Social Web privacy: A new kind of social contract we're all signed onto

1993: In a famous New Yorker cartoon, a dog at a computer says to his canine buddy looking up from the floor, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Fast-forward 13 years....

2006: "On the Internet, everybody knows you're a dog," declares the subhead to a Michael Kinsley essay in which he wondered at how narcissistic the social Web was (before it became a cliché). Fast-forward only four years this time....

2010: Although Internet industry CEOs have recently declared the death of privacy (see security expert Bruce Schneier's blog), "privacy is not dead," said social media researcher danah boyd in her keynote at the SXSW conference in Austin last month. "People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just as much about privacy online as they do offline.... Wanting privacy is not about needing something to hide. It’s about wanting to maintain control."

Furthermore, boyd said, privacy and publicity are a mashup. Web meets reality. We all intuitively know there are many gradients between totally private and totally public – some people online know you're a dog, some don't; the numbers vary, based on how you use the Web, who you are, and how you live your life. The Web increasingly mirrors all of "real life." Technology didn't just start interacting with user privacy. Remember "Don't tell anyone who calls that your mom and dad aren't home"? "Will I sound too eager if I pick up after one ring?" Or even: "Who will see me reading this radical book?" Buzz, email, Facebook chat, tweets, texts, etc. are used in the contexts of our real-life relationships and situations just as much. Which is why it's absurd to think privacy is dead, or ever will be.

"Think about a cafe that you like to visit," said boyd. Compare your Facebook page to that public space in real life. "There's a possibility that you’ll intersect with all sorts of different people, but there are some people who you believe you are more likely to interact with than others. You have learned that you're more likely to run into your neighbors and you'd be startled if your mother popped in, since she lives 3,000 miles away. You may have even chosen this particular cafe in the hopes of running into that hottie you have a crush on or avoiding your ex who lives in a different part of town. You have also come to understand that physics means that there's a limit on how many people will be in the cafe. Plus, you'd go completely bonkers if, all of a sudden, everyone from your childhood magically appeared at the cafe simultaneously. One coincidence is destabilizing enough; we can't really handle a collapse in the time-space continuum."

The difference between my old landline and book examples and today's media and communications environment is the speed at which we communicate and socialize and the speed at which new technologies and products become available (the latter are digital, so they can be made available to all users simultaneously and globally within seconds). So we need to think carefully and a lot – in proportion to the speed of technological change, I'd say.

Who needs to think carefully and a lot? Everybody involved, together not in silos – users, companies, educators, policymakers. But let's just consider the two most important stakeholders, which – in the current new user-driven media environment – are really parties to a new, global social contract that's emerging right now, one that I think Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke to in her 21st-Century Statecraft" speech early this year. Those two parties are:

1. Internet industry, users are unprecedentedly your bread and butter. They supply all the "content" on your services. You need to bake consideration of the privacy and safety impacts of their doing so into your product development. For example, when you mash services up together, such as email and social-network updates, you need to think about how one tool is very private and the other very public. People use them differently. So combining people's email address books and social-network friends lists instantly without preparing them can create a lot of cognitive dissonance and bad will. "In digital worlds, people need to be eased into a situation, to understand how to make sense of the setting," boyd said. Companies need to poll their users or at least do focus groups before they make significant changes to the user experience, and after product or feature release, do more consumer education.

Users & providers are "dance partners." "When you moved from Web1.0 to Web2.0," boyd said to "the technologists in the room," "you moved from thinking about designing and deploying software to creating living code. You learned to dance with your users, to evolve with them." That's a powerful metaphor: Social-media companies and users are dance partners like never before. Users are much more than mere customers or consumers, and they may increasingly exercise that inherent power.

2. Users, we don't need to become conspiracy theorists, but we need to be serious about paying attention to our privacy settings – and go over them each time our favorite social tools announce a new social feature (such as Facebook's just-announced new Like button and Instant Personalization). Consumer awareness and self-protection are essential to exercising our power in a user-driven or participatory media environment.

Parents and teachers, kids know they don't want others to have power over them. Help them see that that's what privacy settings are about – having control over their own information and public image. When it's put this way, they know they don't want to let peers, companies, or anyone else do whatever they want with their info, reputations, and digital creations. You can help them see a) that it's reciprocal: their friends feel the same way – privacy and safety are necessarily collaborative in this media environment (see this); and b) that honoring this new reality is protective to all concerned – oneself, one's friends, one's community, and ultimately society. It's all interconnected and interdependent now. Mindful, collaborative behavior is baseline online and cellphone safety as well as privacy (see "Social norming: *So* key to online safety" and "From users to citizens").

