional news media and our own mass-media lenses. While our children are playing, learning, and socializing with what, to them, is like a new toy or convenience tool, we are slowly grasping the social, economic, policy, educational, etc. implications of a major media shift.

Still, even though there is a generational divide between those who grew up with mass media and those growing up with networked media (realtime, multidirectional, user-produced, etc.), a new paper in FirstMonday, "The digital melting pot: Bridging the digital native-immigrant divide," suggests that it's best not to take the metaphor too far. I agree. Digital immigrants/natives is a huge generalization: among other things, it fails to acknowledge how very individual media and tech use is for people of all ages. It also, by definition, says "the immigrant can never become a native, which may serve to excuse individuals without tech skills" from even trying to gain them and understand new media from the inside, according to the paper's author, Sharon Stoerger. She prefers the term "digital melting pot" because it "refers to the blending of individuals who speak with different technology tongues.... The focus of the melting pot is on the diverse set of technological capabilities individuals actually have, as well as the digital skills they might gain through experience." Two years ago, Prof. Henry Jenkins (then at MIT, now at USC) used the term "digital multi-culturalism," writing in his blog that "I worry that the [digital natives/immigrant] metaphor may be ... implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other."

'What's print?': Navigating the media shift

Tech educator Bud Hunt in northern Colorado looks at what "print" means now in the context of requiring students doing research to look a little deeper than the top five-or-so search results in Google. Is a newspaper article a "print source" now that newspapers are on the Web, along with magazines, encyclopedias, and full-blown research studies? He asks them for primary sources now.

BTW, I point out a lot of stories that illustrate the giant media shift we're experiencing. I think that's important to do because we adults need to understand how our kids' media environment is very different from the one we grew up in. I feel we need to understand that so we can be patient with ourselves, understand why we're so unsettled by digital media tools such as social networking, be open to the emerging positives of social media, and see what hasn't changed. And what hasn't changed? The need for the life literacy that caring adults have always shared with youth. One word for that kind of literacy is "parenting"; some other terms for it are "wisdom" and "street smarts." There's a new inter-dependency that I think is lovely: They need our street smarts, we need their tech smarts. Working from that inter-dependency can teach all parties involved good things like self-respect, mutual respect, and collaboration.

But back to life literacy (a subset of it is the social literacy needed online as well as offline): I'm seeing others saying similar things about its vital role. At the recent Safer Internet Forum in Luxembourg, a representative from Germany's Education Ministry pointed to the need for what I'd call the 3-legged stool of the new online (and offline) safety: "technology skills, media skills, and life skills." I think the reason why Swedish psychologist Pauline Ostner said at the same Forum that "youth are looking for ways to communicate more and better with their parents and teachers about their Internet use" is because they're trying to make sense of it all – what's happening in the social drama of adolescence mirrored or even amplified online. I think if we want to parent and teach kids, we can't afford not to understand this media shift and work with our kids to figure out together what it all means and how to navigate adolescence as well as social media and technologies. But I'd love to get your thoughts on this – pls comment here or email me via anne[at]netfamilynews.org.

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"

Vietnamese fear Facebook blockage

Vietnam's more than 1 million Facebook users are worried that their government may be blocking the social network site, the San Jose Mercury News reports. "Over the past week, access to Facebook has been intermittent in the country, whose government tightly controls the flow of information. The severity of the problem appears to depend on which Internet service provider a customer uses." One ISP's technician said his company had been ordered by government officials to block Facebook, but senior management said that hadn't happened. "Access to other popular Web sites appears to be uninterrupted in Vietnam, a nation of 86 million with 22 million Internet users."

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)."

MySpace's focus on music

MySpace Music announced further expansion this week. Computerworld says the site's adding music features "in a bid to reinvent itself," but you certainly can't believe everything you read about social networking; music has been a core community for MySpace since the beginning. Its music channel's traffic has grown 1,017% since its relaunch in September 2008. But here's some of the new stuff Computerworld mentions: "a massive collection of music videos" (from MySpace's record-label partners); "a new Video Search Tab"; and an Artist Dashboard. "The dashboard is designed to give bands and singers with MySpace profile analytics on who is listening to their music and how they're interacting with it," Computerworld reports. In fact, MySpace is in an entirely different space from Facebook and other social network sites now, its CEO, Owen Van Natta, announced at a conference this week, according to a great post at the ReadWriteWeb blog. MySpace always was as much a self-expression tool as a social one, while Facebook has always been a social utility (now with plenty of extras). See also "MySpace: Entertainment hub that tweets," "MySpace's metamorphosis," and "MySpace's PR problem."

