Teen blogging
Adam, over at A Violently Executed Blog, unearthed this little gem: Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools: Blue Valley Blogs. It is apparently a listing of weblogs and blogrings that the "Citizens" find questionable. All these blogs appear to be authored by area teenagers. Sayeth the "Citizens" [hyperlinks in original]:
In any case, I suspect the whole sexual predator issue is simply a red herring, as it often is. I took the liberty of following some of the links on the "Citizen's" list, and arrived at xmiss_vietx's Xanga Site. The author of this blog is a 17-year-old girl. Here is a brief sample of her writing:
It's obvious that xmiss_vietx is no slouch in the brains and scholarship department. Based on this and some of the pictures she posts, I'd estimate that she's a very fine individual, who her parents and teachers have every reason to be proud of. Would they be proud of the writing on her blog, though, both the teenspeak writing style and the things she writes about? That, perhaps, is a more pertinent point than overblown fears about sexual predators. Note in the first quote how she writes about getting drunk on Halloween. Her writing is sprinkled with profanity, and bears virtually no resemblance to the "proper" English she's undoubtedly required to use in school. She doesn't hesitate to criticize the adults in her life, often with vehemence. Could a core objection here be one of simple propriety? A bunch of overly conservative adults, objecting to teenagers who write embarrassing things on the internet? xmiss_vietx gives her mother both barrels on her blog, and all her friends have probably read that post. So all her friends know she gets pissed off at her mother sometimes. That could be embarrassing to the mother, right? The mother who is not expected to be reading this weblog? And yet, can any of us honestly say that it would be any different if weblogs were not involved? She would still be critical of her mother, and all her friends would still be privy to that information. The objection is based on the fact that, thanks to her weblog, there is now a public record of xmiss_vietx's objections. Teenagers have never before had access to something like this: an uncensored public voice. They can now go "on the record," in their own words, and it smells of power. Adults with authoritarian tendencies are going to be strongly inclined to object.
Embarrassment and propriety aren't the only issues, either. Referring again to xmiss_vietx's writing about getting drunk on Halloween, this is precisely the sort of thing that adults do not want teenagers to be writing about. Adults are very touchy about the vision of reality that they insist teenagers be exposed to--they carefully craft an image of the way the world is supposed to be, and then firmly squelch anything that might threaten that image. This is why teenagers are so often "protected" from "harmful" content and "harmful" influences--often with the full force of the law. It's not that young people don't already know about this stuff, it's because adults want to minimize the influence of these things as much as possible--they want to minimize the social proof surrounding these activities. The problem is that it never works--if they succeed in eliminating social proof at all (an idea which I am highly skeptical of), it is merely replaced with scarcity, which is actually a more powerful motivator. Applying this to biological drives is especially stupid, since these aren't even based on social proof in the first place--teenagers will never, ever lose their interest in sex. No social incitement whatsoever is needed to spark what is a powerful and very fundamental human biological need. It is simply there, as an inherant property of being young and human (although it won't surprise me at all to someday see a type of "medication" designed to eliminate the sex drive of teenagers...for their own "protection," of course). Other issues (e.g. drinking, smoking) are more obviously reinforced with social proof, but, invariably, people will tend to be attracted to things they can't have, or to things they know they're not supposed to have. This is the principle of scarcity at work. Combine this with the natural rebelliousness of young people, and a very powerful attraction is created. This is simply a fact. It is how human beings' brains work, and cannot be changed, no matter how many rules are instituted or how much censorship is applied. The issue with blogging is that the very existence of teen bloggers makes it much more difficult for adults to suppress the truth, namely that teenagers do drink, they have sex, they do drugs, they often take risks that appear flatly stupid to older people. Exposing these truths, acknowledging them, acts to reduce the power of both the scarcity principle and rebellion against authority. We are left with social proof, but now that the truth is being told, this can easily be juxtaposed against actual evidence of harm. Furthermore, since people can openly discuss these things, they can also discuss the actual harm, in a frank and open way, which lends social proof to the anti-drug, anti-drinking, etc. viewpoints. Having social proof supporting both sides of the argument will create an atmosphere of balance, in which young people will be able to make informed, intelligent decisions. How can adults who care about their children, or their students, not want this?
