News for the Week of April 9, 2006
Stories about teen-published content, positive and negative, were all over kid-tech news this week, very in keeping with the very user-driven, multimedia, multi-platform "Web 2.0" we're now experiencing...
Teen self-expression - online, offline
Teen online journals and social-networking sites aren't the only "place" to find out what kids are thinking about. There's also The Notebook Girls, by Julia, Sophie, Courtney, and Lindsey, who "passed a notebook around to each other during classes [at Stuyvesant High School in New York City]. In that notebook, they would share comments on all sorts of things - "boys and basketball, drugs and dating, politics and promiscuity," according to the Los Angeles Times's review - their whole other life that "parents don't even know about," as one of the authors put it, so it's not for the faint of parental heart. That one, collective journal of four freshmen's school life, with both "personal and political [post-9/11 lower Manhattan] anxieties," became five bulging, handwritten notebooks that publisher Warner Books compressed back into one.
The sub-plot of the L.A. Times's great review is about teen writers, who are beginning to compete, perhaps rightfully, with adult authors in the "Young Adult (YA)" category. "This generation of teenagers seems less fazed by the challenges of writing a book and getting it published.. Teenagers, after all, are forever sending text and instant messages. They spend hours updating blogs and keeping online journals. The discipline that adult wannabes fight so hard to master in night classes and writing colonies - the need to write, write and write some more - comes effortlessly to many teens. For them, daily life on the Internet has become an almost natural prelude to the writing of short stories, essays and novels." A definite upside to teen online activity, I'd say.
Winning blog and documentary
It was both his writing and photography that won Buffalo, N.Y., high school student Maxwell Tielman his "Webbie." "Through quirky writing and fashion-shoot style photographs of the people he encounters, a picture of a teenage life in the city is beautifully painted," the Buffalo News reports. Tielman's blog Maxigumee.com won the "Best Teen Blog" category in the sixth-annual Weblog Awards, the News reports, adding that 51% of all blogs are published by people 13-19. In Florida, three 9-graders won Third Prize in C-SPAN's nationwide contest, "StudentCam," for their seven-minute documentary, "Video Game Violence," the Palm Beach Post reports. Their video and all the other winners can be viewed at StudentCam.org.
On the downside, 3 teens arrested
Three Rhode Island girls, two 16 and one 19, were arrested and charged with conspiracy. One of the 16-year-olds allegedly took sexually explicit photos of the other two girls, the Associated Press reported, and "published" them in MySpace.com. I asked an attorney at the National Center for Missing & Reported Children if she believes it's increasingly possible that minors will be up against adult-level prosecution in cases where they "distribute" child pornography like this. Mary Leary, deputy director of the Center's Office of Legal Counsel, replied that kids do "face the 'possibility' of charges much more so now than in the past. However, particularly when the images are of the youth him/herself, the appropriate response from prosecutors is unclear and very jurisdiction-specific. In situations such as that referenced in the AP report, this will be a fact-specific review to see the purpose for the posting, circumstances of the posting, and applicable law." Parents and kids will want to note Leary here: "In many jurisdictions youths will be charged with such offenses, notwithstanding a lack of understanding they were dealing in child pornography." She adds that "there are additional repercussions as well for such actions, even if the product of bad judgment ... [including] charges unrelated to child porn, such as harassment, aiding and abetting, and conspiracy charges. Civil liability should also be a concern."
In Other News...
- MySpace safety steps. The 68 million-member social-networking site this week announced two new online-safety steps it has taken. 1) In partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the National Ad Council, MySpace and News Corp.'s many other media services, including Fox TV, will "begin displaying public service ads aimed at educating its users, many of them teens, about the dangers posed by sexual predators on the Internet," the Associated Press reported Monday. 2) MySpace hired an chief security officer, referred to in many media reports as its new "online safety czar." Here's the New York Times on this development.
- New critical patches. Microsoft has released three new patches for Windows PCs, all critical, the Associated Press reports. One fixes an Internet Explorer browser flaw that has already been exploited, so - if you Windows PC owners don't have patching automated (e.g., at Windows OneCare), get that patch right away!
- Child porn law not global. Since the advent of the Web and the consequent growth in child-porn trafficking, we've usually heard that child pornography is illegal in most countries. Now we know it isn't, thanks to a new study by the International Center for Missing & Exploited Children. "ICMEC's global policy review of child pornography laws in 184 Interpol-member countries showed that more than half [138] have no laws that specifically address child pornography, and in many others the existing laws are insufficient," Information Week reports.
- Virtual pedophilia in game. It's not against the law because real children aren't involved, CNET cites legal experts as saying, but some players in the Second Life virtual world are speaking out about "age play." "This age-based role-playing can take on various forms," according to CNET: "It can be as innocuous as people acting out a family dynamic, or as potentially troubling as two adults engaging in sexual role playing, with one of the avatars made to look like a child." The adults-only game has 170,000 players and is growing by about 20% a month (there's also a Second Life for Teens - see my 8/12/05 issue). This is an example of how the gray area between legal and illegal activity seems to be widening as the Web becomes increasingly user-driven and peer-to-peer, other examples being the use of music in home-made videos (see PC World) and "self-published child porn" (see my 1/20/06 issue, "Teens charged in child-porn case" in this issue, and my 8/27/04 issue, and issues).
