What struck me most as a judge watching the video by Saad, George and David is how they captured, in lyrics, a conclusion of some of the world’s top youth online risk researchers after six years of surveying tens of thousands of young people in some two dozen countries for six years, the EU Kids Online researchers.

The Canadian winners’ video went beyond speaking to both the positive and negative sides of the Internet to touching on an aspect of humanity that the Internet itself is bringing into stark relief: that negative experiences are sometimes portals to positive outcomes. Toward the end of their two-minute video-poem, we hear, “Give an immature teenager education and create an adult. Communicate with the bully and observe the opposite result. The Internet is a composite, and the parts that are negative are what can truly make a positive.”

In 2011, the EU researchers wrote in their 2011 final report that “opportunities and risks online go hand in hand…. Most activities children do online can be beneficial or harmful, depending on the circumstances…. Resilient children are able to tackle adverse situations in a problem-focused way, and to transfer negative emotions into positive (or neutral) feelings.”

Very much like life – in fact mirroring it to a growing degree – the Internet “is a composite,” this year’s winners wisely tells us. They’re building on the fine work of last year’s grand-prize winners, Mark Eshleman and Tyler Joseph in Ohio, who literally drew a line on concrete and challenged viewers to choose the plus or minus side. But it’s not a simple binary, research and three young Canadians tell us. Nobody’s looking for negative experiences, nobody’s advocating for the minus side, but what EU Kids Online, MediaSmarts research in Canada, and so many young Internet users show us, when we pay attention, is that people often learn from or are made stronger through trial and error – and sometimes just trial. Resilience doesn’t come from avoiding risk (which is not the same thing as harm), another EU Kids Online report said early this year. “Resilience can only develop through exposure to risks or stressful events. Consequently, as children learn how to adequately cope with (online) adversities, they develop (online) resilience.”

Congratulations to all of the “What’s Your Story” winners!

Mobile natives

My ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid and I picked these two first (more to come) because – except for the myriad of texting apps that kids use as a free replacement for or tablet version of cellphone carriers’ texting services – these are the top 2 original-to-mobile apps among kids and teens. Instagram is No. 3 after Facebook and Twitter on Pew Internet’s just-released chart of teens’ social media top social-media picks for 2011-’12 (see my post about that study here). The study included surveys (quantitative research) Pew conducted last summer, so the very young Snapchat was still below the radar; but it figured very prominently in the qualitative part of the study (focus groups) conducted by Harvard’s Berkman Center just this past February. Facebook and Twitter certainly have mobile apps, but those services started on the Web. Instagram and Snapchat are native to the mobile platform.

“Digital natives” is already pretty passé, but it will really fade away when mobile moves to center stage here as much as in other parts of the world and kids of all socio-economic brackets are born into a largely mobile media environment. The trend certainly has already begun. Pew recently reported that growing numbers of teens are “cell-mostly” Internet users. If “cell” includes tablets too, we may soon have a “cell-only” generation.

Brief, straightforward information

So ConnectSafely be producing more of these guides, not only because we’ve all turned a corner with tech parenting but also because everybody deserves straightforward information on what to do if things come up in the apps and services of what I call pro-social media companies (see this) – the services that actually offer safety and privacy features in these early days of mobile socializing. Because human beings often fear what they don’t understand; because parents have natural concerns about kids and technology in fast-forward times, and because the news reports only the worst cases – the exception to the rule – we hope these guides put a little more weight on the information and communication side of the balance. Please check them out and let us know what you think!

From Pew Internet Project’s May 2013 study, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy”

Pew turned up a lot of intelligence on teens’ part, where safety, privacy and reputation management are concerned, bearing out findings in Canada last fall. Here are some key findings of this important research, Pew’s first in-depth look at teens’ online privacy since 2007:

