Dr. Larry Rosen: Me, MySpace and I Blog

THE IMPACT OF TEXTISMS ON ENGLISH LITERACY

2008-05-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

A recent Associated Press article entitled "Not all :) as informal writing creeps into teen assignments" discussed another fascinating study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that included the following findings:

Nearly two thirds of teens 12- to 17-years-old admitted to using some informal writing styles ("textisms") in school writing assignments.
Half of the teens said they sometimes use improper capitalization and punctuation in school assignments.
More than one third use acronyms such as LOL in their school writing.
86% of teens believe that good writing is important to success in life.

My colleagues and I have been studying the impact of "textisms" on writing. In a study completed in late 2007, we asked a sample of 678 pre-teens, teens, and young adults to tell us how much they use certain textisms in their daily written “online communication” and then asked them to write a formal letter to a fictitious company complaining about a product and asking the company to take care of the problem. We then used a standard scoring rubric used to assess writing quality (and did not deduct points for using textisms in their letter unless it affected the rated quality) and found some staggering results:

The use of “contextual textisms” such as smilies, using special characters to indicate feelings (e.g., *hugs*), or using all capital letters to suggest strong emotions WERE NOT RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR FORMAL LETTER.

HOWEVER, the use of “language-based textisms” such as acronyms (LOL), shortened words (tht instead of that), and removing apostrophes (wont instead of won’t) WERE NEGATIVELY RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR WRITING. In particular, those who used more of those textisms produced worse writing samples than those who your fewer even after controlling for gender and age [removing any effects of age and gender]!

NOTE: A recent conference presentation PowerPoint slide show presenting these results can be found by clicking here.

Our results are particularly troubling given a recent study by the College Board which found that the SAT Writing Test to be the best predictor of freshman grades.

We had predicted that textism use was not going to be negatively related to writing ability based on data from England suggesting the opposite. We are now exploring these findings further with a larger sample of subjects and two writing samples – a formal one and an informal one – in the hopes of gaining more clarity on the impact of textisms in online communication on writing in the classroom.

I believe strongly that writing is an important activity, regardless of one's age. As a university professor I am finding that more of my students "produce" writing, whether it be the kind of writing that marks proper English; short communication bursts replete with LOLs, wonts, :-) and missing characters; web sites; MySpace pages; blogs; or commentary on what they read about other peoples' writings. I firmly believe that our job -- as parents, teachers, or bosses -- is to take advantage of the writing experiences of these Net Generation and Generation X pre-teens, adolescents, and young adults and weave them into daily life. For example, on the college level, there are numerous tools to allow students to produce online commentary on course material. I, myself, am finding more uses of my campuses online system called BlackBoard to provide writing experiences for my students. For example, I may pose a question online concerning a recent study or something that we have discussed in class, and have students post their own thoughts plus respond to the comments of other, fellow students. I insist that they simply write, in any way that makes them comfortable, which often includes a myriad of textisms. The result is that I get some fascinating discussions of the type I would never see in a large class or in a class with students who are not comfortable speaking in front of their fellow students. In fact, often the most prolific commentators are precisely those students who are shy in the real world. Our research bears that out.

Research shows that a vast majority of Net Geners and Gen Xers feel more comfortable sharing their feelings and opinions in their screen life rather than their real life. It becomes our challenge to figure out ways to take advantage of this sense of disinhibition that many of these younger generation members feel from their years of living anonymously "behind the screen." For example, rather than rave about the negative aspects of teen MySpace or Facebook pages, take advantage of the ease of creating these representations of the self and discussion groups and encourage -- no require -- students to move some of their classroom work to the virtual world. We should recognize that these tools are here to stay and that pre-teens, adolescents, and young adults have grown up sharing ore of their feelings and opinions in virtual worlds than in their real worlds. I expect the younger generation to be even more so with Club Penguin, WebKidz and literally dozens of other online social networks being populated by children as young as late elementary school. We can make this proliferation of technology and media use work toward helping students write and produce their thoughts in a way that is comfortable for them. Given this base, I believe that we can then use these tools to move their more formal, school based writing to a higher level while allowing them and encouraging them to use their online language as a way to this teaching experience.

Return to Dr. Rosen's website for more information on his research, books, and commentaries.

