There’s no such thing as internet privacy, only perceived internet privacy.
ACLU – U.S. Surveillance Law May Poorly Protect New Text Messaging Services
Electronic Frontier Foundation – New Ninth Circuit Case Protects Text Message Privacy From Police and Employers
This history of blogging is full of gimmicks to draw cheap traffic. And I’ll be the first to admit that over the last 10 years I’ve been influenced by these gimmicks, tried them out, and ultimately gotten better at recognizing that they aren’t part of my strategy.
“Cheap” blog traffic is non-organic traffic to a blog drawn by gaming the system to get more pageviews while failing to convert visitors to invested readers.
“Cheap traffic” impresses for all the wrong reasons. It’s all numbers and no real impact or quality. On the surface, it’s easy to get impressed with a blog boasting 100,000 daily readers. But when you look into the actual analytic data you’ll see that most of those visitors are coming to a single page and not returning. Often times visitors aren’t even staying long enough to have actually read the post they are visiting.
Let’s say there is a blog post drawing 90,000 daily readers via referrals from Facebook. That is great, right? Maybe. But if the article is 1200 words and the average visitor is staying 9 seconds, only visited that single page, and then went back to Facebook, they didn’t read it and you didn’t gain a new reader. What did you get? Cheap traffic.
As bloggers, we are all influenced by these trends. Whether we intentionally do it or not, these trends continue to emerge and we find ourselves mimicking stuff that seems like it works.
My point in bringing all of this up is to point out that if you are in this to write and establish a long-term relationship with your readers, you need to remember who your audience is. Getting hooked on drawing cheap traffic to look at an image or enter a contest or get “quick ideas” isn’t cultivating an audience that’ll convert into long-time readers. It might seem like it “could” but it doesn’t. I’ve simply seen it too much in both my own work and the work we do for our clients.
My advice is always the same: The biggest reward in blogging comes when you play the long game. Just write good content and the rest will take care of itself.
You really have to know your business. Very few businesses can survive without establishing relationships. Sometimes you need a quick burst of energy that a promotion can generate. And sometimes you do need to do things just for branding or list building.
But long-term growth in almost any field has to do with excellence. A gimmick is just that. Look at a gimmick like Thanksgiving door busters. How many of those people who come at 5 AM to buy a cheap TV also buy something else? How many of those people come back in 2 months to buy something else? How many of those people are your best customers? How many of them become your best customers.
Just like I don’t see “cheap traffic” on blogs converting to long-term readers of a blog, you have to see gimmicks as a short-term strategy and a sign that something is wrong. A healthy business-owner isn’t opening up his shop at 5 AM the day after Thanksgiving. A healthy business owner is sleeping in, giving his workers the day off, and enjoying time with his family.
Somewhere along the line churches started believing that “cheap traffic” days were opportunities for growth. With the Lenten season upon us we’re only days away from churches “announcing” their Easter gimmicks.
Just because you have high attendance on Easter doesn’t mean you have an opportunity.
But before you do that… stop and ask yourself three important questions:
Do you have a hater? Is someone anonymously posting things on social media that are driving you crazy or disrupting your school? Is someone posing as you?
In many cases, it might seem like you can never figure out who these people are. And, usually, they aren’t doing anything illegal so there’s little the police could do about it.
I’m going to share a simple way that you can catch most online creepers. Most aren’t that sophisticated, most are just idiots who think they are being funny.
Last year I shared how I deal with trolls, this year I’m sharing how I track not-so-anonymous accounts back to their source
I went to a college where pranks were big. It was a conservative Christian college that didn’t allow students to have sex or drink alcohol. We weren’t even allowed to dance or go to movies. With all that extra time, pranking folks was a form of currency.
And there I learned an important thing that applies to annoying anonymous accounts: A Rat ALWAYS Returns.
In other words, the fun for the prankster (or troll or bully) is seeing your reaction. This curiosity will point you back to the culprit 99 times out of 100.
Let’s say someone put something in our microwave for an hour and it burned, causing a nasty smell that brought everyone out to inspect the problem in the kitchen. The person who was there who didn’t fit in… or the random person who walked by “because they smelled something” was usually the person who did it. They were the rat.
The exact same behavior is true when someone is anonymously tormenting someone on social media.
You don’t have to be the NSA to track down the culprit because 99 times out of 100, all you have to do is look at who is looking and it’ll point to your rat.
