'Smartbooks' (more than netbooks) aimed at teens

They're different, Forbes points out, though the names of the devices are very new, and "smartbooks" haven't even hit store shelves yet. The jury's out on whether teens will want the latter, but marketers have been plans for the teen market. Qualcomm and Sharp "expect at least a dozen smartbooks incorporating their chips to debut in early 2010." Here's the theoretical difference: "Smartbooks will be more affordable than netbooks, with prices as low as $199. Unlike netbooks, which resemble laptop computers with their hinged or 'clamshell' shape," smartbooks will be flat and tablet-shaped. One market went to Savannah College of Art & Design graduate students to help refine the product, Forbes reports. The design students said teens want "intuitive, trendy and powerful devices that become extensions of themselves" and help them "keep up with their hectic lives at a low price point." Sounds like good advice that, if taken, might materialize into a hybrid between laptops and cellphones that might actually become a trend, fellow parents.

'Claiming' & social norming in social sites

When she found that about half of teens' social media posts "refer to drinking, sex, or violence," University of Wisconsin pediatrics professor Megan Moreno wondered how much of those posts were just claims, USNews.com reports. She still wonders – hard data is hard to gather – but she "thinks some of it is, some is nonsense, and some is a 'gesture of intention'," where someone might be thinking about partying more and is "testing the waters by putting up pictures or writing about it." What she does know, though, she says, is that these posts have a negative "social norming" effect on peers and young children. "Kids do think that what they see on social media sites is real, and the younger they are, the more they believe it. That's important, because teenagers are powerfully influenced by the behavior of their peers." Here's a useful flag for parents and educators and a great new-media-literacy lesson for younger kids: Peers' posts could be more claim than reality, and thinking critically about the posts of people they know is a great step toward exercising similar critical judgment about what's reported in the overall media environment, from blogs to TV news. [See also "Fictionalizing their profiles."]

NY predators deleted from Facebook, MySpace

The state of New York has made it easier for social network sites that work with it to deleted sex offenders registered in that state. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo this week announced that two sites that do use the state's database to check for predators, MySpace and Facebook, have purged the profiles of more than 3,500 sex offenders - "Facebook was able to identify and disable the accounts of 2,782 registered sex offenders" and MySpace 1,796 accounts, ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid reports in CNET. New York has a law that "bans many registered offenders from using social-networking sites while on parole or probation and requires all registered offenders to disclose their email addresses, screen names, and 'other Internet identifiers.' That data is provided to social-networking sites to run against their rolls" (some states just fax over a list, Facebook says, making it difficult to identify the offenders in sites with hundreds of million profiles). MySpace says there has never been a case reported of a registered sex offender deleted from the site being prosecuted for illegal contact on the site. Cuomo praised both sites for their work in this area, adding that many other social network sites are slow to cooperate. "As always, it's important to put this news into perspective," Magid writes. "It only involves registered sex offenders, which of course,is a good start, but it only includes people who have been caught and convicted. And, while the companies do their best to ferret out registered offenders who try to hide their identity, there is no way to know how many people succeed in eluding them. Also, we know of very few children who have been sexually molested by someone they met on social-networking sites or any Internet sites. The vast majority of child sex abuse victims know the offender from the real world.... And, based on conversations with security officials at social-networking companies, I am not aware of any cases where a registered sex offender has been convicted of using the site to aid in harming a child he or she met on that site."

'How to bully-proof yourself on Facebook'

Here are some great social-networking-specific tips from Facebook's director of public policy, Europe. There's just one key point missing, I think, because of the 2007 finding that "youth who engage in online aggressive behavior by making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization" (see "Digital risk, digital citizenship" and Archives of Pediatrics). That essential tip is: "Be nice." Kindness is contagious too (check out the last three anti-cyberbullying tips at ConnectSafely.org). [See also "A different sort of back-to-school tip: Kindness."]

Adults' status updates on the rise: Study

If anybody considers Twitter and other status-update tools all about self-exposure (I don't, but glad to "talk" with you about that in Twitter, Facebook, email, or the ConnectSafely forum), and consequently all about youth, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has evidence to the contrary - just out today. It found that "one out of five Internet users now say they use Twitter or some other service to share status updates about themselves, or to keep tabs on others." That's from a survey of adult Internet users - 2,200 of them. The 19% who now use status-update services is up from 11% last April. Here's more in a Wall Street Journal blog.

Students sue school for social Web-related discipline

The two Indiana girls who, during a sleepover before their sophomore year started this fall, posted some sexually suggestive photos in a MySpace profile set to private, thought of it as a joke among friends, says the ACLU, which filed the lawsuit on the girls' behalf. "The suit contends that someone copied the pictures and shared them with school officials, and they eventually were given to the principal," the Washington Post reports. "None of the photos made any reference to the school," it adds. The girls, athletes, were suspended from all "all extracurricular activities for the year" at first, but the school later "reduced the penalty to 25% of fall semester activities after the girls completed three counseling sessions and apologized to the coaches board." The school's attorney "said [the principal] was enforcing the northeast Indiana school's athletic code, which allows the principal to bar from school activities any student-athlete whose behavior in or out of school "creates a disruptive influence on the discipline, good order, moral or educational environment at Churubusco High School." Do you think the school's definition of "material disruption" (of students' ability to learn, a test that has been used in a number of cases involving student free speech and off-campus behavior in social media) is too broad? Your comments welcome, via email (anne[at]netfamilynews.org) or, better, posted in our forum at ConnectSafely.org.

Ning adds virtual gifts

Seems all the social sites are taking a queue from virtual worlds and letting users buy and sell virtual goods (e.g., virtual clothes, furnishings, holiday stuff, even hair-dos). Now Ning.com, the site that lets users create their own social networks, is letting them create their own virtual gifts, "bringing a built-in virtual goods store to the site’s 1.6 million networks," TechCrunch reports. So, for example, the "Brooklyn Art Project network can offer gifts that are miniature versions of hand-drawn artwork" and "the New Kids on the Block" network can sell gifts like the bandmembers’ faces," TechCrunch adds. Meanwhile, Marketing Vox reports that the virtual goods market will hit $1 billion this year. For background on Ning, see "Zillions of social network sites" and "Anyone can have a social site now."

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."

Social Web growth: Fresh data

The latest growth figures for social networking from comScore are neatly presented in a chart next to USATODAY's article on the subject (which I blogged about here). Though the chart doesn't say, I'm assuming these are all US numbers because they're in USATODAY. Anyway, at a glance...

The percentage of all Net users (all ages) using social network sites has grown from 69.6% a year ago to 77% this past August.

The total number of Internet users was 189.1 million in July 2008 and is 195.5 million now.

The total number of online social networkers in July '08 was 128.5 million, up to 147.6 million this past July.

Net safety: How social networks can be protective

Hmm. It's arresting to think about what Stewart Wolf, M.D. – discovered and presented at medical conferences, as told by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers – in the context of social media and online safety today. Back in the 1950s, he found a community in Pennsylvania statistically very free of the No. 1 medical concern of the time, heart disease, and looked into what was going on there. When Wolf presented his research, he found that his skeptical colleagues "weren't thinking about health in terms of community [emphasis Gladwell's]." Now sub in (online) "safety" for "health": "Wolf and [his co-researcher, sociologist John] Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were...."

Now add the online piece
A child's (anybody's) safety and wellbeing have a lot to do with his community offline and online, since the research shows that our online social networks are largely our offline ones.

