Saturday, August 19, 2006

Save Your Space

dana boyd:

Save Your Space is a website created by a Southern California organization called “The Friends of MySpace” (not affiliated with News Corp).  They have put together a petition against DOPA and they’re trying to collect signatures of people of all ages who are opposed to the legislation.  If you are (and you damn well should be if you’re reading my ramblings), please take a moment to sign.  And then pass it on.

They want 1,000,000 signatures in one month. There’s only two weeks left. Here‘s the bill. Here‘s the danah boyd and Henry Jenkins public statement of the reasons they think DOPA is a really bad piece of legislation.

RELATED: danah’s putting together what may be the definitive compilation on peer-reviewed social network research sources.

Friday, August 18, 2006

On Social Media and the Networked Public Sphere

Ulises Ali Mejias provides an excellent summary of the issues surrounding digital publics:

Can social media increase and improve civic participation? If so, in what ways? There’s a lot being said and written about the subject these days, but it is difficult to get a clear overview of the opinions. I attempt here to collect viewpoints both for and against the premise that social media is creating a better public sphere, and analyze them in the context of what constitutes a public and its antithesis, a mass. In presenting what are sometimes extreme positions within this debate (too idealistic v. too critical), my hope is to begin to understand the reality that lies in the middle, and come closer to understanding social media’s potential (and limitations) as a tool to bring about social change.

At a general level, we could say that on one side of the debate are those who believe that social media can increase civic participation and shift the balance of power away from the institutions that currently stand in the way of change. On the other side are those who warn that social media can only offer a reduced form of participation, that it diminishes the value of individual contributions, and that it leaves social systems more prone to manipulation by lowering their intelligence to the minimum common denominator (i.e., stupidity or mediocrity).

Thus, the debate can be framed in terms of whether social media can engender democratic publics that embody an intelligence and capacity for action greater than the sum of its members, or whether it will merely continue to support the production of anti-democratic masses of disenfranchised and alienated consumers. Of course, social media is a big label encompassing many different technologies, and even the same technologies can be applied differently in various contexts. But while features and applications might differ, the people contributing to this debate are obviously focused on the aggregated impact that social media is having on our societies rather than on specific examples of applications.

Via Liz Losh:

Mejias focuses on three areas of concern in current debates: 1) the balance between the ability to produce and consume ideas, 2) the access to affordable and effective means of producing ideas, and 3) how (or if) these ideas are translated into action.  It’s worth looking at the comments as well, since Howard Rheingold weighs in with a correction of his position about the NPOV ethos of wiki-communities.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

The dopes passed DOPA!

The House passed the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) last week by an overwhelming 410-15 majority last week. Now it moves to the Senate where it is expected to pass.

The American Library Association, wisely, objects:

“This unnecessary and overly broad legislation will hinder students’ ability to engage in distance learning and block library computer users from accessing a wide array of essential Internet applications including instant messaging, email, wikis and blogs,” said ALA president Leslie Burger. “Under DOPA, people who use library and school computers as their primary conduits to the Internet will be unfairly blocked from accessing some of the web’s most powerful emerging technologies and learning applications. As libraries are already required to block content that is “harmful to minors” under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), DOPA is redundant and unnecessary legislation.”:

Via Henry Jenkins:

USA Today can’t resist jumping on the DOPA bandwagon though, tossing off in the middle of an article otherwise concerned with youth engagement with social networking the following:

To deter predators, the House late Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would keep libraries and schools from allowing children to access social networking sites, as well as chat rooms. It now goes to the Senate.

Let’s see if this statement might even remotely make sense if we rephrased it in response to another medium:

To prevent false advertising, the House late Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would keep libraries and schools from allowing Americans to read magazines and newspapers.

Nope, I didn’t think so.

How about this one:

To deter pornographers, the House late Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would keep libraries and schools from providing books, magazines, and other printed matter to their patrons.

Hmm. Funny, that one doesn’t make a lot of sense either.

ABSOLUTE MUST READ: The danah boyd and Henry Jenkins public statement of the reasons they think DOPA is a really bad piece of legislation.

Monday, August 07, 2006

Keep Webcams from kids III

This passage from Claire Hoffman’s LATimes story on Joe Francis, the founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” empire merits repeating:

Nursed on MySpace profiles and reality television, many young people today are comfortable with being perpetually photographed and having those images posted on the Internet for anyone to see. The boundaries that once contained sexuality have also fallen away. Whether it’s 13-year-olds watching a Britney Spears video, 16-year-olds getting their pubic hair waxed to emulate porn stars or 17-year-olds viewing videos of celebrities performing the most intimate acts, youth culture is soaked in sexuality.

