The new media monsters we've created for our kids

In adjusting to a media environment very different from the mass-media one we grew up in, we adults have created some monsters. They're large, intimidating "creatures" that threaten the mutually respectful parent-child and educator-student communication that young people want and deserve in this highly participatory, sometimes overwhelming new media environment.

One of the monsters is the "digital native" – the term, not the child. Coined by author Marc Prensky in 2001, the phrase has its usefulness in helping us adults grasp the major media shift we're experiencing and embrace young people's openness to it. But two leading new-media thinkers – Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics and Henry Jenkins at the University of Southern California – both have concerns about the phrase becoming too definitive. Why?

'Digital natives' as alien life forms

In February Dr. Livingstone said in a keynote at a University of California, San Diego, conference that all the hype around "digital natives" suggests that new media "brought into being a whole new species, a youth transformed, qualitatively distinct from anything that has gone before, an alien form whose habits it is our task to understand," when what we need to do is think about and work with children in the context of their full life – home, school, friends, media and cultural environments, etc. – in order "to understand what young people do online," not the other way around.

Dr. Jenkins recently wrote, “As a society, we have spent too much time focused on what media are doing to young people and not enough time asking what young people are doing with media.... Despite a tendency to talk of ‘digital natives,’ these young people are not born understanding how to navigate cyberspace and they don't always know the right thing to do as they confront situations that were not part of the childhood world of their parents or educators. Yes, they have acquired great power, yet they ... don't know how to exercise responsibility in this unfamiliar environment."

By viewing kids as alien life forms called "digital natives," we send the message that children don't need tech-, media-, and social-literacy training to navigate the ocean of information at their fingertips 24/7 and the tricky sometimes harsh waters of digital-media-informed adolescent social development. And by focusing on technology instead of children, we create daunting, new-sounding things to fear like "cyberbullying," directing attention away from the good work already being done against bullying as well as cyberbullying by changing school cultures and teaching and modeling empathy, ethics, and citizenship (at school and online). [This is not to say that cyberbullying isn't a problem, but we need to address it calmly and thoughtfully, not fearfully, and in context. There's a lot of overlap between bullying online and what happens offline at school. And for context, see this in MSNBC.com about research showing that the number of youth aged 2-17 who reported being bullied actually declined between 2003 and '08.]

Let's do some social norming by focusing on the social norming that actually does change behavior in positive ways! (For info on social norming, see the last three Related Links below.)

The paralyzing remove-all-risk monster

Another monster we've created: the "ideal" of a risk-free childhood or media experience. The Internet has become for youth "an escape from [the] offline constraints," as Livingstone put it, that we have put on our children out of fear for their safety in public spaces. "We are raising our children in captivity," UK psychologist and Net-safety expert Tanya Byron famously stated. And yet risk can't be deleted online or offline (and experts tell us risk-assessment is a primary task of adolescence). In her research, Livingstone has found that "the online opportunities and risks, as adults define them, go hand in hand – the more children experience of the opportunities, the more also of the risks.... Children do not draw the line where adults do, so these are often the same activity: making new friends or meeting up with strangers; exploring your sexual identity or exposing your private self; remixing new creative forms or plagiarising/breaking copyright."

That's unnerving for parents, but this is even more so: The risk-removal monster eats away at children's healthy development. "To expand their experience and expertise, to build confidence and resilience, children must push against adult-imposed boundaries: identity, intimacy, privacy and vulnerability are all closely related," Livingstone said. So instead of trying to remove risk, we need to allow our children to figure out how to negotiate it – at home and school, in the very media environments (wikis, social sites, Google docs) where they're already presented with those risks and opportunities, as well as the real-world ones.