Other key points in boyd's talk:

PII and PEI are intermeshed. We hear a lot about personally identifiable information (PII) but not as much about personally embarrassing information (PEI), which is every bit as important to users. Boyd said: "Because most people are interacting online with people they know, they expect to make PII available. They do so because they want to be found by friends. But they also want to keep PEI hidden, at least to those that might go out of their way to use it maliciously. Unfortunately, it's hard to be visible to some and invisible to others." The reality online as well as offline, she said, is that "when people make information available, they make themselves vulnerable." Product developers need to think about that as much as users.

It's complicated, like life. "Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean people want it to be publicized," boyd said. Adults, such as Slate's Kinsley, often conflate the two when they talk about the "solipsistic social Web." They're forgetting to ground social-media use in real life, instead somehow thinking technology is layered on top of life as an add-on. For example, you're "publicly accessible" to others when you're at Starbucks, but you're probably not publicizing your presence, though there are times when you might. You might sometimes use Foursquare so that everybody who follows you on Twitter knows you're there. But the reasons for that aren't necessarily narcissism but maybe rather hoping your local friends notice your shoutout and meet you there or, since Foursquare's a game you play, you may be aiming to become "mayor" of that Starbucks. You're probably not thinking that there's a slim chance a burglar is following you on Twitter and – noting that you're at Starbucks – robs your house, which is why social-media companies need to help educate users about that very slim possibility. Digital media use is about as complicated, changeable, and individual as living.

No magic formula. "Unfortunately, online environments are not nearly as stabilized as offline ones. While the walls in the streets may have ears, digital walls almost always do," boyd said. The environments (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) aren't stable, nor is our use of them. There's little common sense around their use yet, like the old "Don't let anybody know Mom and Dad aren't home" – though most youth privacy features in social network sites (see this). "There's no magical formula ... no easy algorithm to implement. Privacy and publicity are living things.... They are fundamentally processes grounded in needs, desires, and goals, situated in contexts and transformed by technology." Of course some needs and rights haven't changed, such as constitutional and legal ones for Internet users and providers in each country, though laws need to embrace and adjust to new-media conditions.

Because privacy's a living thing that's functioning in a new, rapidly evolving media environment, everyone's a stakeholder in supporting it. We need to 1) stay informed and help our children see the importance of doing so and 2) keep revisiting our privacy settings in light of new conditions. Companies need to keep thinking about the impacts on users of the new conditions, bake that thinking into the products they create, and educate users about new conditions. Policymakers need to understand that 1) users want both privacy and publicity as well as the means to calibrate them and 2) need education as much as tools for intelligent privacy management. And we all need to see that – because of the unstable, collaborative nature of everybody's wellbeing in digital media – privacy and safety are an ongoing negotiation, not a one-size-fits-all, once-and-for-all solution.

So I'd like to hear from you: Do you see it this way too, that a new kind of (multi-party) social contract is now in place, not imposed on us by any single power-holder but by changing conditions in which we are all invested (the social Web, or a user-driven, social/behavioral media environment )? If so, it seems to me that, under this contract, it benefits all parties not only to protect their own interests but to understand those of all other parties and protect them too. Otherwise, misguided "solutions," bad laws and lawsuits, and other signs of dysfunction will continue to distract us from hammering out real solutions together. Sorry to end on such a negative note, but that's what I see. Tell me what you see – via anne[at]netfamilynews.org, in this blog, or in the ConnectSafely forum!

Important related links

"Youth, Privacy & Reputation" by Alice E. Marwick, Diego Murgia, Diaz, John Palfrey, and the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative – a thorough review of research on the subject which has been published in the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU (released 4/12/10)

"How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?" (released 4/14/10), by Chris Jan Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow. Their conclusion: "that young-adult Americans have an aspiration for increased privacy even while they participate in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data.... Public policy agendas should therefore not start with the proposition that young adults do not care about privacy and thus do not need regulations and other safeguards. Rather, policy discussions should acknowledge that the current business environment along with other factors sometimes encourages young adults to release personal data in order to enjoy social inclusion even while in their most rational moments they may espouse more conservative norms."

Security expert Bruce Schneier blogging about both of the above 2 surveys

Consumer privacy experts: the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Future of Privacy Forum

"Young Adults Do Care About Online Privacy" in the Washington Post

"Keeping Personal Info Private," one of 8 lessons from Cablevision's "Power to Learn" project for grades 4-8 (thanks to educator Anne Bubnic for pointing this out)

66% of teens text, only 8% tweet: Study

Though adult blogging remains steady, teen blogging has decreased by half since 2006 – from 28% of teens then to 14% now, according to a Pew/Internet report released yesterday. Eleven percent of Americans 30+ maintain a personal blog right now, Pew adds. Blogging by 18-29-year-olds has decreased, too, but not by quite as much: from 24% of that age group in 2007 to 15% now. Social networking continues to grow – 73% of teens use social sites now (compared to 47% of adults), up from 55% in 2006 and 65% last February – but Twitter use among teens is not high. Only 8% of 12-to-17-year-old Net users use Twitter, compared to about a third of 18-to-29-year-olds (the age group that uses Twitter the most). Compare that teen Twitter use to virtual worlds (about the same) and texting (a whopping 66%). Moving from media to devices: 75% of teens and 93% of 18-to-29-year-olds have cellphones. It's not surprising to parents, I think, when Pew says that, "in the past five years, cellphone ownership has become mainstream among even the youngest teens." That's where the biggest growth has been: "Fully 58% of 12-year-olds now own a cellphone, up from just 18% of such teens as recently as 2004."

