teens and social networking – Media! Tech! Parenting!

Check out the Techlicious Facebook Privacy Guide, posted by Josh Kirschner on February 8, 2011 over at the Techlicious website.

Maintaining control over privacy settings is a required and critical technology task for each Facebook user. Since sharing information is one of Facebook’s primary missions, the company wants to collect and share as much personal information as possible with its advertisers. Facebook sets most new features to share data then when they first debut on the site, and to be fair, social networking is all about sharing information. Thus it is up to each individual to determine just how much information to put out there, making conscious decisions about what the world can see, what close friends can view, and what to keep private.

Our children and their friends are enthusiastic Facebook users, but they do not always focus on the need to pay attention, on a regular basis, to privacy settings. I’ve written many privacy posts on this blog including Getting Serious About Online Privacy and Keeping Track: Adolescents in the Digital Age, pieces that focus on the importance of maintaining family privacy when individual members engage in so many digital activities. Knowing the connection between many social networking sites and advertisers — and the impact it has on a user’s privacy — is critical for everyone, but especially for teens.

Continue reading “Facebook Privacy Settings: New Guide from Techlicious” →

As the parent of a Brown University alum, I occasionally check the Brown Daily Herald, the engaging student newspaper that kept me connected during years when my child did not necessarily let me know what was happening. By reading the student newspaper I could find out who was speaking at the university, why certain important issues concerned Brown students, and what significant faculty research projects interested me. More importantly during that time, an amazing woman, academic superstar Ruth Simmons, Ph.D., assumed the presidency of the university, and from that moment on, there was never a dull moment, at least from my perspective, anywhere at Brown or in the Daily Herald.

This week I read with some interest a Brown Daily Herald article about the visit of dana boyd (yes, she spells her name with no caps), a Brown alum (’00) who has established a reputation as an astute observer of the social networking culture and the issues that arise from so many of us using one or another of these virtual communication tools. Her research has focused especially on teens and social networking.

Continue reading “Social Networking Researcher, dana boyd, Speaks at Brown University” →