The Economist Debate on Social “Networking”

The Economist is doing an “Oxford-style debate” on the following proposition:

“Social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to
educational methods, in and out of the classroom”

Given that MySpace and Facebook are ubiquitous, can social networking be defined as the “collective power of community to help inform perspectives that would not be unilaterally formed” or is it simply a distraction for students? Can these tools could be used in the classroom?

While I think that the Economist’s question is quite intriguing (albeit a bit problematically defined), I was sorely disappointed with the two responses.

On the Pro side is Ewan McIntosh. He argues that SNSs are about “helping learners become more world-aware, more communicative, learning from each other, understanding first hand what makes the world go around.” He talks about the use of mini-social networks for media sharing, but his description sounds more like blogs than SNSs to me. He (rightly) critiques the archaic educational styles, talking vaguely about web and SNSs without really explaining how the latter can help reform the former.

On the Con side is Michael Bugeja. He talks about interfaces, how students might misuse technology, and about how Facebook and MySpace are all simply about revenue generation for their respective companies. He then makes an odd techno-determinist claim and then talks about how pedagogy changes to fit interfaces. He then asks a bunch of (problematic) questions.

Sadly, I think that both completely missed the point. I’m frustrated with Ewan for collapsing all social technologies into “social networking” and I’m frustrated with Michael for being so afraid of technology that he lets technology dictate his reality. Given my irritation with both of them, I figured I should try to make a stab at what my response to this question would be.

danah’s response to said proposition

In their current incarnation, social network sites (SNSs) like Facebook and MySpace should not be integrated directly into the classroom. That said, they provide youth with a valuable networked public space to gather with their peers. Depending on the role of school in their lives, youth leverage these structures for educational purposes – asking questions about homework, sharing links and resources, and even in some cases asking their teachers for information outside of the classroom. SNSs do not make youth engage educationally; they allow educationally-motivated youth with a structure to engage educationally.

Social network sites do not help most youth see beyond their social walls. Because most youth do not engage in “networking,” they do not meet new people or see the world from a different perspective. Social network sites reinforce everyday networks, providing a gathering space when none previously existed.

Educational pedagogy has swung over the years between focusing on individual-centered learning, group learning, and peer-to-peer learning. If you take a peer-to-peer learning approach, you are inherently valuing the social networks that youth have and maintain, or else you are encouraging them to build one. These networks are mediated and reinforced through SNSs. If there is pedagogical value to encouraging peers to have strong social networks, then there is pedagogical value in supporting their sociable practices on SNSs.

When it comes to socializing with friends, youth prefer in-person (unregulated) encounters. They turn to SNSs when they can’t get together with their friends en masse or when they can’t get together without surveilling adults. By and large, there are few free spaces where youth can gather with their friends en masse and, even then, inevitably a chunk of parents refuse to let them, thereby destroying cluster effects. So, of course, they turn to SNSs. School is one of the few times when they can get together with their friends and they use every unscheduled moment to socialize – passing time, when the teacher’s back is turned, lunch, bathroom breaks, etc. They are desperately craving an opportunity to connect with their friends; not surprisingly, their use of anything that enables socialization while at school is deeply desired. This is why they text during classes. They go onto SNSs during the day to write to friends who have different schedules or to write to the whole group if a portion of them are on a different lunch. Given how regulated youth are, any open space where socializing is possible will be taken up by socializing; it’s often the only place they can see their friends. This isn’t something that the schools can fix, but they also shouldn’t be surprised when group time turns into gossip time.

I have yet to hear a compelling argument for why social network sites (or networking ones) should be used in the classroom. Those tools are primarily about socializing, with media and information sharing there to prop up the socialization process (much status is gained from knowing about the cool new thing). I haven’t even heard of a good reason why social network site features should be used in the classroom. What is the value of knowing who is friends with who or creating a profile when you already know all of your classmates?

This not to say that technology doesn’t belong in the classroom. Information access tools like Wikipedia and Google are tremendously valuable for getting access to content and should be strongly encouraged and taught through the lens of media literacy. Email, IM, or other communication tools can be super useful for distributing content to the group or between individuals or even providing a channel for group discussion (in-class or out). Blogging tools and group sharing tools are also quite valuable. Having to produce for the group instead of the teacher can work as a powerful incentive; most youth don’t want to be embarrassed in front of their peers and pressure to perform can be leveraged to the teacher’s advantage. But why social network sites? To the degree that they support blogging and group sharing, sure… but that’s not the key point of them at all. They key features that make them unique are: profiles plus visible, articulated and surfable friends’ lists. I simply don’t get why these are of value in the classroom.

