What's Next For Kids and Social Media?

 Even MORE Video—Youtube is the world’s second largest search engine. We’ll see kids moving from texting to sending smaller video files through wider and faster channels. Currently this takes a long time and usually involves a third party host such as Youtube, or my new favorite Viddler. 

More Mobile—advances in mobile technology will make devices like iPhone, Droid and iTouch even better at web navigation, using applications and filming and transmitting video. This will make parental oversight even more challenging. 

Global Positioning—we are growing more and more transparent as a culture. Telling people where you are is already popular. It will get easier with GPS on mobile devices with apps such as Gawalla which with the touch of a button notifies your friends of your exact location. For young people, I don’t have to tell you why this is dangerous.

Livestreaming—Sites such as Ustream and others are now enable an average person us to stream (broadcast) live video and interact with an audience via chat. I believe we’ll see a popularity shift from the Reality TV coming into our living rooms toward live real time TV streaming out of our child’s bedrooms before unknown audience. In fact this is already happening to some degree.

Sites such as Chatroulette enable you, with the click of your mouse to connect live (video and audio) to some unknown person in an unknown part of the world. The more celebrities who engage on this site, the more popular it will become. 

What can we do about it?

Here are some suggestions. You must tweak them to make them work in your home setting with your child.

1.     Move computers to public places.

2.     Regularly check browser histories.

3.     Ask your child to turn in their cell phone at night. (this enables them to get a good nights sleep instead of being awakened by texts all night long)

4.     Read their text messages and have prepared consequences for inappropriate content. Pay attention to cleared conversations and deleted contacts on text logs.

5.     Create accounts on Facebook or whichever social media sites your child is on and insist that they add you as a friend. For younger children it may not even be inappropriate for you to demand their password to inspect their account.

6.     Enforce privacy settings so that posts on sites like Myspace and Facebook are not publicly logged on Google. Remind your child that what is posted in public forums is logged forever—like luggage—on the internet.

7.     Limit internet use. Create designated times where everyone “disconnects” and engages in face to face communication.

8.     Most importantly—teach healthy boundaries. Reinforce why it is appropriate to shut “it” down at times, what types of people a child should not be “friending”.

If you would like a copy of this article formatted for printing and or emailing to your group, email me at roypetitfils@yahoo.com.

Comments

[Dale Van Brocklin]

Good post, Roy.
I guess my belief that kids shouldn't get online until they're 18 will never happen....

I can add a few suggestions:
Raise good kids. Teach them morality, respect, responsibility, and rational thinking.
-If you're a troll online, you're probably a troll in real life. People can talk about "online personality" all they want, but who a person is online usually reflects who they are in life, and how they "were brought up."

[Dale Van Brocklin]

-Encourage them to look for things online last, like knowledge, friendship, communication, etc. If they can't interact well with other people in real life, this will follow over into online life. Real life is always better. They'll never figure out how to replicate a hug online,a kiss, a massage, nor a shoulder to cry on.
Teaching your kids, and yourselves, rational thought and skepticism is a must if you go online. People can lie easier online than anywhere else. Spammers lie, to the point of being jaw-dropping: you'll get a pop-up from your anti-virus software that tells you to run a program to get rid of a virus....and that puts a virus on your computer!
Get a library card. Books still have more knowledge, and more accurate knowledge than online. The internet has more VARIED knowledge, about more subjects than books can ever have, but I have found that books still are the place to go to REALLY research something. There's also less to choose from - the library has about 20 or 30 books on WWII, the internet will have hundreds of millions of sites to wade through. Many not accurate. Books have editors, not many websites do.

[Kathy Prejean]

Thanks for the affirmation of what I'm currently practicing in our home!