 I'm David Thorburn, professor of literature and director of the MIT Communications Forum. I want to welcome you to the second of three forums we're holding this term, and I'd like to begin by announcing, reminding you of the third forum. Normally we would have a video display which would show the communication forum home page which is a calendar of our events for this semester, but we are doing something very daring for the communications forum and for the media lab. This is a very low-tech event. Neither of our speakers will use any visual or audio aids. Ethan has come armed only with a moleskin and the whole day will be, the whole of our carnival will be verbal and intellectual and entirely without electronic backup. But we will be recording the event, and there will be a video available after the fact of this exciting live event. So I'd like to announce that the final event of the fall for the communications forum will be an event titled Long-Form Journalism Behind the Scenes at the Atlantic. And James Fallows and Corbie Kummer, both staffers at the Atlantic, will join our MIT moderator, Tom Levinson, for a conversation about the way in which Long-Form reporting is being done today and what the implications of the fact that this forum may be an endangered one is for our journalism and our civic life. It's a great, great pleasure for me to introduce our speakers today, but I do have one other obligation to discharge, which I'd like to pay my respect, my gratitude to my friend and colleague Patsy Bedoin of the MIT Libraries, who's been a regular, repeated friend of the forum in many, many ways, and is really the only begetter of this forum. Months ago, really years ago, she began to talk to me about the importance of the kind of perspective that John Palfrey and Ethan, too, bring to these questions. And it was really the inspiration behind holding this forum. I want to thank her. As many of you know, Patsy, stand up, stand up. She raised her hand. For those of you who don't know her, thank you, Patsy. Ethan hardly needs an introduction to an MIT audience, and I'll just briefly say for those few outliers who may be watching the video version of this months from now or Ian's from now when we're all on the ground, Ethan is the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and teaches at MIT's Media Lab. And he's recently, the author, just recently published a remarkably interesting, rich, suggestive book titled, Rewire Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. It was just published in June of 2013. He's also the co-founder of the immensely significant and influential global blogging community, Global Voices, an alumnus of the Berkman Center at Harvard. He came to MIT in 2011 when he took over the direction of the Center for Civic Media. And this recitation of his distinguished titles hardly measures the kind of impact he's already had at MIT. The number of the, and especially the immense help he's provided to the communications forum. He's already become the communications forum's most admired moderator after yours truly. I'd like finally to introduce John Palfrey. John became the head, the Phillips Academy's 15th head of schools in July 2012, a job he continues in, and a job that perhaps has a particular relevance to the kind of thing he's been thinking about and writing about for a number of years. Before joining the Andover community, he held the post of Henry N. S., the third professor of law, and vice dean for library and information resources at the Harvard Law School. And he was also the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where Ethan, of course, also worked before coming to MIT. He served as the executive director of the Berkman Center from 2002 to 2008. He's also, especially surprising to see him in person and see what a young man he is, he has also published extensively and very influential. And among his books, of course, is the one we will center on today and the implications of that book, Born Digital, Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, a book he is co-authored. And I'll mention one other title, Access Denied, the Practice and Politics of Global Internet Filtering. And his other publications also deal in different ways with profoundly serious aspects of our digital environment. There's probably no one who's written more significantly and influential about some of these questions than John. When we were planning this forum, we had been thinking about adding another speaker, and Ethan had kindly agreed either to be a broad moderator or a speaker, and as we talked about it, it became clear to me that it would be better to give Ethan some room. I'm especially happy about the fact that we're about to embark on a conversation between two intellectuals I immensely admire. Well, thank you so much, David, and it's a very, very warm welcome. And I know that John and I both have the experience of sort of sitting in front of the room and being slightly embarrassed at someone reading a kind introduction. So I'm going to embarrass John further by building on David's introduction because there were pieces of it that I actually wanted to draw out. Despite the fact that I've known John for more than ten years, I actually had to print this out because there's so much that he's done and so much that he's accomplished. But rather than sort of repeat it, I actually wanted to kind of pull out a couple of threads that I hope are going to come out of this conversation. When I got to know John a little bit more than a decade ago, when he was really building the Berkman Center for Internet and Society to the position of prominence that it's taken as far as a think tank around Internet and Society issues, John was doing an enormous amount of research on questions of who had access to information and what was getting in the way. And so he was a collaborator and co-editor and co-author on a series of three books, Access Denied, Access Controlled and Access Contested, which really worked through a very comprehensive picture of different methods that governments and eventually individuals and corporations have all used to sort of control Internet speech. So I sort of assumed that that was John's true passion and then I sort of looked back and I actually looked at his history and discovered that he'd been an incredibly celebrated lawyer within the EPA and then sort of wondered for a while whether in fact democratic politics or the environment had been his true passion. And then he pivoted leaving Berkman becoming a vice dean at the law school in charge of library and information systems, helped launch the Digital Public Library of America, an amazing, really remarkable project at which point I was convinced that really he was a frustrated librarian in the lawyer's body trying to figure out sort of where to go. And then he did something that I think surprised a lot of us, which is he left an utterly plumb job at Harvard and went to Phillips Andover to pursue something that he's been fascinated by for many, many years, which is essentially how is digital technology changing what it means to be a young person and really changing what it means in terms of people's identity, their sense of community, how they think about privacy and really near and dear to my heart, how they think about civics, how they think about public participation of one fashion or another. We had signs that this was the path that he was starting to go into. He started hanging out with a bad crowd. I refer specifically to Lady Gaga, who came to John and to Dana Boyd and to other colleagues at the Berkman Center to found the Born This Way Foundation, looking at questions of bullying and pressure online and how to create safe spaces and public spaces online. So John is an incredibly multifaceted, knowledgeable individual. One other thing that doesn't necessarily come out immediately, if you just look at this impressive resume and sort of wonder how a guy in his early 40s can end up doing all this much, is that he's an absolutely incredible collaborator. And if you look at the six books that you currently have your name on, one is a monograph. The rest of them are co-authored. Two of the most prominent are co-authored with Urs Gusser, who is somewhere in the audience here. And these guys have a remarkable working relationship. So John is someone who I think is not just a shining individual, but his best in dialogue. Unfortunately, he's having that dialogue with me today. I will do my best to keep up. But I am definitely the junior partner in this enterprise. We're going to ask John to talk about an amazing book that he and Urs wrote called Born Digital, some of the thinking for that. Then we're going to open up sort of a conversation between the two of us. And then we're going to open up into the audience a broader conversation around this idea of what it means to be born digital. Is that, in fact, a category that we want to play with? What we think digital identity means for the identity, the sense of community, the sense of privacy, the sense of civics for this generation. And we're lucky in that we probably have people here who fit the definition of being born digital and we can bring that into the conversation as well. So with no further ado, and that he is thoroughly embarrassed by having at least two people lavish praise. John, I hope you'll tell us a little bit about the ideas in Born Digital. Thank you. I can't imagine being in a more wonderful place to have this conversation. But I can imagine that having fewer than two amazing introductions would be better in the future. I'm sorry to be so embarrassed. But that's very, very kind of both of you. I'm a huge believer in what you do here in this building. I know those of us who work at the Berkman Center have often looked down the street to this very space and drawn from a deep inspiration about trying to get the kind of spirit that's here that brings young people together with slightly older people on the faculty and people from lots of different disciplines to ask what I think are some of the most interesting potentially the hardest questions that are before us. So it's a real honor to be here in this space and to be doing it with you and David and others. Thank you for having us here. I share the praise for Patsy, who's been a huge collaborator on the Digital Public Library of America project too. So thank you. The book that is at least at the sort of roughly there in the conversation called Born Digital is one that I truly am the junior partner in that effort. Where is Worsk Gosser? He's back there, my co-author. So I'm hoping that he will jump in and correct me where I've gotten it wrong. He's also done a lot of work on this same topic from international perspective, which I hope we might get into knowing, Ethan being in the discussion, we certainly will get there. But I want to start off with a set of definitional points and then go into some of the notes that had been put on the flyer about identity, about community, about privacy, and then use civics as probably the primary jumping off point for here. Just in terms of the beginning of the project, we started, I think, with a question which is, as parents and as teachers, how much, if at all, is the world and the experience different for kids who were born in an era that is after the advent of digital technologies, sort of as a social experience? So as researchers, we thought, how do we define this task? And we came up with 1980 as a birthday. Now, 1980, you could have picked any date, it could be totally arbitrary. We thought a lot about bulletin board systems and other things. What were the kinds of digital communications technologies that ought to be a marker between the truly kind of social digital experience that we now have and something that came before? We wanted to place a marker that said, if you were born after this time, you wouldn't have known a world that didn't have some form