I’m not saying that social network sites have no value. Quite the contrary. But their value is about the kinds of informal social learning that is required for maturation – understanding your community, learning the communicate with others, working through status games, building and maintaining friendships, working through personal values, etc. All too often we underestimate these processes because, traditionally, they have happened so naturally. Yet, what’s odd about today’s youth culture is that we’ve systematically taken away the opportunities for socialization. And yet we wonder why our kids are so immature compared to kids from other cultures. Social network sites are popular because youth are trying to take back the right to be social, even if it has to happen in interstitial ways. We need to recognize that not all learning is about book learning – brains mature through experience, including social experiences.

Yes, there are problems with technology and with technology in the classroom. Anyone critical of capitalism has a right to be critical of commercial social network sites and the economic processes that got us here. But don’t blame the SNSs – they didn’t create the obscenities of the market, but they are bound by them. Also, don’t forget that the current educational system was structured to meet the needs of the market, to create good consumers and good laborers. It ain’t pretty, and the privatization of education and educational testing is downright scary, but it’s a systems problem, not a technology problems.

There are innumerable inequalities in terms of educational technology access, just as there are huge inequalities in nearly every aspect of education. How many schools lack pencils, textbooks, teachers? Again, it’s terrible, but it’s not the technology’s fault. We all have a responsibility to rethink education and figure out how to equip all classrooms with the tools needed for giving students the best education possible, including teachers and technology. Don’t devalue technology simply because there are currently inequalities; no one would go around devaluing teachers using the same logic.

Finally, please adult world, I beg you… stop fearing and/or fetishizing technology. Neither approach does us any good. Technology is not the devil, nor is it the panacea you’ve been waiting for. It’s a tool. Just like a pencil. Figure out what it’s good for and leverage that to your advantage. Realize that there are interface problems and figure out how to work around them to meet your goals. Tools do not define pedagogy, but pedagogy can leverage tools. The first step is understanding what the technology is about, when and where it is useful, and how it can and will be manipulated by users for their own desires.

Update: I added a related post that is relevant to this discussion: let’s define our terms: what is a “social networking technology”?

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Technology and the World of Consumption

I had just finished giving a talk about youth culture to a room full of professionals who worked in the retail industry when a woman raised her hand to tell me a story. It was homecoming season and her daughter Mary was going to go to homecoming for the first time. What fascinated this mother was that her daughter’s approach to shopping was completely different than her own.

Using Google and a variety of online shopping sites, Mary researched dresses online, getting a sense for what styles she liked and reading information about what was considered stylish that year. Next, Mary and her friends went to the local department store as a small group, toting along their digital cameras (even though they’re banned). They tried on the dresses, taking pictures of each other in the ones that fit. Upon returning home, Mary uploaded the photos to her Facebook and asked her broader group of friends to comment on which they liked the best. Based on this feedback, she decided which dress to purchase, but didn’t tell anyone because she wanted her choice to be a surprise. Rather than returning to the store, Mary purchased the same dress online at a cheaper price based on the information on the tag that she had written down when she initially saw the dress. She went for the cheaper option because her mother had given her a set budget for homecoming shopping; this allowed her to spend the rest on accessories.

Mary’s mother was completely flabbergasted by the way in which her daughter moved seamlessly between the digital and physical worlds to consume clothing. More confusing to this mother, a professional in retail, was the way in which her daughter viewed her steps as completely natural.

In the 1980s, Alan Kay declared that, “technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.” In other words, what is perceived as technology to adults is often ubiquitous if not invisible to youth. In telling this story, Mary’s mother was perplexed by the technology choices made by her daughter. Yet, most likely, Mary saw her steps in a practical way: research, test out, get feedback, purchase. Her choices were to maximize her options, make a choice that would be socially accepted, and purchase the dress at the cheapest price. Her steps were not about maximizing technology, but about using it to optimize what she did care about.

Examining e-commerce, many businesses have found that people use online sources to research what it is that they want to buy. Few people purchase cars online, but many more research their options there. Online shopping sites are assumed to support offline purchasing. Yet, for Mary and other teens that I’ve met, the opposite is also true: they are visiting stores to research what they want so that they can purchase it online at a cheaper venue. The stores allow them to touch, feel, and try on material goods, while the digital world helps them find the cheapest option without running from store to store.