• “The frequency of teen social media usage may have reached a plateau” – the number of teens social media users who check their pages “‘several times a day’ hasn’t changed in any significant way since 2011,” Pew says.
• Teens’ Twitter use is up significantly, from 16% of US 12-to-17-year-olds in 2011 to nearly a quarter (24%) now, and African American teens use Twitter significantly more than white teens – 39% vs. 23%, respectively.
• “The typical (median) teen Facebook user has 300 friends, while the typical teen Twitter user has 79 followers” (and Pew found that teens “don’t always think of Twitter as a social networking site,” though the authors didn’t say what they do think Twitter is).
• Online mirrors offline: “Teens’ Facebook friendship networks largely mirror their offline networks” (which should further reduce the speculative “stranger danger” fears of the previous decade and its national task forces [see this]). “Unwanted contact from strangers is relatively uncommon, but 17% of online teens report some kind of contact that made them feel scared or uncomfortable,” Pew said, adding in a footnote, thought that its question did not reference sexual solicitations, so respondents could’ve been referring to a wide array of concerning behaviors or interactions.
• A whopping 70% of teen Facebook users say they’re friends with their parents on FB, and 91% of teen Facebook users are friends with members of their extended family.
• Their use of Facebook is “waning.”
• We knew this, but it’s important confirmation: “60% of teen Facebook users keep their profiles private [note that Pew's not just saying that 60% use privacy settings], and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings.” On Twitter, thought, nearly two-thirds (64%) of teens tweet publicly, which is typical for adult Twitter users too.
• “Teens take other steps to shape their reputation, manage their networks, and mask information 
they don’t want others to know: 74% of teen social media users have deleted people from their 
network or friends list”; 58% “share inside jokes or cloak their messages in some way” (see this about “social steganography” from researcher danah boyd); 26% post false information like a fake name, age, or location to help protect their privacy (see this about “fictionalizing profiles” as a safety measure).
• Teens with larger friend networks on Facebook also use more social apps and services other than Facebook. They also share more information and media while at the same time show more care with “profile pruning” and reputation management.
• Teens’ concern about advertisers’ access to their information is low: “just 9% say they are ‘very’ concerned”; 40% are somewhat *or* very concerned, while 81% of parents are somewhat or very concerned about this for their children. Pew adds that “teens who are concerned about third-party access to their personal information are also more likely to engage in online reputation management.”

So let’s zoom in on the reasons teens interviewed in focus groups gave Pew for why they’re using Facebook less and consider some takeaways:

1. “The increase in adult presence”: The takeaway we might consider is that trying to monitor teens’ activities by setting up an account in every online service and app they use in a kind of whack-a-mole approach to tech parenting won’t ultimately keep parents abreast of their kids’ digital activities for the simple reason that the more we monitor, the more likely they are to move on. It’ll get harder and harder, too, because they aren’t moving on to a single new service (the way in the last decade Facebook replace MySpace as the No. 1 social network site). Today, digital socializing is expanding and diversifying because it’s now on the mobile platform at least as much as the Web. It looks like digital monitoring and “parental controls” are being replaced by good old-fashioned communication between parent and child about how they use digital devices and spaces (we ConnectSafely folk offer discussion points in two of those spaces with our new parents’ guides to Snapchat and Instagram).
2. “People sharing excessively”: Note how smart Pew’s respondents are to find that annoying! What this indicates is that protective social norms are developing – teens are viewing it less and less socially acceptable to overshare. Adults might find it comforting to see this; it’s online safety in action at the grassroots level. And I hope parents will increasingly understand and acknowledge the protective power of social norms among young people every bit as much as among adults.
3. “Stressful ‘drama’”: This is one reason why, in other reports, young people are saying they’re moving to Snapchat and other perishable media services: drama avoidance (see this). If the photos and videos vanish in 10 seconds or less, there’s no chance posturing (or “posing”), no self-presentation, “claiming,” or grandstanding. Drama can’t build. Sharing becomes just fun, spontaneous and, well, gone in a few seconds. What a relief, huh? Drama can’t build (or at least drama queens and kings have to work a lot harder), people can let down their guard a little (a little), and reputation management becomes a little less of an issue.

“One of the most striking themes that surfaced through the Berkman focus groups this spring,” the authors write (referring to their co-authors at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society), “was the sense of a social burden teens associated with Facebook. While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own.” Thus their growing interest in the mobile platform. Facebook and its Instagram app are mobile, too, but so are hundreds of thousands of other apps offering at least thousands of different uses. Teens’ digital social activities, from the friendship-driven to the interest-driven kinds*, are diversifying and segmenting. That makes for fascinating conversations with our children and their peers. Seriously, there is so much to learn about them now in kinder, more respectful, less intrusive ways than through impersonal monitoring software and “parental controls.”