Social Web's help for Haiti

With emails from President Obama, tweets in Twitter, and cellphones sending “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief," fixed and mobile social media are raising millions for Haiti earthquake relief. Yesterday (1/14) may've been "the biggest day for mobile giving to date, CNET reports, adding that Facebook said its users "have been posting more than 1,500 status updates a minute containing the word Haiti." The New York Times reports today that "the American Red Cross, which is working with a mobile donations firm called mGive, said Thursday that it had raised more than $5 million this way" and "nearly $35 million" in general by Thursday night, "surpassing the amounts it received in the same time period after Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami." This is an important media story for classroom and dinner-table discussion, but parents and teachers will also appreciate this "teachable moment" for new media literacy. Because, unfortunately, "with any urgent call for donations often comes a rash of scams that can pilfer cash or result in identity theft," another CNET post warns. The article offers advice for applying critical thinking to texted, posted, and tweeted solicitations – and so does the FBI.

More public Facebook => more careful selves (I hope)

Don’t miss Julia Anguin's Wall Street Journal blog post about how "friending" has gone from knowing what the kid three rows back thinks about the latest celeb news to a popularity contest to, now with Twitter, a "talent show" among "followers" (who are much less complicated than "friends") – or how "to prove your intellectual prowess in 140 characters or less. But where she's going with all this, really, is the bottom line of Facebook's privacy changes. It's not a particularly new bottom line, just a more-so-than-ever one: "I will also remove the vestiges of my private life from Facebook and make sure I never post anything that I wouldn't want my parents, employer, next-door neighbor or future employer to see. You'd be smart to do the same. We'll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability.... Not a place for intimacy with friends." Parents, talk with your kids about this! Anguin's piece is a great talking point. [For advice on how to hide that Friend List from Everyone, see this from ConnectSafely.org's Larry Magid, and for last week's news, see "Facebook's privacy changes" last week, when the company said these changes "have no impact" on how FB makes money.]

After I posted this, the New York Times reported that the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 10 other consumer privacy organizations filed a complaint with the FTC that Facebook's latest privacy changes "violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations." Paramount to us at ConnectSafely.org is that Facebook ensure that the friend lists of users under 18 be hidden from public view by default.

Adults' status updates on the rise: Study

If anybody considers Twitter and other status-update tools all about self-exposure (I don't, but glad to "talk" with you about that in Twitter, Facebook, email, or the ConnectSafely forum), and consequently all about youth, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has evidence to the contrary - just out today. It found that "one out of five Internet users now say they use Twitter or some other service to share status updates about themselves, or to keep tabs on others." That's from a survey of adult Internet users - 2,200 of them. The 19% who now use status-update services is up from 11% last April. Here's more in a Wall Street Journal blog.

MySpace: Entertainment hub that tweets

MySpace is taking steps in two directions, both solidifying its entertainment focus and expanding its social-media offerings. According to CNET, it "plans to launch a new video service sometime in the next several months with the help of sister site Hulu," in which MySpace parent News Corp owns a significant stake. The first step will be an overhaul of MySpace Video, adding more "feature films, TV shows, and music videos," CNET adds. On the social front, MySpace is syncing up with Twitter, TechCrunch reports. So – like Facebook users – MySpace members can opt to have their MySpace status updates automatically shared with all their Twitter followers (Twitter's version of MySpace "friends") and vice versa. "A couple weeks ago, AOL made its AIM lifestream go both ways with Twitter (and Facebook) as well. So we are definitely seeing a trend here," TechCrunch adds. Also on the social side, ConnectSafely.org's Larry Magid reports in CNET that the Department of Justice now has a MySpace profile partly to drive traffic to its new Justice.gov site" but also apparently to provide "unmoderated forum where users can comment and 'interact with the Department in entirely new ways'." [See also my "MySpace's metamorphosis?" this past August.]

comScore: Teens flocking to Twitter now

"As the Twitter audience has mushroomed in recent months – to 21 million US visitors in July 2009 – the younger age groups are the ones flooding in the fastest," the comScore blog says about the micro-blogging service. In fact, people under 35 are "fueling Twitter's continued growth," with July usage spread evenly among the 12-17, 18-24, and 25-34 age categories, blogger Andrew Lipsman shows very visually with his growth charts.

