NetFamilyNews

Lori Drew acquitted in cyberbullying case

2009-07-03T17:09:00.003-06:00

In a second ruling in the Megan Meier cyberbullying case, a federal judge yesterday threw out Lori Drew's three misdemeanor convictions of late last year, the Wired "Threat Level" blog reports. "The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking." US District Judge George Wu, who is expected to issue his written opinion early next week, told Wired that the prosecutors' were basing their arguments on the premise that it's up to a Web site operator "to determine what is a crime.... And therefore it criminalizes what would be a breach of contract," the judge said, referring to a site's Terms of Service. What Judge Wu's ruling did not concern was testimony in the case last year which "showed that nobody involved in the hoax [against Megan Meier] actually read the terms of service." In that testimony, Ashley Grills, who was also involved in the hoax against Megan Meier and was testifying under a grant of immunity, "also said that the hoax was her idea, not Drew’s, and that it was Grills who created the Josh Evans profile, and later sent the cruel message that tipped the emotionally vulnerable 13-year-old girl into her final, tragic act." This latest ruling was about the prosecution's application of the law to cyberbullying, and a commentary from the Progress & Freedom Foundation in Washington zooms in on that, saying that one problem with the discussion of this case (leading to confused lawmaking) has been conflation of cyberbullying (which the PFF calls "kid-on-kid" online abuse), general online harassment (involving people of all ages), and adult-on-kid online harassment (as in the Meier case). Here's the Los Angeles Times's coverage of this week's news and my coverage last December.

Who's in charge in virtual worlds?

2009-07-02T13:57:00.004-06:00

The global population of virtual worlds is growing fast, as is the business of creating and running them (venture capitalists reportedly invested more than $590 million in VWs last year). The question is, when bad stuff happens in VWs - theft, fraud, harassment, etc. - how should it be dealt with? Who's in charge, and how should "the management" set and enforce policy? "Another Perfect World" – a documentary from the Netherlands on what users and eventually humanity will learn from virtual worlds about governance, self-government, and community building – is about "grownup" spaces online, but the way these issues get worked out will certainly affect kids' online worlds as well (kids 5-9 are the fastest-growing demographic in a global VW user base expected to grow more than three-fold to 640 million by 2015 - see my coverage).

We're only at the beginning of this question, so maybe our educational institutions worldwide will have the wisdom to enable children to be part of what society works out – not as guinea pigs but as participants, members and hopefully stakeholders in the health of their own online communities, appropriately supervised but supportive of students' own agency as community members. For example, Quest Atlantis, an educational virtual world and game involving quests (the curriculum) that was designed at Indiana University, has 7 guiding principles (called "social commitments"): social responsibility, personal agency, healthy communities, diversity affirmation, environmental awareness, creative expression, and compassionate wisdom, which frame all activity and behavior in-world. One of the issues I hope QA and other educational VWs will address is social stratification and how power is attained and wielded – which, social-media scholar danah boyd pointed out in a talk she gave this week, is happening no less on the social Web than always has happened offline.

"Another Perfect World" gives examples of several adult virtual worlds that are engaged in fascinating governance experiments. The management of US-based Second Life takes as hands-off an approach as it can, leaving it largely to users to work out disputes, which they sometimes do with real-world detectives and lawyers. South Korea-based Lineage's management takes a similarly hands-off approach, but its users, who are largely Korean and have different cultural expectations of authority and hierarchy (than, e.g., the much more multi-national user population of Second Life) have staged an in-world revolution against the mainly feudal system in Lineage (I'm not sure if its outcomes have totally been worked out). Iceland-based Eve Online's management has undertaken a fascinating experiment, gathering a kind of parliament of players whose "power" (or influence over management) will grow only in proportion to their ability to grow its influence with fellow users in-world. These are, in some ways, advanced "civilizations" that are starting from scratch, where government is concerned.

The questions they are all being forced to consider are: Should users largely govern themselves in these worlds, as is the current modus operandi in most? When should management step in - when property gets stolen or people get harassed? What is management like - a capricious and arbitrary bunch of "Greek gods," enforcers of corporate policy, judge and jury? Will in-world user courts or arbitration boards need to be set up, as Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life parent Linden Lab, predicts? Already, the documentary suggests, it seems clear that a utopian society is no more possible in alternate worlds than it is in this one.

