"When I Was One, I Learned to Smell for Explosives"

This blog began six years ago, when it was dedicated to analyzing the rhetoric of e-government, e-learning, and e-business and the inherent contradictions between digital regulation and digital content-creation from which institutional public relations must suffer. The daily stories here eventually formed the material for a scholarly monograph and then contributed to the creation of another book that is in process. But in the last several months the coverage has been much more sporadic, as its once diligent author adjusted to a new post directing the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College in UC San Diego and cranked out a number of articles more obviously valuable to her c.v.

However, since the very first postings of Virtualpolitik were devoted to mocking the awfulness of government websites under the Bush administration, it only seems appropriate to come out of hiatus by giving some column space to the stunning news that the CIA has a revamped official website that includes a YouTube channel and a Flickr stream. Over the years, the CIA's website has been a particularly spectacular example of good reasons for misgivings about the virtual state, like many secret agencies forced by the Internet to put forward a public face. It began with a fun-filled offering of virtual paper dolls to get tykes excited about both espionage and dress-up. Soon it featured a loveable mascot, Ginger the adorable blue cartoon bear.

In the past the CIA website was so consistently terrible that it won one of my coveted Foley awards in 2006, the "prizes" that I give for the worst examples of official online communication every year. Although it was spared such recognition in 2007, 2008, and 2009, it continued to be a regular runner-up in my mind.

Now that it is 2011, the CIA's revamped version certainly seems to merit a full return to the Foley hall of fame, since it manages to ignore almost every one of my "12 Don'ts."

Sure, you can find CIA Factbooks and Freedom of Information Act documents if you browse the site's "library," but the navigation largely directs citizens to whitewashed institutional advertising rather than serious resources for civic research.

The site includes a dreary Flickr stream of all the bad official photo ops on the director's calendar. Particularly dismal is the CIA YouTube video embedded below, which stars "Bradley" the bomb-sniffing dog, who is voiced by a perky, high-pitched voice actress imitating a pre-pubescent girl. This YouTube canine obviously cast in an attempt to get the views normally devoted to pet antics tells an incoherent version of his life story, which starts with a rushed mention of being raised by Puppies Behind Bars, before launching into an industrial tour of the Langley facility.



Thanks to Jeff Brazil for the link.

Stick Figures without Happy Faces

This fake social advertising campaign from Cleanternet.org, which provides a tongue-in-cheek plug for Internet-blocking technologies, uses an infographics style that has also begun to appear in real public service announcements. It is the product of designer Alexander Lehmann, who blogs here. In addition to commercial digital art for films like District 9, Lehmann also does less politically tinged motion graphics and typography films.

Check out his other online "campaigns," such as "You are a Terrorist," which makes the case for ubiquitous surveillance.

Thanks for Ren Reynolds for the link!

I've Got a Lot of Plain Friends

Yesterday Jackie Marsh of the University of Sheffield gave a talk about "Digital literacy and play in MMOs/Virtual Worlds for children." She described children who generally had about two hours a day of media use in which family may "scaffold children's emergent digital literacy," but children also show "growing independence" and are even able to map their own literacy practices for researchers. She noted that other researchers, notably Sonia Livingstone, have demonstrated that children may move from one media platform to another as computational media become more popular in patterns of displacement rather than aggregation of hours spent. Marsh showed a broad continuum of digital media behaviors engaged in by young children, who may be pretending to text in pre-school, from "playing" to "controlling," although many forms of behavior are not ones of "productive and analytic media use." She also criticized the notion of the "digital native" and asserted that research had shown that "access and use was not just about class" because birth order and more complex forms of socioeconomic interaction could play a role.

Marsh's research focused on Club Penguin and BarbieGirls, although she noted that "children are always aspirational" and may quickly outgrow sites perceived as juvenile in favor of more adult virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel or migrate to ones that are seen as more trendy like Moshi Monsters. She defined basic characteristics of these virtual worlds, which included a "customizable avatar," a "home for the avatar," a "persistent space," an "in-world currency," and -- in the case of such kids' sites -- "chat," "moderators," and "link to an offline world of toys and texts." She cited the 2009 work of Maaike Lauwaert about the "geography of play" and the link between online and offline friendship. She explained how many of the sites rely on user policing of behavior, which she described as "cheap," because in playground play kids are eager to report on each other.

In discussing Club Penguin, she talked about various forms of capital, which have been enumerated by Pierre Bourdieu, which she demonstrated by contrasting the split-level igloo of a paid member of Club Penguin with the iglo of a participant limited to free services. She also discussed the "logographic capability" of children who recognize icons, although they also engage in more sophisticated literacy practices involving postcards, books, and newspapers.

