Digital Media

Back-to-school time is an excellent time for kids, parents, and teachers to think and talk about the safe and appropriate use of the Internet and social-networking tools.

My message to parents and teachers is simple: embrace the technology that kids use, recognize that whatever you may lack in technology knowledge you make up in wisdom, and remember that you, too, were once a kid. Your first reaction to kid activity that may be a bit disturbing shouldn't be to freak out and shut down access but to take a deep breath, talk with (and listen to) the kids, and do everything you can to encourage dialog.

And try to become familiar with the technology your kids use. That doesn't mean you necessarily have to be their friend on Facebook or MySpace, but before you start trying to control how they use social-networking technology, make sure you understand it.

Teachers should attempt to use social networking as part of the educational process. Whether they know it or not, kids are engaged in informal learning through their use of social networking, so why not use the same technology for formal learning? And while you're at it, incorporate digital citizenship and media literacy into your teaching.

As my ConnectSafely co-director Anne Collier pointed out in Social media literacy: The new Internet safety, media literacy and critical thinking "is protective against manipulation and harm." Encouraging kids to practice good digital citizenship helps protect all young people, because "behaving aggressively online more than doubles the risk of being victimized."

Hemanshu Nigam, News Corp. & MySpace security chief.

(Credit: MySpace)

As per kids, Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer at News Corp. and MySpace offers some Online Safety and Back to School advice especially suited to youth who use social-networking services like MySpace and Facebook (MySpace is one of several companies that provide financial support for ConnectSafely). He starts off with the usual internet safety advice: "Don't post anything you wouldn't want the world to know" and "don't get together with someone you 'meet' online unless you're certain of their identity." Then, perhaps a bit uncharacteristic of his background as a former federal prosecutor, Nigam also provides advice about the compassionate and kind use of social networking:

• Post with respect: photos are a great way to share wonderful experiences. If you're posting a photo of you and your friends, put yourself in your friends' shoes and ask would your friends want that photo to be public to everyone. If yes, then you're uploading photos with respect.
• Comment with kindness: compliments are like smiles, they're contagious. When you comment on a profile, share a kind word, others will too.
• Update with empathy: sharing updates lets us tell people what we think. When you give an opinion on your status updates, show empathy towards your friends and help them see the world with understanding eyes.

I both envy and worry about young people who are growing up in the age of the Internet.

I envy them for their lifelong access to a media that's diversified enough to bring them news, information, and opinion from an enormous number of sources.

There's something to be said for having access to thousands of media outlets. Unlike those of us who grew up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, young people who smartly use the Internet to consume news today don't have to worry about everything being filtered by a small, elite, and typically white male cadre of journalists working for one of only three broadcast networks or one or two local newspapers. And it's no longer a one-way street. Today's news consumers can also be producers thanks to blogs, social-networking sites, YouTube, podcasting, and microblogs like Twitter.

But, as I look back at the career of Walter Cronkite, who died last Friday, I also worry that young people are finding it harder to come by trusted sources for news and information. The Internet's strength as a news resource is also its weakness. We never will nor should return to the days of only a handful of media outlets, but today's diversified media landscape and especially the Internet, do bring new challenges to consumers of news.

We no longer live in a world where a man like Walter Cronkite can tell us "the way it is."

(Credit: CBS News)

One of the things I loved about the "CBS Evening News" with Walter Cronkite was that it was watched by a high enough percentage of the population that it created a shared experience. When we heard Walter tell us "that's the way it is," we had something that we could all talk about the next day. We all knew it was true even if we didn't all agree on how we should interpret the implications of what Cronkite told us happened.

Every day after returning from work, my father would open up his copy of the Los Angeles Daily Mirror (the long-defunct afternoon paper published by the same company as the Los Angeles Times"). He would then turn on the black and white TV to watch Cronkite on CBS or perhaps Huntley-Brinkley on NBC but, more often than not it was Cronkite who shared our living room for that half hour. As a young boy, I didn't necessarily pay close attention to the news but I did absorb portions of it. When big stories broke, my dad would summon me to watch the news with him or summarize over dinner what he read in the Mirror.

Not always, but sometimes at school the next day, kids would talk about some of those stories along with the entertainment shows most of us watched such as the "Ed Sullivan Show" or Walt Disney's "Wonderful World of Color."

