Next-gen Social Networking Research

Second Life is mentioned in a new ComputerWorld article titled 'Researchers help define next-gen social networking' at http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9110919 .

The article quotes professor Elizabeth Lawley of RIT as saying "People want to create villages and they're being forced into cities." She also criticizes the SL segregation of teens, saying that she can't interact with her son, she can't learn how he uses technologies and he can't learn how to interact socially from her. As far as keeping out sexual predators, she says "We don't talk about shutting down the Catholic Church ... Sexual deviancy isn't unique to the online world."

Microsoft's Dan Reed asserted that it would work well to train young people to identify adults posing as kids.

It's a brief article, but very relevant to SL. Should LL switch tactics, focusing more on educating users than imposing software controls?

It's a grand idea, but in practice - mainly due to the pitbulls of the scaretactic media, it will never be able to happen.

Teens are, in my experience (10 + years as a community manager), much better at finding adults posing as kids and teens).

The media is not ready for teens and adults sharing the same grid - or maybe they are but not in the manner of publicity that LL want.

From the article:

Well now. I don't know how Ms Lawley thinks people coped with learning social interaction before Second Life. Maybe it was from actually being with people in Real Life, rather than via a computer monitor?

I'm not knocking the benefits of social interaction via SL; hell, for many people who are housebound for various reasons or who live alone, SL is a social lifeline. But there's a real world out there, too, and there are opportunities to learn social interaction in that real world.

As for this:

Letting young people onto the adult grid would be all well and good *IF* those young people have responsible parents and other adults in their lives who monitor their internet use and have the computer in a family room where what's going on inworld can't be hidden. By enforcing the separation of the teen grid from the adult grid, Linden Lab is merely covering its back from claims of, "My little Johnny saw PORN on Second Life when he was on the computer in his bedroom at three o'clock in the morning!" by the parents and other adults who do *not* monitor what their kids are doing online.

Can software controls ever even be as effective as Linden Lab seem to want them to be? It's been more than a year and IDV has yet to get off the ground in any meaningful way.

Even in a mixed grid, I don't see how Second Life poses any greater threat to teens than any other online space. The real challenges won't necessarily come in the form of adult/minor interaction, but in content. That seems to be where the focus is, and where the notion of software controls (IDV) doesn't seem to be anything more than a theoretical possibility. In a world where Two Girls One Cup is a search phrase away on Google, I wonder if Linden Lab is attempting to set the bar a little too high for themselves.

Interesting analogy with the Catholic Church. There aren't too many spaces, physical or virtual, where the analogy doesn't work.

Ms Lawley may want to hang out with her son in SL, but *I* don't want to hang out with her son in SL.

Let's leave the kids to their grid - we have enough imbeciles acting like 14-year olds and don't need more.

She can do all those things in RL, where she should be doing them.

And who's to say she isn't?

I honestly don't believe that integrating the grid would mean that you, me, or anybody else would be forced to hang out with teens if we choose not to. At least not to any extent that we don't already in real life. I get what you mean, I just don't see it working out that way.

The "imbeciles" acting like 14 year olds on the main grid probably *are* 14 year olds. Every crowd has its bad apples, and I don't suspect that letting teens in is going to make this particular situation any worse than it's ever been. Many of the teens who hung out in one of the IRC channels I co-ran for almost 10 years were invariably better behaved than many of the adults. I see a non-issue here.

It just isn't feasible. Yes, there is porn all over the internet, but the media views things like SL differently. When you have what the boneheads in the media will describe as cartoons (which the media would describe as being innately of interest to children) having graphic sex, stripping, engaging in BDSM, Dolcett, prostitution, etc. ... well you're going to attract a LOT of attention if kids are "allowed" to access that, regardless of what this person thinks. Do I agree with that sentiment? No, but it is also a reality.

A must-read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin



Interestingly, I'm pretty sure everyone mentioned is legally an adult.

Nice one Desmond. It isn't often that 7 contiguous pages in the NY Times can hold my attention.

Worth registering if you're not already.

There are advantages to merging the grids -

The whole banning people who aren't underage because of an "underage" AR goes away.

The stigma that SL is about "Adult" content may shift.

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Though to be honest it might have been better if they were inclusive in the beginning.

Trying to make the system work for teens now seems nearly insurmountable.

Its definitely not there yet. Even if IDV actually worked, the barriers an Age Restricted parcel puts up are simply not effective.

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I figure the teen grid merging is a guaranteed eventuality because LL wants to be like the 2D internet.

But if they have any common sense, they are years away from being able to pull it off.

If they rush it there will be only one result - Media Feeding Frenzy.

Myspace, Facebook, AOL, and dozens of other major online chat/networking services have all had their share of media feeding frenzies over the years. I wonder if maybe because we are so intimately connected with Second Life, we are being hypersensitive to the effects of coverage targeting our world. Everyone else has survived the hyperbole. Methinks Second Life will fair well in the end.

In my experience, many teens (under 18 years old) online act much more maturely and are much better conversationalists, than many adults.

Though I don't necessarily share your reasons for wanting an online place where I am segregated from teens, you did bring up a critical point that Lawley missed. While it may be good for the teen to hang out with the adults, it's not necessarily true that it's good for the particular adult to hang out with the teen.

As an adult, my interactions with a teen have much different moral and legal consequences than my interactions with another adult.