Tools & sites aimed at better kid time online

There seems to be this firewall between kids' products that kids like and kids' products that parents like. It's rare and amazing when that wall collapses, but I think what helps is when the product, while passing parental muster, is just plain useful to kids.

Kid-friendly online utilities

Children's Web browser Kidzui meets those criteria – after all, kids need to browse the Web, and a lot of parents want them to do so in a kid-friendly environment. Kidzui is a very large "online playground," with more than 2 million kid-appropriate sites to browse. I wrote about this and some other great parent-approved services last fall, but now Kidzui has added another kid-friendly utility – one of those social-media tools like Twitter, Facebook, or good o' email that users of all ages didn't know they needed till they tried it or till all the VIPs in their lives used it. For kids, the utility is a site for viewing and sharing videos, a very social experience. Kidzui's is called ZuiTube. ZuiTube claims to have the biggest collection of child-appropriate videos in existence; it doesn't say how many but that those videos are found in "6,000 channels," which should keep kids safely entertained for a while. ZuiTube and Kidzui were *very* briefly reviewed at CNET recently.

2 brand-new 'products': FaceChipz, WonderRotunda.com

One is social, the other educational. FaceChipz may get the nod from tweens partly because it's very attractively packaged and partly because it's a rarity: a social site (not a virtual world, which is more common) for people under 13. [If you're under Facebook or MySpace's minimum age (13), and your parents aren't, like many parents, looking the other way where your online social networking's concerned, you have few options; two somewhat similar options are YourSphere.com, which checks parents registering their kids against a sex-offender database, and MySecretCircle.com, which sells accompanying security hardware for $24.99.] For kids, the trick with these products is going to be luring their friends who are, right or wrong, already in Facebook or MySpace into this very closed, safe (in terms of adults gaining access, not necessarily peer harassment) social options with them.

FaceChipz, just launched in beta, describes itself as "Facebook with training wheels." As its president, George Zaloom, put it in an email, "For the kids, we tried to make the site fun and the chips collectable. For the parents we tried to make the site SAFE and the chips affordable." The chips themselves come in $4.99 packs of 5 sold at ToysRUs and in the FaceChipz site. Users register the chips online with the code on the back of the chip, then give them to their friends. Once the chip recipient registers its code, giver and receiver are linked and the code becomes invalid for anyone else (so it can't be used again by anyone creepy). The more chips kids buy, the more friends they can add or points they earn toward virtual goods in the site. After they register, their parents have to verify them so the site complies with the US's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. To verify, all that's required is a $1 fee paid once by credit card (no proof of guardianship is required).

There's a brand-new educational virtual world out there, WonderRotunda.com, that may turn out to please both parent and child. It's a good sign that Washington Post tech writer Mike Musgrove tested it on his eight-year-old, who told his dad, "I think this is educational" but then actually stuck around "to explore the virtual theme park, intrigued by the prospect of winning and spending the game's 'wonder dollars' to buy virtual food and loot with which to decorate his virtual treehouse," Musgrove writes. He, the 8-year-old, doesn’t care that CommonSenseMedia.org gave the site 5 stars, but another good sign was that eMarketer senior analyst and parent of a 6- and 8-year-old really liked it too. Maybe her kids did as well? Musgrove doesn't say.

The Post reporter does say that WonderRotunda was created by a concerned dad who wanted to create an alternative to Club Penguin and Webkinz for his daughter and her peers (ClubPenguin.com is more social, and so is Webkinz.com, with the added element of trading in "real world" stuffed animals).

It seems that's the other divide at the pre-tween level (around ages 5-9): Either they're interacting with the site (as in KidThing.com and WonderRotunda in ways designed to enrich or educate) or they're interacting with peers (socializing and playing games) in an environment run by companies that usually moderate and/or restrict communication for users' protection. The very popular Poptropica.com, by Pearson Education's Family Education Network, tries to straddle that divide by being both fun and educational (check out what Undercover Mom says about it: Part 1 and Part 2).
I'm rooting for these companies that work hard to meet the exacting standards of kids as well as parents! Let me know if your kids like them - and about other virtual worlds, videogames, and blogging services that work for under-13s at your house (via anne[at]netfamilynews.org).

Related links

Help with YouTube safety: As the world's 4th-most-visited site on the Web, YouTube is a fact of life in most households. Marian Merritt, parent and Symantec's Net-safety advocate, recently wrote up some meaty advice for families that also, importantly, raises some parental awareness.

