Together While Apart: Virtual Families and Friends

6-Minute Video: How to Maintain Close Relationships Despite Distance

To watch this video on YouTube.com, click. When you live apart from your child or parent, there are still ways to maintain close bonds. Share

Video Games Help Seniors Stay Sharp. Senior Citizens Compete on Wii

Click.

Wii Competition in Nursing Homes.

Follow-up here

Sometimes Old-Fashioned Letters Communicate More Than Webcams

Melissa Seligman, author of "The Day After He Left for Iraq” and the host of “Her War,” a podcast for military wives, has a column in The New York Times explaining how webcams and phone calls prevented her from really communicating well with her husband. "How Letters, Not a Webcam, Saved Her Marriage to a Soldier." She writes:

"For those who came before me, the burden to overcome was communicating without technology — waiting months for letters to arrive. For me and those still to come, it’s learning to communicate despite technology." 

Free Ebooks for Teens and Pre-teens on Divorce

Rosen Law Firm has produced two excellent free ebooks, "Teen Guide to Divorce"and "Tween Guide to Divorce."

My Space, Facebook Help Catch Criminals

Obviously, some criminals are not the sharpest knifes in the drawer. They're posting evidence of their crimes on social networking sites, helping law enforcement catch them, and victims identify them. Click.

Trade-off: Giving Up Privacy for Transparency

The theory is that the transparency of online social networks like Facebook tightens social bonds because we remain in the peripheral vision of our acquaintances and therefore it also increases trust. Maybe, overall that's true. Staying in touch with far more people is far easier. Lunch dates are far easier to arrange. People you might have forgotten remain in your conscious network.

But as we become more transparent, through weekly, daily or even hourly "status updates" through social networks, we are no longer as self-protective as we need to be, or if we are self-protective, it can create distrust. If there is now a new expectation of transparency, particularly among the young, if someone suddenly reduces their transparency by upping their privacy settings, that can create distrust. Marissa Mayer of Google offered an illustration in a recent interview with Charlie Rose:

Track Location of Children, Parents, Close Friends With Google Latitude

Google Latitude lets you see your friends on a map on Google Maps for mobile and iGoogle. Use Latitude to plan an impromptu meetup, see that a loved one got home safely, or just stay in touch with friends. www.google.com/latitude.

How Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter) Is Changing Society

The New York Times Magazine piece, "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy," is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the social networking phenomenon. Tools like Facebook and Twitter are reducing the loneliness, alienation and rugged individualism of the late 20th century. That era was dominated by one-way, passive television-watching. That era saw masses of people uprooted from close-knit small towns to disconnected and impersonal suburbs. They commuted to cities in automobiles by themselves, and moved often for job opportunities, recreating themselves frequently. A few years here, a few years there, a few years at the next place. It was hard for these baby boomers and Generation X'ers to keep up with people. Many have had a tendency to bowl alone; they've become "disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures."

In this new era, dominated by Generation Y'ers and Millenials (born between 1982 and 2000), we are more likely to engage in interaction online, networking than television-watching, more likely to communicate routinely with family, friends, neighbors, and engage with democratic structures. Through social networking it's easy to arrange carpools, trade on Ebay or barter on Craigslist.  With social networking, people are returning to small-town-like connections where you keep up with people all your life that you've known since elementary school.  Yes, privacy is diminished, but so has loneliness. Instead of feeling like rugged individualists who must make it in the world on our own, without the help of others, our "ambiant awareness" of social ties and connections is now constant. We are living in an electronic village and looking out for each other. A communitarian mindset replaces the libertarian "every man for yourself / you're on your own" mindset and of the late 20th and early 21st century and perhaps not coincidentally, the cowboy diplomacy of the Reagan/Bush years is coming to an end.

Books like Millenials Rising: The Next Generation, and  Millenial Makeover devle in some depth on these trends, although they don't devote a lot of space specifically to social networking because it's so new.    

How to Friend Mom, Dad, the Boss on Facebook Without Giving Up Your Privacy

It's all in the privacy settings. You can block certain users from automatically receiving your status updates or automatically seeing all pictures of you. The New York Times explains how to do it.

Not sure changing the settings completely solves the problem, however. Many users want Mom, Dad, significant others, ex's, prospective romantic interests and the Boss to receive certain updates that enhance reputation, just not all updates that indicate goofing off, making mistakes, screwing up or around.