Almost echoing Dr. Wolf, USATODAY reports that, "for the most part, being part of a social network is good for you.... For example, a study in this month's Scientific American Mind finds that social support and social networking offer benefits, from additional resilience to greater life satisfaction to reducing the risk of health problems. Other studies in the past two years have found that feeling like a part of a larger group helps in stroke recovery and memory retention and boosts overall well-being." And the co-authors of a new book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, report that so much of what we think of as individual, e.g., body shape, politics, happiness, are really "collective phenomena."

About peer groups, not technology
The USATODAY piece is balanced, pointing to author and Iowa State University prof. Michael Bugeja's concern that we're not looking at online social networks enough from a computer-science perspective. But what we're addressing in the field of youth online safety is much more about young people's interests, social groups, and home and school environments than about computer science – as pointed out in last year's Internet Safety Technical Task Force review of Net-safety research through last year.

The studies in the USATODAY article that look at community are more helpful to moving the youth-risk discussion forward, suggesting that we consider three things: the impact of an individual's community (online and offline) on his or her well-being; how the individual affects the community; and how the community functions and addresses problems for its members (as a group of people, not a site or technology).

The guild effect
On that third item, author and USC media professor Henry Jenkins made the point at our Online Safety & Technology Task Force meeting in Washington this month that online communities themselves tend to shape members' behavior to protective effect, e.g., through social norming or influencing, behavior modeling, and peer pressure or ostracism. Educators who play World of Warcraft tell me this community self-regulation certainly happens in the "guilds" of that massively multiplayer online game.

So when we work in the field of youth online safety, it might be helpful to think about young people, its intended beneficiaries, in context – as participants in their online/offline communities rather than potential victims, as we have so much in the past. As for those communities: there may be times when outside intervention (from, say, friends, parents, or Customer Service) is necessary but other times when a little time is needed to allow the community itself to sort out how to deal with antisocial behavior. The other piece that needs more consideration is how to encourage youth to develop a "guild effect" in their online environments, so they're invested in the wellbeing of the community and fellow members, as well as themselves.

From interest-driven to friendship-driven
Not that they aren't already doing this. "Kids play socially.... We're growing a bunch of people who see what they do as social and collaborative and as part of joining communities," said author and Arizona State University literacy studies professor James Paul Gee in an interview with PBS Frontline for "Digital Nation." He talks about how young people quite naturally function in "teams," where "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."

What this suggests to me is that "the guild effect" (safe, civil behavior as a social norm) kicks in quite naturally in "interest-driven" social networking, one of the two forms of social networking described in last year's study from the Digital Youth Project (see "*Serious* informal learning"). The question is, how can the guild effect be just as effective in "friendship-driven" social networking and across the entire social Web, fixed and mobile? I think this may be the central question for online safety going forward.

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.

The case of the password-requiring coach

A coach requiring a team member's Facebook password is a serious problem all by itself. But this coach used that password to read private messages and then kick the team member off the squad for profanity Coach Tommie Hill found in the private message. I'm referring to a case in Pearl, Miss., cited in eSchoolNews. The student was nominated for a team spirit award "for the previous year, but the coaches said she did not deserve the honor. [She] also did not take certain academic courses because the cheerleading coaches taught them." The student and her family are now suing the coach and school for $100 million "for what the suit claims are violations of Jackson's right to privacy and freedom of speech."

What's wrong with this picture on the privacy front? Viewing students' public profiles is fine simply because they're public. But in terms of protecting one's identity, privacy, and intellectual property, sharing passwords is one of the most risky behaviors in the online risk spectrum (see ConnectSafely's password tips). I'm stating the obvious in saying that teachers, coaches, and other adult mentors should be modeling safe, ethical behavior, not the opposite. What Coach Hill's behavior teaches students to do is set up a network of "G-rated" profiles and give her those passwords to avoid any repercussions from the "real" profiles – or set up "real life" profiles in another social network site. If not these, then there are other workarounds. CNN Live covered a similar story involving a private school in Georgia, interviewing a few of us bloggers about it. For more on how adults, for their own sake too, could model better behavior in social media, see this at Forbes.

A different sort of back-to-school tip: Kindness

Kindness and mindfulness, really. Those two approaches to the Internet as well as life are both attractive and protective. "Attractive to others, maybe, but protective?" your kids might ask. Yes. Because aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized, researchers have found (see Archives of Pediatrics). Mindfulness covers both alertness and critical thinking - about what's going out via connected devices as much as what's coming in, whether to/from peers, advertisers, or strangers, as well as about how much and how we're involved in it all. Hemanshu Nigam, a dad and MySpace and News Corp's chief security officer, wrote about the kindness part this week, zooming in some important "how-tos" for social networkers: how to "post with respect, comment with kindness, and update with empathy." Help your kids remember how protective – of them, their friends, and their online experience – this approach is.

As for how we approach the online experience (as well as online friends), the other day I wrote about the 24/7 connection to friends and the drama that both the collective and the constant connection (texting, updating, commenting, chatting, etc.) seem to generate and perpetuate (see No. 2 in this post). If the scene is important to them (and it probably is) and they feel the need to stay very engaged, then here's one way to think about it from youth adviser Annie Fox, which also picks up on the kindness issue: "Don't Add to the Garbage." MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle wrote: "Tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people" (see her article "Can You Hear Me Now?" in Forbes last year.

Parental disconnect: Good, bad & increasingly nonexistent?

In "What Parents Don't Know," MediaPost blogger Jack Loechner echoes Common Sense Media's own conclusion from its recent survey: that there's "a continuing disconnect between parents and kids when it comes to kids' digital lives." [Pew/Internet reported a "digital disconnect" in 2002, but between students and their schools, which I plan to write about next week.]

But how different are kids' "digital lives" from their real ones? As far back as the beginning of 2007, Pew/Internet reported that 91% of teens were socializing online with people they see a lot in real life. They're not "social networking"; they're just socializing – online, offline, at school, on phones, on Xbox Live, in virtual worlds, on computers, wherever. And there always has been a developmentally normal disconnect between parents and teens, where the latter's social lives are concerned. We can't and shouldn't know every detail of what they're up to when socializing with peers. They need some privacy, psychologists say – growing degrees of it, as they mature – because it's their job to disconnect from us as they become adults. To mix metaphors horribly, I hope that survey conclusion won't stoke the fires of helicopter parenting.

Teen social lives more visible than ever. Because so much of their socializing is visible on the social Web, parents actually have an historically unprecedented opportunity to know what's going on in their children's social lives (does the appeal of cellphone texting as kids' counter-measure surprise anyone?). Common Sense says that, "as our kids increasingly communicate through social networks, parents are cut out of the process of hearing how and what they say to each other." I'm sure that's true, but it's not the advent of social networking that's cutting them out; it's more because parents aren't engaging with their kids about how they're using social sites and technologies (though this has to be changing, now that research shows half of all Americans now use social network sites - see this USATODAY blog post). The need for parental engagement is probably what Common Sense (an organization I think highly of) is trying to get across, but I suspect many readers "hear" more of a blame-the-technology message.

The two points in Common Sense's conclusion that I think deserve much more attention are these:

1. "Social networks and mobile communication connect our kids to their friends 24/7." We really need to think about the implications of this for our kids. My younger child, my first one "texting-enabled" as he entered middle school (my older one "just" had instant messaging in middle school, which isn't entirely different, but it required a less-mobile computer). I'm observing that, for kids with texting, there just are no breaks from the drama. They're literally inundated with gossip or running commentary on their peers' inner and outer lives. Much more easily than their parents, who only had 2-3 phones in the house and often had to ask to use one, our children can be caught up in and sometimes emotionally carried away by this collective drama, their own school community's on-campus, off-campus, 24-7, highly personalized "reality-TV show." At the very least it can be distracting, and sometimes emotionally overwhelming. It can have tragic consequences it involves bullying. I'd love to have a parent summit where parents, psychologists, educators, school counselors, social workers, and teens who've been there can together think through the implications of 24x7 drama.