Google is YouTube's parent, and here's is Google's own advice for "Making YouTube a safer place"

Recommended sites for tween girls from Connect with Your Teens blogger and parent Jennifer Wagner.

'Social Media in Plain English'

Maybe if for a moment people thought about social media as *social ice cream,* the whole concept would seem a little less daunting. To see what on earth I mean, watch a little 3:44 minute video explanation of what social media are all about by the professional explainers at CommonCraft.com. And while we're on the subject of plain English, also check out a clear, comprehensive resource from the UK that was put together with a lot of input from parents themselves: Vodafone's Parents' Guide. It runs the gamut, explaining everything from blogs, Twitter, and social networking to Net-based telephony and Bluetooth – primer-style. Then it runs through the risks in a levelheaded way, explaining what's involved and where to get help. Some of the resources even come from the US, so it's not like this "plain English" from the UK doesn't translate! Parents, you may also want to tell your child's teacher about another UK-based resource with partners from all over the Western world: Teachtoday.eu.

How MIT gets blogs, marketing & students

Maybe it's that reality is more interesting than fiction? At least reality seems to be a lot more interesting to high school students shopping for colleges and universities. MIT figured that out five years ago. The New York Times reports that MIT hires some of its upperclassman students to blog about life at the Institute for marketing purposes. One such blogger, senior Cristen Chinea has her days when she feels out of place at MIT (e.g., after sleeping through part of a Star Wars marathon, the Times says), but she basically just loves the place. Dozens of other schools, too – including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley, and Yale – are similarly linking to highlighted student blogs from their home pages, the Times adds, but none "match the first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students" that MIT's bloggers have achieved (they get "$10 an hour for up to four hours a week" for their efforts). The bloggers "have different majors, ethnicities, residence halls and, particularly, writing styles. Some post weekly or more; others disappear for months. " But they're celebrities to their high-schooler readers, much sought-out during Campus Preview Weekend. Maybe another trend?: celebrity, as well as marketing, that's real.

Google's Wave: All things to all users?

It's most often called a communication and collaboration tool. Google says it's email if it were invented today, the Christian Science Monitor reports. The Wall Street Journal says "it blends elements of email, wikis, instant messaging and social networking." Computerworld zooms in on the social-networking part and cites the view of one analyst saying it will present Facebook with serious competition. Computerworld exhibits both predictable skepticism and realism where it says that Wave will be dealing with the "problem of 'good enough'.... People think whatever network they're using now is good enough so why bother switching and making sure all their friends and family members switch, as well?" Why realism? Social Web users tend to add tools more than switch to them for the very reason that, if all their friends are in one service (such as MySpace or Facebook), they're unlikely to leave - it's hard to get all your friends and relatives to move on en masse.

Youth, adults & the social-media shift

No wonder adults, born and raised in the 20th century's mass-media environment are struggling to wrap our brains around current media conditions – and what "Net safety" should look like under them. We're in the middle of a Gutenberg Press-style media shift, multiplied by 3. Author and media pundit Clay Shirky talks about the four previous media shifts that "qualify for the term revolutionary," all of which were either a) asynchronous one-to-many or b) realtime, one-to-one "conversations." They were 1) that Gutenberg-enabled first shift to mass media (text) more than 5.5 centuries ago; 2) then real-time, two-way or conversational media (telegraph/text, then telephone/audio); 3) then recorded mass-distributed media other than text (photos, sound, film); then 4) the one-to-many mass media we grew up with, recorded and sent through the air (radio and TV).

Media shift on steroids
The Internet, Shirky said in his talk last June, does two revolutionary things, but I'd say three. Shirky's two are: 1) blends real-time two-way conversation and one-to-many mass media to create real-time, many-to-many media or conversations and 2) is the distribution platform or pipe for all other media as well. The third piece is implied in Shirky's first one, but I think it's so significant or even radical, especially where online youth are concerned, that it deserves to be highlighted: the "many" in realtime, many-to-many media are the producers, marketers, and distributors as well as the consumers of media now. Anyone can be any of the above now, and many active social-media users are often all the above simultaneously. What determines the size of "viewership" is not control of the distribution channels so much as viewers' attraction to the content and desire to help spread the word (these days, though, often it's a hybrid of both conventional and new-media conditions, e.g., singer Susan Boyle's success on both the "Britain's Got Talent" TV show and YouTube).

