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THE SOCIAL
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ISSUE#88
J U L Y 2 0 1 1GET STARTEDCEO@Lt Kol Dato’ Husin JazriCyberSecurity Malaysia
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NIC NAGS p06 BOOKMARK p05
MIND GAMES p09 HELP p11 POSTER p11
HOWTOPEDIA p08
NIC NAGS:
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N I C N A G S
2
READMEANTISOCIAL NETWORKINGFACE TO FACEBOOKDzarul
Farhan
w w w . c y b e r s a f e . m y
“HEY, YOU’RE A DORK,” said the girl
to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you
to know.”
“Thanks!” said the boy.
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re
only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty
normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar
through the generations. Except this one had a
distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook.
The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs
were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you”
was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends.
Those hours spent on the family princess phone or
hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after
school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on
cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at
least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s
teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friend-
ship seems to be conducted increasingly in the
abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant
messages, or through the very public forum of
Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy
Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter
above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that
half of American teenagers — defined in the study as
ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages
a day and that one third send more than 100 a day.
Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s
Internet and American Life Project said they were
more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than
to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their
friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk
to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The
findings came just a few months after the Kaiser
Family Foundation reported that Americans between
the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a
day using some sort of electronic device, from smart
phones to MP3 players to computers — a number
that startled many adults, even those who keep their
BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking
hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of
technology has been focused on the implications for
kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social
repercussions has centered on the darker side of
online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting
sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and
other experts are starting to take a look at a
less-sensational but potentially more profound
phenomenon: whether technology may be changing
the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and
sexting have overshadowed a look into the really
nuanced things about the way technology is affecting
the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G.
Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the
University of Alabama, who has been studying
children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only
beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all
that texting, instant messaging and online social
networking allows children to become more
connected and supportive of their friends — or
whether the quality of their interactions is being
diminished without the intimacy and emotional give
and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in
The Future of Children, a journal produced through a
collaboration between the Brookings Institution and
the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University,
Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield,
psychologists at California State University, Los
Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial
qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic
communication may be making teens less interested
in face-to-face communication with their friends.
More research is needed to see how widespread this
phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional
quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study
relationships believe, because close childhood
friendships help kids build trust in people outside
their families and consequently help lay the ground-
work for healthy adult relationships. “These good,
close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt
away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop
poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions,
express emotions, all the functions of support that go
with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,”
said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York
University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a
huge body of research to confirm what we clinically
think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children
see are exchanges that are more superficial and more
public than in the past. “When we were younger we
would be on the phone for hours at a time with one
person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are
often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a
conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents —
many of whom recall having intense childhood
relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they
would spend all their time and tell all their secrets —
today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that
help them develop empathy, understand emotional
nuances and read social cues like facial expressions
and body language. With children’s technical
obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even
kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during
play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired
and those skills will fade further, some researchers
believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of
psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain:
Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern
Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term
for the generation that has grown up using comput-
ers, are already having a harder time reading social
cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good
with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-
face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology
is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth
Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year
called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding
and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes
that technology allows them to be connected to their
friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say
that the electronic media is helping kids to be in
touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high
school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J.,
estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends
hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re
closer because they’re more in contact with each
other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going
to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the
3
Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-
old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much
on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn
and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s
birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to
give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He
said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the
bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post
messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she
has since begun encouraging her son to get involved
in more group activities after school and was pleased
that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator
for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah
Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who
had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a
bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet
some friends later at a party. The next day she played
in two softball games, texting between innings and
games about plans to go to a concert the next
weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans
and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or
interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends
who may be upset about something — and in those
cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I
definitely have conversations but I think the new
form of actually talking to someone is video chat
because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve
definitely done phone calls at one time or another but
it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been
known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m.
telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by
the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton,
communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversa-
tions going at once” through instant messaging, texts
or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed
of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think
‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal
nature of texting and online communication may
make it easier for shy kids to connect with others.
Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the
11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was
good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson
quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general
“goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s
Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and
social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy
and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so
many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson
suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The
other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting
through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been
beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan,
the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his
shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning
because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of
the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
R E A D M E / A n t i s o c i a l N e t w o r k i n g
“HEY, YOU’RE A DORK,” said the girl
to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you
to know.”
“Thanks!” said the boy.
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re
only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty
normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar
through the generations. Except this one had a
distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook.
The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs
were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you”
was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends.
Those hours spent on the family princess phone or
hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after
school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on
cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at
least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s
teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friend-
ship seems to be conducted increasingly in the
abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant
messages, or through the very public forum of
Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy
Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter
above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that
half of American teenagers — defined in the study as
ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages
a day and that one third send more than 100 a day.
Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s
Internet and American Life Project said they were
more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than
to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their
friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk
to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The
findings came just a few months after the Kaiser
Family Foundation reported that Americans between
the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a
day using some sort of electronic device, from smart
phones to MP3 players to computers — a number
that startled many adults, even those who keep their
BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking
hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of
technology has been focused on the implications for
kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social
repercussions has centered on the darker side of
online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting
sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and
other experts are starting to take a look at a
less-sensational but potentially more profound
phenomenon: whether technology may be changing
the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and
sexting have overshadowed a look into the really
nuanced things about the way technology is affecting
the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G.
Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the
University of Alabama, who has been studying
children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only
beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all
that texting, instant messaging and online social
networking allows children to become more
connected and supportive of their friends — or
whether the quality of their interactions is being
diminished without the intimacy and emotional give
and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in
The Future of Children, a journal produced through a
collaboration between the Brookings Institution and
the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University,
Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield,
psychologists at California State University, Los
Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial
qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic
communication may be making teens less interested
in face-to-face communication with their friends.
More research is needed to see how widespread this
phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional
quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study
relationships believe, because close childhood
friendships help kids build trust in people outside
their families and consequently help lay the ground-
work for healthy adult relationships. “These good,
close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt
away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop
poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions,
express emotions, all the functions of support that go
with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,”
said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York
University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a
huge body of research to confirm what we clinically
think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children
see are exchanges that are more superficial and more
public than in the past. “When we were younger we
would be on the phone for hours at a time with one
person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are
often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a
conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents —
many of whom recall having intense childhood
relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they
would spend all their time and tell all their secrets —
today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that
help them develop empathy, understand emotional
nuances and read social cues like facial expressions
and body language. With children’s technical
obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even
kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during
play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired
and those skills will fade further, some researchers
believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of
psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain:
Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern
Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term
for the generation that has grown up using comput-
ers, are already having a harder time reading social
cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good
with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-
face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology
is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth
Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year
called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding
and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes
that technology allows them to be connected to their
friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say
that the electronic media is helping kids to be in
touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high
school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J.,
estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends
hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re
closer because they’re more in contact with each
other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going
to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the
Today instant messages are often
group chats... Facebook is not a
conversation
4
Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-
old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much
on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn
and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s
birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to
give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He
said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the
bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post
messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she
has since begun encouraging her son to get involved
in more group activities after school and was pleased
that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator
for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah
Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who
had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a
bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet
some friends later at a party. The next day she played
in two softball games, texting between innings and
games about plans to go to a concert the next
weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans
and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or
interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends
who may be upset about something — and in those
cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I
definitely have conversations but I think the new
form of actually talking to someone is video chat
because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve
definitely done phone calls at one time or another but
it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been
known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m.
telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by
the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton,
communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversa-
tions going at once” through instant messaging, texts
or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed
of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think
‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal
nature of texting and online communication may
make it easier for shy kids to connect with others.
Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the
11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was
good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson
quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general
“goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s
Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and
social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy
and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so
many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson
suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The
other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting
through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been
beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan,
the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his
shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning
because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of
the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
“HEY, YOU’RE A DORK,” said the girl
to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you
to know.”
