 Let me speak at Inc about this topic of how technology is changing, how kids communicate with their parents, and how kids communicate with other kids. I thought that I would, in the storytelling spirit of Inc, tell you a few stories to highlight some of my points. So if you take a look at this slide, this is the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, and one of the founding fathers of the United States. He's famous and well respected for a lot of the documents that he wrote, like the Declaration of Independence of the U.S., but to me, one of his most memorable works is this letter of advice that he wrote to his 11-year-old daughter, Martha, nicknamed Patsy. Take a look. My dear Patsy, after four days' journey, I arrived here without any accident. The requirements which I hope you will make under the tutors I provide for you will render you more worthy of my love, and if they cannot increase it, they will prevent its diminution. Okay, nice paragraph to start off with. With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve. From 8 to 10 o'clock, practice music from 10 to 1, dance one day and draw another. From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance and write a letter the next day. Skipping on the next. I expect you will write me by every post. Inform me what books you read, what tunes you learn, and enclose me your best copy of every lesson and drawing. Write also one letter a week, either to your aunts, your aunts, or your aunts' car, or the little lady from whom I now enclose a letter. Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelled, and if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well. If you love me, then strive to be good under every situation to all living creatures, and to acquire those accomplishments which I have put in your power, and which will go far towards ensuring you the warmest love of your affectionate father, Thomas Jefferson. P.S. Keep my letters and read them at times that you may always have present in your mind those things which will endure you to me. Nice letter, huh? So to summarize the letter, for those of you from your last student, Thomas Jefferson is telling his daughter to behave, to follow some of the things that he, the schedule that he set down, and to, to, you know, write to him pretty frequently. So have you ever said something like that to your kids? Behave, follow the schedule I set? Or I see some raised hands. So it seems like you guys have something in common with Jefferson. And one month later he writes again, a little disappointed. He had hoped before this to receive letters regularly and weekly. He has not sent the drawing lessons. And this is my favorite part, which I found relevant to me. I omitted in that letter to advise you on the subject of dress, which I know you are a little apt to neglect. Make your clothes be neat, whole, and properly put on. Do not fancy you must wear them till the dirt is visible to the eye, because this is the kind of, this is the kind of crap my sister gives me when I'm like, hey, I don't need to take a shower. I took one last week. But when you think about it, have you ever asked your kids to dress neatly and cleanly? Raise your hands if you have. I'm seeing mostly raised hands. You guys are probably parents. Your parents told you that when you were young. Dress neatly and cleanly, you know, take a shower. So it doesn't seem like a whole lot has changed since 1783. But wait a second. Imagine that Thomas and Patsy Jefferson were on Facebook. And this is not my original idea. It actually comes from a thing called, what if history had been written on Facebook? So imagine if they lived in 2010. Jefferson's detailed instructions would come in an email. Patsy would open this up. She'd roll her eyes and log on to Facebook and post something like this. Martha Jefferson. OMG, my dad is such a helicopter parent. Listen to this crap. I expect you'll write me by every post. Seriously? And her friends would sympathetically post about their own parents. And oh, that's too bad. And Jefferson, if he was on Facebook and if he was his daughter's friend on Facebook, would comment back, it was for your own good and I'm restricting your internet use now. Or maybe, maybe just maybe, he would see the post sympathized and adjusted his behavior accordingly. That's possible. This is obviously a hypothetical example, but there are many examples of Jeffersonian-style parent-child communication this time with technology. Have any of you watched the show The Big Bang Theory? I'm not sure. I see a few raised hands. So my favorite character is Raj Guthipali, who's, I know, he's really stereotypical. But anyway, he's often shown talking to his overbearing parents in India via webcam. So comedy shows aside, I met a lot of real people who actually stay in touch with their parents or with their friends over webcam at the American School in Switzerland where I was recently. I talked with a student named Tara and she would Skype with her mom every day and her roommate actually got to know her mom very well this way. When I was traveling with my mom and my sister and my dad was home, we would chat with him online