These themes continued in her discussion of BarbieGirls, although she said this world -- which was in pink rather than primary colors -- had no even tokenistic mentions of boys as potential members. She showed the "butchest you can get your avatar to look" and noted the lack of choice in skin color and the fact that you might be frequently reminded that you are not a member during play. She also expressed her bemusement at the "heteronormative" character of "my crush" or fortune-telling forms of interaction that seemed strange to her as a "fifty-one year old lesbian." In this world she said, "children and parents are co-constructed as consumers," and companies like the Mattel empire make their pitch to parents by marketing their anti-predator credentials and their trustworthiness as a "safe" brand.

Marsh explained that she had conducted a small study in comparison with the giant Whyville study, which included 175 children from the ages of 5 to 11 who were surveyed, 26 interviewed, and 3 eleven-year-olds who were filmed. Shopping and consumerism were big themes for girls, while boys were concerned with games, but she said that some children did have critical thinking about the constraints of virtual worlds. In one example, a child complained about not being able to wear a wig and tiara separately, and another expressed distress that virtual pets could run away so easily. Many children found workarounds both playing solo and with siblings, relatives, and classmates. In thinking about playground rhymes and games and the potential for a more comprehensive study of play practice, Marsh observed that it still was not clear how virtual parties and other social rituals online functioned: if they only thickened existing social ties or invited children who would not be otherwise included into play.

One of her informants, Sally, age 11, explained that it wasn't all about "clothes, hair, and posh houses," since "I've got a lot of plain friends." Marsh described may genres of play, which included fantasy play, games with rules, rough and tumble play, and social drama play. She also described their delight in transgressive discussions of discos and getting drunk or throwing mudballs at security cameras. She cited the work of VP friend Tom Boellstorff (on disinhibition) and online friend Constance Steinkuehler (on rituals and performances) for related findings about the pleasures of doing bad online.

Common Sensible

"Teaching About Web Includes Troublesome Parts" from the New York Times includes commentary from my fellow Digital Media and Learning Central blogger Constance Yowell, who serves as Director of Education for the MacArthur Foundation. The piece includes analysis of materials on Common Sense Media, which is one of a number of organizations posting ratings and parent guides for movies, videogames, and web-based entertainment. I've written about Common Sense media before here, here, and here. According to the website, the group is creating a Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum

Our curriculum includes five distinct units. Each unit is mapped to ISTE Digital Citizenship standards and can be used as an integrated digital citizenship curriculum or as standalone units.

* Digital Life. How the anytime-anywhere-everywhere nature of digital media requires responsible choices.
* Privacy and Digital Footprints. How to manage privacy online.
* Connected Culture. How to build respectful one-on-one, group, and community relationships online and protect against cyberbullying.
* Self-Expression and Reputation. Who we are in various online contexts and how to protect your reputation in the process.
* Respecting Creative Work. How to get credit for original creations and respect other’s creative property.

As the article points out, some are unhappy with Common Sense's lack of corporate criticism or societal critique. As the last bullet point indicates, like many "Internet education" sites, the language of "respect" is used in connections with copyright issues rather than challenge.

But some media experts say that in focusing on social issues, Common Sense misses some of the larger, structural problems facing children online.

“We can’t make the awareness of Web issues solely person- and relationship-centered,” said Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Children should learn things like what a cookie or a Web virus is, and how corporations profit from tracking consumers online, he said.

The Envelope Please Please

One of the blogs for the New York Times has been running a series called "The Choice" that seems to have culminated with the posting about "How Fat Was Your Envelope?" Of course, there is some irony to the title because very few colleges actually notify students first with paper and traditional post any more; most high school seniors find out the colleges to which they have been admitted online, just as they applied to those colleges electronically. Watching this blog series and the postings on College Confidential, it is jaw-dropping to see the number of students talking about test scores, grades, and college rejections on public forums for these sites. Rather than read these disclosures as part of the so-called "end of privacy" among the "digital generation," I tend to notice how students cloak certain forms of information about their identities and how they share knowledge with communities of interest outside their schools.

As the mother of a student who will be a college freshman next year, I can't say that I have watched this phenomenon entirely with detachment. When it comes to my digital parenting style, I've never been one to police Internet use and cut off online time with draconian zeal, but I must say that the constant online status-checking among students who are seeking admission to elite schools, particularly on Facebook, doesn't strike me as healthy. Because disclosures on so called "gated" social network sites are so much more personal among a more intimate circle of friends and acquaintances on a minute-by-minute basis, it seems to ratchet up the anxiety of a group of already anxious students. For the first time I even found myself turning off our wireless router at night so my teenager would get some sleep. I hate to sound nostalgic for the era of big envelopes and small envelopes and private elation or disappointment, but the current system seems to be an embrace of technology efficiency before the human costs are entirely worked out.

Bad Dad

As someone who has written "in praise of bad mommies and daddies," I have to admire the stance of "I Let My Kid Play Violent Video Games," although I think that the lessons learned have more to do with teaching how media work rather than "what Xbox teaches children about the offline world," even if Ian Bogost's thesis about procedural rhetoric and how interactive systems can teach players about implicit rules that also operate in the so-called real world may be correct.

