This third, loosely-related post will concentrate primarily on the New York Times and its excellent education-focused series on cyberbullying. Some of the impetus for the Times coverage appears to have been the tragic suicide of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince which, while occurring largely in a school environment, also involved elements of cyberbullying (texting and websites are referenced in the linked article).

For all you educators reading this, here’s a hybrid lesson plan/resource list that is quite comprehensive and (hopefully) provocative. Obviously, its focus is the United States, but I can’t emphasise enough how useful a resource hub it promises to be for teachers, students and parents alike.

Finally the motherlode. Lengthy yet well worth anyone’s time if this topic is even marginally of interest, the article delves into the very real ways in which online cruelty blossoming amid the confusing tangle of adolescent (and even pre-adolescent) peer relationships can have a devastating effect on young people and their sense of self, equilibrium, belonging. It’s also admirably frank, acknowledging that traditional in-school bullying is far more prevalent than its cyber cousin, but a picture nonetheless emerges of how wounding it can be for the kids, and how stressful it can be for school staff.

The concept of “cyberbullying” is itself questioned, in that it tends to refer to a disparate collection of behaviours, some far more traumatic than others (consider the gulf between a teasing text or two on the one hand, and a website dedicated to how ugly/fat/stupid one is on the other). It’s tempting to break it down paragraph by paragraph, but I’ll refrain. Seriously, if you read nothing else about cyberbullying this year, read this one article, and maybe even hop on over to its offshoot in which readers ask the questions you are probably also wondering about, not least this one. I’ll just end with a quote from the parent article:

Affronted by cyberspace’s escalation of adolescent viciousness, many parents are looking to schools for justice, protection, even revenge. …

Can a student be suspended for posting a video on YouTube that cruelly demeans another student? Can a principal search a cellphone, much like a locker or a backpack? It’s unclear. These issues have begun their slow climb through state and federal courts, but so far, rulings have been contradictory, and much is still to be determined.

This story needs a little unravelling, or demystifying, since most reports tend to assume we know the background. What is interesting is how many intriguing aspects of the wider issue it raises.

So. Where to begin…

A 15-year-old girl from Halifax, Nova Scotia, discovered that someone had created a fake Facebook profile — complete with her actual photo (likely lifted from her actual Facebook page) — that contained defamatory comments about her appearance and sexual behaviour. As a result, on Wednesday May 26, 2010, the girl and her family turned to the courts in order to find out who was behind it. The family’s lawyer, Michelle Awad, confirmed that Facebook had provided the IP (Internet Protocol) number assigned to the computer that created the account, but she was more interested in finding out actual names of individuals from the ISP (Internet Service Provider) in question: Eastlink, Inc. Adding to the complicated nature of this story was Awad’s request for a publication ban on the victim’s name as well as on the specific contents of the fake profile.

The following day (May 27), the court ruled that Eastlink must provide the family with the customer information, but lawyers from local media outlets managed to convince Justice Arthur LeBlanc to reject the publication ban, on the grounds that Ms. Awad had failed to provide evidence showing a ban was necessary.

Undeterred, the family then appealed the decision to a higher court, while the girl’s identity and details of the defamatory comments remained under a publication ban.

Subsequently, Nova Scotia Court of Appeal Justice Linda Oland extended the ban until a December 7th hearing, during which a panel of three Appeal Court judges will hear arguments on whether LeBlanc’s original ruling was correct. At stake is this (from that last link):

If the court sides with the family, they would be able to take the order to EastLink, which would then disclose its information on who created the now defunct page. If the court rules against a publication ban, the girl and her father would have to decide whether to pursue the matter.

And of interest to a wider world are a host of questions, as discussed in the Comments sections of most of those linked stories, not least the weighing of the right to privacy of a minor against the public nature of the justice system. Here (without endorsement or comment) is a selection:

