Facebook in the news

The Times had another article on cyber-bullying this week (previous article in the series is here). This new one deals less with the legal and administrative issues and more about all the various different tricky ways that cyber-bullying can happen, and the difficulty that parents are having keeping up. One of the examples they cited in the article was a boy who was being bullied by three of his classmates; although the boy had no cell phone and was not on Facebook, the classmates actually created a face Facebook page in the victim's name and proceeded to post lots of nasty material to it. Whew.

I also found this link especially interesting (it was mentioned on Bruce Schneier's security blog, which I follow), which talks about the interesting idea of "wall scrubbing". Cool example of kids taking matters into their own hands to keep control of their on-line social presence (when facing a potentially dangerous/hostile environment).

Confession: I feel very dinosaur-like when I read this stuff.  I can barely manage a blog post a month, let alone a Facebook status update every half hour.  I also feel slightly weird when I tell people that I subscribe to the New York Times print edition;  none of my co-workers takes a newspaper, even among my college and grad school friends it's hard to find people who still read the paper regularly. Amy and I are not ready to give it up just yet, however (also we are secretly brainwashing our kids into enjoying reading the paper too, hah!).