Dave Letterman's view of Twitter

Whew, glad that's finally settled! Dave has declared Twitter "a waste of time." ;-) Had to tell you. Watch him tell Kevin Spacey in a video clip at Mashable.com. Just plain summer fun. [For readers outside North America, Dave Letterman is a very funny late-night talk show host on CBS TV.] Spacey offers to tweet something to his 800,000 followers for Dave and pulls out his phone. Dave asks how much it costs. Spacey rolls his eyeballs. But Dave then has a hard time getting past the fact that Spacey has to "type" the tweet with his thumbs. Looks like Dave has never texted either. Glad he has an assistant or two! Seriously, I respect Dave's take on Twitter. Whether or not you use it as well as how you use it is highly individual (which is one of the things I like about it). [For a look at how some others think of Twitter, including educators, see "A (digital) return to village life?"]

Dissing Matthew Robson (or was that Morgan Stanley?)

Time blogger Dan Fletcher is so dismissive of Morgan Stanley teenage intern Matthew Robson that he sounds a little jealous. "What exactly did Robson reveal? Well, not a lot," Fletcher reports. His conclusion is that Matthew's bosses at Morgan Stanley "need to spend a bit more time with their kids. Do that, and we suspect the revelation that teenagers like cell phones and free music will seem, well, a little less revelatory." I agree that there's much more value in listening to our own children than to Morgan Stanley about how teens use tech, but that's because the way youth use tech is highly individual. Even Matthew Robson can't tell you how your child uses technology and social media, but I can see real value in his views to marketers. The one useful bit in Fletcher's post is his link to some data at social media market researchers Sysomos, who say that 31% of Twitter's users are 15-19. That contrasts with the prevailing view, based on comScore research and anecdotal evidence from young people themselves (e.g., see "Why Gen Y's not into Twitter" and the comment under this blog post of mine).

Hey, maybe Sysomos is onto something. But what is clear right now is that the assumption that teens will flock en masse to every new social technology (like Twitter) that comes along is just that: an assumption. We make too many assumptions about how youth use tech. Time's Fletcher also made light of Matthew's observation that teens were communicating more in game communities such as Xbox Live; what I drew from that, again, was not "wow, now they're all going to flock to Xbox Live" but rather that here's another little sign of teens' communication diversification. Xbox Live, too, is a "social networking" tool, as are cellphones, World of Warcraft, and virtual worlds. That diversification is the real trend, I'm thinking. [Here's my post about Matthew Robson last Monday. Thanks to my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid for pointing the Time post out.]

Morgan Stanley teen intern on peers' media use

Though Morgan Stanley says its report by 15-year-old intern Matthew Robson on his friends' media habits got "five or six times more feedback" than its European media team's usual reports, the investment banking firm "made no claims for [the report's] statistical rigour," the Financial Times reports. It did offer clear, "thought-provoking insights" to all the hedge fund managers and CEOs who the FT said called and emailed Morgan Stanley the day of the report's release, but I'm not sure any of the young Londoner's observations would surprise my readers. Robson "confirmed" that teens don't use Twitter (though we've seen one created a Twitter worm to test its security - see this); don't watch much TV or listen to much radio, preferring music-focused social sites such as Last.fm; "find advertising 'extremely annoying and pointless'; and, as in newspapers, "'cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text'" instead of "summaries online or on television." What is interesting in the report is that - at least in the London area - teens' "time and money is spent on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, [Robson] said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone." Sounds like he's talking about Xbox Live and other gaming communities (e.g., those within and associated with virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft, maybe). Is that an early warning for mobile phone operators and an indicator for parents that the texting wave may crest at some point? [Meanwhile, here's a US 16-year-old's POV on why teens aren't taken with Twitter. Basically, he suggests they're less in control of who sees their updates in Twitter (I don't think he knows that you can make your Twitter profile private). For Twitter privacy, go into "Account" under "Settings" in the upper right-hand corner of your home page and click "protect my updates" at the bottom of the page so that only people you approve can see them; then click "Save" at the very bottom.]

Why Gen Y's not into Twitter?