of this type of technology. So you guys could pick a different date. It could have been 1975 or it could have been 1985, but we took 1980. And then we looked at what other people had been saying about this topic. And a lot of the discourse was actually not particularly academic. It was in a fairly public conversation, and it usually had to do with safety and things to do with security in kids. So it very often came up in the context of congressional discussions about whether we should keep kids away from porn, as an example, or should we keep kids safe from predators, another sort of common example. And in those conversations, the term that kept coming up was this idea of digital natives. Now, as researchers, you have lots of choices that you make along the way. And I think one of the more important choices, right or wrong, that Urs and I made in our research team, and this was a team that was partly in Europe and partly here at the Berkman Center, was to decide what to do with this commonplace term that was floating around about kids born in this period as digital natives. And lots of people who are academics really, really, really hate this term digital natives for lots of good reasons, actually. The primary good reason, I think, is the notion that if you talk about digital natives, the presumption is that someone is just born at a certain point in history, and that everybody is the same level of access and the same level of ability, and then you lump all kids together. So we're trying to figure out, do you, as academics, choose some other term entirely and sort of recast in that way? Or do you try to reclaim the dialogue, to jump in where people are having this conversation, particularly in places like Congress and in policy discussions around education? And right or wrong, we decided to jump in. And we said, OK, let's take this term digital natives and say, is there a way to define it in a way that actually is backed up by some data? So the data of the quantitative sort, that people like the Pew, Internet and American Life studies come at, and a series of focus groups and interviews that we were going to do. And we went on a reclamation project, basically, to say, what would, if we were going to take this term and define it as something that's accurate, like it or not, as a descriptor, could we do that? And so what we did was we sought to say, not every kid born after 1980 anywhere in the world is a digital native. We decided to say that, in fact, it's only a subset of kids who have this particular descriptor. And then to try to parse out the fact that there are many places in the world that don't have the connectivity to begin with, to have the conversation about this period. And probably, Ethan will give you better numbers. But is it safe to say, on the order of 7 billion people on the planet, something like 8 billion might have a good broadband a little over? Yeah, I think we're probably about 1.5 billion on broadband. But you're probably at about 5 billion on mobile phone. So when we wrote the book, we wrote it was 1.3 billion on good broadband. And it was close to 3 billion with handhelds. And so that number has grown over the last five or six years. So at a minimum, you have to have access to the technology. So that rules out lots of people who didn't. The second was, and I actually think the more consequential for communities like ours, is you have to have the skills to use them effectively. And I think the most important research in this space, some of it done by Henry Jenkins, some of it done by Esther Hargitai at Northwestern, have looked at the participation gap in between those kids who do have access to the technology, but don't actually have particularly good digital literacy skills. So for our definition of digital natives, we actually tried to make it a relatively small set of people in the planet and kids who were born after 1980 had access to the technology in, and we use broadband, because I think at least at that time, having access to a smartphone didn't mean the same kind of connectivity that maybe it does today. And then third, that they really have the skills to use it well. And I think this actually is a really, really important set of distinctions. And I do think that there's something different about people who have this set of attributes than people who don't in a variety of ways. That's not to say that people have this set of attributes are necessarily more sophisticated and effective with technology. I think it's very clear that lots of people in this room who do not meet particularly age criterion are more sophisticated than most people who do meet those age criterion. I think that's one really important kind of complexifier to this debate. I think another is that many people in this room probably have much greater level of technical ability, frankly, than kids, who are seen to be so intuitive with the tools when they're first touching an iPad and so forth, but actually don't do particularly sophisticated things down the road and so forth. So while we talk about digital natives, it's actually really important, I think, to see the number of different kinds of complexity that are in that data and to really claim it in a particular way. Now, we got absolutely blasted by most people who researched this. Henry Jenkins wrote a very loud and angry blog post saying, we shouldn't use this term digital natives. Lots of people who were involved, particularly in the MacArthur Foundation network was giving a lot of the money in this research and digital media literacy, said, how could you? We're trying to do something. And to be in a debate. And I think we could still talk about whether that's the right term to use. But I think that was, in some sense, a really interesting aspect of the research project. And then what we tried to do was to say, let's take a series of topics that we think are important and that are different for some of the people who meet these particular attributes and try to explore them and to say, what are the differences from a learning perspective and what's the difference from a democracy perspective? So taking it really from the kid perspective, what is it that makes life different for kids in these ways? So let me hit a few of them that were put on the flyer and then get it over to Ethan. The first was identity. I think identity is actually a really important starting point in this particular way. Because as we talk to kids in interviews and in focus groups, we ask them a lot about how they perceive their digital activities. And what was very quickly clear, and other people have made this argument in other very important ways, was that they didn't see a distinction, particularly between their life online and their life offline. It was sort of a weird question to say, so how do you think about going online and doing such and so? We get a lot of pushback in the conversation. What do you mean by going online to do it? And it became very clear that it's much more of a mesh for kids who have grown up with this set of technology than it is sort of an online world and an offline world. So you might think about this in terms of dress as one example, since you brought up Lady Gaga as an example. I think for many people that we talk to, the notion of having an online identity and your picture, say, on LinkedIn or Facebook that projects who you are is something that you might create for yourself as someone who has been in an analog only environment. And I obviously thought about when I got to be the head of a prep school and woke up this morning about what tie I was gonna put on. And I've been meeting with alumni and parents all day, so I have a blue tie, which is the right color for my school and it's got a little bell tower, which looks kind of academic, right? Obviously, I wasn't thinking about the MIT Media Lab, I'm sorry, it was my thing this morning as it was putting on clothes, but I didn't go and change my Facebook profile picture, I didn't change my LinkedIn picture today, but I did choose a particular tie to speak to these kids and parents over the course of the day. And I think as we have talked to kids, there's less of the sort of identity construction that's different in the online space than the offline space, much more of a sense of a mesh. Now it's not to say though that we don't see distinctions or the kids don't see distinctions in terms of identity building, and this would be something that would be really fun to talk through. At the time when we did the research, a number of kids we were talking to were using Second Life and other virtual worlds, which of course now seems pretty passe, but I do think you could imagine lots of different online identities that kids create. And one of the interesting fallacies that we've found cropping up in our interviews and in focus groups and continuously is this notion that kids I think have felt in this environment that they can create multiple different identities that in fact are distinct in those different online communities. And forgetting that it's actually quite often possible for somebody as an onlooker to Google or search for this series of identities and actually put together the patchwork of identities that kids are trying to create. And I think this is obviously one of the crucial aspects of adolescence. How do you create your identity and how do you play around with different identities? And in some ways you have much more control and I think kids perceive that they have more control to describe who they are in Facebook, obviously with lots of photographs and so forth, or describe who they are in a particular virtual environment or Tumblr and so forth. But actually they may have less control, less ability to do this in distinct ways because an onlooker can get such good access and we get to privacy, we'll break down some of those fallacies as well. So identity I think is one where on the one hand kids feel they have more control over identity creation and identity play and totally essential part of adolescent life. On the other hand they may actually have less than they do and they actually may be creating something that's actually very, very, very hard to undo over time. And as Ethan mentioned, I've made this unusual career change from being a law professor to the head of a high school which is totally fun and I have a wonderful group of kids. And one of the things that has struck me about seeing these kids is when you probably you went from one school to another, you might have thought about a new chance, a new beginning, right, for your identity. You might decide that you are gonna cut your hair really differently or you're gonna dress really, really differently and you would have the chance to do that. One thing that's pretty clear is if you go from the eighth grade in a public school in Massachusetts or whatever and you go to a new school somewhere else in the ninth grade, all of the pictures of you and all of the identity that you've got online comes with you. And it's actually much harder that to have a new identity in a new school. And I think there's good and bad in this but I think it is something that is again, a difference for kids who are born at this point in history than the way we, those who came before, have thought about identity creation going forward and did it from going from high school to college or college to graduate school or whatever. And I think that there's a lot more of a sense that you might have had a tattoo at one point in your life and you really wanna rub it off but you actually can't in a way in a digital space because it's been so clearly created. So that's identity as one. Second big topic on the poster was this notion of community. And I think that community is something that is deeply misunderstood in the discussion about digital technologies. I think there is a sense, almost a culture war that gives a sense that fabric in community is breaking down because