2. "When teens communicate either anonymously or through a disguised identity, the doors are left wide open for them not to be held accountable." Yup. We're talking about the impact of online anonymity and the "disinhibition" to which it gives rise (borne out in the "skank blogger" story I blogged about earlier this week, and these were grownups). Our "social intelligence" – ability to see, hear, or intuit the impact of our behavior – is impaired somewhat when we're online and on phones (see "Social intelligence & youth"). What happens when social intelligence goes down while social information goes up (or floods one's mental scene!)? We all need to be talking more about what mitigates disinhibition, which what's behind so much online harassment and bullying: training students in empathy and citizenship; showing them that they're not really anonymous online; helping them (and us) "get" that those are human beings with feelings behind those profile comments, text messages, and avatars; maybe all of the above? [See also "Digital risk, digital citizenship".]

Then there's the media literacy piece to parenting the digitally literate. Right from the start of their exposure to media online and offline, we can show our children how to take what they read with a grain of salt , think about who the source is and what his, her, or its goal or intention might be, etc. YPulse's Anastasia Goodstein models this traditional media literacy in her commentary on the Common Sense study. When you turn the figures upside down, as she did, you get quite a different takeaway from the survey:

"63% of teens said they DO NOT USE social networks to make fun of other students [emphasis Anastasia's]

"87% of teens said they HAVE NOT posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves.

"76% of teens said they HAVE NOT signed on to someone else's account without permission

"72% of teens HAVE NOT posted personal information that they normally would not have revealed in public."

New media literacy's an ever more important part of parenting (and education) too – the kind that uses and models critical thinking about what we say, produce, and upload as much as what we see, read, and download. That, too, is protective and mitigates disinhibition.

I would love your input on all this. Please comment here or in the ConnectSafely.org forum – or send an email to anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Related link

"They're Old Enough to Text. Now What?" in which the New York Times's John Biggs looks at what type of texting device is appropriate for what age level - about LeapFrog's Text and Learn, Kajeet, Peek Pronto, and T-Mobile's Sidekick (not the very popular iPhone, interestingly)

Social networkers' computer (in)security habits: Study

A small survey ("250 consumers") found that, while a majority of social networkers are "afflicted by Web-borne security problems," less than a third of them are doing anything about it, its press release said. The sample is small (more on that in a moment), but the results are suggestive of where social networkers run into trouble as far as computer security's concerned. More than a fifth (21%) of social site users "accept contact offerings [friend requests] from members they don't recognize"; 50+% "let acquaintances or roommates access social networks on their machines"; 64% "click on links [which can lead them to malicious sites] offered by community members or contacts"; 26% "share files within social networks." The study, sponsored by security firm AVG and CMO Council, also found that, in spite of that risky behavior, 64% infrequently or never change their passwords, 57% "infrequently or never" use privacy settings, and 90% "infrequently or never" let the site know they've had problems. Even so, nearly 20% "have experienced identity theft"; 47% have been "victims of malware infections"; and 55% have "seen phishing attacks." But besides the small sample and limited detail on the study, there's another important caveat: "To say that users of social-networking sites have been exposed to phishing and malware would be like saying that most people who eat spinach are likely to have had measles when they were children. There is a correlation, but no evidence of causality," ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid, wrote in his CNET blog. See his blog for some good security advice, and check out ConnectSafely's tips for rock-solid passwords.

Social-networking-style problem solving (& policymaking)

I think, or at least hope, online safety (the whole world, actually) is going in the direction of what New York Times columnist Tom Friedman prescribes for solving most global problems: toward using the social-networking model. "Huh?" you might ask. Right, Friedman didn't call it that. But I see a lot of similarity between his prescription for solution development to the collective way young people increasingly do everything from socializing to producing to problem solving. And their collaborative, inclusive approach as well as participation are definitely needed in the Net-safety mix (see "Online Safety 3.0" for more on this). Think "social producing," "creative networking," or interest-driven, social civic engagement (see also the report of the Digital Youth Project). Friedman wrote: "We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems – climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet – separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together," he said, writing from Botswana's Okavango Delta. "We need to make sure that our policy solutions are as integrated as nature itself." Exactly. In other words, not just integration of skill sets within a field by "experts," but collaboration among fields and disciplines, incorporating all skill sets, including the participants or beneficiaries of policymaking and education.

IL bans sex offenders from social sites

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has signed into law a bill that bans registered sex offenders from social network sites, PC World reports. Sounds like a good idea, but the law is problematic for a number of reasons, analysts are saying: This is a state law concerning an international medium. It concerns registered sex offenders, the definition of which covers a vast array of offenses in Illinois. The law "does not distinguish between violent criminals who have served prison time for rape – and adults who are registered sex offenders because of youthful hijinks," reports CBS/CNET law writer Declan McCullagh. It creates a false sense of security, since the vast majority of child molesters are people kids know in real life, not much in social sites, research shows. It also raises questions such as: Does this require all sites with social-media features somehow to match all site visitors to a sex offender database, how will Illinois enforce it, and does this law really accomplish what it was written for? Here's the view from Larry Magid of ConnectSafely.org and SafeKids.com at CNET and a commentary in Salon.com. [Also related is my post earlier this week about US sex-offender registries.]

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.

Adults' social networking doubled

The number of US adults who use social network sites has actually more than doubled since 2007, Mashable reports, citing a new Forrester Research study. Forrester found that just under a third of adults, or 55.6 million people, visit social sites at least monthly, up from 15% in 2007 and about 18% last year. Video viewing, shopping, and email are still more popular than social networking, but SN growth is steady. That, watching/streaming online video, and listening to/streaming online audio are the only three of ten Net activities that show steady growth over the last three years in a Forrester chart. You'll find more Mashable social-media numbers here.

Online 'walled garden' aimed at tween girls

Here's an innovative idea for parents (of girls 8-12) who are concerned about predators: My Secret Circle. It gives new meaning to the safe playground or walled garden idea, because - with this hardware product, the My Secret Circle Access Key (pictured here), which plugs into a computer USB port - groups of real-life friends can socialize online while being completely closed off from the Internet and vice versa. As the site explains it, "My Secret Circle Friend Code Generator generates a unique 12 digit number" that can only be exchanged through an "invitation system," which allows the user to trade her code with a friend in person. "In order to become 'friends,' each girl must own an Access Key" and go through the code-exchange process herself. John Biggs at the CrunchGear blog seems to like it. The only problem is, the whole concept is based on the premise that the most common risk to online kids is adult predators. Research shows, however, that the most salient risk is cyberbullying and harassment - mean things peers say to each other; friends becoming ex-friends and violating trust; sharing passwords and impersonating peers; etc. Keeping adults out of girls' "secret circles" could actually have the opposite effect to what its creators intended: completely safe socializing. Here's the report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which contains the cyberbullying finding among others in a full review of online-safety research thru 2008.

Canadians are big-time social networkers

More than three-quarters (76%) of online Canadians teens 12-17 now have profiles on social-network sites, and many of them on more than one site, DigitalHome.ca reports, citing Ipsos Reid numbers. That 76% is up from 50% in 2007 (eMarketer reports that 75% of American teens use social network sites). For Canadian adults, the number is 56%, up from 39% two years ago. Facebook's No. 1 with Canadian teens, 93% of whom have profiles there. If anyone's interest is lagging at any particular site, they may not be alone - see Lockergnome.com on the "lifecycle" of - I'm not sure - either a particular site or a single user's interest in one.