[Readers, pls note that shortly after I posted this, the producers of "Another Perfect World" took their doc off YouTube, so it doesn't seem to be available in full online (I checked a lot of sites). I could only find their own site with a trailer. Tx to Dennis Richards for the heads-up in Twitter.]

Friends and 'friends': Advice for tweens

2009-07-01T15:34:00.001-06:00

I'm a long-time fan of author Annie Fox, who teaches life literacy to tweens and teens through her writing and "Hey Terra!" advice site. So it was great to see she has a new book out: Real Friends vs. the Other Kind, the second in her new "Middle School Confidential" series. The book offers "insider information on making friends, resolving disputes, and dealing with common hazards of the middle school social scene – like gossip, exclusion, and cyberbullying, its press release says. There's also expert advice on crushes, peer pressure, and being there for friends who need help." Here's Fox's site.

Facebook's new public/private feature

2009-06-30T07:42:00.000-06:00

Is Facebook becoming a cross between Twitter and a mini-blogosphere? Partly – if you make your status updates as long as blog posts. The social network site "is rolling out a new option for users who have made their profiles viewable by everyone," the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro reports. "A new lock icon in the Publisher, the "what's on your mind?" form, will allow users to choose a potential audience for each status update: everybody on or off Facebook; all of their friends and all of their networks; friends and their friends' friends; only friends; or a custom combination that includes some people and excludes others." Pegoraro goes on to correct a misconception some users have had about this development. Which leads to the question of when Facebook will simplify all these private-vs.-public options. The potential upside of being able to choose how public each status update is that it encourages users to think before they send each update. That would be good. Then again, the Post's headline is "Facebook Adding Overexposure Options."

Canadians are big-time social networkers

2009-06-30T07:07:00.002-06:00

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.

Heads up on Free Realms chat

2009-06-29T09:50:00.001-06:00

Chat has always been a problematic piece of the Internet where child safety's concerned - some would say that's putting it mildly! So it's a bit surprising that Sony included chat in its new Free Realms virtual world for kids. Online game specialist and blogger Jaime Skelton registered her surprise about this in Examiner.com, saying that Sony's parental controls allowed parents to restrict what young users could say in chat but not what they could see. She later added a correction: "If you use parental controls to restrict chat to quick chat only, it goes both for what the child says and what the child sees, nor can children [registered as] under 13 see open chat at all." I would add that qualification in brackets because parents need to be involved in the registration process if they want the parental controls to work properly (they also need to know if a child's even using the Free Realms world, of course!). This is a great illustration of how parents need to be engaged if they want virtual worlds to be pure kid entertainment. Skelton gives an example of off-topic chat in a screenshot with her post and, in her correction at the bottom, links to an explanation of chat settings in the Free Realms forums (though that's where anyone can change the settings, including kids, unless parental controls override them). Here's my post about Free Realms when it launched.

Japan's school bullying problem

2009-06-29T08:14:00.002-06:00

The vast majority of Japan's elementary and middle-school students "have experienced bullying, both as the victim and the perpetrator," Agence France Presse reports, based on a survey of 4,800 students aged 10-15 by the country's National Institute for Educational Policy Research. Among the key findings, 86.9% of elementary students had been "shunned by friends, ignored or talked about behind their backs at least once in the past three years," and 84% "had bullied their schoolmates at least once"; 80.3% of middle-school students had been "picked on at least once in the same period," and 81.3% had bullied their peers. The AFP adds that bullying has long been a major educational issue in Japan due to concerns over the high suicide rate among schoolchildren who are picked on." Not that the US doesn't have this problem too - here's a school-bullying case in Los Alamitos, Calif., reported in the OC Register, where a mother received support from the Anti-Defamation League.

Meaty perspective on sexting

2009-06-26T11:22:00.003-06:00

Teens sharing nude or provocative photos is not brand-new, says Dr. Richard Chalfen at the Center for Media and Child Health, and there are "at least 4 kinds of sub-cultures crucial to understanding the 'sexting' phenomenon"; "media culture," "digital culture," "intense visual culture," and "adolescent culture." Chalfen explains each one in "Teen Culture," the first of a very digestible three-part series. In Part 2, "Photo Sharing Behavior," he gives examples of "sexting" past, then talks about influences of the current media environment, including reports of adults misusing cellphone cams, intimate paparazzi photos of celebrities, ethically challenged citizen "photojournalists" and even professional photojournalists, reality TV, graphical language and stories in talkshows, and the general blurring of public and private. In Part 3, Dr. Chalfen discusses some of the consequences, with an eye toward family discussion. A related new resource - another project of the Center, a joint venture of Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard School of Public Health - is "Ask the Mediatrician," where people can email media-related child-health-related questions to and find in-site answers from Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician, parent, and director of the Center. It's a brilliant concept. I'd just like to see a search box in the site and - in answer to a question about Internet safety - a link to research down the street at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, "Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies," which found, among other things, that a child's psychosocial makeup and environment are better predictors of online risk than the technology the child uses.