The bottom line: "We have everything we need on Facebook," says Gen Y CNET blogger Sharon Vaknin - though, despite an insightful post, she's pretty hard on her generation. First the numbers: She cites a recent Pace University/ Participatory Media Network study showing that 99% of 18-to-24-year-olds have social network profiles while only 22% use Twitter. Then she offers a little history on Gen Y's migration from creative expression to status updates. "We no longer impress our friends with profiles that represent us through our creative flourishes, but rather with profiles that spell out what we're doing.... What Facebook intends as a forum for sharing, Gen Yers see as a game of show-off." She cites examples of author and psychologist Jean Twenge's "narcissism epidemic" among her peers. "We do anticipate seeing our friends' activities, but what we really look forward to is what they think of our activities - we want to be 'cyberstalked,' preferably in the form of replies to our self-published content." So why not Twitter? Her reasons illustrate two important differences from FB: 1) Twitter, she says, is too one-dimensional, too text-y (e.g., "Sally went to a great party last weekend, but where are the photos? Who went with her?"), and 2) "updates on Twitter happen so fast there really isn't time to react ... my friends don't have time to react to my activities." I think the latter point is about how fleeting tweeting is, compared to status updates in Facebook, which stay until one replaces them. Twitter is like a real-time, ongoing, multi-person conversation - more like back chat in an online presentation, where people just put tweets "out there" without necessarily expecting anything to come back. It's a little like comparing apples and oranges, because a Facebook profile functions so differently - it's as much a representation of a person's social network as a person, which seems to be the greatest appeal for youth. Vaknin's conclusion may say more about how she feels about her generation than about Gen Y itself: "Largely as a result of the digital communication tools on which we were raised, a big part of my generation wants to know what the cyberworld thinks of us, and we want its inhabitants to pay attention to us." Here's more on this from author and youth tech consultant Derek Baird at BarkingRobot.

Wonder how much teens tweet?

Not much, if we can extrapolate from just-released Pace University figures on 18-to-24-year-olds. A study by Pace and the Participatory Media Network found that, "while 99% of 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed say they have profiles on social network [sites], only 22% say they use Twitter," CNET reports. And the researchers offered a bit of insight into how that 22% use Twitter: "85% of them follow friends [in real life, I'm assuming], 54% follow celebrities, 29% follow family members, and 29% follow companies." I think it's safe to extrapolate similar if not less interest on the part of tweens - at a recent conference, a Pew/Internet researcher told us teens aren't really on Twitter. At 140 characters or less per message, Twitter's a bit like texting, and texting - which pretty much replaced instant-messaging for youth - rules for short messages in that age bracket, I think. Pew says 77% of US 12-to-17-year-olds own a cellphone, and that percentage is growing.

Schools twittering parents

More and more schools are keeping parents informed via Twitter. “Tweets” - little 140-character messages and updates like phone text messages in a Web site - "about student achievement, homework, school plays and school boards in Georgia and across the nation are being sent to [parents] like breaking news bulletins interrupting network programming," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. As of the article's pub date this week (4/29), the Georgia Department of Education had the beginnings of a following, at 62 followers. "Forsyth County Schools, which debuted as the first metro Atlanta public school on Twitter in March, has 300 followers. That’s more eyes glued to its posts than the nation’s largest district, the New York City Department of Education, which only has 220," according to the Journal-Constitution. But - get this - Florida's Broward County School District has a whopping 900 followers, adding new ones at a rate of about 200 a week!

'Continuous partial attention...'

...leads to "continuous partial empathy"? "Continuous partial attention" is the way some researchers are describing what's happening when people communicate or socialize with social-media tools like Twitter, instant messaging, chat, texting, etc. Fast Company looks at a new report from the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC, which argues that the brain is quick to recognize and empathize when people see physical pain or fear in others but "much slower to recognize and empathize with emotional pain.... What this means is that, in a media environment where our social encounters happen very quickly, we may not be giving our brains a chance to generate appropriate compassion or admiration." I wonder if writer Jamais Cascio (or the researchers, if this is their concern) is factoring in the fact that social-media users usually bring existing "real world" relationships to their social-networking, IM, and Twitter accounts, relationships in which empathy is often already established - that tweets and profile comments are not the all of their relating and socializing. SN comments are more effect than cause of relationships.

But what this does suggest to me is that empathy, citizenship, and anti-bullying training in schools needs to be sure to fold the "continuous partial attention" element of online social networking into instruction. And what we might teach students is consideration - giving consideration as much as being considerate. Referring to what business consultants have been calling the new "attention economy," another Fast Company writer, Richard Kadrey, cautions - wisely, I think - that "what's limited isn't attention, but consideration [emphasis his]. Not just hearing, but listening. Not just seeing a message, but understanding its meaning." I think that goes for the social-media-enabled participatory culture in which our kids are so active. Think about this comment of Kadrey's in the context of teaching new media literacy: "It may be worth considering how we'd structure our digital world if the point wasn't just to 'pay attention' but to 'give consideration'" - perhaps another way to look at both critical thinking and empathy.

Teen claims to be Twitter worm creator

A US high school senior in Brooklyn, N.Y., owned up to creating a worm that attacked Twitter over the weekend, PC Magazine reports. Apparently designed to increase traffic to his site, it spread links through some 10,000 tweets, or updates, to Twitter users' pages. CNET reports that among the worm's updates were: "Mikeyy I am done...," "MikeyyMikeyy is done," and "Twitter please fix this, regards Mikeyy." The 17-year-old taking credit for the exploit, Michael Mooney, "told reporters that he created the worm out of boredom and is hoping that it will result in employment from a security firm rather than prosecution," according to PC Magazine. Twitter founder Biz Stone blogged that the worm compromised about 100 accounts, which Twitter later secured.

