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MEDIA UNIT
MRS. CARUSO
ENGLISH 10
Name:___________________________________________________________________
In this unit you will analyze media and its effects on society today. In this packet, you will find
the articles we will be reading as a class as well as the homework readings.
At the end of each article is a news analysis sheet that you must complete.
When you are finished with your research, you will write an essay discussing whether the effects
of media are mostly positive or negative.
The basis of your essay will be the articles and the completed analysis forms. PLEASE make
sure you keep up with them because you will NEED them in order to write you essays.
ARTICLE 1
New York Times
January 27, 2011
Revolutionary Arab Geeks
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — Ill-timed books are an interesting subculture. “Dow 36,000” comes to mind. It was
written by James Glassman and Kevin Hassett and published in 1999, just as the tech bubble
peaked. Now we have Evgeny Morozov’s “The Net Delusion” — sub-title “The Dark Side of
Internet Freedom” — hitting stores just as the Facebook-armed youth of Tunisia and Egypt rise
to demonstrate the liberating power of social media.
Ooops.
Morozov — born in Belarus, educated in Bulgaria, living in California — is a rumpled,
bespectacled 26-year-old (“I am embarrassingly young,” he told me) with no driver’s license and
an outsized brain. He’s funny and talks very fast, as if the words issuing from him are trying, in
vain, to catch up with the thoughts zipping through his head like electrons around an atom.
These thoughts, as gathered in his exhaustive book, go like this: Cyber-utopians, not least
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have spawned a dangerous illusion by suggesting the world
can blog, tweet, Facebook, YouTube and Google its way to democracy and freedom.
In an age where “The best and the brightest are now also the geekiest” — Morozov can turn a
sound-byte — the so-called “Google Doctrine” has, in the author’s view, become a seductive
trap. The reality, he argues, is that too often the Internet “empowers the strong and disempowers
the weak.”
Far from favoring the oppressed, Web 2.0 gives new tools to the oppressor in cracking down on
some opponents — “One stolen password now opens data doors that used not to exist” — and
lulling others into passivity — “All they want to connect to is potential lovers, pornography and
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celebrity gossip.” Kremlin ideologues, he notes, have become very adept, sometimes with sexy
shows, in forging “digital captives” distracted from politics.
The fact that social media is dominated by U.S. corporations allows repressive governments
from Belarus to Beijing to hatch persuasive conspiracy theories conflating, say, Twitter with
American government plots, especially when, as with the Iranian uprising of 2009, there are
publicized contacts between U.S. State Department officials and the company.
A big Clinton speech on Internet freedom, like the one she made in January, 2010, may only
expose dissident bloggers to added danger by making them appear as the long arm of American
subversion — or so Morozov contends. A 69-page bibliography attests to his reading in
unearthing arguments against cyber-delusions.
I think Morozov is brilliant and his book is a useful provocation. I also think he’s dead wrong.
Sure, the first decade of the 21st century has seen anti-Western authoritarianism hold its ground,
and there’s no question the people running repressive systems are quick studies who’ve learned
to exploit, or suppress, a revolutionary technology that challenges them. Still, they’re swimming
against the tide. The freedom to connect is a tool of liberation — and it’s powerful.
I am writing this on my return from Tunisia, where Facebook gave young protesters the
connective muscle to oust an Arab dictator, and as I watch on YouTube images of brave young
Egyptians confronting the clubs and water-cannons of President Hosni Mubarak’s goons.
“All they have, all they have,” says one bloodied protester of the brute force he’s encountered.
Yes, when all you have is a big hammer — and that’s what’s left in the arsenal of decaying,
nepotistic Arab regimes — everything looks like a nail.
The truth is these men — add the 23-year rule of the ousted Tunisian dictator Zine El-Abidine
Ben Ali to the reigns of Mubarak and Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and you have almost a
century of despotism — are relics to whom a wired world has given the lie.
Organization, networking, exposure to suppressed ideas and information, the habits of debate
and self-empowerment in a culture of humiliation and conspiracy: These are some of the gifts
social media is bestowing on overwhelmingly young populations across the Arab world.
Above all, the Internet’s impact has been to expose the great delusion that has led Western
governments to buttress Arab autocrats: that the only alternative to them was Islamic jihadists.
No, the Tunisian revolution was middle-class, un-Islamic and pro-Western. The people in the
streets of Cairo are young, connected, non-ideological and pragmatic: They want a promise that
Mubarak won’t stand in the presidential election this year or hand power to his son, Gamal, who,
by the way, has a nice pad on London’s chic Eaton Square.
As the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei told my colleagues David Kirkpatrick
and Michael Slackman, “I am pretty sure that any freely and fairly elected government in Egypt
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will be a moderate one, but America is really pushing Egypt and pushing the whole Arab world
into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.”
Enough already! If Clinton was serious in announcing that a U.S. priority is now to “harness the
power of connection technologies and apply them to our diplomatic goals,” and if she truly sees
the Arab world’s foundations “sinking into the sand,” the moment is now to back change in
Cairo.
And I can’t think of better atonement for Morozov’s errors than for him to apply his brilliance
and Web savvy to the cause of Egyptian and Tunisian democracy.
Article 2
New York Times
January 9, 2012
Seeing Social Media More as Portal Than as
Pitfall
By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
More than a hundred years ago, when the telephone was introduced, there was some handwringing over the social dangers that this new technology posed: increased sexual aggression
and damaged human relationships. “It was going to bring down our society,” said Dr. Megan
Moreno, a specialist in adolescent medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Men
would be calling women and making lascivious comments, and women would be so vulnerable,
and we’d never have civilized conversations again.”
