Dr. danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, assistant professor at NYU and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thinks that perhaps adults are worrying too much about what teenagers are doing and saying online. What happens at lunchtime on the playground is now happening on the Internet, mostly on social media sites. Kids talk about stuff they can't discuss in class, they flirt with each other, they make crude jokes. They openly discuss what they'd never utter at the family dinner table.

Teens are falling in love and sharing their passwords, potentially opening themselves up to identity theft, online reputation ruining... and a greater feeling of intimacy. Pew reports that 30% of all teen Internet users shared a password with a friend or significant other. In a blog post follow-up to that story, boyd suggests that teenagers learn about password sharing from adults. Learning starts at home.

These budding adolescents also don't give a crap about "liking" your company on Facebook. A study from Forrester shows that only 6% of online U.S. consumers ages 12-17 are interested in interacting with brands on Facebook.

Another study said that teenagers would likely leave Facebook for Google+ because they just weren't comfortable with things like the news ticker (read: stalker feed). They did, however, love Facebook Timeline. Teens take Facebook "likes" seriously: 57% felt that it was a reflection of their own personal brand, and 37% saw it as a "high-five"-like endorsement to their friends. And 56% of teens say they "liked" a brand after seeing a friend do the same thing via the news ticker. An Ericsson study that looked at how teenagers socialized through technology discovered that teens actually prefer meeting in real life to texting and liking one anothers' status updates.

A study from the University of Texas at Austin proved that peoples' Facebook personalities were the same as their real life personalities. Why do people use Facebook? Researchers at Boston University say it's to connect with others, and show their friends who they are. Teens' use of social media sites isn't so different from their adult counterparts.

This doesn't mean that parents and relatives should go stalk their teenagers on Facebook, or even comment on their status updates. Respect that the Internet is space where teenagers go to be themselves. Kk?

Image via U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Interested in learning more about Dr. boyd's research? Read about her teen sexting talk at the 2011 ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit.

Sure, it's easy to dismiss some of this as a fairly standard cultural response to new technology and to shifting cultural norms. Many of these fears echo those we've heard about other, older technologies - video games, the television, the phonograph, the telephone.

And yet the stakes do seem much higher now, in part because of the speed with which information can travel. A message - or more damning, a photo - can go viral, spreading gossip far beyond the school grounds or the local community.

Nowhere are we seeing that play out more than with sexting. And the media hubbub surrounding Anthony Weiner aside, it's been teens and sexting that has stirred up the most frenzy. At ReadWriteWeb's 2WAY Summit this week in New York, researcher danah boyd discussed teen sexting and its impact on the tech industry. (You can read her notes from her talk here.)

Teen sexting vexes us, of course, because of the technology. Darn those teenagers and their rampant texting! Oh, and of course, the easy virality of these intimate photos. But it's also a social or cultural problem: we like to pretend that teens aren't sexual. And finally - and here's where it can be devastating even beyond the rapid spread of personal photographs - teen sexting is often a crime. Because of child pornography laws, sexual photos of underage minors can result in a criminal record and/or being on a sexual predator list for the kids involved.

And it can - and probably will, predicts boyd - be a big problem for technology companies. After all, it is a crime to host child pornography. And while the adage of "I know pornography when I see it" is often bandied about, it really is quite complicated when it comes to material related to teens and sexting. How old are the participants? How explicit is the content? What was the intention behind the image's creation? Behind the image's sharing?

boyd offered no answers and no clear plan forward for the tech industry. "Sexting represents a trainwreck where policies and politics have collided with the tech industry in the most uncomfortable ways possible. And not because the tech industry is trying to misbehave but because no one has the perfect solution."

Hopes: Kids As Makers, Not Just Consumers

On Day 2 of the RWW2WAY Summit, I moderated a panel that, in almost all ways, could not have been more different than danah boyd's talk. The panel examined what we can learn from kids imagining and building the future of technology, and I was joined by Steven Muskin from Latitude Research, Vanessa Van Petten from Radical Parenting magazine, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a PhD Candidate at MIT and creator of the online community around the programming language Scratch.

Van Petten discussed the ways in which kids who are growing up around technology have a new social e-literacy, but one that could easily be deemed social illiteracy by adults. She also noted the way in which technology and identity go hand-in-hand for kids - the ways in which they imagine (and often hope) that people see them. "I am one YouTube video away from a million people seeing me," said one of Van Petten's informants.

In order to help kids be better prepared for a technological future, Van Petten said we need to help emphasize both online and offline social literacy skills and encourage kids to appreciate quality, mastery, and depth.

Mushkin talked about the vision of that technology future as imagined by kids. You can see some of the drawings that kids created when asked to depict the future of technology here. But it's clear in these pictures, as with the research that Van Patten described, that we need to have a place for kids to create and not just consume technology.

Perhaps there is no better example of this than Scratch, the visual programming language created at MIT. Scratch allows anyone to build animations and video games, and over 1.8 million projects have been created and shared on the site's online community. That community was the creation of Monroy-Hernandez, who spoke about the kids' reactions to having their projects remixed via the site. Scratch projects are all openly licensed, which means you can download and utilize others' code and creations in your Scratch projects. It was interesting to hear about what kids thought were the appropriate ethics around sharing and attribution.

The Missing Piece: Kids' Voices

"How can we empower kids to be builders and makers?" asked Monroy-Hernandez. That's a question we need to keep in mind, not just in terms of programming skills or creative vision, but in terms of kids' wants and needs.

Often, when we talk about technology - whether we're focusing on the hopes or the fears - it's the adults' wants and needs that are often expressed. We want technology that helps kids score higher on the SATs, for example. We want technology that helps them stay in closer contact with parents. We want technology that's safe and secure (and desexualized).