*For more on friendship- and interest-driven social networking, see the 2010 MIT Press book Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out (pdf).

Related links

• Social media researcher danah boyd on the Pew study, highlighting important findings on race distinctions and privacy practices (thanks to Tim Lordan of the Internet Education Foundation for pointing this out)
• My ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid’s coverage of this study
• “Young people’s own tactics for public-image management online”
• “Smart public-image management in social media”
• “Australian teen panelists on social media: Meaty insights”
• “Computer-based socializing likely to have peaked”
• Early insights on “How teens view ‘the drama’” in September 2011

A Sameer “selfie” in Instagram (reminds me–I need to follow him!)

This is just one way parents can help kids make sure they’re in control of their technology use and not the other way around. “I know you want to gain more and more followers … but amassing more and more followers is a never-ending pursuit,” blogs my friend Sameer Hinduja, professor, researcher and co-founder of the Cyberbullying Research Center, who blogs about a lot of things besides cyberbullying (this post isn’t about that). “First you were so happy when you got a few likes to a picture you uploaded. Then you weren’t happy until you got double-digit likes. Now you want triple-digit likes. And multiple comments. And it kind of bums you out when it doesn’t happen. This is madness, and there is no end to this. It’s never going to be enough, and you are going to waste so much of your life this way.”

Good likes, superficial likes, creepy likes

Why is it such a waste? For one thing, Sameer adds, “people just quickly scroll through hundreds of pictures when they check their phone in moments of boredom (because they are, like you, often following hundreds of people), and just touch each one to like them. Liking a photo on Instagram is a quick, relatively thoughtless piece of interaction that often doesn’t mean much at all.” Of course it also depends on who does the liking, but usually it only marginally suggests actual interest in the photos and – if a young person’s putting a lot of “selfies” (self-portraits) on display – it could lead to the wrong kind of interest, at least as far as parents are concerned. But does the kid himself or herself really want to attract creepy interest? That might be something to stop and think out loud about together. Everybody likes a little attention sometimes, but not the kind that focuses purely on appearance, right? If the answer is yes, there are other things to talk about – see this. If the answer is, “that photo (or comment) isn’t about that, Dad/Mom,” then ask for the context, find out more, because there usually is context people outside the peer group don’t understand. [This kind of reflective communication about an activity is called experiential learning and practices the mindfulness that is protective in social settings online and offline.]

“Please do not get caught up in [leveling up with likes]. It seriously makes me sad when I see so many teens who do,” Sameer writes. “Your identity cannot be wrapped up in the number of times you are noticed, liked or validated in Instagram” or any social media service.

Gamification vs. what’s really rewarding

Ok, so here’s where “gamification” comes in (going a little deeper if parents and educators are interested): What Sameer is saying, basically, is that likes can’t ultimately satisfy us because they create the desire for MORE. They’re about addiction not satisfaction, being controlled not in control (as in games controlling players, not the other way around). This gets to the question people have about whether we or our technologies are in the driver’s seat. Likes, scores, +1′s, badges, etc. are external rewards. Syracuse University media professor Scott Nicholson, who’s been studying motivation and media, makes an important distinction between external (the academic term is “extrinsic”) rewards, the rewards of gamification, and the internal or intrinsic rewards of what he calls “meaningful gamification.” Meaningful is what ultimately satisfies and motivates (meaningful engagement is also a safety factor, as are agency and community – see the last bullet in Related links). Young people, parents, educators, and media companies need to be talking and thinking together more about intrinsic rewards – what constitutes meaningful participation.

