What Children Get Up To Online (and how we can try to keep them safe)

What do our children get up to online? [and how to cope with that]

It’s a brave new world out there

We need to understand

The new landscape

What children can do there

How you can help them play safely there

THE NEW LANDSCAPE

DIGITAL NATIVES NETWORKS SPEED

In the “real” world …

Immigrants arrive

With little understanding of native cultures and tongues (often if not always)

Their children become “scouts”

“ They add bangers and mash and fish and chips to sag gosht and parathas, not noticing the joins” [ Ziauddin Sardar ]

The same is true of the ‘digital’ world

If you were born before 1980, you’re a digital immigrant (however smart your mobile phone is)

If not, you’re a digital native [developed world]

Problem 1 : You will never be as fluent as your kids

Problem 2: Your children don’t see the on/offline divide

Family communications used to be ‘decentralised’

Now, they’re distributed. Communication is Peer to Peer.

Problem 3: You have little control over how or with whom children communicate

More bad news (sorry)

The tools children use are changing quickly, continually and globally

Problem 4: there’s no catching up

WHAT CHILDREN DO ONLINE

Here’s a small set of popular tools that your children might play with

Trying to understand all of them is a mug’s game

Broad brush categories + Core principles = Begin to understand threats

3 broad brush categories Connections Content Co-creation

CONNECTIONS CONTENT CO-CREATION

There are 2 types of connection: immediate and over time

Immediate connections

Can be 1 to 1 (like a phone call)

Can be 1 to many (like a group chat)

Can be done in lots of ways (phone, IM, Skype, Yahoo, Google, chat rooms, jargoncity, confusetheparents.com)

All share some basic grammar

IDENTITY PRESENCE OPENNESS

Point 1 : Presence whenever you’re online, you can see who else is online

Point 2 : Openness anyone can connect to you, but you can listen to or ignore anyone you like

Point 3 : Identity When everyone can wear a mask, trust becomes critical

Connections over time

Social Networks Last.fm , Bebo , Facebook

Shaping their “country”

Blogs, MySpace , Habbo , YouTube

Point 4 : Trails As you move round online, you leave trails, and you personalise these.

Point 5 : Communities Online communities are quick to set up & quick to join

Point 6 : Trust Trust is found through network proximity & friend of a friend approaches [FOAF].

Walt Disney “ripped, mixed, and burnt” the Brothers Grimm

What’s new?

Access to tools

PC, Mac, Phone & Software

Access to content

Legal & illegal

Point 7 : Creativity Natives have more ways of making and publishing more than ever before. Not all of it ‘legal’

Think Playstation or Gamecube. Think vapid expressions.

Think again.

Second Life

3-D virtual world

Entirely built and owned by its residents.

Inhabited by a total of 4,549,724 people from around the globe

What do they do there?

Comedians have done gigs in Second Life

People have become real world millionaires selling virtual real estate

Point 8 : Virtual is dead Online and offline are so intertwined for natives that the distinction is basically not there.

HOW TO KEEP THEM SAFE

3 possible approaches (and just like the real world none, sadly, are guaranteed)

Total Lockdown  Stop your children from communicating online.

Filter  build some prevention measure into the software you use

Trust  build some prevention measures into the software and focus on the parent-child bond

Possible approaches

Keep the computer in a public space

Ask the children how things work

Explain that they should be very careful handing out personal information

Be open about what your filtering

Monitor in a trusting, non-invasive way

e.g. http:// www.imsafer.com

Piers Young http://www.monkeymagic.net

What Children Get Up To Online (and how we can try to keep them safe)

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