2 more sites sign on to Euro safe social networking

Popular social sites Rate.ee and Tuenti.com, based in Estonia and Spain, respectively, have just signed on to the European Union's "Safe Social Networking Principles," the European Commission reported. They join earlier signatories Arto (Denmark), Bebo (UK/US), Dailymotion (France), Facebook, Google, Hyves (Netherlands), Microsoft Europe, MySpace, nasza-klasa.pl (Poland), Netlog (Belgium), One.lt (Italy), Piczo, Skyrock (France), StudiVZ.de (Germany), Sulake/Habbo (Finland), Yahoo! Europe, Zap.lu (Luxembourg). The seven principles are in this PDF document (p. 6), which states that "these Principles are aspirational and not prescriptive or legally binding, but are offered to service providers with a strong recommendation for their use."

Why Gen Y's not into Twitter?

The bottom line: "We have everything we need on Facebook," says Gen Y CNET blogger Sharon Vaknin - though, despite an insightful post, she's pretty hard on her generation. First the numbers: She cites a recent Pace University/ Participatory Media Network study showing that 99% of 18-to-24-year-olds have social network profiles while only 22% use Twitter. Then she offers a little history on Gen Y's migration from creative expression to status updates. "We no longer impress our friends with profiles that represent us through our creative flourishes, but rather with profiles that spell out what we're doing.... What Facebook intends as a forum for sharing, Gen Yers see as a game of show-off." She cites examples of author and psychologist Jean Twenge's "narcissism epidemic" among her peers. "We do anticipate seeing our friends' activities, but what we really look forward to is what they think of our activities - we want to be 'cyberstalked,' preferably in the form of replies to our self-published content." So why not Twitter? Her reasons illustrate two important differences from FB: 1) Twitter, she says, is too one-dimensional, too text-y (e.g., "Sally went to a great party last weekend, but where are the photos? Who went with her?"), and 2) "updates on Twitter happen so fast there really isn't time to react ... my friends don't have time to react to my activities." I think the latter point is about how fleeting tweeting is, compared to status updates in Facebook, which stay until one replaces them. Twitter is like a real-time, ongoing, multi-person conversation - more like back chat in an online presentation, where people just put tweets "out there" without necessarily expecting anything to come back. It's a little like comparing apples and oranges, because a Facebook profile functions so differently - it's as much a representation of a person's social network as a person, which seems to be the greatest appeal for youth. Vaknin's conclusion may say more about how she feels about her generation than about Gen Y itself: "Largely as a result of the digital communication tools on which we were raised, a big part of my generation wants to know what the cyberworld thinks of us, and we want its inhabitants to pay attention to us." Here's more on this from author and youth tech consultant Derek Baird at BarkingRobot.

Social site + virtual world = Hi5

It's the first marriage I've seen of social networking and virtual worlds: that of Auckland-based Small Worlds and San Francisco-based Hi5.com, by most measures one of the world's Top 20 social-network sites. A bit about SmallWorlds.com (which is not a kids' virtual world) from Venture Beat: Like Hi5, it's aimed at people 13 and up. It has signed up 650,000 users since launch last December, about 65% of them female and half aged 13-18 (30% 19-35). One of its attractions is that, in building out your "small world," you can "easily import anything [you've] created on the Web." Small Worlds also has "built-in incentives to keep users coming back. The more you participate, the more access you get to virtual items." Hi5 had already launched its games channel earlier this year, so this seems a very logical next step. It also already had a virtual economy in place (users could pay for virtual gifts with real-money-based Hi5 "Coins"), so now users will have spaces in which to place virtual furniture, art, plants, etc., along the lines of the very international Habbo, which could be considered a precursor to the Hi5/SmallWorlds arrangement. What's new is mature social network and fairly well-established VW making a go of it together.

Zillions of social network sites

There are now more than 1 million social network sites. Some may hear that and think, "Wow, a million+ Facebook- and MySpace-type sites?!" Well, sorta. What Mashable's actually reporting on with that figure is Ning's explosive growth. In the fewer than four years since Ning's launch, more than a million mini-MySpaces have sprung up on its network. These are smaller, more narrow-interest social network sites - from those focused on a particular celebrity to cooking to a conference to a local club - with all the same features (video, photos, groups, blogs, comments, etc.). This is different from MySpace and Facebook, which are huge and general - more social utilities than nings. Just another sign of the diversification of fixed and mobile social-Web use (see "Where will online teens go next?"). Meanwhile, here are very recent rankings of the big "stand-alone" social network sites from Hitwise and Nielsen at SocialNetworkingWatch.com.

Where will online teens go next?

Some of us are watching to see if, now that so many parents are joining Facebook, teens will migrate somewhere else (see this post, suggesting that mobile texting might be a sign of diversification vs. mass migration). In her YPulse blog, Anastasia Goodstein just asked a good (related) question: "Should Large Social Networks Give Teens Their Space Back?" Teens have always needed to have hangouts of their own, away from parents (online too, now). I posted a comment to that effect at YPulse but want to blog about this too because I think the social network space is in a bit of a transition right now, and parents and teens might want to think together about and weigh in on this.

Where online socializing's concerned, I can see merit to both sides of the debate - on one hand, that teens deserve their own space and should have their own social network sites and, on the other, that it's more "normal" or reflective of the "real world" for sites, worlds, and games such as MySpace, Facebook, and World of Warcraft not to age-segregate.

Some social sites and services - such as YourSphere.com, Teen Second Life, and a forthcoming service called "My Secret Circle" - make segregation an actual safety feature, but I think segregation for safety will slowly be replaced by segregation by interest - people sharing interests such as fairies (as in Disney's PixieHollow), slopestyle skiing (as in NewSchoolers), or teens who aspire to be professional writers (as one teen told me is her reason for spending time on YourSphere). Segregation by interest brings a measure of safety with it, I believe, but you may be asking why I think segregation for safety is losing steam....

Because it's a response to the predator panic teens and parents have been subjected to in US society, not to the realities of youth on the social Web. What nearly a decade of peer-reviewed academic research shows is that peer-to-peer behavior is the online risk that affects many more youth, the vast majority of online kids who are not already at-risk youth offline (see the 12/08 Internet Safety Technical Task Force report's Executive Summary). Segregating teens from adults online doesn't address harassment, defamation, imposter profiles, cyberbullying, etc. It may help keep online predators away from kids (even though online predation, or abuse resulting from online communication, constitutes only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation, according to UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center), which is a great outcome, but it's not enough unless all that parents are worried about is predators. A long-winded way of explaining why I think age segregation is losing steam: the facts are emerging, and parents, schools, policymakers, and businesses will increasingly respond to reality rather than hyperbole (call me an idealist, but isn't this the way it works?) - please post if you disagree.

So my vote's with diversification. Teens will simultaneously: 1) continue to diversify their platforms and channels for socializing (social sites have lost a percentage of teens' social/leisure time to texting on phones, but I think also to a lesser degree to massively multiplayer online games and gaming communities like Xbox Live and Sony Home); 2) stay in the giant, general-interest social network sites just because that's where everybody is and these really are social utilities that for teens have replaced email, chat, IM, etc. as separate social tools; and 3) also increasingly hang out together in vertical sites and other quiet corners of the Web where parents aren't around.

