Video #2 - Private Worlds Outside Parents’ Reach

Source: C.J. Pascoe, Ph.D.Digital Youth Research project, University of California, Berkeley

What do you think it is about the Internet, and particularly about social networking, that has so quickly captivated teenagers?

The Internet affords independence to teenagers that I don't think we've seen since the invention of the car. We saw the creation of teenage culture start in the early 1900s, and it coincided with the widespread use and adoption of cars, because for the first time, teens were really able to escape the purview of their parents and the home.They're able to have a private space even while they're still at home; they're able to communicate with their friends and have an entire social life outside of the purview of their parents without actually having to leave the house.

And social networking sites in particular have taken off because teen culture is a social culture. That's what being an adolescent at this time in history in the United States is; it's being social. We don't expect them necessarily to have career plans; we expect them to go to school and to create their friendship networks. That's what they're doing as teenagers. They are going around and trying on these different identities: "I'm a goth," or "I'm a punk rocker," or "I'm a surfer," or I'm this or that. What social networking sites allow them to do is to display that identity in a very dramatic and very succinct way. Whereas [prior] to social networking sites, teens had to rely on visual cues or say, "I listen to this music," or "I am wearing black pants because this is going to say something about me," now they can literally say on their social networking sites, "This is my identity, this is my music, these are my friends, these are my heroes, these are the people I don't like," and that really defines an identity in a really public way for them. In a way, the social networking sites are this digital representation of what we think of as adolescence.

I want to talk a bit about the media perception of this phenomenon. What are they getting right, and what are they getting wrong?

We've become very paranoid about our children. We've become very, very frightened that something will happen to our most precious resources, which are our children. And the new media and the Internet, along with these fears around our children -- how vulnerable our children are -- have really coincided to result in a little bit of hysteria around children's activities online and children's vulnerabilities online. I think the media picks up on that.

I found in my interviews with teens that they're a lot savvier than we think they are. For instance, most of the teens I've talked to who have migrated to Facebook -- who were on MySpace but now use Facebook or have decided to never use MySpace and just use Facebook -- do so out of concerns about privacy, because they can really limit who sees their site, and they can actually give different groups different levels of access to their site. There are some really savvy teens out there, and teens I talk to who are on MySpace actually say that they do think about the sort of information they put out there.

We do need to teach our children digital literacy. They need to know how to keep safe online; they need to think about the information that they're putting out there; and they need to be able to have discussions with their parents about it. The best-rounded teens I've talked to have said: "My parents have seen my MySpace site, and they're fine. They don't check it or anything, but I've shown it to them." They have the privacy to put what they want to put on their site, but that they're OK enough with what they're putting on the site for the parents to look at it. And I think that their parents do need to be involved in that sense.

What I think is unhealthy is when parents respond to these media stories by saying, "You can't go on MySpace; MySpace is just dangerous." I have had that happen as well, and the kids just go to their friends' houses and set up MySpaces. It doesn't stop them; it just shuts down communication and shuts down any chance the kid has of talking to his or her parents about what they're doing and strategies for being safe. ...

You've alluded to this, that we live in a culture in which for many kids there's just not a lot of freedom. There's a lot of structure to their lives; there's a lot of over protectiveness; there's a lot of fear. Could you talk a little about that and where the Internet fits into it, what it represents to them?

When I ask kids: "When did you first get a cell phone, and why?" They say: "My parents got it for me because they wanted me to be safe." And again and again, that's the story I hear, "My parents got it for me so they could always be in contact with me, and if there was an emergency, I could call them."

In the end what happens is it functions as sort of this digital security guard, who drives kids’ nuts, but it also allows them to stay out at night. They can go out with their friends because they can always check in with their parents. It allows them a slightly wider roaming range than they would have had without the cell phone, because they can constantly check in with their parents.That said, I do have kids who, I'll ask them, "Have you ever had your phone taken away because you texted too much or gone over on your minutes or whatever?" And they'll say, "Yes, but then my parents gave it back to me because they realized they can't get in contact with me." Or kids will lose their phones so their parents can't call them when they're out and then say, "Come home." That's one of the ways in which it affords them more independence but makes parents feel safer about that kind of independence. It allows kids to escape the control of their parents in some ways, which I think is really helpful if their parents' rules are too strict.

