Yesterday as I was driving home from a meeting at Facebook, I got a call from a producer for the Today Show asking if I might be up for an interview about the girls who decided to take a bath in the industrial sink at KFC. Of course I said yes, and scrambled to clean my apartment, banish my husband and dog, slather on lots of makeup and read about the incident. Of course the interview lasted about 15-20 minutes yielding a few seconds for the piece. So you missed me saying, "Taking a bath in a sink at KFC, definitely not ok."

I thought I would fill you in on what I said that got left on the cutting room floor. This has been a week of sensational coverage around all the negative stuff youth are doing online — see the Today Show's earlier report on the new "sexting" survey out from Hearst and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. The percentage in that survey (20 percent) feels high to me, and one of my Twitter friends who is a research guy, questioned where the online sample was taken from, i.e. if it was mostly from MySpace, it might have skewed the results. High or not, I thought Allison Mooney over at Mobile Behavior had the perfect measured response. Here were my other talking points on the KFC scandal:

While inspired by the Burger King bather, I didn't think these girls were going for viral gold. Sharing images on MySpace is different than posting videos on YouTube. These bathing ladies were posting for their friends and had no clue they would be "discovered" and that this would lead to them getting fired. It was more of a let's see if we can get away with it prank, followed by documentation. Teens have always documented in some way - I was just watching "Sixteen Candles" for the hundreth time the other night — what did Farmer Ted do to prove he had driven Caroline home in a Rolls? Had his friends take a picture. What's different now of course, is that posting makes it public, which is the lesson teens learn when they get busted.

One other comment on what I think links the sexting stuff and the KFC story together - the teens on the Today Show sexting story talked about the distance technology adds into the equation, allowing them to do more brazen things than what they would do in real life. I talk about this a lot when I speak on cyberbullying - the girls aren't thinking about photos being passed around or imagining themselves in a room full of teen boys looking at them as they took the photos. Just as the KFC trio didn't think about a co-worker watching them bathe. Technology does make it easier to flirt, bully, share and do other stuff you wouldn't do face-to-face.

Teens have always done stupid things during their first jobs when the manager wasn't looking. If anything, these types of scandals might be good for all of our public health. Now fast food chains and other teen employers can focus even more on worker education and talking about what's appropriate to do at work, and what isn't - i.e. taking a bath, "not ok."

Finally, they used my quote at the end - it's not just young people posting stupid stuff online. We all know colleagues or friends posting borderline photos or status messages on social networking sites. Yes, younger people have less impulse control, but it's not just "kids today." We are all struggling with what it means to share and sometimes overshare online.

And now, here's the clip:

The other day my best friend from college and I decided to not "talk" on Facebook, but to use old fashioned email and the phone. My husband pointed out that sending a message on Facebook is really no different than email, but to us, the public nature of Facebook felt like it was somehow detracting from the authenticity of our friendship. Like leaving comments on photos and walls is fine with Facebook friends, but somehow felt less real between us - like phoning it in. Part of the reason why is that we both acknowledged how most people on Facebook are really curating their profiles, putting their best or happiest foot forward, giving off a certain impression of themselves or creating a personae that doesn't give the full picture of who we are or what we're really going through.

Over the past few months, I've been posting a little more on Facebook including some personal photos. Since my Twitter account feeds into my Facebook status, I've been getting more comments there on "tweets" than @replies on Twitter. As a blogger with a following, I have more "friends" than the average Facebook user my age, and most of them are indeed readers or professional contacts. Like many younger Facebook users, I haven't taken the time to set specific privacy settings around who can see what, mostly because up until a few months ago, I didn't post anything that personal. Whenever I do post a photo now, I have to think, "Do I care whether my readers or professional acquaintances see that photo of my grandma?" So far, I think I'm ok with that, but if I keep posting those types of photos, I may put a wall around who can see them.

