It's a big headache, Facebook's experiment in folding users' input into updating its terms of use, but so is democracy! And by definition - as a user-driven or -produced medium - Web 2.0 is more democratic than any that preceded it. Revising terms of service in this participatory way actually makes them relevant. I wonder why it has taken so long to get here, actually (maybe partly because all … [Read more...] about Terms of use: Social Web bill of rights?
Literacy & Citizenship
*Social* media literacy: The new Internet safety
In talks and sound bytes over the past year, I've been saying that - for the vast majority of online youth - digital citizenship is the new Internet safety. And indeed digital citizenship is HUGE, for the very reason that behaving aggressively online more than doubles the risk of being victimized (see "Good citizens in virtual worlds, too"). Still, that's really only the half of it. Media literacy … [Read more...] about *Social* media literacy: The new Internet safety
Guide to Facebook privacy features
What users do with their own and others' content is just as big a privacy concern on the social Web as what a responsible social network site does with it. Certainly terms of use need to be looked at, but so do your own privacy options, people! Even privacy features can't offer total control over what people do with your content, but they can help a lot - for example, they can keep it so that the … [Read more...] about Guide to Facebook privacy features
Growing civility on the Web?
That's what Lee Rainie, director of the Washington-based Pew Internet & American Life Project, is seeing on the Web, he told the Boston Globe: Social norms that mitigate offensive behavior are developing. "There is a quiet but growing movement to forge a truce in what [Rainie] calls 'an arms race of name-calling' on the Web." Despite "the buckets of venom [that] still flow across the Web every … [Read more...] about Growing civility on the Web?
Facebook’s about-face on terms of use
Facebook was smart to go back to its previous terms of use while it conducts this terms-of-use-updating experiment in a spotlighted Petrie dish in what seems like the middle of Mumbai's Victoria Station at rush hour (see CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "Update on Terms"). And this is indeed a giant (global) societal experiment, as we the people (the content producers and distributors) and they the companies … [Read more...] about Facebook’s about-face on terms of use