Teens’ interest in shopping is not simply about consuming material goods. For many, sites of consumerism are the only venues available for hanging out with friends. Malls, outlets, and box stores regularly emerged as places where teens could meet each other to hang out. Because security often shoos teens who are loitering away, they get into the habit of window shopping, fondling items for sale as though they may purchase them, and trying on clothes just so that they can appear to be at the shop for a reason. When they have money, they often do buy something, but most teens who hang out in shopping venues have nothing to spend – they simply want a place to hang out with their friends.

Teens who spend a lot of time hanging out around shopping spaces begin to know what each store is selling and have a sense of how often they update their inventory. As Nick (16) explained, “we’ll go in the hat store and look at different kind of hats they got. It’s a lot to do, but sometimes it gets boring ’cause if you go there enough, you start, ‘Oh, I saw that last week. They got the same stuff.’ Sometimes it’s really boring to go in there and you see the same stuff over, and over, and over again.” New inventory makes the “task” of window shopping much more interesting.

While shopping to hang out is a popular American teen past time, it also has a reputation amongst some parents for being a venue for troubled kids to gather. In talking with parents, I often heard references to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, gangs, and “the wrong crowd” as reasons for why they did not allow their children to hang out at the local mall. After intense amounts of pressure from her daughter, one mother did begin allowing her 14-year old to go with her friends to an outdoor mall under one condition: she would sit in Starbucks and her daughter would have to check in every 20 minutes. Not surprisingly, the daughter was not thrilled, but consented because it was her only option. Still, many parents refuse to let their kids go to the mall to hang out.

Teens do lie to their parents to get around this restriction. One girl told me that she and her friends had their parents drop them off at the movie theater adjacent to the mall. She would research the movie ahead of time so that she could report back afterwards. She would walk into the theater with her friends and wait until her parents left before going to the mall to meet up with others who had less restrictive parents. She would make sure to be back at the theater before the movie finished. This practice is not new to this generation, but it still highlights how critical shopping venues are for social gatherings.

Online shops do not have the same hangout appeal and the majority of teens that I’ve met who visit them do so with a purpose. They go to buy something specific and usually with their parents consent because of the credit card requirements. Online shopping is primarily task-centric, while offline shopping is primarily social-centric.

All the same, some teens still value consumption as an end in itself. As Shean (17) explained, “I want to get my own job and start my own stuff and make my own money, a lot of it, so that I can buy whatever I want. I want to be one of those people that can just walk in and say I want that and that and that.” To Shean, all that matters is having the stuff because that’s what it means to “live luxurious.”

When it comes to teen culture, consumerism is still rampant, although shopping is primarily about socialization. Aside from how the mobile phone allows groups to coordinate, technology is not really altering the tradition of hanging out in consumer places. What it is altering is the ways in which teens research and purchase things that they know they want.

Blog entry is a Fieldnote for the Digital Youth Project

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Suzanne Briet: madame documentation and librarian extraordinaire

This entry goes out to all of the librarians and information school students who read this blog.

One of the best parts of being in an information school is that you get to learn all sorts of things about people who loved information long before there was an economy for it. One of the professors in my school – Michael Buckland – always astonishes me with stories about great information gods and goddesses, many of whom never got credit for their work. His latest book Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine tracks the story of a Jewish inventor who escaped Germany only to have many of his inventions stolen by Americans. Think Vannevar Bush invented the Memex? Think again.

Buckland piqued my interest with another story of brilliant librarian who ignored and forgotten: Suzanne Briet. A feminist, rabble rouser, and historian, Briet was one of the first behind the documentalist movement during the interim period.

“Briet argued that documentalists should be embedded in the cultural contexts of the users that they serve. From this vantage point documentalists can not only retrieve documents, but prospect for information not yet asked for, translate information from other languages, abstract and index documents, and in general, proactively work within the dynamics of the advancement of knowledge in a field.(Day)

Sounds like Google, no?

“Briet’s writings stressed the importance of cultural forms and social situations and networks in creating and responding to information needs, rather than seeing information needs as inner psychological events.” (Day)

Her writings continue on to anticipate actor-network theory (an approach popular in information schools). She challenged positivist and quantitative notions of “information”, attributing a cultural origin and function to documentation and documentary signs (“What is Documentation?”).

