After reviewing every scientific study published about children's activity online, as well as consulting with experts from social networks and legislators, the group wrote up their conclusions and published them free online.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery, at least for people expecting the group to uncover horror stories about child molesters and porn trauma, was that children's most upsetting experiences online were usually instigated by other children. The group found that the most bullying and sexual come-ons to young people were extensions of their real-life social networks - kids they knew from school or the neighborhood were treating each other online the same way they've treated each other offline in generations past.

The report concludes that there is no such thing as online safety - only safety. Rules that parents teach kids about not getting into cars with strangers in real life apply online as well. The researchers found that, for example, there was a similar pattern between teens who respond to sexual solicitations from strangers online and teens who respond to similar solicitations on street corners. The troubles these teens face exist in their home lives, say the researchers, and have nothing to do with the kind of media they are using.

The researchers also found that web filtering programs - often dubbed "censorware" - seemed to be an ineffective way of preventing children from seeing upsetting content online.

Check out the report, or read the excellent summary on Ars Technica. Definitely worth a read.

SOURCES:

Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies [Harvard's original Berkman Center report]

Biggest online threat to kids is other kids [via Ars Technica]

The Future for Interactive Storytelling was founded by three members of MIT’s Media Lab: V. Michael Bove Jr., who studies object-based media and interactive television, Cynthia Breazeal, who works in personal robotics and human-robot interaction, and Ramesh Raskar, who cultivates new technologies in imaging, display, and performance capture. Together, they are looking at how storytelling is changing and what it is capable of in a world of advanced technologies and community interactions:

According to a release from the newly-formed group:

By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web. Center research will also focus on ways to revolutionize imaging and display technologies, including developing next-generation cameras and programmable studios, making movie production more versatile and economic.

Part of the lab’s work will involve creating more effective robotic actors and improved blending of human and animated movement in motion capture, but at the core of the project is finding new ways for stories to become living, changing products of human interaction. Says Bove:

Imagine what people could do in storytelling if our rooms and our furniture and our cars and our shoes and everything else we interacted with could be collecting information as in a diary and we could play that all back and use that as part of creating stories.

The Center’s work will not be merely theoretical. MIT is partnering with Plymouth Rock Studios, which is planning to build a 14-soundstage complex in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 2010. The studio is looking to produce traditional story-based productions, which it hopes will come out of MIT’s research.

[MIT and The New York Times]

Hewlett Packard used a service called PayPerPost to pay bloggers to create posts or viral videos to promote Hewlett Packard's new digital camera. One woman had her children smash a Fuji camera with a hammer, filmed it, and put it on YouTube. The video didn't actually catch on virally, but did represent a strange and disturbing new phase in the evolution of advertising. A woman who clearly just wanted to feed her kids actually used her kids in a specious ad campaign in order to earn cash. This isn't the only time companies have tried this kind of stunt — paying bloggers a pittance to develop advertising for rich advertising firms — and it's bound to become more popular as more people get their entertainment via places like YouTube. In fact, Hewlett Packard had a much more successful viral ad campaign two years ago, in which people playing "finger soccer" on their desks at work and uploading the vids to YouTube were eventually outed as part of an ad campaign to make HP seem as cool and fun as Apple. By the time the outing happened, however, hundreds of people had spontaneously joined the "finger soccer" campaign just for fun, not realizing that the videos they uploaded were part of a viral advertising effort.

Another recent ad campaign that tried to use Web communities to generate artificial buzz was internet hardware manufacturer Cisco's "human network" campaign. You may remember seeing the phrase "human network" in Cisco ads, but Cisco wanted to do more than create a slogan. They wanted people to start using the phrase "human network" as everyday slang for the internet — the idea, I think, would be to cement a connection in people's unconscious minds between Cisco, the internet, and a kind of Utopian "human network" (which Cisco hardly is, given that its technology is what makes the Great Firewall of China possible). According to digital marketing blog ChasNote:

Since the "human network" isn't yet a well-defined phrase, [Cisco] enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, 43Folders's Merlin Mann, Metafilter's Matt Haughey, GigaOM's Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News's Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine's Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing's Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, Searchblog's John Battelle and Make's Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don't see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the "human network" page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Why are these campaigns a harbinger of things to come? First of all, they are directly engaged with a form of media — social networks — that are only likely to grow bigger as time goes on. Advertising can't only be those little tiny Google ads that go up the side of the page, and advertisers are going to do everything they can to become part of the content on a YouTube or Facebook so that they are more closely woven into the fabric of those networks. After all, you go to YouTube to see wacky videos, not to read the ads. So if advertisers can infiltrate the videos and make you watch their stuff, it's as if you've voluntarily tuned into a TV ad.

This is more disturbing than what I guess you could call traditional advertising mainly because a lot of it is extremely misleading. Ads that are "teasers" are one thing — you know, putting some cool phrase or image out there, only to reveal that it's an Altoids ad three weeks later. But ads that pretend to be real endorsements from regular people? That hide their corporate sponsorship, and use the ideas of underpaid people? It's like turning YouTube into a marketing sweatshop. Advertising dystopia, here we come.