When I show another Second Life resident my Second Life erotic art shop, whether the resident is an adult or a teen in real life may be the difference between whether I'm having fun or committing a crime.

I have had online "adult chat" before with someone whom I thought to be a real life adult, but then the person later revealed to me being a high school teen. I know that it is a defense for me from wrongdoing that I didn't know the person was a real life teen when I did the adult chatting. But having that defense really didn't help me get over the icky feeling after I found out the persons true age (or at least the age I was told- of course, I have no way of verifying it at all).

Personally, I don't mind at all participating in a virtual world with real life teens. Some of them are great to know. But, before socializing them, I do want to know if they are adults are not.

Teens should be restricted to nice harmless things like CounterStrike, Call of Duty etc.

Don't forget the Grand Theft Auto franchise. My 3 year old nephew LOVES that one.

I'm disappointed in the binary logic that limits some of the conclusions here. The opposite of removing the restriction against teens on the adult grid is not teens being allowed everywhere on the adult grid. Setting aside the limitations of age verification systems, there are no technological reasons there couldn't be a third hybrid grid. Or merge the grids but limit the (self-declared) teens to the PG sims.

So the question isn't whether the grids should be merged. Nor is it whether teens should be allowed in your favorite sim, nor whether you should be forced to socialize with teens. It's whether there's potential in having a part of Second Life where adults and teens who want to mingle could do so.

True. And there was a time when social interactions involved writing long letters instead of picking up a phone. Or actually talking on a phone instead of sending text messages. But telling parents to help their kids write letters isn't a way to teach phone courtesy.

For better or worse, social interaction does take place on the net, with very different dynamics. And there are internet social skills that need to be learned, such as judging reactions in the absence of visual or audible cues. Granted, in many cases the youngsters are better at it than their parents, but that's just temporary.

I'm an adult and live in North Carolina. But my teen nephews live in Florida, and my teenage baby sister lives all the way across the pond. Sure, it would be ideal if I could see them every day in real life, or even once a month in real life -- but that ain't the world we live in. So if the grids are merged, I'll be cheering.

And if it means people are pressured into keeping their blatantly adult material to areas specifically meant for it, I for one won't be complaining. I chose to live in a mature sim because I didn't want to be restricted from what I could do at home, but that doesn't mean I want my neighbors leaving their sex bed out on the front lawn. I can't see how merging the grids would be bad for anything (except the media frenzy) -- assuming at least a reasonable attempt was made to ban teens from Mature sims, or better yet, to let landowners ban teens from specific parcels.

And by "reasonable", of course, I mean "sufficient to legally cover landowners' and LL's rears". Arguing over whether any given system of age verification is foolproof seems rather pointless to me -- to be foolproof it would have to be humanproof first.

How do you envision that landowners would know that there is a teen on their lot? Or a 10-year old?

I think the general (Over Simplified) concept might be..

Signup - Declare age
Verify ID
Unverified ID = No Access to M Regions
Unable to Verify, but still 18+ = Adjudication (Process TBD)
Unwilling to Verify = Sucks to be you, no access to M regions
Verified Under 18 = No Access to M Regions
Verified 18+ = Full Grid Access

Obviously the details are more complex, and far from solidified. If someone lies about their age at signup, and somehow manages to pass verification, I don't see that as being our responsibility or LL's. Linden Lab will have undertaken more than reasonable effort to restrict access, and Residents will of course have responsibly flagged their content. It will never be a perfect system, just as it's never a perfect system anywhere else on the Internet, or in the real world. All that's needed is a reasonable, good faith effort, which is more than can currently be said for Xtube, or even Google Video at this point, which is riddled with porn.

Same way we know if there are NPIOF users or anyone on our ban lists. _We_ don't know -- LL does, because LL keeps the registration information. And as long as both LL and the landowner take reasonable precautions, neither of them should be held responsible for negligent parents or lying kids.

I've used LiveJournal for years and spend a lot of time in communities where people post erotic fanfic. And LiveJournal also has a large teen community, so large that in some places LiveJournal has a (misleading) reputation as being primarily a teen site. And yet I almost never run into any of the teens on LJ. The LJ admins know whether a particular user is a teen (unless they've lied on registration). And users and communities have the option to make their entire journal "mature content - no teens allowed" or to make their journal public access and just particular entries "mature content - no teens allowed".

And their system works. Yes, it has the side effect that adults can't read the mature content unless they've chosen to log in, but I don't see that as a drawback and many of the writers consider it a boon. Yes, we occasionally have brouhahas when conservatives who like to impose their morals on others pressure the LJ admins into doing something stupid, like the time a couple years ago they declared breastfeeding pics were obscene -- but there isn't a service provider anywhere on the net whose admins don't occasionally need to be whapped upside the head several times with a large fish. And, yes, once in a while negligent parents allow their kids to lie on registration, and a teen gets into the adult communities. At which point, either the kid never says anything so we never know about it (in which case the teens aren't bugging us and it's no one's fault but the parents), or the kid does speak up and gets identified as a kid pretty quickly -- at which point, the community bans her for their own legal protection and individual users either AR her or quietly decide that "Hey, she seems sensible and mature. If her parents think she can be on the Internet alone without supervision, I'm not gonna second-guess them".

And the system works. It depends on everyone to do their part -- the LJ admin to track the ages of their users, journal owners to flag their content appropriately, teen users to tell the truth and parents to get off their cell phones and actually pay attention to their kids -- but it works.