Archive for the 'Digital literacy' Category

Digital democracy: Where’s your voice?

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Published on May 2, 2008 in Utopia, Video, Identity, Digital literacy, Usercontrols and Technology. 1 Comment Print This Post Email This Post

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“The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.”
- Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass’ message is especially critical to those early-to-late majority users (i.e., everybody) who may not know the value or importance of their voice in the battle for a many-to-many democratic internet.

This post seeks to address why this is with resources and activities designed specifically for early-late majority users to find and use their voice for digital democracy.

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PEW study: Teens and social media

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Published on December 31, 2007 in Digital literacy, Youth, Web2.0 and Social software. 0 Comments Print This Post Email This Post

A new report from PEW Internet illuminates some surprising trends about teens and social media. Of these findings:

  • Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004.
  • Girls continue to dominate written content creation with boys creating more video content
  • Almost half (47%) of online teens posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least “some of the time.”
  • “There is a subset of teens who are super-communicators — teens who have a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including traditional landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging, and email. They represent about 28% of the entire teen population and they are more likely to be older girls.”

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Worst practices v. your online identity

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Published on September 8, 2007 in Worst Practices, Digital literacy, Usercontrols, Web2.0, Social software, News and Technology. 0 Comments Print This Post Email This Post

In January 2004 I read a post at Loic Le Meur’s old blog that changed my approach to online life and activity. He warned us to “build and check your virtual identity and online reputation or you will be in trouble.” This post inspired me to establish a more strategic online identity and maintain some consistency in my selected metadata (stated background, interests, visual media) and contact networks. Given recent worst practices in new social networking services, Le Meur’s advice couldn’t be more prophetic.

Facebook’s recent - and obnoxious move - to allow open searching of FB profiles outside of FB should be read as a warning sign of things to come. This, only one week after they permitted a tool called Friend Finder to bypass user settings to allow people to spam you add you as a friend - even if you had specified that access to your profile was “message” or “poke” only. This is what happened to me and others. And if that wasn’t enough, my privacy settings were compromised within hours of the automated public search. Somehow, my privacy setting changed from “friends only” search to “all my friends and all my networks.”

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