Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Anastasia Goodstein of ypulse.com talks about the questions she gets asked by parents about teenagers and their social networks. Will they lose their social skills? Can the kids take down photos, etc. The kids are used to putting it all on line. [I got a phone call I had to take and missed the rest.]

Stefana Broadbent has done studies and has found that social networking sites are not used by teenagers to communicate, but rather to identify people they've met or record where they've gone. Day-to-day communication is done through instant messaging and the phone. [and I missed the beginning of this one :( ]

Sean Kelly of Zoodaloo talks about the fact that his company doesn't use email. They use Basecamp. Zoodaloo is a social networking site for kids. The avatars are done as cel shading (cartoon style). The boys want to explore and the girls want to customize and decorate.

Mike D'Abramoof Youthography. Last year they did about 120 studies in North America. The 10-29 year old group divides into four equal five-year cohorts, with no one cultural force driving all four. Kids are getting enrolled in school younger than ever and having sex earlier, but having kids, getting married and graduating from college later than ever. It's now more important to people to have a lifelong partner than to get married. People find religion far less important than having faith or being spiritual. Conclusion: It's not just the culture that's changing, but the people. Trends: People integrate culture better than ever before. Identity is harder to catregorize. We are becoming more hedonistic. There's rehumanization.

Fiona Romeo begins by talking about Club Penguin's banning of numbers because members were speaking entirely in coded numbers. "Dictionary dancing" was born substituting other signs for the numbers. [Wonderful.]

Paarents are anxious about children's use of digital tech because they overestimate the risks. There are few public spaces in the real world, so they spend more time on line. "Mobile phones are the new bicycles": It gives them more freedom and greater range. Kids are fine about surveillance by video cameras and being fingerprinted by schools, but think that montoring mobile phones crosses the line.