There Is No "T" in Natives

At the recent Digital Media and Learning Conference closing keynote speaker Sonia Livingstone argued in her talk that the rhetoric of the "digital native" encouraged misguided policy making that cast children both as innocent victims and as magically computationally savvy next generation saviors.

Ezster Hargittai seems to have reached a similar conclusion in "Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the 'Net Generation,'" which examines how dynamics of class and education play out in patterns of Internet use and the role of parental modeling.

Hargittai's abstract for the published results of her study reads as follows:

People who have grown up with digital media are often assumed to be universally savvy with information and communication technologies. Such assumptions are rarely grounded in empirical evidence, however. This article draws on unique data with information about a diverse group of young adults’ Internet uses and skills to suggest that even when controlling for Internet access and experiences, people differ in their online abilities and activities. Additionally, findings suggest that Internet know-how is not randomly distributed among the population, rather, higher levels of parental education, being a male, and being white or Asian American are associated with higher levels of Web-use skill. These user characteristics are also related to the extent to which young adults engage in diverse types of online activities. Moreover, skill itself is positively associated with types of uses. Overall, these findings suggest that even when controlling for basic Internet access, among a group of young adults, socioeconomic status is an important predictor of how people are incorporating the Web into their everyday lives with those from more privileged backgrounds using it in more informed ways for a larger number of activities.

The Island of Broken Toys

As it finished, it is worth reiterating the fact that the DML Conference invited a number of critics of techno-utopianism. Among them was my UCI colleague Mark Warschauer, who gave some of the most damning testimony about the Nicholas Negroponte's XO One Laptop Per Child program that I have every heard.

His first-hand report led off with his main assertion: "Laptops make a good school better, but they don't make a bad school good."

In his DML talk, Warschauer revisited the hyperbole from disgraced former Birmingham mayor Larry Langford, who had once waxed poetic about the promise of the XO, and had begun plans to acquire 15,000 of the devices for local students. Like others, Warschauer has interrogated the missionary zeal of XO enthusiasts and the way that that the technology made children feel disempowered rather than empowered by the devices, particularly since so many appeared to be nonfunctional within a very short time. At one point a dispirited boy, who supposedly didn't need oldsters, like others of the "digital generation," asked Warschauer miserably if he knew how to fix an XO laptop.

Warschauer also described poorly thought out skill-and-drill pedagogies that used the machines as virtual flashcards, and their compatibility limitations that force instructors wishing to project student work to use document cameras.

See my take on the OLPC at "A Story about Bicycles" for more sad stories of how the best of intentions might go awry.

From the Ivory Tower to the Control Tower

There is a word-for-word transcription of Sonia Livingstone's comments here, as she delivered the closing keynote for the Digital Media and Learning Conference, so perhaps it isn't necessary to do a long blog entry, although the talk was provocative and aimed at dispelling myths about "digital natives" in ways that often spoke to my own research about the rhetoric of the "digital generation" for my next book, Early Adopters. Livingstone may not be a familiar name in the United States, but she has an international reputation as "neither a celebrator not a fearmonger," who is also known for "immersion in policy discussions, American cultural studies

As a rhetorician, I must admit that there was one aspect of her talk, "Youthful Participation: What have we learned, what shall we ask next?," which hit a wrong note with me: her use of the "R-word," so that "rhetoric" always indicated deception, emptiness, or manipulation and never had any positive value for pedagogical or civic development.

In trying to understand "different constituencies" and "how the young sustain" certain media practices, Livingstone is known for "interviewing youth in their bedrooms while they are online." She acknowledged that "media are more privatized" but they intersect "with social activities and spheres of life." She explained the large themes in her research by pointing to the work of Friedrich Krotz: 1) globalization 2) individualization 3) commodification, and 4) medialization. The last term she described as the "logic of media systems and media forms (as combination and dependence)," and her work was clearly also influenced by lifeworld theory, since she discussed "instrumental and market values," as well as "surveillance in the lifeworld." She noted also that her talk would have three parts: 1) empirical: what's going on?, 2) explanatory: how shall we explain it?, and 3) ideological: how should we react to it?

She opened by asking "What claims are being made about digital media? Does the evidence support the claims being made, and are we examining evidence that doesn’t fit?" She wondered aloud also about if there were "sufficient independent evaluations of new initiatives," such as the ones that the hosting body, the MacArthur Foundation, was known for funding.

She described a thirteen-year-old trying to find German website on food and drink in vain. "It can involve the family, and it can fail," she lamented. She also depicted the parents of an eight-year-old "information junkie" who marveled at her fast clicking that doesn’t reveal struggle. As Livingstone summed it up, "she is not the digital native" that her parents assume her to be. "If we overestimate younger people’s skills, we can underestimate their need for support," since "children are struggling and have doubts."