There has definitely been a big shift in media coverage of social networking from panic around stranger danger and bullying to the issue of how much we all share on these sites and with whom - parents and teens, students and teachers, bosses and employees. Clay Shirky highlighted a new report over at Boing Boing from James Grimmelmann at NYU Law School titled: Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy. It's lengthy, but well worth reading. My takeaway was that it's not so much what legislation, the companies or more privacy settings can do to solve the new issues these sites raise (since most of the privacy drama is caused by transgressions from our "friends"), but about education — what the report refers to as "culturally appropriate education."

To me this education for younger social networking users should be peer-based. When I speak to parents, they ask me if I can go speak to students. I think what would be more effective is training teens and college students to do this speaking and outreach to their peers. By integrating real-life stories of privacy violations (and encouraging youth to share their own) into a presentation that ends with practical advice on how to manage your online identity(ies), we would take a big step forward in addressing some of these new challenges.

For those of you who don't follow my banal thoughts and minutia details of my life on Twitter, I have just returned from being on the road for two weeks. After our Boston event, I visited my grandmother in Maine, my in-laws in New Jersey, spoke to school librarians in Florida and visited my other grandmother, great aunt and cousins. The upside of travel for me is that I am able to get that rare "totally unwired" time offline on airplanes where my partial attention issues are tamed and I can focus. On my flight home, I read the 50-something page white paper just released today by the MacArthur Foundation. My friend, danah boyd, was one of the researchers/authors involved, and sent it to me a few days early. I'm going to post a very quick summary since you can now access the paper online, but wanted to comment first.

Since publishing Totally Wired over a year and a half ago, I have spoken to thousands of parents and educators about what teens and tweens are doing online. I have attempted to calm their fears, answer their questions and listen to their concerns. What's both refreshing and slightly perplexing about this research is that while reporting from the youth perspective and attempting to allay the reality that "Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games," I can imagine many of the adults I've spoken to reading the research but not feeling all that reassured by the report's failure to address any of the pitfalls of teens living in an "always on" digital culture (and I'm not talking about the debunked hysteria over online predators). Alluding to arguments that youth may be a social construction and that "Simple prohibitions, technical barriers, or time limits on use are blunt instruments; youth perceive them as raw and ill-informed exercises of power," makes sense from an academic perspective but doesn't quite succeed in convincing a parent who sees their child texting more than talking, involved in a case of nasty cyberbullying or stumbling onto internet porn (at a very young age), that it's all good.

Maybe it falls on people like me, Anne Collier, Derek Baird, Common Sense Media and others to take this research, digest it and broadcast the findings to the parent/educator populations we speak to on a regular basis in ways we know might make it more impactful. Personally, I'm up to the challenge and am excited to incorporate these findings into my upcoming talks. And now, a short summary from their press release…

There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.

- Adults tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.

- Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.

Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.

- Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.

- The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.

Young people are motivated to learn from their peers online.

- The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.

- Young people respect each other’s authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.

Most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet.

- Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.

- Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.

- "Geeked-out" learning opportunities are abundant – subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.

Related:

'From MySpace to Hip Hop' In A Couple Paragraphs

Last Friday I was invited to speak at an all-boys boarding school in Connecticut about the teens and technology (the content of Totally Wired). I spent my early years (ages 1-6) growing up in Connecticut and both my parents have degrees from UCONN - the colorful fall leaves and New England style homes dotting the road leading to the school all felt very familiar. I spoke to faculty first, then to parents visiting their sons the following day. The Harry Potter/Dead Poets-esque campus reminded me of why I begged my parents to send me to boarding school as a teenager. I think I even sent away for brochures and was rooting for Interlochen Arts Academy since I saw myself as a burgeoning "triple threat" back then.

One insight I had after my visit was that it's not just public schools where social media is blocked and teachers are saddled with requirements and teaching to the test that are struggling to integrate technology into education in meaningful ways. Elite independent schools that pride themselves in being academically rigorous may be so focused on teaching the traditional canon in traditional ways that they, too, risk becoming part of the widening gap between students and teachers.

