Center on Media and Child Health

Virtual Safety?

Kid-centered online communities may seem safer than many other potential hang outs, whether electronic or not--after all, the sites are often heavily monitored to ensure that less than well-intentioned adults can't access them.

According to an article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, however, even such monitoring doesn't protect the kids from another threat: each other. The kids' virtual selves interact, maintain virtual bank accounts, and buy virtual furniture as they live their virtual lives. But they are also virtually scamming each other in as many ways as they can create.

A 2007 UCLA study explored cheating among tween game players and found that such behavior extended beyond the usual workarounds: It also includes rigging elections, selling products that don't exist, and using scams to empty other users' virtual bank accounts. And although sites increasingly monitor chats between users and can ban them temporarily or permanently for bad behavior, the article suggests that safety in these worlds is more difficult to maintain than it seems.

TV Use Down; Computer Use Up

The 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey is now available.  Here are the results of the media-related questions:

• 35% of students watched television 3 or more hours per day on an average school day (see table).  This is down from 43% in 1999.
• 25% of students used a computer for something that was not school work for 3 or more hours per day on an average school day (see table).  This is up slightly from 22% in 2003.

Though overall use between the two is down, I wonder if teens are really watching less television, or whether the availability of TV episodes over the Internet combined with widely available broadband access means they are watching those shows over the Internet instead of on a traditional TV set.

Glamorizing Thinness through Pro-Anorexia Websites

Last week, the French parliament’s lower house adopted a bill that would make it illegal to publicly glamorize or encourage extreme thinness. In particular, the bill cracks down on “pro-ana”—or pro-anorexia—websites, where people with eating disorders can go for advice on how to lose weight, for photos of waif-like celebrities that offer “Thinspiration,” and for general support.

Pro-ED (eating disorder) websites have raised controversy for as long as they've existed--in fact, when public, most are taken down within days of appearing on the web. And although some call these sites sanctuaries for people with common experiences, others see them as "encouraging prolonged nutritional deprivation that would...[expose] them to risk of death or directly compromise health," which would make them illegal under this bill.

See research about pro-anorexia websites:

• Bardone-Cone et al (2007). "What does viewing a pro-anorexia website do? An experimental examination of website exposure and moderating effects."
• Bardone-Cone et al (2006). "Investigating the impact of pro-anorexia websites: a pilot study."
• Dias (2003). "The ANA sanctuary: Women's pro-anorexia narratives in cyberspace."
• Fox et al (2005). "Pro-anorexia, weight-loss drugs and the Internet: An 'anti-recovery' explanatory model of anorexia."

Eyes on (Cyber)Bullying

As internet use and other electronic forms of communication have become increasingly prevalent among young people, a new form of bullying has been on the rise: cyberbullying. This form of bullying involves “posting hurtful, embarrassing, or threatening text or images using the Internet, cell phones, or other communication devices.” And as difficult as any bullying can be to detect, cyberbullying poses the additional challenges of being anonymous and easy to hide.

That’s where Eyes on Bullying comes in. This new multimedia bullying prevention program, developed in part by CMCH Senior Scientist Ronald G. Slaby, PhD, provides resources to help parents, children, and caregivers address and prevent bullying of all kinds. The website contains information about bullying, as well as activities, resources, and a toolkit that parents and caregivers can download for free.

The program is also hosting three national teleseminars on topics related to bullying. The second, entitled “The Growing Problem of Cyberbullying,” will occur on Tuesday May 6, from 2 to 3 p.m. EST. See the website to sign up or, if you are unable to attend the teleseminars, to download podcasts and transcripts of them after they air.

What I Learned at the CCFC Summit

On Friday, I presented at the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood's Annual Summit.  My talk about research on media and sex was well-attended and lead to some great discussion among participants. 

I wanted to post about a few resources I became aware of through the Summit and pass them on to CMCH blog readers, since you may also be interested:

• Sarah Grimes, a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University, presented her work on interactive websites and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) for kids.  Turns out she has a blog about digital games and other technologies for children: Gamine Expedition
• In the main gathering area, there was an exhibit titled "Buy Me Something" by the talented photographer Nat Ward, who aims for these images to "challenge people to consider how toys and the mechanisms that facilitate their sale inform and reproduce a distinct set of culturally-defined values."  Click the arrow on the bottom right to see more images:  Buy Me Something
• The Media Education Foundation has a new video coming out in Fall 2008 about the commercialization of childhood.  CMCH Director Dr. Michael Rich makes an appearance around minute 3:37 in the trailer they previewed at the Summit: Consuming Kids

 

Do Parents Understand Their Children's Online Activities?