More on Campus Shootings and Communication

2008-03-05T07:50:00.000-08:00

Last week I wrote about university campus shootings and how college campuses need to be aware that different people have different communication modality preferences. One point that I made was that younger students in the Net Generation have a preference for text messaging and that campuses are not taking that into consideration when they send out mass e-mailings to alert students about emergencies. An article from the Associated Press presents some interesting but troubling data concerning creating a campus-wide text messaging database. Omnilert, a company that provides an emergency alert system called e2Campus to more than 500 university campuses, reports that the average campus obtains only 39% enrollment. Another company reports even more dismal findings for its 300 campuses – 28%! One campus even offered a drawing for an iPod Nano to increase enrollment in the system and only got 15% of the students to sign up. Even Virginia Tech, the scene of the worst campus shooting, only got 60% of its students to sign on to the system. Interestingly, according to the article, some universities require their students to participate and others require students to either enroll or decline enrollment to make sure that each one is offered that emergency option.

This is clearly a new issue for many campuses and it is at least gratifying to see that progress is being made. I don’t think that the campus needs 100% participation because word-of-mouth should reach additional students. However, I fear that it is going to take several more incidents for colleges and students to realize that emergency communication is critical and the type of communication preference is also vital. As I said in my earlier comments, no single type of communication system will fit everyone so an effort must be made to try to use the tools that we have to reach the most people. It makes sense to me that campuses need to ask “In case of an emergency, how would you like to be contacted?” or “What is the best way to contact you in case of an emergency?” or perhaps, in the interest of the best overall coverage, ask the students to list any and all preferred communication modalities for alerts.

We are in a major transition period in communication where we are seeing more people choosing to communicate via newer technological devices, rather than “older” technology choices like the telephone which has traditionally been used as an emergency contact on campus application forms.

In a recent study, we asked more than 1,300 people from 11- to 60-years-old how they would prefer to communicate with a variety of people including their best friend, a good friend, an acquaintance, boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse, asking for school or work help, a teacher or boss, parents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, doctors, dentists, to make a date, to break a date, and to break up with someone. In every situation except one (relatives such as grandparents, aunts, or uncles) there were statistically significant age differences. The table below shows two examples of these patterns of communication. There is no doubt that preferences differ across the generations. If you combine texting, IMing and E-Mailing into one “electronic communication” category you can see an even clearer pattern. When communicating with a good friend, for example, 11- to 17-year olds (22%), 18- to 25-year olds (26%), and 26- to 39-year olds (22%) prefer more of these tools than those who are older than 39 (15%). These differences become magnified as you move from good friends to acquaintances: 11-17 (45%), 18-25 (60%), 26-39 (54%), and 40 and older (35%). One other interesting difference is preference for an electronic communication modality for breaking a date: 11-17 (25%), 18-25 (29%), 26-39 (15%), and 40 and older (7%).

	Face-to-face	Telephone	Text Message	IM	E-Mail	Postal Letter
COMMUNICATING WITH BEST FRIEND
11 – 17 year olds	71%	16%	8%	5%	1%	0%
18-25	66%	18%	11%	3%	1%	0%
26-39	57%	32%	6%	1%	4%	0%
40 or older	60%	35%	1%	1%	4%	0%
COMMUNICATING WITH A GOOD FRIEND
11 – 17 year olds	59%	20%	12%	8%	1%	0%
18-25	46%	28%	20%	4%	3%	0%
26-39	41%	37%	12%	1%	9%	0%
40 or older	42%	43%	2%	2%	11%	0%

Although we did not ask about communicating with the campus in an emergency (the study was done before the Virginia Tech shootings), I am sure that the pattern would be the same. It is clear from these data that communication modalities differ by age. We are currently looking further into this issue in an ongoing study. The implications are clear: in a campus emergency you need to provide a range of communication modalities to reach everyone. Just sending an e-mail is not sufficient.

Campus Shootings and Communication Across Generations

2008-02-29T10:52:00.000-08:00

Last week my university had an incident where someone was seen carrying an assault rifle on campus. Police were called, sherrifs converged on the campus and people feared another Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois University. Luckily, it was a false alarm. A flurry of e-mails sent to the entire campus followed for the next few hours as the campus was locked down. Local news (and even some national news outlets) carried the story and reported that campus was closed. However, most students had no idea that anything was happening so they came to campus unprepared for the lockdown.

