Woz/Digg/Kids
Diggnation and Jimmy Fallon: The New Convergence
Woz and a Pink Boa Hit the Dance Floor
The results showed that greater Internet use correlates with a greater acceptance of “Internet harm,” which included threatening others over email and reading other people’s emails without asking. And overall, while the findings indicate that real-world morality hinted at how children view questionable online behavior, the relationship was weak, says Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State and the principal investigator for the study.
That suggests that other factors are influencing online morality, she says. “There’s a disparity in the ways kids think about morality or virtue in the virtual world and the real world. There’s something else that goes on.”
What the “something else” is still isn’t clear. “We have to better understand how they conceptualize that world, whether they really think it is separate in some way. You can imagine how a child would develop that sense, because nine times out of 10, they know more about that world than their parents do,” Ms. Jackson says. “It might give them a sense that ‘Maybe parents know a lot in the real world, but when I get online, it’s my world.’ And they mistakenly believe that there’s privacy, especially among middle-class and upper-class kids who have their own computers.”