“Thanks!” said the boy.
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re
only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty
normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar
through the generations. Except this one had a
distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook.
The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs
were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you”
was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends.
Those hours spent on the family princess phone or
hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after
school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on
cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at
least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s
teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friend-
ship seems to be conducted increasingly in the
abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant
messages, or through the very public forum of
Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy
Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter
above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that
half of American teenagers — defined in the study as
ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages
a day and that one third send more than 100 a day.
Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s
Internet and American Life Project said they were
more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than
to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their
friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk
to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The
findings came just a few months after the Kaiser
Family Foundation reported that Americans between
the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a
day using some sort of electronic device, from smart
phones to MP3 players to computers — a number
that startled many adults, even those who keep their
BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking
hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of
technology has been focused on the implications for
kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social
repercussions has centered on the darker side of
online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting
sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and
other experts are starting to take a look at a
less-sensational but potentially more profound
phenomenon: whether technology may be changing
the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and
sexting have overshadowed a look into the really
nuanced things about the way technology is affecting
the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G.
Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the
University of Alabama, who has been studying
children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only
beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all
that texting, instant messaging and online social
networking allows children to become more
connected and supportive of their friends — or
whether the quality of their interactions is being
diminished without the intimacy and emotional give
and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in
The Future of Children, a journal produced through a
collaboration between the Brookings Institution and
the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University,
Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield,
psychologists at California State University, Los
Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial
qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic
communication may be making teens less interested
in face-to-face communication with their friends.
More research is needed to see how widespread this
phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional
quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study
relationships believe, because close childhood
friendships help kids build trust in people outside
their families and consequently help lay the ground-
work for healthy adult relationships. “These good,
close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt
away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop
poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions,
express emotions, all the functions of support that go
with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,”
said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York
University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a
huge body of research to confirm what we clinically
think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children
see are exchanges that are more superficial and more
public than in the past. “When we were younger we
would be on the phone for hours at a time with one
person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are
often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a
conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents —
many of whom recall having intense childhood
relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they
would spend all their time and tell all their secrets —
today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that
help them develop empathy, understand emotional
nuances and read social cues like facial expressions
and body language. With children’s technical
obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even
kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during
play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired
and those skills will fade further, some researchers
believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of
psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain:
Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern
Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term
for the generation that has grown up using comput-
ers, are already having a harder time reading social
cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good
with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-
face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology
is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth
Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year
called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding
and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes
that technology allows them to be connected to their
friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say
that the electronic media is helping kids to be in
touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high
school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J.,
estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends
hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re
closer because they’re more in contact with each
other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going
to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the
To some children, technology is
merely a facilitator for an active
social life
5
R E A D M E / A n t i s o c i a l N e t w o r k i n g
FactOf
DayThe
Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-
old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much
on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn
and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s
birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to
give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He
said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the
bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post
messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she
has since begun encouraging her son to get involved
in more group activities after school and was pleased
that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator
for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah
Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who
had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a
bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet
some friends later at a party. The next day she played
in two softball games, texting between innings and
games about plans to go to a concert the next
weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans
and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or
interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends
who may be upset about something — and in those
cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I
definitely have conversations but I think the new
form of actually talking to someone is video chat
because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve
definitely done phone calls at one time or another but
it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been
known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m.
telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by
the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton,
communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversa-
tions going at once” through instant messaging, texts
or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed
of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think
‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal
nature of texting and online communication may
Cybersquatting is the act of procuring someone else’s trademarked brand name online, either as a dot com or any other U.S.-based extension. Cybersquatters squat for many reasons, including for fun, because they are hoping to resell the domain, they are using the domain to advertise competitors’ wares, stalking, harassment or outright fraud.
make it easier for shy kids to connect with others.
Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the
11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was
good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson
quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general
“goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s
Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and
social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy
and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so
many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson
suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The
other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting
through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been
beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan,
the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his
shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning
because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of
the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
CYBERSQUATTING
BOOKMARK
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce dictum tincidunt libero, vel tristique turpis gravida quis. Quisque aliquam bibendum mauris in lacinia. Quisque ac est libero, a scelerisque nunc. Nulla et varius est. Nullam laoreet massa ante, eget placerat elit. Sed nec consectetur lectus. Duis non sem
COOLNESS :
“HEY, YOU’RE A DORK,” said the girl
to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you
to know.”
“Thanks!” said the boy.
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re
only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty
normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar
through the generations. Except this one had a
distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook.
The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs
were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you”
was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends.
Those hours spent on the family princess phone or
hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after
school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on
cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at
least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s
teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friend-
ship seems to be conducted increasingly in the
abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant
messages, or through the very public forum of
Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy
Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter
above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that
half of American teenagers — defined in the study as
ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages
a day and that one third send more than 100 a day.
Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s
Internet and American Life Project said they were
more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than
to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their
friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk
to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The
findings came just a few months after the Kaiser
Family Foundation reported that Americans between
the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a
day using some sort of electronic device, from smart
phones to MP3 players to computers — a number
that startled many adults, even those who keep their
BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking
hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of
technology has been focused on the implications for
kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social
repercussions has centered on the darker side of
online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting
sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and
other experts are starting to take a look at a
less-sensational but potentially more profound
phenomenon: whether technology may be changing
the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and
sexting have overshadowed a look into the really
nuanced things about the way technology is affecting
the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G.
Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the
University of Alabama, who has been studying
children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only
beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all
that texting, instant messaging and online social
networking allows children to become more
connected and supportive of their friends — or
whether the quality of their interactions is being
diminished without the intimacy and emotional give
and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in
The Future of Children, a journal produced through a
collaboration between the Brookings Institution and
the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University,
Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield,
psychologists at California State University, Los
Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial
qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic
communication may be making teens less interested
in face-to-face communication with their friends.
More research is needed to see how widespread this
phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional
quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study
relationships believe, because close childhood
friendships help kids build trust in people outside
their families and consequently help lay the ground-
work for healthy adult relationships. “These good,
close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt
away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop
poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions,
express emotions, all the functions of support that go
with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,”
said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York
University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a
huge body of research to confirm what we clinically
think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children
see are exchanges that are more superficial and more
public than in the past. “When we were younger we
would be on the phone for hours at a time with one
person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are
often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a
conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents —
many of whom recall having intense childhood
relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they
would spend all their time and tell all their secrets —
today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that
help them develop empathy, understand emotional
nuances and read social cues like facial expressions
and body language. With children’s technical
obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even
kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during
play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired
and those skills will fade further, some researchers
believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of
psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain:
Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern
Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term
for the generation that has grown up using comput-
ers, are already having a harder time reading social
cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good
with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-
face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology
is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth
Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year
called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding
and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes
that technology allows them to be connected to their
friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say
that the electronic media is helping kids to be in
touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high
school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J.,
estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends
hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re
closer because they’re more in contact with each
other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going
to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the
Don't feel bad if you don't tweet!
A lot people never tweet, and they live perfectly happy lives
READMEThe Internet Facts of LifeAS EXPLAINED BY A 12-YEAR OLDEdwan
Aidid
w w w . c y b e r s a f e . m y
JULIA YOUNG AND Zachary
Smilovitz —The Internet Facts of Life as
Explained by a 12-Year-Old"Mom, I
know you have a lot of questions, and I want us to be
open with each other. So, I think it's time you learned
where blogs and tweets come from."
Mom, it's gonna be a long ride to Grandma's, and
while we have some time alone together, I think it'd
be good for us to talk about some things. I'm getting
older, and I'm not always gonna be around the house
to explain stuff to you. I know you have a lot of
questions, and I want us to be open with each other.