In other words, the telephone provoked many of the same worries that more recently have been
expressed about online social media. “When a new technology comes out that is something so
important, there is this initial alarmist reaction,” Dr. Moreno said.
Indeed, much of the early research — and many of the early pronouncements — on social media
seemed calculated to make parents terrified of an emerging technology that many of them did not
understand as well as their children did.
Whether about sexting or online bullying or the specter of Internet addiction, “much social media
research has been on what people call the danger paradigm,” said Dr. Michael Rich, a
pediatrician and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital
Boston.
Though there are certainly real dangers, and though some adolescents appear to be particularly
vulnerable, scientists are now turning to a more nuanced understanding of this new world. Many
have started to approach social media as an integral, if risky, part of adolescence, perhaps not
unlike driving.
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Researchers are also looking to Facebook, Twitter and the rest for opportunities to identify
problems, to hear cries for help and to provide information and support. Dr. Rich, who sees many
teenagers who struggle with Internet-related issues, feels strongly that it is important to avoid
blanket judgments about the dangers of going online.
“We should not view social media as either positive or negative, but as essentially neutral,” he
said. “It’s what we do with the tools that decides how they affect us and those around us.”
Dr. Moreno’s early research looked at adolescents who displayed evidence of risky behaviors on
public MySpace profiles, posting photos or statements that referred to sexual activity or
substance abuse. E-mails were sent to those adolescents suggesting that they modify their
profiles or make them private.
Girls were more likely to respond than boys, Dr. Moreno found, and sexual material was more
likely than alcohol-related material to be removed.
Her current research, by contrast, approaches social media as a window, an opportunity to
understand and improve both physical and mental health. In a study of the ways college students
describe sadness in status updates on their Facebook profiles, she showed that some such
expressions were associated with depression in students who completed clinical screening tests.
Since freshman year is a high-risk time for depression, many college resident advisers already try
to use Facebook to monitor students, Dr. Moreno said. Perhaps it will be possible to help R.A.’s
recognize red flags in the online profiles of their charges.
Still, she acknowledged that this new strategy raised privacy concerns, asking, “How do you
think about extending this to other at-risk groups in a way that still doesn’t feel like an invasion
of privacy?” For example, can we help people in support groups take care of one another better
through social media?
Going back and forth, as I do these days, between the worlds of academic pediatrics and
academic journalism, I am struck by the focus in both settings on the potential — and the risks
— of social media and on the importance of understanding how communication is changing.
Our children are using social media to accomplish the eternal goals of adolescent development,
which include socializing with peers, investigating the world, trying on identities and
establishing independence.
In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media issued a
clinical report, “The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents and Families.” It began by
emphasizing the benefits of social media for children and adolescents, including enhanced
communication skills and opportunities for social connections.
“A large part of this generation’s social and emotional development is occurring while on the
Internet and on cellphones,” the report noted.
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Our job as parents is to help them manage all this wisely, to understand — and avoid — some of
the special dangers and consequences of making mistakes in these media. (We can expect the
same kind of gratitude that we get for all of our guidance: mixed, of course, with an extra helping
of contempt if our technical skills are not up to theirs.)
“Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all harm model, one of the questions parents need to ask is,
‘How is this going to interact with my child’s personality?’ ” said Clay Shirky, who teaches
about social media at New York University. “Digital media is an amplifier. It tends to make
extroverts more extroverted and introverts more introverted.”
And both parents and researchers need to be sure they understand the subtleties of the ways
teenagers interpret social media.
At a 2011 symposium on the Internet and society, two researchers presented information on how
teenagers understand negative talk on the Internet. What adults interpret as bullying is often read
by teenagers as “drama,” a related but distinct phenomenon.
By understanding how teenagers think about harsh rhetoric, the researchers suggested, we may
find ways to help them defend themselves against the real dangers of online aggression.
The problems of cyberbullying and Internet overuse are serious, and the risks of making
mistakes online are very real. But even those who treat adolescents with these problems are now
committed to the idea that there are other important perspectives for researchers — or parents, or
teachers — looking at the brave new universe in which adolescence is taking place.
Social media, said Dr. Rich, “are the new landscape, the new environment in which kids are
sorting through the process of becoming autonomous adults —
Article 3
New York Times
November 20, 2008
Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad
Thing
By TAMAR LEWIN
Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet
are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.
“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s
on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living
and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills
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and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along
with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”
The study, conducted from 2005 to last summer, describes new-media usage but does not
measure its effects.
“It certainly rings true that new media are inextricably woven into young people’s lives,” said
Vicki Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and director of its program for the
study of media and health. “Ethnographic studies like this are good at describing how young
people fit social media into their lives. What they can’t do is document effects. This highlights
the need for larger, nationally representative studies.”
Ms. Ito, a research scientist in the department of informatics at the University of California,
Irvine, said that some parental concern about the dangers of Internet socializing might result
from a misperception.
“Those concerns about predators and stranger danger have been overblown,” she said. “There’s
been some confusion about what kids are actually doing online. Mostly, they’re socializing with
their friends, people they’ve met at school or camp or sports.”
The study, part of a $50 million project on digital and media learning, used several teams of
researchers to interview more than 800 young people and their parents and to observe teenagers
online for more than 5,000 hours. Because of the adult sense that socializing on the Internet is a
waste of time, the study said, teenagers reported many rules and restrictions on their electronic
hanging out, but most found ways to work around such barriers that let them stay in touch with
their friends steadily throughout the day.
