News for the Week of May 11, 2008
Tech-news turned up some fresh numbers this week on digital media's impact on youth...
Sleeping still trumps media
"America's young people spend more time using media than they do on any single activity other than sleeping," according to The Future of Children, a joint project of Princeton University and the Brookings Institution. So we all need to know how our children and students use media - the Web, phones, videogames, instant messaging, music, video, TV, etc. - and how they affect their users. The just-released new issue of the project's journal Children and Electronic Media, published semi-annually, "looks at the best available evidence on whether and how exposure to different media forms is linked to child well-being."
Key findings
Other key findings in the Executive Summary are....
- "Content matters" to young people much more than delivery devices or platforms (I was glad to see this because my own observation has long been that "the message is [increasingly] the medium" where youth is concerned, seeing how fluidly they move from uploading to downloading, online to offline, and device to device when socializing and using media).
- They use media to communicate better with their friends not strangers.
- Their exposure to media "can enhance healthful behaviors - such as preventing smoking and alcohol and drug use, and promoting physical activity and safe sex - through social marketing campaigns."
- "Some risky behaviors such as aggressive behavior and cigarette and alcohol consumption are strongly linked to media consumption," but others such as obesity and sexual activity "are only tangentially linked" or need more research.
- Advertising is an "integral and influential" part of children's daily lives - just another message being communicated (they don't understand it's about getting them to buy stuff and not just information) - "and many of the products marketed to children are unhealthful."
- Government regulation of media content either won't work or won't happen.
What should be done, then?
Rather than regulate, the project says, government should help parents and educators do the regulating in homes and schools. It should also help the development of positive content that educates and counteracts negative or non-constructive messaging in electronic media - it should "fund the creation and evaluation of positive media initiatives such as public service campaigns to reduce risky behaviors."
In other news...
- Age verification not the 'killer app.' ConnectSafely.org, a site and forum, Larry Magid and I co-direct, was invited to join the Internet Safety Task Force that is part of MySpace's settlement last January with 49 state attorneys general. The Task Force's first meeting last month - attended by Internet companies including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, AOL, Google, and Yahoo, age- and identity-verification companies, and online-safety organizations - caused Larry to feel "a bit of a disconnect," he wrote in a commentary at CBSNEWS.com. Why? Because one of the Task Force's main goals is to see if age verification technology can be used to protect minors from bad stuff in social sites and, "yet, at its first full meeting ... the experts who addressed the task force painted a picture that causes me to wonder if such technology would be helpful even if it could be employed." See also "Verifying kids' ages: Key question for parents" and "Social networker age verification revisited."
- More safety features at Facebook. As part of its agreement with 49 state attorneys general in the US, 70 million-member Facebook is implementing "40 safeguards to protect young people from sexual predators and cyberbullies," the San Jose Mercury News reports. Facebook's agreement follows that of MySpace with the attorneys general, announced in January, and many of the new features are similar, for example, restricting users' ability to change the age they signed up with; faster removal of adult content from the site; "safety and privacy guidelines that third-party vendors and developers [such as widget makers] have to follow on Facebook; deleting links out to porn sites; investigating and deleting users who break Facebook's terms of use; and prominent display of privacy and safety info. MySpace says that, among many such implementations, it has "designed functionality to meet the 72-hour requirement," indicating one of the AGs' requirements that needs to be part of the industry best practices toward which their Internet Safety Task Force discussions just may, by default, be moving (I hope).
- Benefits from having virtual selves. According to findings at Stanford University, it may actually help people to have an avatar, which has implications for "residents" of Teen Second Life, Whyville.net, and of course grownup versions of virtual worlds. It has a lot to do with what having a virtual self can do for offline self-image, according to this NPR report. At Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, people visit for a new approach to losing weight, for example. They take photographs of the visitor's head, create an attractive avatar, or graphical image, of him and show this attractive self running - he actually sees himself losing weight, which seems to encourage him by showing him just how very possible it is to lose weight. So he proceeds to "try this at home" and virtual reality becomes reality. The lab also studies virtual identity. Lab researcher Jeremy Bailenson told NPR that as people with attractive avatars spend more and more time as their virtual selves, they tend to become more social - their confidence level goes up.
- MySpace, Facebook, et al: Data portability. "Data portability" is kind of a techie term, but it's something a lot of avid social networkers have been waiting for - being able to have their "credentials" (user name, password, profile info, etc.) move around the social Web with them, rather than having separate IDs and log-ins all over the place. It's great if you're just you online, but if you're trying out different personas or playing to different publics, it's just another step toward transparency and could make it hard to remember who you were where! "Welcome to the social mess," quips a CNET blogger, though she's referring to all the various 'n' sundry interoperability projects - OpenID, OpenSocial, Flux, MyBlogLog, OAuth, etc. - that have been in the works and which approaches will win out. MySpace made its announcement first, about its Data Availability (among Fox Interactive sites and partners eBay, Yahoo, and Twitter - see The Telegraph's coverage). Next was Facebook's, with its own project called Facebook Connect, CNET blogger Caroline McCarthy reported separately.