Undercover Mom inBarbieGirls.com, Part 2: Talking numbers

2009-06-26T10:21:00.002-06:00

By Sharon Duke Estroff

This week’s post continues detailing my investigation of Barbie Girls, and the crown jewels and skeletons in the closet that I uncovered there.

Crown jewel: Number-blocking filters
Part of the appeal of children's virtual worlds like BarbieGirls.com exists in their conversational filters, one of the most notable functions of which is weeding out mention of any specific numbers in both written and numeric form (i.e. “7” or “seven”). The driving wisdom, here, is that without numbers, kids cannot reveal personal information such as age, address, and phone number - which could put them at risk of being targeted by an online predator. From a parental perspective, I found this feature both comforting and welcome. Not only does it place a significant barrier between Internet ne’er-do-wells and our children, it also helps to teach kids the difference between safe and unsafe online chat.

Skeleton in the Closet: Kids' own workarounds
But just how effective are these filters? Strictly speaking they get the job done. Every time I tried typing a number in Barbie Girls, a series of nonsensical symbols (i.e. #*#*) would appear in its place. But digital natives can be very clever and creative when it comes to working around Web site safety features. In one virtual world I visited, I witnessed kids asking one another “How many dots are you?” then tapping out the appropriate response with a sequence of periods. On Barbie Girls, a common tactic is using homonyms and rhyming words in place of numbers. I managed to snap a couple of screenshots demonstrating this technique in action during an open party in another Barbie Girls swanky studio apartment. In the first screenshot, PRINCESSCAALAZ is saying “Get it?” “The Number” “Won and Too” (meaning "12"). “Yes,” replies the avatar sitting next to her. Then, in the second screenshot, PRINCESSCAALAZ is stating that she is “the number before,” or 11. At this point, SALOOMY, the girl with the brown legwarmers, announces that she is “mine,” otherwise known as "nine."

Bottom Line: Indeed, BarbieGirls.com’s conversational filters make it exceedingly difficult for kids to spill their essential 411 on the website. Parents should be aware, however, that it is not impossible for children to reveal their essential FOR WON WON on this or any other Web site. As in the real world, children’s virtual-world activity requires ongoing parental supervision and involvement.

More Barbie Girls to come next week! For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

Sexting legislative update

2009-06-25T10:03:00.002-06:00

Vermont lawmakers reconfigured state child-pornography law so that "that minors caught sexting would not be charged with a felony and forced to register as sex offenders, so long as the incident was done voluntarily and without coercion," the Washington Times reports (I mentioned this earlier when a House vote was still pending). The Times adds that Utah and Ohio are considering similar tweaks. Prosecutors in some states, though, have decided that keeping the possibility of criminal charges for teens on the table is a good prevention measure. Some experts agree because they say sexting can be an element in teen dating violence, in which case malicious or criminal intent can be a factor. So sexting needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis, Carolyn Atwell-Davis, director of legislative affairs at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told the Times. The only problem there is when a sexting case involving bad judgment, not malicious intent (for example this one in Pennsylvania, probably), gets into the hands of a prosecutor who doesn't have the kids' best interests at heart! Here's a commentary on this in the Los Angeles Times by David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family.