As someone who studies technology, media, and communication I have always maintained that since you are dealing with multiple generations who have different communication styles and choices, you need to communicate in a way that has the highest likelihood of getting through to all students. My university is the most multicultural university west of the Mississippi and has students ranging from 18 to 80 (I believe our average age is around 28). Given this diversity, a campus-wide email is a totally ineffective way of reaching younger students. Live television news is also worthless as these students view their news online (or get it from The Daily Show). You must match the communication modality of the student and that depends on their age and techno-savvy. Here are some of my suggestions. No one option will cover all students (or faculty and staff for that matter) but using all of them will provide the greatest communication coverage:

Have each student supply his/her cell phone and send a mass text message. This has been done at other universities where they ask students to voluntarily go to a website and input this information in case of emergency. In my most recent research, Net Geners prefer text messaging to any other communication modality.
Post information on the campus website
Post a notice on any MySpace groups that involve campus students since many students check their MySpace page often during the day.
Post a notice on any Facebook groups that are frequented by campus students for the same reason as #3.
Use the reverse 911 to supply a telephone alert.
Post information on BlackBoard -- a campus-wide system where each course has a separate page for information, grades, etc. -- where many students visit before classes for updated information.

The problem is that Baby Boomers, Generation X and the Net Generation all have different preferred communication modalities. Baby Boomers tend to prefer phone and email. Generation Xers tend to prefer email while Net Geners prefer text messaging and social networking communication. My 6 options would provide the greatest possibility of reaching the most students.

I did quite a few media interviews on this topic after both recent shootings and this is what I always tell the reporter. You have to communicate by matching modalities with each person. Everyone has a different preferred modality which they check often. My six suggestions should reach the maximal number of students (and faculty).

Internet Safety Task Force

2008-02-29T10:30:00.000-08:00

This press release can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/newsroom/pressreleases/the_berkman_center_announces_formation_of_internet_safety_task_force

When I originally read the press release I had to stifle hysterical laughter. I'm sure that they have finally figured it out!!! An electronic solution! Wow! That is sure to stop those young kids from being online.... Yep .. that's right. Let's provide parents and social networks with more unusable electronic leashes. What happened to providing "parenting" instruction to these parents so that there is no reason for the kids to do anything bad without being aware of the consequences? I don't know what the task force costs but it is a band aid solution at best. Do they really think that better electronic solutions are going to do anything at all to this generation of techno-savvy kids? You may as well try to hold up your hands to stop a tsunami. Within a few minutes of instituting any electronic barriers, the kids will have “work-arounds” posted on their MySpace pages and on a variety of websites that already have work-arounds for other electronic “solutions.”

MySpace and Attorneys General Announce Join Effort to Promote Industry-Wide Safety Principles

2008-01-17T19:26:00.000-08:00

On January 14^th, MySpace and Attorneys General from 49 states and the District of Columbia released a joint statement that can be found at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080114/20080114005546.html?.v=1.

The “Principles of Safe Social Networking” were partitioned into four categories:

Site Design and Functionality

Reviewing every image and video uploaded to MySpace
Reviewing the content of MySpace discussion groups
Making the profiles of 14- and 15-year-old users automatically private
Deleting registered sex offenders from MySpace
Defaulting 16- and 17-year-old users’ profiles to private
Improve technology to enforce the minimum age of 14

Education and Tools for Parents, Educators and Children

Online safety public service announcements
Free parental software (underdevelopment) so parents can prevent their children from having access to any social networking site
Increase communication when consumers report inappropriate material or activities on MySpace

Law Enforcement Cooperation

24-hour hotline

Online Safety Task Force

Develop online safety tools to authenticate identity and verify age
Explore new technology to “help make users more safe and secure”

My Thoughts:

At first glance, this sounds like law enforcement and MySpace are sure working hard to keep our children safe out there in cyberspace. However, no “technological tool” solution is going to keep children safe. Net Generation children, pre-teens, and adolescents are far too technologically savvy to be thwarted by technology if they truly want to social network. OK, so you are going to try to develop technology to keep young children (under 14) off MySpace. How is that going to happen? When you create a MySpace profile you are asked to state your age. No verification is required. How do they plan to verify if you are truly 16, 18 or even 99 as many underage kids indicate? Interestingly, in my studies of MySpacers, when asked their age in an anonymous online survey, and allowed to type it into a box rather than check their age from a list, 15% of the participants VOLUNTARILY told me that they were under 14. The youngest was 9!

