Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

8.27.10 | Earlier this week, AOL released a new online tool—Safe Social—that “provides parents a 360 degree view of their child’s social networking life, with an easy-to-read report card of overall social networking activity and identification of potential red flags.”

As The New York Times reports, it’s just one of several new subscription services that have emerged to help parents monitor their child’s activities on social.

To coincide with the release, AOL commissioned a Nielsen survey of the interactions between parents and children on social networks. Some of the more dramatic statistics:
* 76 percent of parents with kids on Facebook claim to have ‘friended’ their teens.
* 29 percent of teenagers are ready to “un-friend” their parents given the choice, and are twice as likely to want to “un-friend” mom versus dad.

Tiffany Hsu uses the survey as the reference point of this Los Angeles Times article that briefly explores the tensions of parenting in the digital age. While the arena may be different, the arguments feel very familiar: Teenagers are embarrassed and uncomfortable when parents intrude so intimately on their social spaces. (To wit: Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook.—which was, however, started by two women in their 20s.)

But teens are also resourceful. As danah boyd points out in this fascinating post at DMLcentral, teenagers are hiding messages in plain sight—and this act of social steganography is evidence of how linguistically sophisticated teenagers have become on Facebook.

In one example, boyd writes about a teenager named Carmen who welcomes being “friends” with her mom on Facebook, but her mom can sometimes overreact, so Carmen “will avoid posting things that have a high likelihood of mother misinterpretation.”

For instance, when Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she posted the lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” instead of the more depressing song lyrics she had been listening to—mainly to avoid upsetting her mom. The strategy worked.

“Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh,” writes boyd. “But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.”

boyd continues:

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She’s hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren’t in the know and read differently by those who are. She’s communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she’s focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they’re concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults - namely their parents - for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing. Social steganography is one of the most common techniques that teens employ. They do this because they care about privacy, they care about misinterpretation, they care about segmented communications strategies.  And they know that technical tools for restricting access don’t trump parental demands to gain access. So they find new ways of getting around limitations. And, in doing so, reconstruct age-old practices.

Continue reading for more analysis about privacy in a public age and how teens are adapting. Monitoring companies may envy the sophistication.