She shared her observations about social networking attitudes when she asked teens a simple question about "how to change their privacy settings" and recorded their befuddled answers. She insisted that "hyperbole brings questions the wrong way round," particularly when young people using technology are talked about as a "new species." For her, central to inquiry should be "not what can the digital offer to learning and participation" but rather among all the factors shaping young people's experiences, what does the digital contribute, particularly when "not all the factors are within our expertise" and it is difficult to "escape the charge of technological determinism."

She told the story of how Megan, who was eight when her observations began but is now twelve, demonstrated her facility with the story-writing option on AOL. But Livingstone discovered that a far more mundane program, Microsoft Works, was allowing this student to produce a story she was in the middle of writing that was "creative," "dramatic," and had a "fantastic vocabulary." She also reminded the digerati present that the girl also lived in a "bedroom full of books." She also described eighteen-year-old marry who found "school council more meaningful than use of Internet" to explain how "school, information, and civic" spheres" might be "three things that don’t come together."

She also spoke about the "constraining of children’s lives" that took place now that "children were getting older younger and yet staying younger" and thus "held longer in a state between dependence and autonomy," much like the one described in the book Hackers and Painters. By seeing "childhood as last place for enchantment," she warned that adult society perpetuated a "construction of childhood" as endangered and fragile in which "we may inadvertently fuel surveillance" with "digital native rhetoric." She told about Anisah, 15, who lived in a housing estate that was troubled with parents with high expectations. Although she was never to download music, she did enjoy chatting with friends late. As computational media offered a route for temporary escape, the girl still had to face a mother who wanted "to empower and yet to control" by shutting off "opportunities and escape from offline constraints." In this situation "risks lurked and yet were not spoken about." For Livingstone, they were too "tied together" to be verbalized.

As she moved out of her summary of fiedwork experiences, Livingstone offered a few generalizations:

1) Children don’t draw the line where adults do. What they call meeting up with friends, we call meeting up with strangers. They might remix forms; we worry about copyright. There are fused activities.

2) Design of digital resources confuses and brings risks and opportunities into collision. For example searching for "teens" without the safe search filter on Google is quite something. We cannot draw these neat lines in online digital worlds.

3) Learning involves risk-taking as young people try "to expand experience and expertise." Children have to push against adult-imposed boundaries.

4) With participatory genres there will always be some "playing with fire" as young people "explore what adults have forbidden" and "take calculated risks to show off to others" in "trying to work out for themselves what adults consider strange and dangerous." In Livingstone's opinion, "this is not so very new." It may "look like young people are creating, participating, but it may be playing with fire." Those adult goals are being attained, but let's examine closely the adult structures next to or imposed upon young people.

Then she displayed a diagram with "State," "School," "Parents," and "Commerce" mapped out that she described as "not an elegant piece of art." At this point, she quipped that she might "need a younger person" to create a more dazzling computer graphic. Such diagrams could reinforce the "need to focus on structure as well as agency," as she reviewed a number of dyads and connections: "create" (state and school), "subvert" (state and parents), "network" (school and commerce), and "explore" (parent/com). She made the analogy to earlier sites of illicit discovery like a "bike shed" or "World War II bomb sites." She talked further about the relationship between "political economy and popular opinion" and the disengagement (or collaboration) of critical theorists and semioticians.

She then reiterated a number of points that she described as "repeated findings": children engaged in online participation are generally the already engaged; they are not the newly motivated. Backgrounds of the children shape their digital use more than the digital technology affordance itself. The design of digital resources confuses and brings fused behaviors. Learning involves risk-taking, and children must push against boundaries, which involves intimacy, privacy, vulnerability. These were capped off with the inevitability of "playing with fire" when it could be "fun teasing the suspicious man in the chatroom" or trying out chat roulette where "you might be able to go and meet a rapist," much as earlier generation might have dared themselves to sleep in a park or street. She described how some of her informants even disrupted an adult Yahoo chat room for police and fire officers by pretending to be blind orphans in a home with abusive caregivers.

As she closed, she warned against the "unholy alliance" between "network society optimists and popular opinions" in which fan activities, profits, autonomous learners, and state interests might be served by "digital native rhetoric."

Of course, as some one who hands out awards for bad official websites, I was most charmed by her mockery of a government website supposedly designed for children: Epal.tv. Producers claimed it is "about participation in the broadest sense," because services for young people "need to engage with young people in a participatory way." However, Livingstone derided the site by complaining that "such vague expectations regarding engagement contrast with the considerable planning of project funding and design." "When pressed, they could not state what kind of participation they aimed for," she chuckled. Teenagers, not surprisingly, resisted this approach and found the site "boring." Despite well-meaning statements, young people "need to know about a lot more these days to make the right choices" rathen than be talked down to by adults or appealed to as if "youth" could be treated "as single thing." (This has also been called the "creepy treehouse" problem.)