The other big concern I heard from both faculty and parents was around media multi-tasking or "continuous partial attention" and students not being able to concentrate. One faculty member volunteered that for this generation, it's actually comforting or familiar to have at least some multiple media happening while doing homework. That said, the school appeared to put strict limits on this during study time since a parent later told me how much faster her son completed his homework without being able to also IMi, play games, etc. while studying at the same time. Parents were also concerned about Facebook loopholes and how employers or college admissions types could find inappropriate content posted on Facebook profiles. In many ways at a boarding school, the faculty are more like parents, at least when a child is living there, and I sensed that they were pretty hands-on in terms of monitoring what their students were posting on social networking sites.

After returning home from Connecticut, I drove to Sacramento to speak at a convention of youth workers (youth ministry) organized by Youth Specialties. It was huge - 2500 attendees, massive trade show floor full of organizations that looked like they could have been on the Warped Tour (and probably are). After my talk, the Q&A evolved into a really interesting discussion about whether friending the young people in these ministries was appropriate. This is obviously becoming a big issue for adults working with youth (as well as for parents) - to friend or not to friend? I usually encourage educators or in this case youth ministers to create an organizational profile to friend with vs. your own personal profile and be clear up front about whether you're going to look at teens' profiles and potentially act on inappropriate posts. The ministers in the room obviously have a big investment in the moral character of the youth they work with so whether to friend wasn't as much of an issue for most of them - it was more about how to intervene when they saw something they didn't like.

Anyhow, just sort of a field report from "the real world" where adults, teens and social media are colliding every day.

Last night I went to a talk for Born Digital, a new book out for parents and educators about youth and technology. The book's authors are law professors affiliated with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society — I haven't read the book yet, but from the talk my sense is that it is very similar in message to Totally Wired but with more emphasis on the legal ramifications of these issues as well as a more global perspective. John Palfrey, one of the authors who spoke last night, made it clear that their audience was parents and educators and that the goal was to defuse some of the "culture war" (aka moral panic) around youth and technology. Last night's audience was decidedly geekier/techie/academic (though I know there were parents in the room).

I was late and missed the beginning, but I caught some of the myths Palfrey pointed about when it comes to youth and technology:

- Kids are intuitive users (not all are, just as not all adults are complete luddites. Still - I think kids are more motivated to figure out how to make tech work because so much of it for them is meeting core needs that are more prominent in kids' lives - play, socializing, identity formation, etc.)

- Kids are bad (he used the media's coverage of cyberbullying to point out that it's not that kids are doing anything worse, it's just that we now have a window into what they're doing)

- Kids are in danger (this is the debunking of the predator scare - see this post on Totally Wired for more background)

- Kids are dumber (the literacy debate — kids are reading less but doesn't take into account new ways of learning)

Palfrey also talked about the "participation gap" (see Henry Jenkins work on this) as replacing the "digital divide." There is a global culture of elite kids using this technology in sophisticated ways vs. kids with less access and more importantly less parent or educator involvement in helping them use technology.

He showed a couple of videos from young people about privacy or what makes up our "digital dossiers" and about file sharing.

As part of the project they worked with young people to create media — one piece of learning I thought was interesting was that in teaching youth about piracy, helping them understand the perspective of the creator (by being one) is much more effective than the "it's just wrong" approach.

They also looked at how youth are finding information (keyword search then Wikipedia) and found that a minority of kids viewed Wikipedia critically and even fewer had ever participated in the editing process on Wikipedia. Similarly, Palfrey shared how they saw youth consuming news, i.e. news grazing, and found many young people stopped there. Some did a deeper diver and actually read articles and a smaller group (that digital elite) participated in the feedback loop (blogged it, created a video about it). He also mentioned that while technology is empowering young activists, it's not really creating new activists.