Twitter going mainstream

Mainstream among young adults, mostly, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project (teens off the study's radar, but they microblog in other ways). Twitter, the most popular service for microblogging or status updating, and other such "have been avidly embraced by young adults," Pew says - nearly a fifth (19%) of US 18-to-24-year-olds and a full 20% of 25-to-34-year-olds now use such services to send "short updates about themselves, their lives, their whereabouts ... moods," personal, professional, national, and international news. Citizen journalism is a key component of microblogging online. But what seems to be the No. 1 attraction is that Twitter is "an inconspicuous way of staying in touch with the passions, obsessions of your friends, colleagues, and experts," as described by author and professor Howard Rheingold in this "Why does microblogging matter" slide show. Pew adds that Twitter use is "highly intertwined" with blogging and social networking, and its users are a very mobile bunch, accessing the social Net a lot from mobile wireless devices. And "mobile" is the operative word for teens, for whom texting = microblogging. Meanwhile, as for mobile social networking, the number of people who access MySpace by phone has quadrupled in the past year to 20 million, the service's CEO Chris de Wolfe said in a keynote at Europe's mobile industry trade show last week, InformationWeek reports. [See also "A (digital) return to village life?"]

A (digital) return to village life?

Did you ever hear someone speak nostalgically about "the good ol' days" of small-town life, when neighbors and people you cared about kept tabs on you? It had its downsides, but there's no denying everyday life (at least in the developed world) has gotten so much less personal. It's almost dehumanizing in some ways. People sometimes argue that the Internet has contributed to that. It can also be argued - I believe more persuasively - that the Internet is reversing that and bringing back village life in a non-geographical sense.

Case in point: the Twittersphere (Twitter's the fastest-growing social-networking service, CNET cites the latest Nielsen figures as showing). People microblogging through their days while "following" their relatives, friends, colleagues, and other interesting people doing the same. A superficial glance by babyboomers yields predictable reactions like "narcissism on steroids." But there's more to this phenomenon. It de-isolates. It creates "ambient awareness," as Clive Thompson recently described it in the New York Times Magazine - a growing (sometimes sustained, sometimes intermittent) awareness of the thoughts and moods of people who interest you wherever they are, even on the other side of the world (you can unfollow anyone any time, and it's up to you how much you say what's on your mind). It gives fresh meaning to the term "global village" and challenges the old saw, "familiarity breeds contempt." For one thing, you're only hearing from people you care about and they're only hearing about you if you allow them to.

"Taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce," Thompson writes, "like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting" of the people you follow. He tells of a person who twittered about what sandwich she made each day. Another person he mentions thought it all sounded silly. Then he "discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner.... Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click [maybe slightly comforting] that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day" and would miss if it weren't there.

All this raises so many questions - you really have to read Thompson to see many of them thoughtfully considered.... Are all these weak ties superficializing friendship or affection, or adding to it - on personal and global levels? Does microblogging increase self-knowledge or the potential for narcissism? Does it help to objectivize personal troubles, get perspective, find solidarity, make us more vulnerable? Probably all the above - it depends on the individual. Experimenting with it myself, following fascinating thinkers in my general field of work (none of my relatives are on it!), I have found it to be a positive experience. There is this unprecedented sense of sort of intimacy being trustingly conveyed by people you only knew from a distance ("trust" is a key word in all this), as well as a sense of stimulation but also a bit of overload - people you respect posting so many links worth checking out.

One thing's certain: Twittering has a way of keeping us honest. You'd have to be an extremely gifted pathological liar (or actor always in character) to be someone other than yourself microblogging to a well-developed following even once a day (tell me if you disagree, anyone!). Thompson tells of a student of Zeynep Tufekci, a University of Maryland sociologist, who posted that the difference between Web 1.0 and being under the microscope of the social Web is that - as the old New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs conversing points out - on Web 1.0 no one could tell you were a dog. On Twitter, the social Web to the 10th power, everybody knows you're a dog!

[Tufekci's student might've read Michael Kinsley at Slate. See also: "Just because they crave attention?"]

Twitter in the classroom

Also see how Twitter is making classes - and thereby education - more village-like (see ArsTechnica). A communications professor approached Twitter the way many of us baby boomers do, thinking microblogging's all "solipsism and sound-bite communication," but after using it realized that it "brought him closer to his students, creating a personal connection that helped to increase their involvement in his classes." In this blog post is the experience of a Central Connecticut State U. professor who, after each class, twitters a reflection about how the class went. "Students who see the messages often give him a reality check." He said that if he twittered that he didn't think something got across, for example, sometimes students would twitter back that they "understood that fine" but were just distracted by ... [something outside of class] or they were tired.

Powerful things can happen when people can come to understand each other on even slightly deeper levels afforded by the kind of fairly frequent, candid, humanizing communication that happens in microblogging. Empathy emerges.