Brilliant as she was, she was ignored and forgotten. Only one librarian attended her funeral. Most of her writings were ignored and never translated. Even today, few information scholars know about her and fewer teach her contributions. She doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry!

In an attempt to make her work more accessible, Ronald Day, Laurent Martinet, and Hermina Anghelescu have translated her work “What is Documentation?” into English and PDFified it for free download. Together with Buckland, they have also put together a website dedicated to her. Their hope is that more information scholars will learn of her and understand the historical context of documentation culture. Personally, I’m intrigued to learn that a brilliant feminist scholar was so visionary yet so forgotten.

Dearest librarians and fellow information students, Michael Buckland, the rescuer of forgotten librarians, is curious what it will take to truly resuscitate her memory? We live in a world of records and information, yet we often forget the explorers and founders (especially if they were women, people of color, gay, or non-Christian). How do we revive the stories of those whose contributions were ignored?

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what are marketing and advertising’s social responsibilities wrt youth?

A new report by the UK National Union of Teachers – Growing up in a material world – shows that contemporary marketing and commercialization practices have devastating consequences on youth:

Of increasing concern to teachers is the increasing commercialisation of childhood and the lifestyle pressures exerted on children by the advertising and marketing industries. Using ever more sophisticated methods, these industries encourage children to buy particular brands of clothing and food and conform to specific images. Parents, too, experience this, as children’s ‘pester-power’ is exploited by the advertising industry. Those on a low income can feel particularly affected.

The pressure to consume and conform can lead to excessive levels of materialism and competition among children leading to bullying. There are dangerous consequences for the physical and mental health of young people.

The rise in childhood obesity and illnesses such as the early onset of type 2 diabetes, for example, highlight the dangers of advertising unhealthy food to children.

The report continues on to discuss how commercialization leads to the “creation and reinforcement of a culture of ‘cool'” amongst youth. The most terrifying finding in their report has to do with the link between bullying and consumerism: “Over 55% of those responding had either been bullied or knew someone who had been bullied because they did not have the latest products.” To fit in, youth have to consume. Marketing creates this cycle and bullies do the dirty work of making sure everyone conforms or suffers the consequences.

Body image and sexuality are at the crux of this. Girls are sold the “right” body image through dolls and clothing and their sexuality is structured around sexually provocative clothes, makeup and other product. Fitting in requires being “sexy” even at a young age. Not surprisingly, sexism and gender stereotyping are reinforced (if not constructed) by marketers seeking to capitalize on vulnerabilities.

“Companies routinely hire child and consumer psychologists to conduct research to help them target children effectively. Children’s vulnerabilities are played on as advertisers sell images of perfection and increase the pressure to have the latest ‘in vogue’ fashion and gadgets.”

In my own fieldwork, I regularly witnessed the consequences of mass commercialism. Teens had to buy to fit in and if they couldn’t buy, they were pressured to steal. Identity is constructed and status is marked by consumption. The goal of so many teens when they grow up is to make money so that they can buy the right things.

It’s easy to demonize marketers – they make for good punching bags – but many of us live off of the cud of advertising and marketing. Most of the tech industry is indebted to advertising and much of what we use for “free” is because we are eyeballs that can be manipulated. The entire structure of contemporary capitalism rests on companies ability to compete for consumers and, when they’ve saturated the market, create reasons for consumers to keep coming back for more more more. Not surprisingly, one of the reasons that companies have tapped into children is because they are the only true “new” market. More problematically, healthy economies are based on growth and growth doesn’t happen when people just consume what they need. Manipulation is central to a healthy economy – you have to convince people that they want your product so that you can report good news to your stockholders.

This presents a huge moral dilemma:

  • How can companies be both ethical and financially successful?
  • What are the moral responsibilities of a company when it comes to children’s consumption?

These are hard questions, but questions that I think that we need to start asking ourselves if for no other reason than because “teachers and parents now look to the advertising and marketing industries to become more socially responsible over their targeting of children and young people and for the Government to step in should they not live up to their responsibilities.”

(Thanks to Anastasia. News coverage of this report can be found at The Telegraph.)

This is a Shift 6 post. For more discussion, check out the comments there.

