MediaSmarts Blog (01/01/2010 - 12/30/2011)

The classic 1985 science fiction novel Ender's Game is one of several books of that period that foresaw both the advent of the Internet and its eventual importance in society. While certain aspects of its portrayal seem dated – in particular, it more resembles the text-based bulletin board systems of the time than today's graphic Web – one element stands out as being particularly prescient: the use of the Internet to allow youth to participate fully in society. While today's young people aren't using the Internet to take over the world, as the characters in the novel do, they are increasingly using it to change the world, and more and more teachers are using the Internet to bring civic engagement into the classroom.

I was recently asked by Jane Tallim to write a guest blog and seriously wondered what suggestions I could offer that would appeal to high school English and Media Studies teachers. We all know that teaching media is like trying to hit a moving target, and education lags behind revolutionary changes in new media forms. However, over the past decade of teaching both Media Studies and high school English, I have spent much time considering the intersection of new media forms with traditional English forms and have tried to build a bridge of understanding across time for my students regardless of the target. By focusing on the skills of deconstruction and construction, I believe the form of the text, or the new medium, becomes less relevant to comprehension.

A recent case involving lawmakers who want to access data on the computer of a woman accused of engaging in a mortgage scam in Colorado has opened up a virtual Pandora’s box of legal questions: American courts are currently struggling with whether or not suspects can be forced to show authorities how to access their encrypted information and the repercussions of their ruling could affect Canadian law as well.

The YouTube video “Ultimate Dog Tease” has jumped from 15 million to 37 million views since the beginning of May 2011. The “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” has hit 67 million views since it was launched on YouTube. These two videos have more followers than some TV shows. They're fun, they're silly and, like YouTube as a medium, they are worth celebrating.

One of the most famous images of online life is the New Yorker cartoon captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.” The cartoon, published in 1993, was hugely influential in fixing an image in the public imagination of the Internet as a place where anonymity reigned. It did not take long for that humorous view of anonymity to take on a darker cast, as parents began to fear that Internet predators would use this invisibility to lure their children in the guise of twelve-year-old girls. It's instructive, though, to realize just how long ago this cartoon was published, and how much the Internet has changed since then.

Advertising: This is probably the most common revenue model on the Web. Most sites that deliver their content for free make their money through advertising, in the same way that commercials pay for TV shows. A lot of online advertising, like banner ads, is annoying but relatively easy to ignore. This can be a problem, though: some kinds of malware (programs that will harm your computer) pretend to be pop-up ads because they know most people close pop-ups without thinking about it. When you click what you think is the red "Close" button, though, you may actually be leading you to a dangerous Web site or giving the malware program permission to install itself on your computer. When you want to close a pop-up ad, let the cursor hover for a moment over the red "Close" button before clicking: if it looks like a hand instead of an arrow, don't click it -- close the whole tab to get rid of it. (Also, never click any box in a pop-up ad other than the red "Close" button, even if it says "close" or something similar.) Even legitimate ads, however, can use deception. Because many sites that host ads are paid for each time the ad is clicked, sites use a variety of tricks to get users to click through, such as misrepresenting the ad link as something else. The worst example of this is what's called typosquatting, in which advertisers register for Web addresses that are very similar to popular ones, in the hopes that you will type them by mistake; if you misspell Wikipedia.org as "Wikpedia," for instance, you might well land on a site advertising all manner of things; in many cases, typosquatting sites contain pornographic material or malware. The best way to prevent typosquatting is to establish Favorites or Bookmarks for children's preferred sites, so they will not have to type the Web address. In some browsers the Address bar can be removed altogether; while it's not possible in Internet Explorer 7, in Firefox it can be done by clicking on View in the top menu, then selecting Toolbars and unchecking Navigation Toolbar. This is easily undone, however, so it's only likely to be effective with younger children.

One of the most unusual things about Internet-based businesses is that few of them try very hard to make money. Of course, with a very few exceptions (such as Wikipedia) making money is certainly in the business plan, or there wouldn't be all that venture capital floating around, but in general the approach has been to come up with a good product or service first, and only look for ways to make it profitable after it's acquired a steady clientele. Hugely important and successful ventures like Google, YouTube and Facebook all started out operating at a significant loss. This pattern continues today: it's already hard to imagine the Internet without Twitter, but so far that service isn't earning its makers much money (though you can be sure they're looking for ways to do that.)

Someone encountering the Internet for the first time might be forgiven for assuming it was created specifically for teenagers. Indeed, the Internet could reasonably be said to have been aging backwards since its birth – the domain first of scientists and the military, then of university students in the 1990s and now children and teenagers. The same is true of many popular online environments: Facebook, once restricted to university students, is now just as popular with teenagers (indeed, recent research has shown that one in five 8 to 12 year-olds in the UK has a Facebook account, though the Terms of Service theoretically require you to be 13 or older). Whether it's social networking, Wikipedia or iTunes, the Internet is tailor-made for teens: an intensely social environment that nevertheless feels intimate, providing constant stimulation and instant results. Unfortunately, for the most part teens receive little instruction in using the Internet, and most of what is taught is specific technical skills rather than how to critically engage with online media and use the Internet wisely and ethically. One obstacle to teaching digital literacy skills is the assumption that teenagers already know them, and there is no question that they are tremendously fluent in their use of online tools and environments – but fluency is not literacy, any more than a tenth-grader fluent in English knows how to write a competent paragraph without being taught.