Digital risk, digital citizenship

It's becoming increasingly clear that - in a highly participatory environment such as the fixed and mobile social Web - risk and citizenship are directly related. Risk-prevention experts show how online community mitigates risk. Inner thoughts are expressed outwardly, and peers notice a friend in crisis and get help by any means possible. Online social networks are powerful tools for peer help and protection. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has data back several years showing how effective social network sites are as sources of referral (see a post of mine from back then, "The social Web's 'Lifeline'").

Helping one another is one vital aspect of digital citizenship. Researchers such as Harvard education professor Howard Gardner (second link below) are now turning up important findings on how youth function in digital communities. Their work is the kernel of the digital citizenship instruction and practice that will increase safety and trust in an environment that increasingly mirrors the "real" world (for youth, the fixed and mobile social Web is not something separate from "real life"). How will digital citizenship increase online safety? It includes the ethics, civility, empathy, social norms, and community awareness that can mitigate aggression and other results of online disinhibition. We know from the work of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at UNH, for example, that "youth who engage in online aggressive behavior by making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization" (see their analysis in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine). In any case, digital citizenship by definition teaches the community awareness that protects individuals, enables collaboration, and promotes civic engagement.

Both of these features illustrate the clearer definition of "online safety" that has emerged since the end of last year, with the help of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. The ISTTF's report, which summarized all online-safety research to date, showed that 1) not all youth are equally at risk online, 2) the youth most at risk offline - of sexual exploitation, self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, etc. - are those most at risk online, and 3) young people's psychosocial makeup and family and school environments are greater predictors of real-life risk than the technologies they use. Now we're finding that the use of those social technologies is not only not the best predictor of risk, it can be 1) an avenue to help both immediate and enduring and 2) a means for learning and practicing good citizenship.

In other words, yes, dysfunctional, anti-social behavior is acted out online as well as offline but so is the exact opposite behavior - and the latter can be reinforced for the well-being of individuals and society (see "Geeking out for democracy" at media scholar Henry Jenkins's blog.

The two features:

"A summit for saving lives"

"Learning how to navigate virtual communities: Key to digital citizenship"

Learning how to navigate virtual communities: Key to digital citizenship

"Once you enter digital media - whether through email, social networking, blogging, or playing a game - you simply don't know how wide a community you're part of, you can't control that.... This is unprecedented in human history," Howard Gardner told Education Week in this video. He went on to explain that, in the past, we all "evolved to deal with groups of 50 or 100 people whom we knew, they knew us, and our morality - how we treated them - was based on everyday [in-person] experience." And those circles would widen as we grew up. "What's unique about digital media and our era," he continued, "is you can be as young as 7 or 8 and participate ... in some kind of a social network site or game and you are in touch potentially with thousands and thousands of other people, and so the former lag between behaving morally toward people you know and behaving ethically toward people in the community who you don't know - that's been lost. To me that's a very, very striking finding.... Once they go into digital media, people will be parts of much larger communities, and the only question then is, do they behave as good citizens or not?"

This is the psychologist and Harvard University professor of education who famously taught us about multiple intelligences. Gardner has been studying ethics and citizenship in American society for many years and most recently "Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media," part of his MacArthur Foundation-funded GoodPlay Project. The project's researchers asked five questions about ethics in digital media: "what is your sense of identity and how do you portray yourself to the rest of the world; what's your stance on privacy - your own and how you should relate to others' privacy; the issue of ownership and authorship (should that be respected or ignored in digital media?); issues of trust and credibility - whom you should trust and why you should be trusted; and what does it mean to belong to a digital community." Gardner said that last question turned out to be the most important question of all.

I think of this work as the kernel of the study of digital citizenship, which - along with social media literacy - represents the bulk of what's needed for "online safety" education by the vast majority of online youth going forward, those not already at risk offline (see "A new online safety: The means, not the end"). Listening to Gardner, I wonder how the two can possibly be separated - how can children learn to function appropriately and ethically in virtual communities without instruction also in media literacy? On the social, user-driven Internet, media and community have melted into each other.