E.g., the new 'TV'
University of Southern California media professor Henry Jenkins zooms in on just one medium, television, in a fascinating piece at the Huffington Post about how it is not just something watched on TV sets anymore and how it's distributed as much by social networks (real-life social circles) as by broadcast networks. And he gives lots of examples of transmedia properties (TV shows' own videogames, comic books, podcasts, and Web series). As I read, I thought of Japan's cellphone novels: serial novels "written" via cellphone, one screen at a time, the best of which go from blogs to books and probably eventually old-style TV shows and movies.

Big adjustment for adults
But just as interesting about this media revolution is the way we adults are handling it vis. our kids. I think youth use digital social media more fluidly because they're experimenters, and digital media are experimental – they require active not passive use. To really make these media work for you, you don't just take delivery; you need to experiment, play, produce, and collaboratively mess around with music, text, video, blogs, sites, games, virtual environments, and all the devices they're on – which is really fun and compelling for youth. Maybe because "our" media are much less demanding, we grew up thinking of them as mere entertainment, and we project that view a lot onto our children's media experience. We're binary in our thinking: we somehow think they're either working or playing, and we trivialize or even fear and block their use of media.

Our one-way, top-down media also had relatively few companies producing them and controlling their distribution, with government regulating those companies. So at a recent meeting on Capitol Hill, I noted that some of us adults think that problems in today's media can simply be fixed by people in authority (parents, companies, regulators, etc.), and distribution of bad stuff, e.g. adult content (which is no longer produced and distributed only by companies or only by adults), on all these dispersed, multi-directional media can be controlled or blocked at the "source." But now the source – whether or good or bad content – is often a kid. As for professionally produced media, certainly government can still regulate some of it, but only media produced or mass-distributed by responsible companies, aka conventional media – not the media that parents are generally most concerned about.

Media companies ≠ media producers
Youth produce all kinds of media, most of it ok, neutral, or constructive, some nasty, less of it unethical, and even less illegal. It's complex, like their lives, not given to simple characterizations - see the New York Times's commentary on a New Jersey high school's "slut list," a case in which teen behavior around social status, gender, and sexuality deserves more consideration than the media through which those behaviors are acted out. What youth do communicate and produce in digital media largely mirrors their real-world social lives, though they often fictionalize and sometimes exaggerate parts of them (see "Fictionalizing their profiles").

That deep, rich, disturbing picture is, for many of us, harder to look at than the professionally produced, regulated images of our past. But in many ways it's good that this reflection, communication, and production are much more exposed than ever before – so people can conduct research, parent better, consider technical and other protections, and find ways to help young people respect and protect themselves. Two things are certain: Government can't regulate the producers of the new media environment, and 2) those producers' ears will tune out media-safety messages coming from the media environment of their parents.

Related links

An example of a mass-distributed, many-to-many video conversation in YouTube: MadV's "One World" (see Clive Thompson in Wired)

"School & social media"

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"

"How teens use social network sites"

"*Serious* informal learning"

Web community moderator to the rescue

There's help on the social Web. Lloyd Mann, a volunteer moderator for DiabetesDaily.com, a support community on the Web, appears to have saved the life of one of the site's users, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Another user noticed some disturbing posts and contacted the moderator. "Mann communicated with the troubled poster and said the messages were enough to convince him that [the poster] was serious." He and the man who got him involved worked together to figure out the poster's location and contacted the police. For privacy reasons, the police told Mann they couldn't confirm attempted suicide but said the person was ok and Mann had had reason to be worried. See also "Facebook friend saves suicidal teen," "The social Web's 'Lifeline'" about MySpace's role, and last spring's "Summit for saving lives."

*Good* news involving swine flu

There just may be an upside to the swine flu: It may be the cause of more educators becoming comfortable with using interactive technology (aka social media) in the classroom. With the message that its wiki-like online collaboration tool, Office Live Workspace, can help keep classes on track if schools close for flu outbreaks, Microsoft "has launched a how-to Web site that walks teachers through the steps of setting up accounts for their classes on ... the free Web service," the Associated Press reports. Pretty much like Wikispaces.com, Google Sites, and Wetpaint's Wikis in Education, the service can be used by teachers to post assignments and handouts so that students can work on the assignments individually or collaboratively from home. According to eSchoolNews, Microsoft and other companies, such as Pearson Education, are responding to a call by Education Secretary Arne Duncan "to help keep home-bound students sick with the H1N1 flu virus connected to school."