of the internet. The idea that we can't actually create as strong communities because kids, for instance, don't know how to speak face to face as well because they spend so much time looking into their devices. You hear this from parents and teachers over and over again that kids can't communicate. And there is some data to suggest that that is so, that for some kids they spend more time mediated through their devices and less time speaking face to face. But I completely resist this idea that community is breaking down ultimately, that the technology is to blame and that we can't actually create richer and stronger communities. And I can give you lots of kid-based examples, but I would note actually more importantly in a way the global voices community that Ethan has created as an example of a community that literally didn't exist before Ethan and his team came together and created this group of people. And of course what's important about this is that they are pursuing a civic passion on the ground in specific places and they are writing about important events that are happening and they're playing a crucial role in conversation globally, but also the governance locally in their communities. But what's equally important from my perspective is that they come together as a community in lots of really interesting ways. One is of course through conferences, they come to physical spaces that are not just the digital environments they create, but also it'll be interesting to hear you riff on this Ethan, but the idea of the lingua project where a number of people have said I would like to understand in one language what somebody's writing in English or somebody's writing in Farsi or someone's writing in Chinese. And you've developed a community, created literally a community of people who translate for one another. That is absolutely new community creation made possible through a set of internet technologies on the one hand, but of course good old fashioned human connection in other ways. And then we just jump in for half a second because it's certainly not uniquely us, right? So in many ways we're sort of building on phenomena that we've seen a great deal, particularly in Chinese internet culture and Japanese internet culture where there are whole communities of translators, mostly young people who are very, very interested in media coming from other countries. So it's completely commonplace in China for an American television show to air, Game of Thrones for instance, incredibly popular in China. And so it will get shown on HBO, someone will rip it, it will be uploaded to a Chinese server and it will be subtitled first in English and then fully translated into Chinese and disseminated within 12 hours. And this becomes these sort of translation teams who are mostly teenagers, who are working on their English Chinese translation skills who are almost solely motivated by passion and their sort of incitement about the show who are sort of getting together and doing what we normally think of as sort of thousands and thousands of dollars worth of work but this notion of communities that are organized by interest and by passion puts this really interesting tension on some of the other aspects of this because you were mentioning previously this idea that there's no distinction between the online and the offline identity. We often end up thinking about youth online as being engaged with strangers. Most of the time we actually find that youth online are engaged with exactly who they're engaged with in real life. This passion driven activity in these sort of virtual communities actually sort of complicates that and challenges that a little bit. I think that's true. So we come back to that in the conversation part as well. So on the community front, all I would say is I think it is not unidirectional. I do not think we can say that the advent of the internet pulls apart communities, rents the fabric in Terboys, nor is it something that necessarily creates a better world. But I think that seems to be true for most disruptive technologies, that there are ways in which you can put it to good use. You can bend the arc of justice using it. On the other hand, there are times when it pulls things apart. So in terms of how kids have been using it, I think part of our job as educators is to say, what are the important skills in terms of community creation? What are the important skills in terms of connecting to one another, both in online spaces and in offline spaces that in fact can be additive? And I admit that I am mostly polyana-ish. I would see a glass of water in front of Patsy and say that's at least half full. But I really see opportunity here for community creation more than I see the possibility for it just to be pulled apart. On the, in terms of how much time kids spend online, I think this is another one of the key topics. I will admit that I feel like kids probably spend too much time online. One of the concerns I have for kids who are in a high school setting, in a competitive high school setting where I'm the head of school, is that they spend a lot of time when they're doing their homework, also on Facebook and so forth at the same time. I do think this notion of multitasking, doing more than one thing at the same time, actually makes them slower at doing their work and ultimately is not particularly productive as a study skill. So as we think about how we encourage kids to use the technology as well and to support their own learning as well as communities, we just need to give them good skills and we need to model it ourselves, ultimately. Third of the big issues to put on the table is privacy. I think this is a topic again where there are a lot of myths about how kids don't care about privacy or they share too much information about themselves online. I think it's pretty clear from our research that kids do probably share too much about themselves online that they don't think enough about the consequences of what they're doing. But I don't think it's true that kids don't care about privacy. I'm actually quite sure that that myth is wrong and I think there's a lot of data to show that that myth is wrong. I think they care about privacy as against you and me. I think they care about privacy, protecting information from adults or others that they don't particularly want in their business, but they do want to share a lot of information with their friends. And I think one of the challenges that kids face is they don't make good decisions about when and where to share information. They make a lot of mistakes. Our friend Dana Boyd has done a lot of research in this area and I think it's been played out over the last five or six years very clearly. The kids make a series of really, really clear and consistent mistakes about sharing too much information about themselves. They forget that if you put some little bit of information into this environment, whether it's a photograph or something about yourself, that it can be searched from lots of places, that it can be replicated and it often is replicated, that in fact it's gonna be much more persistent and backed up than it was before. And ultimately that they are gonna have information about themselves out in the public discourse that they're not gonna want to have out there. And I think this is something that we mistake for, kids don't care about privacy. I think they care about privacy. I think they just need much better tools to make much better decisions about this. And I observe it just as an example as technologies have emerged in the social space with for instance Snapchat. So a lot of the kids in our high school use Snapchat as a way to communicate with one another. And there's a sense that if you take a dangerous photograph of yourself and share it with Snapchat that this will go away and it'll be safer than putting it on a blog or on a Facebook. And I think there's some truth to that. But I think you're forgetting that there's an analog hole, right? Or there are lots of ways in which one could take a photograph of or a screenshot of something that is on Snapchat and create a digital object with it. This is sort of a recurring pattern as new technologies come along, which is that you think all of a sudden maybe that you're going to be safe and you can share information this way. And yet in fact, they're making substantial mistakes. Last of the topics is civics that was on the flyer. And I think civics is actually a really good stand in for some of the great opportunity associated with what kids are doing in online environments. Again, I'm an optimist about society in general. I'm an optimist about kids just spending time with these 14 to 18 year olds in our school. They are wonderful and brilliant and kind most of the time, not always, but much of the time. And I think that they have tools at their disposal that will allow them to become better citizens over time. I don't think that the technology means that anybody is going to be a better civic actor. I think there's any chance that because the telephone existed or the book before that or any technology that's come along that all of a sudden people are more engaged in civic life. But I do think that there are new and exciting opportunities by virtue of kids' skills and the most elite of these kids having these skills using technologies to be engaged in civic life. The one class that I'm teaching at the school is called hacking. And it's been a ton of fun to do and there's a little bit of technology and we do little bits of actual hacking but nothing too substantial. But the most important part of it I think is thinking about hacking as the making and remaking of institutions. The ability to take libraries as an example, to think about an institution and to break it down into its constituent parts and to remake it in a really wonderful way. And the extent to which I think the MIT libraries have been doing this for many years, I think that the Digital Public Library of America notion is very much that way to think about what are the essential parts of a library and how do we create it? And I think kids, when put to this task of actually deconstructing and reconstructing something in this way, have really great creativity to tap into. And I feel like there's something here that could be put to work when it comes to civic engagement. Now Ethan has some really interesting theories and this is where I'd like to throw it back over to him because I've been talking too much but about how we might harness that ability. Again, I don't think it'll happen on its own. I think this is all about mediation from adults and institutions like schools, institutions like libraries, institutions like journalists that will help make these things happen. But I do think the opportunity space is just as great as the threat space. So just by way of sort of mini summary and then over to Ethan. I think often when we think about kids and technology, the headline is more predators out there. Turns out not to be true. More risk of harm to kids in a variety of ways may be true if you're thinking about peer-to-peer harm about kids, but it's not because of the technology. It's because of what's happening more broadly in society. But we don't actually talk as much, I think, about what are the positive sides of this? What are kids doing in terms of learning? What are kids doing in terms of entrepreneurship? What are kids doing in terms of activism and connectivity globally that could be really, really interesting and positive and meet goals that we have otherwise in society? So incredibly helpful. What I really love about your way of framing it, JP, is that you're sort of looking at a lot of assumed truths and sort of asking us to look more closely at them. And as I was sort of going through this, I found myself asking the question of how did these things become assumed truths? And I find myself sort of wondering if we've gone through a bit of a