Meaningful gamification, Nicholson says, is about agency or autonomy, mastery, and purpose (the words Daniel Pink uses too, in his best-selling book Drive; other words people use are “choice,” “relevance” and “meaningfulness”*). Parents can ask their kids (and themselves): Isn’t THAT what we really want – e.g., meaningful connections, real friendship more than likes, to be appreciated for who we are at least as much as what we look like? An intrinsic reward is very individual, but Pink describes it generally as something that delivers on “the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

We see kids working toward that kind of reward all the time – working for causes they care about deeply. They seek it out in games too, sometimes because it’s easier to find “epic meaning,” as game designer Jane McGonigal, PhD, puts it, in game worlds than in classrooms and everyday life. What if it were easier to seek and pursue epic meaning in everyday life? How can parents, educators and media companies help with that? [I think social media, with its allowance of progressive engagement – hanging out, messing around, and geeking out – are making it possible for young people to explore for greater meaning in their lives (see the book of that title from MIT Press).]

Make way for agency, mastery, purpose

Certainly meaning doesn’t always have to be epic. There’s meaningfulness and learning in play, and playfulness is vital too, especially in digital media, which we learn as we go, by messing around with it. It’s just important not to be played – by people, media, or technology – regardless of our age, and for adults not to view youth merely as people who can be played, as potential victims or “game addicts.” Parents, kids, schools, social media companies can think together about how to focus at least as much on what supports autonomy or agency in youth (what empowers them as much as protects them) in programs that are relevant and meaningful to them – rather than just gamifying their lives, education, and digital media use. There’s something inherently disrespectful and unmotivating about believing or sending the message that the only way they’ll engage is if we gamify the experience. If we want kids to have control over their tech and media, we have to start giving them that control – treat them as active agents for their own good and that of their friends, families, communities (online and offline), talk with them about how that happens in their lives, and give them opportunities to define and pursue what’s meaningful to them.

Related links

• *A word about 21st-century learning (and preparing our kids for life): Daniel Pink says that, “for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery and purpose.” I say that’s the main upgrade education needs too – not gamification per se, or flipped classrooms, or any other single “solution,” but agency, competence and meaning/relevance/purpose for students. THIS is what prepares them for learning and working creatively in a rapidly changing environment. This is 21st-century learning.
• About ed tech: Of course none of the above is to say there shouldn’t be digital games or even extrinsic rewards in school! (Heck, grades are basically extrinsic rewards, though they’ve come to have a lot of meaning for some people.) It’s not either/or. It’s possible there’s an extrinsic-to-intrinsic spectrum, and what’s meaningful for some isn’t for others. And having digital games and environments in school can greatly increase student engagement and learning – we just all need to think about where digital learning tools and games like these fall in the intrinsic-to-extrinsic spectrum (in each context: in your classroom, our family, our school, at this point in time). Meaningful is individual, situational, and contextual.
• On obsessing about likes, some more perspective
• Nicholson in long form: The link I gave you above to a video by Prof. Scott Nicholson at Syracuse University is a little 9-min. introduction to the ideas. Here‘s a longer-form version (90 min.)
• “Challenging the idea that games can’t be fun AND meaningful”
• Example of meaningful gaming in school (to the students, their teacher, their parents and the school): “Mining Minecraft”: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, guest posts from teacher Marianne Malmstrom in New Jersey
• On Meaningful gamification and Internet safety

And the squished-ness feeling is mutual, she points out, in a lot of ways. It isn’t just the embarrassing comments of parents when they forget children’s whole peer groups can see them, including peers who could use the embarrassing comments against their kids. The article’s even more about the TMI feeling parents get too – not just about their children’s peers, those sweet little kids they knew 10 years ago but also just typical teenage stuff that we never wanted our parents to see all the time when we were teens – stuff that’s completely normative as well as stuff that tempts parents over and over again to intervene, when there really are some things our children need to work out themselves so they can build resilience. It’s a delicate balance we’re being asked to strike, and it’s not easy to be on a tightrope all the time.

So when is too much information really a problem, you might ask? Well…

• When we find ourselves increasingly stressed out by what we see in this big “bay window” on our children’s lives
• When we let it suggest to us that problems are worse than they really are and we overreact (e.g., when we believe news reports that there’s a cyberbullying epidemic and there isn’t by any stretch of the imagination)
• When we let it suggest that young people, especially our own children, are worse than they really are (see the awful cover of Time’s May 20 issue – awful except for the last line “Why they’ll save us all,” which is probably much more predictive than the rest of it)
• When the tsunami of information decreases our respect and increases our fears for our children – and it’s the respect that encourages them more than anything to be the human beings they want to be.