Sexting picture a bit clearer, maybe brighter

2009-06-25T09:43:00.002-06:00

We all just got a little clearer picture on teen sexting (nude or sexy texting), and it's not quite as dark as previously painted. The first known (and widely cited) survey on the subject, by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, found that 20% of teens have "sent/posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves." The latest figure - in a new survey by Harris Interactive for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and Cox Communications - is very close to that (19%), but it's cumulative; there's a breakdown of who's involved in sexting and how. As ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid reports in CNET, "the data from the Cox survey showed that, while 20% of teens "have engaged in sexting ... only 9% 'sent a sext,' ... 17% received one and 3% forwarded a 'sext'.... That 9% number is too high but it's less than half the 20% figure commonly used. And 90% of the kids who sent 'sexts' said that nothing bad happened, even though 74% of the kids agreed that sexting is 'wrong'. Twenty-three percent felt that it's OK if both parties are OK with it and only 3% said 'there is nothing wrong with it'." It's when "something bad happens" that we worry, because of the child-porn-related legal implications (see "Tips to Prevent Sexting" for more on that), but sexting can also turn into cyberbullying. And here's what's concerning about there: According to Clemson University psychology professor Robin Kowalski, kids don't want to tell parents or other adults about digital harassment because they fear 1) they'll be further victimized if the bully gets into trouble and retaliates and 2) their parents will remove their computers or cellphones - social lifelines - in an effort to protect them.

2 more sites sign on to Euro safe social networking

2009-06-24T17:05:00.004-06:00

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."

'Look, Ma, no textbooks!'

2009-06-24T14:46:00.002-06:00

Even as, for obvious budgetary reasons, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that digital textbooks are on the way and paper ones on the way out, a high school in Arizona proves it absolutely can be done. This year, Empire High School in Vail, Az., graduated its first class "to have started and completed their high school careers without the use of traditional textbooks," Tech&Learning reports (check out the great class photo!). Governor Schwarzenegger, whose plan is not without its critics, should sign a consulting contract with Empire's faculty and students! According to the Toronto Star's well-reported coverage, Schwarzenegger's plan is that as early as this fall, all high school math and science texts "will be entirely digital and, as the program rolls out, all textbooks on all subjects, K-12, will join them." Education reportedly accounts for about 40% of California's budget, and Schwarzenegger's talking about $2 million/year savings per 10,000-student district. "Come again, say critics," according to the Star. "Presuming teachers won't be just distributing print-outs and students will be given some sort of electronic device, aren't those savings wiped out?" Britain's Times Online says UK schools could well follow suit. [See also "Why participatory media need to be in school" and "School & social media: Uber big picture."]

Why Gen Y's not into Twitter?

2009-06-23T15:24:00.002-06:00

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.

Cellphones in class: New study on cheating

2009-06-22T13:56:00.007-06:00

On average, US teens send and receive more than 2,000 text messages a month, according to Nielsen figures, and a new study sponsored by Common Sense Media found that - despite many school policies to the contrary - a quarter of those texts are sent and received during class! Common Sense zoomed in on the opportunities this represents for cheating on texts, pointing to these key findings: 26% of students surveyed have stored notes on a cellphone to access during a test, 41% of the students surveyed say doing so is cheating and a 'serious offense'," and 23% don't think it's cheating; 25% of students have texted friends about answers during tests, 45% says this is "cheating and a serious offense," and 20% say it’s not cheating at all; 36% "say that downloading a paper from the Internet to turn in is not a serious cheating offense" and 19% say it isn’t cheating at all. "The results of this poll show a great need for a national discussion on digital ethics," Common Sense says in its press release. Hear, hear! There is no question a national discussion on digital ethics is needed - has been needed for some time - but not just with regard to cheating and plagiarism. What needs to be understood nationwide (worldwide, actually) is that ethics and the respect and civility associated therewith is protective as well. Ethics is protective of individuals and the communities - online communities and school communities - in which they function. And not just legally protective. Ethics, civility, respect, and citizenship mitigate aggression toward and disrespect for individual and collective rights and responsibilities. That is another national discussion we need to have, I feel.

But back to the important academics question. The other side of this needing to be addressed is what testing should look like in the digital age. As my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid writes in the San Jose Mercury News today, "Cheating is cheating regardless of whether you use technology or old-fashioned paper notes. But in addition to admonishing kids about why it's wrong to cheat, perhaps it's also time to rethink what it means to evaluate students in the age of the Internet and omnipresent mobile devices." Here's the San Francisco Chronicle on the Common Sense study, mentioning the organization's great new work in media literacy). [Here's my earlier post on the Nielsen teen-texting figure.]