Reviewing all photos, videos, and discussion group conversations is quite admirable and an unfathomable task. With more than 200,000,000 profiles, most with multiple photos and videos being uploaded daily, it would take years to check each one. Now, consider their plan to monitor MySpace groups. Below is a list of MySpace groups as of January 17, 2008:

By my rough calculation, there are 4,086,000 groups! How they plan to monitor group conversations is a mystery to me. Perhaps they will use software that identifies key nasty words. Oh, yeh, the kids will simply create new words to replace the old ones or use starts between letters, or something even more clever to hide these conversational no-nos.

Educating parents is an excellent idea and public service announcements are a nice start. But MySpace needs to do much more than that to alert parents to the ways they can keep tabs on their children. In fact, MySpace already has a complete section with colorful, informative tabs of all types of MySpace safety information. Didn’t you know that? Where is it you ask? Well, scroll all the way down to the bottom of any MySpace page – where you typically find links to matters that are more legal than informative – and hidden between their privacy statement link and how to contact MySpace is a link to “Safety Tips.” I think that MySpace might be better served by figuring out ways to get these sources into the hands of parents without making them search all over the place. For example, why not develop software to determine who is a parent and who is not by simply identifying profiles that answer the question about whether or not they have children in the affirmative? Having done that, Tom can send each parent a message alerting them to the available safety tips. How about posting messages about safety resources on the 49,323 groups dealing with “Family and Home”? Or, in a completely self-serving comment, Tom could buy a copy of my book for every MySpace parent!

The final two principles, Law Enforcement Cooperation and Online Safety Task Force are typically vague and without any real solutions to aid child safety.

Finally, you may have noticed that I ignored the goal of “Deleting registered sex offenders from MySpace.” Creating a MySpace page does not require anyone to use their real name nor does it ask if the person is a sex offender. What is to stop a registered sex offender from creating a profile without indicating that they are a danger to the safety of children? That one is really ludicrous. My first entry on this blog discusses just how unnecessary it is for MySpace and parents to work themselves into a frenzy about so-called sexual predators roaming cyberspace. Sure there are some people on MySpace who have ulterior motives and send kids messages containing foul language or pornographic pictures. However, my data as well as the data collected by the Research Center for Crimes Against Children (supported by the Department of Justice), show that when MySpacers do receive these sexually-tinged communications nearly all react appropriately by blocking the person, ignoring the message or telling an adult. Further, according to the research, most of these “sexual predators” are actually kids themselves simply fooling around.

One final thought: Giving parents software to prevent their children from going on any social network is a ridiculous idea and terrible parenting. With 80% of all 11- to 17-year-olds on MySpace, many kids experience the majority of their social lives online. With working parents, where nobody is home when school is over, many teens must go directly home after school. Instead of hanging out with friends at after-school activities or at the mall, they congregate on MySpace. Pulling the plug is tantamount to making your child a social outcast by limiting a major part of his/her social life.

My research has shown that parenting style is critical in determining online safety. The best solution is to teach parents how to use “Authoritative Parenting” to establish rules and set limits for their children while allowing the children to have input in the discussion. My extensive research, which you can read on my website, shows convincingly that having an authoritative parenting style is by far the best solution to keeping your children safe and healthy while letting them enjoy an online social life. Good parenting is the answer, not technological tools.

Second Life: Living in a Virtual World

2007-12-20T14:26:00.000-08:00

I was watching an episode of Law and Order: SVU the other day with my 17-year-old daughter, and saw the detectives track a potential killer in Second Life. What is Second Life? It is a virtual world, created in 2003, but popularized in the media in late 2006 when it exploded from a relatively unknown site, to appearing on major television shows. Briefly, anyone can join Second Life by becoming a “resident.” Residents create avatars, or representations of themselves, using two-dimensional icons that are personalized. An avatar can be human-like or non-human. In effect, your avatar can look like anything you choose. Once you create your avatar you are free to roam Second Life. As you motor along you meet and chat with other residents, buy products (both real and virtual), create businesses, build houses, play games, or do just about anything you wish. If you have never been there this may seem silly or a waste of time but more than 20 million users find it compelling and addictive.