Blogging, of course, is not totally free of repercussions. xmiss_vietx has pictures of herself on her blog, for example. This is something I would never dream of doing myself--I am just too paranoid, and I have more at stake than her. There's also a legitimate concern that what she writes on her blog will have consequences in the future--some potential employer or manager who happens to be a total nutjob (like one of these "Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools" people) might take offense at the content. Once you put something out on the internet, it's not in your control anymore. If it's potentially compromising, it could be used against you. This could happen years or even decades in the future. Another concern is that people often forget the very simple and important fact that anyone can read a weblog. From that link:
In light of all of this, I think it's obvious that teen blogging safety (as well as blogging safety in general) is not a cut-and-dried issue. However, I think the best thing to do is simply to encourage some reasonable precautions, and to support the freedom of teenagers to write as they please. Any type of suppression is simply not going to help. My own precautions include not posting pictures of myself on the internet. I think posting a picture of yourself on the internet is still pretty risky, especially if it's right alongside text that might be compromising in some way. Over time, this may change at a cultural level (in fact, I hope it does--more than one science fiction author has dealt with the question of how society would change if anyone could access personal details about anyone else's life), but at present, it just seems too risky to me, looking at it from a long-term perspective (and given what I write about). The other main precaution I take is that absolutely no one who I know in real life knows how to find my weblogs. I hate this restriction, and I often find myself wishing I could tell people about this stuff. But it's just too great a risk. In fact, nobody I know in real life is even aware that I blog at all. I also take the further precaution of never using the real name of someone I know in my blogs, nor do I mention the name of the city where I live.
Perhaps I am overly cautious. Others will no doubt be less so, and, quite frankly, I would love it if they are the ones who turn out to be right. The current trends in teen blogging appear to be towards greater frankness and openness. If an entire generation embraces this trend, it is virtually inevitable that society will be forced to accommodate it, just as society has mostly adjusted to the body piercing and tattooing of the 90's generation, and the pot-smoking tendencies of most of the generations in the past 100 years. Of course, there will always be a small percentage of fuddy-duddies out there who simply will not hire a person with a nose ring or visible tattoo, and there will always be asshole corporations who insist that none of their staff smoke pot ever. Likewise, there will probably always be people who have a problem with the level of openness displayed on the blogs of today's young people. But as time goes by, their numbers will continue to decrease. In the long run, I don't think teenagers blogging about how drunk they got on Halloween or how pissed off they are at their mothers is anything to worry about.
Q: Why can blogging be so dangerous?They fail to note the obvious, namely that the Kacie Woody case had nothing to do with blogging. Furthermore, I don't believe I've ever encountered a weblog, by anyone, that contained the sort of information a criminal would need to plan a crime against that person. A far more realistic risk is that a person's boss (or high-school principal) will discover something he or she doesn't like and take some sort of retaliatory action. (The other thing about that final part that is really out of line is the simple statement of the man's age, as if the fact that he was 47 years old is proof enough that he was a psycho. That, however, is another topic.)
A: Blogrings are electronic neighborhoods. Would you allow your kids to run unrestricted in a neighborhood full of lies, profanity, occultism, pornography, sex shops, and perverts? Of course not. We move into real neighborhoods that we consider the most beautiful, safe, and best environments to raise our families. Yet, for some reason, some parents neither monitor nor question the electronic neighborhoods that their kids spend hours in every night through the Internet.
Imagine your most intimate thoughts as a teen -- your hopes, dreams, details of a date, a crush, a fight with your boyfriend, the loneliness of never having a boyfriend, your frustration over a test or teacher, or the struggles your dad is facing because he got laid off. Imagine the things you might have written in a private diary stuffed under your bed. Now imagine sharing that information with every stranger in your school, neighborhood, registered Johnson County sexual predators, and even the world! Welcome to the world of teen blogging.
