EVERY FOUR MONTHS, we have the attention of a captive audience of 40 teens, like those at left, who immerse in new media for six hours a day. They are minnows in an online ecosystem, swimming in waters very unfamiliar to their school teachers. When these college-oriented students land on our doorsteps, we share personal stories about the need to be careful online. At a short event a few weeks ago, some of the 15-yr-old students shared tidbits of their experience with Facebook and Bebo. It seemed like a cool thing for several girls to notch up more friends as possible, as though they were in a competition. So they accepted hundreds of people as their online friends--people they do not know. "Would any of these people be your mates?" "No way." In several cases, they input their mobile phone numbers online. Hundreds of other people could see those numbers. These numbers are merely data points in the Facebook matrix. You can guess what happened next--the phones started ringing.
We have a mobile phone service desk across the street from our campus and it's relatively quick and straightforward to port a number to a dead pool or to get a new SIM card and to change a phone number. But when you get a new number, you also get a lot of work since you have to text your real friends with your new number so that means spending more money and losing some face time with friends on the weekend since your pocket money has gone out on phone charges.
Naive young people are part of the driving force behind social networking today. They are the growth engine for the social networking industry. Their use patterns are immature and flighty. Smart money is not chasing them down. They revel in the graffiti effect of writing on walls or messing for the sake of winding up "friends" or dissing chavs. They like laughing at compromising pictures and coming back from lunch with a piece of sca. The teenagers we see every five months in the classroom follow their herds and often do things for splash effect. Splashing out a phone number if it helps attract a dozen more friends in a competition for notching up contacts is an impulse act. It's a compromise of personal privacy as well. And no matter how strongly we emphasize this point, we know it's very easy to find another 20 students within a fortnight who will need to hear the message and the stories repeated again for their education.
But I believe the education message is the way to go, not to shut down the sites or block their usage. We have entered an era of personal information security and those first clicks into Bebo or Facebook are just a start in a lifetime of online social networking.
Euan Semple -- "Watchdogs warned"
Dave Winer -- "I am not your friend." And that's a good thing.