• If the 15 year old and the parents laughed at it and made a joke about it, people would have forgotten about it. – WYSIWYG2
• you have a reasonable expectation to a level of anonymity on the internet, but that expectation does not afford you protection when you break the law through slander, defamation and harassment. - Fed Up in YHZ
• If we had a responsible media who actually considered the well-being of people to be more important than tabloid style journalism this would not be an issue. - Imhotep
• She was defamed publicly by those hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. So, their rights to the privacy of their IP is superseded by their responsiblity not to break the law using that right privacy. - j_wilson
• If she commits suicide because someone said sh!t about her and she couldn’t handle it, then the parents did a bad job raising her and helping protect her self esteem… In my opinion an ISP should be locked down and completely private not even allowing a court order to release the information. - WYSIWYG2
• Trust me employers, customers, clients, and co workers do google names and check people out. Competition among co workers is one reason you want to keep your reputation and online profiles intact and clean. - jason rohlig
• Either a crime has been committed or it has not, if it has start a legal action. If no crime has been committed, revealing identities becomes a crime in itself. That crime is one of violating individual Privacy Rights. Our legal system is particularly slow in understanding & reinterpreting our current laws to reflect the vast differences between the physical & cyber worlds. - ThePope
• You couldn’t get away with this behaviour on the olde fashioned telephone, yet somehow doing it with a PC is different and worthy of protection? - BazzaRichie​
• This will probably hurt the girls reputation even more and she will get that much more harassment. The parents should be more concerned about teaching her how to deal with a situation like this herself. This kind of stuff happens all the time in everyday life. Are you going to call the police every time someone says or does something mean? - gman5556
• To further complicate things, an IP address only identifies the computer & the account holder of the Internet service being used. An IP address does not identify who physically used said computer or service. - ThePope
• I think its appalling that media outlets are fighting this media ban. Bullying can be a traumatic event for children growing up and the situation has now been exacerbated by the advent of social networking sites. - humantraffi​c
• How many bullied kids and their families will be brave enough to take their abusers to court if they know that their names, in addition to all the slurs said against them, could be splashed all over the national media? - clairehall

Anyway, you get the idea. Plenty of touchpoints, both emotional and philosophical.

One final thought that occurs to me is that, despite the obvious wrinkle of the alleged offence being located in cyberspace, the Criminal Code of Canada arguably covers it here:

Identity fraud

403. (1) Everyone commits an offence who fraudulently personates another person, living or dead,

(a) with intent to gain advantage for themselves or another person;

(b) with intent to obtain any property or an interest in any property;

(c) with intent to cause disadvantage to the person being personated or another person

First things first: happy birthday, Canada.

Now, it seems we can’t ever escape this topic, but a gaggle of recent discussions involving cyberbullying have been begging for our attention.

I’ll begin with a study by McAfee/Harris [pdf], which appears to show a decline in online bullying in spite of a sensationalist press release that encouraged negative reports media-wide. While there are a number of areas of potential concern (e.g. 37 percent of 10- to 12-year-olds are on Facebook), a closer reading of the study indicates that the press release claim (“cyberbullying on the rise”!) is well off the mark, with the percentage of teens reporting that they have “ever been bullied or harassed online ” down from 15% in 2008 to 8% in 2010. Again, where the press release brays: ”Nearly 50 Percent of Teens Don’t Know What to Do if Cyberbullied,” back in the real world of the report, we learn that ”1 in 4 teens say they wouldn’t know what to do if they were bullied or harassed online” and that a ” significantly higher proportion disagree with this statement in 2010 than in 2008, suggesting that teens may now be better equipped to handle cyberbullying.” The report also adds: ”many youth who have been bullied or harassed online say they have made some adjustments to their online behavior as a result (72 percent).”

I’d be really curious to know how the author(s) of the press release reconcile all that with the aforementioned “cyberbullying on the rise.” Beware the distorted filters of the information-glut which is the Web, I guess.

Anyway, if you want to read a sane breakdown of the report, Larry Magid’s your man.

So this is what it looks like when observers and pundits kneejerk all over a new study, seemingly at random singling out [insert latest bête noire du jour of your choice -- in this case: social digital media/technology] for blame. What am I talking about? The recent University of Michigan study which has concluded that today’s college students are 40% less empathetic than their ’80s and ’90s counterparts. First of all, and I do have to say it appears to be fairly rigorous, employing a timeline of 30 years as well as a decent sample of almost 14,000 students, but regardless, I feel obliged to add that I’m always fairly suspicious of anything that parallels the conclusion of that old chestnut tenuously attributed by Plato to Socrates:

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?

In other words, every so often somebody (almost exclusively a member of a previous generation) decides that those young folk just aren’t bringing the goods any more, and in fact may well be morally reprobate to boot. Funny, isn’t it, how civilization has managed to limp along for well over two millennia since then?