A psychologist friend of mine told me that one of his clients confessed to spending substantial amounts of time in Second Life, mostly finding female avatars and having virtual sexual relations. Needless to say, this was causing a strain on his marriage. His argument was that he was just doing the same thing as if her were playing a video game so he did not understand why his wife was so upset and hurt by his preoccupation with this virtual world when he had a real world right outside his computer.

Second Life is just one of many virtual worlds, although it happens to be more visually stimulating than sites such as MySpace or Facebook, which are based more on communication thorough written words. Nonetheless, these are all virtual worlds and people are flocking to them in droves. MySpace currently houses more than 200,000,000 sites, most created by pre-teens, adolescents, young adults, and yes, even older adults (who are the fastest growing segment of MySpace users). This makes it the 5^th largest country in the world. According to Gartner, Inc., a company that analyzes Internet trends, by the end of 2011, 80% of all active Internet users will belong to at least one virtual world and many will belong to several simultaneously. This is a staggering figure. We already know that these virtual worlds appeal to teenagers with more than 50% of 12- to 17-year-olds already having a presence on at least one social network according to national surveys by Pew Internet & American Life Project’s latest reports.

In my book, “Me, MySpace, and I” I talk a lot about teenagers and how they relate to cyberspace, technology, and, of course, MySpace. But this phenomenon is not limited to teens. Moms and dads have virtual worlds as do even grandma and grandpa. What does it mean that so many people crave life in a virtual world? What does this say about our “real world?” From the standpoint of a parent and someone who has studied reactions to technology for more than 20 years, it speaks yards about how our real world is not meeting our needs. If it were, we would not need to spend so much time in cyberspace. What needs are not being met in RL (real life)? From my research with children, adolescents, and adults, it is clear that these social worlds are just that – social. People are craving communication and companionship with other humans. Given the current state of our society, where we rarely know our neighbors since they most likely are only living there for a short period of time until they move on, virtual worlds provide an online neighborhood with a never-ending supply of “friends” and neighbors.

Is this good or bad? I think it is a bit of both. For many people, including children and adolescents, their world is so limited that they wake up, go to school, participate in after-school activities, go home (often to an empty house), do their homework, watch television, and go to bed. There is precious little time for friends, at least face to face in RL. So, virtual worlds such as Second Life and MySpace provide opportunities for them to socialize and make friends, even if those friends may not be people they would ever meet in RL. The good part is that it allows them to learn to be social and to experiment with different forms of their “self.” According to psychologists we possess a variety of selves, including your true self, ideal self and ought self. The true self is how you present yourself to the world. The ideal self is how you would like to be seen by other people and the ought self is how you think other people expect you to act. Virtual worlds provide opportunities to work on all three selves and according to more than 2,500 interviews with MySpacers; this is exactly what they are doing.

Is it bad? It can be. There are a plethora of potential potholes including Internet addiction, cyberbullying, pornography, sexual predators, and anything else the media can hype as a negative aspect of virtual worlds. How bad are these? My own research as well as that done by the Pew group and Crimes Against Children Research Center, indicates that these problems are not as bad as the media portrayals. In fact, long-term studies show that most of these potential Internet hazards have declined over the past few years.

Whether it is Second Life, MySpace, Facebook or any other virtual social network, the chances are that the best way to stay safe is through moderation. Parents need to help monitor and limit their children’s use and exposure and adults need to monitor their own use as well as that of their family and friends. Technology can be quite addicting. It is fast, visually stimulating, and fun, but it cannot be your only social outlet. You inhabit RL and you have to spend time there to develop real-world skills and friendships.

Online Confessionals: 15 Minutes of Fame?

2007-12-20T12:57:00.000-08:00

I just did a TV taping for a syndicated show on the rise of online confessional websites. The questions were so interesting that I thought I would share some of my answers. If you have never seen an online confessional site visit either http://www.ivescrewedup.com or perhaps http://www.truedadconfessions.com. Here are some samples of what’s out there:

I confess that I have stolen about $15,000.00 when working for a family member. I was sexually active as a teenager and pregnant when I got married. I did drugs and drank as a teenager. My cousin and I use to do sexual things as young girls. I've masturbated a few times. I have wished death and bad things on people I didn't like. I've lied a lot in my life. I have since turned my life around and asked to be forgiven for all my sins.