And so the question remains: how can we create a space in the tech industry, in the classroom, and at home to have kids build the tech tools they want and need? This is their future, after all.

danah boyd, researcher at Microsoft Research New England

Fred Wilson, venture capitalist

Andy Carvin, senior strategist, social media desk at NPR and Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University

Chris Dixon, hunch founder, left, and Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb co-editor.

Chris Dixon

She references "eyes on the street" -- a concept coined by urban sociologist Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Writes Jacobs:

"There must be eyes on the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind. The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce a sufficient number of people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks."

boyd believes this same concept can be applied to online safety and health. She explains, "The web makes available all parts of society and it's up to us to find a way to make it constructive." With Facebook's user base often cited as being bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world, netizens have the visibility to do more than simply consume content. boyd's presentation reveals that while the Internet has the power to uncover the abuse and oppression that is happening around us, ultimately it's up to us to decide whether or not to acknowledge and help remedy them.

Photo Credit: Ewan McIntosh

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How are newspapers adapting to digital syndication? Today the Associated Press announced that more than 500 newspapers are using their service called the AP Member Marketplace. To web savvy consumers, the Marketplace might look like an RSS reader that publishes selected stories to a webpage built out of Del.icio.us badges. It's a pretty interesting program.

The AP Marketplace interface looks like a sophisticated, multi-media RSS reader but with limited sources. Publishers set up a workflow that lets editors send selected media items directly from the reader out onto the paper's website.

Below, the AP newsreader, click to view full screen image.

It's very reminiscent of of the CMS built by the Crowd Fusion team, which we profiled last week. There's one huge difference though between the AP's project and things like the Crowd Fusion project, the red-hot world of cool-hunting aggregation and even the new publishing strategy of web giants like Yahoo and AOL. The AP service finds and publishes AP stories, not content from around the whole web.

There was a time when it must have been hard to imagine getting more news to choose from than what the wires brought publishers each day. That time has passed and while the small Midwestern US newspapers that the AP highlights as happy users of the Marketplace may be on board - it's hard to say how for how long readers will remain excited about AP fueled news websites. Especially once they discover a little more about how the internet works. (We don't mean to be critical of Mid Westerners, they were just the demographic of several AP demo sites.)

The online research tools used by financial professionals, for example, could probably slap this service both ways to Sunday before it knew which way was up. The AP says, though, that many local papers find their readers overjoyed with the breadth of topical AP content published to content sections or niche websites.

Left: The North West Arkansas biker scene had nothing like this news site before the AP Exchange came to town, the AP says. This kind of site does look like a good idea for everyone.

Training Component

One very interesting part of the AP Marketplace is that it's very search-centric and the wire service offers weekly 30 minute-long classes in online search skills. The AP Exchange School of Search is a great idea.

Not all parts of the program are working well, admittedly. The Exchange "blog" and community on Ning are dead, for example. Perhaps early participants learned enough to escape out into the web at large.

News Publishing Around the Web

A year ago media analyst Jeff Jarvis wrote an excellent post about what Editor 2.0 jobs are shaping up to look like. Two years ago we wrote here about some of the exciting things that AP competitor Reuters is doing. [Disclosure, the Reuters semantic web project Calais is now an RWW sponsor.] The media business blog PaidContent says that the AP Marketplace/Exchange service is pitted against new aggregation services explicitely aimed at replacing the AP, like Politico.

It's a time of deep change in the news media world and though we love the feel of a good local paper and its website - their ongoing success cannot be taken for granted. Tools like the AP Exchange look like a great step to take and we enjoy getting to see what the RSS reader equivalent is inside hundreds of local newsrooms.

Who is danah boyd? (She spells her own name with lower case letters.) You may have seen her when she hit the international spotlight for writing about the shift from MySpace to Facebook. She wrote that her research leads her to conclude that "The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other 'good' kids are now going to Facebook. ...MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, 'burnouts,' 'alternative kids,' 'art fags,' punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm."

None the less, that was only one of boyd's many writings on the subject of youth and social networking. Youth and social networking is a nexus point for one of the most significant cultural changes of our era and as the leading expert on the topic, boyd's work warrants the attention it gets. If Microsoft is going to be relevant to the next generation of computer users, who better to pay attention to than the leading expert on how the next generation is using social networks?

Boyd's new position will be at Microsoft Research's newest facility, in Boston, which was just opened this summer. You can read boyd's discussion of her new position in a blog post she wrote last night.

What Boyd Writes About

In addition to topics like socio-economic class and social networks, boyd also writes, for example, about early social networks like Friendster acting as "tools for scaling up social networks rooted in proximate social relations and--equally significantly--for representing this dynamic to the community in new ways."

Her recent work in general might best be described with these lines from Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life:

While particular systems may come and go, how youth engage through social network sites today provides long-lasting insights into identity formation, status negotiation, and peer-to-peer sociality...I argue that social network sites are a type of networked public with four properties that are not typically present in face-to-face public life: persistence, searchability, exact copyability, and invisible audiences. These properties fundamentally alter social dynamics, complicating the ways in which people interact. I conclude by reflecting on the social developments that have prompted youth to seek out networked publics, and considering the changing role that publics have in young people's lives.

Boyd's Fascinating Gigs

Boyd is currently a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She's also on the Board of Advisors of LiveJournal, along with Lawrence Lessig and Esther Dyson.

Previously boyd worked as a researcher at Yahoo! and did a year long internship at Google studying the ethnography of blogging at Blogger.

Now she'll join Microsoft Research New England in January. She says she'll be directing her own research, publishing frequently and doing pure, interdisciplinary science instead of focusing directly on the Microsoft bottom line. We hope that Microsoft can prioritize long term analysis and support more inspiring work by this trailblazing researcher.

Cartoon of boyd by Marc Scheff