So, I think it's time you learned where blogs and
tweets come from.
I don't know what kind of stories you've heard from
your friends or the ladies in your book club. Some-
times, old people will spread around what they've
heard from other old people. This can make things
even more confusing and scary. That's why it's
important you get the straight facts from me.
The Internet is a very beautiful thing if used
properly.
When a person loves a funny video very much, he
or she may want to share it with someone special to
them. This is called linking and if done properly, it
can bring people together in a very special union of
love: usually the love of sneezing animals, or bed
intruders, or Bill O'Reilly having a temper tantrum.
But it's important to be sparing when you send your
links. You don't want to become the neighborhood
outbox, constantly forwarding yourself around.
Nobody wants that kind of reputation. Trust me, you
do not want to be known as a "spammer."
Now when someone has a lot of things they want to
say, they may want to try blogging. Blogging is a kind
of social intercourse, and should only be tried after
years of experience with the Internet. Think of a blog
as a newspaper that people actually read. It's a very
personal thing, and you need healthy boundaries. For
example, you can't go around blogging about the time
I peed my pants when we went to see Ice Age like
you told that woman in line at TJ Maxx yesterday. You
need to be cautious before you move on to something
more serious, like a tweet.
A tweet is a powerful yet brief experience that you
share with thousands of people, sometimes even
famous ones. Don't feel bad if you don't tweet! A lot
people never tweet, and they live perfectly happy
lives. Yes, you'll read a lot of bad tweets before you
find the right ones. But once you do find that perfect
feed, you'll spend the whole day wanting to refresh on
it. And whatever you do, don't follow @aplusk.
You should try Facebook, though. Everyone tries
Facebook at least once in their life. It usually starts in
college. It may seem like harmless fun at first, but I
know a lot of people who once they started Facebook-
ing, couldn't stop. They'd waste their whole day
updating their status, commenting on colleagues'
vacation photos, and, tragically, poking almost
complete strangers. It can become very unhealthy, so
I want you to be careful. And listen; I don't want you
ever writing on my Wall; even if it's my birthday.
That's just not appropriate for a mother and daughter.
I hope this wasn't too embarrassing for you. We'll
talk about what a meme is when we get to
Grandma's. I don't want to have to explain it twice.
6
Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-
old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much
on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn
and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s
birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to
give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He
said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the
bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post
messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she
has since begun encouraging her son to get involved
in more group activities after school and was pleased
that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator
for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah
Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who
had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a
bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet
some friends later at a party. The next day she played
in two softball games, texting between innings and
games about plans to go to a concert the next
weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans
and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or
interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends
who may be upset about something — and in those
cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I
definitely have conversations but I think the new
form of actually talking to someone is video chat
because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve
definitely done phone calls at one time or another but
it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been
known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m.
telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by
the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton,
communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversa-
tions going at once” through instant messaging, texts
or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed
of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think
‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal
nature of texting and online communication may
make it easier for shy kids to connect with others.
Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the
11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was
good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson
quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general
“goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s
Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and
social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy
and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so
many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson
suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The
other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting
through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been
beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan,
the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his
shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning
because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of
the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
I'm not willing to date anyone
exclusively unless she feels
comfortable going Facebook-public
READMEYour FacebookRelationship Status:IT’S COMPLICATEDBenny
Lim
w w w . c y b e r s a f e . m y
FOR MANY people, the manner in
which they present themselves on
Facebook has come to mirror how they
see themselves in real life. Photos broadcast the fun
they're having, status updates say what's on their
mind and a change in relationship status announces
their availability, commitment or something in
between.
Of these mini-declarations, relationship status is
the only one that directly involves another person.
That puts two people in the social-networking mirror,
and that, to borrow a Facebook phrase, can make
things complicated. (Read "How Not to Be Hated on
Facebook")
There are six relationship categories Facebook
users can choose from: single, in a relationship,
engaged, married, it's complicated, and in an open
relationship. (Users can decline to list a status, but
Facebook estimates that roughly 60% of its users do,
with "single" and "married" the most common
statuses.) The first four categories are pretty
self-explanatory, but when should you use them? A
Jane Austen of Facebook has yet to emerge, let alone
a Miss Manners, and no one seems to have a grip on
what the social norms ought to be.