Might seem too obvious. But you need to isolate the account. Go to it’s profile page, it’s a wealth of information.
Looking at the offending profile, start taking notes on who are they engaging with? Grab a piece of paper and identify the first 10 people the account followed or became friends with. Next, identify who they most frequently engage with. Look for social activity like favorites, retweets, mentions, things like that.
Once you’ve done that, order the accounts that they engage with the most from #1 – #10. Chances are very high that your culprit is one of those accounts OR they are, at least, friends with them. These are your “accounts of interest.”
Why? Because this behavior is about social power. And there is nothing to be gained unless other people know you are doing it, can watch it, etc.
I find it helps to get the text/images/videos out of the actual app and into another format.
Create a Google/Excel spreadsheet with a new tab for each incident when the offending account posted something. Create a column for each of your 10 “accounts of interest” associated with the anonymous account. (So row 1 is the names of all the accounts) Next, copy/paste any post from those users around the time that something was posted. Note mentions of the offending message or the person being targeted. Anything that could be in context.
The point in doing this isn’t that you are going to identify your offender. But you are most definitely going to be able to identify the friend group of the offender(s). You can assume that these people are either together or texting/messaging one another about the anonymous account.
Take careful note about who is promoting the account to other people. They are vested in other people discovering the account, sharing it as funny or asking other people to check it out/follow it.
As you sift through this you will see a few accounts who are the closest to the action. These are the most interested parties. They might not be the offender, but they know who it is.
Remember: Social media happens in real time. Context is very important. Circumstances often lead to the timing of what is posted, when.
I can’t believe how often this points directly back to a source.
Most smartphones have a built-in GPS. And most social media apps, unless you turn it off, will tell you a location. Scroll through the offending account to see if you can spot any of that.
If they are posting images they’ve taken, their goose is cooked. Seriously, this is too easy. Download the images to your computer and look at the properties of the image with the image viewing applications included with your computer for free. (In my case Preview) Open the image, click Tools>Show Location Info
Here’s information about a picture I took at a local grocery store of some duck eggs.
If you have this information, you can establish exactly where that person was when the image was taken… but you can also tell the exact model of their device. If you have 10 people you’re looking at, how many of them have a black iPhone 6? Your circle just got a lot smaller.
Let’s say you are an administrator at a school and you need to know who is impersonating a teacher or who is bullying a student. Now that you have this information you have a pretty good idea who to talk to.
The last step is the confrontation. If you’ve followed the steps above, chances are very high you’ve identified 3-4 people you need to talk to as well as created a paper trail as to why you are talking to these individuals.
Likewise, let’s say that this behavior has crossed a legal boundary. The information above is easy enough to share with an investigator to give them a fast-forward on doing a criminal investigation.
This post relates to my social media principle #2: There’s no such thing as privacy online, only perceived online privacy. If you’d like to learn more about that please check out my book, A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media.
Question from a middle school administrator – Over break I was invited by students and former students to JoinSwipe. It has a smiley face. What do you think of this app? What is it? Any advice would be great.
First off, their logo is a wink. The logo alone is a bit of a shot across the bow about what the app is all about.
Second off, I’ve not heard of it. It seems to be pretty small and new, which doesn’t mean much I suppose.
So let’s do some digging.
Here’s the official description on the iTunes App store:
By invitation only.
See the photos & videos your friends won’t post on Facebook.
With Swipe we wanted to build something fun that made conversations more like running into friends in real life?—?wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. When you get into the app, you’ll see a stack of photos & videos posted by your friends. It’s not stuff you’d find on Facebook?—?it’s what they’re really doing. That’s because your username is invisible by default when you post to Swipe.
You can do three things with posts, and they all involve swiping ;). If the post doesn’t interest you, swipe left to pass?—?you’ll never see it again. If you think it’s cool, swipe right to let the poster know you like it. And if you want to reply, just tap the post, write a message, and swipe up. When your friend gets the reply, they can send one back to you and reveal their identity. Replies can go back and forth until someone gets bored?—?and just swipes it away.
Here’s the official screenshots:
Here’s some background from the developers on their blog:
With Swipe we wanted to build something fun that made conversations more like running into friends in real life?—?wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. When you get into the app, you’ll see a stack of photos & videos posted by your friends. It’s not stuff you’d find on Facebook?—?it’s what they’re really doing. That’s because your username is invisible by default when you post to Swipe.