Social sites, videogames can up IQs: UK researchers

Well, it depends on the social-networking service, actually. Psychologist Tracy Alloway at the University of Stirling in Scotland "told the British Research Association that Facebook brings about educational benefits because it requires users to exercise their working memory – their ability, in other words, to store and manipulate information," the Education Week blog reports and, according to The Telegraph, "playing video war games [strategy games, in other words] and solving Sudoku may have the same effect as keeping up to date with Facebook." Dr. Alloway's research team developed a "working memory training program" called "JungleMemory." After two months in the program, a group of "slow-learning" students aged 11-14 in the Durham area "saw 10 point improvements in IQ, literacy, and numeracy tests," and some who were at the bottom of their class at the beginning finished the program near the top, according to The Telegraph. Twitter, text messaging, YouTube, and TV don't produce the same results because they're mostly about short bursts of info that recipients don't have to store, process, and repackage, apparently. It isn't black and white, though, I think it's important to point out. It's not about specific sites or technologies so much as the brain activity involved in using them. Collaboratively producing and sharing a video on YouTube or writing a cellphone novel with text messages as writers do in Japan, would have entirely different effects from passively watching a video or quickly exchanging burst of info on a mobile phone. Here's coverage in the UK's IBTimes, and here's the last story on Facebook & grades that got a lot of coverage.

President Obama to US students: Practice new-media literacy

Work hard to find and pursue your unique contribution was the basic message I heard the President tell American students this week – what I think the US's founding fathers and mothers meant by "pursuit of happiness" in their historical context. More to the point for NetFamilyNews and its readers, though, was something he said in the Q&A session with students after his 19-min. speech at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., that Reuters zoomed in on: that they need to be careful about what they post in social network sites because what they upload "could come back to haunt them in later life," according to Reuters. "The presidential words of advice follow recent studies that suggest US employers are increasingly turning to sites such as Facebook and News Corp's MySpace to conduct background checks on job applicants."

You could say that the President of the United States is promoting new-media literacy – the kind of media literacy that employs critical thinking about what we say, upload, and produce online and with digital media as much as what we see, download, and consume. I use "new-media literacy" interchangeably with "social-media literacy" (see this post), but really we're also talking about a new kind of media literacy (unhyphenated) that employs all the old media-literacy skills while embracing new (interactive, multidirectional) media delivered on multiple devices and platforms; the old one-to-many mass media still exist, are definitely in the mix, but we are not truly media literate any more if we are mindful only of what we're consuming. Media use is behavioral now, too, right? I'm glad that smart student asked Obama "for some advice on becoming US president." Social media are a factor now, and the new media literacy is protective of reputations, prospects, friendships, and safety, as well as good for social and cognitive development.

'Beatles: Rock Band' game & participatory music

If you'd like some powerful insights into how music is changing, why audiences are turning into participants, and what role videogames have in all this, read "While My Guitar Gently Beeps" in the New York Times Magazine. It's the story of how Apple Corps warmed up to and fully embraced interactive, or participatory, music – the next phase of music history, one could say (without exaggerating). Author and writer Daniel Radosh runs you through the Beatles' version of this evolution, from helping to "kick the compact-disc era into overdrive in 1987," about 20 years after they broke up, right past the "current era of downloadable music" (when "financial disputes kept the Beatles conspicuously sidelined"), to what the $3 billion music part of the videogame industry (a category that's a close second to action games and ahead of sports) represents: simulated performance of real music, among other things. Beatles: Rock Band will be released Sept. 9.

From one perspective, the music videogames of Rock Band and Guitar Hero are a solution to the music industry's P2P file-sharing problem (it probably calls it the piracy problem): Videogames don't just market songs, they sell them now. "In its first week, Motley Crue's 2008 single 'Saints of Los Angeles' sold nearly five times as many copies on Rock Band as it did on iTunes, and at twice the price," Radosh reports. "Pearl Jam plans to release its new album simultaneously on CD and in Rock Band."

Citizen artists? And soon there will be the Rock Band Network, which "will license software tools and provide training for anyone to create and distribute interactive versions of their own songs." That doesn't only expand "the amount and variety of interactive music available," it expands both the musician and participant bases. Now, I think, Rock Band just needs to team up with MySpace or maybe Last.fm to complete the picture, strengthen the community part (see "MySpace's metamorphosis?"). Because fans are often musicians and vice versa, and tunes are talking points in an ongoing "conversation" between artists and fans (and among fans, of course), multidirectionally.

