News for the Week of April 20, 2008
The British government has released a milestone document outlining best practices for social-networking services. This week, a look at why it's relevant worldwide...
UK Home Office guidance
Two milestone documents out of the UK have just been released, one a 200-page report requested by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and called "The Byron Review"
Based on solid research
For a practical understanding of a teen's-eye-view of Net use, don't miss "Children's Use of the Internet," p. 14, based on the research of Sonia Livingstone and colleagues (she is a social psychology professor at the London School of Economics & Political Science). Showing the difficulty of reaching child-online-safety consensus, she writes that "views on young people's development are often polarised." On the one hand, "children are seen as vulnerable, undergoing a crucial but fragile process of cognitive and social development to which technology poses a risk by introducing potential harms into the social conditions for development and necessitating, in turn, a protectionist regulatory environment." The other view holds that "children are competent and creative agents in their own right, whose 'media-savvy' skills tend to be underestimated by the adults around them, with the consequence that society may fail to provide a sufficiently rich environment for them." I agree with her that "finding a position that recognises both characteristics is important."
"Disinhibition" understood
Guideline 9.4 reflects what we know of this online condition that allows "space" between bully and victim as a contributing factor to cyberbullying. It suggests that sites inform users that they are not as anonymous as they may think and employ IP address and identifying technology to track users. I'd go further and recommend that sites explain to users in their online-safety pages, in as much detail as feasible (without giving information away to malicious hackers), how their real-life identities can be found. It's the kind of meaty information that's meaningful to adolescents and shows respect for their intelligence. [To great effect, a school in Philadelphia brought in a computer-forensics police officer to demonstrate the lack of real anonymity to an entire student body.]
Not just social networking
In spotlighting chatrooms and Webcams as trouble spots, the guidance reflects the understanding that young people's socializing flows freely from device to device and between various technologies - as both technology and kids develop - and social sites aren't the only place where socializing happens for good or bad. For example, this significant finding about Webcams: "Recent research conducted in Holland by the My Child Online Foundation in 2006, involving 10,900 participants between the ages of 13 and 19, reveals that 47% of girls who responded to the survey, said they had received unwanted requests to do something sexual in front of a webcam – although only 2% actually did so."
Read more about the report – including where it falls short – here.
In other news...
- New guide to videogame parental controls. The videogame ratings board and Parent Teacher Association have teamed up to help parents get a better handle on videogame safety. They've published a free parents' guide to both the ratings system and the parental controls on game consoles, including step-by-step instructions for the controls' settings on PLAYSTATION 3, the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, and PSP, as well as the game controls in the Windows Vista operating system. You'll also find advice from "GamerDad" Andrew Bub about online gaming and a family discussion guide with talking points. "The booklets were distributed to all 26,000 PTAs, and are available in both English and Spanish on both the ESRB and PTA web sites," according to the organizations' press release (there's a link right to the guide from the presser).
- Kids posing online as pedophiles. This is an important heads-up if parents are worried about predators contacting their children online. The "predators" could be other kids playing pranks or being cyberbullies, because anybody can pose as just about anybody else online. Apparently that's happening in southwestern England, where police are saying "children as young as 10 may be posing as predatory paedophiles" on social-networking sites "to frighten boys and girls they have fallen out with," The Guardian reports. It adds that "as many as nine youngsters" were targeted in this way in Bebo and MSN. The police "initially believed a local man was trying to groom the children" (see "How to recognize grooming") but "a member of the public has come forward and told them that youngsters are trying to settle playground disputes by posing as a paedophile to frighten their rivals."
- Number of child porn sites down. For the first time since it has been keeping count, the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation reports that "the number of Web sites hosting child pornography has fallen," Australian IT reports. The number has gone from 3,052 in 2006 to 2,755 last year, according to the latest figures available from IWF. Most of these child-abuse sites are based in Russia and the US, it added. The nonprofit organization says it hopes that this fact and "the analysis and intelligence behind the numbers" will result in further international cooperation in fighting this abuse. The most horrifying numbers from the IWF were: "about 10% of the victims photographed were less than two years old, with a third between three and six years old. Some 37% were aged between 7 and 10 years old, 18% were between 11 and 15 years old, with 2% between 16 and 17 years old."
- 'Running l8, luv, mom.' Kids are seeing texts like that from their parents more and more, the Washington Post reports. "Parental text messaging is outstripping the growth rate among younger generations. In the past two years, use of texting among people 45-54 increased 130%, the Post added, citing M:Metrics research - compared to a mere 41% increase among people 13-17. Apparently, it starts with k2k (kid-to-kid), then it's k2p (k2parent), followed by p2p (not file-sharing but rather parents texting each other to coordinate kid drop-offs and pick-ups and possibly other errands). And now it's even s2p and s2k: "Schools have caught on. Fairfax County and Montgomery County send automatic text-message alerts for weather-related school closures and other emergencies." If you want to learn texting lingo fast (some phones offer a menu of phrases), check with your cellphone carriers; it's quite possible Sprint, Verizon, etc. has a guide for parents and others getting up to speed quickly. Web resources include Lingo2word.com and netlingo.com.
