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Carrill is part of the Platte County Sheriff’s Office. He also leads the Western Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force. One of his primary missions is to track down and arrest online predators who trade in child pornography.And all these cameras only make his job more challenging. About 40 percent of the nation’s minors have access to Webcams, Carrill explained, devices for uploading live video to the Internet. About 65 percent of all children have access to cell phone cameras.

erhaps the biggest issue is that fact that kids don’t understand that when a picture is posted online, it’s nearly impossible to remove.“Once that image is taken, it’s out there forever,” Shehan said. “The No. 1 issue that we’ve seen with Webcams is teenagers self-producing pornography.”

All we can tell them is, ‘I’m sorry,’” Carrill said. “The minute the camera clicks, you no longer own that image. It has the potential to harm that person years from now.”A Webcam placed in a child’s bedroom is another bad combination, according to Shehan and Carrill. Sexual predators search for kids who use Webcams in the privacy of their own rooms, then lure or blackmail the child into providing pictures of themselves.“We see cases time after time of children who take pictures, send them to a predator and get a pornographic collage back that the predator uses to blackmail the child into providing more images,” Shehan said.

For example, miniDV cameras are not only among the new tools of self-expression, but the very act of creating personal videos with friends and creating events and key themes to shoot have become key aspects of entertainment in and of itself. To this generation, playing music via your cell phone, and movies and TV shows via your iPod are a given. Emailing is considered too old-school by many, whereas texting is outpacing cell phone calls. These things also go hand-in-hand with changes in online shopping patterns, top website preferences, communication and blogging patterns, and new habits for using social networks—not to mention the tremendous changes in preferred social networks and profile page usage patterns in general. These things are changing the paradigm of how the businesses of entertainment, communication, retail, marketing, advertising, and branding have been done in the past.

Unfortunately, as more companies pour big money into expanding their new media marketing components, as many people have discovered, the Field of Dreams theory (“if we build it, they will come”) certainly doesn’t apply when it comes to reaching savvy youth today. Popping up a site (or social network for that matter) no matter how cool it is means nothing if you can’t reach the market it’s intended for. This Report, therefore, also includes a great deal about how young people find out about new websites, communicate with others, and other forms of grassroots networking.

Overall, the Digital Lifestyle Youth Culture Profile Report 2008 not only reveals traits by target demographics, but also the growing generation gap occurring even within this generation.