She also encouraged critical thinking about publicly funded use of technology in education. She described observing an after-school computer club in which there was a math game and how she couldn't help intervening by reading the instructions, because "neither the game nor the teacher gave instructions." In this numerical simulation "one mistake, and the boat crashes." She said that there were many instances of "the supposed fun of digital media," although she did tell about a stopped school in Denmark where all participants devoted themselves to a digital animation project successfully. But she asked that if "radical transformation" is desired, are teachers, parents, and governments ready?

She cited the excellent work of my UC Irvine colleague Mark Warschauer at this point to ask "in whose interest" such projects are undertaken, when there are "unequal power relationships that exist in society." Technology may actually "reinforce existing interests of power" in such situations, rather than overturn them.

She said that host Henry Jenkins understood that there was also a sense that our use of digital media might only foster consumerism, edutainment, standardization, and individualization, so that collective interests might be overlooked in the promotion of self more than community. We must "counter that rhetoric," she said, as the "R-word" appeared yet again. Among "transnational elites," there were "new forms of illiteracy as well as literacy," she claimed.

In particular, she attacked how the once critical field of media literacy, personified by Patricia Aufderheide and legitimated by a national report on media literacy that emphasized critical thinking:

Media literacy may be defined as the ability to access, experience, evaluate, and produce media products. Media are seen to represent actual events, but those representations are subjective and incomplete. Journalists and news producers select which stories to publish, what aspects to emphasize, and what language to use. Media literacy is necessary for media consumers to sift through the variety of presentations, including films, newspapers, Web sites, and video screens to arrive at meaning.

Eventually these kinds of statements were watered down by those with more socially conservative agendas. Ofcom (2004) reduced it to "the ability to operate the technology to find what you are looking for, to understand that material, to have definition of media literacy" when "put simply." AVMS (2007) paternalistically announced that "media literacy refers to skills, knowledge and understanding that allow consumers to use media effectively and safely." (Note the language of use and consumption not production and creation.) The Minister of State for Culture, Media, and Sport (2004) reminded one of Foucault's concept of "governmentality" with its summary definition emphasizing "personal responsibility for what they watch and listen to." By emphasizing what Ulrich Beck has called "the individualization of risk," the possibilities of citizen collective action in the digital realm are delineated extremely narrowly, according to Livingstone.

In cataloging "financial literacy, health literacy" and other literacies in which "media literacy has parallels with other skills," she reminded the audience of how Robert McChesney’s critique of "literacy" emphasizes how it "distracts from questions of power."

Livingstone expressed her concern about how "critical and state priorities are aligned for now" and the need for an "explanatory form of critique" with a "wider gaze that encompasses the structures" be they "political or ideological," as academic discourses move "from the ivory tower to the control tower."

Her call to action urged that participants "must be tougher on ourselves" and must "stop being so nice to each other." "Are we cheerleaders for change?" she asked plaintively.

Jenkins served as her respondent and repeated his self-characterization as a "critical utopianist" engaged with the question of "what kind of world do we want to live in" and "blockages and obstacles" that represent "what do we have to overcome." As remedy he emphasized that the event had brought "theorists and practitioners into the same space," even if it was impossible to represent "all voices in US much less the world" or to analyze "deeply cultural problems."

Like Livingstone, there was a lot of the R-word with Jenkins, who talked about "dismissing that rhetoric" and the "digital revolution rhetoric" in his closing remarks. As he closed the conference, he again referenced his mentor John Fiske, author of Media Matters, by quoting his line that "in early modern Europe everyone had a larynx, but not everyone could speak."

One of the most retweeted lines from the session actually came from danah boyd who said that the group needed to add "playing w/ fire" to the standard trio of "hanging out, messing around, and geeking out" as core youth practices.

Here is the formal copy of her paper.

Scout and About

The digital rhetoric of the Boy Scouts of America merit badge webpage has moved away from the traditional books and booklets conventionally associated with advancement in scouting and has now embraced the wiki form.

MeritBadge.org has many of the aspects of a standard wiki, where encyclopedic institutional authority and NPOV policies sometimes run afoul of the very structure of open access and user-generated content, whether it is a legitimate contributor lamely promising to deliver a better vector graphics image just as soon as he (or she) figures out the software or a spammer introducing "game power leveling and game gold" into the page for "helping scouts advance."

You Know Where They Sit in the Lunchroom

Yesterday I was one of the respondents to John Palfrey's talk as part of the "Youth & Digital Culture: A Workshop & Discussion" sponsored by the Center in Law, Society, and Culture. Palfrey is the co-author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives and the Co-Director of Harvard's Berkman Center, where I had the privilege to speak last May. Palfrey's work is well known for its collaborative spirit and appeal to public audiences, and this international project looking at the intersection between social science and policy with digital youth around the world was first developed at a collaborative website. Palfrey's own blog is here.