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remix culture and fair use: a new study

Folks over at the Center for Social Media have just released a new study on copyright and creativity. They identify nine common types of re-appropriation practices that use copyrighted material:

  • Parody and satire: Copyrighted material used in spoofing of popular mass media, celebrities or politicians (Baby Got Book)
  • Negative or critical commentary: Copyrighted material used to communicate a negative message (Metallica Sucks)
  • Positive commentary: Copyrighted material used to communicate a positive message (Steve Irwin Fan Tribute)
  • Quoting to trigger discussion: Copyrighted material used to highlight an issue and prompt public awareness, discourse (Abstinence PSA on Feministing.com)
  • Illustration or example: Copyrighted material used to support a new idea with pictures and sound (Evolution of Dance)
  • Incidental use: Copyrighted material captured as part of capturing something else (Prisoners Dance to Thriller)
  • Personal reportage/diaries: Copyrighted material incorporated into the chronicling of a personal experience (Me on stage with U2… AGAIN!!!)
  • Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials: Copyrighted material that might have a short life on mainstream media due to controversy (Stephen Colbert’s Speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner)
  • Pastiche or collage: Several copyrighted materials incorporated together into a new creation, or in other cases, an imitation of sorts of copyrighted work (Apple Commercial)

This study interrogates these practices in the context of copyright law, namely “fair use.” They try to assess which way the courts might fall depending on practice. They also offer potential defenses that creators can make if they were sued in an attempt to build best-practices principles. They also categorize exemplar videos that fall into each category.

For those who aren’t familiar with U.S. law, fair use is quite tricky because courts address it on a case by case basis after someone is sued. There is no list of what constitutes fair use. Thus, remixers engaging in practices that would collectively be viewed as fair use never have certainty that what they’re doing is legal. Because court cases are extremely costly (especially for the lone defendant in the face of Big Mega Corp), corporations can wield a lot of power through the egregious use of “Cease and Desist” letters. Most creators bow down in the face of them even if what they’re doing is totally legit because they are terrified of being sued. In legal terms, a “chilling effect” is when practices are squelched by fear of persecution. Right now, when it comes to remix, we’re in the middle of an ice age. The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse website attempts to counteract some of this effect by collecting and publishing Cease and Desists and other nefarious attempts by corporations to silence fans and critics.

It’s a really really really screwy system that pits little people against big corporations, stifling innovation and creativity. Yet, in order to change it, people have to understand what is taking place, what is at stake, and how to rethink the situation. This is the goal of this study.

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the music industry would be proud: I bought music this year

I love music and I refuse to be one of those people whose listening habits were formed in college and never progress. I pride myself on acquiring music on a regular basis, but I absolutely positively refuse to buy DRM-ified music. I’ve been buying CDs and ripping them for years, grabbing music from friends, and downloading using P2P software (even though I know that all three are “illegal”). Because most of the music that I listen to has a short run on CDs (and is not carried by any of the Top 5 distributors), I usually can’t buy the CD if I don’t get to the album in the first few months. As much as I love psyshop, it’s really irritating that the majority of albums are “not available.” This means that my only option is to “steal” them. Not an ideal situation. The other problem is that I hate having to wait for CDs – they take forever, especially when they’re being shipped from Europe. Thus, I’m more likely to grab them by any means necessary than to buy them, not because I don’t want to buy them, but because the inconvenience factor is so high.

Another issue with music shopping has been the dreadful “recommendation” systems. Any system that can’t tell the difference between psytrance and house needs to be shot. I want nuance in my recommendations because “electronica” doesn’t describe my tastes. I had been really hopeful that Last.FM would be the answer, but it seems as though their algorithm is incapable of taking into consideration context. Just because I listen to Dr. Toast and Johnny Cash and Ani Difranco doesn’t mean that I’d ever put them together in a playlist. Also, people suck at tagging music. Mega suck. I need to find good new music, but the systems haven’t been in place. Historically, Fake Science always had music that I loved, but they’ve closed their doors.

To make matters worse, my music situation has always been a combination of wires and hacks and crap. And interesting new stuff comes out on PCs but I don’t do Windows. Even my nightmare with Leopard is more bearable than Windows.

Things have been changing in the music industry for a while and for the first time in a long time, I feel like the music bits came together for me. It’s a weird hodgepodge, but it works surprisingly well. For those who are curious about how others handle music, let me detail it. For those in the industry, maybe my “solution” might give you some ideas.