But over and above those misgivings, the ease with which the authors’ speculations on causal factors leap so quickly to blaming social networking and texting –

technologies that allow people to tune others out when they don’t feel like engaging [...] physically distant online environments [that] functionally create a buffer between individuals, which makes it easier to ignore others’ pain, or even at times, inflict pain upon others

– feels premature and unfair. Granted, they also speculate about reality television and changing parenting styles and (sigh) violent video games, but that’s all it is; speculation, however interesting a launchpad for future studies such theorising may be.

For me, it’s just as easy to surmise that the rise of the internet has broadened peoples’ circles of empathy via exposing them to a wider swath of humanity, and that, in order to distort these findings to the degree they have been distorted, something far more nefarious must be going on… such as the increasing emergence of right wing political ideologies which promote the individual over the common good, say.

My point is, we can all play the blame game, but I think it’s fairly irresponsible to point random, unsupported fingers, even if our initial data is good. Correlation is not causation, in other words. Or even better: intuition alone is not science.

I mean, my own anecdotal experience of young people is that, increasingly, they possess a well-developed sense of irony and are very much inclined to mock any displays of earnest sincerity, even when answering test questions (or especially when answering test questions like these — take a look, and do the test if you like). Part of this is an instinctive recoil, on their part, from the self-aggrandizing nature of the Baby Boomers, alongside a corresponding desire to not be seen as a “hippie”. Quite simply, it’s a front, and one not qualitatively different from the pop cultural hip-hop braggadocio/swagger which also happens (not coincidentally?) to get their Boomer elders all a-twitter (pun not intended, although I could pretend it was and reap dubious kudos).

Anyway, point is, this is not the same thing as lacking in empathy, even if it appears to be. Overall, young people demonstrate, if anything, more empathy and kindness and gentleness than previous generations, although to stave off accusations of hypocrisy, I will completely own the subjectivity of that particular generalisation, and leave it there.

Here’s a particularly distressing story out of South Korea: last week (Friday, May 28, 2010), a couple were convicted of abandoning their 3-month-old baby, who starved to death while they fed their online gaming habit. It goes without saying that this is an awful, appalling scenario, and that, beyond any punitive sentences, these two people will surely need intense therapeutic intervention in order to rehabilitate their respective criminal lapses in parental responsibility. You don’t really need to be a “think of the children” type to come to that conclusion.

But the story, as sad as it is in isolation, has become somewhat of a bellwether for the larger issue of internet addiction in South Korea, something we’ve touched on here before. While instances of teenage addiction have dropped slightly, it appears that adults (almost one million, according to the Ministry of Public Administration and Safety) are becoming more addicted to internet gaming such as large multiplayer online role-playing games. In response, the government  has announced plans to open adult rehab centres, and to expand counselling for students and the unemployed (groups considered especially vulnerable to compulsive internet gaming addiction).

Interestingly, while there don’t appear to be many calls for censorship of the games themselves — something markedly different from how this would likely have played out in the English-speaking world — the reason for that absence of moral outrage might not be as refreshingly admirable as it first appears. Because, well, it’s probably down to money. Turns out South Korea has a huge and leading stake in the $28.5 billion global video game industry, in which combined revenues of some 1,200 online gaming companies in Korea reached an estimated $1.94 billion last year.

On the one hand, given the self-serving nature of most countries whenever revenue is threatened, Korea’s response is both pragmatic and apparently sensible, and yet we’re still left with the nagging sense that the overall point has somehow been missed, that addiction itself is a symptom of something more fundamental in the lives of those afflicted, and that focusing on internet gaming alone feels strangely unsatisfying… as if when dealing with alcoholics we only provided help for beer-drinkers. Plus, is anyone asking (I mean really asking) why the number of adolescent addicts has been decreasing, particularly given the rise for twenty- and thirty-somethings? And then, of course, there are those who engage in online gaming who are wondering why their own particular hobby is being so negatively singled out in contrast to others:

“Online games are a culture. [...] To me, people who hike or fish are as crazy as they think I am.”

In other words, something still feels off: if two million Koreans of all ages are addicted, and there is only a single case of a baby starving to death (which admittedly is one case too many), how large is the overall problem in terms of human misery? Sigh. But we’ve been here before, asking questions instead of providing answers. Hopefully, before we move on, we can point our readers toward any potentially productive trail markers we may have noticed up ahead.

For the sake of balance, here’s one last quick update, and after this, we promise to stop talking about Facebook for a while.

Some good insights, there, and don’t forget, it’s usually worth reading the user comments, too.