generational shift as we think about, as we think about cyberspace, as we think about digital spaces, that we've really gone through a generation of non-natives, of people who sort of came in as digital immigrants. And I'm thinking of people like Howard Reingold who really took to this new environment but clearly had grown up in a very, very different environment. And for folks like Reingold, I'm thinking Sherry Turkle and her early work, a lot of what was most interesting about this space was the way in which everything would be different. So you wouldn't necessarily have a single fixed identity. On the internet, nobody knows who you're a dog. Everyone's gonna engage in gender play. Everybody's gonna have multiple avatars and sort of a fragmented self and it would be a way to explore. And your response is basically, no, not so much. Very quickly that reduces to a single self. There was a lot of cyber-utopian hope that you would see the emergence of these sort of transnational issue-based communities. And this is really what my last book was about. And the answer for the most part has been, sure, in very, very small cases, but it's certainly not the dominant paradigm of all of this. And I think we could kind of look through these four categories. I think Civic Life is one where you and I have both done deep dives over the years and there's been a great hope that the internet would be sort of a deliberative space and that may be one where that hope is still a bit more alive. But I wonder if part of what's going on with this sort of notion of digital natives is not just that we're seeing a first generation that's sort of grown up with these technologies since birth, but we're also seeing sort of a first generation that's actually using these technologies in the mainstream not the sort of weird folks who jumped on board as sort of alpha users in the 90s and sort of coming up with it. Maybe this is actually what happens, not so much that you've had the technology since birth, but more that everyone has the technology and there's sort of the assumption that everyone's going to end up using it. I think that's right. I think there's a narrative here that's as much about those who have had such high hopes for this and who came at this from funny angles. I mean, if you think about historically with some of these new technology, I think librarians were early adopters. It turns out that some lawyers who are really interested in the use of information because that's sort of the stock in trade, certainly the programmers and the scientists and the geeks and so forth, I think had a set of values that were superimposed on the technology as a matter of design in really interesting ways. And we're seeking to have, part of it was a cyber libertarian streak. Of course it was to resist control and corporate control and so forth in one way. Another was to say, to have a much more open deliberation space, something that would allow for more voices to be heard from more places, something again where I think we may still have some hope that that's actually true. But I think part of what happened was a bunch of old patterns in society kind of superimposed themselves on top of it. Not in maybe unpredictable way, but in a way that didn't allow some of these hopes to come true in the way that they are. And I guess part of my hunt is to say actually, I think there are a bunch of these dreams that are still out there that could be really, really interesting. And I think education may well be one of those areas where that's gonna be really important. And I still think that civics possibly could and I really, really think that the creation of institutions, you could think about it as entrepreneurship, although I don't think it only as for profit startups. I think that's another place where I really do think there may still be kind of second order breakthroughs that are possible. So I wanna get into that remixing and hacking discussion, but I don't wanna get there quite yet because I wanna hold on to some of these tensions. And I would say that one of the things that I think your work and Urs and Dana and a lot of related researches on this have really thoroughly debunked stranger danger and have sort of gone after this notion that young people are going online and they're finding kid lover 69, who's immediately luring them off to a motel on a roadside near Cleveland. And while that happens and while it's tragic, it's a very, very small percentage of what happens online. But you just mentioned this sort of notion that what happens offline translates online. And what does seem to happen an enormous amount offline for adolescents is bullying. And that what this seems to have set up is a dynamic where bullying and in some cases really aggressive sexual harassment can move into these online fora. And because there is still this generation gap between a set of digital natives and parents who in many cases aren't aware of the tools being used, that behavior is more or less invisible until the consequences become sort of tragic. How do you find yourself thinking and talking instead of engaging with these issues of digital tools as a space where kids can be horrible to one another? They can, for sure. So let me go back to the stranger danger thing for a second just to try to get the facts as crisply as I can because I think it really, really matters. The way you summarize this is entirely correct. I think that when people think about the internet and kids, the first thing that hits you is to catch a predator, particularly if you're talking to parents and teachers. The concern that if kids go online at too early in age they're gonna connect with someone who's going to do them harm. And it turns out that it's not what we all thought and I think the data continue to play this out which is point one. It is the case that sometimes this happens. There are horrible instances of this occurring. You and I are both parents. It would be our worst nightmare if this were to occur. There's no question about it. The fact is also that the meeting place for kids these days of people who would do them sexual harm has in fact moved often from public parks to online spaces. So that's another part of the myth that's actually accurate that some of the people who would do this harm are stranger 69 or whatever who are after kids in social environments. Here are the ways in which it's not true. Number one is the popular myth said because of the internet this is a greater risk to kids. Turns out if you look at the data since 1990 which is really when it's been sort of collected in this way to today the risk of this happening to kids is down and not up. So it's extremely important I think to realize that there is not a causal relationship between the advent of the internet and a big uptick in this danger to kids. So as we think about it as public policy it's a horrible thing. We must prevent it. We must give law enforcement the tools to prevent this happening to our kids but it is not the case that there is an epidemic of this happening because the internet has occurred. The second piece that's really important about this is a little bit the point you're making Ethan that it's not everything new under the sun all of a sudden. The kids who are at risk of having this happen to them were at risk before and will be at risk on an ongoing basis. Kids who are at risk youth who are often on the internet looking for sex are the ones who meet people who do these horrible things to them in places devoted to people talking about sex. So for my sins Dana Boyd and I and a woman named Dana Sacco became the co-chairs of a national commission looking at this issue a few years ago called the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. We worked with all of the state attorneys general less Texas which was out. We worked with all of the social media organizations and the child safety organizations and the discussion about this really was is this a bigger risk or not? And should we have things like a driver's license for kids online and so forth? And I think what the data pointed to in this case was there are really good strategies that law enforcement is using that do find people who are doing this to kids online and there are really good strategies for helping at risk youth and we should pursue them. And you know what? This is the thing that never shows up in the newspaper. It's working right? Actually the rate is down of this happening and when the strategies are working I don't think that's the time when all of a sudden you require a driver's license for the internet and strong authentication and so forth that I just don't think it's gonna protect kids and that was a controversial thing to say but I think it's turned out to be true. Now the other thing we said in that report and in subsequent work was to say what we do see happening is that kids are harming one another psychologically in ways through the internet that they hadn't done before. That there are new forms of mediated through digital technologies harms that kids are doing. And I think it's a very simple idea which is the disinhibition effect. If we are not sitting across from one another we often do things that are harsher. You've all sent that email that you wish you could unsend, right? Or you've all posted that the flame to a listserv or to a blog or whatever where with the blog you pull it down but in other cases where you wish that you had the chance to pull it back and kids do this all the time. They do not have good self-control in lots of cases and sometimes it's sexting which is to say taking a picture of the person you are with or not with. I suppose and sending it to them or of yourself and not realizing that that will be sent around. It is a very common practice still. That's I think a perfectly clear example of it. I think the idea of a series of sites called PostSecret if you've seen these I think that's another sort of internet specific example where people create environments either a general one, a general PostSecret or specific ones to communities. We had one called Andover PostSecret and the idea was that people could put postcards in a little mailbox and have whatever they posted put on this internet site to reach somebody else and often those postcards were pretty harmful to other people. I'm not sure that they would have said these things face to face to one another. Does that site continue? Was that a discussion that you had at Andover? It was a discussion we had at Andover. Yes, it was a very interesting test of my own set of values. Where did you end up on this? So let me say one more thing about the general point and then come back to it. But the general point was that in these cases about kids harming one another in these spaces very often it was tied to offline behavior. So again, it was not by and large a situation in which a kid who didn't know someone else was mean to them because the internet existed. It was kids who were building one another in the locker room or on the schoolyard sometimes doing it there too and having this space as another environment for doing it. It's almost always connected to these kinds of social relations. So in the case of, sorry, I got... Well, I was just gonna say on that specifically because I'm not gonna let you off the hook on Nandor and Kostick with either, but if kids are bullying each other in the locker room there's a coach, there's adults, there's other kids, there's a certain amount of visibility to it. I think one of the things that's really scary to people who are not part of the scene is this notion that there may be enormous psychological pressure going on on a young person that's essentially invisible to adults whereas you would hope that it would be significantly more visible, certainly in a school like Andover, if that's going on in real life. Or am I drawing too many assumptions about how people see bullying? I think it turns out to be