Setup: Airport Express attached to stereo. iPod with car iPod input. Airfoil for streaming anything other than iTunes to my Airport Express (including Pandora and Firefox). 70 gigs of current music on computer, another 100 gigs of “haven’t listened to recently” on backup drives simply for space reasons. (I’m waiting for Airport Extreme to really work.)

My iTunes is organized by genre (obsessively with genres like ClitRock and PsyChill) with smart playlists to combine my genres. Because iTunes still doesn’t do tagging (damn you Apple!), I’ve resorted to creating even weirder genres like “CalmGirl-Folk-80s” so that I can smart playlist around it. Music from iTunes gets auto-uploaded to Last.FM through the Scrobbler software.

When I want something new, I switch to Pandora. Because the Pandora app doesn’t update to Last.FM, I go through Pandora FM and set Airfoil to stream it to my Airport Express, but Airfoil doesn’t really do well when Firefox crashes so I end up listening to Pandora less than I’d like to. When I hear something that really impresses me, I jump to Last.FM to find out more about the artist and preview the tracks. I then jump over to Amazon to buy the album through the MP3 download. I don’t know what has changed in the last few months, but lately, everything that I’ve wanted to buy has been available for download at Amazon. It’s been shocking. If it’s not available, I usually don’t buy it. If I’ve heard it a bunch of times and desperately want it and it’s still not available, I decide if I want the whole album. If not, I just go P2P. Because MP3 downloads have finally happened on mass, I’m buying a whole lot more music. $7.00 or so for an album is AOK by me.

There are still things that I want. So, for you out there who are thinking about music, help a girl out.

1. Pandora/Last.FM: let me save artists/songs on a wishlist (Last.FM’s playlist feature is not good enough). Let me store the names so that I can go back to them and buy them. Right now, I put the album in my Amazon wishlist but that’s downright silly and I only do that if I _really_ like something. I’d buy more music if I had a record of the things I liked and could go back to them.

2. All y’all: while I usually love Pandora’s recommendations, I think that a recommendation system could be a whole lot better if it would combine music structure with the network structure of listening. Take into consideration context. A song relates to another song if it’s played shortly after the first one. Build networks of songs, connect them.

3. Apple: figure out how to make actually smart playlists. Learn from my listening habits, take advantage of recommendation systems. Help me listen to my own collection of music in a more interesting way. Let me start with a song and then you take me down a new path through my own music collection.

4. Labels: make EVERYTHING available via MP3 download. I know the quality isn’t as good, but y’know what, I still buy it. And if you don’t make it available for download, I don’t. What the hell are you afraid of? Yeah, I know.. you don’t like Apple having so much control and you’re not sure you want to work with Amazon.. you want something that’s just yours. Well, frankly, that’s just annoying because I never know what artist is on what label. Why can’t you all just get along?

5. Scion: while I appreciate being able to go to my playlists through my stereo, I hate that I can’t go to my genres that way. You also have the worst interface possible for scanning through 1500 artists. At the very least, let me scroll through the alphabet to get closer.

6. Someone: I almost killed my computer last week. I have 70 gigs of music on this system alone. Do you know how long that takes to backup and how much disk space I use doing so? Why can’t I “recover” through my playlist somehow? I know, I know.. evil labels think that the act of copying is akin to blasphemy and that I should buy everything over again rather than be allowed to back it up. But that’s just plain lame. Maybe this should be something insurance companies do… Tehe. I know plenty of folks who lost their music collections in a fire. Instead of having to pay them to buy it all again, imagine if the insurance companies would be able to just give them a hard drive of everything they’ve “insured.” Anyhow, labels, I know that you’re super greedy, but it might help if you respected your consumers a little bit. Give them some support when they’re down. I can’t tell you how much it sucked to have 250 CDs stolen a few years ago. And I can’t tell you how grateful I was when a nice kid in NY volunteered to burn off every psytrance CD I could remember having (and since I’m compulsive, I had an excel sheet for him with a record of all of the CDs I had owned). Yeah, it was illegal.. but y’know what? I had bought all of those CDs once and so I took the moral high ground and refused to buy them again just because some prick threw a rock through my car window and got into the trunk while I was living out of my car. So maybe y’all could get together and come up with a respectful way of preserving what people did buy?

7. Artists: please don’t go with Universal or its sublabels. They’re the worst abuser of their consumers and I refuse to buy their music in any format out of protest. There’s a lot to be said for remix and innovative distribution models and they’re so the big bully in the room. Is it really worth it?

