I listened to this LSE podcast - Happiness around the world by Prof Carol Graham and I asked her whether she had any data on whether (as some media scholars suggest) the increased exposure in poor countries to media depictions of life in rich countries had any effect on happiness (by making them feel impoverished by comparison. She replied:

I have data on internet and media access for Latin America, and there I find that those with internet access are typically happier than the average, but this correlates with an overall income/education effect, even when controlling for these things. We do find, though, that those respondents with greater access to the media are more likely to think that the distribution of income in their country is unfair.

Of course, the direction of causation might be either way - perhaps people who are dissatisfied with income distribution are more likely to consume the media? But interesting nonetheless - and it’s comforting to hear that education makes you happier…

A journal article I recently wrote with Sonia Livingstone appeared early this month on “early view”. It’s in Children and Society (which is not, alas, an open access journal) but here’s the address and abstract to give you a flavour of it:

On the Rapid Rise of Social Networking Sites: New Findings and Policy Implications

Social networking sites have been rapidly adopted by children and, especially, teenagers and young people worldwide, enabling new opportunities for the presentation of the self, learning, construction of a wide circle of relationships, and the management of privacy and intimacy. On the other hand, there are also concerns that social networking increases the likelihood of new risks to the self, these centring on loss of privacy, bullying, harmful contacts and more. This article reviews recent findings regarding children and teenagers’ social networking practices in order to identify implications for future research and public policy. These focus on the interdependencies between opportunities and risks, the need for digital or media literacy education, the importance of building safety considerations into the design and management of social networking sites, the imperative for greater attention to ‘at risk’ children in particular, and the importance of a children’s rights framework in developing evidence-based policy in this area.

We encourage comment and queries…

The (US) Natural Resources Defense Council just published a report claiming that video game consoles across the US alone use 16 billion KWh a year (what San Diego uses) and by better and easier to use power management they estimate that could be dropped by 11 billion KWh. Their spokesman described the XBox 360 and Playstation as having similar energy footprints to fridges. So if you’re a console gamer, visit the page below, find the auto-shutdown mode for your console (which I gather isn’t enabled by default!) and enable it. Your children will thank you…

NRDC: Lowering the Cost of Play.

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

One of the questions that fascinates me is the relationship between Internet technologies and social norms - particularly those around privacy. Some suggest that as “Digital Natives” get older, their exposure to various tools for online self-disclosure may change their view of privacy norms. In today’s New York Times*, however, we see that this process is not always just an unintended consequence of technological change - it seems that the founder of Facebook wants his software to change people’s privacy norms:

When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

Of course this makes sense commercially - the more happy we are to share information about ourselves with others, the more data about ourselves we provide for potential advertisers and the more we provide the content that brings people back to Facebook. But there are some un-addressed problems here.

Even if we get comfortable with this new attitude to self-disclosure is this a good thing for society? And what about the transitional difficulties when self-disclosing young people run into authorities who don’t understand or sympathise with this new attitude?

(Also see my earlier post “The Death of Privacy” or indeed any of the posts here categorised Privacy)

* I’ve highlighted just a small part of this article by Clive Thompson - it’s well worth reading the rest too if you want a quick and interesting overview of the issues around microblogging…

Respected researchers at the Crimes against Children Research Center have released an excellent new paper debunking myths about the use of the Internet to get underage sex. Much of the information contained in the press release and the paper has been published before but it bears repeating.

Most Internet-initiated sex crimes involve adult men who are open about their interest in sex. The offenders use instant messages, e-mail and chat rooms to meet and develop intimate relationships with their victims. In most of the cases, the victims are aware that they are talking online with adults.

A majority of the offenders are charged with crimes such as statutory rape, that involve non-forcible sexual activity with adolescent victims who are too young to consent to sexual intercourse with adults.

What is new (at least to me) is their assertion that:

adolescents’ use of popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do not appear to increase their risk of being victimized by online predators. Rather, it is risky online interactions such as talking online about sex to unknown people that increases vulnerability

The paper is freely downloadable:
Online “Predators” and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment, by Janis Wolak, PhD, David Finkelhor, PhD and Kimberley J. Mitchell, PhD Crimes Against Children Center at the University of New Hampshire and Michelle L. Ybarra, PhD, Internet Solutions for Kids, Inc., in American Psychologist, Vol. 63, No.2 .

It seems YouTube viewers watch more anti-immunisation videos than ones promoting immunisation, and public service videos on the subject were among the most low-rated. It seems Gresham’s Law can be applied to information on the Internet as well - bad (but interesting) information can drive out good.

Ironically, the JAMA study referenced is itself subscription only!

The National Endowment for the Arts just published an interesting new study and review of the literature on literacy in the US but it retains a rather exclusive definition of reading (it’s fiction, poetry and drama, in book form) - so web surfing and magazine reading don’t count. It suggests that regular leisure readers are better employed and more skilled at reading (well duh!) I don’t know how they disentangled number of books in the home and leisure reading from social class though - I read somewhere that number of books in the home actually works reasonably well as a proxy for social class.

I would have thought that the increasing amount of leisure web browsing and online writing young people are doing would be beneficial to reading skills. Well, the report is 98 pages long so maybe I’ve missed the part where they tackle this…

I presume that it is only consistent with my having done a first degree in English and being a PhD student now that do a fair amount of leisure reading myself…

Here is a set of handy book-related links I have collected.

This clip from the television version of one of my favourite radio programmes, This American Life illustrates dramatically how the existence of the media can affect everyday behaviour.

David Brake

Rep. Joseph Pitts of Pennsylvania said last week at a hearing on the subject of video game ratings:

I think it’s safe to say that a wealthy kid from the suburbs can play Grand Theft Auto or similar games without turning to a life of crime, but a poor kid who lives in a neighborhood where people really do steal cars or deal drugs or shoot cops might not be so fortunate.

Actually it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that any effects from exposure to video game violence exposure would be likely mediated by social class and environmental factors. But in a way a trifle more complex than he said!

You can see him giving that soundbite around 4 minutes 23 seconds in to this somewhat amusing Daily Show take on the congressional hearings.

David Brake