The Internet is a big part of children’s lives

by James Martin

The kids are online, and Leslie Regan Shade wants to know exactly what they’re doing.

Shade, an associate professor in communication studies, came to Concordia last July from the University of Ottawa.

She brought with her a three-year study-in-progress called “Children, Youth and New Media in the Home.” Funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Initiative on the New Economy, the study is the first major exploration of what roles the Internet, as well as videogames and personal computers, play in the domestic lives of six-to-17-year-old Canadians. The key is “to use the voices of the kids themselves.”

In 1998, Shade helped the Media Awareness Network, a non-profit Canadian organization dedicated to promoting media literacy, with a study of what parents think their children do online. Much of the concern was with what Shade calls an “almost moral panic” over pornography, violence, and the dangers of adults preying on children online.

“Those are the things that the media really likes to talk about, but I was seeing that my own kids, and the kids that I work with in the web-awareness courses that I teach, were intrepid web-surfers.

“They knew their way around the Internet, and if they came across anything that their parents might find unsavory, they just ignored it. Or it didn’t bother them. But they weren’t actively seeking it, nor were they being actively influenced by the kind of content that was freaking out their parents.

“Of course, you can ask any adolescent male to find something online that Aunt Hilda wouldn’t want to see, and they can do so, no problem. But are they really interested in doing that?

“Instead of having adults tell us what kids are doing on the Internet, I became interested in finding out what the kids like to do. What do they not like? What do they think of privacy and commercialization on the Internet? The ethics of downloading?

“I wanted to give the kids an arena to talk about what they’re really doing.”

Shade’s student researchers are interviewing 30 young Canadians in Montreal and Ottawa in front of their home computers. (Guardians are nearby during the interview, but to encourage honesty, the Q & A sessions are one-on-one. Participants’ identities are kept confidential.)

Questions range from “How much time do you spend on the Internet per day?” to “Have you ever encountered a site with violent content?” to “Do you know what a cookie file is?”

Preliminary findings suggest that the Internet is used much more for entertainment than education: “There’s a lot of shopping.”

Shade hopes to complete the interviews by April, after which she’ll compile an overview of issues and trends. She’s particularly interested in the areas of privacy and commercialization. Canada has no equivalent to the American “Children's Online Privacy Protection Act,” which stipulates that children under age 13 must seek parental permission to fill out an online quiz or survey.

However, even such legislation doesn’t prevent many commercial websites from being “quite nefarious and exploitative” when it comes to collecting information from young users.

She cites the wildly popular Neopets.com entertainment site, which allows kids to nurture fantasy creatures by engaging in consumer surveys: the site is so ripe with embedded product placement (such as the McDonald’s-sponsored virtual pet playground) that NeoPets.com has actually trademarked the term “immersive advertising.”

“I didn’t start this study with any particular preconceived notions, but I’m somewhat surprised that what we’ve found so far is that kids don’t have a real sense of their own privacy, or of what these commercial entities can and can’t ask them. They’re growing up in such a commercialized culture that they’re not asked to think in a critical fashion about these issues in their day-to-day lives.

“As they get older, they approach the Internet in a more cynical fashion: ‘Pop-up ads are annoying. Banner ads? I don’t click on those.’ But generally speaking, even though they consider surfing a very private activity, they’re not really concerned with their information leaking out beyond the confines of their digital transaction.

Shade concluded, “I think what will come out of this study more than anything else will be policy recommendations about having more Internet awareness education — especially education as to what kids’ privacy rights are — at a younger age.”