People often put down Rock Band and Guitar Hero as trivializing music, as "just a game" or more about partying than music. Pointing out that, 40 years ago, "an earlier generation was deeply troubled by the advent of recorded music," Radosh cites the view of Brown University ethnomusicology professor Kiri Miller that people seem either to believe these games should be teaching some "fabulous skill" or else they're having some sort of addictive or automatizing effect on you, when they actually represent "a new form of musical experience."

Like 'Grapefruit.' It looks like Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and Olivia Harrison have come to agree, to varying degrees. Though the Beatles one isn't quite as interactive as other Rock Band games (comparatively, it's "a 'walled garden' from which songs cannot be exported and added to a party mix alongside other Rock Band tunes, [violating] the central shuffle-and-personalize ethos of modern music consumption"), Yoko Ono sees it as art, Radosh writes, along the lines of her 1964 book Grapefruit. He cites Lennon's view in a later edition of Grapefruit: "A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality."

Apple Corps also apparently liked how a music videogame adds a physical dimension, "requires players to make a commitment of time, effort, and energy," "demands attention," makes the music multisensory. It wasn't about making the Beatles' music compelling for a new generation, Ono told Radosh. For her, McCartney, and Dhani and Olivia Harrison, it came to be about an art form evolving with its practitioners of all kinds - listeners, sharers, performers, composers, etc.

Ringo 'leads from his left hand.' For details on how, in these games of performance simulation, players learn more about both the music and how a particular artist (e.g., Ringo Starr) plays it, look for the paragraph beginning: "Like roughly 80% of the creative team, Eric Brosius, Harmonix's director of audio is an active musician..." (Harmonix is the maker of Beatles: Rock Band). And don't miss the last page or so, where Radosh shows what he's learned from this writing project about where music is headed, then closes with a scene from the E3 videogame convention in Los Angeles this summer, when Paul, Ringo, Yoko, and Olivia appeared on the Staple Center stage together for 75 seconds to unveil the Beatles' 21st-century incarnation.

This isn't just the Beatles' and Harmonix's story. It's everybody's. It's the story of the media sea change we are all experiencing right now, and I think we parents and educators would be wise to join Apple Corps in embracing it.

Related links

CD vs. digital: "While CDs made up 65% of all music sold in the first half of 2009, digital downloads are quickly catching up," the San Jose Mercury News reports, citing NPD Group research. Digital music sales are increasing 15-20% a year and CD sales are dropping "at an equal pace." NPD also found that iTunes iTunes store is becoming the leading music retailer. "Song downloads from iTunes represent 25% of all music units sold in the United States, up from 21% in 2008 and 14% in 2007."

"Joe's Non-Netbook": a student-produced 1:45 minute video on YouTube that'll make you smile and give you a feel for how strange non-interactive media are becoming to the digital generation.

"The power of play"

"Play, Part 2"

How a police officer uses Facebook

Constable Scott Mills, a community youth officer in Toronto, says "police officers must be where the people are, and these days, the people are on Facebook." He uses his Facebook account, as well as Groups and Events, not just to send out information and get tipped off to threats and crimes very fast to and from a lot of residents, but to "build a stronger, more meaningful connection with the community we serve," he says as a guest writer in the Facebook blog. This is participatory law enforcement, Mills says, getting the community involved in preventing and solving crime. Facebook users have helped him "sniff out threats against local schools, bring much needed help to people at risk of committing suicide, warn the public about criminals on the loose and even locate missing persons," he writes. And his program, Toronto Crime Stoppers, is not alone in this. He points to social policing programs in Boston, Vancouver, and Brunswick, Maine, as well. And speaking of policing, Facebook is doing a little of its own - making sure advertisers on its service comply with its new guidelines and blocking them if they don't, Advertising Age reports (please see Ad Age for specifics).

Archbishop down on social networking

I found a little pastiche of negative headlines about social networking in my in-box yesterday, including one tying obesity to it. (I continue to be mystified by these indicators that people view social media as a "thing" all by itself, somehow separate from life, socializing, behavior, culture, etc., when life online is really just a mirror of all of human life). But the most widely picked up SN story was: "Facebook and MySpace could lead teens to suicide, warns Archbishop Nichols." Even though the Vatican has a Facebook profile and YouTube channel, and the Pope told youth to use the Internet responsibly a couple of months ago, the Archbishop of Westminster said social sites "are leading teenagers to build 'transient relationships,' which leave them unable to cope when their social networks collapse," UK-based Examiner.com reports, adding that "he said the Internet and mobile phones were 'dehumanizing' community life." Teenagers the BBC spoke with had a different view, however, though some understood where he was coming from, since negative stuff does happen in social sites (and that's what turns up in the news), though also on phones and other places where people socialize. The main point they made, in the BBC piece, was that social networking is "just a different way of socializing." Here's a commentary on the archbishop's view in The Telegraph, which broke the story.