As for Anastasia's question about whether the giant sites should give teens their space back? I don't know about should because I'm sure she'll agree the business question is would they? And the answer is no, because their massive-traffic business models won't allow it. The logical question is where the social Web's natives and early adopters will choose to go not just to hang out, but to do the amazing array of things they use the fixed and mobile social Web for: keeping in touch, comparing class notes, designing, software writing, fiction writing, commentary writing, video producing, being entertained, job seeking, marketing, activism, solidarity - generally just the digital version of living. The answer to that, necessarily, is a vast and growing number of social media and technologies. I don't think it's going to be a giant monolithic thing like social networking again. But I definitely could be wrong about that. Please tell me if you disagree, especially if you know what the next big thing is!

Related links

"Living and learning with social media: Many American youth are embracing a wide array of social media as part of their everyday lives," a talk given by social media scholar danah boyd at Pennsylvania State University

For some background on social networking in general: "The Life and Death of the Social Network: The Glory Days Are Over"

'Continuous partial attention...'

...leads to "continuous partial empathy"? "Continuous partial attention" is the way some researchers are describing what's happening when people communicate or socialize with social-media tools like Twitter, instant messaging, chat, texting, etc. Fast Company looks at a new report from the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC, which argues that the brain is quick to recognize and empathize when people see physical pain or fear in others but "much slower to recognize and empathize with emotional pain.... What this means is that, in a media environment where our social encounters happen very quickly, we may not be giving our brains a chance to generate appropriate compassion or admiration." I wonder if writer Jamais Cascio (or the researchers, if this is their concern) is factoring in the fact that social-media users usually bring existing "real world" relationships to their social-networking, IM, and Twitter accounts, relationships in which empathy is often already established - that tweets and profile comments are not the all of their relating and socializing. SN comments are more effect than cause of relationships.

But what this does suggest to me is that empathy, citizenship, and anti-bullying training in schools needs to be sure to fold the "continuous partial attention" element of online social networking into instruction. And what we might teach students is consideration - giving consideration as much as being considerate. Referring to what business consultants have been calling the new "attention economy," another Fast Company writer, Richard Kadrey, cautions - wisely, I think - that "what's limited isn't attention, but consideration [emphasis his]. Not just hearing, but listening. Not just seeing a message, but understanding its meaning." I think that goes for the social-media-enabled participatory culture in which our kids are so active. Think about this comment of Kadrey's in the context of teaching new media literacy: "It may be worth considering how we'd structure our digital world if the point wasn't just to 'pay attention' but to 'give consideration'" - perhaps another way to look at both critical thinking and empathy.

'Digital Samaritans' and lost 'n' founds

It's great to see a good news story for a change, so don't miss the one in the New York Times about how more and more people are using social-network and -media sites to get found valuables and critters back to their missing owners (case studies for digital citizenship training?!). New, altruistically minded lost 'n' found Web sites are also popping up, as are some startups who see a business opportunity in all this.

Facebook friend saves suicidal teen

A girl in the US saw a suicidal comment from a UK boy on her Facebook friends list, and within three hours he was found and taken to the hospital for treatment, The Daily Mail reports. "Shortly before 11.30pm [last] Wednesday [the 16-year-old boy] wrote: ‘I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out'." His friend knew the school he went to but not his address, so she told her parents, who contacted the British Embassy in Washington. Police local to the boy "had just a name to go on but narrowed the search to eight addresses in [his] county. Officers were dispatched to each location, and three hours after the boy had filed his Facebook message, he was found at home [conscious] " conscious but suffering the effects of a drug overdose." He has since been released from the hospital and "is recovering at home," The Daily Mail adds. The story bears out what the US's National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told me for a 2007 profile of its work with MySpace and other social sites, that peers are often the first to know when a teen's in trouble, so social network sites are a vital source of referrals to hotlines.

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."

Major update on Net predators: CACRC study

As scary as some of the reports covering it may make it look, there's a lot of good news for online youth in the much-anticipated new study from UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center, "Trends in Arrests of Online Predators." I hope the news coverage doesn't focus solely on the nearly five-fold increase in online predator arrests since the CACRC's last such study in 2000, but even if it does, that finding points to great preventive police work throughout the US (in 2006, 87% of those arrests involved police posing as teens, not real young people, the study found). Those arrests likely prevented crimes against children, and they're sending the message that cops are out there patrolling "the neighborhood."

But there's a lot of other positive news in the report. For example...

Between the CACRC's last study of Net-related predation arrests and this one, there was only a "modest" increase - 21% - of arrests of offenders soliciting young people, its authors report, "from an estimated 508 arrests in 2000 to an estimated 615 in 2006," at a time when the number of US 12-to-17-year-olds online went from 73% to 93%, or more than 25 million, in 2006, and when their Internet use was getting a lot more social.

Overall sex offenses against youth declined during this period, and Internet-initiated child sexual exploitation constituted only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation.

Despite all the hype about registered sex offenders, only a tiny percentage of the arrests surveyed were of registered sex offenders, which indicates that, while blocking them from sites may reduce, it by no means stops sexual solicitation (and we already knew that a significant percentage of the solicitations come from peers).

Not good news, but a notable finding in the study is that there has been "a significant increase in arrests of young adult offenders, ages 18 to 25," which also challenges the image of "predators" presented in the news media.

What about social networking?

Now let's zoom in on what the authors say about online social networking - not just because it's so important to our kids (and statistically of growing use to us too), but also because of all the hype and news coverage about predators in social network sites since 2005:

"There was no evidence that online predators were stalking or abducting unsuspecting victims based on information they posted at social networking sites.

"The nature of crimes in which online predators used the Internet to meet and victimize youth changed little between 2000 and 2006, despite the advent of social networking sites."

Going even further, USATODAY later cited the view of study lead author David Finkelhor that "ongoing studies show that being on a social networking site doesn't create risk for sexual victimization."

Where the risk is

The key to cutting through all the hype and really protecting kids from online predators is in understanding where the risk really lies. Since social networking hit the public radar screen in late 2005, the misconception has grown that the problem lies in a particular technology or "place" online. Dr. Finkelhor put it this way in an email the day the study was released: "The SNS [social-network sites] issue like the age authentication solution is all about mistaking the problem as one of 'access'," he told me. "It’s not about access. It’s about what kids do when interacting online: behaviors."

As for what those behaviors are, Dr. Finkelhor spelled some of them out in a CBS/CNET interview for Larry Magid, my ConnectSafely.org co-director: talking about sex with strangers in a lot of different places online, especially chatrooms about sex and romance, and getting into sexual relationships with people met online (see also "Profile of a teen online victim" from a talk Finkelhor gave in 2007).

"I think the messages [about online safety] need to warn kids about the very risky things they can do in their adolescent naivete and interest in exploring the world," he told Larry. Finkelhor added a risk-prevention behavior that both the Internet industry and all child safety advocates can help promote: "We also need to encourage other people online, the bystanders, people who know these young people or see these interactions on various sites, to report it, to caution the kids about what they're doing, to intervene, to begin to feel they need to take some action to short-circuit what they're seeing might happen." Watching each other's backs, I'm hearing Finkelhor suggest. One of the country's top experts on online safety is pointing to the need to foster digital citizenship.

