Oh no, our world’s children are succumbing to the perils of the World Wide Web. A new survey of 19,000 parents worldwide said their kids browse porn as early as age six and begin e-flirting at eight years old. The news comes from Bitdefender, a Bucharest-based antivirus company, that compiled the results from talking with parents and monitoring which sites parents block. Read More
Oh, XOJane! Adorable, anti-angel-dust XOJane. It appears the time has come for the site to explain Reddit to its readers. And blogger Kate Conway, who has been “on and off Reddit for years,” has bravely taken up the task.
Ms. Conway, who describes herself as “such a freaking sucker” (for feel-good Internet tales) Read More
In the mid-90s, when this reporter was in elementary school, we developed a code for AOL instant messenger to alert our chat buddies whenever our parents had entered the room or were looking over our shoulders. “1,” we would type, when they were lurking around, to let our buddies know not to type anything inappropriate, and “11″ when they eventually left.
We were rarely actually talking about anything that could get us into real trouble–back then “inappropriate” meant the boys we had crushes on and articles about the Spice Girls that we weren’t technically allowed to read because they were in grownup magazines like Vogue. But we enjoyed the conspiratorial feeling of having a secret language, of having something that belonged to us and only us. It was a treasured part of being young–and it is apparently something that teens today don’t get to enjoy.
According to an article in the New York Times, parents are using our quantitative obsession to track their teens’ every move. And it’s not just online, but on their phones, in the car and when they’re out and about, too. Read More
“Warning to parents,” Vator News cried out yesterday, “this is what your teen does online.” Exclamation points implied! So what’s the terrifying new teen pastime parents should be panicked about? According to Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, teenagers are, get this, using online video.
The actual study doesn’t adopt Vator New’s fear-mongering tone, except in the way that all sentences about the online activities of teenagers sound like they’re pulled from a “Nightline” investigation. “Nearly 2 in 5 online teens (37%) say they have video chatted with someone else using applications such as Skype, iChat or Googletalk.” Ahhhhh, lock up your kids. Read More
With 3 percent of Twitter’s servers devoted to Justin Bieber, there is no denying millenials are a power force on the internet. Alloy, the creator of books like Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, among others, has honed its formula for churning out youth bestsellers and accompanying spin-offs to perfection.
Tween and teen-oriented page turners were Alloy’s bread and butter, but the company has lost its faith in books; instead turning to the web and television for eyeballs and mindshare. Alloy Digital, a division of Alloy Media + Marketing, says it reaches more than 60 70 million youngsters a month through its network of websites including the websites for the aforementioned series, new-fangled products like this confusing Facebook app, and Teen.com.
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The New York Times dove into the hyper connected world of 20 something with smartphones this weekend, returning with some shocking revelations about the behavior of this new cyber culture. A few findings:
People are always texting one another on their phones, even when they are out to dinner.
Checking in to venues. Passive aggressively emailing friends who are checking in when you are stuck at work.
To maintain an information edge, the digital youth keeps a device handy at all times. Spencer Lazar, founder of Spontaneously, sleeps with his smartphone, iPad and laptop in the bed. Read More
Canvas, the friendlier, more forward thinking cousin to Chris “Moot” Poole’s original meme generator, 4Chan, has just rolled an interesting twist. Up till now Canvas was an image board where users posted pics, remixed them, added badges and shared like crazy. Now Canvas users can add audio remixes, allowing anyone to scrape audio from Read More