With his collaborator Urs Gasser, Palfrey describes himself as part of a group of "academics who want to speak to the policy debate" about young people online. He has often been at the center of some of the most heated debates about cyber-predators and legislation targeted against them, as the chair of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. These can be difficult debates to be involved in, because -- as I write in the opening chapter of the Virtualpolitik book -- members of both political parties are eager to score points by seeming tough about Internet crime and are willing to overlook both civil liberties and the reality that most sexual abuse is committed by parents and other loved ones who exploit their power in face-to-face situations. Too often, Palfrey said, Internet policy is shaped by "response to fears," and even lawyers like himself should acknowledge the limits of the law in governing social conduct, especially when conduct like downloading music illegally has become a cultural norm.

He apologized for being only able to give an overview of his "deep dives" that involve fieldwork in Bahrain, Shanghai, and South Korea, but he did announce his intention to use his brief talk to "bust a bunch of myths" that are popular in the mainstream media about kids born after 1980, whom he judges to be the "most empowered" by the digital revolution.

He opened his talk with an image of a pair of hands recognizable to almost all in the audience that show a close up of Barack Obama with his Blackberry, as an emblem of how interaction with computational media now had certain iconic representations associated with political authority, so complete has the transformation of society become. (It's an image that I would argue is suppressed in the current visual rhetoric of the White House, where Blackberries are to be checked at the door and instead Obama is shown repeatedly on a traditional corded phone.)

In a section called "I Blog Therefore I Am: Digital Identity," Palfrey noted the convergence of online and offline life for many young people, and -- as he showed images from Global Kids -- he observed how the avatar experience could be one of seeming power and control, and yet an onlooker might assemble their identities in ways that they might not imagine.

He also questioned how the rhetoric of multitasking was being promulgated and expressed his own preference for the term "switch-tasking," while also noting the possible unanticipated consequences of wiring classrooms not only to productivity but do the learning community's dynamic.

He even described how his own four-year-old daughter used a box camera on a vacation and how she was puzzled by not being able to see the pictures to delete bad shots and asked "Daddy, where are the pictures."

Although he granted that keyword searching habits could lead to information literacy problems and that media were not always as shareable as they appeared, he still pointed to syndication and aggregation technologies as those created by young people for young people that engaged them with code production, hacker culture, and the creative feedback loop, even if a "sophistication gap" still existed.

He then launched into several cluster concept areas in the book, starting with "Security," which in the mainstream media is associated with "stranger danger, bullying, hacking," although there has actually been a decrease in sexual predation since the online revolution. This was followed by a cluster around "Privacy" that included parental fears about "unintended audience," "persistence," "replicability," "searchability," and "unintended contributions" that are highlighted in popular journalistic accounts, although for Palfrey the real dangers lie in "identity theft," "digital record," and "continued erosion" of the privacy held dear by both young people and adults. He argued that the perception that teens didn't care about privacy anymore, since they seem to share everything from their personal lives in an exhibitionistic culture, actually didn't match the behavior and attitudes expressed by young people in his study.

His next cluster focused on the issue of "Intellectual Property," where "copyright issues" and "remix issues" take center stage. Palfrey warned that not only had the social norm of downloading become so strong that legal enforcement wouldn't change it, but that confusion about the complexities of copyright law and its four tests were encouraging many not to experiment and test the boundaries of fair use. This was followed by a "Credibility" cluster with "misinformation," "cheating," and "hidden influences" in its constellation, and then "Information Overload."

Palfrey argued that each issue presents both opportunities and costs, and that there were significant potential gains in expression as young people explore identity and media literacies and are empowered as creators and information generators. He also argued that this creativity could benefit what he called the "semiotic democracy" in which social production becomes more inclusive and accessible, which has consequences for knowledge creation, equity, democratic participation, autonomy, and cross-cultural community building, even if such a system may not directly lead to conventional forms of political participation or protest.

As he concluded, Palfrey focused the audience's attention on the "construct of a learning environment," one that might be less like the library of Oliver Wendell Holmes than traditionalists would prefer, but one capable of rich interactions and meaningful educational experiences.

He closed with a remarkable video created by one of the students working on the Digital Natives project about "Digital Dossiers" that highlights the importance of adaptation as a multimodal composition skill.



In response, I took issue with the rhetoric of the digital generation that I feared might cause policymakers to overestimate the computer literacy of the young and assume that learned behaviors were only expressions of natural facility.

In her comments, Mimi Ito provided a brief history of digital youth as the subject of analysis both in the academy and the mainstream media. She talked about the ongoing back-and-forth between "boosters" and critics and said that all three panelists were trying to present a more nuanced and complex representation of the digital youth landscape. She also said that her own research showed that both the boosters and the detractors were right, if they studied different populations of young people and that both Palfrey and I represented her favorite group to study: "geeks," who needed advocacy and understanding from the broader culture.