Having said all that, the article might actually be TMI about TMI, since this is only the Facebook-on-the-Web phase – one that’s ending. We’re now moving to the mobile phase in which we’ll increasingly feel we don’t know enough (maybe this is some sort of cosmic correction for parental TMI!), where the good news is, we’ll have to keep the lines of face-to-face communication with our children wide-open.

Related links

• “Peering thoughtfully through this window into our kids’ lives”
• “Private vs. public parenting (& a new Pew study)”
• “It’s time to outgrow the ‘kids, these days’ cliché”
• “The meta-trend behind the teen (& everybody) mobile trend”
• “Study on long-neglected factor in Net safety: Resilience”
• “Parenting or (digital) public humiliation?”
• “Does tracking our kids’ every move make them safer?”

Along with her qualitative research on sexting among 16-to-25-year-olds, Nina looked at news reporting on the subject. She analyzed coverage in 738 newspaper articles in the Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US published during 2009. Here are some of her findings, which she presented in a talk I heard her give in Sydney this past March:

• Heterosexual bias: “Not one mentioned homosexual sexting. This is despite the fact that taking and sharing nude images is an established courtship practice within many parts of the gay community and that apps such as Grindr have popularized the practice considerably.
• Gender bias: “Not one specifically mentioned teen boys “‘ruining their reputations,’ although this was a commonly stated concern for girls. Numerous studies show that teen boys are producing images at almost the same rate as teen girls. While it is true that girls’ images get down-streamed (forwarded on) more often than those of boys, the rate of production of boys images is by no means trivial.”
• Racial bias: “Virtually all the photos associated with these stories featured white teenagers: particularly, slender, white, attractive teen girls.” If you only saw the newspaper photos, Nina said, “you would be forgiven for thinking that sexting was exclusively a “hot white girl phenomenon. This of course is not the case.” As a University of Texas study of sexting among Latino and African American 10-graders found that 20% of black and Hispanic teens have sent a sext and 30% have received one <http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=sexting-habits-of-teens-13-03-07>.
• “Purity vs. prospects”: The coverage indicated that concerns about sexting “tend to break down along clear gender lines. For girls, the main concerns were that sexting could lead to shame, humiliation, embarrassment, loss of reputation, bullying and regret. For boys, the fears tended to revolve around the belief that sexting could lead to prosecution or sex-offender registration and that this in turn could affect future prospects (particularly in terms of college admission and employment).”

The coverage pointed to a “problematic double standard” whereby “the risks for girls are discussed in relation to privacy and a female’s moral reputation, while the risks around boys are framed in terms of a boy’s legal standing as a public citizen.” Nina added that the sexting coverage reflected an odd blend of “paternalistic concern” for and “prurient interest” in the particular demographic of teenagers featured in photos and cases covered.

All in all, what her analysis indicated to her is that “the panic around sexting is highly scripted and conforms to a predictable narrative where girls are reduced to victims or sluts, boys are assumed to be aggressors, and same sex couples get ignored all together,” she wrote. That resonates with findings in the last decade by researchers Justine Cassell and Meg Kramer, then at Northwestern University, and reported in “High Tech or High Risk: Moral Panics about Girls Online.” In it Cassell and Kramer write, “The myth of girls’ vulnerability online has unfortunate consequences, because it may result in positioning girls as disempowered with respect to technology.” And I would add: disempowered in general. And if girls are simplistically represented as potential victims, what message does that send about boys?

These are the kinds of questions that fuel good media literacy discussions at home and school – discussions that would serve both boys and girls well if they analyze news coverage for assumptions and biases about both sexes, as well as young people in general.

This is the last post of a three-part series on youth sexting. Here are Part 1 on the motivation spectrum and Part 2 on recommendations for sound education around sexual health and ethics.

Young people she interviewed told her they’d never do such a thing. One invoked the Golden Rule as a reason why she’d never do such a thing, another pointed out the “exploitation” or “cheating” that nonconsensual forwarding would represent. A high school student I spoke with recently said, “Nice kids would never do that.” There is growing evidence that young people already have in place preventive or protective social around digital photography of all kinds, including sexually related imagery.

