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Net safety: How social networks can be protective

October 5, 2009 By Anne 12 Comments

Hmm. It’s arresting to think about what Stewart Wolf, MD, 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.

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Filed Under: Internet safety task force, Risk & Safety, social networking Tagged With: digital citizenship, Digital Nation, Digital Youth Project, guild effect, Henry Jenkins, ISTTF, James Paul Gee, Malcolm Gladwell, online safety, Stewart Wolf

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Anne says

    October 29, 2009 at 5:39 pm

    Tx, Erin. Agree it can't possibly be homogenous – even within World of Warcraft, with its many types of guilds. Reaching for a digestible term – maybe "community effect," but so many syllables.

    Reply
  2. Erin Hoffman says

    October 29, 2009 at 5:31 pm

    Hi Anne. New to your blog, and enjoyed this post. You synthesize a number of community data-points in an interesting and insightful way. I come from a 'traditional' online game background, if there can be said to be such a thing, and it's fascinating to watch as these online community elements that the older online communities knew through instinct and experience come to the mainstream and begin to be analyzed from the outside, especially as pertains to the youth space and children. I think that the concept of 'guilds' is central to stable evolved online community behavior, and it's interesting to see it sort of convergently emerge in the kids' space, separate from the long tradition of guild formation. The only thing I would add to your thoughts here is that the concept of "guild" is a starting point and not homogeneous, depending largely on world politics, game mechanics (when applicable), and individual leaders. I gave a presentation earlier this year at Games+Learning+Society on how game mechanics lead to mass social behavior and community foundation — depending on what social behaviors you create incentive structures for within the game itself. We observed this quite acutely in running GoPets from 2004-2009. So all of this is quite fascinating to me.

    Reply

Trackbacks

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Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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