Been married11 years now I still have occasional dreams about my ex-fiancé. I still feel she was my perfect woman, and wonder what happened

Both of these confessions were anonymous.

Anonymity plays a major role in telling all online. You can say things behind the screen that you would never say face-to-face – I’m sure that the dad in the second sample has never told his wife how he feels – and feel free and vindicated. The vindication is critical since most “secrets” are never shared and stay in the background of our brain, picking at us when we are vulnerable or feeling particularly poorly. Telling all online helps get those feelings out of your brain and places them in a permanent, online location where they can be revisited at any time. They say the “confession is good for the soul” and these sites provide that avenue.

A second aspect of online confessions is the sense of empowerment people get when they see their words on the screen. Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame. We have seen that happen with YouTube videos and other websites. There is a sense of empowerment in being able to go to Trip Advisor and tell the world how awful that hotel in San Francisco was and why they shouldn’t consider staying there. Those words carry weight and that makes people feel important. Notice on Amazon that book reviews are preceded by a count of the number of people who found the review helpful. If you have ever given your thoughts about a book on Amazon, don’t you feel great if it says “20 of 25 people found this review helpful”?

A third issue concerns feedback. Many of these sites allow others to comment on confessions. Reading the comments, they appear to mostly center around people saying how they did the same thing and understand why the person did it and appreciate the confession. This provides support – positive reinforcement according to psychologists – and engenders a positive sense of self. Reading the first confession above, I followed the links to comments and found that most were quite positive and many people told the confessor that they understood, were proud of the person for turning her life around, and were more than happy to grant forgiveness. In the past many people felt that they could only be granted forgiveness for their sins by their priest, rabbi, or other ordained person who was allowed to grant absolution. Now, anonymous people can do the same and perhaps this makes the confessor feel even better than going to confession since she can read these absolutions often and continue to heal psychically.

Fourth, people who confess online and see others commenting on their sins gain a sense that must be similar to those contestants on reality shows. It is no surprise that the weekly television ratings show reality shows to be among the most viewed. Some people crave public attention and they can’t all be on television. The Internet is the biggest reality show around. Millions can view your thoughts and unlike reality television, which rarely replays shows, this Internet reality show stays forever. YouTube is a great example of this phenomenon. Lonelygirl15 jumped to world prominence for her frequent missives about life. Even though she was exposed as an actress playing a role, her videos were among the most viewed. Other YouTubers have had their day in the sunshine with some gaining fame. Brook Brodack (username Brookers) is now developing a television show. Others have been signed by record companies or given spots on network television. Just browse YouTube and you will see videos that garner millions of viewings in just the first several days after posting. It is a form of fame to which anyone can aspire.

Is there a downside to these sites? Certainly. For example, people have confessed to heinous crimes but they are protected by their anonymity. Imagine that your friend was murdered and the murderer was never caught. Now you are reading online confessions and you see someone confessing to that act. How would you feel? My guess is that you would be forced back to the beginning of the grief process and knowing that the person is out there and free can only make you upset and angry.

The power of anonymity in engendering confessions is not novel. Priests sit in a booth next to the confessor with a curtain barrier between the two because it is easier to confess without looking at someone. The power of this was never made more poignant to me than when back in the 1970s I used a program called ELIZA to demonstrate the power of technology. ELIZA was a simple computer program written by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 to model a Rogerian psychotherapist. The program would use Carl Rogers’ idea of rephrasing the client’s statements and returning them as questions. For example, if you typed “I hate my mother” ELIZA would type back “Tell me more about your mother.” The program was written as an example of the power of technology and artificial intelligence but was never intended to replace face-to-face therapy. I would have an entire class sit at computers and talk to ELIZA for the final 15 minutes of class. Invariably, one or two students would want to stay after class to keep talking. When I would walk by their computers they would cover up the screen saying something on the order of “This is personal between me and ELIZA.” In later papers the students had to write about their experiences with ELIZA, many told me that they used it as a form of confession.

