Several story highlights in the coming week, beginning with Israeli author Guy Hasson‘s latest: Generation E: The Emoticon Generation, over at Midnight East.
Six months ago, I snuck into my fifteen-year-old daughter’s room when she was asleep, ‘borrowed’ her iPhone, and started checking up on everything she’s been up to.
It was late at night, and I’d just seen Brian Williams profile pedophiles on the web. They’re out there, talking to teenagers anonymously, luring them away from their computers and into meetings in the physical world. Parents have no idea what their teenagers are doing on the web. And, yes, Williams gave us the money line, “Do you know what your kids are up to?”
The path from there to exercising my parental right to violate my daughter’s underage privacy was short: five minutes, all told.
Here’s what I discovered. For the last two weeks she has been getting literally tens of thousands of different-colored exclamation marks and tens of thousands of little moon-shaped icons on her iPhone from almost all her contacts. Thousands of the moon icons were half-moons, thousands were quarter-moons, thousands more were eighth-moons, and the rest were even smaller than that. At the same time, she had been sending the same enigmatic moon icons and strangely-colored exclamation marks back to almost all her contacts. By. The. Tens. Of. Thousands.
Do you know what the moon icons mean or why exclamation marks have colors? I certainly didn’t. – continue reading.
Meshuggener Smiley created by Refael Chalfine for Generation E.
The World SF Blog 