All in all, it felt validating to hear a similar message to my own. And the more folks bringing a balanced message about technology to parents and educators, the better! You can find out more about the book/project here.

I'm in downtown Charlotte, NC, where I gave two talks yesterday to librarians on "totally wired" teens and tweens. I'm looking forward to seeing more of Charlotte this afternoon before returning to San Francisco, and was pretty blown away by their library. I was happy to spend time with Ypulse reader Kelly Czarneck, who is very active in her library's groundbreaking efforts in Teen Second Life. She shared a project she has been working on (with Global Kids) with incarcerated youth in SL as well. In the Q&A part of the session, one of the librarians mentioned an article, which sounded a bit like this story that I linked to the other day in Essentials about teachers/educators friending students on social networks. The question was whether or not this is a "good" thing. In some ways, it's similar to the issue of parents friending teens on these sites, which I commented on in this AP story the other week.

I don't think there is an easy answer to this one — are there benefits to being a teen's friend on these sites if they let you? Of course, it's easier to reach them (since they're checking them more frequently than email) and to see how they are defining their identity/interests/expressing themselves to their peers [i.e. getting to know them better]. For some teens, it's no big deal to friend adults, including their parents. The challenge or where this gets tricky is when a teacher/educator abuses this access or does something inappropriate (rare, but it happens leading unions and legislators to want to ban this type of contact), or when teachers/educators see risky behavior (from that teen or their friends) or read about something that went down between teens that was not really meant for them to see. Suddenly you [the educator or parent] are in a position where you will be compelled to get involved, i.e. talking to another teen's parents, reporting something to the school or authorities, etc. You're suddenly a voyeur into what danah boyd has called "the most social of social spaces" for teens/younger people — and you're not their peer.

The easiest way for educators to avoid some of these issues, is to create a library profile or join with other teachers and create a homework help profile on MySpace or a group on Facebook with a way for teens to friend you, yet keep the bulk of their profiles private from you. This way you can communicate with them where they hang out, but limit how much you see as well as how much they see of your personal profile. Another option is to use IM as a way to make yourself available at specific times as a resource as well as using opt-in text messaging to send reminders (just make sure not to overdo it, especially since lots of teens have limits). If other folks have thoughts on this issue, feel free to share. I don't have all the answers, but this is definitely a policy area within schools and libraries that will evolve over time. Feel free to share your thoughts/opinions on this in the comments!

Kinda sorta related:

For those of you who have heard me give my talk, you know my mantra is "educate don't legislate" which is why I think this new CA cyberbullying legislation is a bad move.

Just wanted to let Ypulse readers know about a couple of upcoming speaking engagements this week/early next before the Ypulse Mashup in July. For all you Ypulse readers in L.A., I will be speaking on a panel (organized by the Media Project) Wednesday evening at The Writer's Guild. It's free and open to the public, but you must RSVP here in order to attend. Below is the panel description:

The Instant Access Generation & The Future Of Entertainment: What Teens Are Watching & Why

Wednesday, 6/25, 7 p.m. - WGAW 2nd Floor, Multipurpose Room. Info: (323) 782-4589.

The event will cover a range of issues that teens face in their daily lives and why media, both television and new media, is an integral part of their lives. Panelists include:

Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, Executive Producer, Lincoln Heights;

Anastasia Goodstein, publisher of YPulse.com, a Forbes magazine best of the blog and author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online;

Steven Tsapales, writer and co-creator of the popular web series, We Need Girlfriends,

Tyler Spiers, Co-Creator of Planet Unicorn, 2007 top 20 funniest videos by New York Magazine.

The panel will also include two teens that will share their views about the teens they see on TV and their media consumption.

Next up I'll be traveling to San Antonio on Sunday for the National Educational Computing Conference where I'll be speaking during the "Internet Safety Town Hall". If you're heading to San Antonio, definitely stop by and say hello.