Great social-media resource in Oz

Looking for nice, clear definitions of social-media tools like blogs and wikis? Check out a new resource in Australia recommended in an educators' bookmarking group I subscribe to: the Technology Guide in the Australian government's Cybersmart site. That's just one piece of a very comprehensive resource that includes online-safety advice and curricula as well. What I like about it is that it also gets at how youth use technology (it doesn't present technology as a problem). There's a "Cybersafety Help" button for Australians in the upper-right-hand corner of every page. Americans seeking such help can go to CyberTipline.com, Canadians to Cybertip.ca, and Britons to CEOP.

Basic iPod mutating away

Apple anticipated what would replace the iPod practically when it came out with the first model, if we're to believe Arik Hesseldahi at BusinessWeek.com. And I do. I remember Steve Jobs talking about the iPhone as a great music player at a conference of tech execs a few years ago. "Anticipation of the [iPod's] drop-off is 'one of the original reasons' Apple developed the iPhone and the WiFi-enabled iPod touch, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said on a July 21 conference call with analysts," Hesseldahi writes. The iPod needed to become a full-blown connected platform, and it is already – a platform for apps, games, video, and Web info-gathering as much as for music-playing. Also needed now, Hesseldahi says (predictions, probably) are: a mic (for talking via Skype and making recordings without the pesky headset) and a still and video cam. What all this says and what Apple apparently got long ago is that the future is sharing (and producing) as much as consuming media.

Dave Letterman's view of Twitter

Whew, glad that's finally settled! Dave has declared Twitter "a waste of time." ;-) Had to tell you. Watch him tell Kevin Spacey in a video clip at Mashable.com. Just plain summer fun. [For readers outside North America, Dave Letterman is a very funny late-night talk show host on CBS TV.] Spacey offers to tweet something to his 800,000 followers for Dave and pulls out his phone. Dave asks how much it costs. Spacey rolls his eyeballs. But Dave then has a hard time getting past the fact that Spacey has to "type" the tweet with his thumbs. Looks like Dave has never texted either. Glad he has an assistant or two! Seriously, I respect Dave's take on Twitter. Whether or not you use it as well as how you use it is highly individual (which is one of the things I like about it). [For a look at how some others think of Twitter, including educators, see "A (digital) return to village life?"]

Morgan Stanley teen intern on peers' media use

Though Morgan Stanley says its report by 15-year-old intern Matthew Robson on his friends' media habits got "five or six times more feedback" than its European media team's usual reports, the investment banking firm "made no claims for [the report's] statistical rigour," the Financial Times reports. It did offer clear, "thought-provoking insights" to all the hedge fund managers and CEOs who the FT said called and emailed Morgan Stanley the day of the report's release, but I'm not sure any of the young Londoner's observations would surprise my readers. Robson "confirmed" that teens don't use Twitter (though we've seen one created a Twitter worm to test its security - see this); don't watch much TV or listen to much radio, preferring music-focused social sites such as Last.fm; "find advertising 'extremely annoying and pointless'; and, as in newspapers, "'cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text'" instead of "summaries online or on television." What is interesting in the report is that - at least in the London area - teens' "time and money is spent on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, [Robson] said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone." Sounds like he's talking about Xbox Live and other gaming communities (e.g., those within and associated with virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft, maybe). Is that an early warning for mobile phone operators and an indicator for parents that the texting wave may crest at some point? [Meanwhile, here's a US 16-year-old's POV on why teens aren't taken with Twitter. Basically, he suggests they're less in control of who sees their updates in Twitter (I don't think he knows that you can make your Twitter profile private). For Twitter privacy, go into "Account" under "Settings" in the upper right-hand corner of your home page and click "protect my updates" at the bottom of the page so that only people you approve can see them; then click "Save" at the very bottom.]

Facebook: No. 1 tool for parenting? Maybe. Use wisely.