Livingstone suggests to the authors of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (MIT Press, 2009) that, after "geeking out," they tack on a fourth category addressing youth risk assessment: "Playing with Fire." Why? She says "children are not weirdly motivated to take risks online; they are motivated to explore precisely what adults have forbidden, to experiment with the experiences they know to lie just ahead of them, to take calculated risks to test themselves and show off to others." Checking out sites like ChatRoulette (see this) is "not so very new," Livingstone says, when you think back to the time when "young teenage girls told their parents they are staying at a friend’s house but then dare each other to sleep in the street or park instead. Now they play with fire online. It’s evident even from their screen names – Lolita, sxcbabe, kissmequick."

The extremely busy adult-blinding monster

A third very large monster is our own preoccupation with adult life, perspectives, and goals. We have a very hard time seeing past it to understand and respond appropriately to children's best interests. For example, Livingstone asked the question (only lightly considered at the end of a recent piece in The Economist about "the Net generation") of whether the disappointing apparently shallow civic engagement of youth online is because of a lack of interest on their part OR a boring, top-down, adult approach to engaging them online – see p. 9 of her keynote for examples (an example I can think of is the way we impose our mass-media perspective on their media use – see this on the Kaiser Family Foundation study released in January).

What could guide us around and past this hyperactive monster is the approach to youth taken by the researchers who contributed to Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. In the book's introduction, they write: "Adults often view children in a forward-looking way, in terms of 'ages and stages' of what they will become rather than as complete beings 'with ongoing lives, needs, and desires' ... [and] as active, creative social agents who produce their own unique children's cultures while simultaneously contributing to the production of adult societies."

Viewing youth as active agents and stakeholders in their own, their peers', and their communities' well-being (in or out of media, online and offline) will not only defeat the adult-blinding monster, it’s likely also to increase adult-child communication in a media environment where respectful, informed communication is protective. How so? It opens thought to other perspectives and unconsidered solutions, making it less likely that kids will go "underground" for fear of ignorant overreaction, and encourages youth who are being victimized to seek help from adults they can trust, to name only two highly desirable outcomes. Clarity and communication are more important than ever in an unregulated, user-driven, and uncharted new media environment in which children are children so much more than they're "digital natives."

Related links

On parenting these days: "Parenting & the digital drama overload"

On the media sea change we adults are adapting to: "Youth, adults & the social-media shift"

That Economist piece: "The net generation, unplugged," The Economist found some other scholars who find mass generalizations like "digital natives" unhelpful, including Kansas State professor Mike Wesch, who says that "many of his incoming students have only a superficial familiarity with the digital tools they use regularly.... Only a small fraction of students may count as true digital natives.... The rest are no better or worse at using technology than the rest of the population."

"Let's not create a cyberbullying panic," by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid at CNET

"Major obstacle to universal broadband & what can help"

"Social norming: So key to online safety"

"Clicks & Cliques, Part 2: Whole-school response needed"

Teens taking Facebook breaks together

I think it's not so much taking a break from technology as it is from high school drama – though social networking does make it easy to have the drama in their faces 24/7, if they allow it to. The New York Times tells of two high school juniors in San Francisco who, "by mutual agreement," allow themselves to log on to Facebook only the first Saturday of each month. "The two are among the many teenagers, especially girls, who are recognizing the huge distraction Facebook presents – the hours it consumes every day, to say nothing of the toll it takes during finals and college applications, according to parents, teachers and the students themselves," the Times reports. Some deactivate their accounts, others form support group (not Facebook groups!) to help each other stay away. The Times cites the view of a psychologist and "Internet addiction" center director that Facebook's just like any other addiction. I'm no psychologist, but I do think it might be partly the real-life reality TV of school life that's addictive. On p. 2 of the article, the view of educator and author Rachel Simmons seems to agree when she refers to how hard it can be for teens to turn away from the sort of ticker tape of their social circle represented by Facebook's News Feed when they're "obsessed" with where they stand in that "social landscape." I'm impressed with the initiative they're taking (are they feeling that reflection time is healthy and acting on that?). But I wonder if, by creating agreements and forming support groups they're any less tethered to each other (see MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle's "Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self") and using technology that much less. Do they not need texting and talking on mobile phones to maintain pacts and check up on each other? Still, I'm sure there are some adults just as addicted to drama who could take a queue from these high school students.

