How Tom stopped peeping!

Tom is everybody's friend. Well in the world of MySpace he is unless, like me, you deleted him! It seems that him and Mark, who doesn't add himself as your friend when you sign up to Facebook, are causing something of a surprising change online.

This week TIME put out an article called Facebook: More Popular Than Porn. It states that, in the US, more 18-25s are spending time on social networks than on adult sites. It offers a few suggestions as to why. I'll add one it didn't

When I logged into MySpace tonight I girl whose name I can't remember wanted to be my friend. Like so many others she was new to myspace, didn't understand it but had a webcam - oh, and she thought I was cute. Why do all these friend requests have exactly the same body text? (rhetorical question!) The porn industry hasn't overlooked the success of social networking. But perhaps it hadn't banked on how much people would prefer to be titillated by the provocative posing of their online freinds!

New Media Literacy

I owe Tom for putting me onto this. If you want to get a grip on how we should be training our young people for the world they're growing up in then get Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published this white paper that explores new frameworks and models for media literacy. It's well worth reading.

Check out Tom's video's on YouTube. He goes by the user name tlg847. This is a taste of what you'll find...