exactly the opposite. I think that we see much more bullying because of the internet. So I think what has happened is you would often not, I mean a lot of the bullying happens on the playground when adults aren't there, right? Or in the locker room, the snapping of the towels and all those things, I've still got the welts from it that happens when the coach is out. I think what happens with the internet is it gets recorded, right? And it's there, not just at that moment when it's recorded, but it's there over time and it persists. And so I actually think one of the reasons that the data show increases in bullying of kids is because of the internet. Not necessarily because kids are meaner or doing more of it, it's just that we can see more. We can actually, it's a scientific. The Lord of the Flies was still a really compelling book, you know, a long, long time ago before we had digital technologies to capture all this. So how did you handle this at Endo? Or how did you end up with Endover post-secret? So I didn't start Endover post-secret, just to be clear. It sounded like a great controlled experiment. It was a really interesting experiment. Take a highly functioning, you know, high quality school, show up with a new head of school and then introduce technology. It's a great A-B test. Exactly. So here are a couple of data points that are useful about describing this particular school. It's 1,129 kids. They are academically extremely strong. They're also selected in the admissions process for NICE. So it's actually required to have somebody, someone who's writing a recommendation, say you are a kind child, so that it is a very geeky, I mean to say it in the most loving way. I love geeks. And it's a community that is by and large a very strong kid community. They're generally, generally very supportive. Now, it would be boring if everybody were nice to one another at all times. And it's of course not true that in adolescence, people don't do things that are mean to one another. So that is true in this environment too. It's 75% boarding and 25% day students. So most of the kids are there 24 by seven for the time that we were in it. So it's a hot house. It's a pressure cooker and it's coed. And even the day students are there for very long days. And so what happened in this particular case with the site and over post secret was actually part of a course. It was a very, I would say open and creative course taught by two faculty members who were allowing students to do a variety of experiments of this sort around community. And so three girls, all of whom are seniors, all of whom are very respectable kids. Not kids who had had huge discipline records. We weren't talking about sort of difficult cases trying to stick it to the man or that wasn't the thing. It was three kids who were worried about their peers who were harming themselves or who were upset. And we like any environment have kids who practice self-harm. We have kids who have psychological trauma of all the ordinary adolescent sort. And when you're living in a dorm with these kids, you're seeing it among your peers more often, I think, than if you're the lone teenager in the house, right? Then you see it in pretty graphic ways in some cases. And their theory was that if we had a post secret site that kids would be able to express themselves in ways that they couldn't otherwise. And their teacher said, fine, go for it. So they modeled it on the existing, the overall post secret site, if you haven't seen it, it's worth looking at. And so they created an environment where people could post postcards. And they didn't really set many rules at the start. It was pretty free form. They gave out a postcard in every one of the 1130 kids post boxes. And they made another post box so that you would draw on it or write on it, put it in the post box, and then it would get posted on the internet site by these three students. And I think you could probably predict what happened. Some of the postcards were beautiful. Just artistic and self-expression like you read about in this best possible adolescent way and just smile looking at it and thinking, this is a great way for kids to be able to express themselves. And then some of them are just kind of weird in the way that you would also imagine for adolescence. And you kind of go, huh, what's that? And then a bunch of them were sad of the variety that are not troubling, but kids expressing sad mood. And maybe this is helpful, in fact, for them to vent this in some fashion. A bunch of them were, you know, worse, you're so cute, will you marry me? Kind of things where they're writing to someone they couldn't speak to and they wanted to let somebody know that they were attracted to them. But then a lot of them were pretty harsh and harmful in a variety of ways. And these three girls, to their credit, played the role of putting these things up. And they would post them, I think, on Wednesday and on a Sunday, I think those were their rules. And they started to go up in ways that, you know, people were watching. Like every Wednesday, people would look at what were the new postcards gonna be? And on every Sunday, what were the new postcards gonna be? And they really, interestingly in this sort of agenda-setting way, galvanized the community around what were these postcards gonna be? It was kind of exciting in that fashion. And there would be editorials in the school newspaper and so forth about them. And in a way, it was wonderful. In a way, it was totally what they meant it to be of self-expression. But it also was incredibly dark. There were lots of things about kids hurting themselves. There were lots of things about kids, you know, potentially doing nasty things to other people. And there were things that sometimes were too close to personal and saying not nice things about other people where they wouldn't have said them face to face. So what do you do in this case? You have faculty up in arms, you have kids up in arms, but you also have the internet, right? And you have free expression. You have the faculty members who were in charge of it, you know, pretty strongly saying kids should be able to do this is a class thing. This is an experiment. And you have, particularly at this school, a really strong independent streak. We pride ourselves on having this be a place where kids learn to interact in this world. And I as the digital guy, I want them to be able to interact in this digital world, right? So before we tell people what you did, let's frame this as a binary, because I'd like to get a read from the group here on how we do this. I love it. So what was the choice that you sort of found yourself? Well, it's not a binary choice, of course, even these things never are. But let's, we can make it in a binary. So choice zero is you do nothing. You let the kids keep posting the stuff as much as they want. And you run the risk that at some point, someone puts up the horrible one that said, I'm gonna kill myself tomorrow. You don't know who the kid is and you know, something horrible happens, right? But you run that risk. You say, this is our libertarian internet space and we're gonna go for it. That's binary choice zero. And binary choice one, is this a reasonable way to put it? You want a one. So one would be, I shut it down. I say, you cannot do that at this school. Take down the site and scrub it and go to, you know, BrewsterKale and get it out of archive.org and you know, say, thou shall never put up an internet post secret and don't you dare put out postcards and collect them? Do you want a third choice or do you want to go with a binary? Go with a binary, I suppose. So you are now head of Phillips Andover. Congratulations to all of you. It's now not just the 15th head, it's 16th and 17th and so on. Choice zero, who keeps it up? Who doesn't take it down? Everything goes up. It simply goes up smoothly, show of hands. Who ends up on choice one? Who ends up saying, this is too dangerous. This is too challenging. Let's take it down. Put them up high. Put them up high. Who didn't vote? A lot of you didn't vote. You didn't vote because you don't like either of the choices or you didn't vote because you didn't know I was gonna call on you for not voting. So where did you end up on this jump? Well, let's just state for the, if anybody ever is watching this after in a macabre sense, we're gone. There were more people. Yeah, I thought that was really dark. It was pretty dark. By the way, I, you know, talk about the dark stuff that comes out during this. Yeah, absolutely. More people chose zero than one, but I would say it was sort of 40 to 10 or something, right? And then there were, I don't know, whatever the balance was of non-voting. And maybe 50 non-voters. 50 non-voters, okay. So that's the lineup. So obviously I don't like either of those choices particularly, and I think as an educator, I see this as a chance to meet with these kids, right? So what do I do? I call them into my office and I say, let's talk about it. One of the kids was in my hacking class at the time who I liked very much. I liked all these three girls. They're fantastic. And very thoughtful. Quite different views among them. So I call them in my office and I say, all right, ladies, this is problematic. You know, well, first of all, I let it run for a while and I took a fair amount of heat from a lot of people saying you should take it down for a while and then I brought them in. And I said, so how are you thinking about your moral responsibility in this case? So when you get that postcard that I'm worried about, which is the I'm about to hurt myself or I'm about to hurt someone else and it's an anonymous postcard, what are you gonna do? Yeah. This was a concern to them. These are girls and they're 17 or 18 years old. They're in the winter term of their senior year, just waiting to hear from colleges. And they are all of a sudden potentially in this extraordinary position that none of us as parents or teachers or mentors wanna be in, right? Of soliciting these views, potentially getting them and not being able to reach back out. So that was one question I put to them. Second question I put to them was to say, look, could you imagine putting up some rules on your site that actually might make this a more positive experience where it's not just post anything you want, harmful as it might be. What about thinking sort of in terms of terms of service? Can you imagine encouraging a particular form of activity that you want kids to engage in and model it or shape it a little bit? So they thought about this for a little bit. Another thing that I brought up was look, let's imagine somebody posts something on here that is highly pornographic or I know on their thing and there were some that were close to pornographic and certainly some that got very close to the, you know, when you see it kind of definition and they were starting to put edgier and edgier ones up. They're a fair amount of fallatio and other things that complex to have in exactly this way. And I said, you're the publisher of this. How do you feel about being the publisher of something that it might go on the edge of something that, I don't know, I'm not sure you'd get arrested for it, but you know, people are thinking of you as the publisher of something that it's pretty edgy. So I put to them a series of hypotheticals and they, in each of the cases, I think they had talked about it as amongst themselves. I think they had had conversations, but I think they disagreed, these three girls about this. And there was one of the girls I think who probably was willing to run more risk and others were thinking a little bit more about I'm not sure I wanna be a publisher of pornographic stuff and I didn't ever play the card of calling the parents, but one could imagine engaging the parents and looking at what their kids were the publishers of and their names were on it and so forth. So we engaged them in a