Source (Notice they are using Medium as their blog platform, not Tumblr. I see Medium as more of a grown up version of Tumblr.)
And here’s some backstory about the primary brains behind it, actually a really interesting read.
The app is a mash-up of several different trends right now.
It’s “anonymish.” Your friends share different photos but you won’t know exactly who took them, even if you have a pretty good idea (like Snoop Lion, pictured above).
It’s got a Tinder mechanic where you swipe left or right to like things. Or up if you want to comment on something.
It’s ephemeral. You only get to see photos once.
How did Roushdy and Hardy end up here?
They wanted to build something fun that would be universally recognized; they structured Complex Polygon as a startup where they could spin out idea after idea to see which one stuck. Swipe is their second one, and it had enough promising engagement metrics that they decided to do a bigger launch.
I think Swipe is most like Tinder. If students are using it in your school or youth group I wouldn’t be overly concerned. It doesn’t have a positive or negative reputation at this point. But I would be curious, I would inquire with students about what they are doing with the app and why they like it.
If I were a middle or high school student and Tinder was a little too, um, flirty and/or sexual for me, I can see playing with something like Swipe. It’s basically a mash-up of Snapchat and Tinder. (With the swiping right or left of Tinder, the disappearing image thing.)
For students, again, it’s all about helping them understand that the images here don’t really disappear any more than they do with Snapchat. (Social Media Principle #2) And since people can send you pictures and you don’t really have any context for it… what TechCrunch called “anonymish” it could just as easily be someone doing something you don’t want to see as it could be someone making cutesy duck face at their grandmas.
Questions for readers: How are you using Swipe? Did I get something wrong? Leave a comment and share your experience.
Have a question for Tech Tuesday? Submit your question on the Tech Tuesday form on the sidebar of my blog.
Ephemeral – lasting for a very short time. “fashions are ephemeral” synonyms: transitory, transient, fleeting, passing, short-lived, momentary, brief, short
For most adults, you roll your eyes at things like Yik Yak, Tinder, and Snapchat.
Understand this– That’s entirely the point!
RULE #1 – Teenagers and college students want to hang out where adults don’t. The less popular something is for adults, the better.
RULE #2 – Perceived anonymity and privacy is enough for what they want to do. We’re talking about a generation of app users who have grown up with their lives documented on mommy blogs, Facebook, and Instagram. They ultimately know that there is no such thing as privacy or anonymity online… that things get tracked back to them… but that’s not the point. The point is creating private space from the prying eyes of adults and/or people they don’t want to connect with. The perception of anonymity or privacy is just fine with them.
When I’m talking to parents or youth workers or school administrators they are dealing with very practical problems.
But I don’t think you can problem solve ephemeral apps without first taking the time to understand why it’s important for teenagers and what it’s in response to within our society.
My advice? As an adult, it’s easy to just deal with the frustrations caused by things you haven’t taken the time to understand. Don’t waste your time trying to talk people out of using apps. (You’re actually increasing their desire to use them!)
Instead, take the time to understand why these apps matter to the young adults in your life. Just because you don’t get it doesn’t mean something is bad. It might mean that you need to be the learner and not the teacher.
“How many of you guys have a cell phone?” [most hands go up]
How many of you guys have an account on Instagram or Snapchat?” [nearly the same amount of hands go up]
This gymnasium of 4th through 6th graders in Northwest Kansas was just another example of our failed Adult Verification System. “Age gating”— the industry term for asking users their age when signing up for an account on a website that collects personally identifiable information, aka every social media app on the planet, is horribly broken.
The intent of age gating is to comply with COPPA— a federal law that prevents the collection of personally identifiable information of those 12 and under. More technically, age gating helps social media apps get out of very expensive COPPA compliance because they don’t have to maintain a system whereby parents can get access to all of the information collected about their children.
See, creating an account on a social media site is not about capabilities or gaining parental permission. (see When Should I Allow My Child to Get a Social Media Account?) Creating an account on a website or app that collects personal information is about age… like driving a car or voting or buying alcohol.
The minimum age to create an account is 13. But the system for verifying users is virtually non-existent.
You can’t tell me that app manufacturers don’t know that they’ve have tons of underage users. It’s rampant and they definitely profit from their usage and data.
Whenever I do assemblies with elementary-aged kids lots of them have questions about apps that they aren’t old enough to use.