Moderator Mona Lynch has done a lot of interesting work about the Internet and capital punishment and the justice system, including work about "jailcams" and the push for online viewing of executions.

Lifeline or Noose?

The U.K.-based group CyberMentors have complained that television stations have refused to air the ad above for their anti-cyberbullying organization. Their website emphasizes their live chat services, although they admit that "Beatbullying has funding to keep our BACP-accredited counsellors online from 8am-10pm," although "you will mostly find CyberMentors and Senior CyberMentors online until much later, often until midnight."

Of course, the question I find myself asking, as sympathetic as I might be to the parents who founded this organization after the death of their daughter, is if this ad only reinforces the idea that the web is harmful to teenagers and brings abuse into their homes, despite the fact that there are teens who use Internet websites as a way to escape abusive situations and define what is normal in a separate realm from a dysfunctional home.

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus . . . And That Diaper Pail Manufacturer

In a piece called "Parental Guidance" writer Sarah Wildman exposes how mommy blogs and daddy blogs, once thought to represent an antidote to advertising-driven consumerism and a reaffirmation of the values of domesticity outside of market interests, actually have become lucrative sites for promoting particular corporate brands. She describes how "reviews" of baby products are sometimes used as a way to collect free merchandise by cash-strapped parents and how events supposedly about parenting can become crass promotional events.

I'm not surprised by what Wildman says. When I mentioned a "sippy cup" and "stroller" in a posting about a famous TSA online video that showed a mother seemingly harrassed while going through airline security, I was quickly contacted by those pushing particular baby items, who were hoping for "advertorial" space on this blog, despite the ludicrousness of using a blog about digital rhetoric in very academic contexts as a vehicle to do so.

However, I'm not sure that she is right that the "blog with integrity" pledge would be the honor code that would really fix the problem.

I treat others respectfully, attacking ideas and not people. I also welcome respectful disagreement with my own ideas.

I believe in intellectual property rights, providing links, citing sources, and crediting inspiration where appropriate.

I'm not sure that corrupt practices deserve respect and that satire isn't a legitimate tool. Nor am I sure that the present intellectual property regime should be upheld if it quashes creative production and political speech.

Out of the Fingers of Babes

"Google Seeks to Help Children Search Better" gets at a fundamental issue in digital parenting, now that so many children go to the Internet for schoolwork rather than for fun. It explains how search engines like Ask.com have some market advantages for a digital generation that is not actually so digital when it comes to Boolean searches with keywords. It also discusses how Google is developing the Google Wonder Wheel for simplifying and arranging results in formats other than the traditional results list, which has been the standard approach in digital libraries for decades.

Twas the Night Before Christmas

On Christmas Eve it is interesting to see how Christmas magic, superstition, and faith are both supported and debunked on the Internet. I often wonder if a child's faith in Santa gets tested as rigorously by a Google search as a similar set of queries about the existence of the stork that brings babies without sexual reproduction. Many online sources reinforce the Santa myth, although this Wikipedia entry encourages doubt.

There has long been some opposition to teaching children to believe in Santa Claus. Some Christians say the Santa tradition detracts from the religious origins and purpose of Christmas. Other critics feel that Santa Claus is an elaborate lie, and that it is unethical for parents to teach their children to believe in his existence.^[8] Still others oppose Santa Claus as a symbol of the commercialization of the Christmas holiday, or as an intrusion upon their own national traditions.^[9] Others point out that the Claus tradition is a good example of how children can learn that they may be deliberately misled by their elders; this will help teach them to be cautious about accepting any other superstition or unsubstantiated belief.^{[citation needed]}

NorthPole.com is one of the most popular results among the Santa-is-real websites; it offers interactive stories with sound effects to Santa Claus enthusiasts. Oddly no one seems to be doing anything with the Christmas.com domain, despite its obvious lucrative potential.

My former UCI colleague historian Jennifer Luff has argued that the "Night Before Christmas" poem and the domesticity that it represents was partly exploited by those who wanted to end the public carousing and collective drinking and carnivalesque behavior in favor of a more sanitized at-home alternative. The piety and patriotism of Santaland.com, with its "God Bless America" banner and "Yes, Virginia" story plays to this normative Santa narrative.

From a digital rhetoric standpoint, it's also interesting to see so many web design failures. At the critical juncture, Claus.com was down for maintenance, and EmailSanta.com with its Comic Sans and its loud sound effects and jarring color scheme is a classic website of the "World's Worst" variety. Santa-Claus.com offers more ugliness with its clip art, and the over-animated and over-hyphenated the-north-pole.com may be even worse from an aesthetic perspective.

