News for the Week of October 22, 2006
The focus of online-safety risks temporarily shifted from social networking back to instant messaging when the scandal about former Congressman Mark Foley and congressional pages hit the news. But was IM actually the source of the problem? Here's some perspective on that, as well as what you might call the good news about bad news involving online technologies and kids:
IMs at fault?
As prominent as instant messages have been in media reports, the latest Capitol Hill scandal "has almost nothing material to do with the Internet," points out Tim Lordan, executive director of the Internet Education Foundation in Washington. "As difficult as it may be to come to grips with, [Foley's] case represents the most common type of sexual predator - the person who has close physical proximity to our children and who stands in a position of implied trust with them. The vast majority of sexual predator cases continue to be perpetrated by those we least suspect - family members, family acquaintances and trusted members of the community. If media reports are accurate, Foley used his position as a US lawmaker to personally interact with the pages during ice cream trips, dinners out at upscale Capitol steakhouses, in the cloakrooms, down the halls of Congress, and with handwritten notes. The only reason his exploits have come to light is that some of his behavior was memorialized using Internet IMs and emails."
As difficult as the message can be for parents and educators to observe in some IMs, emails, videos, photos, and profile comments by teens, its coming to light is not entirely a bad thing, we're seeing. Sometimes, amid occasional acting out and over-self-exposure the message might even be "Help!" Often, parents and researchers can learn a lot about teen interests in profiles, blogs, and discussion boards. Of course, teens are getting wise to this fact and increasingly turning on privacy features, which means parents will have to work harder to monitor their online socializing - and (the upside) maybe even communicate with their kids more!
Teachable moment
In any case, the Foley story is a national-level teachable moment. Over time we'll probably find that it's the smaller and sometimes tougher developments - involving our kids' own social lives - that will be the most effective way to help them learn safe, smart use of the Internet. A teachable moment might be something you see on his or friends' profiles, a call you get from a parent in her peer group, something about MySpace that happened at school or in the news. Sometimes we'll be the facilitators, sometimes other "teachers" will be (their friends, the sticky situations themselves, a school assembly, etc.). Safety tips and online-safety courses are fine, but the less relevant they are to our kids' own lives, the less their content will stick. Problems on the participatory Web need participatory solution development, which often needs multiple skill sets - teens', parents', counselors', tech educators, etc. It just seems logical that teen social networkers need to know that they're part of the solution too.
Related links
- For educating teens' on grooming and other influencing techniques, see "How to recognize grooming" and "How social influencing works".
- For more on teachable moments at home, see "Monitoring MySpacers".
- For some relevant research, see "Contact with strangers" just below "Non-stranger danger"; and "Net crimes against children: Reality check" (and here's the Associated Press on how the current scandal goes back further than we thought).
In other news...
- Milestone for social-media research. The MacArthur Foundation announced it's committing $50 million over the next five years for research designed to help "build the field of digital media and learning," the foundation announced. Now the public discussion can get both more granular and broader, moving beyond the incessant message to parents that they need to fear social networking. Important questions the research will address include teaching media literacy and critical thinking in and out of the classroom and "ethical uses of digital media." One study will "engage young people directly via Global Kids, a nonprofit youth development organization, and a University of Chicago effort to expand after-school media literacy programs in Chicago.
- Update on fight against child porn. Some 30,000 Web sites containing child pornography have been taken down in the past 10 years, Britain's Internet Watch Foundation announced, citing a study marking its 10th anniversary. "Although the number of UK websites providing such content has fallen [from 18% to 2%], the severity of the images has significantly increased in the last 12 months," the BBC reports. IWF chief executive Peter Robbins "blames this on pay-per-view sites that use sophisticated means to avoid detection." In a thorough update on anti-child-porn efforts, USATODAY summarizes the significant law-enforcement work going on while reporting that all these efforts on the part of credit card companies, Internet service providers, the Ad Council, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) can't keep up. "In the past 24 months . the task forces have identified 6.5 million pornographic pictures of children online, up from 3,600 three years ago. Forty percent originated in the USA," USATODAY reports. A key reason for this flood of illegal content, it adds is that "much child porn isn't about money but pedophilia.. Many images are traded free like baseball cards." The NCMEC's CyberTipline figures show that "of more than 800 online child porn victims identified by the National Center . more than a third, 36%, were abused by a parent, 10% to 15% by another relative and 30% by other people they know. About 10% are enticed by strangers to post photos; 5% do it unasked."
- Families that play together... are the sweet spot for console makers, the Washington Post reports . With its "Wii" (pronounced "we") console, Nintendo is aggressively marketing to families. Microsoft told the Post "family-friendly" games are on the way. We'll see how it's looking for the PlayStation 3 when it becomes available next month. Meanwhile, Microsoft has launched a campaign to teach parents how to use Xbox 360's parental controls, ArsTechnica and the BBC report (here's Microsoft's page about the safety settings).
- Mobile social networking. That would be socializing by cellphone. The trend is gathering steam, with Helio for MySpace users (http://www.helio.com/page?p=services_myspace), Google's Dodgeball (http://www.dodgeball.com), Loopt (http://www.loopt.com), and Microsoft's SLAM (see ComputerWeekly. These services take advantage of the GPS (global positioning system) technology now in most new phones. So, in timely fashion, the New York Times looks at the related dilemma of parents: when to get them their first cellphones . The Times goes into that other, parental, reason for using GPS-enabled phones. "Most of the major wireless companies have introduced a Global Positioning System technology that allows someone (parents presumably) to track children using cellphones. There is, for example, the Chaperone Service through Verizon Wireless, Family Locator from Sprint and Wherifone by Wherify Wireless" - which of course only works when the phone is on the child's person (key consideration for kid-phone decisionmaking: how old are they when they're better about not losing their phones!). The Times writer thinks it's all a bit "creepy" - what do you think? (Email your comments to anne@netfamilynews.org.)