Advanced moral reasoning among sexters

Going through her interview results, Nina thought of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development because most of the answers from the “non-forwarding group” in her sample “fit somewhere between stages 3-6,” she told me. “No one [emphasis hers] mentioned anything that would actually fit into stage 1 or 2.” A Stage 1 or 2 answer would be the response that virtually all anti-sexting education has been aimed at to date: something like “I don’t want to get prosecuted/charged with child porn offenses” or “She’d never send me another nude again” – responses that are only about consequences for oneself, not the other person(s). Nina’s point, she wrote me, “is to illustrate that the ‘non-forwarders’ are actually highly capable of advanced moral reasoning. We shouldn’t assume that young people are not capable of this and can only be engaged in education around the laws.”

That should be underscored: We shouldn’t assume that young people aren’t capable of caring about the consequences of their actions for their peers. Or at least we shouldn’t build educational campaigns based on such an assumption. What kind of message would such an educational campaign send to young people?

Risky sexting correlates with other risk factors

“I think,” Nina continued, “young people are actually doing a pretty good job most of the time of developing and negotiating what those values are. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule but, very often, when you find that an individual is out to humiliate or hurt others, there are all sorts of other things (and risk factors) going on in that young person’s life.”

Which raises two questions for educators to consider: 1) If there are other risk factors in a person’s life, how effective would education be if aimed strictly at a behavior that is likely more symptomatic than the root problem? 2) How effective is it to develop education that fails to acknowledge the intelligence or wisdom demonstrated by most of the intended recipients of that education?

Sexting as individual as sex

So here are Nina’s own take-aways about young people who engage in sexting from interviews she has conducted so far: They have a wide range of views, values and experiences around sexting; probably parallel to sexuality in general, “their reasons for sexting are highly diverse and individual”; they “have very different views of consensual vs. non-consensual sexting”; and “they are eager, able and willing to discuss the issue provided it is done in a safe, respectful space.”

Respect is key. One of the problems that has hampered digital-risk-prevention education to date is that adults “do not recognize or celebrate the competencies young people bring to these discussions,” Nina wrote. I wholeheartedly agree.

For effective education

Her recommendations on how to talk with young people about “nudes” or “selfies” is that the conversations be…

• “Pro-active (not reactive)
• “Evidenced-based
• “Ongoing, not one-offs (like a single school assembly or class)
• “Gender-inclusive (not heteronormative)
• “Free from demonizing technology or young people
• “Build on young people’s strengths and ethical decisionmaking ability
• “Developed in consultation with young people”

This is the 2nd part of a series about Nina Funnell’s work. Part 1 is here. Next: Biases in news media coverage of sexting (which distract from the development of sound, evidence-based education around sexual health and ethics)

Related links

For more on ethics in digital media see “Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Dialogue on the Ethics of Digital Life” and “Morality and ethics behind the screen: Young people’s perspectives on digital life.”

Until 2011, when Janis Wolak and David Finkelhor at the University of New Hampshire published the first typology of sexting, it was seen and treated as a single undifferentiated and mainly illegal practice. Wolak and Finkelhor significantly advanced understanding of the practice when they created two categories of “youth‐produced sexual images” – “Aggravated” and “Experimental” – based on their review of “550 cases obtained from a national survey of law enforcement agencies” (for more, see this post). The cases all involved “images of minors created by minors that could qualify as child pornography under applicable criminal statutes.”

This was a major step forward because 1) it opened up thought to the idea that sexting isn’t just deviant or criminal behavior and 2) it opened up “experimental” or consensual sexting as an important new area of study. Still, it’s helpful to note that Wolak and Finkelhor’s study was of sexting cases that involved law enforcement, which both makes it all the more significant that the “experimental” category emerged and makes it all the more important to understand that category better (and possibly rename it) by studying it outside the context of criminal law.

Out of the crime context

I’d say the next step in our collective understanding of sexting was psychology professor Elizabeth Englander’s finding that much of the harmful kind of sexting is coercive, and “any discussion of coercive sexting should be made in the context of sexual harassment,” she reported in a study she published last year (see this) – so we need to educate young people about what sexual harassment is in the digital age so they can protect themselves better not just from prosecution or a betrayal of trust but also from sexual harassment and manipulation.