Surely you don't want to reveal too much and advertise your angst to everyone. Some Facebook users seem to have lost all discretion, while others reveal virtually nothing about themselves.

Those of us who link our Facebook status updates to Twitter risk seeming too chatty and obsessed with sharing information about ourselves or things we're interested in, but if you never update your status and reveal nothing what's the point of being on Facebook except to lurk on what others are doing? Only about 10 percent of Facebook users updated their status daily in early 2009. That number is likely to increase as more people become accustomed to Facebook. Then another problem will arise when you're getting status updates several times a day from your 150+ connections. The phrase "I'm just not into you" comes to mind. In the privacy controls, you can designate that you place higher priority on information from certain users and lower priority from other users, but the filters aren't as effective as they need to become as Facebook grows.

Related:

• 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
• Why Facebook Is For Old Fogies

Previous:

• Facebook Becomes Dominant Social Networking Portal
• Downsides of Facebook
• Social Media, Social Networks, Online Neighborhoods and Electronic Democracy Blog

 

Facebook Becomes Dominant Social Networking Portal

Betting that the social networking space is "a land grab where we have to get to scale first," Facebook continues to aggressively market and attract new users, hoping to become a vital portal that hundreds of millions of users around the world visit at least once a day. By its fifth anniversary on Feb. 4, 2009, it had 161 million users, adding more than 100 million users in one year.

Facebook has zoomed past MySpace, which has shown steady growth, standing at 118 million. But cowed by the recession, a dearth of new investors and new advertisers, MySpace is focusing on monetization and profitability over rapid growth, Business Week reports.

In contrast, Facebook's investors aren't yet ready to put the breaks on rapid growth. The social networking site is growing by 600,000 users per day, compared to 300,000 per day just 12 months earlier, and projected to hit 200 million users by spring, 2009. In the U.S. alone, Facebook has about 40 million users, and is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S. Facebook is on target to connect with well over half the approximately 90 million U.S. Internet users in 2009.

in 2004, Facebook was just the germ of an idea on the computer of a student at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg. Now 24-years-old and worth (on paper) an estimated $1.5 billion, Zuckerberg blogs about the ways the Internet has changed over the last five years, pointing out that Facebook has "offered a safe and trusted environment" for people to reveal more of their true identities than they did before it existed.

B J Fogg, a professor at Stanford University, teaches a course called the "Psychology of Facebook." "Facebook has changed how people view the world," he tells Redorbit.com. "Today, a friend from any country is just a few clicks away. It brings the world together as one trusted place."

Stereotypically, women care more about maintaining and nurturing relationships than men do. That plays out on Facebook:

• Facebook is growing faster with women than men in almost every age group. Women comprise 56.2% of Facebook’s audience, up from 54.3% late last year.

Stereotypically, social networking is mainly for high school and college kids. Not any more. About 45% of Facebook’s US audience by the end of 2008 was 26 years old or older. Half are adults outside of college. Remarkably, the fastest growing demographic for Facebook is women over 55, up 175.3% between October, 2008 and January, 2009.

Of the 160+ million Facebook users, about 10 percent update their status daily. As more users become familiar with the site, more will probably update their status frequently and share more content -- notes, links to news articles and videos. 

The average Facebook user as of February 2009 had 120 friends -- that number increased by 20 percent in one month. But how many of these "friends" are anything more than contacts?  Anthropologists years ago calculated that the vast majority of people are unable to maintain active friendships with more than 150 people. Facebook is challenging that long-held assumption.

Certainly teachers over the years touch the lives of far more than 150 students; writers hope for far more than 150 readers; successful businessmen have far more than 150 customers. If we think of Facebook "friends" as people we've served or who have served us in some way, as well as those we've worked with or attended schools with, then clearly the networks of most of us are far larger than 150. But then the question becomes whether most of us can truly care about more than 150 people.

Never mind what the anthropologists say. Facebook is planning to end its 5,000 limit on friends, so hyper-networkers like future presidents (imagine if Bill Clinton had come along when Facebook existed) need no longer feel frustrated by Facebook's limitations. Eventually, you may have 10,000 or a 100,000 or a million "friends" in your network, and as Chris Matyszczyk points out, there will be a great temptation to monetize or market to those friends. Facebook could even define celebrity -- if you're well known enough to endorse products and make money off of Facebook, that's CELEBRITY. 

