Citizenship & the social Web mirror in our faces 24/7

I think what A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz says about citizenship at the beginning and end of a talk (about the social game Farmville, of all things), nails it: He told his audience at State University of New York, Buffalo, that "...democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master.... Citizenship requires cultivation...." At the end of the talk, he adds, "The central task of citizenship is learning how to be good to one another." Exactly. I do think it's that simple and that hard. For *digital* citizenship, you just add the word "online" to the end of that sentence. That's it. Let's do ourselves and our children a favor and not make it one bit more complicated than that.

The thing about this digital age is that it's holding up a very big, society-wide mirror to our faces nearly 24/7, and what we (meaning all of us) see in that mirror of humanity called the social Web is not always pretty. But it's unavoidably in our faces, so we are in effect being forced to think about citizenship – how we treat one another – in school, on phones, in Facebook, in ClubPenguin or WorldofWarcraft, at work, at home, wherever we commune, more than ever before. Because of this mirror in our faces. There are definitely things that need to be fixed at school, at home, in Facebook, but fixing those procedural, policy, and architectural things won't help much if we don't address the behaviors too. The behaviors, good, bad, and neutral, haven't changed all that much (though school bullying has gone down - see this). What's new is that we are being forced to look at them (and the attitudes behind them) so much, and we are overwhelmed, sometimes traumatized, by what we see. What's bad about this reality is that we think technology – the mirror – is creating the problem and keeping us from solving it; what's good is that the need to be good to one another feels more urgent than ever! [As for what Liszkiewicz says about Farmville (as basically the new chain letter) in the bulk of that talk, don't miss it!]

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"

Can the social Web be policed?

In "Cyber-bullying cases put heat on Google, Facebook," Reuters points to increasing signs around the world that people want to hold social-media companies responsible for their users' behavior. "The Internet was built on freedom of expression. Society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused. And major Internet companies like Google and Facebook are finding themselves caught between those ideals," it reports. Back before social networking, when people harassed or fought merely over the phone, people didn't hold phone companies accountable for settling the disputes. In the US, the Communications Decency Act extended that "safe haven" to Internet service providers, and courts have included social-media companies in that category ever since.

Here's the view from Australia, where the Sydney Morning Herald reports some cruel defacement of tribute pages in Facebook have gotten Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to consider "appointing an online ombudsman to deal with social networking issues." [Maybe that's where we're headed: countries having ombudsmen able to decide if complaints in their countries should be "escalated" to their specially appointed contacts at social sites at home and abroad? But what about sleazy social-media operations that fly under the radar or refuse to deal?]

Certainly it's understandable that people expect more from social network sites than they do from phone companies because bullying is more public and harder to take back, but is the expectation logical? That's an honest question, not a rhetorical one (please comment here or in the ConnectSafely forum), because what does not seem to be different in this new media environment is how arguments and bad behavior get resolved: by the people involved. It may take time with complaints sent from among tens and in some cases hundreds of millions of users, but fake defaming profiles and hate groups do get deleted by reputable social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. Deleting the visible representation of bullying behavior, however, doesn't change much. Bullies can put up new fake profiles as quickly as – often more quickly than – the original ones can be taken down.

Of course we should expect companies to be responsible and take such action, but can we reasonably blame them if doing so has no effect on the underlying behavior? What court cases like the one in Italy against Google executives for an awful bullying video on YouTube that the court felt wasn't taken down fast enough (see the article in the Washington Post above) illustrate are: humanity's struggle to wrap its collective brain around a new, truly global, user-driven medium where the "content" is not just social but behavioral – and the full spectrum of human behavior at that.

If you do, please comment, but I know of no real solution to social cruelty on the social Web as yet except a concerted effort on the part of the portion of humanity that cares to adjust to this strange, sometimes scary new media environment by adjusting our thinking and behavior. That includes teaching children from the earliest age, at home and school, social literacy as well as tech and media literacy (social literacy involves citizenship, civility, ethics, and critical thinking about what they upload as much as download) – as well as modeling them for our children. Can it be that universal, multi-generational behavior modification is not just an ideal, but the only logical goal? What am I missing, here?

Major study on youth & media: Let's take a closer look

With its fresh, sweeping look at the media lives of US 8-to-18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation's just-released "Generation M2" is a tremendous service to parents and educators – but also a subtle disservice. The latter, because it looks at kids' and teens' experiences with today's media through the lens of yesterday's, the mass-media culture we adults grew up in. "The story of media in young people’s lives today is primarily a story of technology facilitating increased consumption," the authors write, even while a growing body of research shows that the youth-media story is actually more about sharing, playing with, and producing media, individually and collectively, than consuming it. But more on that in a moment. First, the findings....