Looking back, it seemed as if all of America--or at least the slice of it I knew--had a shared experience. If nothing else, our family shared its media experience, probably because we had only one TV set, one newspaper subscription, and no Internet. The closest thing I had to my own personal media was my bedroom table radio and, eventually, a transistor radio that I got to control all by myself.

We also had dinner together every night in a room with no TV, a household telephone that almost never rang during dinner hour, and no mobile devices that let us exchange text messages with people outside the room. The only people we could hear from or talk to were each other. Having dinner together was one tradition my wife and I maintained with our children.

I'm not longing to return to the repressed, racist, sexist, and homophobic days of the 50s and 60s and I don't think we'll ever--or should ever--have another "most trusted man in America" like Walter Cronkite, but I do see some value in looking at what we might be missing as we move forward, not to repeat the past but to ensure a better future.

Without an almost universally respected news anchor to tell us "the way it is," we have to figure it out for ourselves. It's not that we don't have resources--we have more than ever and that's a good thing. But it does put more pressure on us to think critically about what we see, hear, read, and say.

Today's media environment provides an opportunity--and responsibility--for parents and schools to teach critical thinking. Not only must young people learn to "consider the source" of what they take in but also think critically about what they post in a world where just about every young person is now potentially an author, photographer, and videographer. Kids--who may never even know who Walter Cronkite was--need to have a miniature version of him inside their head by asking questions such as "Is this true?" and "How do I know it's true?." And when they're about to post they need to think carefully before they broadcast their own versions of "the way it is."

This post was adopted from an article that appeared on SafeKids.com.

In 1994, when I wrote Child Safety on the Information Highway, the first widely disseminated Internet safety publication, I advised parents not to let kids put personal information or photos online and--because of what turned out to be an exaggerated fear of predators--I urged them to avoid online conversations with strangers. Back then, along with trying to keep kids away from porn, Internet safety was mostly about protecting children from dangerous adults.

But starting around 2005, a new phase of the Web--often referred to as "Web 2.0"--prompted some Internet safety advocates to focus on ways kids could get in trouble for what they post on social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. It was in that year that Anne Collier and I founded BlogSafety.org (later renamed ConnnectSafely.org) so we could provide a forum for discussing safety issues on the interactive Web. It was also around that time that politicians and the media, especially the TV show "To Catch a Predator," started whipping up fears of predators trolling the Web for vulnerable children.

But statistics show that the likelihood of a young person being harmed by an online stranger is quite rare, and sexual solicitations and harassment are most often from peers. And to the extent it has occurred, it affects teens, not young children. Based on studies by the Crimes Against Children Research Center, the overwhelming majority of crimes against youths continue to take place in the "real world," mostly by adults known to the child.

Teens interact with 'real world' friends
That doesn't mean that the Internet is a risk-free zone. It's just that young people are far more likely to be harmed by other youth or the consequences of their own online behavior than by adult criminals.

Their interactions are largely with people they know from the real world. As danah boyd (she prefers a lower case d & b) observed in her doctoral dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics (PDF), "teen participation in social network sites is driven by their desire to socialize with peers. Their participation online is rarely divorced from offline peer culture; teens craft digital self-expressions for known audiences and they socialize almost exclusively with people they know."

This understanding of youth risk led to a whole new phase of Internet safety education focusing on such things as cyberbullying and urging youth to avoid posting material that could be embarrassing or get them into trouble with authorities and potential future employers. Recently, the focus has turned to the emotional and legal consequences of "sexting,"--kids sending nude pictures of themselves via cell phones or the Web. But as Collier observed in NetFamilyNews.org, we run the risk of "technopanics" over sexting and bullying.

What we've learned from observing how kids use the Net, mobile phones, gaming devices, and other interactive technology is that there is really no distinction between online and offline behaviors. Technology is woven into their lives. They don't go online, they ARE online. So it's really about youth safety--not Internet safety.

It's about helping young people make wise choices not just in how they use technology, but in how they live their lives. Internet safety is more than just the absence of danger. It also includes finding ways to use technology for learning, collaboration, community building, political activism, self-help, and reaching out to others.