With that I quote again New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald who told the story of the boy looking for friends who became an online porn star in Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World. This is what he told Oprah:

There is absolutely no reason for a child to have a Web cam. Every Web cam in every child’s room in America should be thrown out today...I can’t think of one use besides sexual that a kid needs a Web cam for… I went on a lot of teen bulletin boards, teen chat rooms, to see what they’re saying about Web cams. They know what they are. They’re not saying, `I want to talk to someone in England,’ they say, `I want to get on a Web cam, and when I do, will you get on, too, and we can both strip naked?’ That’s what they’re about.

To be clear, I see this only as a stopgap measure while we get a grip on a much more complex set of issues. We’ve got to get as comfortable as we can with these technologies. Not demonize but understand this new world that is not going away and help our young people navigate it.

One important resource in that regard is the work of Henry Jenkins and danah boyd. Here an excerpt from a recent interview. (Click here for a printable, PDF version.):

[M]ost parents understand their children’s experiences in the context of their memories of their own early years. For the baby boom generation, those defining experiences involved playing in backyards and vacant lots within suburban neighborhoods, socializing with their friends at the local teen hangout, and participating within a social realm which was constrained by the people who went to your local school. All of that is changing. Contemporary children and youth enjoy far less physical mobility, have less time outside of adult control, and have fewer physical places to hang out with their friends.

Much of this activity is being brought online. What teens are doing online is no better and no worse than what previous generations of teens did when their parents weren’t looking. The difference is that as these activities are being digitized, they are also being brought into public view. Video games bring the fantasy lives of young boys into the family room and parents are shocked by what they are seeing. Social networks give adults a way to access their teens’ social and romantic lives and they are startled by their desire to break free from restraints or act older than their age. Parents are experiencing this as a loss of control but in fact, adults have greater control over these aspects of their children’s lives than ever before.

Indeed, one of the biggest risks of these digital technologies is not the ways that they allow teens to escape adult control but rather the permanent traces left behind of their transgressive conduct. Teens used to worry about what teachers or administrators might put in their permanent records since this would impact how they were treated in the future. Yet, we are increasingly discovering that everything we do online becomes part of our public and permanent record, easily recoverable by anyone who knows how to Google, and that there is no longer any statute of limitations on our youthful indiscretions.

Friday, August 04, 2006

Debunking the penguin army

GMA’s talking global warming right now, “ Even Christian Broadcaster Pat Robertson, who had called extreme weather a sign of biblical apocalypse, converted in this heat wave...”

Meanwhile, questions arise as to who is behind this YouTube video:

Everyone knows Al Gore stars in the global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” But who created “Al Gore’s Penguin Army,” a two-minute video now playing on YouTube.com?

In the video, Mr. Gore appears as a sinister figure who brainwashes penguins and bores movie audiences by blaming the Mideast crisis and starlet Lindsay Lohan’s shrinking waist size on global warming. Like other videos on the popular YouTube site, it has a home-made, humorous quality. The video’s maker is listed as “Toutsmith,” a 29-year-old who identifies himself as being from Beverly Hills in an Internet profile.

In an email exchange with The Wall Street Journal, Toutsmith didn’t answer when asked who he was or why he made the video, which has just over 59,000 views on YouTube. However, computer routing information contained in an email sent from Toutsmith’s Yahoo account indicate it didn’t come from an amateur working out of his basement.

Instead, the email originated from a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington, D.C., public relations and lobbying firm whose clients include oil company Exxon Mobil Corp.

Via Kos.

Monday, July 17, 2006

The return of the military draft

I’m for it. It ain’t gonna happen.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

MySpace 4300% increase

Speaking of hits, Hitwise:

Today Hitwise issued a press release reporting that for the first time, http://www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. To put MySpace’s growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits, myspace.com has achieved a 4300% increase in visits over two years and 132% increase in visits since the same time last year.

Via GigaOM:

For the entire month of June, ComScore’s data still places Yahoo over MySpace in terms of visitors, but said that MySpace still grew in both page views and unique visitors. We’ll see when next month’s numbers emerge if the trend stays the same. When it comes to unique visitors, though, MySpace isn’t growing as fast as Yahoo, Time Warner Network, MSN-Microsoft, Google, or eBay-it’s ranked 6th on uniques.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Paey v Limbaugh again

I don’t believe there’s much of a chance that Rush Limbaugh’s being detained at the airport with Viagra but no prescription will lead to his deal with prosecutors falling through.

