Without contradicting the moral weight of social software post from last week, let’s take a moment to look at three stories from Arstechnica about MySpace and others: online video leads to teen arrests, shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting, and Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble.

These are the stories we’ve come to expect: teen does or post the results of something [stupid|illegal|dangerous] in [MySpace|Facebook|some other online place] and gets caught. The point here is that the (meatspace) community’s existing means of enforcement worked, and perhaps worked better, in these new electronic forums.

Our youth’s new Wild West may have instead turned out to be an Orwellian nightmare that no kid can escape from.

It’s bad enough, anyway, that Nate Anderson had to give some advice to the young’ns:

What can you do to keep yourself out the crosshairs? The obvious first step is to internalize the idea that no section of the Internet is your private playground, and to keep your mouth shut in public forums about information you would rather the rest of the world did not know. Beyond that, though, it can be difficult to eliminate traces of stupidity online. Good luck getting Google to remove all links to that embarrassing office karaoke video that comes up first when you search your name. It ain’t gonna happen. The moral of the story is: don’t expect privacy on the Internet and you won’t be disappointed.

embarrassing, facebook, moral responsibility, myspace, online policing, playground, privacy, public forums, social internet, social software, youth

I happened to stumble back onto the Pew Internet Report on teens and technology from July 2005 that report that told us “87% of [US children] between the ages of 12 and 17 are online.” But the part I’d missed before regarded how these teens were using communication technology:

Email, once the cutting edge “killer app,” is losing its privileged place among many teens as they express preferences for instant messaging (IM) and text messaging [SMS] as ways to connect with their friends.

To them, email is increasingly seen as a tool for communicating with “adults” such as teachers, institutions like schools, and as a way to convey lengthy and detailed information to large groups. Meanwhile, IM is used for everyday conversations with multiple friends that range from casual to more serious and private exchanges.

It is also used as a place of personal expression. Through buddy icons or other customization of the look and feel of IM communications, teens can express and differentiate themselves. Other instant messaging tools allow for the posting of personal profiles, or even “away” messages, durable signals posted when a user is away from the computer but wishes to remain connected to their IM network.

Interesting. Connect that with a 2004 Korean study of student’s communication practices that revealed more than two-thirds of the 2,000 respondents “rarely use or don’t use e-mail at all.” Why?

…it’s impossible to tell whether an addressee has received a message right away and replies are not immediately forthcoming. [...] “The new generation hate agonizing and waiting and tend to express their feelings immediately,” said Professor Lee. “The decline of email is a natural outcome reflecting such characteristics of the new generation.”

Interesting. American teens say email is for old people, Korean high-school and college students say it’s too slow, and UNH’s students tells us they chat away an average of 9.3 hours a week in AIM.

aim, aol instant messenger, communication, im, instant messaging, instant messenger, short message service, sms, technology, teens, the death of email, youth

Jenny Levine alerted me to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report on teens as both content creators and consumers.

It turns out that teens, and teen girls especially, are highly active online IMing, sharing photos, blogging, reading and commenting on other’s blogs, and gaming. An especially strong trend in this group is the use of web technologies for collaboration. Interactivity, increasingly, is being defined by the teen’s ability to ask questions, comment, or contribute. Take a look at this quote, (found via this BBC report):

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

Jenny calls this the “4Cs,” for conversation, community, commons, and collaboration. Clearly, services that allow those 4Cs are preferred over those that don’t. Competitively, where do you stand? How well have you embraced the 4Cs in your online services.

tags: 4cs, collaboration, commons, community, conversation, interactivity, internet, jenny levine, pew internet, pew internet & american life project, pew internet project, social internet, social software, social web, teenagers, teens, youth