And when I talk to parent groups– most of the parents readily admit that their 9 or 10 year old has an account on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, or another app that they aren’t old enough for.
When questioned about this, most app manufacturers simply blame parents. They cite quotes from research like this:
“Our data show that many parents knowingly allow their children to lie about their age — in fact, often help them to do so — in order to gain access to age-restricted sites” — Dana Boyd
The problem with app developers blaming parents? The Federal Trade Commission doesn’t make age verification the responsibility of parents… it’s the website or apps responsibility:
If you operate a commercial Web site or an online service directed to children under 13 that collects personal information from children or if you operate a general audience Web site and have actual knowledge that you are collecting personal information from children, you must comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
COPPA requires those sites and services to notify parents directly and get their approval before they collect, use, or disclose a child’s personal information. Personal information in the world of COPPA includes a kid’s name, address, phone number or email address; their physical whereabouts; photos, videos and audio recordings of the child, and persistent identifiers, like IP addresses, that can be used to track a child’s activities over time and across different websites and online services.
See, in regards to COPPA compliance from a legal perspective, the burden isn’t on parents. (Though we all agree they should play a part in compliance.) It’s on the operators of the sites which collect personally identifiable information.
Most apps deploy a simple script on their account creation page which acts as their Age Verification System. They call it Age Gating because the app is only going to check once, it’s a gate. Provide a birthdate older than 13 years old one time and it’ll never ask again.
Technically speaking we’re talking about a few lines of code, asking for a user’s birthdate, and that’s it. If you tell Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat you are under 13 years old it doesn’t allow you to create an account. But standard age gating doesn’t prevent the same IP address or even browser session from submitting the exact same information with a different birthdate. Deploying a blacklist isn’t that hard to do. It’s simply blacklisting an IP address or device ID to prevent it from changing the birthdate to get past the gate. If app developers wrote a script that told users they weren’t old enough and then prevented them from trying to submit the form again for 24 or 48 hours, most would go away.
[box type=”note” size=”large” style=”rounded” border=”full”]Most of these same sites use a similar blacklisting technology to prevent spammers and bots from creating hundreds of accounts from the same device or IP address. So the technology already exists and is deployed, just not applied to age verification.[/box]
[box type=”note” size=”large” style=”rounded”]Did you know Instagram and Twitter don’t even ask users for an age? How is this COPPA compliant? The operators make no attempt to keep underaged users off their application.[/box]
Rather than simply age gating a social media app which has done nothing to prevent underage users from gaining access to sites intended for older teens and adults, I would like to see a developer create an on-going age verification system that not only prevents underage users from creating accounts but also flags on-going underage user activity.
For instance, many app and device manufacturers (most notably Facebook with facial recognition on images and Apple with fingerprints) are using biometrics to identify users. (see Biometric Technology Takes Off) So the technology is available to identify users based on their physical biometrics, like if they use their finger to unlock their phone, or if they post a photo of themselves on Instagram but no effort is put forth by these companies to verify that users are of legal age to use their services. For instance, if a 10 year old creates an account on Instagram saying she is 16 then later tags themselves in a selfie with her mom whom she also tags in the photo… why doesn’t Instagram’s API correlate that data to the tagged parties Facebook account where the mom correctly lists the child’s age as 10? It’s not that the technology doesn’t exist, it’s that Instagram– a Facebook company– has no will to do so.
Similarly, we know that technology exists for apps to flag content based on geolocation, keywords, or message content. If an app developer were truly interested in on-going Age Verification the technology exists to limit the collection of personally identifiable information to those 13 years or older but the will to do so does not exist.
Instead, most app developers take a passive approach, ignoring [and profiting from] underage users and only dealing with it when reported. It’s not seen as a legal compliance issue, it’s usually seen as a community management issue.
[box type=”note” size=”large” style=”rounded” border=”full”]I’ve made the same argument about Snapchat’s lack of will to prevent the creation and distribution of child pornography. Could they not deploy a technology that detected nudity and prevented someone under 18 years of age from sending or receiving illicit images? Of course they could. They don’t have the will to do so because ultimately the illegal behavior is driving usage and making them rich![/box]
14. Will the amended COPPA Rule prevent children from lying about their age to register for general audience sites or online services whose terms of service prohibit their participation?