For those who worry about the "Googlization of government," like Siva Vaidhyanathan, the use of Google products by NORAD in its elaborate "Santa Tracker" may be a sobering reminder of the global reach of the Mountain View, CA company.

Of course, people can still use the Internet to congregate with others as they simultaneously stay at home in virtual places like America's Army, Second Life, and World of Warcraft.

When in Doubt, Blame the Internet

Coming into work yesterday, I heard a segment on the radio about teen dishonesty, in which a spokesperson for the Josephson Institute repeatedly made a causal connection between lax morals among the young and access to the Internet.

Indeed, the Institute, which boasts of having White House approval for their Character Counts program, has been pressuring Google for several years to omit advertising and search engine results that would lead students to content from term paper mills, sometimes in ways that seem to support the rhetoric of the movie and record industry in calling everything piracy and ignoring how great writers have appropriate material throughout our entire literary and rhetorical tradition.

Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis. Helen Keller pilfered an early short story, “The Frost King.” Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, has been accused of stealing twice. The list goes on. Plagiarism is as old as the printing press, which allowed text to be distributed wider, easier, and cheaper.

The advent of the Internet has reinvented the practice. Any academic institution that considers itself free of piracy is probably either turning a blind eye or fooling itself (and should check the April edition for a free anti-plagiarism tool).

Not only is it possible to copy and paste online text into essays, but it is incredibly easy to buy entire essays and pass them off as one’s own. Google says it will address the issue by banning companies that sell essays online. Google also blacklists companies that sell or promote weapons, tobacco, cigarettes, or gambling.

That’s not to say those items are not available elsewhere online, but rather that Google is trying to live up to its unofficial motto: Do No Evil. At the time of writing, the inclusion of companies selling essays online had not yet been included in Google's AdWords Content Policy document, but a Google spokesman confirmed the sale of essays in the AdWords service had been disallowed and updates to the Content Policy would be made in the near future.

As Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course, I have to deal first-hand with the consequences of plagiarized student work, but I don't appreciate seeing the Internet demonized or unworkable models for policing intellectual property praised.

Actually, I have had a skeptical view of the methods and causal claims of the Josephson Institute for a long time. I well remember working at a delinquency prevention center for the California Youth Authority, where I ran an after-school tutoring program and computer lab. My supervisor loved the slick pamphlets and videos of the Josephson Institute and wanted to take academic time away for their secular sermons, which I usually refused to give. If we had any free time to talk about ethical dilemmas in the classroom, I often spent the time on emphasizing how the harm for students' lapses could be minimized, since I thought that low-income students of color with family members in the justice system often paid disproportionately for their transgressions. Thus, I was more likely to mention birth control distribution or strategies for avoiding people packing weapons, rather than abstinence or principled stands on violence.

After all, even exhibitionism, dissimulation, and transgression may have their own kind of moral authority on the Internet.

Direct Line

This parody of digital parenting practices combines old stereotypes about Jewish mothers with ironic commentary about the absence of audiences for many social network posts in a "zero comments" age.

Biting Off More than You Can Chew

It is interesting to see how the famed "Charlie Bit Me" video is at the center point of Michael Wesch's "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube."

The video has been remixed and restaged many times and the parents have posted a long disclaimer in response to possible accusations about child abuse and self-interested exploitation.

Just a Friendly Mom

Thanks to Darren Purcell for spreading the word about this video that parodies the surveillance obsessions of contemporary parents and the number of moms who friend their own children for self-interested ends. This send-up of the technology parenting expert on broadcast news isn't that far from reality, unfortunately, as self-appointed authorities try to cash in on moral panics about online predators and cyberbullying.

Creepy Treehouses

Lately there has been considerable discussion of the metaphor of the "creepy treehouse" to describe online learning initiatives that are doomed to failure because their rhetorical appeal to young people is so profoundly wrong in its address.

Of course, there have been many other metaphors from vernacular architecture to describe the location of Internet practices in relationship to the conventional spheres of home and work. For example, technology researcher Genevieve Bell has argued that ubiquitous computing plans tend to enshrine certain ideas about domesticity that ignore the functions of liminal places more tangentially associated with the home environment, such as the shed, which functions as a site for tinkering and repair. I suppose that in the United States, the garage often serves that function.

The treehouse is creepy and off-putting to children partly because it is so obviously constructed by an adult to attract non-adults to a given site, much as a gingerbread house built by a witch should attract suspicion.

A blog posting on "Defining 'Creepy Treehouse'" suggests some other ways beyond the straightforward definition of a "place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids" that the term could be meaningful to experience designers.

Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

Many of these definitions have to do with the institutional power behind much educational technology and the uncomfortable relationships that many institutions and the Internet maintain.

You can see the reactions on TechRhet to the question "Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?" to see how it also generates discomfort among e-learning advocates.

(Thanks to David Schwalm for the link.)