and tell him about all the awesome stuff that he missed and he really got to be familiar with our adventures in the way. But the internet doesn't just give kids away from their parents a way to communicate. It helps parents and kids in the same household. Take my family for an example. These are my parents and they're kind of a study in extremes when it comes to the ends of the technology scale. So this is my mom, Joyce Vitoch, and she's what you could call a kinder early adopter. I'm not sure what you call a second wave. She wasn't in the long lines of the iPhone when it first came out, but she was on it. She was no connection to the price. No, no. She was just being economical through time. She was the first in our family to get a Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and she's also quite the social butterfly on Facebook. So she has this very complex system to decide whether or not to friend someone. You're particularly valuable if you attended the same conference, so you're welcome to friend her. She'll love that. So as soon as my sister and I got our Facebook accounts, then our mom was one of our first friends. And I thought nothing of it. It wasn't like I said anything on Facebook that I wouldn't want my mom to see. My older sister, Adriana, was just a little bit more protective of her privacy. Why does my mom have to be friends with me and with my friends? She wondered. Meanwhile, my mom was enjoying her role as Facebook's secret police keeping an eye out on what was going on and running background checks. Okay, not quite. I'm exaggerating. My sister's friends. Pretty close, though. In her defense, my mom said that she had to get to know my sister's friends on Facebook since no one ever came to people's houses anymore. But my sister didn't like that my mom was seeing her wall posts and her relationship status. While my mom didn't like that my sister was being on Facebook when she should have or could have been doing her honors homework, et cetera, et cetera. So this went on for quite a while and she didn't like the trigger. She de-friended my mom. This obviously was not acceptable to mom. And the happenings of the online world had an impact on their relationship in real life. I said, no, I'm not cooking for you. Okay, not that bad. The two weren't so happy about this, but they finally managed to reconcile, reach a good agreement, and my mom became my sister's Facebook friend once again. In turn, my mom has then quite as much investigative work, and she's been working with what she posts. But I think that my sister and I have also helped my mom moderate slightly in how she uses technology. While she's taken a lot of initiative to engage with us online, she's also now realized the importance of balancing that with connection in person. So here is the other end of the technology scale. This is my dad, John Svitak, and unlike my mom, he didn't really have the inclination to purchase new products, and iPhone was fine for my mom, and I had to work in one at home, he reasoned. So on the other hand, he was interested in Facebook. He even checked out the Facebook for Dummies book from the library, but he never found the time to set up account until late October this year. And what's nice about my dad being on Facebook is that it's given my sister and I the chance to teach him sign, because usually we're the ones asking him questions. How exactly do we solve this inequality? What's the deal with the ionic and covalent bonds again? So my mom and I, for the last few months, have it the other way around. They say the old dogs can't learn new tricks, but my dad is a quick learner when it comes to Facebook. So as my mom is learning to disconnect just a little bit from us online, then my dad is beginning to connect with us a little more online. You've even gotten him hooked on the addictive cell phone game app Angry Birds. Have any of you guys played that? Angry Birds. You might think that now they're just going to chat with us, they're not going to actually talk, but we're talking, we're asking questions, we're explaining things. At TED, I spoke about what adults can learn from kids, and I think that technology provides a way for adults and kids to engage in conversation and learn from each other. After all, haven't you ever asked a kid for help with a computer before? And when you think about it, then my family's story highlights a few of the points that I'm trying to make. What we do on the internet, and how we keep it there, has a long-reaching impact in our interactions in real life, how we communicate at home, at school, and within our communities. And that impact can be positive or negative. As a student of history and a writer, I have profound appreciation for the evocative and grammatically correct letters and communications of history's great writers, but I think it would also be reductive to say that technology is somehow cheapening our communication. In fact, the internet offers us the chance to exchange ideas at lightning speed, which lets us overcome miscommunication quickly. Technology has this potential and kids are acting on it. For every inane Facebook post and tweet, then there's