conversation. And at first what they decided to do was they posted a bunch of rules and they agreed that if they got some troubling cards they would work with our school psychologist. So we are fortunate we have three full-time psychologists and a whole bunch of other people who do this. But I will say the psychologists were concerned about the existence of this for exactly that same problem which was even if they got the card and the kid says I'm about to harm myself what are they gonna do with it, right? You go to the psychologist, they can't track down who the kid was. So they agreed to work with sort of an interim measure. Then a couple weeks later they did post some more edgy stuff. It got closer and closer to various lines and it got to the point where it was going to be perhaps a discipline issue for them publishing some of the stuff they were publishing. So I called them back in and said look, would you like this to be a discipline issue or would you like to take another route here? And it was coming up on Spring Break and it was their senior year and I think they were getting a lot of pressure from their friends and their teachers and I think they decided that they had had enough and what they did was they had a huge pile like a hundred more cards and they went through the cards and they found about a dozen of them that were actually quite cheerful and kind of happy ones and so they decided to do a final posting of the more or less cheerful, there are a couple dark ones in there but mostly cheerful ones and then they decided as of Spring Break they were done with the site. So it was I think through friendly but fairly clear kind of intervention that they decided on their own that they would take down the site or they would close the practice. So I'm interested because this comes up in the context of thinking about digital behavior and there's a funny way in which this is a purely analog phenomenon. There's no reason why your students couldn't have set up a box, taken the cards, selected them, put them up on a bulletin board and in a locked glass case so they didn't get ripped down by someone who was offended by them, is there something about what's going on now at this moment of change, at this sort of moment of, again this idea of digital natives that we're exploring, the assumption of anonymity but simultaneously this fear that anything that you create online might be traced back to you. This disinhibition effect of sort of speech at a distance. Do you think this is really different? Do you think that if someone had been in your role in 1970 and the same thing had happened, do you think you would have had the same dynamics or do you think this is playing out differently at this moment in time? It's a great question. I'm sure it did happen. Was anybody ahead of school in 1970 and have this happen? It's probably right. I doubt that the kid behavior here is all that different. They were challenging authority. They were being publishers of edgy material that to some extent probably was helpful to some people and that they were trying to figure out where a line was and we as adults were trying to help them find that line. I think there is a difference in terms of doing it behind that glass case with sort of analog postcards in terms of the effect and the reach of it and the extent to which it's a little bit less an art project in a hallway that everybody has to come through and see and kind of peer at than it is something that's kind of much more accessible and commonly available and frankly in this particular case it went outside of our little community. So the parents could see it. The reason I was getting a lot of heat for it was it was admissions yield season. So all applicants to our school who had been admitted and they were looking at some other school they might go to, would go online and see Andrew and this is what kid life is like. So there were lots of ways in which the fact that it was online was material. And yes, an applicant could have walked through that hallway and seen those postcards but that's much less likely. It's much less dynamic, it's much less persistent. So I think there are aspects of this that are clearly the same behavior but the effects of it, the potential harms or the potential reach of it I think are distinct and more and I think that they're built into a broader and more complex fabric. So let's make perhaps an awkward pivot and let's see if I can do this in almost like a two step pivot, right? So one of the things that's different in a digital environment is that the notion of public is different, right? So you could have imagined in 1970 at Andover those postcards coming in and being public but they would be public to the Andover public and now they're public in a much, much broader sense. They're public to anyone who cares to look. They might be public in the sense of someone trying to figure out whether in college admissions they're going to admit Andover students wondering whether they are in fact those dark ones all those sort of different ways to go. There's another side of that public which is that sort of notion that one could act at a very different scale. That one might think of oneself as embedded with Andover but one actually might be an actor on any number of scales, on the scale of national scale, on the scale of global scale. Now you were head of school during Coney 2012 which I assume swept through your institution as it swept through most institutions where there were a lot of teenagers where suddenly there was this call to action on an international scale issue, perhaps a badly conceived call to action but an incredibly well crafted call to action. And I wanna put that in dialogue with a question that a lot of people are having which is, is this a generation that is so narcissistic, so self-obsessed, so staring at the screen and so staring at each other that they basically disengaged from civics? We have Sandra Day O'Connor saying we have a crisis in civics, falling voting rates, falling participation. Are they moving into a different public space or are they moving out of that space of civics? I don't think it's an awkward pivot at all. I think it's a very sensible pivot from the notion of doing something that is edgy and very adolescent in its qualities but really interesting in a digital space to something that we would say as just plainly pro-social, right? The idea of engaging in public discourse around something that matters on a global scale. And I should say that my frame of vision here is a group of kids, if you're talking about this particular school, not necessarily the set that we studied but a group of kids who are likely to be positive actors in society for all the reasons I suggested. It's a need-blind school. We draw from kids all over the world. It's very meritocratic in its view and kids I think pride themselves on a degree of activism that is a positive thing. So they're inclined to be engaged. I think when Coney 2012 came along and I was actually not yet in that job but I was very much in dialogue with the kids and the conversation went along, they were very inclined to jump on that particular bandwagon in the way that the people creating the movement wanted young people to jump in. These were, I think, exactly the targets, 1130 good smart kids from all around the world who would do whatever the anti-Coney people wanted to have happen. Visible children, thank you. And so that video was absolutely viral. The kids wrote in the school newspaper consistently. And actually what I did, and I was from afar but then actually ended up teaching in the class was I sent them your blog post. I grabbed a bunch of things that were breaking down that conversation. I said, you know, I think it's more complex than you think it is and let's try to frame the second order conversation about it. Let's try to frame the conversation that said if you really want to do good in the world and the motto of the school is non-Siby, not for self. So if you want to do the non-Siby thing, let's think one sort of click more about what that is and then figure out how then to act. And I have to say that one of the reasons I'm so bullish about this group of kids who graduated from this school in 2013 was the extent to which they had all the time in the world for that second order conversation. Now they're not always going to get it right and they're not always going to do all the homework and not always going to have it. But they were really, really up for, I want to make a positive difference in the world and I see the technology as one of the ways I can do that and I see that I have agency in the world in a way that I didn't before because I can write stuff, because I can be connected in the social space not so much to give money, but all the things that one would have. So, you know, Coney is such a complex thing as to whether or not invisible children, you know, caused good to happen in the world. But it certainly created a heck of a great conversation at least in this elite, you know, residential environment. And that I would completely agree with and I would grab onto the word that you use near the end there around agency. And one of the things that I'm finding as we sort of think about this question of, is civics changing as we sort of move into a direction of digital natives? Is that there is this sort of expectation of having agency. And I find that it's not necessarily an expectation that I have. And one of the reasons I'm happy to be on stage with you tonight is that I'm really depressed. We have a government shutdown. We may be heading towards default. We're at 8% approval rating for Congress. It's very, very hard for me to think about how one would have impact on issues that I care about like changing the penal system in America, which is phenomenally badly broken, but seems so far out of the realm of where we are. And then I look at people in their teens and in their 20s and sort of the activism that they're engaged with. And it seems to be all about agency. It seems to be all about how do I find a lever that I can move. And sometimes this is Kony, and sometimes this is the Harry Potter Alliance trying to figure out what they can do jointly as Harry Potter fans fighting Fair Trade Chocolate. But it seems, fighting for Fair Trade Chocolate. But it also seems like- Ooh, it's Fair Trade Chocolate. Well, I'm a diabetic, so I'm not too pro for Fair Trade Chocolate, but that's okay. But it seems like this is more of a general trend with Kiva and Donors Choose and Kickstarter and sort of all of these different ways to sort of say I wanna see my impact on the world. Are these students, because you are very literally training the next generation of leaders, are they going to engage with Washington, or are they gonna say I don't have agency there and that's not a space that I'm gonna work in? So Ethan, I will accept the first part of what you said completely. I have never felt more frustrated in my life that our government is so preposterously dumb that we are shut down. It's unthinkably ridiculous that we're in this situation. I worked at the EPA actually during the last shutdown and people lived furloughs and you had to decide whether you were essential government employees and I was the most just upsetting, stupid thing, like how could we do it? So I certainly won't fight that part of the argument because it's outrageous and I wish I had more agency or we all had more agency. But I will go back to my Polly Anna ish that glasses have full personality in the context of these amazing kids that I spend my time with and I accept that this is a global elite that has come to this particular school and but I don't think it's only this particular elite set of kids because I think some of the data points to this. I would point to a couple of topics where I think actually kids are remarkable in the way in which there will be generational change around topics and I hope that