In fact, "the No. 1 tool in our lifetimes for parenting," according to B.J. Fogg, who runs Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab and teaches about Facebook with his sister, Linda Phillips, parent of 8, in a free, noncredit class. Their reasoning: "Because it enables parents to ask about specifics." Absolutely. That's a great point. But, please, parents, think this monitoring option through carefully. Every child's different - at some point in the spectrum of age, maturity, and trust levels - and parental questions and monitoring need to be calibrated to those levels. Why? If we go too far and really hover - try to friend all their friends and maybe embarrass them (not that Fogg and Phillips are suggesting this) - we risk losing their willingness to engage with us and communicate. That, I contend, is, always has been, and always will be the No. 1 tool for parenting. If kids stop wanting to communicate and go into stealth mode online, which is very easy for them to do, we're even farther out of the equation, the one in which they use us as their chosen backup. For a teen's view on this, see Aseem Mehta's blog post here. Also don't miss "Parental Faux Pas on Facebook," by author and blogger Sharon Cindrich. Meanwhile, Lisa Belkin, the New York Times's "Motherlode" blogger seems to have declared the end (or at least rapid decline) of helicopter parenting in "Let the Kid Be." [Thanks to Susan Fassberg in California for pointing out the Stanford Alumni magazine article.]

A student and a principal on books & tech

Take a 2 min. break from whatever and consider this cute video snapshot of how a book might look to a digitally fluent teen. The students in the video are at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy, a three-year-old "inquiry-driven, project-based high school focused on 21st century learning and formed by a partnership between the School District of Philadelphia and The Franklin Institute. Note what its principal, Chris Lehmann, recently said in a brief interview right after he spoke to this year's convention of the National Association of Secondary School Principals: "In too many schools we have this idea that we have the school we've always had plus some computers.... Technology needs to be like oxygen - ubiquitous, necessary, invisible. It's got to be everywhere ... just part of the day-to-day work that we all do." Hmm, kind of like books? [Books are media too, and both tried 'n' true and new media need to be in school. Here's what I last wrote about that.]

School & social media: Uber big picture

When I think about how the book, enabled by Gutenberg's press, was pretty controversial back in the day (15th c.) and probably didn't make it into "school" for a while (though it fueled the Renaissance and the Reformation), maybe I understand why there's resistance to using today's media - called social media - in school. But things are moving a little faster these days, and students are actively using social media anyway outside of school (books were less accessible to students in the 15th and 16th centuries than the participatory Web is today). Social media researchers tell us some amazing informal learning is going on in this out-of-school use (see the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth research findings), but what about the formal learning part - the potential for student engagement in school (and community, government, etc.) if media so compelling to students could be used in schools nationwide - not to mention the potential for schools themselves, and for the advancement of American education as a whole in this shrinking world, where the US ranks 15th in terms of per capita broadband penetration, as the Financial Times reports?

Books and literature were made so meaningful to me in AP English - in school - way back before social media. Now social media, e.g., Teen Second Life, can help schools help make literature more meaningful to students. I watched a presentation by New York educator Peggy Sheehy at NECC (the National Educational Computing Conference) last summer, showing how the courtroom scene in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was acted out by students (playing judge, jury members, DA, court reporter, etc.) in a virtual world. She said they mined that book, read every word, so they could play their roles intelligently. Here's what an educator in Connecticut writes about what's happening at Peggy's school. Other prime examples are what Global Kids is doing for students in and after school in New York City and what Digitales' digital storytelling workshops are doing for students in schools around the country (e.g., this one). The work of these educators and the visionary administrators and superintendents behind them is key to school's relevance to students as well as to American education's competitiveness in the developed world (see Appendix B of the New York-based Joan Ganz Cooney Center's study "Pockets of Potential" for classroom mobile social-media projects in 7 other countries).

But that's not all. These educators know how to increase the value of social media for youth by making new media as meaningful and enriching for them as my AP English teachers made books for me. That's a lifelong gift to students as well as to a society that can't afford to lose the engagement of its youth. Renewed relevance is also a gift to schools, of course.

Team of Rivals author Doris Kearns Goodwin tells us Abraham Lincoln was desperate to get his hands on books - any book. Today's youth probably have a comparable level of interest in all forms of social media: virtual worlds, social sites and technologies, online games, vertical-interest online communities, and all of the above on phones as well as on the Web. That presents schools with an opportunity as much as a challenge. Maybe parents, law enforcement, and policymakers can help schools shift the focus more toward the opportunity side so that school can seem less like the "prison house" referred to by British educator John Gibson (see the BBC). New media are a little scary to anyone who doesn't understand them. But then there's the promise they hold. In a way, we're back at the beginning of the Renaissance.