News for the Week of July 20, 2008
Kids' virtual worlds - Club Penguin, Webkinz, Whyville, Nicktropolis - is a growth industry. They're mostly all fun and games but, like everything online involving unknown people behind the avatars, they have their sketchy moments. This week we're zooming in on some other things parents might want to be aware of about these services:
Cyberbullying with avatars
As you know, avatars are those cartoon-like characters kids create to represent themselves in virtual worlds. Sometimes they cause their avatars to act mean instead of nice, just as what happens in the "real world" of school. This week I spoke with writer, parenting expert, and mother of 4 Sharon Duke Estroff about her first-hand research in Disney's virtual world Club Penguin and got a sampler of some of these "darkside" behaviors occurring in kids' online worlds. Simply put, they're workarounds - tricks kids have found to "beat the system" to gain the kid version of virtual points, power, and prestige.
A sampler of workarounds
For more of these, including "Digital 'Spin the Bottle'," click here
Code lingo. Not just POS ("parent over shoulder") or ROTFL ("rolling on the floor laughing"), but text-formatting tricks that get around safe-language rules: e.g., if language filters don't allow numbers, kids share their ages by expressing them in dots. For example, they ask, "How many dots are you?" and get back: "I'm ........."
ID theft, kid-style. One of the cardinal rules of online safety is never to share your password because best friends sometimes become non-friends and can impersonate and embarrass you. Password-sharing, however, is rampant in kid virtual worlds - a popular way of offering and accepting best-friend status. It becomes a problem when your "best friend" logs on as your avatar and makes it break the rules so you get kicked out.
Abusing abuse reporting. The digital version of tattling: being mean by reporting avatars just so they get privileges taken away. "Kids can report other kids for all kinds of vague reasons, but they don't have to give a reason - all they have to do is press a button on the player card and the complaint goes straight to the monitor," Sharon said. "
Using safety features to bully. Using blocking, ghosting, ignoring, and other in-world user-security tools to a ostracize kid or make it clear he's not a member of "the club" - whatever the club-of-the-moment is.
My takeaways
Most of what kids encounter in virtual worlds is harmless fun. It's possible the average child user (probably 7-10) could experience or use one or two of these workarounds, but not likely all, unless he or she is looking for trouble, feeling mean, or really into power in a social sort of way. They only confirm for me that, wherever kids are online, alertness and critical thinking are needed on the part of children as well as parents. Club Penguin and other kid virtual worlds are not babysitters! But they are great social-networking training for both participants and parents, offering many teachable moments for learning all kinds of things: e.g., how to treat others online as well as offline, how to be a good citizen and friend, how to detect social and commercial manipulation, how to deal with peer pressure and group think, and even how to be a leader.
In other news...
- NSFW 'rating' useful to parents. It stands for "not suitable for work" and, in effect, it's a Web content rating. "NSFW" is "used to indicate that the content of the message or Web page is not appropriate because it is off-color at best or sexually explicit at worst," according to the GetNetWise blog. Like IMHO ("in my humble opinion") or even POS ("parent over shoulder"), it's one of those grassroots Internet terms that just takes off, usually because it's supremely useful to a lot of people. That would include parents, who probably wouldn't want to see it in the Subject field of an email message a child could view or among the search terms among those used for "homework."
- New York's new videogame law. Gov. David Paterson this week signed a law that establishes an advisory panel to study the effects of videogame violence on kids and establishes $100 civil penalties for "violations of labeling and parental control provisions," Newsday reports. Most videogame consoles already have parental controls, however (see this about a guide for them), and game ratings are available to all at ESRB.org. Critics are calling it "moral preening" after similar laws have been struck down as unconstitutional in other states. "Language making a felony of selling video games that are sexually explicit or contain depraved violence was lost during furious lobbying that derailed [New York's] bill in May 2007. That provision would have made the law among the strictest in the nation," Newsday adds. Let's now see if this version of the law passes constitutional muster.
- 'Friending' against school policy. It's against school policy in Mississippi's Lamar County Public School District for teachers and students to text each other or to be "friends" in social-networking sites. "Both texting and social networking have too many gray areas that could lead to misunderstanding and downright trouble," the Hattiesburg American reports. The policy's being considered in other Mississippi school districts as well.
- Another COPA ruling. The federal appeals court in Philadelphia again ruled that the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 is unconstitutional. The decision is "the latest twist in a decade-long legal battle [that] ... has already reached the Supreme Court and could be headed back there," the Associated Press reports. COPA, which was blocked by the Philadelphia court shortly after it was signed, followed the Communications Decency Act, which was also intended to regulate adult Web content. CDA was ruled unconstitutional in "the landmark case Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union," AP added.
