Teen's tragic, very public suicide

The tragedy of 19-year-old Abraham Biggs's suicide last week was compounded by the fact that hundreds of people watched as he streamed his death live on the Web. [The Hollywood, Fla., college student died after taking a combination of opiates and the drugs he'd been prescribed for his bipolar disorder, USATODAY reported.] Some viewers "expressed shock, while others laughed or encouraged Biggs to die. Some members uncovered Biggs' identity, phone number, and address, and at least one online community member called police," InformationWeek reported. By the time the police arrived, Abraham was dead. Investigators told InformationWeek that "some users told them they did not take Biggs seriously because he had threatened suicide on the site before," but they are "investigating the role of Web site moderators and discussion board members," InformationWeek adds. They have a tough job. The Montreal Gazette editorialized that online suicides can't be stopped. "Live video feeds ... have become part of modern life. Most live-streaming and video sites have policies that prohibit the webcasting of violent or disturbing content. But technically, the problem with sites such as YouTube or Justin.tv ... is that with millions of videos uploaded, it's just not possible for administrators to know what is being shown." But, more important, what about the human factor? USATODAY talked to Texas Christian University sociology professor Keith Whitworth, who said that the anonymity of the Internet may cause some users to behave in ways they wouldn't in person. It has a dehumanizing effect by putting distance between viewers and the person in trouble, allowing viewers to feel absolved of personal responsibility (sound like a factor in bullying?). Whitworth told USATODAY they are "'absolutely not'" absolved, but "they also cannot be held accountable." He also told the paper that "Biggs' act is similar to suicide pacts in Japan and school shootings in the USA that end with suicide: All are well planned by people seeking fame." He worries about copycat suicides amid national - and now international - news coverage (choose from 1,300+ more stories here).

Sesame Street on video-sharing sites

Believe it or not, Big Bird, Bert and Ernie are 39 years old this year, and now there's a Sesame Street not only in 140 countries but also on the Web. It'll soon launch its YouTube channel with 100 video clips from the TV show, Reuters reports. Like YouTube, Hulu will also Hulu, an online video venture between News Corp and General Electric Co's NBC, will host 100 segments, and in addition "30 other segments featuring celebrity actor guests such as Julia Roberts and Laurence Fishburne." Reuters adds that full episodes of the show can be downloaded and purchased from iTunes "from season 35 and onward for $1.99." The first 10 seasons of Sesame Street are available only on disk.

What are online video viewers like?

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

Watch this video, parents

If you want to understand...

who digital natives are and what they're doing online

how community is experiencing a rebirth online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links

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

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

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

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

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

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

The video-driven Internet

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

Staging fights for Web video-sharing

It has become "an Internet rage for teens and young adults," the Chicago Tribune reports (story picked up by RedOrbit.com). And - judging by the popularity of other negative adolescent uses of cellphones (see last week's feature on naked photo-sharing) - it could be true. The Trib leads with the account of five 8th-graders huddled around a camera phone watching "video of a fake fight they staged in a bathroom at Benjamin Middle School. They had filmed multiple rounds of a shoving match ... and planned to post it on YouTube." Some of the fights kids post aren't staged. The New York Times this week ran a tragic story about a long-term bullying victim. The online part of the bullying is on p. 2: "A couple of the same boys started a Facebook page called 'Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe.' It featured a photograph of Billy’s face superimposed over a likeness of Peter Pan, and provided this description of its purpose: “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

Video sites' traffic way up

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

Web video's dueling giants

Watch out, YouTube: Now there’s MySpace TV. Then again, watch out, MySpace: YouTube is adding social-networking features. MySpace Video is morphing into “an independent Web site (www.myspacetv.com) that people can visit to share and watch video, even if they have not signed up for MySpace,” the New York Times reports. And even though it will “offer some new ways for members of MySpace, which attracts 110 million users a month, to more easily integrate the videos they create and watch into their personal profiles,” the focus reportedly will be more on professionally produced video. “For example, last week MySpace became the exclusive site for Sony’s ‘Minisodes’ - five-minute versions of ‘80s sitcoms like ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ and ‘Silver Spoons’.” Meanwhile, the Times reports, YouTube is testing a new tool that allows “YouTube users to chat while they watch the same clip and share their favorite videos.” As for audiences, MySpace TV launches “in 15 countries and 7 languages, much like YouTube’s own foray into nine countries announced this month,” and YouTube says more than half its audience is now overseas.

Social Web exploding in China

Watch out, YouTube, here come KU6.com. Well, YouTube probably doesn’t have to worry too much, but baby video-sharing site, based in Beijing, is the 46th most popular site in China, one of the world’s most populous countries, and says it broke even in three months, “attracted 2 million unique users a day in the last week of May … and unique users have been growing by 200,000 a day on average per week,” CNET reports (not sure is that growth is per day or per week, but…). KU6 also just struck a 2-year partnership with Baidu, which controls 70% of China’s search market, CNET adds. All this is in a story about how Web 2.0 – the very social, media-sharing, youth-driven Web – has totally taken off in China. And I’m telling you this because if any parent thought this is just another passing phase of the Net, that there are only a handful of sites or technologies kids use for online socializing, or that this is something a single government can regulate, here’s yet more evidence that none of the above is true.

Cyworld's 'video studio'

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

Piracy genie won't return to bottle

Heard of 1Dawg.com? It’s a video-sharing site that claims to be growing 40 times faster than YouTube, Forbes reports. Then there’s DailyEpisodes.com. Its users “vote for their favorite portal, so that when lawyers manage to shut down one copyright-breaking link site, viewers can quickly flock to the next best,” according to Forbes. But far more than these or US-based YouTube as a media-companies’ headache is Sweden-based ThePirateBay.org, which is basically the global nexus for copyright infringement. This “world's largest repository of BitTorrent files … helps millions of users around the world share copyrighted movies, music and other files” for free, with the help of Sweden’s easygoing copyright laws. The Pirate Bay has also “distributed its servers to undisclosed locations and is even soliciting donations to purchase a small island where it can avoid copyright laws altogether,” Forbes says. It’s a fascinating, well-reported article that illustrates very effectively how tough it is for laws, governments, companies, or parents to control what users do on the Internet. Meanwhile, CNET writer Declan McCullagh reports that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is “proposing a new crime: ‘Attempted Copyright Infringement’." Here’s a San Jose Mercury News blog’s tongue-in-cheek version of the story.