The Internet is no doubt the most powerful influence of the millennium. In the parlance of psychologists, we are experiencing “unanticipated consequences” that its creators never envisioned. Online confessionals, the viral nature of YouTube videos, the power and omnipresence of MySpace are but a few. Clearly, the future will bring more uses that we can’t imagine. Teaching and writing about the “psychology of technology” gives me an opportunity to explore these worlds and discover their value or, in some cases, their potential harm. Regardless, the ride is fascinating and never boring. When I teach my course on “The Global Impact of Technology” there is no textbook. Instead, there are weekly postings of articles about the impact of technology. No textbook can capture the speed of change in cyberspace. This fascinates and intrigues me and guides my research.

As always, I welcome your comments and thoughts.

Fires, Technology, and Multitasking Adolescents

2007-10-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

I live in San Diego and have had to watch areas that I know well burn to the ground this past week. Luckily, my home and those of my friends are safe, although there are several threatening fires, so caution is still in place.

Throughout this week it has been interesting to watch the major role that technology has played in keeping teens connected to their friends and the world. I have watched my daughter (17) and her friends spread all over the world, text, e-mail, phone, MySpace and simply connect in any way they can to keep tabs on everyone’s well being. I was sitting with my daughter watching the local coverage of the fires while PIPing [watching a picture-in-a-picture with a second television channel smaller picture placed somewhere on the screen without sound, allowing you to watch one on the main screen with sound and swap the two with the push of a button] CNN and flipping back and forth to get different perspectives. We both had our laptops open and were on several websites each, keeping track of road closures, exact fire locations, evacuations, school closings, and swapping information while at the same time she was texting 6 to 8 of her friends in other Southern California fire areas. “Whew!” she said. “My friend who lives up near the Magic Mountain fire is safe and my friend who is near the tongue of the Witch fire has evacuated and her family decided to drive to Arizona and stay with friends. I’m still waiting to get a text from a couple other friends, but I’m going to check MySpace to see if they have posted anything about what is going on with them.”

In the meantime, on my side of the couch, I had to appeal to technology to keep in touch. Cell phone reception was limited due to the fires but I could IM my parents and my son who is back east in college and reassure them that all was OK for now. My two other children got text messages from me – strangely while phone reception was bad, text messages were going through just fine – and other friends who could not get through on the phone got e-mails or texts depending on what I knew about their technology preferences.

All in all, this was an amazing lesson in the power of communication technologies and how many tools we have available to connect to the outside world. Of course, if the power went out we would be left with only cell phones until they ran out of battery power, but it was fascinating to watch us all multitask to gather information and connect. It was also interesting to see how my daughter could juggle all these communication tools and keep in touch with everyone, while watching television and checking multiple websites, all simultaneously, and all seemingly without exploding her brain from too much cognitive effort.

There is a fascinating often quoted set of studies in psychology performed by E. Colin Cherry in the early 1950s on “dichotic listening” that suggests that people are not able to split their attention and keep track of multiple modalities without severe decrements in the modality that is not getting direct attention. Cherry had people listen to two different messages, one coming through headphones into the right ear and the other into the left. The standard paradigm was to present a passage in the right ear and ask the subject to “shadow” or repeat it word for word as it was presented. The left ear presented different information including other passages spoken by a male or female in English or another language, garbled speech, tones, and other signals either English-based or not. The results, according to Cherry showed: “In no case in which normal human speech was used [in the opposite ear to the shadowed message] did the listening subjects fail to identify it as speech; in every such instance they were unable to identify any word or phrase heard in the rejected ear and, furthermore, unable to make identification of the language as being English. On the other hand the change of voice – male to female – was nearly always identified while the pure tone was always observed. The reversed [garbled] speech was identified as having ‘something queer about it’ by a few listeners, but was thought to be normal speech by others.”

In other experiments, psychologists found a phenomenon that came to be known as the “Cocktail Party Effect” where one can hear his or her name mentioned in a noisy room even when engrossed in a conversation many feet away. However, what is most often lacking in these popular press reports is that only one in three times do people actually recognize their name in the opposite ear when done in a dichotic listening paradigm. Add to this studies that demonstrate that if you perform two tasks at the same time – say talking on a cell phone and driving – the performance on both tasks suffer compared to doing either alone, and you have a picture of a human brain that can multitask, but it is a difficult process and results in poor performance on the secondary task.