Related links

"Social norming for risk prevention"

MySpace's PR problem

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety"

"Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context"

Parental social networkers multiplying

Well, an actual group labeled "parents" wasn't measured, but I suspect parents figured prominently in a Nielsen study that found 35-to-49-year-olds are the fastest-growing group in social-network sites. "Time spent on these sites is growing three times faster than the overall Internet rate ... [and] more than two-thirds of the world's online population now visits social networking and blogging sites," USATODAY reports, citing the study. In fact, one out of every 11 minutes of the average Web user's time is spent in a social site, the USATODAY article says, and one out of every 6 minutes in the UK, reports the BBC. The Nielsen study looked at nine countries. Among these, Brazil was No. 1 in social networking and blogging with 80% of Net users visiting such sites. Spain and the US were Nos. 2 and 3, at 75% and 67%, respectively, according to USATODAY. Social networking has surpassed Web email among top computer activities across the user population, the (others are search, portals, and PC software). As for mobile social networking, the numbers of Britons accessing a social site via their phone was up 249% (the BBC doesn't say, but that's probably in the past year). If you're a parent in Facebook or MySpace, check out "Virtual helicopter parenting" and, in the Los Angeles Times, "Big Mother is watching."

The Dunbar no. & online social networks

A few years ago, extrapolating from her study of primates, Oxford Unviersity-based anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that "the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148," The Economist reports. That's usually rounded off to 150 and called "the Dunbar number." The Economist interviewed Facebook's "in-house sociologist," Cameron Marlow, whose findings pretty much match up with the Dunbar number - an average of around 120 "friends," but ranging from a handful to thousands. I've long suspected that people whose friend lists are at the upper end of the spectrum are marketing more than being friends or, in the case of young adolescents, working through the "popularity contest" that school social scenes can represent. Here's the thing, though: Marlow told The Economist that the average person with 120 Facebook friends responds to the comments of (keeps in close touch with) only 7-10 friends (men at the low end of that range) - their "core network." Beyond that are the "casual contacts that people track more passively." The Economist ends with the observation that "humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever." Not that everybody uses social network sites to advertise themselves, but I do think the second half of that observation is exactly right. [See also the UK's NewScientist.com on "how social networking might change the world."]

Social networking 'infantilizing' users' brains?

The social-networking backlash is taking a new form as we move past the predator panic's peak. A fresh sign of digital-non-native uneasiness about the social Web concerns its neurological and psychological impact. Oxford University neuroscientist and Baroness Susan Greenfield made headlines today with her comment that social network sites are "infantilizing the brain," reminding her "of the way that 'small babies need constant reassurance that they exist'," as quoted in The Guardian, The Daily Mail, a New York Times blog, and many other news outlets. Among other things, these social-media critics seem to think that "real life" and online socializing are entirely mutually exclusive, when research shows that - among teens, at least - online socializing is very grounded in their offline social lives. Times blogger Robert Mackey is more analytical than the British reports, thankfully, pointing out what appears to be a very superficial understanding of how social sites are being used. I'd dearly love to hear Dr. Greenfield and Dr. Aric Sigman (whose comments appeared in the BBC's "Online networking 'harms health'" last week) debate social media researchers Mimi Ito at Stanford University and danah boyd - or Canadian author of Born Digital, Dan Tapscott, who says, yes, digital natives' brains are being wired differently, but that's a positive (see Yahoo Canada). Cross-disciplinary study of what's happening in a medium whose uses and users are as diverse as humanity itself would be good! [I loved the readers' comments under the Times blog, one of which was: "Let’s give this an honest headline, shall we? 'Two Neuroscientists Hypothesize Social Networking Bad, Offer No Data'"! Your comments would be most welcome too - in this blog, in our ConnectSafely forum, or via email - anne(at)netfamilynews.org)!]

MN might ban sex offenders from social sites

Minnesota state legislators want to help social network sites keep predators off their sites. A committee of the state House of Representatives approved legislation this week that would prohibit any registered sex offenders from "logging on to sites like Facebook or MySpace," Minnesota Public Radio reports. "Participation in Web-based chat rooms would also be banned," the public radio service added, which would not be a bad thing, since - based on Pennsylvania's experience, anyway (see "PA case study: Social networking risk in context") - most sexual contact between sex offenders and minors seems to happen in chatrooms. Minnesota legislators say that, if it passes, the law would actually help keep offenders from going to social sites in the first place - "state officials could warn sex offenders about the ban in a regular notification of prohibited activities."

Teens best adults on privacy

At Facebook, 60% of teens use privacy controls compared to 25-30% of adults, a sitepoint blog cites Facebook numbers as showing. Computer Associates offers some confirmation with a recent study finding that "79% of teens aged 13-17 who are members of a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook protect their profiles from the general Internet in some way (i.e., only allow friends or friends of friends to view their information), according to the blog. The study also found something not so surprising: that teens "are very likely" to post photos of themselves online. That may be why they're more careful about privacy. Good news!

JuicyCampus: Good bye, good riddance

Citing tough economic times as the reason, gossip site JuicyCampus has shut down. "I'm not shedding any tears for [founder Matt Ivester, who made the announcement]," my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid writes at CBSNEWS.com. "What he refers to as 'lighthearted gossip of college life' was, in many situations, vicious innuendos, hateful messages, and downright lies. In covering the site ... I saw postings that went so far as to call someone a willing slut and publish her cell phone number and address," he says. Let's hope a similar cyberbullying opp - the little social-network app Honesty Box - meets a similar fate. If anybody knows of any downside to losing these venues for anonymous comments about peers, pls email anne(at)netfamilynews.org, and I'll consider publishing their points.

Another imposter profile

Our ConnectSafely forum gets reports of these all the time - posing as someone else, including fictional people, is not unique to any social site or technology - but this case is particularly ugly. "Eighteen-year-old high school student Anthony Stancl is accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves," CNET reports. He then proceeded to blackmail them, saying he's post their images online if they didn't have sex with him. At least seven of the boys did. Here are two early cases of imposter profiles that came to my attention, involving what I'd call "extreme cyberbullying."

Pennsylvania case study: Social-networking risk in context

This is interesting in light of criticism by state attorneys general of the peer-reviewed research in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report this month: a just-released study from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRIU). The attorneys general have said the research is outdated (it's actually not, but see the Wall Street Journal) and not enough about predators in social-network sites, so study author Nancy Willard analyzed some data that couldn't be more current: all online predator arrests in Pennsylvania from 2005 through the middle of this month, cited in press releases in Attorney General Tom Corbett's Web site.

In a recent statement, General Corbett said, "I believe this [Task Force] report is incredibly misleading.... The threat is real.... In the last four years, my office has arrested 183 predators, all of whom have used the Internet for the purpose of contacting minors to engage in sexual activity."

No one - in the Task Force report, the research community, or certainly the online-safety field - disagrees that online predation is a risk, and all agree that the attorneys general are performing an important public service in reducing Internet-initiated predation. The risk does need to be put into context, though. A whole lot of parents (those of the 65% of US teens with social-network profiles, according to Pew/Internet) would really like to know how dangerous social networking actually is, since it's so much a part of their kids' lives now.

Willard's analysis looks at 1) Internet-related child sexual exploitation in context (what proportion of overall exploitation involves even the Internet, much less a single social technology on it) and 2) social networking in the context of all online social technologies teens use - chat, IM, etc.

Internet-related child sexual abuse in Pa.

During one year (FY '06-'07) Pennsylvania rape crisis centers and sexual assault programs served 9,934 child victims of sexual abuse, Willard reports.

Over four years (2005 through ’08), the Pennsylvania attorney general's office made 183 arrests concerning Internet-related child sexual abuse through its Child Predator Unit.

Only 8 of the 183 cases involved actual minors (the rest were sting operations involving police posing as minors) - though certainly these arrests may've prevented cases involving minors.

Only 5 of the 183 involved sexual contact.