Yesterday I had the privilege to speak at the national Boys & Girls Clubs conference here in San Francisco. I gave my Totally Wired talk twice — once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I had one hour for each session and quickly realized my talk ended up filling the entire hour — it's like every time I give it there is more to talk about. One bit of information that surprised me and saddened me a bit was that many of the clubs block access to sites like MySpace and Facebook. In reality it shouldn't have surprised me. The fears and concerns were the same fears and concerns I've heard from parents and teachers across the country. I was told the challenge is that they are not staffed well enough to monitor each teen's computer use.

What bums me out about this is that these clubs often serve low income youth who may not have a laptop or PC at home. So it's essentially one less place they can go to experience the social media their middle class peers are using all the time. It's also a missed opportunity to offer these teens real guidance on using these sites. I was also told the Boys & Girls Clubs have an amazing internet safety program — and I'm sure it is very comprehensive….in its coverage of safety. My guess is that it doesn't really cover ethics or information literacy. The other concern they have is that if something happens from one of their computers, they'll have angry parents to answer to.

I understand the need to limit access to these sites at school when teens are supposed to be focused on learning. Though I would argue that this, too, can happen without actually blocking. But Boys & Girls Clubs are spaces to hang out in, just as MySpace and Facebook are virtual spaces to hang out and connect in.

Hopefully, I was able to persuade at least some of the people listening (ok, not the guy who told me I talked too much, that he dozed off a few times and wished I would have taught them all how to create MySpace profiles), but some of the people there to think about unblocking these sites.

I don't think it's enough for me to just say, "unblock." So here is what I would propose after school programs like the Boys & Girls Clubs should do. Invite parents to a talk similar to what I do — emphasizing the positives along with the challenges, and the reality that these kids need to have access to these sites to be competitive in the future. The idea is to get them more comfortable and less afraid. Develop a mandatory workshop for any Boys & Girls Club teens who want to log on from the Club — BUT have it taught by teens aka their peers. The workshop should be fun, engaging and cover privacy, ethics and some information literacy. Youth workers can identify the teens who are really into the computers and train them to be peer educators. Then create a contract/agreement between the teens and the Club around using the internet. If they mess up, they lose access for a period of time. If this is all done in a way that treats these teens as if they won't mess up, they probably won't.

We have to educate, not legislate (the latest attempt) and block — and not deny access to teens who will otherwise be left behind.

I'm giving a "Totally Wired" Webinar for the folks at the Discovery Educator Network next week. Has anyone given a Webinar before? I would love to hear any tips on how to make it compelling…I'll be working on it over the weekend. Anyhow, you can register to attend here.

Wow. Thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday's "cry for help." There were some great suggestions. I got in late after speaking in Palo Alto last night and had to catch up on "The Wire" finale of course after being in Austin all weekend. So…I decided to sleep in and get a full 8 hours. That coupled with some other stuff I need to do this morning means I'll be posting much later today (east coasters: That means night time for you!).

In the meantime, I thought you might be interested in what the Palo Alto parents were asking me after my preso. Some of it was familiar, like is there any decent block/filter software that doesn't block porn and stuff we actually need? (this was referring to the new parental controls in Windows Vista). I'm grateful to Henry Jenkins and his keynote for helping me attempt to answer the question around whether teens are technology addicts. I tried the whole addiction is a disease, addicts usually have underlying mental health issue approach, but I could tell it wasn't going over too well with a couple of parents. I tried to say the word addiction is a label with negative connotations — maybe compulsion is a better word to describe the desire we all share when it comes to constantly checking our email/Twitter/Crackberries. That it's about setting limits and more importantly connected parents (there are lots in the Valley) modeling this for their teens. The other question, which I've had before is how set limits or manage kids' technology use (especially younger kids) when it is coming from an institution, i.e. schools. When your child says, "I have to do this for school" or has a school laptop. I don't really have an answer to this one — do any of you?