The publisher characterises The Breakup as opening up -
the world of romance as it is constructed in a digital milieu, offering insights into the ways in which different media influence behaviour, beliefs and social mores. Above all, this full-fledged ethnography of Facebook and other new tools is about technology and communication, but it also tells the reader a great deal about what college students expect from each other when breaking up - and from the friends who are the spectators or witnesses to the ebb and flow of their relationships. The Breakup 2.0 is accessible and rivetting.In my opinion it is also poorly edited and somewhat thin. The book would have greater authority if the author had interviewed more than 72 people. Call me a grinch but infelicities such as the following could be fixed before the book went out into the 1.0 world -
As Lisa Gitelman, a historian of media, points out, things we now take for granted about the telephone took a while to be established.I preferred the more modest 135 page Kids and Credibility: An Empirical Examination of Youth, Digital Media Use and Information Credibility (MIT Press, 2010) by Andrew Flanagin & Miriam Metzger, which draws on representative sample of 2,747 US minors (ages 11 to 18) with internet access plus a survey of one parent of each child to obtain household indicators of digital media use, parental involvement and various demographic factors.
[quote from Gitelman]
As Gitelman explains, much of what we take for granted about older communicative technology like the telephone had to be established.
The researchers conclude that -
+ The vast majority of children began using the net between 2nd and 6th grades, with a majority online by 3rd grade. 97% are online by 8th grade. Children use the net ("not including email") for an average of almost 14 hours per week. Usage generally increases with age, from an average of 8 hours weekly among 11yr-olds to 16 hours per week for 18yr-olds.In relation to 'information credibility' (a matter that would, alas, not be wasted on some grownups who confuse correlation with causation or go into a trance when encountering pseudo-scientific jargon) the authors report that -
+ Overall, the US children rely fairly heavily on the net, with the most important general uses include social networking, "virtual usage" ("gaming and the like") and "information contribution" in various forms (eg file sharing or creating personal sites and blogs). Although the children generally acknowledge that information overabundance might pose a problem, nearly two-thirds report that their life would be either a little or much worse overall if they could not go online again, which is more pronounced with age. The children believe that they are highly skilled net users, with "even 11-year-olds believ[ing] that their technical skill, search skill, and knowledge about Internet trends and features are higher than other Internet users".
+ 75% of the parents control their child’s access and use of the net by placing the computer in a certain location in the home, limiting sites the child can visit, limiting the time spent online or controlling access in other ways. Parental oversight decreases as the children get older, with each method of control reported about half as frequently by parents of older children compared to parents of younger children.
+ Young people are concerned about credibility on the net, yet they find online information to be reasonably credible, with 89% reporting that "some" to "a lot" of information online is believable. Although the amount of information they find credible increases with age, their concern about credibility does not. That concern could stem from the fact that 73% of children have received some form of information literacy training, and the majority of parents report that they talk to their kids about whether to trust internet information.The authors go on to report that -
+ A third of the minors reported that they, or someone they know, had a bad experience due to false information found on the net or through email. Nearly two-thirds said that they had heard a news report about someone who had a bad experience because of false information online. These experiences affect the extent to which minors are sceptical of online information.
+ Among several options, the net was rated as the most believable source of information for schoolwork, entertainment and commercial information, as well as second most believable source for health information and third most believable
for news information. Notably, the children report that the internet is a more credible source of information for school papers or projects than books.
+ Kids are not very trusting of blogs, but they do find Wikipedia to be "somewhat believable". Many children report believing information on Wikipedia substantially more than they think other people should believe it.
+ The children differentiate in reasonable ways among entertainment, health, news, commercial, and school-related information online when deciding which credibility assessment tools to use and with how much effort to employ them. Although this is generally encouraging, children also report finding entertainment and health information to be equally believable online, suggesting a suboptimal degree of skepticism between information types that have potentially quite different consequences. Older minors also show greater diversity and rigor in assessing the credibility of online information. Moreover, young people who are less analytic in their processing of information report trusting strangers online more and are more likely to be fooled by false information online.
+ Children’s concerns about credibility appear to be driven largely by analytic credibility evaluation processes, which involve effortful and deliberate consideration of information. By contrast, actual beliefs about the credibility of information they find are dictated by more heuristic processes, by which decisions are made with less cognitive effort and scrutiny. This suggests that while most kids take the idea that they should be concerned about credibility seriously (by invoking a systematic and analytical approach), many also exhibit a less rigorous approach to actually evaluating the information they find online.
+ There was no clear evidence of a "digital divide" in terms of the credibility beliefs and evaluations of kids from different demographic backgrounds. Instead, the rigor with which kids evaluate information they find online drives much of their credibility beliefs and concerns.
+ A majority of children displayed an appropriate level of skepticism when presented with hoax sites, a trend that contradicts prior research about this type of site. Nonetheless, approximately 10% still believed hoax sites either "a lot" or "a whole lot", indicating some lingering and important concerns.
+ Children found encyclopaedia entries that they believed originated from Encyclopedia Britannica to be significantly more believable than those they believed originated from either Wikipedia or Citizendium. The actual source of an online encyclopedia entry (ie from Wikipedia, Citizendium or Encyclopaedia Britannica) was irrelevant to the credibility of the entry However, encyclopaedia entries were assessed as less believable when placed on Wikipedia than when placed on the other sites. Entries actually originating from Wikipedia were perceived as more believable when they appeared on Citizendium than if they appeared on Wikipedia and even more believable if they appeared to have originated from the Britannica. Thus, ironically, while children find the content of Wikipedia to be most credible, they find the context of Wikipedia as an information resource to be relatively low in credibility.
