For teens, Dear Diary morphs into Xanga covers everything from banning Xanga in schools to cyberbullying to the advantages of blogging for youth. It’s a great article (although the worst signup process ever).

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For those who hadn’t heard, other social communication tools are usurping email’s supremacy in Korea, or at least so says Chosun

In a cover story on urban youth in India called Aliens! (ref Stowe Boyd and Dina Mehta), Business World begins the article with “If men are from Mars and women from Venus, is the species known as ‘youth’ from the moon orbiting the distant Pluto?” This kind of framing inevitably worries me because it signifies that the writer is going to speak about youth as a fascinating ‘other’ where adults exotify youth. Throughout the article, they refer to different age groups as different species while trying to classify different groups of youth using models that would make sense to adults. ::cringe::

Deeper inside the magazine is an article entitled IMHO*, IM Rulz. I begin the article concerned. For the most part, the article discusses practices, but there are embedded assumptions that really get my goat. Here’s the one that upset me the most:

IM is a kind of metaphor for the mindset of the new millennium youth. It fulfils a deep-seated need for constant stimulation. And keeps pace with their shorter attention spans.

In July, i spoke about how designers are building technology off of the assumption that everyone has ADD. We often joke about the fact that the MTV generation has no attention span, but i have never seen anything that empirically validates this. Without concrete data, i’m absolutely convinced that this is just an adult projection onto youth. There is no doubt that the prescription of ritalin and adderall are way up but there are tons of reports on misdiagnosis of ADD. Interestingly, more kids are diagnosed in the wealthier districts of the States. Why? Well, frankly, almost everyone i know sees an improvement in their attention span when they’re on these meds and pressure parents who are determined that their kids get into the best schools and calm down and otherwise act proper are bound to see this as a perfect remedy. That does not mean that these kids have less attention than any previous generation.

What we do know is that there is far more media available to consume today. With thousands of TV stations and the Internet, there’s almost infinite choice. Guess what? With more choice, people are needlessly asking themselves “is there something better?” Channel surfing is not a new phenomenon. Given choice, people are worried that they might be missing something.

And what is this deep-seated need for constant stimulation that they are referring to? And why is this particular to youth?

Aside from my irritation at their projection of ADD onto youth, i think that their causal relationships are all screwy. Youth exist in an always-on culture. With mobile phones and computers at their finger tips, they are able to maintain relationships constantly, unbarred by physical geographical constraints. Always-on culture is not the product of a deep-seeded need for constant stimulation. Alternatively, the perception of this need for stimulation probably results from the opportunity of having an always-on culture.

Identity formation amongst youth is deeply rooted in being able to connect and relate to others of the same age. Remember the paper cup phones that kids would string between neighboring houses to talk late at night? Remember teenagers and land lines? IM is no different. It’s just a new opportunity to keep in contact with one’s friend group, not the production of some mental deformity.

My gut reaction says hysteria around IM culture has to do with hysteria over what adults don’t understand about youth because of generational differences with regard to access to media. Thus, i groan.

Damn, the NYTimes has been really compelling lately. And their apology about their coverage of the Iraq war makes me think i should re-acquire my subscription (i cancelled it because i was peeved with their coverage after 9/11).

Anyhow, over the weekend, the NYTimes ran an article on friends with benefits. It’s a fascinating article about teenage relationships and i really want to know how common the described practices are. I mean, if girls are really calling the shots about sex, what are the long-term implications? Damn that’s rad. If girls are calling the shots, will it help combat HIV? (Historically, male pressure to not use condoms has put women at great risk in hetero relationships.) And if a matter-of-fact attitude about sex is emerging, can we begin to be more serious about realizing that marriage is just a contract, not some hormone-driven fantasy about love? If this is actually true, what all falls out?

And is FaceTheJury facing the jury because of aiding and ebedding teens under the guise of an 18+ site?

One more on Kellogg… two framings, in particular, really made me think:

Mimi Ito (whose work anyone in socialtech should follow) is an anthropologist and comes at digital kids with that perspective. Using an anthro framework, the key is to think about kids in their terms, not trying to project or assert an adult framework on kids. In other words, the goal is not to save kids, but to respect them on their terms. She points out that age is one of the most oppressive forces in society, even more naturalized than gender. Because kids grow into adults and we were all once kids, people tend to treat kids as young adults. The goal is to get them to adulthood, not to be valued on kid level.

We also talked about technological tinkering and how many kids learn to explore technology that way. Liz Keith pointed out that a lot of digital participation by kids is social tinkering.