8. Mobile phone people: WTF is up with your approach to ringtones? I know you see a big market and want to take advantage of it, but duuuuude, talk about abusive. Why is it more expensive to buy the ringtone than it is to buy the song? And why can’t I actually keep the song when I buy it as a ringtone? Definitely not humored.

OK… that’s my music rant for a while. Now back to writing…

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Santa meets the IRB

Since I love the IRB sooooo much, it’s not surprising that everyone I know forwarded this message along to me over the holiday season. For all of you out there who dream of writing IRB proposals, this is for you:

Dr. K. Kringle, Adjunct Professor of Child Psychology Far Northern University

Dear Dr. Kringle:

At the regularly scheduled December 24 meeting, the IRB reviewed your protocol, “A Global Observational Study of Behavior in Children.” While we believe it has many good features, it could not be approved as submitted. If you choose to revise your study, please address the following concerns:

1. You propose to study “children of all ages”. Please provide an exact lower and upper age limit, as well as the precise number of subjects. Provide a statistically valid power calculation to justify this large of a study.

2. Your only inclusion criterion is “belief in Santa Claus.” Please provide a copy of the screening questionnaire that determines such a belief. Provide a Waiver of Authorization under HIPAA in order to record these beliefs prior to enrollment in your study. The Board recommends that you obtain a Certificate of Confidentiality as beliefs are sensitive and personal information.

3. You propose to “know when they are sleeping and know when they are awake”. How will this be done? Will children undergo video monitoring in their beds? Will they have sleep EEGs? You list 100 elves as research assistants. Are any of them a sleep physiologist?

4. Your primary outcome measure is to “know when they’ve been bad or good.” What standard is being used to determine ‘goodness’? Do children have to be good all year or just most of the time? What if they have been really, really, good except for one time when they hit their little brother?

5. You propose to conduct your research by entering the subjects’ homes through the chimney. Have you considered the damage to the roof, carpeting, etc., that this will cause? Moreover, children are likely to be startled by your appearance late at night. Please revise your protocol to conduct your home visits between 9 am and 5 pm Monday through Friday with at least one parent being present.

6. You state that compensation for participation will be “sugarplums, candy, and toys” for the good little girls and boys. This may not be appropriate for the children with obesity, dental caries, and hyperactivity. Also, your proposal to leave a lump of coal in the stockings of the bad children will be unfairly stigmatizing to them individually and as a group. In general, the Board suggests a small token of appreciation for all participants. Perhaps a $5 Toys-R-Us gift card would be better.

7. The database of good and bad children will be kept “on a scroll at the North Pole.” Please describe the security provisions you have in place to protect the research data. Is the scroll kept in a locked cabinet in a locked room? Who has access to the scroll? Are there backup copies of the scroll and how often are they compared to the original?

8. You mention the participation of “eight tiny reindeer” in your protocol. Please provide the Board with documentation of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee approval.

9. Please provide the Human Subjects Protection training dates for Mrs. Claus and the elves.

10. As this study involves prospective data collection and is more than minimal risk without prospect of direct benefit to the subjects, informed consent signed by both parents will be required. Please have the consent form translated into every language spoken by children.

Please submit 25 copies of your revised protocol to the lRB. The IRB will be on Holiday Season schedule for the next two weeks. If approved, you will be able to conduct your study sometime in January.

Sincerely,
E. Scrooge, MD – Chair, Institutional Review Board

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Pew on teen social media practices (with interesting bits on class)

While I was off struggling with Leopard and pants, Pew put out another great report: Teens and Social Media. This report fleshes out what I noticed earlier – teens are much more protective of the content they post online than adults are. Yet, this report is sooo much more than that. Here are some of the new findings to whet your appetite:

  • Digital images – stills and videos – have a big role in teen life. Posting them often starts a virtual conversation. Most teens receive some feedback on the content they post online.
  • Email continues to lose its luster among teens as texting, instant messaging, and social networking sites facilitate more frequent contact with friends.
  • More older girls than boys create and contribute to websites.
  • Girls have fueled the growth of the teen blogosphere.
  • Teens from lower-income and single-parent households are more likely to blog.
  • Teens who are most active online, including bloggers, are also highly active offline.
  • Most teens restrict access to their posted photos – at least some of the time. Girls are more restrictive photo posters.
  • Content creators are not devoting their lives exclusively to virtual participation. They are just as likely as other teens to engage in most offline activities and more likely to have jobs.
  • African American teens are more likely to look for college information online.
  • Girls are more likely than boys to look up health, dieting, or fitness information on the Web.
  • The number of teens who report instant message use has dropped since 2004.
  • Visiting a chatroom has declined significantly in popularity since 2000.
  • Fewer teens are buying products online.
  • Wealthy teens are more likely to engage in multimedia Web activities.