No. COPPA covers operators of general audience websites or online services only where such operators have actual knowledge that a child under age 13 is the person providing personal information. The Rule does not require operators to ask the age of visitors. However, an operator of a general audience site or service that chooses to screen its users for age in a neutral fashion may rely on the age information its users enter, even if that age information is not accurate. In some circumstances, this may mean that children are able to register on a site or service in violation of the operator’s Terms of Service. If, however, the operator later determines that a particular user is a child under age 13, COPPA’s notice and parental consent requirements will be triggered.
Source, emphasis mine
The Child Online Privacy Protection Act belongs to the Federal Trade Commission. The will of social media operators to comply with COPPA is not there, therefore it is up to the FTC to force operators to comply.
If you are like me and believe that social media operators should actively comply with the intent and letter of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) than I’m asking you to consider the following:
CBS News 8 – San Diego, CA News Station – KFMB Channel 8
[Link to the above video – I appear in a phone interview talking about the situation at Torrey Pines High School and Yik Yak, in general.]
The harder they try to market themselves as an app for college students the more high schoolers they attract.
In fairness, they really have been a good digital citizen.
They make it easy for law enforcement to contact them, they provide information to aid investigations when they receive a court order, and they went to great expense and effort to geofence off every middle and high school over the summer. They’ve even made it possible for school administrators to request geofencing or correct it.
And yet problems persist. The perception of anonymity gives some teenagers license to wreak havoc. Just like there were idiots who pulled the fire alarm every day at Hanau American High School when I was a junior in high school, the (child of) that same idiot will make threats on Yik Yak.
In the words of a great American, Antoine Dodson, I say this: If you think you can post an anonymous threat on Yik Yak and get away with it… You are so dumb.
All of the so-called anonymous and ephemeral apps point directly back to you. (Yik Yak, Snapchat, Whisper, Secret, etc) The only people that thinks things disappear or are anonymous are the users.
So if you are using these apps and thinking it’s all private or secure or anonymous, recognize that this is merely a perception.
There is no such thing as privacy or anonymity online, only the perception of privacy or anonymity.
And do you know how hard it is to get all of that information? Not that hard if you are law enforcement. A court order, subpoena, or search warrant is all that’s needed. A little paperwork and the signature of a judge.
So, let’s say you make a threat about a school on an “anonymous” app. Within about two weeks you’ll discover that what you thought was anonymous was anything but that.
Far from putting on winter gloves and pulling the fire alarm in 1993, an online threat posted to Yik Yak or another so-called anonymous app leaves a digital footprint that easily establishes your guilt. All of this data is admissible in court. And all of this data will prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you did it.
Yes! I agree that it’s weird that I have to write this. It feels kind of obvious. But then again… every day a new story emerges of someone doing it. So, I guess this post really is needed.
“How can I help families with social media?”
I think this is something that lots and lots of churches are wondering. While culture is ever-morphing and hard to understand– the way people are communicating and integrating technology into their lives is big/obvious and churches feel the need to offer help.
The flip side is that most recognize that they are not experts on social media, much less experts on how social media integrates into adolescent life. And so they either do nothing… which is common. Or they try to provide their congregation access to “experts“… which is rare, but appreciated. (No really, thank you.)
But I want to present to you a plan that is right down the middle and plays into your expertise as a pastor.
As I’m out doing seminars and workshops with people I end up speaking out of two different postures about social media.
In other words, half of the skill set that I have, every pastor has.
Often times I’m asked about how social media impacts the home relevant to children and teens. And just below the surface of those questions are questions relevant to family life and marriage. It’s pretty normal that a spouse will attend a workshop and then make mention of their spouse being “the one with the problem in our home.” So, as a pastor, I can see that issues in the home might be flowing from a lack of communication about how the device makes his spouse feel or maybe that he’s using the device because of a larger marital issue or even that they aren’t have sex as often as they’d like because they are staring at their phones in bed instead of each other.
You don’t have to be a social media expert to talk about these things, these are pastoral counseling issues that you, as a pastor, really are an expert on. These are things you can deal with in informal counseling in your office or make a referral to a professional counselor.
Social media might be the presenting issue. But often social media is the symptom of something bigger, it’s a family problem with which you can provide counsel.
The more I talk and write about social media the more I realize that the behavior itself is a window to a persons soul. In a normal healthy adult situation, social media usage is congruent to their life. They say things and do things with social media they would do in real life. And where there is incongruence, it’s often from a place of dissatisfaction or unhealthiness.