Think about what can happen when people feel empathy toward one another: compassion, civility, encouragement, empowerment, engagement, etc. Disinhibition - that condition of online experience that allows for cyberbullying, harassment, hate, etc. by dehumanizing people - becomes less of a factor. "Users" move through being mere participants to being citizens and community members.

Related links

But is Twitter a teen thing? Not really, Anastasia Goodstein of Ypulse.com suggests. It seems to be more for young professionals, with Plurk of more interest to teens, a 20-something told Anastasia. However, when I went to Plurk: of the dozen "recently joined members" featured on the home page, one was under 30 (she's 20) and the one other didn't declare his age. The other 10 were all in their 30s or 40s - even further away from being teens. Anastasia's theory makes sense: "If you think about it, since teens' social networks are mostly comprised of friends they know in real life, and the majority are teens they go to school with, they sort of already know what their friends are up to at any given moment."

"Who am I on Twitter?" The Financial Times calls Twitter "social networking around mutual stalking." I think writer Peter Whitehead doesn't quite get it yet, but he asks good questions: "My biggest concern, however, is over who I am on Twitter. Am I just me or am I representing the FT? Can I say outrageous things?" On that last one, some Twitterers actually do, but remember: "Everybody knows you're a dog!" In some ways, online anonymity is going away.

"Twittering from the Cradle"?! The teeniest tykes are twittering with the help of their sleep-deprived parents, the New York Times reports. When they become old enough to send their own tweets, they probably won't have Whitehead's sort of Twitter-induced identity angst.

Twitter grew 343% from September '07 to September '08, according to Nielsen. Over the same period, nos. 2-10 in the Top 10 fastest-growing social-networking services were Tagged (330%), Ning (251%), LinkedIn (193%), Last.fm (121%), Facebook (116%), MyYearbook (115%), Bebo (86%), Multiply (59%), and Reunion (57%). CNET reports.

Readers, feel free to disagree - send your comments to anne[at]netfamilynews.org or post them in our forum at ConnectSafely.org!

Microblogging: Heads up

It might be interesting to ask your kids if they're Twittering these days ("microblogging" is the generic term if they're using a service other than early entrant Twitter). Microblogging is basically a blow-by-blow account of one's life, sent via phone or Web site. Kind of hard for some non-digital natives to imagine doing ("so very narcissistic" is the dismissal I've heard, or "why would my friends care if I'm at such-and-such a conference or the grocery store?"). Well, some adults and a lot more young people do want to know and share up-to-the-minute activities and thoughts. It's a form of intimacy and presence that express highly connected friendship, manifest in Facebook newsfeeds and prolific phone texting (for a bit more on intimacy, see "Fictionalizing their profiles"). However, as with all technologies, there's a potential downside along with the upsides, and youth don't always think about the former. "There is the risk that teens could use microblogs to reveal personal information or engage in a relationship with someone whose intentions are less than honorable," writes my co-director at ConnectSafely, Larry Magid in Yahoo!Parents. "By default, Twitter messages can be seen by anyone, so if you want privacy you need to go into Settings and click 'Protect my updates' to make sure only people you approve can see what you type. Otherwise anyone can 'follow' you and see what you enter." Please see his piece for more on this. See also "The text version of hanging out" and "Do you Twitter?"

The text version of hanging out

There is a place for micro-blogging (such as with Twitter), and not just for hyper-communicative youth or parents on business trips who use it to keep in constant, drive-by touch with their kids. Fascinatingly,
Clive Thompson at Wired calls it "social proprioception" - the social version of the hand knowing what the foot's doing. He writes that Twitter "gives a group of people a sense of itself.... It's almost like ESP.... You know who's overloaded ... and who's on a roll.... Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees." This is in contrast to past claims that the Net isolates us from one another, and it's where the social Web is heading, Clive suggests. He also offers a good reason for why it's widely misunderstood: It's "experiential" - you can't just view it to understand, you have to do it with a group of friends or colleagues, people with shared lives or interests. Dipping into it from the outside is like walking in on the hanging-out banter of a group of close teenaged friends - you not only need to know a bit about what they're talking about, you need to know them to understand what's going on.

Twitter not upholding Terms of Use: Why important?

Last week I wrote that two cases put the spotlight on sites' Terms of Service, and - whatever legal scholars say (I'll get to that in a minute) - this is a good thing. It's good because it sheds light on one part of the social Web that needs public awareness.

Now a timely illustration. Long-time Twitter fan and blogger Ariel Waldman has shined her own spotlight on how Twitter, another social Web service, isn't enforcing its Terms of Service and to what effect. [For more on the service, see "Do you Twitter?"]

"Overall, Twitter is a great platform to connect with friends and co-workers," Ariel writes. But, she adds, "considering the social-network sphere as it exists today, most people would assume that Twitter would be prepared to react and take action against TOS [Terms of Service] violations...."

