Thanks for your post, a.arminger. Those are good questions a lot of people are asking. The user-driven Web, or Web 2.0, kind of came out of nowhere for a lot of parents. People of all ages, but especially young people, have been putting up their own content in the form of online journals and Web pages, then blogs, for years. It just kept getting easier, with sites like Blogger, then Xanga and LiveJournal. Friendster added the social-networking piece but without a lot of flexibility for page design. When MySpace allowed all the elements - the social aspect and blogging and easy page design (html not needed but allowed) - Web 2.0 really took off from a teen perspective. Bebo is one of hundreds of similar sites that provide for this collective self-expression or creative networking (see
this list in Wikipedia).
It's not something that anybody or any government allowed, and it's international (e.g., LunarStorm in Sweden, Cyworld in Korea, Mixi in Japan and many of them moving into other regions and countries), so it's complicated for national governments to enforce their laws. And in many countries there are free-speech laws or principles that protect this online expression, provided it doesn't break existing laws against child pornography, hate speech, violence, etc. Many individual sites have added features that protect minors to a degree, for example privacy features, but these apply to minors who are truthful about their ages, and privacy is a double-edged sword when private blogs block parents as well as strangers with bad intentions. But so much of the risky behavior occurring on the Web, on mobile phones, etc. - such as cyberbullying - isn't against the law or about strangers at all. Online peer harassment, defamation, gossip are going to require the best thinking of a whole lot of experts, including those who have been dealing with these issues since long before the Web came along. Bullying has always been a problem and probably always will be, but when it can be 24/7 and anonymous, it can be even worse.
And you zoomed in on another key problem - that everybody's in the same space together, minors and adults. The latest research is showing that, in MySpace, for example, most teens just socialize with their friends and so are quite safe, but nothing ensures that they are. There will always be risk-takers, and they're the ones most at risk.
That's just a partial picture of what parents (and teens and governments and Internet companies) are dealing with on the social Web. The onus for child protection is increasingly very much with parents and young people themselves. Not so much because of irresponsible Internet businesses (some of the social sites are very responsible and responsive to parents, some less so) but also because of the growing number of places where kids can access the Net and devices of all kinds with which they can access it. I hope this helps. Let us know if not or if this only raises more questions. All best,
Anne
--
Anne Collier
BlogSafety co-director