leadership will emerge out of this group. One is gay rights. I think that the conversation that kids are having about the extent to which people ought to be able to marry who are of the same sex, it's astonishing to me how quickly the normalcy has been created around this topic in the sense that, I don't know, just a few decades ago that this was something that might be awkward and difficult to talk about and so forth and I think now kids at an earlier age are able to come out and be safe in that way and that their peers, whether they are the captain of the hockey team or the sensitive artist or whatever anyone in between, it's a very safe space, I think, for kids in this particular way and I feel like a lot of that is kids have been very active in the conversation and are active in that conversation so that's one where I think it just has a human rights issue but it's one where a lot of that change I think is a generational one. Another one I would notice is prison reform. I think in here, I heard kids do a, they sort of created a class on the last Martin Luther King Day about prison reform and looked really carefully at the data about incarceration in America and what we're doing and how we're, you know, the after effects of the war on drugs and so forth and a bunch of kids, many of whom I think are actually culturally and politically quite conservative, this is not a left right thing. You know, I think we're looking at this and saying, this is screwed up, like how can we be making this set of choices with this set of effects on our society and just I've seen a fair amount of sophistication in kids around this. A third issue that came up in the context of these kids was the environment. I think that when you ask a group of kids who are thoughtful about society and their role in it, what they're most concerned about, they're deeply concerned about climate change and what they're being handed by us, right? And I think that they really see a role in individual action, whether it's through the means of food and sustainability, whether it's through the kinds of actions and what kind of transportation they use, whether it's in terms of their voting and sort of more systemic change. I think these kids are actually pretty sophisticated about this, this played out in the form of a petition that came to us as the trustees of the school. So we have a $900 million endowment and a lot of it's invested in equities and a bunch of kids came and said, we want you to divest from the 15 dirtiest stocks. And they created a movement and petitions and so forth. And this drove actually a lot of the discussion among trustees and we set up a series of forums and we had scientists from MIT and elsewhere come. It was a fantastic conversation. Now, for a variety of reasons, the trustees did not decide to divest in this particular way. We're changing a bunch of other things that we're doing. But I think these kids, they helped set that agenda. They drove a conversation. They affected some real change. And whether or not they get their exact way with these 15 stocks, I think they're remarkable things have happened. So on an issue by issue basis, I see real agency that's linked somewhat to digital behavior, but not exclusively. And I see real chance of, I don't know, positive change. So where we are at this point just to quickly recap because we're now gonna ask people to stand up and stand by these two microphones if you wanna put a question to John or God forbid to me. We've talked about complicating this notion of the digitally native and essentially saying this isn't a simple application of a term to anyone who has grown up at a time when computers are pervasive. But we're actually talking about a special definition. People born since 1980 who had access to broadband, who had access to computing, who've developed the skillset to have the ability to be able to create within that space, have some agency within that space. We've then gone on and sort of looked at what this might mean for a couple of different facets of life. What it might mean as far as identity, what it might mean as far as senses of privacy, of community, of civic engagement. And in many cases, the response has been to say, yes, there are aspects of this that are different, but sometimes they were sort of different from our utopian expectations of what we're going to come around with these technologies. And in some ways, they're simply reinforcing tendencies of what it means to be a young person and to find your way in the world. People are mean to each other. And people who are 16 are often really mean to each other. People are stupid and say things they don't think about. I do it on stage all the time and people do it on the internet in a way. So we've sort of put forward, thanks to John's deep research in this field, I think a very nuanced vision. I'm curious from the audience whether it's a vision that sounds right to you. I'm particularly interested for people who identify as part of this generation, whether this sounds like a correct version of it. I'm also very interested in people who either work with people in this generation, either as parents or as teachers. And while I love people raising hands, what you actually want to do is make your way to a microphone because otherwise, A, we won't be able to hear you over the cocktail party on the fifth floor and the audience watching streaming certainly won't be able to hear you. So please feel free to queue up. We'll take some questions. We'll open up the discussion from here. And it would be great if the first thing you say when you step in front of the mic is to identify yourself. Okay, my name is Carl Hackerinen and I'm a grandfather of seven. So one of the things that I've noticed and is a little bit of a rant is that I think that parents, generally of kids who've been born digital, meeting the criteria that you talk about, have abdicated their responsibility as adults. The stories that we hear about the wonderful attention brought by an elite school to deal with some of these issues, both of technology and the broader meetings of what it means to be a community, what it means to be responsible for one another. Most, I'll say most parents feel so outgunned by their kids. Not realizing that most of the kids aren't that technically savvy, aren't that technically adept, aren't using the technology to their full extent. But so many adults, I've just walked away and have said, oh, that's what the kids do. I'm gonna leave it alone because I'm embarrassed that I'm stupid. I'm embarrassed that I can't handle it. I teach classes to senior citizens. I mean, so I have people in my classes literally in their 90s. And it's a great joy to watch them learn how not only to adapt to the technology, to see how community can be developed, how learning can continue throughout life, but also start to understand what's going on with their kids and their grandkids at a level that they couldn't be for. So how do we get the parents of many of the ones who are born digitally? Now we're starting to get sort of second generation digital parents. And that may hold some hope. But for now, the people in their 40s and 50s who just feel overwhelmed and as a result, have just checked out. So wonderful rant, because you're right completely and it's a wonderful question at the end of it. So just to restate where I think you're completely right is the extent to which parents and teachers to lesser extent and other kind of mentors too quickly check out of this conversation on the grounds that my kid knows so much more about these technologies. I can't really help them. And therefore I'm just gonna go over here and either pretend it's not happening or complain about it or tell them not to use it or whatever. And I think that's exactly the wrong strategy. One of the reasons that Urs and I wrote this particular book, which sort of semi-scholarly in the sense it was a trade press. We tried to use real scholarly data, but to present it in a public way, it was geared to our parents and teachers because as we did the research, we felt that parents and teachers were feeling outgunned and actually didn't need to be. So much of this is common sense. You know, one of the things to tell your kids to do is go outside and play soccer. Like, and when don't do Facebook when you're doing your homework and sit over them until they do that. I don't think there are actually quite such scary aspects of this as people think. And to your point, in most cases, kids are nowhere near as technically able as they're feared to be in many cases. Now, some kids are absolute wizards and can get around proxies and all sorts of things that they want to do, but in the most, in the vast majority of cases, parents have way more to offer than they actually do. Teachers do too and we should apply that. I think that the sort of what can we do in this respect? I often, when I'm asked by parents, how should I get involved with this? I say just do it more. Use the technology more yourself and in ways that is helpful modeling. So I think if we as parents are in the kitchen constantly with two laptops open when all our kids are there having dinner, that's a terrible form of modeling and the kids are gonna do it too. We all do this to some extent. While I was writing the book, I was realizing I was in the living room writing an email to my wife in the kitchen. Get up, turn off the computer and go talk to her. We all do these things and have bad behavior ourselves. So I think modeling is much more powerful than we give it credit for. I think the parents can very easily learn some of these techniques well and share them with kids. And then I think sometimes the way to do it is flip the tables and let the kid be the teacher. Where you're open to doing that, let the kids show you something cool that they're doing. That with my 11 year old who his courses are all now on an iPad entirely, he loves to show me what he's doing in iMovie and this cool new thing and whether or not I've seen it before and know how to do it, that's an amazing moment for him to be able to say, hey dad, I can do something you can't. And I think there's a great conversation there. So I actually don't think it's that different than parenting's ever been, but abdication is totally the wrong answer. Just as a follow up to that, one of the things that I've seen work really well but it requires that the parents and many cases teachers in public schools, get their egos out of the way is to be able to ask the kid for help and listen. And realize that okay, as a teacher, I don't have to know everything in order to know something. I don't have to know everything in order to be a good teacher. What I have to have is a sense of purpose. What I have to have is a sense of clarity. But if there's a skill in terms of video editing, if there's a skill in terms of, all right, what's the app that's gonna be fun for this ride, ask the kid, nothing is better for a kid than to teach an adult how to do something. This is a circumstance that I experience basically constantly here because by the time you get admitted to be a student at the Media Lab, you are necessarily smarter than I am. And you're clearly gonna have very, very deep skill sets in areas that I don't have those skill sets. And so the art of teaching here is sort of that art of getting out of the way and essentially trying to figure out how you match make and how you sort of say to someone, I know that my student knows this really, really well. How do you let that person shine? I think it's a way that most of us have a tough time learning how to teach. We teach because we have expertise. We teach because we have deep knowledge. And of course what's going on right now is that we may be teaching multiple things at the same time. We're teaching a subject, but we're teaching a medium and trying to find that way to sort of get out of the way and let a student teach the medium while