“Teens usually have a ‘full-time intimate community’ with whom they communicate in an
always-on mode via mobile phones and instant messaging,” the study said.
This is not news to a cluster of Bronx teenagers, gathered after school on Wednesday to tell a
reporter about their social routines. All of them used MySpace and instant messaging to stay in
touch with a dozen or two of their closest friends every evening. “As soon as I get home, I turn
on my computer,” said a 15-year-old boy who started his MySpace page four years ago. “My
MySpace is always on, and when I get a message on MySpace, it sends a text message to my
phone. It’s not an obsession; it’s a necessity.” (School rules did not permit using students’ names
without written parental permission, which could not be immediately obtained.)
Only one student, a 14-year-old girl, had ever opted out — and she lasted only a week.
“It didn’t work,” she said. “You become addicted. You can’t live without it.”
In a situation familiar to many parents, the study describes two 17-year-olds, dating for more
than a year, who wake up and log on to their computers between taking showers and doing their
hair, talk on their cellphones as they travel to school, exchange text messages through the school
day, then get together after school to do homework — during which time they also play a video
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game — talk on the phone during the evening, perhaps ending the night with a text-messaged “I
love you.”
Teenagers also use new media to explore new romantic relationships, through interactions casual
enough to ensure no loss of face if the other party is not interested.
The study describes two early Facebook messages, or “wall posts,” by teenagers who eventually
started dating. First, the girl posted a message saying, “hey ... hm. wut to say? iono lol/well I left
you a comment ... u sud feel SPECIAL haha.” (Translation: Hmm ... what to say? I don’t know.
Laugh out loud. Well I left you a comment ... You should feel special.)
A day later, the boy replied, “hello there ... umm I don’t know what to say, but at least I wrote
something ...”
While online socializing is ubiquitous, many young people move on to a period of tinkering and
exploration, as they look for information online, customize games or experiment with digital
media production, the study found.
For example, a Brooklyn teenager did a Google image search to look at a video card and find out
where in a computer such cards are, then installed his own.
What the study calls “geeking out” is the most intense Internet use, in which young people delve
deeply into a particular area of interest, often through a connection to an online interest group.
“New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a
classroom setting,” the study said. “Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are
often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults.”
Article #4
New York Times
February 17, 2012
Spring Awakening
By Wael Ghonim
In the embryonic, ever evolving era of social media — when milestones come by the day, if not
by the second — June 8, 2010, has secured a rightful place in history. That was the day Wael
Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, was browsing Facebook in his home in
Dubai and found a startling image: a photograph of a bloodied and disfigured face, its jaw
broken, a young life taken away. That life, he soon learned, had belonged to Khaled Mohamed
Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria who had been beaten to death by the Egyptian police.
At once angered and animated, the Egyptian-born Ghonim went online and created a Facebook
page. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill
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me.” It took a few moments for Ghonim to settle on a name for the page, one that would fit the
character of an increasingly personalized and politically galvanizing Internet. He finally decided
on “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”
“Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to
me,” Ghonim writes in “Revolution 2.0,” his fast-paced and engrossing new memoir of political
awakening. “All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own
homeland.”
Ghonim’s memoir is a welcome and cleareyed addition to a growing list of volumes that have
aimed (but often failed) to meaningfully analyze social media’s impact. It’s a book about social
media for people who don’t think they care about social media. It will also serve as a touchstone
for future testimonials about a strengthening borderless digital movement that is set to
continually disrupt powerful institutions, be they corporate enterprises or political regimes.
An accidental activist, Ghonim tapped into a shared frustration that became immediately evident
online. Two minutes after he started his Facebook page, 300 people had joined it. Three months
later, that number had grown to more than 250,000. What bubbled up online inevitably spilled
onto the streets, starting with a series of “Silent Stands” that culminated in a massive and historic
rally at Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. “We Are All Khaled Said” helped ignite an uprising
that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak and the dissolution of the ruling National
Democratic Party. In turn, Ghonim — who was arrested during the height of the protests —
reluctantly became one of the leading voices of the Arab Spring.
Ghonim’s writing voice is spare and measured, and marked by the same earnest humility he has
displayed in media appearances. During the interview he gave on Egyptian television after his
release from detention, when he broke down crying as a photo montage of young Egyptians
killed in the protests played across the screen, he was quick to point out that “the real heroes” of
the revolution were those who had been martyred. He resists being labeled an icon. He insists he
represents just one story and says his online activism should be seen only in the context of
“hundreds of other pages, Facebook accounts and Twitter profiles” dedicated to covering and
organizing the Arab Spring.
And he’s right. But his individual story resonates on two levels: it epitomizes the coming-of-age
of a young Middle Eastern generation that has grown up in the digital era, as well as the
transformation of an apolitical man from comfortable executive to prominent activist.
The Middle East is home to roughly 100 million people ages 15 to 29. Many are educated but
unemployed. Though only a fraction of Egyptians have Internet access, Ghonim writes, the
number of Web users in the country increased to 13.6 million in 2008 from 1.5 million in 2004.
Through blogs, Twitter and Facebook, the Web has become a haven for a young, educated class
yearning to express its worries and anxieties.
Technology, of course, is not a panacea. Facebook does not a revolution make. In Egypt’s case,
it was simply a place for venting the outrage resulting from years of repression, economic
instability and individual frustration. Ghonim writes that in 2011, out of Egypt’s more than 80
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million people, some 48 million were poor and 2.5 million lived in extreme poverty. “More than
three million young Egyptians are unemployed,” he says.