I think that point is really key because we tend not to value the social tinkering or give kids the framework to value that, even though it’s such a key feature of their lives. [And there are nice parallels to my Etcon rant about social hacking vs. technological hacking.]

I’m at a meeting with the Kellogg Foundation talking about vulnerable youth. They are interested in how technology can help at-risk kids take an alternate path. A few things keep coming up for me.

Situated learning. Folks have passions and if you can situate the learning they are doing in the scope of those passions, would learning be more effective? Fan fiction communities seem to be learning how to write and edit. What about teaching physics on the field to football students? What can be done with consumer media? What are the different ways to engage with passions?

Follow the drugs. Crystal meth use goes up amongst youth between 125% and 200% every youth. Educators and governments keep talking about the addictions and are screaming for it to stop, but they aren’t looking into why people are using it in HS. They think it’s only about peer pressure. When i was talking to kids doing meth, i kept hearing about how it gave them motivation, a relief to boredom, the feeling that they were doing something in this world (even if it was only scrubbing a tile floor with a toothbrush). Boredom is literally killing the youth.

What’s the point? Many kids i knew growing up had no motivation to live; where the hell were we going? Health, the future… these are all products of an optimistic life view. When you’re working a job till midnight, dealing with parents who are abusive, dealing with gang culture, what the hell does school have to offer that’s at all helpful? More than anything, it’s a place to just release all of that tension, anger and get attention for it. I mean, if you release that on the streets, you’ll get the shit beat out of you. At school, teachers give you attention.

In other words, how can education get out of philosophy and work in spite of all of what’s going on? Better yet, how can education be situated in the chaos that’s going on rather than thinking it’ll go away?

When Melora Zaner told me that teens didn’t use email, she was talking about the generational gap of preferred communication methods. Although i’m anxiously awaiting her actual report on this, it doesn’t surprise me in the least. Around 1998, colleges stopped giving out email accounts and pretty much everyone reverted to free accounts (Hotmail, Yahoo and the like). Hotmail purports to have about 1/4 of all email addresses worldwide.

This week, i got the first spam burst that has truly crippled me. Normally, i’ll get a burst of like 10000 messages; it’ll piss off my ISP, make a mess out of my phone and whathaveyou. But this current round is unbearable. Some spam system is hitting random things like joe [at] danah [dot] org and ben and a lot of other random first names. I used hundreds of names at my domain name for specialized addresses. I have no clue which ones i use. But i do know that i can’t handle this, my phone can’t handle this, and i’m utterly uninterested in coping with it.

Personally, i’m horrified by technological communications. My voice mail crashed this week. My email is a wreck. Fucking spammers have inundated my blogs. I just want face-to-face interactions without having to deal with organizing them. This is when i really wonder what life was like before the phone (or even the telegraph). I definitely have romanticized notions of moments of showing up a the town pub when i want to be social.

::grumble::grumble::

In recent days, schools have been getting more and more outraged over ratemyteachers.com. The site allows you to anonymously rate your high school teachers and express discontent. Of course, no teacher deals well with anonymous feedback, particularly in the form of a public site. That said, we’ve all been through the hells of high school and there’s nothing more entertaining than voicing our aggrevation.

We all know that teenagers are highly susceptible to fashions. Fitting in is inherently part of those miserable years. Thus, it should come as no surprise that contemporary teenage culture requires cell phones. Of course, what makes this trend even more interesting is that teenagers are literally shut out of social circles if they fail to participate in cell phone culture.

On the spur of a moment, i wandered into a new media conference that was addressing youth culture and their relationship with technology as a result of growing up digital. My motivation in attending was primarily to hear John Seely Brown speak and i was quite glad that i did. He did a great job of taking his philosophy and making it real through stories and a fabulous presentation. Although the content was not necessarily that novel to me, i was easily reminded of why i love attending talks: they make me think and generate new ideas.

I very much enjoyed many of the talks. An ethnographer from Japan spoke about SMS culture in youth there while a professor discussed the racist and gender issues embedded in Diablo. Others talked about blogs, the value of music, the role of games, paper journalism directed at youth (it was run by the Journalism department).

Yet, the most problematic speech for me was the one by a woman who worked at NeoPets. While i had heard the name before, i knew nothing about the system. The images were so compelling and her speech pattern made it easy to fall in love with the game. The problematic component of her presentation was not actually during it, but the addictive habit that formed a few hours following the conference. Needless to say, i went home and created Zazuzen, my pet Nimmo and then proceeded to lose track of time such that at 5AM i was still playing multiplication games to earn more points so that Nimmo could get food and books about yoga and meditation. Frankly, it’s quite an adorable online site (although i was under the impression that there would be a lot less advertising than there was).