PBS Frontline's 'Digital Nation': Presenting our generation with a crucial choice

Seems to me, Gever Tully's Tinkering School would be the perfect antidote for all the concern about kids and digital media expressed in PBS Frontline's "Digital Nation" – hands-on problem-solving, lots of tools, collaboratively learning by doing, giving kids time to work the problem, celebrating and analyzing failures, teaching that success is embedded in the process (watch his TED Talk about this). The thing is, so much of that sort of tinkering is being done by kids using the very digital media and technologies that are the focus of our fears. But more on that in a minute.

This time, Frontline, which airs on PBS this Tuesday night, is depicting the personal explorations of Digital Nation's writers themselves, those of Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff, both parents. Last time, in 2008's "Growing Up Online," the stories were more those of the documentary's subjects. It's as if Dretzin, the producer of both Growing Up Online and Digital Nation, was shaken by what her reporting turned up in the last project. Thoughtful journalist/anthropologist that she is, she went in-depth and looked at all sides of those teens' stories, presenting the most balanced picture I'd seen anywhere to that point, having interviewed leading social-media researchers such as C.J. Pasco and danah boyd for depth and perspective.

In Digital Nation, at least the preview version I saw this past weekend, it seems the main story is two parents' concerns. We're on a 90-minute journey with them, wending our way through skillfully told vignettes (about everything from a South Korean boy at videogame-addiction camp to the US Army's shopping-mall-based videogame arcade/ recruiting center to a corporation's daily multinational staff meetings in a virtual world) and thought-provoking interviews, again with top academics (e.g., MIT's Sherry Turkle, USC's Henry Jenkins, Arizona State's James Paul Gee, educator Katie Salen, Emory's Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, and Marc Prensky, who coined the term "digital natives"). Important, if not particularly new, questions are raised – for example, about multitasking, etiquette, addiction, alienation, and the blurring of virtual and real.

Documenting an angst-ridden point in history?

Certainly we hear Rushkoff when he says "we need to know if we're tinkering with something more essential than we realize ... what it means to be a human being." But we also hear from scholars who have been studying that question very closely for years that, with societal and technological change, some things have always been lost and some gained. Prensky says on camera that "we confuse the best ways of doing something once [in our past] with the best ways of doing something forever." That's what so many of us are doing. Perhaps Dretzin and Rushkoff are Everyman, or Everyparent, and Digital Nation is documenting a point in history – here in the middle of this profound media shift Earth is experiencing – when we're fearing and mourning what's being lost a lot more than we're seeking and considering what is being gained.

Did the writers really hear James Paul Gee, when, in their interview with him, he told of how, in virtual worlds and multiplayer games, young people function in teams in which "everybody is an expert in something but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else's; they know how to understand the other person's expertise so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world"? That's what happens for home-schooled students and the teacher members of the Cognitive Dissonance guild in World of Warcraft – and with students at school on curriculum-grounded "quests" in an educational virtual world called Quest Atlantis developed by the University of Indiana School of Education.

Did they hear Gee when he said we have two school systems now – traditional school, fixated on delivering content via textbooks, and the informal school system of social media, where kids are problem-solving, researching, producing, etc. on their own because social media are largely blocked from schools?

How about Katie Salen – professor, director of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design, and executive director of the Institute of Play – when she suggests on the show itself that seeing young people's game-based learning and play only through the lens of our old media environment, where virtual worlds didn't exist, may be somewhat myopic for us and limiting for our children? (See "From chalk 'n' talk to learning by doing" about Quest to Learn, a new school of which the Institute of Play is a founding partner.)

Stick with 'chalk 'n' talk' or open our minds?

For our children's sake, we really need to dig past the legitimate but relentless, visceral, and politically correct questions with which all parents and mass-media natives struggle and seriously consider what these scholars are saying. And not only them! I can't wait to see what Digital Nation's producers come up with next, now that the work of more than two dozen social-media scholars – Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out – has been released by MIT Press. It's a mother lode of stories about how young people learn in and with new media.

Which brings me back to tinkering. I got that word from Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation Yes, who presented a workshop about it at Educon, a tech educators' conference, this past weekend. Reading through her past posts about it, in addition to references to Gever Tully, I found a profound 10-minute video interview with John Seely Brown, visiting professor at USC and former director of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), about using digital technology to bring collaborative "tinkering" back to school. Digital Nation, please look into this next!...

Collaborative tinkering & social capital for kids

In the interview, Brown said: "I think we're moving into quite a different kind of world, one in which change is omnipresent, where we're beginning to find ways to bootstrap our own knowledge, tinker with ideas around us, find things we don't know, ask good questions, and be open to criticism." He calls for peer-based, collaborative learning, "because, from the sharing you begin to see how other kids use what you just created. Kids learn from each other as much as from an authority or mentor."