These are not just philosophical arguments. They're pragmatic because preaching about safety or trying to lock down the Internet doesn't protect kids. Trying to instill fear--especially based on myths--actually increases danger because it causes kids to tune out good advice.

Filters as fences
Sure, there are technologies that can keep kids from using social-networking services or visiting inappropriate Web sites. But, like fences around swimming pools, the use of filters at home and school can't protect them forever. That's why we teach kids to swim. Not only does knowing how to swim help prevent drowning, it empowers them to thrive in the water instead of fearing it. The same is true with technology. Filters and other parental control tools often make sense for young children, but as kids mature into teens, we must pull back on the technological controls in favor of self-control.

In an e-mail interview, Larry Rosen, professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and author of Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation observed, "sadly, too many parents think that using technology to track their children's keystrokes or restrict access to certain Web sites is sufficient parenting. It is not. Parents must be involved with their children's virtual lifestyles developing trust, being aware of any potential problems, learning about the technologies they use, and communicating often."

This post is adapted from an article that first appeared in the Palo Alto Daily News.

From a MySpace-related suicide to hate speech on YouTube, the world of user-generated content has been plagued by plain, old nastiness since its early days.

That's why, as part of the Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington, D.C., YouTube parent company Google has unveiled an "Abuse and Safety" resource guide.

According to a post on the official Google blog, the new section of YouTube's help center features "straightforward safety tips and multimedia resources from experts and prominent safety organizations" regarding topics like cyberbulling, privacy, spam, and sexual exploitation.

YouTube also said that the resource guide will make it more straightforward to find out how to manage privacy and safety settings.

The dark underbelly of online video was in the spotlight once again when a Florida teenager used live-streaming service Justin.tv to broadcast his suicide last month.

Authorities may have found the wreckage of the plane that adventurer Steve Fossett was flying when he went missing last year.

"The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched investigators to California to investigate the crash of a small plane that was found (Wednesday)," the NTSB said Thursday in a statement.

Steve Fossett, who has been missing since September 2007, was declared legally dead in February, despite the lack of a body.

(Credit: Virgin Atlantic)

Fossett, who was flying a Bellanca 8KCAB, has been missing since September 3, 2007. He took off from Yerington, Nev., for a local flight. Investigators say they found wreckage at about a 10,000-foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada in the vicinity of Mammoth Lakes, Calif.

There has been no word yet on whether a body was discovered. There were reports earlier this week that a hiker found some of Fossett's belongings.

Fossett was a successful businessman and world-class thrill seeker. He was the first balloonist to fly solo nonstop around the world and set 116 records in five different sports.

In November, Fossett's wife filed a petition to have the court declare him legally dead. Her request was granted in February.

Pop quiz: do you feel more or less secure with the arrival of Google Maps and other online mapping services?

I ran into that question when I got two very different news releases Monday. One argued that Google Maps helps awful people find you, but the other argued Google Maps helps you find awful people.

The first was from an outfit called Stop Child Predators, which launched a campaign to tell parents about the potential ills of Google Maps' Street View, which shows driver's-eye views of countless neighborhoods.

"This technology shows anyone in the world our communities, and exposes not only the routes from the bus stops to homes, but our children, without ever stepping foot in our neighborhoods," said Stacie Rumenap, the executive director of Stop Child Predators, in a statement.

On the other side was the announcement of CriminalSearches.com, a new service from PeopleFinders.com that said it shows where "sex offenders...thieves, violent offenders, murderers, or con artists" live in your neighborhood. The site shows people icons on a Google map; clicking an icon shows a person's photo, description, address, and criminal history.

"In a society where personal safety has become an important concern, CriminalSearches.com provides useful information that will help families feel secure in their neighborhoods and personal lives," PeopleFinders.com said, with President Bryce Lane adding, "We created CriminalSearches.com to help consumers make the most educated decisions about the people they let into their personal lives and the lives of their loved ones."

So what's the verdict? Do online maps creep you out? Or do you feel safer because they enable you to keep an eye out for threats?

Vote in the poll, and share your thoughts in the feedback section below.

PeopleFinders.com said its CriminalSearches.com site lets you scope neighborhoods for people with a criminal history.

(Credit: CriminalSearches.com)