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Powells.com, the online version of the famed Powell's Books in Portland, OR reprints this Atlantic Monthly book review by Caitlin Flanagan of the recently published Generation MySpace.
The review really only glances at the book and also the recent book To Catch A Predator (based on that unbearable "Dateline NBC" feature of the same name) and instead the reviewer talks about her own experiments in social networking websites. She posed as a "tween" girl on a social networking site called Club Penguin to see if she would be singled out by potential pedophiles, but her results were inconclusive. She also played the role of stalker by singling out a young girl on MySpace.com and seeing how easy or difficult it would be to target her in "real life". It turned out to be extremely easy, but, as she writes, teens seem to be very aware of what they are doing by engaging in the strange public exposure of social networking websites. The review is well worth reading. The book might be, as well.
Meanwhile, via The Good Reverend, who got the story from Bruce Schneier, comes this very interesting first-hand account about how Disney tried to implement a variety of restrictions on their Toontown Online MMORPG website, only to have ingenious kids figure out several ways to defeat the restrictions in order to have open chat.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Because we are the lucky ones who get to live with the Internet as a first-generation, we're all going to be the ones who get exposed to the pluses and minuses of reinventing social communication. The 20-somethings and their younger siblings are doing the reinventing, and so they have a much better ability to negotiate the pitfalls, but some of them are nonetheless going to end up victimized by it. That's the way the world has always worked, technology notwithstanding.
Consider this recent infographic from the New York Times about how the Internet is used by different age and psychographic groups. Those of us beyond the magic age of 40 are mostly viewers and consumers, not creators or interactors. We can't help it, we were raised during the Age of Television and were completely acculturated into being passive consumers of media. The smaller subset of "older" people who ARE less passive would have been the fringy element of people who published zines, made their own home video productions, organized theater groups, etc. (you know...people like ME) Among the "younger" groups, that sort of active engagement is now the norm, not the exception.
By the time my own child hits her teenage years, a lot of the initial bumps and bruises of social networking should be gone, as the 20-somethings find themselves "grown up" and able to exert better methods of control over the interactions compared to our present dysfunctional ones. Not that everything about it will be sunshine, lollipops and roses -- every social adaptation brings with it genuine dangers and unintended consequences -- people will just be less agog about it.
Yup. You're right. I've been the generation that was first to TV and all of my life I've seen the evils of TV debated. They still can't make up their minds...it's up to us to decide how to best protect our kids...because like water, the bad guys will always find a way in.
Posted by Karan [URL] at 06/27/07
It is up to us, but I guess my point is that once again we're over-reacting to a broader societal change that we can't quite get a grasp on. As a consequence, sometimes our focus is misdirected -- thus the example of the Disney people trying to engineer out any possible "unsafe" chat, only to have the kids themselves develop a workaround. It's not so much a question of the bad guys always finding a way in as it is a question of young people always finding a way to connect with the larger outside world.
Posted by Brian [URL] at 06/28/07
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