To sum up, the article makes the argument that Facebook, far from being chastened by the recent privacy backlash, knows exactly what it’s doing, and indeed is at worst encouraging and at best resigned to the controversy that always erupts whenever the site makes its very calculated changes to privacy settings. Bottom line: in order for it to succeed, Facebook needs to continuously challenge existing privacy conventions, and it’s this need that not only drives the regular (approximately every 18 months) s@#t-storm, but also the gradual adjustments in online attitudes toward privacy in general.

Will Facebook’s bet every 18 months that it can push the world to rethink privacy be the driver of the social web?

Anyway, enough already, it’s a good read, so go ahead and browse if you’re interested and, as promised, we’ll bow out for now.

On the day that Facebook announces new privacy settings amid almost instantaneous Web-wide reactions, we wanted to go over, in one all-encompassing post, the issues that led us to this point.

The thing is, there was already a notorious precedent, and the world’s foremost social networking site had been collecting plenty of negative press even before the current re-emergence of privacy as the paramount issue. Just recently in the UK, for example, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) had attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade Facebook to include on all of its pages, in the interests of child safety online, a clearly visible “panic button” that links directly to CEOP. Instead, Facebook met them halfway, by retooling its safety info center.

So far so (reasonably) good.

But nothing prepared them for the raging firestorm that seemed to build so suddenly regarding the privacy issues. Now strictly, this story is slightly outside the purview of this blog, affecting as it does pretty much everyone and not just youth, but it can’t hurt for adults reading this blog to have at least some inkling of both the issues and the timeline that led us to this point. To that end, I heartily recommend exploring most if not all the embedded links herein.

In November/December, 2009, Facebook adopted a new privacy policy that changed the privacy status of users’ information — as a concrete example, your “list of friends”, however restricted previously, was now automatically “publicly available”, with no privacy settings. Valiant (as well as illuminating) attempts to explain the issue in terms the average user could grasp sprang up. Since the New Year, the discontent rumbled along ominously, finally erupting all over the place. This was no longer just a gearhead issue; 400 million people were potentially affected. Here was Gawker‘s early take, in what it termed Facebook’s Great Betrayal:

Facebook’s business rationale here is clear. Rival Silicon Valley startup Twitter has grown extremely quickly in the last few years, almost entirely on the back of public content — from celebrities, people’s friends and users’ professional colleagues. That has brought traffic, money from search engines and a $1 billion valuation.

Facebook wants in on that kind of growth, and more public content means more traffic. But Facebook has historically been one of the most private of the social networks, functioning as a sort of safe alcove amid the chaos of MySpace and Friendster.

When you add the recent security issues (in which users’ email addresses, IP addresses and chat logs were exposed) to that of privacy, you get a sense of why the backlash has been so fierce. And believe me, it’s been fierce. Try this for size:

We’ve fought for years to create an open web, and we would be crazy to give our future over to a selfish little kid who has no problem stealing any innovation he catches from the corner of his eye from other entrepreneurs.

Didn’t anyone read “Tom Sawyer”? We’re whitewashing [Facebook founder and CEO Mark] Zuckerberg’s fence.

People are creating fan pages on Facebook and then paying Facebook to send them traffic. Let me explain this one more time: You’re PAYING Mark Zuckerberg money to send traffic to HIS SITE. Think about it.

Oh yeah, and while he’s taking your money and page views, he’s convincing everyone that they don’t need their own customer’s information: Just use Facebook Connect!

Oh yeah, and if you’re stupid enough to give up your customer database to Facebook, he will pay you back by screwing over your user’s privacy! Yes, that’s right: give up your customer database, pay for traffic to build Facebook’s page views and, by the way, if you would like to use a virtual currency, Zuck will take 30% of that as well!

Adding insult to injury for many has been the relative silence from Facebook executives. And when the likes of Zuckerberg did speak, they came across as unconcerned and, well, arrogant. Not to mention, plain wrong. Here’s danah boyd:

What startled me was the radio silence from Facebook.

And, in that same blog post, she includes these two Zuckerberg quotes (taken from David Kirkpatrick’s soon-to-be-released The Facebook Effect):

We always thought people would share more if we didn’t let them do whatever they wanted, because it gave them some order.

Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

Like I said, arrogant and wrong. That sense of wrongness, as intuitively grasped by many users even without a deep grounding in the issues, is perhaps best captured here, a nuanced and thoughtful post that is well worth five minutes of your time. But anyway, here we are, and Facebook has not exactly fallen over itself to apologise, even if today — around six months after the policy change that sparked the controversy — it has finally addressed the privacy issues to some degree.

History lesson over, we’ll see how it now plays out in real time. And speaking of real time, the restless Web never settles, and perhaps none of this will end up mattering at all.

[Update May 27th, 2010: Canada's Privacy Commissioner is still not happy with Facebook.]

A few posts ago, we mentioned Common Sense Media in passing, but we would be remiss if we ignored a recent and very laudable initiative from that same U.S. organisation.

Larry Magid at CNET News reports that the non-profit resource has developed a new educational curriculum, the Digital Literacy and Citizenship Initiative, aimed at raising ”a generation of responsible, smart, and safe digital citizens.”

Importantly, it appears to avoid any suggestion of lecturing, or indeed any trace of fearmongering, while based on a foundation of knowledge and respect towards young people. It is built around five units:

• Digital life: “How the anytime-anywhere-everywhere nature of digital media requires responsible choices.”
• Privacy and digital footprints: How to manage privacy online.
• Connected culture: How to build respectful one-on-one, group, and community relationships online and protect against cyberbullying.
• Self-expression and reputation: Who we are in various online contexts and how to protect your reputation in the process.
• Respecting creative work: How to get credit for original creations and respect others’ creative property.

It probably goes without saying, that Hot Topics approves wholeheartedly.

Two more interesting stories related to video gaming, then we’ll move on.

When most people think of the Boy Scouts organisation, images of wholesome, largely conservative and typically practical activities tend to dominate. Which is why it might be surprising, initially, to learn that the Boy Scouts of America have introduced two new video game-related awards for Cub Scouts. But you can quickly erase those mental images of smart uniformed boys gleefully collecting mutilated alien corpses in order to meet some predetermined requirement, since the expectations are of a decidedly more responsible (and gentle) nature, focusing instead on developing an understanding of rating systems and emphasising age-appropriateness throughout. For example, here are a couple of the requirements necessary for earning the belt loop and the academics pin, respectively:

Learn to play a new video game that is approved by your parent, guardian, or teacher.

Play a video game that will help you practice your math, spelling, or another skill that helps you in your schoolwork.

It’s almost disappointing, isn’t it?

Not so this next story out of the University of British Columbia. Quite inexplicably, given the current climate in which we seem to be wanting to positively micromanage the physical, mental and emotional well-being of our kids to an almost obsessive degree, UBC are offering (for $140 per week) a video game summer camp for kids, The Arcade Bunker, in which those children who are not especially athletic or artistic may still get their social needs met via Nintendo Wii, Playstation and computer games (including a tour of Electronic Arts).

Predictably, this has not gone unnoticed in some quarters, particularly among those concerned with such issues as childhood obesity. Prof. Heather McKay of UBC’s own department of medicine says:

“It seems to be going in exactly the wrong direction we want children to be going in the summer months, where they should be engaged in unstructured play, and should be outside and be doing what children of every age should be doing.”

But, all-things-geek website Geekosystem counters (while sensibly acknowledging the importance of exercise!):

But lets go back to those kids in the camp, playing video games for three hours every day. Take away the camp that keeps them supervised during the summer when their parents have to work. What are they likely to be doing? Yup, that’s right. Sitting at home playing video games.

Not only that, but likely without any scheduled fresh air breaks or a three-hour maximum daily limit, both of which are built into the UBC camp’s itinerary.

And speaking of imagination, here’s a lighter story with a slightly darker heart. A government-funded program in England is showing images from the controversial video game Grand Theft Auto and über-violent Simpsons cartoon The Itchy and Scratchy Show to elementary school kids in order to impart anti-violence messages. The idea behind it appears to revolve around combating desensitisation by stressing the reality of violence versus its fanciful portrayal in various media.

Hmmm. I know this is entirely anecdotal, but my experience whenever I’ve asked kids about violence in whichever game they’re currently playing is to be fixed with a withering gaze filled with a shame-inducing mix of pity and exasperation, followed quickly by the words: “You do know this isn’t real, right?” I mean, the authors of this program (a charity with the alarming name Support After Murder and Manslaughter) undoubtedly have their hearts in the right place, but do we really think that most kids need to be reminded of that essential rule of fiction, or that the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy said fiction is a permanent state?