someone like my friend Maya Gaineson who posts poetry on her blog, Allegro. Countless journal keepers and letter writers have communicated inspiration with the tools that they had at hand, and now we can as well. Today, millions of kids use the internet to communicate every day. I was reading the New Delhi newspaper The Pioneer, which published this study of 2,500 teenagers. Over 65% carried cell phones to school. Over 85% owned cell phones. And the reports said the study revealed that the children would use their phones also for MMS, online chatting. So the internet has changed many aspects of everyday life, even including saying as simple as how we say happy birthday. This is my Facebook wall on my birthday. But what do you do when your birthday happens, when you're thousands of miles away from your friends that you want to invite? My older sister Adriana was in this dilemma. She'll be in Sri Lanka on her birthday, December 16th, but she decided to have combined birthdays in her eve when she gets back. How does she invite her friends? She sets up a Facebook event. I received an e-bike for my friend Shannon's birthday, and me, I went old school for my birthday party, meaning that I sent an email. Yeah, relatively. These examples just show you how much we've changed over a few years because before, I still remember when invitations would come printed on paper and stuffed into envelopes, and today they come inside our email inboxes. So those of you with children may have seen them chatting with friends online, and when you see chats, I blocked out faces and names. Like, hey, what's up, LOL, OMG. The idea of kids using technology for social change may not be the first thing that comes to your mind. Yet many youth are using technology as a means to help the world. This September, I created an event called TEDx Redmond, and it was organized by kids. Our 18 speakers and performers, all 16 years older under, had started charities founded companies, published books. Because the speakers came from all corners of the U.S., we connected with them, communicated with them over the Internet. We held our committee meetings online, used online event planning services, and so we benefited from technological tools when it came to fostering our passion to do good and make the world a better place. TEDx Redmond, I think, really showed that kids plus technology doesn't always have to equal distracting chatter, it can equal good for the world. I work with the United Nations World Food Program to promote their programs called Free Rice, and it's answering questions to get rice for hungry people, but a lot of students use this tool to great benefit to do good, because you don't have to donate money, and so it's very empowering. And then there are the examples of students many in high school who create their own technologies, if you take a look at this list. Technology isn't just making waves within our homes, it's having an impact within our schools. If you remember that statistic that I showed about how many kids brought cell phones to school, then you'll be able to see what I'm talking about. More and more schools are also giving students computer access, giving them Internet access, but of course this has challenges of its own. So I was a guest student at this art history lecture and I looked in front of me and I saw that the girls on her computer are busy typing away. On Facebook, she then went to check her horoscope. I mean, important stuff, but maybe you couldn't wait until after class. In university lecture halls, you've probably, many of you have been in those, where the teacher can't just walk up to you and peer over your shoulder to see what you're doing, then this is a particularly big challenge where many students are tuning out and instead tuning in online. But just as you're about to think that technology is this divisive force, it's dividing people, having a bad influence in school, you get all these examples of the classrooms that have cross-cultural learning experiences online, or the classroom that maintains an informative blog. I use educational video conferencing to connect to schools around the world. And you've probably all heard about the connections that kids have made with Sugata Meachar's Hole in the Wall project, just having Internet access can mean learning. So it's a seemingly obvious example of how technology is letting us connect. But is all this deep connection, you may ask, is what we see every day on Facebook really valuable? Asking myself this question, I realize something. Just as the sentiments Thomas Jefferson wrote to his daughter in the 1700s seemed remarkably similar to the sentiments we're echoing today, there's always been a historical equivalent to the shallow tweet or post on Facebook. Whether you connect to a cell phone text message or a postcard in the mail, it's still words and connection. So does not being on Facebook make you a bad parent? No. Does not being on Facebook possibly not hit parent? Yes. But is learning an understanding of your kids' world a good idea? Yes. Here's another question to consider. Does technology divide or unite? And the answer? It's up to us. Thank you.