1. The data

As "one of the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information on the amount and nature of media use among American youth," this is also Kaiser's third such study (the first two were done in 1999 and 2004), so it shows usage trends. "Generation M2" also zooms in on individual media and devices, behaviors such as multimedia multitasking, and gender and ethnicity differences in the data. Here are some highlights:

Nothing but more (almost): Youth media consumption has grown from 6:21 hours/day five years ago to 7:38 today, and they now "pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes of media content into those 7.5 hours a day." The breakdown: Movies and print, 0 growth; 47 more min./day for music/audio; 38 more min./day for "TV content"; 24 more min./day with videogames; and 27 more min./day on computers (though I'm not sure why computers are called media, when they're more delivery devices). Age-wise, the biggest media-use growth spurt is "when children hit the 11-to-14-year-old age group," when total media use goes up a whopping 4 hours a day (from 7:51 for kids 8-10 to 11:53 for those 11-14).

Much more mobile: All that growth in media use was "driven in large part by ready access to mobile devices like cell phones and iPods," according to the study's press release – cellphone ownership for 8-to-18-year-olds went from 39% to 66% and iPods and other music players from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players. Of course parents know that kids spend more time doing everything besides talking on their cellphones (games, music, photo-sharing, video-viewing, etc.: 49 min./day; talking 33 min./day). This study did not consider texting a form of media use, it says, but it did find that people in grades 7-12 spend an average of 1:35/day texting.

"Parental control": About 30% of youth "say they have rules about how much time they can spend" with various media. But children who do have rules at their house spend almost 3 hours less time with media a day than those with no rules.

TV leads in more ways than 1: "TV remains the dominant type of media content consumed, at 4:29 a day," and 64% of 8-to-18-year-olds "say the TV is usually on during meals; 45% say it's on "most of the time"; 71% have a TV in their bedroom; 50% have a videogame console in their room. The authors did say that this latest study found for the first time that TV-viewing on *TV sets* went down 25 min./day between 2004 and '09, but TV-viewing on other devices more than offset that decline: 24 min./day online; 16 a day on MP3 players; 15 a day on cellphones. "All told, 59% (2:39) of young people’s TV-viewing consists of live TV on a TV set, and 41% (1:50) is time-shifted, on DVDs, online, or mobile.]

Media use & grades: With the caveat that the study "cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades," the authors write that 47% of heavy media users ("the 21% of young people who consume more than 16 hours of media a day") say they usually get "mostly Cs or lower," compared to 23% of light users. ["Light users" are the 17% who consume less than 3 hours/day.] Book reading held steady over the past five years at about 25 min./day, but magazine and newspaper reading are both down ("from :14 to :09 for magazines and from :06 to :03 for newspapers").

Favorite Net uses: In terms of time, social networking unsurprising topped the list (74% of people in grades 7-12 have profiles), but – surprising to me – they spent only 22 min./day at it, followed by gaming (17 min.) and checking out video sites (15 min.).

Girls & boys: Girls spend more time than boys in social sites (:25 vs. :19), listening to music (2:33 vs. 2:06), and reading (:43 vs. :33), but not by all that much. The real gap shows up in game playing and video use: console games (:56 boys vs. :14 girls), computer games (:25 vs. :08), and sites like YouTube (:17 vs. :12).

2. Removing the mass-media filter

So are we looking at all this data largely from the context of the media environment we grew up in, where media were consumed, professionally produced (much of it for entertainment), and government-regulated? As we read, are we worried that new media are just a waste of our kids' time, a distraction, or even a potential health problem (Kaiser's study appears in its "Media & Health" practice)? The Kaiser report is riddled with the words "consume" and "consumption," when really what youth do so much more with media now is blog, share, post, text, discuss, remix, and produce, often collaboratively, as mentioned above. As sweeping as this study's scope was, a study about their consumption is only a small part of today's youth-media equation.

The report refers to "screen media" vs. "print media," when what can appear on that Net-connected screen is virtually all traditional media as well as the new, user-generated kind – because the Internet increasingly mirrors all of human life, the behavioral parts (from bullying to mentoring) as well as the consumables (from great literature to research to frat party photos) and creative productions (photos, tunes, videos, podcasts) are there too. Yet, when referring specifically to young people reading text on the screen, the report cites "the latest advice column on a fashion website or a classmate’s posting on a social networking site," not peers' blog posts, videos or other creations.

This study wasn't about the informal learning going on in social media, but that needs consideration in the context of youth media use. [A question asked in the 1999 Kaiser study – about whether time spent using the computer was mainly entertaining, killing time, or learning something – was in fact dropped for the next two studies (see pp. 46 and 47).] It's important to keep in mind that extensive research into how youth use social media at home, in school, and in after-school programs shows that a lot of learning, not just entertainment, is going on in their media use. In its 2008 report, "Living and Learning with New Media," the Digital Youth Project found that, "by exploring new interests, tinkering, and 'messing around' with new forms of media, [youth] acquire various forms of technical and media literacy.... By its immediacy and breadth of information, the digital world lowers barriers to self-directed learning." In a paper on videogame-based learning, Digital Youth Project lead investigator, Dr. Mimi Ito, wrote last fall that "online groups mobilizing through games like World of Warcraft, [alternate-reality game] I Love Bees, or [virtual world] Whyville have demonstrated the possibilities of new forms of collaborative problem solving and collective action which exhibit properties of scientific inquiry."