Social lives, media in their pockets

If our kids text, 80% of us do too, according to The Nielsen Company. Nielsen doesn't say why, but we all know: Our kids "hear" us better when we text them, and – besides – it's fun to text with them! Here's some more interesting cellphone data from Nielsen:

Phone owners are getting younger: Last year kids typically got their first phone at age 10.1; by the beginning of this year 2009, the phone ownership age "was down to 9.7." Same for borrowing: In 2008, the average age when kids started to borrow a cell phone was 8.6 years"; now it's 8.

How they use phones: 66% of tween phone owners took photos with their phones in the past year; half played pre-installed games; 40% activated the speakerphone feature; 28% filmed a video clip; 24% listened to tunes. We've already seen this reported, but "the average 13-17 year old sends more than 2,000 text messages per month."

Younger phone owners: more than half of 8-year-old owners "used their cell to send text messages in the last 12 months. "That figure soared to 81% for 12-year-old mobile users," with "the vast majority" (90%) of those texts going to friends and family."

Parental controls: More than half of cellphone users' parents don't use parental controls. Among the minority who do, "20% limit the number of calls, texts or instant messages, followed by download limits (17%), talk time or voice minute allocations (16%), mobile website access limits (15%), locator services and restricted in/outgoing number access (13% each), time of day restrictions (11%), and alerts to unauthorized texts, IMs or callers (6% each); 60% of parents "forbid downloads onto their children’s phone for financial and security reasons."

For parents' own views, see also a piece in the Washington Post about when texting becomes nagging; "When Dad banned text messaging" in a New York Times blog; and another mom's view of her kids' texting at TMCnet.com.

FL teen a registered sex offender for sexting

Teens do not want a late-night fit of anger channeled into a few seconds' worth of clicks on a cellphone to lead to anything close to what happened to Phillip Alpert, who will be in Florida's sex offender registry until he's 43, CNN reports. He told CNN he had just turned 18, he was tired, and it was the middle of the night "when he sent a naked photo of his 16-year-old girlfriend [for 2½ years], a photo she had taken and sent him, to dozens of her friends and family after an argument." Arrested and charged with distributing child pornography, he was later convicted and "sentenced to five years' probation and required by Florida law to register as a sex offender." Please see the CNN article for how US states handle child porn crimes, which - unfortunately, until US policymakers come up with a better idea - is how sexting is dealt with under US state and federal laws. What makes this complicated for law enforcement is, sexting is not always impulsive behavior by teenagers who know nothing about the law. Sometimes it's premeditated and malicious (e.g., bullying) or even criminal (blackmail or sexual abuse), in which case, Catholic U. Prof. Mary Leary and other legal scholars believe prosecution of minors should not be taken off the table (see "Self-produced child porn").

I wonder if it would it help to look at how other countries are dealing with sexting. When a Toronto TV reporter contacted ConnectSafely today, I learned that Canadian child porn law is a little easier on juveniles - more reasonable, I think, even though "sexting" has barely hit the public radar there, he told me. He pointed me to a thoughtful Macleans magazine article, reporting that, in Canada, "it’s not illegal for two teenagers under the age of 18 to carry naked photographs of one another, provided it's [consensual activity and] for private viewing only." It becomes child porn when one of them sends it around, and charges are for that distribution not against the minor who took the photo, according to Maclean. I haven't seen reports on UK law where sexting's concerned, but I noted that "90 children in the UK have been cautioned [presumably by law enforcement people] as a result of posting sexual material of themselves or their underage friends online or on their mobile phones," according to The Daily Mail, which indicates to me that those 90 children weren't arrested and that UK law enforcement may be playing the largely educational role that the realities of adolescent behavior and development demand of law enforcement where sexting's concerned. [For some research-based tips on how to deal with sexting in the US, click here.]

