Is your Child Leading a Second Life?

Last October  I posted Under Your Very Nose about email hacking and sexual predation.  I promised a follow up post and here it is, all about teenagers and wannabe teenagers and their use of the net.....

Most of us parents with young teenagers know the attraction of the internet and its various sites for our children. We talk generally, often wonderingly, about the knowledge they have, laugh about the weird shorthand language they use, worry about the increasing amounts of time spent on the computer.

Few of us however really know what our children are doing on those computers. We naively hope that it’s relatively harmless, scan the screen every now and then, hope that keeping the computer in an open location will deter too much adventurism. It’s the Caribbean after all, how much harm can they come to, and when your child is over at a friend’s house - maybe the other parents are doing a better job, so you can relax a bit.

It’s a sort of nagging background worry, isn’t it? I've been following my daughter and her facebook "friends" interactions on the internet, and while I thought I was pretty in the 'know', I wasn't...

Let’s start with FaceBook – fb – apparently used most by the 25 – 40 age group, but of course fb is not checking that most kids are using fake ages. The minimum age is 13, so any child going on before 13 is using any arbitrary year for their birth date.

Fact is, many children from 10 years old are on fb, pretending to be older. Their status updates have none of the pseudo-existentialist quality you get from us adults. They aren’t there yet, so to sound interesting and to shock, they paste in stuff from somewhere else. “Somewhere else” is just about every website these days, where with a click of your mouse, whatever you’re reading can be posted on fb as a status or a link. Kids use it to post fml posts.

Fml? “F--- my life” (the f-word is left up to your imagination), and most of you reading this have probably never heard of it. You post your loser story to the site, if it’s found interesting enough, it gets posted. People now vote either to sympathise with you or that you deserve it. Naturally there is every incentive to exaggerate or just plain lie to see if you can get posted on the site. Kids find the stories hilarious, and some of them are very sexual. Here are some examples from fml posted by my daughter's fb 'friends', none of them older than 14:

“Today, the subway was extremely crowded and I ended up with my butt in a man's crotch. I kept trying to inch away or turn a different way, but there was no room. He could have turned to face the doors, but didn't. He got an erection. I was there for 20 minutes.” FML

“Today, my boyfriend told me he couldn't hang out with me because he felt really sick. I went to his house anyway to surprise him with homemade soup. I walk in to his room only to find him hooking up with my sister. She can't drive, our mom drove her there." FML

Another popular pastime is posting lyrics from songs, the more shocking, the more amusing. Here are some used by these same friends, they are from Lil Wayne, a popular source:

Get between your legs and eat it like its candy, mmmmmm im thinking jolly rancher girl i want you to be ma private dancer, answer this question for me is it wrong that im always horny lil mamaaaa. [8] :)

Press a button, watch the m*****f***er do tricks, I don't know what you are on, but I'm on some new s****. While your b**** is on my d***, like a glue stick. I got a grill, I don't have to get my tooth fixed.

Even besides all of this, there's lots of inappropriate content from children on fb, including obvious stuff like their profile pics and the absence of sensible privacy controls make it open to all and sundry.

Over to Second Life, the simulated life community. Second Life to kids seems a familiar place, because it is a bit like the Sims, a popular computer game. In the Sims, you create whole families using Avatars (computer generated human representations), and the computer generates the community. On Second Life, the online community is “real” and the Avatars represent real persons. SL lets you be whoever you want to be and to do whatever you want to do, trade goods,develop property, shoot randomly at people, have sex any which way, it’s all there, sexual predators and all. Sexual age play (adults with child avatars to make it more exciting) is not uncommon. There’s also Gorean – an openly misogynistic culture of male dominance and female submission, with a very heavy reliance upon violence and violent sexuality.

As a lark, my daughter and a friend recently registered on SL.  It is a lark because they cannot figure out why adults would want to play make-believe games.

She has to register as an adult, because it is an adult space, but using actual email details. As Wendi Salubria, a black avatar (you get to pick your style, sex, and features), she approaches a group of avatars “HIYA FOLKS!”, and makes a few silly remarks (this is known as ‘griefing’). She types in bold letters, basically just to annoy them. The group variously tell her to go away/ stop shouting and learn to type/spell. She then jokingly says to them “You don’t like me because I’m black”. This triggers several of the avatars in the group hitting the ‘abuse’ button, which reports Wendi Salubria as breaking the rules.

As Wendi grows bored and leaves the scene, one of the group comes with her…”wait for me, I’ll be your friend” 'it' says. The adults on SL are very good at spotting kids...

Linden Labs (creators of SL) receives the reports and email “Wendi”, advising her of her contravention of the site policies and suspending her account.

SL is full of kids pretending to be adults, and they’re often, worryingly, easy to spot. On SL chat rooms it is not hard to find adults discussing what to do with all the ‘kids’ wandering round in SL, some innocently, some with purpose. One guy complained of finding two apparently adult avatars trespassing on his land, but as soon as they spoke, it was quite clear they were kids.

Note: SL has a teen version, but it requires parental permission, many kids are not even aware it exists….Things are apparently changing at SL, where they’re strengthening the boundaries between adults and teenagers.

Young "teenagers", which is the age group I’m mostly referring to here, the 10 – 14 year olds, don’t get the openness of the internet, that it is a real place with real people, and actions there have consequences too. These kids practice some kind of disassociation when they use fb and other social forums, because they are no apparent consequences, no-one is reining them in. Parents least of all.

So, is your child leading a Second Life?