Note: The bits on social network sites in the report are using data collected in late 2005/early 2006. Much of those findings were reported in an earlier Pew Report. I strongly believe that SNS use is up since then and that 55% is extremely low.

The whole report is extremely interesting (and I strongly encourage you to read it), but I want to take a moment to talk about the two statements that I bolded in the list above. What Pew’s data shows is that online participation correlates with offline participation. They are not able to show causality (and they do not try to claim that they can), but such a correlation still contradicts the ever-present myth that online activities cause a decline in offline activities. Of course, don’t misread this correlation in the opposite direction either. In other words, you cannot say that if you get a group of teens involved online, they will also get involved offline. Meshing these findings with my own qualitative observations, I have a sneaking suspicion that what Pew’s data is pointing to is that the hyper-motivated and/or overly scheduled teens from middle/upper class communities are extremely engaged offline and use online technologies to socialize with their friends in the interstitial times and that this cohort’s content creation is primarily to support friendships rather than create for creation sake. This also makes sense because teens who have more free time tend to have less restrictions and tend to prefer offline encounters with friends to online ones.

I wasn’t surprised by most of their findings, but one of them did make me raise my eyebrows: Teens from lower-income are more likely to blog. Because of how Pew collects data, it cannot answer the question “why?” when it finds such correlations, but I figured that my qualitative data might provide some insight and so I went back through my data. When asked about blogging, most of my MySpace-dominant users would immediately talk about the blogs that they kept on MySpace while my Facebook-dominant teens would talk about how Xanga was “so middle school” and that “everyone stopped” because “it just felt really weird writing about my day to people that I didn’t even care about.” And then it clicked. As I pointed out last summer and Eszter saw in her survey, the MySpace/Facebook split is correlated with socio-economic status. Because MySpace supports blogging and Facebook does not and because many of the teens who were once on Xanga are now using one of the SNSs, it makes sense that teens from lower-income households are more likely to blog now. They are blogging on MySpace. Now, that outta be interesting when these kids hit college where blogging is used as an educational tool.

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All I need is a pair of pants.

Dear Clothing Designers,

I am disappointed in your lack of understanding of the diversity of women’s bodies. I traipsed down Broadway, into Soho, and out to the malls in search of a pair of pants that fit. I was willing to spend a decent amount of money on said pants so I visited everything from high end designers to department and chain stores. I tried on over 150 pairs and came up empty handed. I tried on pants ranging from sizes 6-12, petites, regulars, and “short.” I was even willing to get the bottoms hemmed if only I could find a pair that fit up top. I even tried on the ugly pants.

The relationship between my waist, hips, ass, and thighs appears to be completely alien to you, for none of you seem to make a pair of pants that fit all of these dimensions (let alone length). Why? Am I _that_ different? Or would you simply prefer that I conform to your body aesthetics? Like many other women, I do not belong on a hanger. I am not shaped like a model nor do I have any interest in resorting to anorexia to try to fit into your skinny clothes. I am curvy and I like my curves.

I am a confident woman, but shopping demoralizes me. Your industry sells a standard of beauty, demanding women to conform and ostracizing them when they do not. I know that I am not alone in not fitting into your clothing. Have you ever considered the impact that you have on young women’s sense of self? How hard would it be to diversify your clothing dimensions?

I long for the day when I can submit my dimensions and order personalized clothes. I know it’s coming, but I desperately want it NOW. Particularly since the only thing that is “in” seems to be tight and tighter. Why oh why can’t we personalize our clothes yet?

In the meantime, dear clothing designers, please bring back phat pants. I don’t care if they’re not “in style” but at least they fit. I desperately need new clothes for all of the ones that I bought when phat pants and flowy yoga pants were the in thing are falling apart. I have upcoming engagements and I desperately need pants. Please, I beg you, do something.

Thank you.

PS: For all of you men who think that my flowy clothing is my “style,” please realize that it is simply because nothing else ever fits. Welcome to the hell of women’s shopping.

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