I've asked them that. I've asked them, "Why do you constantly need to be talking to one another or in touch with one another?" and the response I hear is, "I'm bored." They're bored in class. ...

I think the in-class stuff is slightly different because all they're doing is replacing note-writing. I spent the vast majority of my high school years writing long, involved notes about whatever drama I was going through to my friends and then folding them up in very specific ways to hand them off in between classes. Instead of doing that, they're just texting now. ... Teen culture is a social culture, and they like to constantly be in touch.

But also what they're doing is, they're subverting the authority in the classroom. Kids don't have a lot of authority in the world; they don't. No one does what they say; they're constantly under the control of someone else. There's a lot of laws that apply to them. Parents tell them what to do; teachers tell them what to do. So what this social world allows them to do is to be in charge of their lives in this one little social realm. ...That's something that these digital media allow kids: to be actors and not just acted upon, which they usually are in our world.

What about the whole privacy issue? ... Adults, in particular, think kids ... have no concept of privacy whatsoever; it just doesn't exist for them. ... I think it depends on the kid. I think, however, because these kids encountered these social networking sites so much younger, that it feels less foreign to them, or that an expectation of keeping things to themselves or the idea that they might keep some things to themselves seems a lot stranger to them than it does to us. A lot of the kids I talk to keep blogs and put what I think is personal information up online. ...

I asked them, "Do you think about the information you put up there? Do you feel scared knowing that someone would know this?" And their answers are, ... "I know other people look at it, and I wouldn't put anything up there that I won't mind somebody else seeing." ...

They just don't have a sense that anybody would actually care what they put up there, and what is public realm for them, or what belongs to the public, is much more expansive than what adults think belongs to the public.... The respondents who really think about what information they're putting out there usually migrate to Facebook, because they can control who sees it -- that either they can put it so everybody sees their sites but not everybody sees their friends, or that only their friends see their site. They have a lot more control over who sees what information. Those respondents have a sense that they don't want the entire world knowing what's going on. ...

The compulsion to take pictures, to sort of constantly be recording the life and then posting it, what is that all about?

When you looked at kids in the '70s and the '80s, in the '90s, their lockers were covered in pictures. They constantly had the little cameras and were taking pictures of everything, and then would come to school after prom and show each other all their pictures. If you ever looked at a high school girl's folder, they would get these sort of clear folders where they'd stick pictures in of everything that had happened.

That compulsion in some sense is nothing new, because it's all part of that identity work, where they're reflecting back to themselves who they think they are. What digital media has done is given them a more intense way to do this. ... So there's a proliferation of pictures and videos of them living their lives, in essence, online. And instead of bringing their pictures to school and passing them around and having everybody talk about them -- "Oh, this picture makes me look fat; this picture makes me look great" -- they put them on their pages, and then they can get online comments from their friends where they have the exact same discussion. ...

But they also can be very artistic with these pictures, which I think, again, is something the media doesn't pick up on. The media doesn't pick up on the fact that there's a site called deviantART, and on this site teenagers take these amazing pictures -- I mean, a lot of people do, people of all ages -- but it's a site where you can put your art up, whether it be a picture or a drawing, and people can buy prints from you. It's quite amazing.

So in a sense, this expansion of digital media and the availability to them of digital photography allows them to be creators and independent artists and even make some money from that art, which I think is quite fascinating!

MySpace Agrees to Toughen Age Controls

On Jan. 14, 2008, 49 state attorneys general announced an agreement with social networking giant MySpace to "better protect children on its Web site." The deal, which was the culmination of two years of talks and threatened litigation, is the latest effort by state and federal officials to tighten age and content restrictions online.