Drill Deeper:

• Facebook Changed My Life (BBC interviews with three Brits).
• About Face: Parents All Over Facebook, by Bella English, Boston Globe.
• Facebook's Downsides: Friend Envy, Dilemma of Unfriending, Divorce and Social Networking
• Inside Facebook blog for developers and marketers.
• Facebook's Blog
• New Interactive Advertising Turns Consumers into Partners

Mom's Nude on Facebook?? Facebook's Downsides: Embarrassment, Friend Envy, Very Public Arguments Ending in Nasty Divorce

"12 Great Tales of Defriending," writes David Spark. The worst humiliation? A daughter brags about her drug use on Facebook, and in retaliation Mom posts a nude picture of herself on Facebook for all the daughter's friends to see. The two haven't spoken since.

"Facebook Dilemma: An Unexciting Life. Facebook's Giving Me An Inferiority Complex," by Patricia Beauchamp. "The underlying truism to the saying "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" is that appearances are deceiving. But since Facebook has added a new level of voyeurism to surveying your neighbor's yard, I find myself wondering, more than I would like to, whether other people's lives really are better."

Social Networking Smackdown: "How incriminating information posted on social networking sites can affect the outcome of child custody, alimony, and alienation of affection suits in a divorce." Using Facebook to serve legal papers.

TechDigest: Facebook has resulted in academic misconduct, arrests, multiple lawsuits, house-trashings and viruses.

Facebook and computer games are "infantilizing the human mind," causing more attention deficit disorder, and reducing empathy, a professor at Lincoln College in Oxford, UK asserts.

WSJ: Getting 'Unfriended' Online Stings; Users of Social Networking Sites Delete Friends Who Don't Keep in Touch, Misbehave:

Unfriending online "friends" is emerging as the latest offense in the world of social networking. Sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow people to build personal profiles with photos, videos and up-to-the-minute updates about their lives, then to share them with select users, or "friends." The process has even turned the word "friend" into a verb, as in, "so-and-so just friended me on Facebook." Users agonize over whom to friend (your mom? your ex-boyfriend? your boss?), and worry about whether their friend requests will be accepted or ignored, lingering in cyberspace in what some dub "friend purgatory."

Now, people who have accumulated hundreds, or in some cases more than a thousand, friends are cutting loose some of the ones they have lost touch with or who were little more than acquaintances from the start. It's a shift from the days when users, eager to boast about their online popularity, added new friends with abandon, whether or not they really knew them.

Adding to the downsizing push: Consumers' growing awareness of the privacy pitfalls of sharing personal details with casual associates or total strangers. And as social networks encourage users to share more stuff -- from videos to games to invitations to join causes and fan clubs -- all those extra friends are creating a lot of extra noise.

Read the whole story. Do you agree? What's your experience with unfriending or being unfriended?

Podcast (Audio Download) on Parents, Kids Using Webcams To Stay Close When They Live Apart

I recently participated in an online radio show about virtual visitation -- parents using a webcam with kids -- in the case of divorce, with Lee Rosen, a divorce lawyer in Raleigh, NC, and Michael Gough, a pioneering father on a mission to educate more parents and family lawyers and judges about virtual visitation. He manages a website called www.internetvisitation.net. Details about the show and a download can be found here.

Voice Recognition Software Improves, But to Use It Well Is a Lot of Work

Rob Pegoraro: "Speech-dictation software has advanced immensely over the past decade, but it's still not like talking to the Starship Enterprise's computer or a human stenographer." More.

700 Facebook Friends, Yet Only One Shows Up

Hal Niedzviecki: "I decided to have a Facebook party. I used Facebook to create an 'event' and invite my 700 digital chums."

'Twitter' Gains Steam

hrheingold " I now have nothing to say when my daughter calls, since she knows all my news via Twitter. Maybe we can sing on the phone."

"The latest innovation in online social networking is here, and it has a funny name," writes Brian Dukes in the Fayetteville Observer. "Meet Twitter, a free service that provides near-instantaneous contact with friends, family members and co-workers. The service begs its users to answer the question: “What are you doing?”

Gwen Sutton, a 53-year-old insurance agent, was introduced to Twitter by her son, Wayne Sutton, who lives in Raleigh.“Old folks twitter, too,” Sutton said, “and not just for fun.”

Sutton said she sees Twitter’s benefits carrying over into business networking. She has used Twitter to increase her personal and professional contacts, as well as to keep in touch with Wayne and her daughter, Janet.

“I’ve sent Wayne a tweet saying, ‘Wayne, call your mamma,’” Gwen Sutton said. “Twitter lets me instantly be able to get in touch with my kids.”