But it’s equally important for parents and educators to understand that not all sexting is harmful – or even experimental. More and more, it’s also just the latest way people of all ages use imagery in consensual sexual activity. So we need to understand sexting better in the context of sexual health and adolescent development, including healthy risk-taking (see this from Lynn Ponton, MD).

Sexual health & healthy risk-taking

So now the vital next phase: Nina is one of the researchers doing the important work of filling in the picture on the “experimental” side (though she found the word to be problematic) through interviews with people who engage in it. She’s talking with teens and adults mostly ages 16-25, but some older (“into their 60s”), she said, “both male and female, and a mix of heterosexual, bisexual and same-sex-attracted.” This qualitative research will go into a book she’s working on.

What she has found is that sexting involves a broad spectrum of motivations. “Based on my interviews with young people, I’ve found that the range of motives around sexting is as complex and multifaceted as you would expect to find in relation to any other sexual activity,” Nina wrote me in an email after her talk, and not all the motivations are sexual, she added.

The motivation spectrum

Among the motivations she’s heard from interviewees are: “pushing boundaries” (in games like “Truth or Dare” [see Related links below]); “group identity bonding (sharing images in a group as a ‘trust game’ in order to develop a sense of group solidarity)”; “testing out one’s desirability or sexual power with either a stranger or a prospective partner”; flirting, foreplay (turned up by Pew Internet in 2009 – see this), or a purely digital sexual activity in its own right [in person or online]; a way for partners in a long-distance relationship to stay connected; safety for LGBT partners who haven’t yet come out; and safety for cultural or religious reasons (when physical contact is not allowed before marriage).

“We shouldn’t ever make assumptions about why a young person might engage in a particular behavior, because their reasons are highly diverse and individual,” Nina wrote. They can also be highly localized.

Why better understanding helps

“In a particular school, you might get one particular group of 8-10 boys who all share nude images of girls without consent as a way of ‘bonding’ [what Wolak and Finkelhor would probably call "aggravated sexting"] and, while that is accepted within their micro group, meanwhile the rest of the students [in their class] are dead opposed to it.” [She's talking about the overall protective social norms of the larger community (which deserve acknowledgment and support from adults) around an anti-social group dynamic).]

“That sort of thing to me demonstrates how values and ‘unwritten rules’ are negotiated at a very, very localized level,” Nina added, pointing to the challenge of educators: that “top-down approaches would be unlikely to generate much behavioral change for those 8-10 individuals.” By “top-down approaches,” she’s referring to general anti-sexting campaigns and directives from authorities. “The spectrum of motivations must be better understood before we can develop meaningful educational resources,” she wrote.

The vast majority of teens already have plenty of positive social norms in place – norms they’ve been exposed to all their lives, starting in their families and practiced at school, online, wherever they interact. The adults in their lives will be much better-equipped to guide them if we understand that practices such as sexting aren’t single undifferentiated new “threats” but rather spectrums of tech-related behaviors just as affected by social norms as social experiences that have nothing to do with technology. And we’ll also be much better able to guide them – and to enlist their help when problems arise – if we acknowledge and support the intelligent norms and values they are already practicing.

A little more on the researcher I feature in this post: Nina Funnell was awarded the Australian Human Rights Commission award in 2010 and was a finalist for Young Australian of The Year for her work in sexual violence prevention. She contributed to the book Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry and is currently working on a book about sexting.

Next: Some thoughts for better youth education on sexting

Related links

• Here’s a commentary by Nina Funnell in the Sydney Morning Herald
• Some very intelligent comments on sexting by a panel of Australian high school students
• “Don’t hype sexting risks to teens: Study”
• “Another high-profile sexting study: Takeaways for parents”
• “Sexting much rarer than thought to be”
• My 2009 post about US research: Sexting: New study & the ‘truth or date’ scenario”

It’s not all sweetness and light, certainly. Different users have different uses, depending on them, the situation, and the time of day. What I try to get across in talks is that how people use social media is…

• Individual (like the way we live our lives and relate to others, based on who we are)
• Situational (the time factor, based on the situation in the moment[s] of use)
• Contextual (the social and environmental conditions around us and the people with whom we’re interacting)

…but Instagram has opened my eyes to how fun and artful social media can be (social media that weren’t specifically designed as games, anyway).