Brown talks about how to make school responsive to the pace of change and suggests thinking of schools in terms of "distributed communities of practice," which digital-technology learning tools allow. "With these powerful tools with which to craft things, tinkering has really come back big time.... This networked world is an open-source world, where I can make something, pass it back to the community, and have that community do new things with it." This is not just a shift for media or even education, but for identity and self-worth: "In earlier decades, a lot of kids grew up thinking, I am what I'm wearing, how I dress, what my parents own; my identity came from those material possessions. Just maybe we're entering a world where ... a sense of identity starts to get constructed for myself based on what I have done, what I have created, and others have built on, passed on to others, and they have been able to do wondrous things with as well. A whole new sense of reputational capital and social capital is on the move...."

Related links

"digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier" - the show's main page (the full 90-min show can be watched online right now here)

A review of Digital Nation by media professor Henry Jenkins (who appeared in Digital Nation and taught at MIT for 20 years, until moving to USC six months ago) offering a different take on "killer paragraphs" and multitasking MIT students (including his own)

The perspective of Duke University English professor Cathy Davidson, who wrote a book about the 19th-century panic over the destructive effect of novels on children

"PBS documentary questions tech and our future," by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid

"Are you an Internet optimist or pessimist?: The great debate over technology's impact on society," by Adam Thierer

Of "Dangerism" at The Tinkering School blog

"Net safety: How social networks can be protective," where I blog about how James Paul Gee's Digital Nation interview got me to thinking about how what I call "the guild effect" – or online community social norming and self-policing – will be an increasingly key element of online safety going forward

Digital Nation interview: My thoughts on parenting our digital-age kids

The reality TV of school: Helping our kids with tech-assisted 24/7 school drama

My review of "Growing Up Online" two years ago – maybe a little biased; it's good I wasn't interviewed for Digital Nation

Net safety: How social networks can be protective

Hmm. It's arresting to think about what Stewart Wolf, M.D. – discovered and presented at medical conferences, as told by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers – in the context of social media and online safety today. Back in the 1950s, he found a community in Pennsylvania statistically very free of the No. 1 medical concern of the time, heart disease, and looked into what was going on there. When Wolf presented his research, he found that his skeptical colleagues "weren't thinking about health in terms of community [emphasis Gladwell's]." Now sub in (online) "safety" for "health": "Wolf and [his co-researcher, sociologist John] Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were...."

Now add the online piece
A child's (anybody's) safety and wellbeing have a lot to do with his community offline and online, since the research shows that our online social networks are largely our offline ones.

Almost echoing Dr. Wolf, USATODAY reports that, "for the most part, being part of a social network is good for you.... For example, a study in this month's Scientific American Mind finds that social support and social networking offer benefits, from additional resilience to greater life satisfaction to reducing the risk of health problems. Other studies in the past two years have found that feeling like a part of a larger group helps in stroke recovery and memory retention and boosts overall well-being." And the co-authors of a new book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, report that so much of what we think of as individual, e.g., body shape, politics, happiness, are really "collective phenomena."

About peer groups, not technology
The USATODAY piece is balanced, pointing to author and Iowa State University prof. Michael Bugeja's concern that we're not looking at online social networks enough from a computer-science perspective. But what we're addressing in the field of youth online safety is much more about young people's interests, social groups, and home and school environments than about computer science – as pointed out in last year's Internet Safety Technical Task Force review of Net-safety research through last year.

The studies in the USATODAY article that look at community are more helpful to moving the youth-risk discussion forward, suggesting that we consider three things: the impact of an individual's community (online and offline) on his or her well-being; how the individual affects the community; and how the community functions and addresses problems for its members (as a group of people, not a site or technology).

The guild effect
On that third item, author and USC media professor Henry Jenkins made the point at our Online Safety & Technology Task Force meeting in Washington this month that online communities themselves tend to shape members' behavior to protective effect, e.g., through social norming or influencing, behavior modeling, and peer pressure or ostracism. Educators who play World of Warcraft tell me this community self-regulation certainly happens in the "guilds" of that massively multiplayer online game.

So when we work in the field of youth online safety, it might be helpful to think about young people, its intended beneficiaries, in context – as participants in their online/offline communities rather than potential victims, as we have so much in the past. As for those communities: there may be times when outside intervention (from, say, friends, parents, or Customer Service) is necessary but other times when a little time is needed to allow the community itself to sort out how to deal with antisocial behavior. The other piece that needs more consideration is how to encourage youth to develop a "guild effect" in their online environments, so they're invested in the wellbeing of the community and fellow members, as well as themselves.

From interest-driven to friendship-driven
Not that they aren't already doing this. "Kids play socially.... We're growing a bunch of people who see what they do as social and collaborative and as part of joining communities," said author and Arizona State University literacy studies professor James Paul Gee in an interview with PBS Frontline for "Digital Nation." He talks about how young people quite naturally function in "teams," where "everybody is an expert in something but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else's; they know how to understand the other person's expertise so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world."

What this suggests to me is that "the guild effect" (safe, civil behavior as a social norm) kicks in quite naturally in "interest-driven" social networking, one of the two forms of social networking described in last year's study from the Digital Youth Project (see "*Serious* informal learning"). The question is, how can the guild effect be just as effective in "friendship-driven" social networking and across the entire social Web, fixed and mobile? I think this may be the central question for online safety going forward.