Because teens are quick to reveal personal details about themselves and their friends on blog sites (personal details compromise about 90% of the blog postings), teens are also the most vulnerable to sexual predators or other individuals or groups who use type of personal information to manipulate and harm them.Kacie Woody was a 13-year-old middle student in Greenbrier, Arkansas who began talking with "Dave" after they met in a Yahoo chat room for Christian teens. On December 3, 2002, Kacie was home alone while her father worked the night shift as a police officer. She received a phone call from Dave. What Kacie did not know was that Dave was 47, not 18. He traveled from his home in San Diego to Kacie's home in Arkansas, planning for this specific night. As he spoke with her on the phone, he stood right outside, holding a rag soaked with chloroform. Kacie was abducted, sexually abused, and killed. Teen blogs such as xanga provide a sexual predator exactly what he needs to plot his next crime. [snip]
In any case, I suspect the whole sexual predator issue is simply a red herring, as it often is. I took the liberty of following some of the links on the "Citizen's" list, and arrived at xmiss_vietx's Xanga Site. The author of this blog is a 17-year-old girl. Here is a brief sample of her writing:
HAPPY HALLOWEEN everyone! damn wat a sucky halloween i'm havin this year! well saturday i went to a halloween party down in westport and that was a lot of fun! got drunk off my ass haha...my first college party with college ppl...saw a FINE ass asian guy..black n korean and i don't remember his name ne more haha o well! gosh i can't wait to leave for freakin college..There are also pictures of her and her friends, and a whole mess of links to other blogs. And, just to give xmiss_vietx all due credit, I'll quote this as well, from that same blog entry:
well got my progress report card...all A's and one freakin B in physics! i'm sooooo mad! she is such a baddddddddd teacher.....i have an A in my honors pre-cal class but i don't have an A in PHYSICS? omg!Complaining because she didn't get straight A's on her report card? I have to admit, I think that's pretty cute. And I can relate to the physics teacher thing--my own high-school physics teacher was really, really bad, and physics can be challenging. Note that she's also taking pre-calculus for honors. She seems to be a lot like I was, at that age--a very good student, with a thirst for independence and self-determination. She clearly wants to get on with things, to have some freedom from what she knows is undue interference from the adults in her life. We all felt this way when we were 17. The only thing she's doing differently from older generations is writing about it on a public website. As are a whole lot of other teenagers.
It's obvious that xmiss_vietx is no slouch in the brains and scholarship department. Based on this and some of the pictures she posts, I'd estimate that she's a very fine individual, who her parents and teachers have every reason to be proud of. Would they be proud of the writing on her blog, though, both the teenspeak writing style and the things she writes about? That, perhaps, is a more pertinent point than overblown fears about sexual predators. Note in the first quote how she writes about getting drunk on Halloween. Her writing is sprinkled with profanity, and bears virtually no resemblance to the "proper" English she's undoubtedly required to use in school. She doesn't hesitate to criticize the adults in her life, often with vehemence. Could a core objection here be one of simple propriety? A bunch of overly conservative adults, objecting to teenagers who write embarrassing things on the internet? xmiss_vietx gives her mother both barrels on her blog, and all her friends have probably read that post. So all her friends know she gets pissed off at her mother sometimes. That could be embarrassing to the mother, right? The mother who is not expected to be reading this weblog? And yet, can any of us honestly say that it would be any different if weblogs were not involved? She would still be critical of her mother, and all her friends would still be privy to that information. The objection is based on the fact that, thanks to her weblog, there is now a public record of xmiss_vietx's objections. Teenagers have never before had access to something like this: an uncensored public voice. They can now go "on the record," in their own words, and it smells of power. Adults with authoritarian tendencies are going to be strongly inclined to object.
Embarrassment and propriety aren't the only issues, either. Referring again to xmiss_vietx's writing about getting drunk on Halloween, this is precisely the sort of thing that adults do not want teenagers to be writing about. Adults are very touchy about the vision of reality that they insist teenagers be exposed to--they carefully craft an image of the way the world is supposed to be, and then firmly squelch anything that might threaten that image. This is why teenagers are so often "protected" from "harmful" content and "harmful" influences--often with the full force of the law. It's not that young people don't already know about this stuff, it's because adults want to minimize the influence of these things as much as possible--they want to minimize the social proof surrounding these activities. The problem is that it never works--if they succeed in eliminating social proof at all (an idea which I am highly skeptical of), it is merely replaced with scarcity, which is actually a more powerful motivator. Applying this to biological drives is especially stupid, since these aren't even based on social proof in the first place--teenagers will never, ever lose their interest in sex. No social incitement whatsoever is needed to spark what is a powerful and very fundamental human biological need. It is simply there, as an inherant property of being young and human (although it won't surprise me at all to someday see a type of "medication" designed to eliminate the sex drive of teenagers...for their own "protection," of course). Other issues (e.g. drinking, smoking) are more obviously reinforced with social proof, but, invariably, people will tend to be attracted to things they can't have, or to things they know they're not supposed to have. This is the principle of scarcity at work. Combine this with the natural rebelliousness of young people, and a very powerful attraction is created. This is simply a fact. It is how human beings' brains work, and cannot be changed, no matter how many rules are instituted or how much censorship is applied. The issue with blogging is that the very existence of teen bloggers makes it much more difficult for adults to suppress the truth, namely that teenagers do drink, they have sex, they do drugs, they often take risks that appear flatly stupid to older people. Exposing these truths, acknowledging them, acts to reduce the power of both the scarcity principle and rebellion against authority. We are left with social proof, but now that the truth is being told, this can easily be juxtaposed against actual evidence of harm. Furthermore, since people can openly discuss these things, they can also discuss the actual harm, in a frank and open way, which lends social proof to the anti-drug, anti-drinking, etc. viewpoints. Having social proof supporting both sides of the argument will create an atmosphere of balance, in which young people will be able to make informed, intelligent decisions. How can adults who care about their children, or their students, not want this?