More conversation than story

Ok, so why am I talking about the fun and creativity? Because, in keeping with the nature of the app, Instagram is handling this new feature announcement in a creative way. It’s all about story, the company says in its blog about “Photos of You” – Instagram is about “bringing the stories behind your photos to life. Your captions and hashtags capture the ‘what?’,” your Photo Map the “where?” and now tagging (which Instagram just calls “adding” someone) the “who?”

I think that makes sense, and it’s a creative product developer’s narrative but, from watching kids in Instagram, I don’t actually think it’s the whole story, if you will. Because for young people, there aren’t just stories behind photos, as in photography as a way of documenting something. Sure, it does that, but for teens the photos are also parts of conversations. They’re not just documenting a relationship or the process of growing up, for example; they’re more a part of those things, part of the process, than ever before – part of relationship creation, artistic creation, self-creation, narrative creation, etc. They’re also part of a mix-media mashup of expression sometimes.

What “Photos of You” is

So about the “Photos of You” feature. It’s tagging (like on Facebook, which owns Instagram), and it’s also a new section of one’s Instagram profile that just has, well, photos of you, posted by you or others. So it’s also a convenient way to see how one is represented on Instagram – unless someone with a private profile posts a photo of you and you’re not following that person. But, as on Twitter, private profiles are rare among young Instagram users because it’s also kind of a game to see how many followers one can amass and how many likes one’s photos can get (where that lightness comes in). Some parents insist on their kids keeping their accounts private as a kind of trial or first phase. That’s not a bad idea, but it could also defeat the whole purpose of Instagram for some peer groups and create conditions for the digital version of social marginalization, so it’s good to really listen to our kids about why and how they and their friends use digital social tools.

Some good privacy features that come with “Photos of You” are: you can untag yourself, you can hide photos of you from your profile, and you can approve photos of you before they appear in your profile by choosing “Add manually” after tapping on the little gear icon (Instagram users will show you how). For much more on how it all works, see my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid’s description at Forbes.com.

4th- and 5th-graders in Instagram

As for the “why” of telling you all this, well, Instagram is so fun that it’s aging down. But don’t take it from me. Take if from my friend Trudy Ludwig the award-winning children’s author who talks to a lot of kids in a lot of schools. She told some colleagues in an email, “It’s amazing, really, how many elementary school kids are using Instagram. When I ask 3rd-to-5th graders how many use it, there is literally a collective and loud ‘Oh yeah!!!’ from the audience, with at least 50% of the hands instantly shooting up when I ask this” – more 4th and 5th graders than 3rd-graders, she later told me on the phone. “And while they’re raising their hands in the air,” she added, “they’re chatting out loud with one another about how much they love the app. You should see the looks on the teachers’ faces when they see the kids’ responses to this question.”

It’s good for parents and educators of kids under 13 to know about kids’ favorite social and creative tools. Instagram was not designed for and officially does not allow people under 13, but there’s nothing inherently inappropriate about the app for children. It’s just that not all kids (or adults, for that matter) are developmentally ready to use the app in a consistently fun, creative, and civil way that’s appropriate for them and their peers. Whether your kids are is up to you and them, but have a little fun as you figure it out together!

Related links

• “Stickers, emoji & other social-media conversation add-ons”
• “App ambition: Fun media-sharing for small social circles, planet-wide”
• “Less is more for mobile teens”
• “Consider the possibility of kids’ self-regulation of digital media”

“I have been liaising with child protection practitioners in the UK to raise awareness of this issue, unfortunately the media have been spreading serious mistruths about the site, which is really unhelpful!! You CAN report abuse on the site, and you can also turn off the anonymous element. I have a direct contact with Mark Terebin and his team, and despite dozens of calls from concerned parents, I have not seen one example of the moderators not responding appropriately. They also work proactively with the cyber-crime department in Latvia who have no concerns about their handling of abuse. I am not in any way endorsing the site, it is a total breeding ground for hate speak, bullying and highly sexualized content … but I think it is really important that we are spreading the positive safety messages rather than the negative media version.” I agree with Laura and thank her for reaching out.