News for the Week of July 23, 2006
With teen blogging, socializing, and media-producing increasingly in the news, the question on a growing number of parents' minds is "What's the appeal?" Why are young people putting so much about themselves on the Web? Here's a look at that question:
Today's 'cave painters'
Now that the Web is 24x7 reality TV on which everyone's a "star," parents mystified by their kids' need to be so public online need only look at the media and social environment they live in - at society itself, even history, the Washington Post suggests in its very readable, thoroughly reported "See Me, Click Me".
Entire lives and innermost thoughts exposed on profiles and blogs are like cave art on steroids, exponentially more public because of what technology allows. But why? parents ask. It's therapeutic, validating, and cleansing somehow, the Post has bloggers explaining - like "coming clean" about everything all the time, along with all of one's friends, when one has nothing to hide and anyway would definitely prefer to do the exposing oneself before someone else beats you to it. For many social networkers, it's perfectly acceptable exhibitionism, maybe a little narcissistic, but collegial too.
And what's so surprising, when considering the history behind this, the Post suggests. "You can trace the roots of publizenship ["publizens," writer Linton Weeks says, are "very public citizens"] back to cave painters, drawing stick-like pictures of themselves in pursuit of berries or bison or one another.... It was in a 1968 art catalogue that Andy Warhol predicted, 'In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.' In the early 1970s, an everyday California family, the Louds, let TV cameras into their lives on 'An American Family.' The country watched in prime-time intensity as the family fell apart. In the 1970s, Tom Wolfe coined the phrase: 'The Me Decade'." And recently the New Yorker profiled Facebook under the headline, "Me Media."
Savvy publizens (our teenagers among them, we hope) know how to participate in the reality Web without doing damage to their reputations and futures, one publizen told the Post. In fact, the article cites one professor as saying, "increased public exposure can even increase personal security." If you have your photo online and someone tries to cash a check with your name on it, "it will be very easy for the bank to know what [you] look like." This is definitely a new way to think about discretion: nowadays it's more like spin control. It might be interesting, possibly important to have family discussions about "publizenship." It's good the social networks provide privacy features, but indicators are, young users aren't very inclined to use them - all the more reason for parent-child discussion about savvy blogging, socializing, and spin control online.
'Publizens' in the news
For more on this, read about lonelygirl15 at YouTube.com in InsideBayArea.com ; get the big picture from the survey "Bloggers: A portrait of the Internet's new storytellers" at the Pew Internet & American Life project ; and see "Teen reputations, jobs at risk" last month in NetFamilyNews.
In Other News...
- Law against deceptive sex sites. Congress passed a bill that makes it a felony to create porn sites with innocent addresses using words like "Barbie" or "Furby" to deceive children into clicking to them, Reuters reports. President Bush was expected to sign it on Thursday (7/27). Penalties include up to 20 years' imprisonment and a fine. According to CNET, "the 163-page Child Protection and Safety Act represents the most extensive rewriting of federal laws relating to child pornography, sex offender registration and child exploitation in a decade." Among other provisions CNET lists, the bill "would also create a national sex offender registry to be run by the FBI."
- Food ads & kids on the Web. 85% of brands like Snickers, Lucky Charms, and Cheetos targeting kids on TV have a presence on the Web, according to a just-released pioneering study by the Kaiser Family Foundation . "More than 500 'advergames' such as Hershey's Syrup Squirt, LifeSavers Boardwalk Bowling and M&Ms Trivia Game were offered on 77 Web sites," USATODAY reports in its coverage of the study . These immersive "ads" - games, coloring pages, screensavers, etc. that kids can play and otherwise interact with can be much more compelling to children than 15- or 30-second TV ads, and kids often can't tell the difference between advertising and non-promotional content, researchers find. "Policymakers and health experts increasingly are concerned about the role food advertising plays in childhood obesity. About 25 million children, or one-third of children and teens in the USA, are either overweight or on the brink of becoming so," USATODAY adds.
- Why so much porn online? Porn affiliates is a big part of the answer, the Wall Street Journal reports . They're easy-to-set-up small businesses that don't produce or sell pornography but rather operate multiple Web sites that display free porn images which link to porn retail sites in exchange for a percentage of the subscription sales they drive. More than porn retailers, these are also the kind of porn sites kids are mostly likely to stumble upon. "The lure of big bucks has saturated the Internet with affiliate sites - and, by extension, free porn," according to the Journal. "Now, there are so many free images and video clips that affiliate companies say it has grown more challenging to get users to sign up with pay sites." The Journal adds that "the fierce competition has led to something of a no-holds-barred atmosphere among some affiliates," resulting in huge porn-spam campaigns that have led to Federal Trade Commission lawsuits under the CAN-SPAM Act and other automated-distribution tactics.
- Marketing to teens, by teens. As our kids get increasingly blasé about TV and other conventional ad media, ever wonder how marketers are reaching them? CNNmoney looks at how Hollywood and other media industries are wooing "the MySpace generation". For example, it describes how marketing agency Streetwise appears to have helped "Little Man," "the new comedy by the Wayans brothers that was almost universally panned by critics," become No. 2 at the box office recently. Streetwise "organizes groups of [some 70,000 registered] teens and young adults to promote films, music and video games through a variety of means" - such as by posting comments or bulletins at social-networking sites or just via "old-fashioned street marketing, putting up posters or handing out hats, T-shirts, DVDs and CDs."