A father of two, Ghonim comes from a relatively prosperous family. Though he places himself in
“a small, privileged slice” of Egypt’s population, he once shared his countrymen’s indifference
to politics. “Most of us shied away,” he writes, “believing that we could not do anything to
change the status quo.” Connecting online with other young, educated Egyptians changed his
mind.
The Internet, Ghonim says, was “instrumental in shaping my experiences as well as my
character.” Like many who grew up with instant messaging, online video games and the herecomes-everybody ethos of sites like Wikipedia, he refers to himself as a “real-life introvert yet an
Internet extrovert.” He met his wife, Ilka, an American Muslim, online.
Ghonim drew on his considerable skill and knowledge as an online marketer while running the
“We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page. Early on, he decided that creating the page, as
opposed to a Facebook group, would be a better way to spread information. More important, he
knew that maintaining an informal, authentic tone was crucial to amassing allies. People had to
see themselves in the page. “Using the pronoun I was critical to establishing the fact that the
page was not managed by an organization, political party or movement of any kind,” he writes.
“On the contrary, the writer was an ordinary Egyptian devastated by the brutality inflicted on
Khaled Said and motivated to seek justice.”
He polled the page’s users and sought ideas from others, like how best to publicize a rally —
through printed fliers and mass text messaging, it turned out. (“Reaching working-class
Egyptians was not going to happen through the Internet and Facebook,” he notes.) He tried to be
as inclusive as possible, as when he changed the name of the page’s biggest scheduled rally from
“Celebrating Egyptian Police Day — January 25” to “January 25: Revolution Against Torture,
Poverty, Corruption and Unemployment.” “We needed to have everyone join forces: workers,
human rights activists, government employees and others who had grown tired of the regime’s
policies,” he writes. “If the invitation to take to the streets had been based solely on human
rights, then only a certain segment of Egyptian society would have participated.”
As the youth-led Tunisian upheaval further inspired young activists in Egypt, Ghonim was
arrested by the secret police. For nearly two weeks, he was held blindfolded and handcuffed,
deprived of sleep and subjected to repeated interrogations, as his friends, family and colleagues
at Google tried to discover his whereabouts. That he was released as quickly as he was
demonstrated the power of Revolution 2.0.
A year after Mubarak’s ouster, it remains to be seen exactly how and when — or whether —
Egypt will transition to a better democracy. What Ghonim’s book makes clear, however, is that
revolution begins with the self: with what one is willing to stand for online and offline, and what
one citizen is willing to risk in the service of his country.
Jose Antonio Vargas has written for The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and The New
Yorker. He is the founder of Define American, a multimedia campaign for immigration reform.
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Article #5
The Atlantic
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
What the Internet is doing to our brains
By Nicholas Carr
Illustration by Guy Billout
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL
pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene
toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent
to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the
memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says,
forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or
something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the
memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I
used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a
lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the
argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case
anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose
the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward
brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time
online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The
Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or
periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick
clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not
working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing emails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just
tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened,
hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the
information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having
immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been
widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive
Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price.
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive
channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of
thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration
and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in
a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip
along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—
literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use
the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the
bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog
about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit
major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He
speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I
read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has
changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described
how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read
and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who
has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated
on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a
“staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources
online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.
Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and
psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects
cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from
University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way
we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer
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logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the
British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles,
e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites
exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely
returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two
pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d
save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The
authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new
forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents
pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in
the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on
cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when
television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a
different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we
read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf
worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and
“immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that
emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose
commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of
information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when
we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our
genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we
see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and
practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our
brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a
mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose
written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain,
including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation
of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the
Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to
be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become
exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his
writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least
for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using
only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
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But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer,
noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter,
more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the
friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often
depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
Article #6
New York Times:
November 21, 2010
Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction
By MATT RICHTEL
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his
bedroom desk: book or computer?
By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his
summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.
He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing
Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see
an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.
On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate
gratification.”
Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of
stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people.
The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly
switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate
professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And
the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to
be wired differently.”
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But even as some parents and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to
use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the
country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on
the students’ technological territory.
It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal’s school, Woodside High School, on a sprawling campus set against the
forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages
a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook.
The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised,
is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with
students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach
Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.
He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because
they were up late on their computers. Unchecked use of digital devices, he says, can create a culture in which students
are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it.
“I am trying to take back their attention from their BlackBerrys and video games,” he says. “To a degree, I’m using
technology to do it.”
The same tension surfaces in Vishal, whose ability to be distracted by computers is rivaled by his proficiency with
them. At the beginning of his junior year, he discovered a passion for filmmaking and made a name for himself among
friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with digital cameras and editing software.
He acts as his family’s tech-support expert, helping his father, Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on
the computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the San Francisco airport, build her own Web site.
But he also plays video games 10 hours a week. He regularly sends Facebook status updates at 2 a.m., even on school
nights, and has such a reputation for distributing links to videos that his best friend calls him a “YouTube bully.”
Several teachers call Vishal one of their brightest students, and they wonder why things are not adding up. Last
semester, his grade point average was 2.3 after a D-plus in English and an F in Algebra II. He got an A in film critique.
“He’s a kid caught between two worlds,” said Mr. Reilly — one that is virtual and one with real-life demands.
Vishal, like his mother, says he lacks the self-control to favor schoolwork over the computer. She sat him down a few
weeks before school started and told him that, while she respected his passion for film and his technical skills, he had
to use them productively.
15
“This is the year,” she says she told him. “This is your senior year and you can’t afford not to focus.”
It was not always this way. As a child, Vishal had a tendency to procrastinate, but nothing like this. Something
changed him.