The reason why she brings up the site's TOS is because a fellow Twitter user harassed her for months starting in June 2007. The harassment escalated, she says, with the user putting her full name in abusive posts in a public forum. "I would periodically report cases of continuing harassment (some of which spread between Flickr and Twitter). Twitter would take no action while Flickr would immediately ban and remove all traces of the harassment."

This past March, as it continued, she says she wrote to Twitter, including Web pages with examples of the abuse, and asking that the user be removed. Citing Twitter's 4th Term of Service - "You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users” - she told them, "Honestly, I believe this harassment has gotten way out of hand for too long. I am writing to you ... to remove this user for consistent long-term harassment."

Twitter's response after three days, she says, was: “Unfortunately, although [this user’s] behavior is admittedly mean, [s/he] isn’t necessarily doing anything against our terms of service.... We can’t remove [this user’s] profile or ban [this user’s] IP address; [they’re] not doing anything illegal.” For some reason this respondent was confusing what's illegal with what violates the site's TOS or community rules.

Ariel writes that she copied Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on her reply, which said:

“I don’t believe this is a case of illegal activity - this is a clear case of harassment which is outlined in your TOS...."

Dorsey asked for a phone conversation with her (see her blog post for her notes on the call, March 19), at the end of which he asked what action on Twitter's part would make her happy. She answered as before, she writes: that the harasser be banned or at least warned.

"Jack didn’t get back to me until I emailed him on April 9 with eight new instances of abuse that included my full name and email address...." The CEO then did respond, Ariel writes, with this email:

“Ariel, apologies for the delay here. We’ve reviewed the matter and decided it’s not in our best interest to get involved. We’ve tasked our lawyers with a full review and update of our TOS. Thank you for your patience and understanding and good luck with resolving the problem. Best, Jack.” [See the bottom of Ariel's post for nearly 300 comments from readers.]

When she wrote about all this in Twitter's out-sourced customer support forum at GetSatisfaction.com, she did get two more responses from the company, one of which said in part: "Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content." In response to that, Ariel later writes, "A decent portion of Twitter users see the service as a community (similar to Flickr), while Twitter chooses to view themselves as a “communication utility” (similar to AT&T)."

An interesting distinction. Courts actually have put social-networking sites in the same category as phone companies in their interpretations of the Communications Decency Act. And it is true that only the people involved can fully resolve an argument between them, regardless of whether it happens on the phone or in a social-networking site (for one reason, because no matter how many times a site's customer-service department might bar a harasser or take down defaming profiles, more comments or profiles can pop up under a new screenname).

However, let's look at this a little more closely:

1. Even phone companies get involved if customers report being stalked or threatened.

2. Ariel was not asking Twitter to change the harasser's behavior or resolve his apparent problem with her; she was asking that Twitter warn or ban him for violating the site's TOS with public harassment that included her full name and email address.

3. Interestingly, society as a whole - not just users, but parents and attorneys general too - has increasingly viewed and treated social sites as communities that need to be accountable and abide by and enforce their rules of operation as a baseline best practice - even though the US's social-networking industry hasn't yet started a discussion of social site best practices (for the UK's discussion see my posts on the Byron Review and the British Home Office's guidance for social-networking best practices).

Do you think Ariel's view reflects what we have come to expect of social sites, at least where minors are concerned? [I'd welcome your thoughts via anne@netfamilynews.org or posted in the ConnectSafely forum.] I wonder what the reaction would've been if Ariel and her harasser were teens and the site under discussion were MySpace.

Now for the part about what legal scholars are saying

About the Drew indictment, that is. University of Pennsylvania law professor Andrea Matwyshyn told a Wired blogger of her concern that, "if successfully prosecuted, the case [against 49-year-old Lori Drew about her involvement in the Megan Meier case] could set a bad precedent for turning breach-of-contract civil cases into criminal ones."

That does indeed have scary implications and needs consideration. But that doesn't change my view, blogged last week, that in Drew's indictment, "existing law is being unprecedentedly applied in a way that puts the public focus on sites' terms of service as, basically, a set of user safety regs that need to be observed by all as a protection to all." I feel strongly that two things will get us all closer to a safer social Web: 1) greater understanding, scrutiny, and enforcement of site terms of service and 2) better education for all participants about accountable behavior online. So, it's not good to set bad precedents, but it is good to try applying law in a way that strengthens the role of Terms of Use in the online-safety mix.

Related links

The UK Home Office's "Good practice guidance for the providers of social
networking and other user interactive services 2008"

My blog post on the Home Office's best-practices guidance

It's half-a-year old, but here's an interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

"Popular blogger ignites uproar over Twitter harassment" in Webware.com

Thanks to tech educator Anne Bubnic of the California Technology Assistance Project for pointing out Ariel Waldman's post.