Blogging, of course, is not totally free of repercussions. xmiss_vietx has pictures of herself on her blog, for example. This is something I would never dream of doing myself--I am just too paranoid, and I have more at stake than her. There's also a legitimate concern that what she writes on her blog will have consequences in the future--some potential employer or manager who happens to be a total nutjob (like one of these "Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools" people) might take offense at the content. Once you put something out on the internet, it's not in your control anymore. If it's potentially compromising, it could be used against you. This could happen years or even decades in the future. Another concern is that people often forget the very simple and important fact that anyone can read a weblog. From that link:
One young teen who is a friend of mine was shocked to learn that I knew her boyfriend had broken up with her. She knows I have a Xanga, but she was still shocked that I knew. Funny thing is, it was supposedly a secret from the boy's mom, yet it was posted on the WWW for the world to see.This problem isn't just limited to teens--I've made this sort of mistake myself more than once. It's a very common issue on multi-forum websites like Worldcrossing. You never know who might be lurking. People have actually lost their jobs because of stuff they've posted on their blogs--they failed to consider that their boss could read a blog just as easily as anyone else. The question is, will the boss actually read it? Or will xmiss_vietx's mother actually read her blog? There is no way to know. However, the fact that "Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools" has gone through the trouble of compiling a compendium of weblogs of area high school students actually seems to make it more likely that something like this would happen! In other words, their very effort to try and fix this problem is making it worse.
In light of all of this, I think it's obvious that teen blogging safety (as well as blogging safety in general) is not a cut-and-dried issue. However, I think the best thing to do is simply to encourage some reasonable precautions, and to support the freedom of teenagers to write as they please. Any type of suppression is simply not going to help. My own precautions include not posting pictures of myself on the internet. I think posting a picture of yourself on the internet is still pretty risky, especially if it's right alongside text that might be compromising in some way. Over time, this may change at a cultural level (in fact, I hope it does--more than one science fiction author has dealt with the question of how society would change if anyone could access personal details about anyone else's life), but at present, it just seems too risky to me, looking at it from a long-term perspective (and given what I write about). The other main precaution I take is that absolutely no one who I know in real life knows how to find my weblogs. I hate this restriction, and I often find myself wishing I could tell people about this stuff. But it's just too great a risk. In fact, nobody I know in real life is even aware that I blog at all. I also take the further precaution of never using the real name of someone I know in my blogs, nor do I mention the name of the city where I live.
Perhaps I am overly cautious. Others will no doubt be less so, and, quite frankly, I would love it if they are the ones who turn out to be right. The current trends in teen blogging appear to be towards greater frankness and openness. If an entire generation embraces this trend, it is virtually inevitable that society will be forced to accommodate it, just as society has mostly adjusted to the body piercing and tattooing of the 90's generation, and the pot-smoking tendencies of most of the generations in the past 100 years. Of course, there will always be a small percentage of fuddy-duddies out there who simply will not hire a person with a nose ring or visible tattoo, and there will always be asshole corporations who insist that none of their staff smoke pot ever. Likewise, there will probably always be people who have a problem with the level of openness displayed on the blogs of today's young people. But as time goes by, their numbers will continue to decrease. In the long run, I don't think teenagers blogging about how drunk they got on Halloween or how pissed off they are at their mothers is anything to worry about.
posted by cke at 4:23 PM
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