Growing Up With Gadgets
When he was 3, Vishal moved with his parents and older brother to their current home, a three-bedroom house in the
working-class section of Redwood City, a suburb in Silicon Valley that is more diverse than some of its elite neighbors.
Thin and quiet with a shy smile, Vishal passed the admissions test for a prestigious public elementary and middle
school. Until sixth grade, he focused on homework, regularly going to the house of a good friend to study with him.
But Vishal and his family say two things changed around the seventh grade: his mother went back to work, and he got
a computer. He became increasingly engrossed in games and surfing the Internet, finding an easy outlet for what he
describes as an inclination to procrastinate.
“I realized there were choices,” Vishal recalls. “Homework wasn’t the only option.”
Several recent studies show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that
this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families. Jacob L. Vigdor, an economics professor at
Duke University who led some of the research, said that when adults were not supervising computer use, children “are
left to their own devices, and the impetus isn’t to do homework but play around.”
Research also shows that students often juggle homework and entertainment. The Kaiser Family Foundation found
earlier this year that half of students from 8 to 18 are using the Internet, watching TV or using some other form of
media either “most” (31 percent) or “some” (25 percent) of the time that they are doing homework.
At Woodside, as elsewhere, students’ use of technology is not uniform. Mr. Reilly, the principal, says their choices
tend to reflect their personalities. Social butterflies tend to be heavy texters and Facebook users. Students who are less
social might escape into games, while drifters or those prone to procrastination, like Vishal, might surf the Web or
watch videos.
The technology has created on campuses a new set of social types — not the thespian and the jock but the texter and
gamer, Facebook addict and YouTube potato.
“The technology amplifies whoever you are,” Mr. Reilly says.
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For some, the amplification is intense. Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers
clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She texts between classes,
at the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying.
Most of the exchanges are little more than quick greetings, but they can get more in-depth, like “if someone tells you
about a drama going on with someone,” Allison said. “I can text one person while talking on the phone to someone
else.”
But this proficiency comes at a cost: she blames multitasking for the three B’s on her recent progress report.
“I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up
the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’ ”
Some shyer students do not socialize through technology — they recede into it. Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert,
plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends, leaving homework to be done in the bathroom
before school.
Escaping into games can also salve teenagers’ age-old desire for some control in their chaotic lives. “It’s a way for me
to separate myself,” Ramon says. “If there’s an argument between my mom and one of my brothers, I’ll just go to my
room and start playing video games and escape.”
With powerful new cellphones, the interactive experience can go everywhere. Between classes at Woodside or at
lunch, when use of personal devices is permitted, students gather in clusters, sometimes chatting face to face,
sometimes half-involved in a conversation while texting someone across the teeming quad. Others sit alone, watching
a video, listening to music or updating Facebook.
Students say that their parents, worried about the distractions, try to police computer time, but that monitoring the
use of cellphones is difficult. Parents may also want to be able to call their children at any time, so taking the phone
away is not always an option.
Other parents wholly embrace computer use, even when it has no obvious educational benefit.
“If you’re not on top of technology, you’re not going to be on top of the world,” said John McMullen, 56, a retired
criminal investigator whose son, Sean, is one of five friends in the group Vishal joins for lunch each day.
Sean’s favorite medium is video games; he plays for four hours after school and twice that on weekends. He was
playing more but found his habit pulling his grade point average below 3.2, the point at which he felt comfortable. He
says he sometimes wishes that his parents would force him to quit playing and study, because he finds it hard to quit
17
when given the choice. Still, he says, video games are not responsible for his lack of focus, asserting that in another
era he would have been distracted by TV or something else.
“Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean, sitting at a picnic table in the quad, where he is surrounded
by a multimillion-dollar view: on the nearby hills are the evergreens that tower above the affluent neighborhoods
populated by Internet tycoons. Sean, a senior, concedes that video games take a physical toll: “I haven’t done exercise
since my sophomore year. But that doesn’t seem like a big deal. I still look the same.”
Sam Crocker, Vishal’s closest friend, who has straight A’s but lower SAT scores than he would like, blames the
Internet’s distractions for his inability to finish either of his two summer reading books.
“I know I can read a book, but then I’m up and checking Facebook,” he says, adding: “Facebook is amazing because it
feels like you’re doing something and you’re not doing anything. It’s the absence of doing something, but you feel
gratified anyway.”
He concludes: “My attention span is getting worse.”
The Lure of Distraction
Some neuroscientists have been studying people like Sam and Vishal. They have begun to understand what happens
to the brains of young people who are constantly online and in touch.
In an experiment at the German Sport University in Cologne in 2007, boys from 12 to 14 spent an hour each night
playing video games after they finished homework.
On alternate nights, the boys spent an hour watching an exciting movie, like “Harry Potter” or “Star Trek,” rather than
playing video games. That allowed the researchers to compare the effect of video games and TV.
The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected the boys’ brainwave patterns while sleeping and their
ability to remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found that playing video games led to markedly
lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a “significant decline” in the boys’ ability to remember
vocabulary words. The findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.
Markus Dworak, a researcher who led the study and is now a neuroscientist at Harvard, said it was not clear whether
the boys’ learning suffered because sleep was disrupted or, as he speculates, also because the intensity of the game
experience overrode the brain’s recording of the vocabulary.
“When you look at vocabulary and look at huge stimulus after that, your brain has to decide which information to
store,” he said. “Your brain might favor the emotionally stimulating information over the vocabulary.”
18
At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like
exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from
their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory.