Why participatory media need to be in school

2009-06-19T11:12:00.003-06:00

Writer, tech consultant, and educator Clay Shirky just gave a talk at the State Dept. explaining the media sea change we're experiencing globally. Keeping participatory media, the most fluent though not necessarily most literate users of which are youth, out of school only solidifies the firewall between formal and informal learning and holds school back from 21st-century relevance. Isn't the idea of adults unidirectionally disseminating to students info that the latter have actually never encountered before beginning to sound quaint? Doesn't helping students make sense of all the info they're gathering and think about the implications of all the info they're sharing, multidirectionally, almost 24/7, sound a little more current? Remember that old term "information superhighway"? Well, even back in Web 1.0, when the Internet was more mass-media-on-screens, it was getting to be like a "highway" for all forms of "transport." It simply can't be called either "technology" or a new medium that's being layered on top of life or school. It's technology + media + communication + producing + consuming + community and so on. It's a planet-size screen displaying, pipeline carrying, and mirror reflecting virtually all of human life. Shirky says the Net has become "the mode of carriage for all other media ... less a source of information and more a site of coordination" because people can now consume, produce and also gather 'round and talk about the info simultaneously.

So the Internet or participatory media simply can't be an add-on to what students are currently learning - just "another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers," as author and professor Howard Rheingold put it, quoted by professor Michael Wesch here. That approach would sell students, the learning process, school, and participatory culture short. They need to learn new media literacy and how to function well and civilly in community (be civically engaged, good citizens) in and with multidirectional, many-to-many social media throughout the curricula, the school day, and all grade levels. Visionaries like Rheingold, Wesch, and Shirky - and some amazing tech educators I feel so lucky to have met - show how important it is for students, as both producers and consumers, to approach participatory media in an ethical, mindful, and literate way. That's what school could do if it stops blocking participatory media: bring the rigor and enrichment of formal learning to the informal-learning that's engaging students and, in the other direction, bring the meaningfulness of informal learning to school. I ran across all three of the above links while doing some research for a talk at Purdue University this week. I hope they'll be as thought-provoking for you as they were for me.

But those are just a couple of reasons. Send yours! (Post here or in the ConnectSafely forum) - you can email me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Undercover Mom in BarbieGirls.com, Part 1: Romance in the air

2009-06-19T10:47:00.003-06:00

By Sharon Duke Estroff

As with every children’s virtual world I’ve visited undercover, I found BarbieGirls.com to have both its crown jewels and its skeletons in the closet.

Crown jewel: Socially acceptable doll play for tweens
When I was growing up, girls played with Barbies well past their 12th birthdays. Today, in contrast, publicly admitting to owning a Barbie Dream House at the age of 12 would equate to middle school social suicide. Not so, however, for her virtual counterpart. BarbieGirls.com is one of the most popular websites in the burgeoning children’s virtual world market. K-Zero virtual world consultancy places it at 15 million unique accounts and skip counting. The vast majority of those accounts belonging to tween girls. This is welcome news considering the widespread concern among child development experts that the KGOY phenomenon (Kids Getting Older Younger) may be cheating millennial kids out of their one and only go round at childhood. BarbieGirls.com has allowed a generation of cool-conscious tweens to stay on the pink bandwagon for just a little longer.

Skeleton in the closet: Questionable conversation
But just because the BarbieGirl.com’s is the classic high-ponytailed pink silhouette doesn’t mean that the play is the same as in yesteryear. The chat and virtual interaction factors have added a completely different dimension to this Barbie world. Because pictures speak a thousand words – and I am frankly speechless after some of the conversations I witnessed – I am going to use screenshots to out this skeleton.

Surprising Barbie Girl Scene #1: I took this screenshot in the Extreme Dreamland palace, where ambience is kitschy Arabian Nights with matching background music. I’d just plopped myself down by the crystal ball when the avatar sitting next to me announced “I am a guys” (the filter disallows “guy” in the singular). Hmm, she/he sure doesn’t look like a guy….

Surprising Barbie Girl Scene #2: Once we’d established that he was of the male species and I of the female, our conversation progressed to the next level. Here is my new guy friend asking me if I’d like to make out. Note that his proposal is presented in separate bubbles to bypass filters that block certain strands of words.