Probably since the beginning of modern-day-style adolescence, parents have had to adjust to unnerving new kinds and uses of media, but today's media shift is an order of magnitude different: Not only is it mobile, multimedia, multidirectional, user-produced, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one; it's all mixed up with traditional, professionally produced media in the same "place" – the Internet, via proliferating devices – and it's social and behavioral (see "Youth, adults & the social-media shift"). It's asking a lot of us adults, so there's a strange need for both patience (with ourselves and each other as we adjust) and urgency (to hurry up and adjust!). There's also a need to be alert to mass-media biases in what we read about youth and social media and open to the positive as well as negative implications.

Related links

"Kids pack in nearly 11 hours of media use daily," by my ConnectSafely co-director, Larry Magid, at CNET and his audio interview with the study's director Kaiser Family Foundation vice president Victoria Rideout, where she makes 2 interesting points: 1) how hard it is to categorize kids' media use when it's so fluid (it would be a lot easier if the study were youth-centric, not media- or tech-centric), and 2) how most of kids' media use right now is what might be called passive and non-productive (which is no surprise when we block social media from school and leave them on their own in new media – see "School & social media: Uber big picture").

"If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online" in the New York Times, or did that headline writer mean watching TV, as the study actually suggests? The Times reports that "the study’s findings shocked its authors," then cites the view of Boston pediatrician Michael Rich that it's "time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment."

"Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project"

"Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-olds"

"Youth, adults & the social-media shift" here at NetFamilyNews

Thankful for new media & what they're teaching us

Here in the US, this is kind of, partially a week of reflection and thanksgiving, as many of us shop, cook, travel, cook some more, and feast and some of us try to keep it really simple. But for the reflection and thanksgiving part, treat yourself to this enriching example of participatory media, a video by Michael Wesch and his students (the main one on this page). Then treat yourself to Professor Wesch's whole playlist on the right-hand side of that page. These students of anthropology – of humanity, really – understand social media from the inside out, so this is efficient, fun, joyful, profound, unsettling, mixed-media learning for us people who grew up in the profoundly different mass-media era.

In 12 years of writing about youth and tech, I have not seen a better resource for parents, teachers, police, and policymakers working in the youth and online-safety or 21st-century-learning spaces (pls see Related links below for teaching and parenting resources). [I've seen many, many great resources, mind you, but nothing quite as moving in the social-media space as this one.] Young people deserve to have their parents and teachers informed. And we all deserve exposure to the care and quality of thought that went into producing and presenting this 55.5-minute video that was presented at the US Library of Congress June 2008 (months later Wesch was named Professor of the Year; see his brief acceptance speech here). It's a global picture, which is essential, I think, given the nature of new media, and naturally it's not entirely a pretty picture – some viewers may find parts of it disturbing. But what picture of humanity is entirely beautiful? What's important is the humanity.

I think Mike Wesch understands cultural shifts, media shifts, and human beings well for two reasons: 1) his own shift from 18 months' anthropological field work in a remote (Iron Age?) village in Papua New Guinea to teaching the anthropology of social media in and with YouTube in 21st-century Kansas and, 2) as his talks and sound bytes indicate, he loves working with people and seems to have a way of bringing out the best in them – even when the picture is grainy. You'll get that in his playlist.

Related links

Parents, here's why we need to understand new media: Prof. Henry Jenkins at the University of Southern California says it's because social media "weren't part of the world of our childhood," and "now we're in a space where we're dealing with stuff our parents never had to deal with.... But we have to be open to the new ... there's much more valuable stuff here [online] than risky stuff.... At the end of the day, they need us to be informed about this. They don't need us looking over their shoulders; they need us watching their backs.... We have to recognize that they're going some place we never went and that's what's exciting and what's terrifying about the present moment," he says. [Thanks to CommonSenseMedia.org for linking to this clip at the MacArthur Foundation site.]

Teachers, if you wonder how Prof. Wesch uses new-media tools in his classes, he describes how (both in his huge undergraduate anthropology classes and small graduate-level digital ethnography classes) in a talk he gave at the University of Manitoba a little over a year ago. You can read a description of how the class is set up here, with an insightful comment below it from Bryan, a teacher of 9th- and 10th-graders, about how social-media tools can be used at those grade levels.

Here's the spring 2009 work of Wesch's class - a 6-min. video they created out of the class's "trailers," or spring semester projects (each student produces one) - and one of the trailers.

This month YouTube named Wesch its Curator of the Month. He explains all that here.

My previous piece on Wesch, August 2008: "Watch this video, parents"