So, how are teens seemingly able to multitask with ease, switching from their MySpace to a song on the iPod plugged in their ears, to the television, and to multiple IM screens on the computer? That poses several interesting questions:

Are they able to do what Cherry’s subjects could not do, and dissect different messages in each ear?
Is their multitasking leading to the same decrement in performance as seen in cell phone and driving tasks?
OR, and this is a big or, are their brains somehow changing in a way that they allows them to successfully multitask?

Several of my students are embarking on a replication of the Cherry study with teens to answer some of these questions. I will keep you informed. I am interested in what you think about whether we are witnessing an evolutionary change in brain functioning or simply a generation of children who switch their attention often and are burdened by that process in performing important tasks.

Using electronic media before sleep affects sleep time

2007-10-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

A recent article by Nakamori Suganuma and colleagues at Osaka University published in Sleep and Biological Rhythms (2007, Volume 5, pgs. 204-214) found that teens and adults who used media more before going to sleep slept less than those who used less media. Strikingly, over half of those who used media 3.5 hours or more before going to bed reported that they did not sleep enough due to their media use. In addition, the younger subjects in the study reported that media was more a factor in their lack of sleep than the older subjects. The most commonly reported medium used prior to going to bed was accessing the Internet (38%) followed by watching television (25%) indicating that these two activities may be causal factors in sleep deprivation.

This study is particularly important given the large amount of media consumed by children and adolescents. According to recent studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 12- to 17-year-olds consume 45 hours of media per week. Given that most Net Generation members multitask, this actually equates to more than 8 1/2 hours of daily media consumption! Add to these statistics the fact that my research shows that the most common time for adolescents to access MySpace is 5 PM to midnight, plus the result that children with computers in their bedrooms use them 50% more than those with computers in common areas, and you have a picture of a sleep-deprived teenager, multitasking away in the bedroom late into the evening.

My most recent studies ascribe a large portion of the "blame" for this excessive media consumption to parenting styles. Parents who use an "authoritative" parenting style -- setting limits and boundaries in a warm, caring manner while accepting input from their children -- have children who do not overuse or abuse media. Sadly, the research also indicates that only one-third of parents adopt this parenting style with the remaining being authoritarian (setting rules without input from the children in a strict manner), indulgent (allowing media use with few limits or rules), or neglectful (ignoring their children's media use).

The clear message from these studies is that parents must pay attention to their children's media use and set clear limits and guidelines to keep their children from using excessive media leading to sleep deprivation. This does not mean that parents need to pull the plug on the Internet, Wii, cell phone, television, or other media. It does mean that parents cannot assume that their children can monitor their own media use. They need to be proactive and help their children keep a balance between "screen time" and other activities.

2007-10-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

RECENT HEADLINE:

Official: MySpace Finds 29,000 Sex Offenders on its Site

"Popular Internet social network MySpace said on Tuesday it detected and deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its service, more than four times the figure it had initially reported."

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The implication that MySpace is overrun by sexual predators is predictable, unbelievable, and counter to nearly all research studies. The moral panic screamers just won't give up and face the facts.

In June 2007 MySpace had over 70 MILLION unique visitors. OK, so MySpace removed 29 THOUSAND sex offender profiles. That is 4/100ths of a percent of regular MySpace visitors! In addition, in my studies of more than 2,500 MySpacers, nearly all of them told me that when faced with a "solicitation" they act appropriately and block the person or report him to an adult. When asked if these episodes were upsetting, the vast majority said that the "solicitations" did not upset them at all. While television shows such as Dateline: To Catch a Predator make it appear that "sexual deviants" are cruising the Internet searching for gullible children, the data simply don't support that allegation.

I am appalled that people keep focusing on MySpace as a hotbed of sexual predators soliciting teens. It is not. There is no reason that MySpace cannot be a positive influence in the life of an adolescent. It is all an issue of good parenting. Parent can take control and make their children's virtual worlds safe. As my research demonstrates: good parenting leads to healthy adolescent development regardless of how much time teens spend on MySpace, IMing, texting, or simply enjoying their multitasking technological worlds.