It should; exacerbated by his lawyer’s excuse that the prescription was “labeled as being issued to the physician rather than Mr. Limbaugh for privacy purposes.” His deal permits doctors to issue prescriptions in other names to an admitted drug abuser for privacy purposes??? That’s quite a deal.

It’s worth remembering here that while Limbaugh was caught pocketing pills to pump up his penis, on his way back from a country plenteous with prostitutes, the wheelchair-bound car-crash victim Richard Paey, who also was prosecuted in Florida for the use of prescription painkillers, is sitting in prison serving a mandatory 25 year sentence.

Limbaugh is back on the radio making jokes while Paey sits in prison victimized by a system that errs on the side of seeing pain killers as criminal narcotics rather than as medicinal relief from suffering. Paey’s doctor changed his story after being threatened by prosecuters and sold him down the river. What will Limbaugh’s doctor do?

Monday, June 19, 2006

MySpace sued, lawmakers likely to become unglued

I’m guessing this is not good news for those who oppose the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006: Wonkette has photos of Brian Bilbray’s kids’ under-age drinking and partying from MySpace & Photobucket.

When taken together with Republican strategist Jack Burkman’s sleazy propositioning (also posted to MySpace and by Wonkette) you might expect more Republicans to sign on to the bill.

Icing on the cake is the Texas mom suing MySpace because, she alleges, her 14-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted by a 19 year old she met on the social networking service.

Important context to all of this is found in this interview with Henry Jenkins (co-director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT) and danah boyd (PhD student at the School of Information, University of California-Berkeley) by Sarah Wright of the MIT News Office.

My excerpts include: online predator stats and flower child v social networked child.

RELATED UPDATE: MySpace changes the rules.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Why they really want to shut down MySpace

In town for Capital Pride, a lesbian couple was offered $1,000 by Jack Burkman to have sex with him. They declined, and posted the proposition on MySpace. Wonkette got it:

this really hot business man in a pinstriped suit walked past me, said hello, and doubled back. he asked me my name and introduced himself (jack burkman, government relations strategies), asked where i went to school, etc, gave me his card, and asked me to call him. i later texted him and never could get rid of him again. he thought he talked to me on the phone several times, but he never did. i always made kat or kristin be me. he told kristin about how he really enjoyed my outfit (TITS GALORE) and that i was beautiful, etc. by the end of the night (5 am or so), he was offering to pay for our room and give us a thousand dollars if two of us would [Read on]

Now this is the same Jack Burkman who was all over cable [here and here] defending Ann Coulter’s trashing of the 9/11 widows. In her post dispelling any doubts that it really was Burkman, Wonkette adds a new dimension to that Coulter defense.

Crooks and Liars finds that Burkman is a registered lobbyist for the Family Research Council, “I wonder what [FRC President] Tony Perkins will say?” And The American Street found this from Burkman on a June 5 MSNBC appearance:

But this issue [the anti-Gay Marriage Amendment] and the moral fabric of the country is five times as important as the war on terror and the war in Iraq combined . . . . Americans didn’t wake up this morning being afraid of a Lesbian couple. No, but that Lesbian couple is free to do what it wants. It’s not oppressed in America. But that doesn’t mean somehow that it has some right to join what the majority does. What Patrick is arguing here is not only does he want that Lesbian couple to be free from oppression, which it deserves, I agree, but he demands! He demands to this country and this society that they be let into what the majority is doing!

So this Republican strategist wants us free to have sex with him but banned from legally recognized committed relationships. I’m only guessing what his position would be on the Republican sponsored Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006. My position is suggested here and here.

Flower child v social networked child

Earlier in the week I quoted danah boyd, a PhD candidate at the School of Information, University of California-Berkeley, from an interview with Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, conducted via email by Sarah Wright of the MIT News Office on MySpace and Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). (Click here for a printable, PDF version.)

I finished it last night, I urge you to read it too. A boomer with my own - shall we say colorful? - history, I find this point by Henry particularly resonant:

[M]ost parents understand their children’s experiences in the context of their memories of their own early years. For the baby boom generation, those defining experiences involved playing in backyards and vacant lots within suburban neighborhoods, socializing with their friends at the local teen hangout, and participating within a social realm which was constrained by the people who went to your local school. All of that is changing. Contemporary children and youth enjoy far less physical mobility, have less time outside of adult control, and have fewer physical places to hang out with their friends.

