News for the Week of August 3, 2008
YouTube is the No. 1 site among 2-to-11-year-olds. You heard it right. According Nielsen research, the video-sharing site beat out DisneyChannel.com for the youngest Web surfers (see this for more. So, I suggest:
Watch this video, parents
If you want to understand...
- who digital natives are and what they're doing online
- how community is experiencing a rebirth online
- how identity-exploration can be a collective experience and how that can be therapeutic...
...pour yourself a tall glass of iced tea or something and watch "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube", presented by Kansas State University anthropology Prof. Michael Wesch's last month at the US Library of Congress. Just click on the title, then hit the little "Play" button in the middle of the picture of the two tiny brothers, and I suspect you'll find - as I did - that you'll actually enjoy becoming more digitally enlightened in this way. I guarantee that, if you have kids and they're online, they'll appreciate your taking the time.
Some highlights
If you want to know a little more before you invest the 55.5 minutes:
Sheer volume. If the 3 major TV networks broadcasted 24 hours a day, every day for the 60 years they've been broadcasting, they would've produced 1.5 million hours of programming. YouTube has published more than that in the last six months, Dr. Wesch said. People post 9,000 hours of video a day (another way to say it: 200,000 three-minute videos a day) - most of them meant for fewer than 100 viewers.
Not isolating. "New forms of community" have developed in this global video-sharing, and with them "new forms of self-understanding," Wesch said.
Not trivial. Yes, there are "stupid pet tricks." But there's also courageous experimentation with video, identity, and collaboration going on in YouTube - with many unknowns, including audience and what happens to one's very personal work and exploration. It's also global. Note the hero of "Free Hugs" worldwide at 35:35 minutes into Wesch's talk.
Sexy images. Very often the sexy titles and screen shots (called "flash frames") that present videos are not what parents and other newcomers think (they're not presenting x-rated videos). They're about serious or funny completely innocuous videos. Representing them in a "sexy" way is a way of gaming the system. Their creators are just trying to get their videos noticed and watched so they'll rise to the top of the list (YouTube's home page) and so get noticed even more so they'll become famous or they'll raise awareness for their cause.
"Era of prohibitions." Don't miss Stanford Prof. Laurence Lessig's message (at about 46:15 min. in) about the impact on youth of knowing that remixing media, a way of life for them, is technically illegal in this "era of prohibitions": "That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting," Lessig said. We can't stop our kids from playing with digital media, he said, we can only send them underground, where we can't learn about what they're doing.
In other news...
- Social-networking worms. Any social networkers at your house should be aware of the "Koobface" worms, which can turn household computers into remotely controlled "zombies." Computer security firm Kaspersky Lab reports that the worms work this way: A MySpace or Facebook user gets a message or comment from a friend whose computer has already been infected. The messages contain text such as "Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street"; "Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet"; "Hello"; "You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam [sic]"; and "Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments and many others." Inside the messages or comments is a link YouTube (with a ".pl" extension), supposedly to a video clip. "If the user tries to watch it, a message appears saying the user needs the latest version of Flash Player in order to watch the clip. However, instead of the latest version of Flash Player, a file called codesetup.exe is downloaded to the victim's machine; this file is also a network worm" that probably not only sends the same message to everyone on your child's friends list but is capable of turning that computer into a "bot" that becomes part of a "botnet" that malicious hackers use to commit crimes such as denial-of-service attacks.
- Cyberbullying federal case. A mean conversation about a middle-school peer is videotaped off school grounds, is uploaded to YouTube, and suddenly their school's administrators have to figure out what to do about it. "Citing 'cyberbullying' concerns, school administrators [in Beverly Hills] suspended for two days the student who uploaded the video, without disciplining others in the recording. The suspended student sued the school district in June in federal district court in Los Angeles, saying her free-speech rights were violated," the Los Angeles Times reports. The Times cites one legal expert as saying that, unless the school shows evidence of "substantial disruption of school business" by the video it doesn't have much of a case.
- For young cancer patients. A just-published study in the journal Pediatrics involving 375 cancer patients aged 13-29 in the US, Canada, and Australia found that their playing a videogame called Re-Mission "led to better compliance with their medications and more confidence in fighting the disease," redOrbit.com reports. The study's lead author in the Netherlands, Dr. Pamela Kato, told Reuters that the results are important because adherence to treatment is a major problem in that age group. According to redOrbit, Re-Mission, developed by the nonprofit HopeLab in Redwood City, Calif., is about "a microscopic 'nanobot' named Roxxi [who] travels through the bodies of characters with cancer, blasting away cancer cells and bacteria with a firearm of chemotherapy and antibiotics."
- Social networking at school? TechNewsWorld suggests it's time to end the stark dichotomy of second-nature social networking at home vs. a complete ban on social networking at school - even in an academic context. Though not so much in the classroom, "some school districts are going beyond e-mail technology and using collaboration software and online services to share information, host Web conferences and assign tasks and projects," and teachers are social networking with each other for professional purposes. The article includes an annotated list of social-networking tools for the education market that might interest parents as well as teachers - for example, Blackboard's Sync, Cramster.com for the college market, ePals for K-12, Jooners, and Wimba Pronto.
