Working for a Living (part two)
This is the second part of a two-part blog. The first part looked at some of the more straightforward ways of making money online such as sales, fee-for-service, subscription and brokerage.
Wikiwars
With all the recent attention focused on stories of teenagers charged with distributing child pornography for taking sexually suggestive pictures of themselves, jobs lost due to Facebook and MySpace entries, and libel suits over blog posts, people are justifiably concerned about the permanence of material posted to the Internet. Many a teacher or parent has had to carefully explain to children or teens that whatever they post online might be seen by people other than the intended audience, and might be out there for a very long time.
Guest blog: How YouTube Watches Us
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.
The Privacy Dilemma: Balancing Privacy and Online Life
It's been widely said that attention is the currency of the 21st Century. In an age where media occupy an increasingly central role in our lives, the need to have that media focused on you becomes intense. For no-one is this more true than for children and teens, who now expect to be connected twenty-four hours a day and for whom the Internet and cell phones are essential parts of their social lives. An interesting Facebook page, amusing Tweets, outrageous YouTube videos, even shocking photos sent by cell phone -- most of us are aware of the ways that young people seek their peers' attention. In today's media environment, is it still possible to teach young people the value of privacy? What, indeed, does the idea of privacy even mean to today's children and teens?
Privacy matters for Media Literacy Week 2012!
Young people today spend large amounts of time sharing parts of their personal lives online playing games, “checking in” with geolocation apps, posting photos and catching up with friends through social media. But despite this openness, privacy does indeed matter to youth, especially with their online actions being increasingly monitored by parents, educators, and corporations.
Public or private? Facebook and the Stefanie Rengel case
With the tremendous success and spread of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, along with home-broadcasting sites such as YouTube and Flickr, many people have become concerned about what effect they will have on our attitudes towards privacy. Now a new question has arisen: whether Facebook postings violate the Youth Criminal Justice Act if they identify suspects or victims covered under the act.
Upcoming events
The Association to Reduce Alcohol Promotion in Ontario is accepting submissions for the ARAPO Recognition Award until Friday, February 29th. (Yes, it's a leap year.) In the words of their Guiding Statement, the award is for “recognition of individuals (e.g. journalist, teacher, student etc.) or organizations (e.g. schools, businesses) that have made, and continue to make, outstanding efforts to reduce the effect of alcohol promotion in Ontario.” Nominations must be made jointly in writing by two or more members of the community, following a format you can find here.
Who Steals My Purse Steals Trash
“Who steals my purse steals trash,” Shakespeare wrote, “but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.”
Gone in Sixty Seconds: The Sociology of Snapchat
Snapchat, the mobile app that lets users send "self-destructing" photos, has the distinction of being the only digital tool that does not have a single redeeming feature. While the moral panic associated with blogs, cell phones, social networks and online games has largely faded in grudging recognition of their more positive uses (indeed, research shows that many parents have actually helped their children lie about their age register for Facebook accounts), Snapchat is seen as the Q-tip of the digital age: its sole function is to do the thing that you're warned not to do on the box.
Constant surveillance: Youth privacy in a digital age
Despite what many adults believe privacy matters to youth. More and more, though, youth are finding that their actions online are monitored – by parents, teachers, and corporations. A high school principal creates a fake Facebook profile page and adds over 300 of her school’s students as friends; a Texas middle-school plans to introduce ID cards with microchips that its students will be required to carry at all times; an Indiana high school student is expelled after a profane tweet (sent in the middle of the night from the student’s home computer) alerts his school’s monitoring system.