Having mom just a few keystrokes away is one of Twitter’s many benefits to Wayne Sutton, who has found social networking — and Twitter in particular — to be invaluable to his work. He is a community content manager for NBC 17 in Raleigh.

“Twitter has greatly impacted my network ability, my reputation and spread my brand all over the world,” Wayne Sutton said.

Wayne has approximately 6,000 followers — people who receive his tweets — on Twitter. By comparison, presidential candidate Barack Obama has 60,000.

“I’ve met more than 100 people through Twitter and established new relationships,” Wayne said. “But it takes hard work and time to build an audience. You need to listen first before you jump in and start posting.”

ScanMyPhotos.com: $50 for 1,000 Photos Scanned

Dave Pogue, New York Times: "If you, like millions before you, have a collection of prints somewhere, it’s probably crossed your mind that they really ought to be scanned — converted into digital files, both for protection and for ease of displaying. In that case, you, like millions before you, have probably even decided when you’ll do all that scanning: someday. Because let’s face it: scanning hundreds or thousands of photos yourself, one at a time, on a home scanner, is a time drain the size of the Grand Canyon. You could send them away to a company that does the scanning, but that’s incredibly expensive; most charge 50 cents or even $1 a photo. You’d be forgiven, then, for raising an eyebrow at the offer made by a California company called ScanMyPhotos.com. It says it will professionally scan 1,000 photos for you, the same day it receives them, and put them on a DVD for $50."

http://www.scanmyphotos.com/

I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop

New York Times: "As image-editing software grows in sophistication and ubiquity, alterations go far beyond removing red-eye and whitening teeth. They include substituting head shots to achieve the best combination of smiles, deleting problematic personalities or adding family members who were unable to attend important events, performing virtual liposuction or hair restoration, even reanimating the dead. Revisionist history, it seems, can be practiced by just about anyone.

"As people fiddle with the photos in their scrapbooks, the tug of emotion and vanity can win out over the objective truth. And in some cases, it can even alter memories — Cousin Andy was at the wedding, right? In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was." Read the whole thing.

The article mentions the blog, Photoshop Disasters.

Just a Paycheck Parent?

What non-custodial dad or mom wants to be "just a paycheck," someone who sends money, but doesn't have a close relationship with the child? Research indicates that non-custodial parents who have relationships with their children are far more likely to contribute something financially to the kids' wellbeing, so this technology can be very helpful in encouraging child support. Money, or lack of it, should never determine whether a parent and child are able to maintain their relationship.

I wonder if there are ways we can get this technology promoted (by child support agencies?) as a way to improve child support payment rates, with a "carrot rather than a stick" approach? Other approaches (jail-time?) seem so punitive and counter-productive: how can guys in jail earn money to pay child support??

Drill Deeper:

• How to Maintain Relationships Despite Distance

Addicted to Facebook?

CBS News ran this story examining whether social networking online is an addiction. Obviously YES, if it interferes with getting work done or is such a preoccupation that it distracts from scheduling face-to-face activities.

Is it possible to have TOO MANY FRIENDS on social networking sites? As one gets older, one realizes they all aren't friends, they are CONTACTS, and that online relationships are far shallower than relationships developed primarily offline. It's too easy to hit the delete button or to ignore someone online. And instead of getting upset that someone is ignoring your emails, pick up the phone or go to see them face to face.

Just How Radically Is the Internet Transforming the Experience of Childhood?

PBS Frontline investigates the risks, realities and misconceptions of teen life online. "Nearly every teen in America is on the Internet every day, socializing with friends and strangers alike, "trying on" identities, and building a virtual profile of themselves--one that many kids insist is a more honest depiction of who they really are than the person they portray at home or in school. In "Growing Up Online," FRONTLINE peers inside the world of this cyber-savvy generation through the eyes of teens and their parents, who often find themselves on opposite sides of a new digital divide." Click.

Playing Scrabble on Facebook

On "60 Minutes," Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old Harvard drop-out and founder of Facebook, mentioned that he has a running game of Scrabble going with his grandparents. So I decided to go onto Facebook and download the Scrabulous application and set up a game with my 24-year-old son, working on a cruise ship in the Carribbean, and my niece, a high school student in Massachusetts. I doubt Matthew will have much time to play scrabble from the ship over the next few weeks, but once he's online, maybe the game will go faster. Anyway, we'll see how it goes.