Coming next week: more crown jewels and skeletons oat BarbieGirls.com. For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

Important new book on youth online

2009-06-18T10:21:00.004-06:00

So much great work in youth social-media use and online safety has been going on in the UK, from the Byron Review and ensuing Action Plan to the just-released "Digital Manifesto" from a coalition of children's nonprofits to Digizen.org to the EU Kids Online project based at the London School of Economics & Political Science. LSE professor Sonia Livingstone has been busy - having directed EU Kids Online, a three-year, 21-country study that just ended with a conference last week; won a 2.5 million-euro ($3.47m) grant for two more years' research ("one of the largest ever won by the LSE," Webuser.co.uk reports); and published her new book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations, Challenging Realities. Media professor Henry Jenkins has just blogged a short interview with Livingstone about her book here, commenting on the balance she has always struck: The book, he writes, "will be of immediate relevance for all of us doing work on new media literacies and digital learning and beyond, for all of you who are trying to make sense of the challenges and contradictions of parenting in the digital age. As always, what I admire most about Livingstone is her deft balance," Jenkins writes. I hope he won't mind if I share an especially interesting comment from Livingstone in the interview: "I've sought to show how young people's enthusiasm, energies and interests are a great starting point for them to maximize the potential the internet could afford them, but they can't do it on their own, for the internet is a resource largely of our - adult - making. And it's full of false promises.... It invites civic participation, but political groups still communicate one-way more than two-way, treating the internet more as a broadcast than an interactive medium; and adults celebrate young people's engagement with online information and communication at the same time as seeking to restrict them, worrying about addiction, distraction, and loss of concentration, not to mention the many fears about pornography, race hate and inappropriate sexual contact." I first wrote about Livingstone's work in 2003 and most recently in "Fictionalizing their profiles."

Will India switch to Facebook?

2009-06-17T14:37:00.001-06:00

Facebook has serious designs on India, but "for years [Google's] Orkut has dominated the Indian social-networking scene," Business Week reports. Facebook added Hindi and five other Indian languages last month, bringing the total number of languages it supports to 57, "with several dozen more in the works." Some question why, though, since such a high percentage of India's Net-using population speak English, especially connected young urbanites. The real draw for Facebook, probably, is English-speaking friends overseas who already use Facebook. A New Delhi-based source told Business Week that none of her US friends use Orkut, so she had to join Facebook. On the other hand, globally, linguistic diversity and issues may not be the issue so much as differences in how digital media and technologies are used from country to country, an interesting piece in Ad Age suggests, also using India as an example.

Virtual world populations to skyrocket

2009-06-17T13:26:00.004-06:00

At 27% growth between now and 2015, children aged 5-9 are the biggest growth sector of a global virtual world population that will grow from 186 million to 640 million by 2015, Virtual Worlds News reports. Citing just-released figures from market researchers Strategy Analytics, the report says "that's almost 100 million new players a year, a nearly 25% compounded annual growth rate." The current biggest growth demographic, tweens and teens, is expected to grow 21% in the next six years, and adult virtual world users will just triple. So from now till 2015, the actual numbers given are 5-to-9-year-olds, 50 million to 209.9 million; 10-to-17-year-olds, 125m-395.6m; and adults, 11.5m-32.5m. As for how VWs will make money: microtransactions, largely, which means sales associated with virtual objects such as clothes, furniture, pets, transportation, weapons, armor, spells, real estate - some for VWs simulating RL (real life), some for quests and other aspects of multiplayer online game play. Though some, such as Disney's Pixie Hollow and Webkinz and Webkinz Jr also have associated real-world objects for sale, e.g. Webkinz stuffed animals (for the latest on that, see this). Virtual Worlds News says microtransactions will account for 86% of all VW revenue, growing from over $1 billion now to $17.3 billion in 2015. Business Week linked to this story here.

More Internet, less family time?

2009-06-16T10:01:00.005-06:00

Not necessarily, but while a just-released study doesn't come out and blame the Internet, one of its lead researchers seems to. The latest release of the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future's longitudinal survey found that 28% of Americans say they're spending less time with their families, up from 11% in 2006, according to an Associated Press report in Yahoo Tech. It was citing the 2009 edition of a survey Annenberg (at the University of Southern California) has been conducting annually since 2000. "The decline in family time coincides with a rise in Internet use and the popularity of social networks, though [the] study stopped just short of assigning blame," the AP reports. However, the respondents "did not report spending less time with their friends." As for their views of time spent online: In 2000, 11% of the 2,000+ respondents (ages 12 and up) said that family members under 18 were spending too much time online. By 2008, the latest study, that figure had grown to 28%. It also found that higher-income families reported "greater loss of family time" than lower-income ones, and "more women than men said they felt ignored by a family member using the Internet." Center senior fellow Michael Gilbert does seem to single out the Internet more than other technologies, such as TV and cellphones, as problematic, though, as the AP paraphrases him as saying that the Net "is so engrossing, and demands so much more attention than other technologies, that it can disrupt personal boundaries in ways other technologies wouldn't have." Here's Annenberg's report page.

