News for the Week of August 24, 2008
Great care needs to go into teaching young people online safety, and great care has, but we are reaching a crossroads now. What we know from emerging research shows that old-school fear-based messaging only alienates youth, sending them "underground" online, where they're harder to reach. Case in point: A small-town news story about a high school Net-safety presentation that gained national attention this week...
Public humiliation or Net-safety ed?
It appears that student online-safety education took a harsher tone recently in Windsor, Colo., about 60 miles north of Denver. The principal of Windsor High School apologized that "some of the ways" John Gay, a Cheyenne, Wyo., police officer, approached his presentation about Internet dangers "offended, embarrassed and are hurting some of our kids," Windsor Now reports.
Two accounts of what happened in an all-school assembly - Officer Gay's and that of the father of one of the students present "and a lot of other people in Windsor ... don't match." What isn't in dispute is that the officer used the social-network profiles of students at the assembly as examples of material that encourages predators, his language was sexually graphic beyond references to rape, and one of the students left in tears. She told the paper that Gay showed the 500-student audience her phone number and "read her blogs and comments out loud." Gay told the paper that he "apologized for causing [her] any grief, but he said he would never apologize for the way he presents his material because of the seriousness of the crimes." Her father's account was that, after the officer asked her to identify herself in the assembly and she raised her hand, Gay displayed her profile and told the students she could be "raped and murdered" because of how accessible her content was. The father added that "Gay gave the example of a girl in another state who had been targeted on MySpace, and the girl was taken to an empty warehouse, was raped and shot dead," according to Windsor Now. Because she'd apparently put her phone number in her profile, Gay called her cellphone from the stage to "see if she'll come back." The father told the paper he "had no problem with the topic of the assembly, and that he doesn’t want to see [the principal] lose his job over this."
Not black and white
The story offers no clear answer but plenty of questions. Even if the consensus is that teens need to "wake up" to online risks, is that best done by making an example of one child among his or her own peers? And if the answer is yes, what should the tone of that exposure be? The Denver Post reports that the principal "essentially backs up" Officer Gay, and teachers present at the assembly "corroborated Gay's version of events." The officer's presentation in Windsor was not unique. Windsor Now reports that Gay "travels to schools and has talked to 4,000 to 5,000 people, mostly kids." And I remember reading of a similar singling-out-specific-students methodology used in social-networking-safety assemblies in Ireland. It'd be great to get your views - in the ConnectSafely.org forum, where two police officers have already commented. See also "Online safety as we know it: Becoming obsolete?", coverage of this story from Denver's Channel 7 News.
In other news...
- 150+ virtual worlds for youth. If anyone had doubts about rapid growth in the virtual-worlds sector of cyberspace, this should clear them up - the sector populated by sites such as ClubPenguin, Webkinz, and Teen Second Life. There are now more than 150 virtual worlds - either open now or in development - targeting people 18 and under, up from around 100 just last April, according to Virtual Worlds Management (VWM) (the full list is at that link, though the definition of "virtual world" seems to be broad - I noticed one site that's largely avatar chat, not a whole "world"). Some 95 are open now and another 68 are under development. Tweens' worlds (for ages 8-12) lead at 88 of the 150+, kids' (7 and under) come in second with 72, and teens' third with 60. Disney alone has nine in development, VWM reports. Here's some analysis about the report from its authors. I noted a comment in it about virtual worlds "aging with their users" from Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online, a world targeting 13-to-18-year-olds. He told VWM that 30% of Gaia users were now 18+ and the site had, "accordingly, grown a little edgier" (inevitable, undoubtedly, but something for parents to be alert to, with kids and adults sharing an online community). It's logical that people wouldn't suddenly drop away from a site targeting youth just because they turned 18. Here's CNET on "What kids learn in virtual worlds".
- US tweens prefer to be online. They now prefer the Web to television, the New York Times reports. It cites research from search marketing firm DoubleClick Performics showing that 83% of US 10-to-14-year-olds spend an hour or more a day online, compared to 68% of children in the same age bracket who watch an hour or more a day of TV. Interesting note about social networking among members of this age group (most underage for popular social-network sites' Terms of Use): "Performics reported that some corners of the Internet were more popular with the children than others. While 72% of the children online belonged to a social networking site (usually MySpace), 60% of them said they rarely or never read blogs."
- Register to vote on Xbox Live?! Thanks to a partnership between Rock the Vote and Microsoft, registration in Xbox Live started this week, the BBC reports. Having also worked with MySpace to grow the number of youth voting, Rock the Vote aims to register 2 million voters via the Xbox gaming community by this fall. The BBC adds that Xbox Live had 12 million subscribers in 26 countries by last May (the latest figure available).
- Facebook controlling 'wall spam.' Yup, yet another new term for malware on the social Web. "Wall spam" is comments on your Facebook wall purporting to be from a friend but which usually contain a link to some bad Web page that puts malicious code on your PC. The term "rose to notoriety earlier this month, when members started noticing the phenomenon, and security firms started flagging worms that were spreading via Facebook members' walls," CNET reports. Facebook appears to be on top of it (see this from the Washington Post).
- Students' online free-speech rights. Law Prof. Mary-Rose Papandrea at Boston College recently looked at "all of the various justifications for limiting juvenile speech rights" - including the in loco parentis doctrine and Tinker's material disruption test - and "concludes that none of them supports granting schools broad authority to limiting student speech in the digital media." In "Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age", she advises that, instead of making punishment or the restricting of digital speech, schools' primary approach should be to "educate their students about how to use digital media responsibly." Her article will appear soon in the Florida Law Review.
