Remember how myspace leads to suicide?
As a counter to that sort of thing, there’s a great essay at the e-journal Knowledge Tree by blogger and communications scholar danah boyd. It’s worth reading for some very interesting thoughts and analysis on mediated publics and privacy, but one aspect of her essay is probably particularly worth emphasising at a time when dead tree news outlets are indulging in techno-panic:
When a teen is engaged in risky behaviour online, that is typically a sign that they’re engaged in risky behaviour offline. Troubled teens reveal their troubles online both explicitly and implicitly. It is not the online world that is making them troubled…
There’s a live chat with danah at 2pm tomorrow. Go here if you want to participate, and consider voting Labor for the fast broadband we need to use java chat environments properly! 
Speaking of dead tree news media, one of their own moral panics is the evils and irresponsibility of so-called “citizen journalism”. OMG, the masses might not take our crud as gospel - the sky is falling! There’s a great counter to that sort of thing in a very thoughtful post from Joseph Pearson.
Good to see a link to apophenia - it’s a very interesting blog.
She often raises some very good questions, as in this post about moral panics about the yoof running wild and unsupervised on the intertubes:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/05/07/myspace_secondl.html
Yep, she’s very good value.
“When a teen is engaged in risky behaviour online, that is typically a sign that they’re engaged in risky behaviour offline. Troubled teens reveal their troubles online both explicitly and implicitly. It is not the online world that is making them troubled.”
Hmmm, can this be proven? After all, lots of people “invent” themselves online, and are probably nothing like their online persona in real life. Also, sitting in front of a computer all day moaning and groaning is not healthy for anyone (go outside and play kids and all that). As for the Barbie thing, this is a positive initiative. Yep, too much being watched is a bad thing, but keeping an eye on what little ones are doing is surely positive. It’s the job of adults to keep littlies safe.
To be fair to Scanlon’s piece on citizen journalism, I think he was talking more about the lack of “reporting” on most blogs. As an MSM journo myself, I love Larvatus Prodeo, Andrew Norton, etc for the opinionating, etc — but it is usually outlets such as The Age, The AFR and the SMH that you need to turn to for the news stories which allow the likes of LP bloggers to do their thing so well.
Teenagers are not “littlies”, and what works for one will not work for the other.
My daughter enjoys writing Buffy fanfic and publishing her graphic artwork on the ‘net and participating in forums on same. Interestingly enough, her MSN messaging is to people she knows IRL - differs from how we use the internet. More like a phone.
Why would teens be spending their time on the Barbie chat list?
I assume you mean this.
*groan*
Hopefully, as it is a marketing exercise imposed on “teens” (horrible word)as opposed to “owned” by them, it will die a gruesome death.
I’ve found Girlchild’s MySpace page, as well as her (real life) friends and my niece’s. Also a site dedicated to graphic art, where they post and comment on each other’s work - so far everything has seemed quite civil and kewl. I like her friendship group and she seems to stay with them online with MSN, so that helps.
I haven’t told her I know where her pages are. I just lurk occasionally. Non parents of teenagers can bite me.
No doubt, ten years after the invention of the printing press, monks who made a living illuminating Bibles convinced themselves that the new invention was no threat to their long-held lifestyle. (This is not a dig at Kenneth Nguyen’s comment above)
On the side of the bloggers, they can beat the MSM to ‘real’ stories, as I did with the resignation of Sentaor Santoro.
If I had had a cameraphone on January 26 this year, I would almost certainly have beaten the mainstream media to the punch with the news that S/Sgt Hurley was to be charged with manslaughter related to the death of Mulrunji. (I was at the rally where this was announced, but chose to stay to cover the rest of it and then had to go home to post)
Bloggers have (to some degree) independence from the agenda of the MSM proprietors, and mobile technology gives bloggers the same speed as the MSM. Take a picture, tap out an MMS message and send it directly to your blog - 5 minutes compared to the 15-20 minutes it takes the MSM to react.
What bloggers do not (yet?) have is the large institutions that the MSM have. Unless a political blogger can make enough money from their site to make a living, they don’t have the resources to do this full time
However, since Adsense advertisers rarely know what blogs their ads appear on, intimidation by advertisers can be much less effective than before.
Of course, you still have to win an audience - which is now the principal problem in a world with millions of blogs. According to the LP Sitemeter, LP gets about 4 500 visits (not unique visits, as I understand Sitemeter, which I use for one of my own blogs) per day. This is tiny compared to the MSM, but can be magnified by the fact that LP is well known in the Ausblogosphere and read by many other bloggers).
It is of course laughable for the mainstream media to accuse the blogosphere of ‘irresponsibility’. No longer are we restricted to the opinions of the media, people we know personally, badly-reproduced activist ‘zines and Green Left Weekly for our views of the world. Tough. The world is changing, people.
But there is a kernel of truth in the ‘irresponsibility’ accusation. 9-11 conspiracy nutters (just to take one example) also can take advantage of the massive fall in the cost of publishing and distribution. This would seem to make critical thinking an even more important skill than ever before - and it is even easier for the delusional to build a world of opinion that re-inforces their own prejudices.
I don’t think the MSM will disappear anytime soon. The blogosphere is still a hobby for a certain type of person, not a mass media in the sense that Channel 9 and the Daily Telegraph are. But millions of people have already found their voice, and I think millions more will.
An example: if the person (I suspect) in the US DoD who leaked the Abu Ghraib photos to the mainstream media had found that the MSM were not interested in the photos for whatever reason, it would have been a simple matter indeed to put them on a blog. It’s becoming more and more difficult to silence a story that someone wants to tell.
As I said, the MSM won’t go away, but they will be forced, more and more, to acknowledge the blogosphere as a source of stories. Not so much as a serious competitor, but as a movement that cannot be totally ignored.
Some of those stories will be picked up by the MSM, against the wishes of the proprietors, if only because the MSM can’t - for purely selfish reasons - ignore them.
I’m also mildly suprised at Helen’s defensive tone at the end of her comment. Or rather, at the attitude that could provoke such a tone.
Would anyone at all - parent of teens or not (I’m not) - criticise a parent for keeping track of her children’s friends in Real Life? If not, how could they possibly justify such criticism of this action online?
Hi! You just won one more regular reader ;)..
Good luck!
l8rz. Big lol