The last decade has seen the Internet becoming a more important resource in all types of different areas of life. From business to entertainment, the World Wide Web now rules above all else. But does this also mean that a generation of children are being raised online?

I have gone from spending a few hours a week on the Internet five years ago, to maybe six to eight hours a day currently. The biggest reason for that is my job being Internet based, but there is also the time I spend on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, on Wikipedia finding out lots of useless information, and YouTube to see stupid, and sometimes newsworthy videos.

This current generation of children probably aren’t working online, which means they spend all of their time on the sites I previously mentioned, as well as various forums and discussion groups. But is that actually healthy? Particularly when it’s clear that a large percentage of kids have personal access to the Internet, with little or no monitoring done on what they see.
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Facebook, MySpace and other Web sites have unleashed a potent new phenomenon of social networking in cyberspace. But at the same time, a growing body of evidence is suggesting that traditional social networks play a surprisingly powerful and underrecognized role in influencing how people behave.

The latest research comes from Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at the Harvard Medical School, and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. The pair reported last summer that obesity appeared to spread from one person to another through social networks, almost like a virus or a fad.

In a follow-up to that provocative research, the team has produced similar findings about another major health issue: smoking. In a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the team found that a person’s decision to kick the habit is strongly affected by whether other people in their social network quit — even people they do not know. And, surprisingly, entire networks of smokers appear to quit virtually simultaneously.
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If you were to guess how many children were involved in networking, your first reaction might be “few.” Well, if we expand our idea of networking (beyond suits and career fairs and business cards) to mean social networking, than your first reaction would be very wrong.

A BBC News story by Darren Waters cites a recent survey showing that almost half of children online use social networking sites. And, of course, that’s not all. A surprising number of youth (59%) use these sites to make new friends. While they are making all these friends, 43 percent say their parents set no rules for use of social networks.

As hard as it may be to understand the latest jargon, we might want to start paying attention to who might be the new “bff.”

Read the full article here.

Manifest for the extension of the SMS slang to all the media.
This book is built as a grammar book where all the SMS slang’s rules are taught then immediately applied in the manual.

Source: http://www.clementgallet.com/

After a lot of designing and redesigning, I finally decided to go with this one. Much thanks to Jake Bergman who helped me with the design. Also a big thanks to Dusty Groves for helping me screen print the folders by hand. Here’s a sample of what they look like…