"You change your Facebook status when it's
official," says Liz Vennum, a 25-year-old secretary
living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. "When you're okay
with calling the person your girlfriend or boyfriend.
Proper breakup etiquette is not to change the status
until after you've had the 'we need to talk' talk. Then
you race each other home (or back to the iPhone) to
be the first to change your status to single."
Not everyone agrees, of course. Some couples are
together for years but neglect to announce their
coupledom to their social network. "Some moron
tried to convince me that [my relationship is] not
legitimate because I don't have it on Facebook," says
Annie Geitner, a college sophomore who has had the
same boyfriend for more than a year. "So that made
me even more determined to not to put it up there."
Others, like Trevor Babcock, consider the Facebook
status a relationship deal-breaker. "I'm not willing to
date anyone exclusively unless she feels comfortable
going Facebook-public," he says.
One common theme among romantically inclined
Facebook users is that there are almost infinite ways
for the Facebook relationship status to go awry.
There's the significant other who doesn't want to list
his or her involvement (causing a rift in the real-world
relationship); the accidental change that alerts friends
to a nonexistent breakup (causing endless
FactOf
DayThe a pop-up pops and it looks like a window on your PC. Next thing a scan begins. It often grabs a screenshot of your “My Computer” window mimicking your PCs characteristics then tricking you into clicking on links. The scan tells you that a virus has infected your PC
SCAREWARE
7
annoyance); but worse than both is when the truth
spreads uncontrollably.
Lesley Spoor and Chris Lassiter got engaged the
night before Thanksgiving. The couple thought about
calling their families immediately, but instead
decided to wait a day and surprise everyone at
Thanksgiving dinner.
The problem, of course, was Facebook. The
morning after the big night, Spoor changed her
relationship status. "I got all giddy since I'm old and
engaged for the first time," says Spoor of her switch
from "in a relationship" to "engaged." "I thought it
had to be confirmed by [my fiancé] before it would
update, though. Apparently not."
The wife of a guy who went to high school with
Spoor's fiancé — a woman Spoor barely knew — was
the first to post a congratulatory message on Spoor's
Facebook wall. Spoor realized her mistake and
deleted the message, but by then it was too late; her
future in-laws had seen the message, and the status
update, and called to ask what was going on. How do
you explain to your family that you told the Internet
you just got engaged before you told them? "It caused
a huge fight," she says.
But relationship status doesn't have to be a source
of confusion and despair. Emily and Michael
Weise-King were in complete agreement about their
status: they decided to change themselves from
"engaged" to "married" in the middle of their
February 2009 wedding reception.
"It was after cocktails but before the first course at
dinner," says Mrs. Weise-King. Still in their bridal
attire, the couple whipped out their iPhones — they'd
done a test run ahead of time and determined that
they had to use the web browser and not the simple
iPhone app — and switched status in front of
bemused wedding guests. (They also uploaded a
photo.) Throughout the rest of the night, Weise-King
would occasionally glance down at her Facebook
profile, "the way I'd glance at my ring when I first got
engaged." Their status has not changed since.
FOR MANY people, the manner in
which they present themselves on
Facebook has come to mirror how they
see themselves in real life. Photos broadcast the fun
they're having, status updates say what's on their
mind and a change in relationship status announces
their availability, commitment or something in
between.
Of these mini-declarations, relationship status is
the only one that directly involves another person.
That puts two people in the social-networking mirror,
and that, to borrow a Facebook phrase, can make
things complicated. (Read "How Not to Be Hated on
Facebook")
There are six relationship categories Facebook
users can choose from: single, in a relationship,
engaged, married, it's complicated, and in an open
relationship. (Users can decline to list a status, but
Facebook estimates that roughly 60% of its users do,
with "single" and "married" the most common
statuses.) The first four categories are pretty
self-explanatory, but when should you use them? A
Jane Austen of Facebook has yet to emerge, let alone
a Miss Manners, and no one seems to have a grip on
what the social norms ought to be.