Toward fixing teen risky behavior in social sites: Study

A professor of pediatrics said she was a little surprised by how much information about risky behaviors teens post online - information for all to see but that their doctors struggle to get out of them. In a random selection of 500 MySpace profiles of people who say on their pages they're 18, Dr. Megan Moreno at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her co-authors found that "54% of the profiles contained information on risky behaviors" - 24% of them about sexual behaviors, 41% about substance abuse, and 14% about violence, the Washington Post reports, citing a just-released study in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

"The good news," the Post says, citing a second study by the same researchers, "is that a simple intervention - in this case, an email from a physician - made some of the teens change their risky behaviors" - a significant number, in fact. For their second study, described in the same medical journal article, the authors sent emails to half of the owners of 190 randomly selected MySpace profiles of people saying they were 18-20. They were signed by Dr. Moreno. "She called herself 'Dr. Meg,' identified herself as an adolescent medicine doctor and researcher, and urged them to check out her academic Web page," the Boston Globe reports in its coverage of the studies. "'You seemed to be quite open about sexual issues or other behaviors such as drinking or smoking,' the message said. 'Are you sure that's a good idea? After all, if I could see it, nearly anybody could.' The message invited them to consider revising their profiles to protect their privacy. It also raised concerns about sexually transmitted diseases and pointed them to a Web site offering free testing."

And the response was? "Three months later, 42.1% of the ones who received the email had changed their profiles, dropping references to sex and substance use or moving their profiles from public to private," the Globe reports. So does the New York Times in "A Note to the Wise on MySpace Helps."

That's great news. Besides rules and tools, which not all teens respond to positively, other means of changing risky behavior are emerging, such as this kind of targeted, relevant educational messaging and social norming (peers' positive influence, as illustrated in a substance-abuse-prevention program at University of Virginia, Charlottesville). I think, as did Dr. Moreno, we need to get past the surprise adults have at teen risky behavior online. It's not new, it's just more public (which is a problem these studies help address), and it's actually developmental behavior, since neurologists tell us that the part of the brain that understands cause and effect and the implications of actions, the frontal cortex, isn't fully developed till people are in their early-to-mid-20s. Which is why, child development specialists say, risk assessment is a primary task of adolescence (and why adult guidance needs to be in the picture).

There's a lot more good thinking expressed or linked to in the Globe article, including:

The view from Dr. Michael Rich of Children's Hospital Boston that "social-networking sites [are] venues where young people channel their images and ideas, connecting with peers as they try on different identities - the way their parents might have done on the telephone. Where they can get into trouble is believing what they put on their profiles remains anonymous, outside their circle of friends," the Globe paraphrases him as saying. See also related articles in this same (January '09) issue of Archives, including It also links to an editorial in the same issue of Archives by the study's other authors he said.

The view that "using such sites [e.g., MySpace] to promote health messages is promising," in "Social Networking Sites: Finding a Balance Between Their Risks and Benefits," an editorial by Dr. Kimberly J. Mitchell of the Crimes Against Children Research Center and Michele Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids (in this same latest issue of Archives).

More than 90% of US teens have Net access, and about half of those use social-network sites, USATODAY reported in its coverage of the studies. Citing background information in the Archives article, the Post added that "MySpace boasts more than 200 million profiles, according to the studies, and about one-quarter of those belong to teens under 18."

Related links

"Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress," National Institute of Mental Health , and "The Teenage Brain," Frontline, PBS .

The Internet effect: What about the Net is actually changing the equation now, what distinguishes socializing online through sharing comments, photos, and videos about ourselves from the old-fashioned, less public socializing we've done for a long time? Social media researcher danah boyd sums it up in four factors: persistence (it's hard to take down); searchability (people you don't know can find it); replicability (it can be copied and pasted elsewhere, without our knowledge); and invisible audiences (what's most prominent in the above studies) - see this interview with danah in AlterNet.org.