In that vein, recent imaging studies of people have found that major cross sections of the brain become surprisingly
active during downtime. These brain studies suggest to researchers that periods of rest are critical in allowing the
brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self.
Researchers say these studies have particular implications for young people, whose brains have more trouble focusing
and setting priorities.
“Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a
constant mode of stimulation.”
“The headline is: bring back boredom,” added Dr. Rich, who last month gave a speech to the American Academy of
Pediatrics entitled, “Finding Huck Finn: Reclaiming Childhood from the River of Electronic Screens.”
Dr. Rich said in an interview that he was not suggesting young people should toss out their devices, but rather that
they embrace a more balanced approach to what he said were powerful tools necessary to compete and succeed in
modern life.
The heavy use of devices also worries Daniel Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, who is known for research showing that children are not as harmed by TV viewing as some researchers
have suggested.
Multitasking using ubiquitous, interactive and highly stimulating computers and phones, Professor Anderson says,
appears to have a more powerful effect than TV.
Like Dr. Rich, he says he believes that young, developing brains are becoming habituated to distraction and to
switching tasks, not to focus.
“If you’ve grown up processing multiple media, that’s exactly the mode you’re going to fall into when put in that
environment — you develop a need for that stimulation,” he said.
Vishal can attest to that.
“I’m doing Facebook, YouTube, having a conversation or two with a friend, listening to music at the same time. I’m
doing a million things at once, like a lot of people my age,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll say: I need to stop this and do my
schoolwork, but I can’t.”
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“If it weren’t for the Internet, I’d focus more on school and be doing better academically,” he says. But thanks to the
Internet, he says, he has discovered and pursued his passion: filmmaking. Without the Internet, “I also wouldn’t know
what I want to do with my life.”
Clicking Toward a Future
The woman sits in a cemetery at dusk, sobbing. Behind her, silhouetted and translucent, a man kneels, then fades
away, a ghost.
This captivating image appears on Vishal’s computer screen. On this Thursday afternoon in late September, he is
engrossed in scenes he shot the previous weekend for a music video he is making with his cousin.
The video is based on a song performed by the band Guns N’ Roses about a woman whose boyfriend dies. He wants it
to be part of the package of work he submits to colleges that emphasize film study, along with a documentary he is
making about home-schooled students.
Now comes the editing. Vishal taught himself to use sophisticated editing software in part by watching tutorials on
YouTube. He does not leave his chair for more than two hours, sipping Pepsi, his face often inches from the screen, as
he perfects the clip from the cemetery. The image of the crying woman was shot separately from the image of the
kneeling man, and he is trying to fuse them.
“I’m spending two hours to get a few seconds just right,” he says.
He occasionally sends a text message or checks Facebook, but he is focused in a way he rarely is when doing
homework. He says the chief difference is that filmmaking feels applicable to his chosen future, and he hopes colleges,
like the University of Southern California or the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, will be so impressed by
his portfolio that they will overlook his school performance.
“This is going to compensate for the grades,” he says. On this day, his homework includes a worksheet for Latin, some
reading for English class and an economics essay, but they can wait.
For Vishal, there’s another clear difference between filmmaking and homework: interactivity. As he edits, the
windows on the screen come alive; every few seconds, he clicks the mouse to make tiny changes to the lighting and
flow of the images, and the software gives him constant feedback.
“I click and something happens,” he says, explaining that, by comparison, reading a book or doing homework is less
exciting. “I guess it goes back to the immediate gratification thing.”
20
The $2,000 computer Vishal is using is state of the art and only a week old. It represents a concession by his parents.
They allowed him to buy it, despite their continuing concerns about his technology habits, because they wanted to
support his filmmaking dream. “If we put roadblocks in his way, he’s just going to get depressed,” his mother says.
Besides, she adds, “he’s been making an effort to do his homework.”
At this point in the semester, it seems she is right. The first schoolwide progress reports come out in late September,
and Vishal has mostly A’s and B’s. He says he has been able to make headway by applying himself, but also by cutting
back his workload. Unlike last year, he is not taking advanced placement classes, and he has chosen to retake Algebra
II not in the classroom but in an online class that lets him work at his own pace.
His shift to easier classes might not please college admissions officers, according to Woodside’s college adviser,
Zorina Matavulj. She says they want seniors to intensify their efforts. As it is, she says, even if Vishal improves his
performance significantly, someone with his grades faces long odds in applying to the kinds of colleges he aspires to.
Still, Vishal’s passion for film reinforces for Mr. Reilly, the principal, that the way to reach these students is on their
own terms.
Hands-On Technology
Big Macintosh monitors sit on every desk, and a man with hip glasses and an easygoing style stands at the front of the
class. He is Geoff Diesel, 40, a favorite teacher here at Woodside who has taught English and film. Now he teaches
one of Mr. Reilly’s new classes, audio production. He has a rapt audience of more than 20 students as he shows a
video of the band Nirvana mixing their music, then holds up a music keyboard.
“Who knows how to use Pro Tools? We’ve got it. It’s the program used by the best music studios in the world,” he
says.
In the back of the room, Mr. Reilly watches, thrilled. He introduced the audio course last year and enough students
signed up to fill four classes. (He could barely pull together one class when he introduced Mandarin, even though he
had secured iPads to help teach the language.)
“Some of these students are our most at-risk kids,” he says. He means that they are more likely to tune out school,
skip class or not do their homework, and that they may not get healthful meals at home. They may also do their most
enthusiastic writing not for class but in text messages and on Facebook. “They’re here, they’re in class, they’re
listening.”
