News for the Week of November 25, 2007
In this week's youth-tech news, the benefits of social networking for kids - and the roles race, ethnicity and parents' education play when students select a site.
Social-networking benefits for youth
The benefits of social networking "can far outweigh the potential dangers," wrote Dr. Brendesha Tynes in the latest issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research. The assistant professor of African American Studies and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign further argued that "banning adolescents from social networking sites - if this were even feasible - as well as monitoring too closely might close off avenues for beneficial cognitive and psychosocial development that are available to young people in the online social world," reports the Wilkes University Beacon (in Pennsylvania) about the study.
Among the upsides cited in the article were "beneficial cognitive and psychosocial development"; global political and cultural awareness (because many social sites have international memberships); and "perspective-taking, argumentative, decision-making and critical thinking skills."
Race's role in social networking
Social media researcher Danah Boyd caught some flak for similar observations last July, but now research at Northwestern University agrees that "college students' choice of social networking sites is related to race, ethnicity and parents' education," a PsychCentral.com blog reports.
The survey of 1,060 freshmen at the University of Illinois, Chicago (among the US's Top 10 universities with regard to student ethnic diversity) found that white students prefer Facebook, Hispanic students like MySpace, and "Asian and Asian-American students are least likely to use MySpace." That last group are "prodigious users of Facebook" but also like Xanga and Friendster a lot, according to the research, which also found "no statistically significant social networking choices for black students."
The study's author, Eszter Hargittai, said in Northwestern University's press release about it: "Everyone points to that wonderful New Yorker cartoon of the dog at the computer telling a canine friend by his side that 'on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.' In reality, however, it appears that online actions and interactions should not be viewed as independent of one's offline identity."
In other news...
- Battle against child porn far from over. Humanity still has a battle ahead in its effort to stop online child pornography, says Ernie Allen, CEO of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in a commentary in the Christian Science Monitor. "While inroads have been made in the fight against child pornography, the problem remains severe," he writes. "The Internet has become a child pornography superhighway, turning children into a commodity for sale or trade. Analysts at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) have reviewed 9.6 million images and videos of child pornography on the Internet just since 2002. There are millions more such images in cyberspace that we have yet to find. The Internet has become a child pornography superhighway, turning children into a commodity for sale or trade." One of the horrible realities of child porn is that 75% of the photos were taken by people the victim knows - 35% by a parent, 15% by another relative, and 20% by "someone close to the child or the family." Another terrible reality is that the children in the photos circulating the Net are getting younger - Allen writes that 58% haven't reached puberty. He adds that law enforcement agencies and NCMEC have identified almost 1,200 of the children depicted in these photos; NCMEC has "provided more than 12,000 evidence reports to prosecutors and law enforcement officers to assist in prosecutions"; and - thanks to a coalition of financial institutions - the use of credit cards has been "virtually eliminated" from online child-porn transactions.
- US sex-offender registries: An update. If anyone wonders how law enforcement people around the US will be handling sex offender registries, see this article in Police Chief magazine. Any day now, the Justice Department will be issuing guidelines on how law enforcement agencies can implement the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which established "comprehensive standards for sex offender registration and notification" across all 50 states (before it, standards and practices were up to individual states' discretion). The US attorney general's office issued guidelines last May which were then open to public comment, ending August 1. The final guidelines are "expected to be released 60-90 days after closing of the comment period," Police Chief reports.
- Applying for college at Facebook. Yup, it's now possible. The widget's called College Planner, and its source, Embark.com, says students can research some 5,000 schools and apply to more than 1,000. As a CNET blogger points out, it's hard to imagine that people wouldn't wonder if colleges and universities would take such applications seriously, much less want to share all their academic plans with social-networking peers. As of this writing, only one person has added the widget to his profile (as seen on the College Planner widget page in Facebook). According to a thorough writeup on this in the Yale Daily News, Yale University has "no immediate plans" to join the program.
- Librarians: Parents' best friends. Here's a thought to bookmark, parents of teens: If you have questions about how social networking works or a particular site, a really good person to ask is your local librarian. So many people now log on to their profiles and blogs at public libraries that librarians (and not just youth librarians) have become experts on the subject. See this article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, for example. So, either come to our forum, ConnectSafely.org, to talk about social networking online, 24/7, or talk to the social-Web expert at your local library. Some libraries are actually conducting "Social Networking 101"-type classes for parents and other adults looking to learn about the social Web.