The only national figure we have is from 2000, when the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that 508 out of 65,000 child sexual exploitation cases were Internet-initiated (where offender and victim "met" for the first time online). [An update from the CACRC is expected to be released soon.]

Social networking compared to other Net technologies

Willard writes that, "because the attorneys general have been focusing their attention on the social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, this analysis gave special attention to any case that mentioned any activity occurring on either of these two sites." She found that:

144 of the sting operations involved chat, 11 instant messaging, and 9 unspecified in the press releases; the rest were cases of child porn possession.

Only one case involved both a teenager and MySpace, "a re-arrest of a person who had already been arrested through a sting," Willard reports.

One case involved a police officer committing child sex crimes: He "was arrested for sexual abuse of many teens with whom he had interacted in the line of duty. [He] also had a MySpace account with links to teen girls, but there was no assertion that these communications had led to sexual activity."

"One predator in a sting provided the agent with a link to his Facebook page," Willard writes.

"In 5 of the stings that took place in a chat room [no minor involved], reference was made to the fact that the predator had either looked at the 'teen’s' MySpace profile or suggested the 'teen' look at his account."

And the Child Predator Unit itself has, since November 2006, "maintained one or more public sting profiles [depicting teens] on MySpace," but in four years not one arrest has occurred as a result of communications through its fake teen MySpace profiles.

What Willard concluded was that, though a single state's arrests are not a representative sample, "the arrest reports on the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s site fully support the insight and conclusions of the Berkman Task Force Research Advisory Board. The incidents of online sexual predation are rare. Far more children and teens are being sexually abused by family members and acquaintances.... It appears that chat rooms are far less safe than social networking sites and that there is limited inclination and ability of predators to use social networking sites to contact potential teen victims.

"However," she notes, "some predators are apparently looking at non-protected social networking profiles to obtain more information about victims," and more research on the secondary role social and media-sharing sites might be playing is needed. The attorneys general are right - we need more granular understanding of how predators operate - and we can only get that when they make their case records available to the research community. By law, the Electronic Privacy Communications Act, Internet service providers (including social sites) can't share data on users' communications without a subpoena or other court instrument. Once that subpoena has been served, for example by an attorney general's office, that information can be made public. Let's hope the attorneys general, who didn't provide predator data to the Task Force researchers whose report they're criticizing, can soon make it available to the research community.

Let's broaden the discussion

But online crime needs to be seen in context too. Crime must be addressed, but so much of what is happening online - including among teens, of course - is good. Or neutral. Or bad but not necessarily criminal. Increasingly, the Web mirrors all of "real life." Our kids deserve more from parents than fear about it and from the rest of us than overemphasis on crime.

I like the metaphor used by Barry Joseph of Global Kids, a nonprofit organization in New York that does a lot of educational work with youth in virtual worlds. Referring to Teen Second Life, an all-teen virtual world that may merge with the main SL world, he writes, "Why is it important for youth to have their own community? How is this different from a focus on keeping youth safe? The difference is that keeping youth safe, while a desired goal, sells everyone short. Youth deserve support to access their inherent abilities to fully participate in society.

"Let's take the example of a playground," Joseph continues. "What makes a playground safe? Recreational equipment that isn't broken, for example. Barriers to keep out drug dealers or predatory adults. Authority figures to police the space. How would this playground change if it were redesigned to not just keep youth safe but also support their development? The recreational equipment would be selected with an eye toward their developmental impact, such as supporting collaboration or creative play.... The authority figure would do more than just watch and observe but get actively involved, building supporting relationships with the youth, and offer activities designed to engage and develop their abilities."

How might our kids' experience of the social Web change if we were to redesign our collective thinking about it and them - if we saw them less as potential victims and more as participants in and producers of a digital place they can help make safe?

Related links

"How risky are social networking sites?", by Michele Ybarra and Kimberly Mitchell in the journal Pedatrics: "Our findings suggest that 15% of all youth report being targeted by unwanted sexual solicitation, 4% in a social networking site specifically. Similarly, 32.5% of youth report being harassed, either by threats or aggressive comments, or having rumors spread about them," 9% while on a social networking site specifically. "Youth are less likely to be targeted for unwanted sexual solicitation in social networking sites than they are through IM and in chat rooms, however, and are less likely to be a target of harassment on social networking sites than they are through IM."

For even more context (and a view from Washington), head over to Adam Thierer's blog, TechLiberationFront.com.

"New study challenges attorneys general on predator danger," by Larry Magid of CBS/CNET and ConnectSafely.org

"Social networking benefits validated" in the Washington Times

"Serious informal learning: Key online youth study" in NetFamilyNews

"Greatest Internet threat to teens may be teens themselves" - best coverage of Task Force report in the mainstream media I've seen, appropriately in the Los Angeles Times's Health section

"Key crossroads for Net safety: ISTTF report released," my thoughts on the Task Force report

ISTTF report

App as parent-child talking point

Here's a good talking point for the tech part of parenting: Facebook Grader. It's a mini application ("app") that tells users their "reach and authority" on Facebook, TechCrunch.com reports. "The tool works by analyzing the number of friends you have, how important those friends are (whatever that means [maybe based on how many "friends" on their lists?]), how complete your profile is, how many wall posts you have and how many groups you belong to." Billed as a profile grader, for some kids it may be more of an indicator of how cool, sought-after, or popular they are. So it could fuel a discussion about whether your child uses a grading or rating tool like this, what s/he likes about social-networking, what it's best for, whether something like Facebook Grader is really any indicator of what a good person s/he is, and what s/he feels (and you feel) the real indicators are or should be.

The 'weak ties' that bind

Of course, young social networkers at your house already know all about "weak ties" - they just call them something else: their social-network "friends." Some of them are friends in real life, some just friends of friends, kind of second-tier friends, or somebody they met at the last away game. It's just helpful to have a fellow adult explain what friends in social-network sites are like from a sociologist's perspective. That's what Julia Angwin at the Wall Street Journal does. These weak ties can really come in handy in these crazy economic times, as well as when one's looking for a summer job or a prom date for her visiting cousin. "Weak ties are particularly good for job searching," Angwin reports, citing the view of a Stanford sociology professor, "because acquaintances can expose a job candidate to a much wider range of possibilities than his or her close friends can." Check out the article for more on the value of weak ties. But remember this is a very adult discussion, wherein the "friends" in social sites are viewed in a different, more casual and detached, way than among young social networkers. For a sense of that greater intensity, see "The pain of 'unfriending'" in the Digital Natives project's blog at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Top 10 'social media sites'

That's what TechCrunch wisely calls them, as it looks at the latest available comScore traffic figures (November) for "social networking sites." ComScore includes blog-hosting, media-sharing, and pre-social-Web community sites in that category, though, so "social media" works much better. Google's Blogger - which hosts blogs, of course - is No. 1 (with 222 million unique visitors in November, up 44% from '07). The rest of the top 10 are: Facebook (200 million); MySpace (126 million); Wordpress blogs (114 million); Windows Live Spaces (blogs - down 22% to 87 million this year); Yahoo GeoCities (69 million); Flickr photo-sharing (64 million); Hi5 (No. 1 social site in Latin America - 58 million); Google's Orkut (social-networking site that's huge in Brazil - 46 million); and SixApart (blog-hosting - 46 million). Two China-based sites, Baidu Space and 56.com, were in the 11th and 13th spots, respectively. [See also "Latin America's social Web."]