Much of this activity is being brought online. What teens are doing online is no better and no worse than what previous generations of teens did when their parents weren’t looking. The difference is that as these activities are being digitized, they are also being brought into public view. Video games bring the fantasy lives of young boys into the family room and parents are shocked by what they are seeing. Social networks give adults a way to access their teens’ social and romantic lives and they are startled by their desire to break free from restraints or act older than their age. Parents are experiencing this as a loss of control but in fact, adults have greater control over these aspects of their children’s lives than ever before.

Indeed, one of the biggest risks of these digital technologies is not the ways that they allow teens to escape adult control but rather the permanent traces left behind of their transgressive conduct. Teens used to worry about what teachers or administrators might put in their permanent records since this would impact how they were treated in the future. Yet, we are increasingly discovering that everything we do online becomes part of our public and permanent record, easily recoverable by anyone who knows how to Google, and that there is no longer any statute of limitations on our youthful indiscretions.

Emphasis mine. My experience is that what’s true for baby boomer parents is also true for baby boomer college professors and administrators: we’re too often focused on the wrong problem! Caught up in our own shock, how can we effectively help teens take appropriate precautions?

My goal is to understand and support, and then from that understanding supportive place look for and find the teachable moment. I’ll be very interested in the MacArthur Foundation development of an ethics casebook:

Right now, MySpace and the other social network tools are being read as threats to the civic order, as encouraging anti-social behaviors. But we can easily turn this around and see them as the training ground for future citizens and political leaders. Young people are assuming public roles at earlier and earlier ages. They are interacting with larger communities of their peers and beginning to develop their own styles of leadership. Across a range of issues, young people are using social network software to identify and rally like-minded individualism, forming the basis for new forms of digital activism. Current research shows that teens who participate in massively multiplayer games develop a much stronger ability to work in teams, a greater understanding of how and when to take appropriate risks, an ability to rapidly process complex bodies of information, and so forth. At the same time, these teens are facing an array of ethical challenges which are badly understood by the adults around them. They have nowhere to turn for advice on how to confront some of the choices they make as participants within these communities. Part of the work we will be doing for the MacArthur Foundation involves the development of an ethics casebook which will help parents, teachers, and students work through some of these issues and make sensible decisions about how they conduct their online lives. We see this kind of pedagogical intervention as far more valuable than locking down all public computers and then sending kids out to deal with these issues on their own.

ALSO WATCH FOR: Henry has a book book coming out this summer, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, which he intends to provide some frameworks for thinking about the new forms of participatory culture which are emerging in the digital era.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Online predator stats

I have finally gotten around to reading Henry Jenkins (co-director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT) and danah boyd (PhD student at the School of Information, University of California-Berkeley) on the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006.

I’ll have much more to say once I finish and digest the full interview, for now here’s danah on the distortion of statistics:

The media often reference a Crimes
Against Children report that states one in five children receive a
sexual solicitation online. A careful reading of this report shows
that 76% of the unwanted solicitations came from fellow children.
This includes unwanted date requests and sexual taunts from fellow
teens. Of the adult solicitations, 96% are from people 18-25; wanted
and unwanted solicitations are both included. In other words, if an
18 year old asks out a 17 year old and both consent, this would still
be seen as a sexual solicitation. Only 10% of the solicitations included
a request for a physical encounter; most sexual solicitations are
for cybersex. While the report shows that a large percentage of youth
are faced with uncomfortable or offensive experiences online, there
is no discussion of how many are faced with uncomfortable or offensive
experiences at school, in the local shopping mall or through other
mediated channels like telephone. 

Although the media has covered the
potential risk extensively, few actual cases have emerged. While youth
are at minimal risk, predators are regularly being lured out by law
enforcement patrolling the site. Most notably, a deputy in the Department
of Homeland Security was arrested for seeking sex with a minor. 

The fear of predators has regularly
been touted as a reason to restrict youth from both physical and digital
publics. Yet, as Barry Glassner notes in The Culture of Fear,
predators help distract us from more statistically significant molesters.
Youth are at far greater risk of abuse in their homes and in the homes
of their friends than they ever are in digital or physical publics.

RELATED: Salon on MySpace or OurSpace:

The past few years have seen an explosion in the number of schools taking to the Web to find out what students are saying and doing. And punishment has followed, from a Pennsylvania school that suspended one student for creating a parody MySpace profile of his principal to a California school that suspended 20 students simply for viewing one student’s MySpace profile, which contained threats against another student. And some public school systems, like Illinois’ Community High School District 128, are even taking steps to monitor everything their students say on sites like MySpace.