That’s a two-way street, right? If someone is projecting perfection on social media but you know they are a mess, that’s incongruence. Likewise, if they are a mess on social media about their job, but happy-go-lucky at church… you know that incongruence means something.
I share that because, again, you don’t have to be an expert on social media to notice this. If you’re sensitive to knowing your congregants you’ll be able to see that plainly and ask hard, yet obvious, questions. “Tom, how is everything going at work? You seem… I don’t know… grumpy when you post stuff on Facebook at work. Can we get together and talk about that?”
Let’s say you want to do a seminar about social media for parents at your church, but you can’t afford to bring someone in? Well, if you take my book A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media and reverse engineer it… you’ll see my presentation. Voila! Start there and add/edit it to fit your context.
Subscribe to my blog, iParent.tv, and Common Sense Media and keep those resources in your back pocket as things come up. But don’t feel like you need to become a social media expert in order to help the people in your congregation.
Don’t get caught up in the trees to miss the forest when it comes to social media usage and helping families within your congregation. Focus on your expertise, lean on it, and allow the natural love a pastor has for her congregation and your expertise in pastoral care to overcome what you do or don’t know about how to use the latest social media app.
And when you need more help, ask me. That’s what I’m here for.
Since news of this broke on Friday I’ve received at least 50 texts, emails, and other messages about it.
I’m a little torn. I don’t want to say “I told you so.” More like– “NO!!! I tried to warn people.”
More than 4 million people have read my post, “Why you should delete Snapchat.” The PDF of that post has been downloaded 45,000 times. It’s been taught as an example of a persuasive argument in just about every state in the United States.
But here we are. My efforts weren’t enough.
Somewhere, in the ether of the internet, are 200,000 images posted online without permission. That’s on top of the countless number of Tumblr blogs and other websites dedicated to sharing captured Snaps.
If anything, what I wrote in August 2013 has been validated time and again. Which only leads me to the same conclusion: Delete the app.
Do not trust an app built like this. And do not trust people like this.
There are white hats and black hats in this world, Snapchat wears a black hat.
Right now, nearly every hour, a story is coming out blaming Snapchat for this leak. And they are 100% to blame. No doubt many will join me in calling the Snapchat board to remove Snapchat’s founders for their incompetence.
But, emotionally, I’m just not interested in “I told you so” any more than I truly care about who is the CEO of an app people should just delete.
Just like there wasn’t anything in it for me when I wrote the original post in August 2013, I am not somehow filled with pride that this has happened and I was right all along. (If you didn’t know, I wrote the post in response to requests from a group of moms at a seminar. I couldn’t answer their question about Snapchat sufficiently on the fly, I told them to watch my blog and I’d write some reasons you should delete it.)
I’d love to hear from people who have had enough and deleted Snapchat. Now that you aren’t using it, what are you using instead?
With the latest round of social media leaks making waves today, this time impacting Snapchat users, I’m in the odd place of looking like an Old Testament prophet.
I’m not a prophet.
I simply applied long-standing principles of social media to the current wave of ephemeral apps popular today.
And here’s the deal: I love to share those principles of social media with anyone who will listen– teenagers in school, teenagers at church, teenagers in a social club, teachers, parents, youth workers, etc.
In 2013-2014 I spoke in dozens of classrooms, school assemblies, youth group meetings, parent groups, conference, and even a farm safety day. I’ve spoke to grandparents trying to sort out what their grandchildren are doing on their phones and I’ve spoken to kindergartners about picking games that are fun and safe for them.
If you’d like me to come to talk to your group… let’s chat.
I’m not a “scared straight” speaker. I don’t find that trying to scare teenagers or parents about all the bad things that can happen with social media affects any change.
But what does help bring change is two-fold.
When adults learn both how social media works and why it’s important to the teenagers in their life with some common language that everyone can use to talk about it… they can bridge the gap to get beyond behavior management and into a conversation about shared values.
It’s much more productive to lead people to a place of “Who are we trying to be as a school, family, church and how does social media impact that?” instead of “Why do you take selfies?”
I’m not systematic about getting recordings of every talk, but I do allow groups to record me… so there are plenty of YouTube and Vimeo links out there.
Here’s a few:
If you’d like to have me out in 2015 (or even late 2014) drop me a note on my contact form. I’m willing to work with your organizations needs, budget, schedule, etc.