Tech & the student athlete

In proportion to their notoriety, star athletes (and aspiring ones) run the risk of a different kind of celebrity on the social Web. Established student athletes have probably already learned this, hopefully not the hard way. "Post a photo of yourself on your own or someone else's Facebook page holding a beer at a party or engaging in some other objectionable behavior and you could find yourself a star on badjocks.com" (if that isn't a badge of honor for some kids), TMCnet.com reports. "Not to mention suspended or kicked off your team, even expelled from school. Post a racist or profane message that embarrasses yourself, your team and your university, and you could face similar punishment." One coach likens posting photos on profiles to getting a tattoo - post it and it becomes part of it. Sure, profile owners can delete photos, but there's no guarantee somebody else hasn't copied, pasted, or sent them elsewhere.

A (digital) return to village life?

Did you ever hear someone speak nostalgically about "the good ol' days" of small-town life, when neighbors and people you cared about kept tabs on you? It had its downsides, but there's no denying everyday life (at least in the developed world) has gotten so much less personal. It's almost dehumanizing in some ways. People sometimes argue that the Internet has contributed to that. It can also be argued - I believe more persuasively - that the Internet is reversing that and bringing back village life in a non-geographical sense.

Case in point: the Twittersphere (Twitter's the fastest-growing social-networking service, CNET cites the latest Nielsen figures as showing). People microblogging through their days while "following" their relatives, friends, colleagues, and other interesting people doing the same. A superficial glance by babyboomers yields predictable reactions like "narcissism on steroids." But there's more to this phenomenon. It de-isolates. It creates "ambient awareness," as Clive Thompson recently described it in the New York Times Magazine - a growing (sometimes sustained, sometimes intermittent) awareness of the thoughts and moods of people who interest you wherever they are, even on the other side of the world (you can unfollow anyone any time, and it's up to you how much you say what's on your mind). It gives fresh meaning to the term "global village" and challenges the old saw, "familiarity breeds contempt." For one thing, you're only hearing from people you care about and they're only hearing about you if you allow them to.

"Taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce," Thompson writes, "like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting" of the people you follow. He tells of a person who twittered about what sandwich she made each day. Another person he mentions thought it all sounded silly. Then he "discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner.... Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click [maybe slightly comforting] that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day" and would miss if it weren't there.

All this raises so many questions - you really have to read Thompson to see many of them thoughtfully considered.... Are all these weak ties superficializing friendship or affection, or adding to it - on personal and global levels? Does microblogging increase self-knowledge or the potential for narcissism? Does it help to objectivize personal troubles, get perspective, find solidarity, make us more vulnerable? Probably all the above - it depends on the individual. Experimenting with it myself, following fascinating thinkers in my general field of work (none of my relatives are on it!), I have found it to be a positive experience. There is this unprecedented sense of sort of intimacy being trustingly conveyed by people you only knew from a distance ("trust" is a key word in all this), as well as a sense of stimulation but also a bit of overload - people you respect posting so many links worth checking out.

One thing's certain: Twittering has a way of keeping us honest. You'd have to be an extremely gifted pathological liar (or actor always in character) to be someone other than yourself microblogging to a well-developed following even once a day (tell me if you disagree, anyone!). Thompson tells of a student of Zeynep Tufekci, a University of Maryland sociologist, who posted that the difference between Web 1.0 and being under the microscope of the social Web is that - as the old New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs conversing points out - on Web 1.0 no one could tell you were a dog. On Twitter, the social Web to the 10th power, everybody knows you're a dog!

[Tufekci's student might've read Michael Kinsley at Slate. See also: "Just because they crave attention?"]

Twitter in the classroom

Also see how Twitter is making classes - and thereby education - more village-like (see ArsTechnica). A communications professor approached Twitter the way many of us baby boomers do, thinking microblogging's all "solipsism and sound-bite communication," but after using it realized that it "brought him closer to his students, creating a personal connection that helped to increase their involvement in his classes." In this blog post is the experience of a Central Connecticut State U. professor who, after each class, twitters a reflection about how the class went. "Students who see the messages often give him a reality check." He said that if he twittered that he didn't think something got across, for example, sometimes students would twitter back that they "understood that fine" but were just distracted by ... [something outside of class] or they were tired.

Powerful things can happen when people can come to understand each other on even slightly deeper levels afforded by the kind of fairly frequent, candid, humanizing communication that happens in microblogging. Empathy emerges.

Think about what can happen when people feel empathy toward one another: compassion, civility, encouragement, empowerment, engagement, etc. Disinhibition - that condition of online experience that allows for cyberbullying, harassment, hate, etc. by dehumanizing people - becomes less of a factor. "Users" move through being mere participants to being citizens and community members.

Related links

But is Twitter a teen thing? Not really, Anastasia Goodstein of Ypulse.com suggests. It seems to be more for young professionals, with Plurk of more interest to teens, a 20-something told Anastasia. However, when I went to Plurk: of the dozen "recently joined members" featured on the home page, one was under 30 (she's 20) and the one other didn't declare his age. The other 10 were all in their 30s or 40s - even further away from being teens. Anastasia's theory makes sense: "If you think about it, since teens' social networks are mostly comprised of friends they know in real life, and the majority are teens they go to school with, they sort of already know what their friends are up to at any given moment."

"Who am I on Twitter?" The Financial Times calls Twitter "social networking around mutual stalking." I think writer Peter Whitehead doesn't quite get it yet, but he asks good questions: "My biggest concern, however, is over who I am on Twitter. Am I just me or am I representing the FT? Can I say outrageous things?" On that last one, some Twitterers actually do, but remember: "Everybody knows you're a dog!" In some ways, online anonymity is going away.

"Twittering from the Cradle"?! The teeniest tykes are twittering with the help of their sleep-deprived parents, the New York Times reports. When they become old enough to send their own tweets, they probably won't have Whitehead's sort of Twitter-induced identity angst.

Twitter grew 343% from September '07 to September '08, according to Nielsen. Over the same period, nos. 2-10 in the Top 10 fastest-growing social-networking services were Tagged (330%), Ning (251%), LinkedIn (193%), Last.fm (121%), Facebook (116%), MyYearbook (115%), Bebo (86%), Multiply (59%), and Reunion (57%). CNET reports.

Readers, feel free to disagree - send your comments to anne[at]netfamilynews.org or post them in our forum at ConnectSafely.org!

Anti-social networking

If for some strange reason your kids want to lose friends in Facebook, now there's help. They can download a little "Anti-Social Networking" application with features like "Insult-a-friend" or "Doodle-on-a-friend" (allowing them to "deface a friend's profile picture and send it back to them"), The Telegraph reports. They can also thoughtfully send a warning that they're considering unfriending someone using "People You May Know (But Don't Really Like)." This, of course, is marketing 2.0. The mini app was "developed on behalf of Paramount Pictures International to accompany their new film, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People." By the end of last month, some 3,000 anti-social Facebook users had downloaded the application, The Telegraph adds, but - who knows? - this could also just be a post-modern way of making or keeping friends. [I wonder if it'll soon be possible to create a non-group?]

Teachers in SNS: 'Creepy treehouse' or ok?

My headline's referring to "slang for how students feel creeped out by school teachers and college professors who are using Facebook and MySpace to interact with their students online," the Dallas Morning News reports, adding that "the term derives from urban legends about sexual predators luring children into treehouses." Of course that's not fair to a lot of teachers who are in social-network sites to understand their students' real, outside-of-school lives. In any case, there are now student Facebook groups on both sides of the question: "Teachers ... please stop going on Facebook," "Students should get over Teachers being on Facebook," and "No ... it's not awkward being friends with my teachers on Facebook." Check out the article to see what some principals says, as well as some examples of "Creepy Treehouse." See also "Online student-teacher friendships can be tricky" at CNN.