Despite Woodside High’s affluent setting, about 40 percent of its 1,800 students come from low-income families and
receive a reduced-cost or free lunch. The school is 56 percent Latino, 38 percent white and 5 percent AfricanAmerican, and it sends 93 percent of its students to four-year or community colleges.
21
Mr. Reilly says that the audio class provides solid vocational training and can get students interested in other
subjects.
“Today mixing music, tomorrow sound waves and physics,” he says. And he thinks the key is that they love not just
the music but getting their hands on the technology. “We’re meeting them on their turf.”
It does not mean he sees technology as a panacea. “I’ll always take one great teacher in a cave over a dozen Smart
Boards,” he says, referring to the high-tech teaching displays used in many schools.
Teachers at Woodside commonly blame technology for students’ struggles to concentrate, but they are divided over
whether embracing computers is the right solution.
“It’s a catastrophe,” said Alan Eaton, a charismatic Latin teacher. He says that technology has led to a “balkanization
of their focus and duration of stamina,” and that schools make the problem worse when they adopt the technology.
“When rock ’n’ roll came about, we didn’t start using it in classrooms like we’re doing with technology,” he says. He
personally feels the sting, since his advanced classes have one-third as many students as they had a decade ago.
Vishal remains a Latin student, one whom Mr. Eaton describes as particularly bright. But the teacher wonders if
technology might be the reason Vishal seems to lose interest in academics the minute he leaves class.
Mr. Diesel, by contrast, does not think technology is behind the problems of Vishal and his schoolmates — in fact, he
thinks it is the key to connecting with them, and an essential tool. “It’s in their DNA to look at screens,” he asserts.
And he offers another analogy to explain his approach: “Frankenstein is in the room and I don’t want him to tear me
apart. If I’m not using technology, I lose them completely.”
Mr. Diesel had Vishal as a student in cinema class and describes him as a “breath of fresh air” with a gift for
filmmaking. Mr. Diesel says he wonders if Vishal is a bit like Woody Allen, talented but not interested in being part of
the system.
But Mr. Diesel adds: “If Vishal’s going to be an independent filmmaker, he’s got to read Vonnegut. If you’re going to
write scripts, you’ve got to read.”
Back to Reading Aloud
Vishal sits near the back of English IV. Marcia Blondel, a veteran teacher, asks the students to open the book they are
studying, “The Things They Carried,” which is about the Vietnam War.
“Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?” she asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest
follow along.
22
To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of
technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments
on their own.
“How can you have a discussion in class?” she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent
years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework
assignment.
She adds: “You can’t become a good writer by watching YouTube, texting and e-mailing a bunch of abbreviations.”
As the group-reading effort winds down, she says gently: “I hope this will motivate you to read on your own.”
It is a reminder of the choices that have followed the students through the semester: computer or homework?
Immediate gratification or investing in the future?
Mr. Reilly hopes that the two can meet — that computers can be combined with education to better engage students
and can give them technical skills without compromising deep analytical thought.
But in Vishal’s case, computers and schoolwork seem more and more to be mutually exclusive. Ms. Blondel says that
Vishal, after a decent start to the school year, has fallen into bad habits. In October, he turned in weeks late, for
example, a short essay based on the first few chapters of “The Things They Carried.” His grade at that point, she says,
tracks around a D.
For his part, Vishal says he is investing himself more in his filmmaking, accelerating work with his cousin on their
music video project. But he is also using Facebook late at night and surfing for videos on YouTube. The evidence of
the shift comes in a string of Facebook updates.
Saturday, 11:55 p.m.: “Editing, editing, editing”
Sunday, 3:55 p.m.: “8+ hours of shooting, 8+ hours of editing. All for just a three-minute scene. Mind = Dead.”
Sunday, 11:00 p.m.: “Fun day, finally got to spend a day relaxing... now about that homework...”
Malia Wollan contributed reporting.
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Article #7
UNESCO (United Nations)
Media Freedom has The Power to Transform Societies
Free media transform societies by enlightening the decision making process with
information, and thus empowering individuals to take control of their destinies. In this
context, media freedom plays a crucial role in the transformation of society by reshaping
its political, economic and social aspects. That is why media freedom is promoted by
UNESCO, as the United Nations’ specialized agency with a mandate to defend and promote
freedom of expression and its corollary press freedom.
This wave of revolution was triggered by the self-immolation of a vegetable peddler in Tunisia
who set himself on fire after having his vegetable cart confiscated and being publicly humiliated
by the authorities. This singular image of a desperate act by an ordinary person, which went viral
through mobile technology and social media, heralded an extraordinary beginning for this new
decade. Years of censorship, suppression, and restriction came crumbling down with the fall of
the former Tunisian authorities. Tunisia demonstrated the transformative power that can be
brought forth by the convergence of social media, mobile connections, satellite TV and an
earnest desire to fundamentally change socio-economic-political situation. It started a domino
effect that went on to reach Tahrir Square in Egypt, the city of Benghazi in Libya, and other parts
of the region. The actions of young people have been crucial during the movement, and amongst
their tools has been social media.
Similarly, in Egypt, the use of social media, ICTs and satellite TV, has also played a
revolutionary role in the democratic and political processes. Indeed, the protest movement
against the Egyptian authorities was accelerated through the use of social networking sites and
specifically through mobile phones. A case in point was the effort of a young Egyptian, Wael
Ghonim, who created the Facebook campaign, “We are all Khaled Said”, referring to a 28-yearold Egyptian arrested six months earlier and beaten to death while he was held in detention. This
Facebook campaign soon snowballed from thousands to more than a million supporters online. It
has been one of the rallying points to denounce the regime’s violence and abuse.