Under the terms of the agreement, MySpace agreed to:

  • create a task force to develop age and identity verification technology to keep underage kids off its site;
  • set up a registry of blocked e-mail addresses of minors, supplied by parents;
  • make the profiles of members ages 14-17 "private" by default, meaning they can be seen by friends only;
  • establish a "high school" section of the site for users under 18;
  • respond within 72 hours to complaints about inappropriate content; and
  • hire more staff to police such content as photos and discussion boards.

Greg Abbott of Texas was the only attorney general who didn't sign the agreement. He wrote in an open letter to MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, "We do not believe that MySpace.com -- or any social-networking site -- can adequately protect minors until an age verification system is effectively developed and implemented."

Indeed, one Texas news outlet was able to create a new e-mail address and use that to make a MySpace account without any age or ID checks. "There was no effort to verify any of the information used in the process -- name, age, address," the San Antonio Express-News reported.

In an audio interview with CBS News' Larry Magid, Hemanshu Nigam, chief technology officer of MySpace parent Fox Interactive, agreed that there is "no current technology that allows anyone to identify underage individuals," but stressed that MySpace will be studying the issue under the new agreement. MySpace has been in talks with other social networking companies about joining the deal.

Days after the MySpace deal was announced, Wired.com reported that a bug in MySpace's design "allows anyone who's interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles -- including those under 16 -- despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user's friends list." MySpace fixed the problem the following day.

Federal Legislation

Congress has been taking steps to protect kids online for a decade. The 1998 Children Online Privacy Protection Act requires Web sites collecting personal information from children ages 13 and under to maintain privacy policies and seek parental consent. The law is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, which has levied fines against violators, including a $1 million penalty against social networking site Xanga in 2006.

But laws protecting children from objectionable content online have been met with court challenges on free-speech grounds. Not to be confused with COPPA, the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) aimed to restrict minors' access to online pornography. The law has never been enforced; a court issued an injunction against it immediately, and the act's constitutionality has been argued inconclusively in various federal courts since then.

January 14, 20089:51 AM PST

MySpace agrees to social-networking safety planby Caroline McCarthy

NEW YORK--A coalition of law enforcement authorities and representatives from social-networking site MySpace.com gathered Monday morning to unveil an extensive new plan for ensuring the safety of minors on the Internet.

Under the agreement, MySpace has pledged to work with the attorneys general on a set of principles to combat harmful material on social-networking sites (pornography, harassment, cyberbullying, and identity theft, among other issues), better educate parents and schools about online threats, cooperate with law enforcement officials around the country, as well as develop new technology for age and identity verification on social-networking sites.

"Today's announcement is a landmark step forward in providing new protections for teenage members of social-networking sites such as MySpace," Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, said at the press conference here.

The new Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking, led by attorneys general Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, consists of Nigam as well as the attorneys general of 49 total U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The group has released a "Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking," which it hopes will achieve industrywide approval from other social-networking sites and Internet providers.

The lone state missing from the task force is Texas. North Carolina's Roy Cooper, speaking on behalf of the coalition's executive committee--Cooper, Blumenthal, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and Marc Dann of Ohio--would not comment on the reason why. The members of the executive committee were joined by Anne Milgram, attorney general of New Jersey, as well as Steve Cohen, a representative for New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said later on Monday that his office declined to participate because he didn't consider the proposed safety measures to be strong enough.

In the press conference, the attorneys general acknowledged that existing standards of law enforcement simply don't suffice in the rapidly changing climate of the Internet. "You're in an area where what you are looking at today will not be what you're looking at in six months," Cohen said. "There is an exponential change that goes on with each passing week and month, and you really do need to bring together the best minds and the best ideas."

The task force aims for cooperation from other social-networking sites, namely Facebook, which reached its own agreement with Cuomo's office over sex offender data on the site in October. "We are calling on Facebook and other social-networking sites today to adopt these principles, to put these safety practices in effect, and to join the task force," Cooper said. "We think it's critical that this be industrywide.