The following was written by guest blogger Dafna Lemish, editor of the Journal of Children and Media, professor of communication at Tel Aviv University, and future CMCH visiting scholar.  Since this study is currently published in Hebrew, she translates her findings here:

My colleague Rivka Ribak and I sought to understand the role of the Internet within an Israeli inter-generational context, focusing on parental mediation and children's literacy. We used elaborate questionnaires (developed following the UK Children Go-On-Line project) which were completed by 532 dyads of children and their parents. 

The study details intergenerational responses to "out-going content" – information that children give away (such as their personal information and their photos); and "in-coming content" – exposure to material that is deemed inappropriate to the age of the surfers (such as pornography, racist and gory content); the children's perceptions of on-line dangers; and the parent-child-Internet triangle – what parents know and do not know about their children's web practices.

We found that parents know little about their children's Internet proficiency; however, parents in Israel do not suffer from a "moral panic" over their children’s use of the Internet. Instead, they trust themselves and their children. Thus it is educational programs and media literacy that they regard as helpful, and not censorship – that quintessential cure for moral panic.

Most interesting for us is noting the difficulties in interpreting the findings:

• in practical terms -- e.g., is the internet a legitimate source for homework?
• from a moral standpoint -- e.g., is experimentation with alternative identities immoral?
• from a developmental point of view -- e.g., are children's efforts at concealing their on-line activities from their parents helpful for the development of their individual identities?
• from historical perspective -- e.g., do parents today really know and regulate their children less than parents in olden times?

We learned a lot from this study about how the same data can be interpreted in quite different ways, and used to support quite different ideological positions about the social construction of childhood, and what are good and/or bad media practices.

Cyberbullying Issue of JAH

The Journal of Adolescent Health has dedicated a supplemental issue to the topic of cyberbullying and all full-text is publicly available.  In the first article, long-time media violence researcher L. Rowell Huesmann reviewed 41 studies on violence in television and video games and concluded: "Media violence increases the risk significantly that the viewer or game player will behave more violently both in the short and long run."

• See research on media violence from the CMCH Database of Research

Other articles in the issue explore the prevalence and predictors of cyberbullying, the difference between online harassment and cyberbullying, and commentaries on educational policy implications and Internet gang violence.

• See JAH table of contents

 

Making Facebook Friends with a Frog?

Sophos, an IT security company, performed an interesting experiment to learn more about identity theft.  They created a fake profile for a frog named Freddy Staur, then sent out 200 friend requests.  Eighty-seven Facebook users accepted Freddy's friend request, 82 of whom also gave out identifying information such as their email addresses, phone numbers, photos of themselves, current addresses, education or workplace, mother's maiden names or their full date of birth.

Given that 96% of teens use social networking programs like Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace, online privacy is becoming more of a concern among parents. 

In response to their study, Sophos has created a best practices guide for how to use Facebook safely. 

 

Online Bullying and Sexual Harassment Studies

There are two new studies on the Internet in this month's Journal of Adolescent Health:

Prevalence and Frequency of Internet Harassment Instigation: Implications for Adolescent Health. by Ybarra, M. L., & Mitchell, K. J.
Using data from a survey of 1500 teens, researchers found that 6% reported being frequent perpetrators of online harassment, 6% reported being occasional perpetrators, and 17% reported being limited perpetrators in the past year.  They conclude that their findings "reinforce previous research that youth who harass others online are likely facing concurrent behavioral and psychosocial challenges."

Online Requests for Sexual Pictures from Youth: Risk Factors and Incident Characteristics.
by Mitchell, K. J., Finkelhor, D., & Wolak, J.
Using data from a survey of 1500 teens, researchers found that among teens who use the Internet, 4% had been asked to send a sexual picture of themselves during the past year.  Female Black youth and boys and girls being abused are particularly vulnerable.

Plug and Play Barbie

With the success of physical toys related to online content (such as the Webkinz phenomenon), Mattel has unlocked a whole new world for Barbie fans.  A New York Times article describes the latest Barbie product: a doll shaped Mp3 player that opens up online content such as games, shops, and chatting capabilities when plugged into a docking station. 

Though research has shown benefits of using the Internet such as the ability to express one's identity and connect with others, it has also shown that Internet safety concerns like online sexual predators and privacy are a reality.  Toys created to drive children to a company's website encourage kids at younger and younger ages to begin using the Internet regularly, exposing them to both the benefits and disadvantages of Internet use.