"You change your Facebook status when it's
official," says Liz Vennum, a 25-year-old secretary
living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. "When you're okay
with calling the person your girlfriend or boyfriend.
Proper breakup etiquette is not to change the status
until after you've had the 'we need to talk' talk. Then
you race each other home (or back to the iPhone) to
be the first to change your status to single."
Not everyone agrees, of course. Some couples are
together for years but neglect to announce their
coupledom to their social network. "Some moron
tried to convince me that [my relationship is] not
legitimate because I don't have it on Facebook," says
Annie Geitner, a college sophomore who has had the
same boyfriend for more than a year. "So that made
me even more determined to not to put it up there."
Others, like Trevor Babcock, consider the Facebook
status a relationship deal-breaker. "I'm not willing to
date anyone exclusively unless she feels comfortable
going Facebook-public," he says.
One common theme among romantically inclined
Facebook users is that there are almost infinite ways
for the Facebook relationship status to go awry.
There's the significant other who doesn't want to list
his or her involvement (causing a rift in the real-world
relationship); the accidental change that alerts friends
to a nonexistent breakup (causing endless
8
HOWTOPEDIA
Twittering the safer way
SWEET TWEETS !RESTRICT YOUR FOLLOWERSOne of the easiest ways to protect your
personal privacy on Twitter is to restrict
delivery of your tweets to only specific
followers.
DON'T GIVE TOO MUCH DETAIL ABOUT WHEN YOU'RE AWAY FROM HOMEWhile many of your followers might want to
know when you and your family are headed
to the beach, this may be a little too much
information.
DON'T GIVE TOO MUCH DETAIL ABOUT WHERE YOU'RE GOINGIf you don't want any surprises when you get
to your destination, try limit the details of
where you are going.
LIMIT YOUR TWEETS TO UPDATES ON YOURSELFDon't give details about their whereabouts
unless you have their permission.
annoyance); but worse than both is when the truth
spreads uncontrollably.
Lesley Spoor and Chris Lassiter got engaged the
night before Thanksgiving. The couple thought about
calling their families immediately, but instead
decided to wait a day and surprise everyone at
Thanksgiving dinner.
The problem, of course, was Facebook. The
morning after the big night, Spoor changed her
relationship status. "I got all giddy since I'm old and
engaged for the first time," says Spoor of her switch
from "in a relationship" to "engaged." "I thought it
had to be confirmed by [my fiancé] before it would
update, though. Apparently not."
The wife of a guy who went to high school with
Spoor's fiancé — a woman Spoor barely knew — was
the first to post a congratulatory message on Spoor's
Facebook wall. Spoor realized her mistake and
deleted the message, but by then it was too late; her
future in-laws had seen the message, and the status
update, and called to ask what was going on. How do
you explain to your family that you told the Internet
you just got engaged before you told them? "It caused
a huge fight," she says.
But relationship status doesn't have to be a source
of confusion and despair. Emily and Michael
Weise-King were in complete agreement about their
status: they decided to change themselves from
"engaged" to "married" in the middle of their
February 2009 wedding reception.
"It was after cocktails but before the first course at
dinner," says Mrs. Weise-King. Still in their bridal
attire, the couple whipped out their iPhones — they'd
done a test run ahead of time and determined that
they had to use the web browser and not the simple
iPhone app — and switched status in front of
bemused wedding guests. (They also uploaded a
photo.) Throughout the rest of the night, Weise-King
would occasionally glance down at her Facebook
profile, "the way I'd glance at my ring when I first got
engaged." Their status has not changed since.
IMAGE
R E A D M E / Y o u r F a c e b o o k R e l a t i o n s h i p : I t ’ s C o m p l i c a t e d