Pew on teenage online social networking practices
Another fine report from Pew, this one about teenage online social networking practices. There's a lot to work with here — from how many teenage kids are posting online profiles (61%, most of them 16-17, vast majority on MySpace), to how careful they are about how much personal information they post online (more careful than you might think), to how much their parents know about what they're doing.
It's this last point that is particularly encouraging. The big split in the most recent Supreme Court COPA decision is between Kennedy and Breyer, with Kennedy saying that there are plenty of choices of relatively-effective (and certainly less-restrictive) filtering tools out there for parents to use, and Breyer essentially saying that parents are helpless so mandated shields of various kinds should be put in place to protect kids. It turns out that, in fact, parents are knowledgeable and are giving advice to their children about what to do online.
In comparison to television and video games, the internet is a much more parent-regulated piece of technology. Take a look at this:
More than eight in ten parents (85%) of online teens said that they had rules about internet sites their child could or could not visit, and a similar number (85%) said they had established rules about the kinds of personal information their child could share with people they talk to on the internet.
Most kid-used computers are in public places in homes; most parents are checking up on what their kids are doing online; and more than half of parents with online teens use filters.
This is a serious survey — I hope it comes in handy when COPA comes back around again.
Congressional Research Service reports online
If you want to get access to a Congressional Research Service report, you have to hope that someone has made it available to OpenCRS. You may be out of luck. And that's not a good thing. Or, you may never have heard of OpenCRS, and you'll be missing out.
Here's an op-ed by Ari Schwartz of CDT on the subject. We — all of us — paid for these reports, and they should be freely available online. (They're often really great reports.)
In a little more than a year, members of the public have downloaded
more than 3.5 million CRS reports from OpenCRS.com. Making the full
catalog of these reports readily available over the Internet will sate
those demands and help produce a better-informed electorate.
I really like the candor of this quote:
The . . . telling defense for the decrepit CRS policy [keeping the reports offline] came
from former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, who was quoted as saying: “Let’s say
that I’m working on an issue and I’m trying to look for some research
that helps me to get my point across and, all of a sudden, the
Congressional Research Service sends me over something and I read it
and I say, ‘Oh, no, that’s not going to help.’ Let someone else do the
research. Why give your opposition free research?”
Hah.
=== in other news, welcome to the blogosphere, Rob Frieden!