Pediatricians' role in dealing with bullying

2009-06-16T09:51:00.001-06:00

Perri Klass, M.D., thoughtfully tells a story on herself about how her thinking about both victims and bullies has changed - and how differently she'd approach them as a pediatrician, based on what we now know from the research. In her commentary in the New York Times, she also reports a key development in pediatrics: "Next month, the American Academy of Pediatrics will publish the new version of an official policy statement on the pediatrician’s role in preventing youth violence. For the first time, it will have a section on bullying." This is huge progress. Klass also touches on what schools can do about bullying, adding the vital healthcare piece to the judicial one (the view of a juvenile judge in Georgia blogged about here) and the school piece (see this about a new anti-bullying program for schools called CAPSULE). She writes that, "for a successful anti-bullying program, the school needs to survey the children and find out the details - where it happens, when it happens.... Through class discussions, parent meetings and consistent responses to every incident, the school must put out the message that bullying will not be tolerated.... Parents of these children need to be encouraged to demand that schools take action, and pediatricians probably need to be ready to talk to the principal. And we need to follow up with the children to make sure the situation gets better, and to check in on their emotional health and get them help if they need it."

Bing's better

2009-06-15T15:07:00.000-06:00

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, got off to a rocky start where porn filtering was concerned. It got rave reviews except for the way it allowed people to bypass its SafeSearch filter even after set to "strict filtering," which my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid wrote about at CNET. Microsoft quickly made two changes that pretty much solve the problem if parents have filtering software installed on the computers their kids use (or use Microsoft's or Apple's operating-system-level parental controls). Now you can just put the URL "explicit.bing.net" into the filter's list of sites to block, and the filter will block all sexually explicit images Bing searches might turn up. Sites already excluded from the filter, such as Playboy.com, will also not display in Bing.com, Larry explains. What won't work is what I suggested in my original post about Bing: simply turning on strict filtering and - if kids are compliant with a rule about not changing the strict setting - having peace of mind that nothing untoward will turn up without filtering software, as is true with other search engines. But to Microsoft's credit, it acted very quickly in response to concerns.

Social site + virtual world = Hi5

2009-06-12T11:44:00.001-06:00

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.

Microsoft: Forget the controller

2009-06-12T11:26:00.002-06:00

Is it a trend, or is Microsoft just trying to leapfrog Nintendo as it goes for more family videogame players? Maybe both. First, with the Wii, Nintendo turned the videogame controller into "a simple swing-and-swivel device. Now Microsoft wants to ditch the controller entirely and leave the swinging and swiveling to you," USATODAY reports. With the help of none other than Steven Spielberg, Microsoft made the point at the recent E3 gaming conference that controllers are intimidating to people and - despite the huge videogame market - 60% of households don’t own videogame consoles. So it unveiled the console-less "Project Natal" with demos of "a painting game that lets players fling paint onto the screen like Jackson Pollock" and a "dodgeball-type game [that] had a player moving forward and back, left and right, using arms, legs and the whole body to ricochet balls and knock down walls of 3-D tiles," USATODAY adds - but with no details on pricing or release date, the Christian Science Monitor adds. But Nintendo keeps innovating too, also with sensors. At E3, it showed off a "Vitality Sensor," which takes videogame players' pulses, Forbes reports. It's "another milestone in Nintendo's quest to break down traditional definitions of videogames," Forbes says, but adding that Nintendo didn't announce what role the sensor would have in future games.

But back to the controller. Microsoft probably hopes that the 60% of households who don't own consoles won't just play games on cellphones. The New York Times recently reported that the iPhone is becoming a significant gaming platform, with games representing three-quarters of "the most popular paid downloads" from the iPhone App Store (Apple also recently announced that 1 billion apps had been downloaded from the store in its first nine months). But beyond games, iPhone's just about all things to all people - it can be anything from a baby rattle (USATODAY reports) to a musical instrument (hear it on the YouTube video).