From developed countries mired in economic woes to developing countries aching for change,
people and especially young people found a voice where there was none before. Where their
voices had been muffled and ignored, new voices—stronger, more powerful and using
communication tools—have emerged. The “Occupy” movement, spread across Europe and
North America, finds its strength from its ideology, its presence in occupying physical location
and also through occupying a prominent spot in various social media. In this way, media
freedom has amplified and multiplied each individual voice. As media freedom grows, the
strength of the new voices grows in tandem, and their calls for social transformation and positive
political change become an unstoppable force.
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Food for Thought:
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What are the best ways to engage youth in the wider promotion of freedom of
expression?
How to use media freedom to improve the democratic development of a country?
How can governments use new media to better meet citizens’ rights to information?
What are the added values of social media in contributing to the democratic debate?
What can we do to capture and sustain the gains on freedom of expression created by
social media, and on the Internet more broadly?
Article #8
VentureBeat.com
John Koetsier
October 15, 2012
FACEBOOK, TWITTER and TEENS: WHO’S WINNING THE YOUTH WAR?
Sure, Facebook is the world’s largest social network — and the one currently ranked highest
by teens. But don’t count the little blue bird out yet: Twitter just might be winning the youth
numbers game.
A recent Piper Jaffray survey of 7000 U.S. teens ranked Facebook first in importance to
teens. Twitter came in second, and Instagram — owned, of course, by Facebook — came in
third. Detailed results, including how big the differences are, were not released, but Gene
Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, said that Facebook is well positioned to stay top dog in
social networks for teens.
That, however, contrasts with a mammoth social media demographics study completed by
Pingdom just two months ago.
In that survey, which analyzed social media use at 24 different social networks, the average
age of Facebook users is 40.5 years, while the average age of Twitter users is slightly
younger, at 37.2. And when Pingdom compared the results to a previous study, the website
performance monitoring company found that while the average age of Facebookers has
increased by two years since 2010, the average of Twitter users has decreased by the same
amount.
All of which correlates well with statistics way back from 2009 which showed Facebook
users aging and Twitter users growing younger.
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Source: Beevolve
Self-disclosed ages on Twitter
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And it matches up with Beevolve’s recent survey of a whopping 36 million Twitter
users. In Beevolve’s study, almost three quarters of users who disclose their age on
Twitter are aged 15 to 25. That needs to be taken with a big fat grain of salt, as most of
Twitter’s 500+ million users don’t disclose their age on the site, but is still an interesting
indicator of a sizable youth contingent on Twitter.
A possible explanation?
Facebook has more than double Twitter’s users. At over a billion daily active users to
Twitter’s perhaps 550 to 600 million total users, there’s a massive size advantage. Take
into account the percentage of monthly active users out of Twitter’s total userbase —
about a third — and the difference becomes even more apparent.
Daily active Facebook to Twitter users is probably about a five to one ratio … a billion to
maybe 200 million. And that’s even before you take Instagram into account.
Which means that even if the average age of Twitter users is young, and perhaps on a
percentage basis Twitter has more teens than Facebook, Facebook still easily has Twitter
beat.
But that may yet change in the future, if the current demographic trends on social
network continue.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/15/facebook-twitter-and-teens-whoswinning-the-youth-war/#rUuS41C6o3QZYBk5.99
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Article #9
From CNN NEWS SITE
China tightens grip on social media with new
rules
By Katie Hunt, for CNN
updated 5:34 AM EDT, Mon May 28, 2012
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
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Users of China's popular Sina Weibo service have to abide by new rules aimed at
preventing online rumors
Points system introduced to manage user misconduct and punish abusers
Steps come as Beijing puts pressure on social networks to police what their users are
saying
Hong Kong (CNN) -- Users of Sina Weibo, China's popular Twitter-like micro-blogging
service, now have to abide by new rules aimed at preventing online rumors and other
controversial posts.
The "user contracts" that took effect on Monday come as authorities put increased pressure on
China's social networks to police what their users are saying.
Sina has also rolled out a points system as a way to manage users who post content that
contravenes the new rules, according to documents posted on Sina Weibo's website.
Under the system, each Weibo account will begin with a score of 80 and points will be deducted
for any perceived misconduct. Accounts that drop to zero will be canceled.
Weibo and rival platforms like Tencent's QQ have become hugely popular in China, with many
Chinese regarding them as an important source of news and other information. Weibo is
estimated to have 300 million users.
China cracks down on 'coup rumors'
The contract seeks to prevent posts that "spread rumors, disrupt social order, or destroy social
stability."
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Other banned content includes revealing national secrets, threatening the honor of the nation, or
promoting illicit behavior such as gambling.
'China's Twitter' introduces contracts to curb rumors
The new rules also seek to stop the use of code words or other expressions often employed by
Chinese web users to refer to controversial people or events. For example, the disgraced Chinese
politician Bo Xilai was often referred to as BXL.
Doug Young, a Chinese media expert from Fudan University in Shanghai, said the steps are
intended to ease Beijing's concerns about the spreading of false rumors.
"I think Sina are trying to be proactive and clean up the site and show the government they are
taking steps to stop people from spreading false information or other posts that create trouble,"
he said.
In April, China's Internet regulator temporarily suspended the comments sections of Weibo and
Tencent's QQ as a punishment for allowing rumors to spread.
Authorities also closed 16 websites and detained six people for allegedly spreading rumors of
"military vehicles entering Beijing" shortly after the arrest of Bo when China's Internet was rife
with talk of an alleged coup