you're teaching the subject. I think it's an extremely rich way to think about this on a bunch of different levels. Can I push you one bit more before going to Evie? Just in terms of the MIT Media Lab Atelier model of teaching and learning, and you've referenced in a variety of ways the connected learning model that MacArthur and Joey Ito and his sister Mimi and others are big fans of. Can you elaborate a little bit just on the theory of the pedagogy and whether you think in a way the way in which teaching and learning happens here is sort of a digital or pre-digital thing that is now a model that could scale outside of these rarefied walls? Well, so I don't actually know if you know this, but this is the class that I'm co-teaching at the moment. I'm co-teaching a class with Mitch Resnick, Patty Moss, and Philip Schmidt. And Philip is one of the leading thinkers about sort of the future of online education. And what we basically did was we built a class reacting to MIT's edX experiment. So in edX, MIT is trying to figure out how to take classes here and make them accessible to the rest of the world, which is a wonderful thing. But edX was really built around the paradigm of instructive learning. And in instructive learning, I know what I'm going to say in a statistics class. I have a well-developed lecture that I've honed over the years. I have problem sets that could probably be corrected automatically or at least by a TA. And we can put that all together and that's an easy way to sort of go ahead and teach that class. We almost never teach that way in this building. It'll occasionally happen. We'll occasionally teach a bit of hard subject matter. But we teach almost exclusively around either project-based learning or peer-based learning. So we either essentially throw out a task to our students and say, you go figure out how to do this. I'll coach around this. Or peer learning, where we sort of say, oh, you want to learn that aspect of video editing. Go ask Chris Peterson. He figured it out. He can show you how to go ahead and do it. So now the question becomes, when you take that edX model and you try to make it work on the project or the peer learning, that stuff works really, really well when you're all in a room together. It gets much, much trickier when you go and Google Hangout. And now the challenge that I'm sort of putting to my work groups on that is I want you not just to get out of the rarefied air of the Media Lab and into Cambridge, but I want you to partner with your counterparts at the iHub in Nairobi, Kenya. And how could we get into a true sort of symmetrical peer learning situation there? And we're right in the middle of that experiment. I have no idea how we're going to sort of come out on this. We're just sort of getting teams together to sit down and do it. But it is really based around this idea that at its best, one of the things that's incredible about this technology is that it would allow you to find that peer somewhere else. If I wanted to learn things that I need to know about Kenya to build some of the projects that I can work with, I can find my peers in Kenya who may be willing to do that with me in exchange for me talking about new media and journalism in the directions that I'm going in. So I'm enormously excited about how we might get there. But I also sort of have this recognition that it's going to take five, 10, 15 years as we start working that paradigm out. But let's go to our next question. Hi, Evie Kinzer from WGBH. It's a good segue to the conversation because I was going to ask you if you talk about education a little bit. As you know, we produce a lot of content for younger kids. And we've found that kids are loving the tablets and they're using it a lot. But all this talk about flip classrooms and hybrid models and what's going to happen with bring your laptop to school kind of things. What do you think is going to happen? Not in schools like PA, but in public schools around the country. But I'm interested to hear what you think about PA, too. Thank you. So thank you, Evie. And you should say more about what you guys are doing because I think it's an incredibly interesting set of activities that you've designed around GBH. And I would say that with total humility and appropriately, I think that much of the experimentation is happening in public schools and in environments much less rarefied, put it that way, than a very expensive elite private school. And I think, actually, in many cases, elite independent schools because they've been so good at what they've done for hundreds of years, they're less likely to be changing. And in fact, in many cases, they're behind the curve. So I wouldn't just assume that it's the wealthiest schools that are doing the most interesting teaching and learnings. It's definitely not true. At least my own theory is straightforward and not a breakthrough at all. But it's to say, we've got a model of teaching and learning that has worked in the classic sense for hundreds of years around the case of our school. It's more or less 12 kids sitting around a table and using Socratic methods, which are thousands of years old and a bunch of materials that are created by experts. And they then create a really great conversation. And kids are assessed on the basis of that learning over the course of four years. And it prepares them to succeed in university. And that model has worked very well, at least if you can afford to pull it off with good teachers. On the other end of the spectrum, you have in high schools, anyway, you have Stanford University's online high school, something that's completely brand new. It's something where for, I think it's $18,000, you can take an entirely online high school experience over four years. You could take other examples of it. Khan Academy would be free. And I'm not sure you could sort of get a degree by doing Khan Academy, but things like it. Thank you, Ethan, you're awfully nice. And that's sort of the pure online version. And my hunch is neither one of those is right, as the future only, and that we're gonna define something that's blended or a hybrid in a way that actually makes sense for different communities. And I think in the case of our school in particular, I would like to see us do the best of the classic Socratic face-to-face residential learning and to take what's exciting about what's happening in this other space and bring them together in a way that prepares our kids better than anywhere else for what they do next. And a specific example of what we're doing is we're working with Khan Academy. And we're having our kids in some cases, and our adults in lots of cases, work on problems on things that they're really good at. So there's this weird part of high school after you've taken an AP exam in the beginning of May. And when the end happens, what are you supposed to do for three weeks or whatever? So last year, Sol Khan came to our campus and had a bunch of his guys and we had a bunch of kids who had just taken the chemistry one and a bunch of kids had taken the math one. And they created problems. They worked on what they had mastered up to that point, but they created problems and videos and so forth for other people. And it's really fun for a kid to create a problem and think about what are the right wrong answers in a multiple choice thing? Or how do I find which of the things we did all year that I'm most passionate about and want to make a video about? And maybe I can be better than Sol Khan at describing it and so forth. And the exciting part then, of course, is that you put it up online as we have with our BC calculus materials there. And very quickly, you get a lot of data back. You get data back on what things people mess up and which problems are actually really good at showing kids how to learn a particular part of calculus in ways that we've never known before. And I think that will improve the in-person education as well. So I don't think that's the only version of a blended model that's gonna work. Can we do flipping? Of course, we should waste less time lecturing. We should create video objects that use class time much better. And we certainly do that. I think more project-based learning, more creative environments for kids. I'd love to partner with Joey in the Media Lab to create more maker spaces for kids. I think all of those things in an interdisciplinary environment are going to be really, really powerful for kids. And we're gonna figure out how to have the master disciplines well enough, but also do these incredibly interesting integrative and connected and interdisciplinary things in ways we haven't before. So it's an amazing moment. I'm also really interested to see what sort of emerges naturally, right? I mean, there's the way that we can sort of look at this very consciously and say, how do we create that video object for use in the classroom? How do we take something like Khan Academy and say this is great, let's do a better version of it, let's get the data from it? When I joined you over at Berkman and had the pleasure of teaching a couple of classes at the law school, we were at a point where students were just starting to bring laptops into classes. And a lot of classes would basically say laptop shut. We had a lot of debate about whether to do this. I was leaving them open. I was discovering some of my students were managing their online football teams. But what I mostly discovered was that they were fact checking everything I was saying and then calling me on it when I got it wrong, as I often do. And I thought this was completely maddening at first because it's pretty damned intimidating to be teaching at Harvard Law School in the first place when you're not a lawyer. But then over time, I ended up realizing that this was actually like a different form of pedagogy and it was actually keeping me sharper. It was keeping them sharper. That process of being a pain in the ass instead of calling me in the detail meant that they were actually engaging and they were basically treating my words as hyperlinks. And for me, it ended up sort of changing how I was teaching over time. And so what I'm gonna be really interested in is to sort of see, not necessarily at PA where you guys are probably gonna think about this so carefully, but maybe whether other paradigms are gonna start emerging in classrooms where people are very heavily wired and we start sort of seeing in the wild what these behaviors end up happening around the use of tech. It seems totally right. Let's go to a question, please. Hi, my name's Sans Fish. I'm from MIT Libraries. I was wondering what both of your thoughts were on kind of unplugging as a form of control with kids and how being from, not from that generation gives you a different perspective on or a perception of that than the kids actually get out of it. You hear of parents pulling the Wi-Fi as a form of punishment or form of control just like a country would during a crisis or something like that. So I'm curious what you guys thought about that and what type of impact or whether it's a good idea or whether it's not. So I'm in this odd position where I'm still trying to figure out what relationship I'm hoping my son will have with technology. My son Drew is almost four. We did not do the don't touch the tech because it seemed totally inconsistent with how my wife and I live. My wife and I both have online presences. Generally speaking, like an evening at our house has both of us sitting quietly listening to music working on our laptops. And so there was sort of no way to sort of say to our child, no, you can't look at a screen. And Drew was navigating YouTube and finding his own videos and choosing what to watch at 15 months. And this does raise all these questions about is this a good idea, is this a bad idea? I subscribe a little bit to the notion that interactive screens versus flat passive screens are actually quite different. But what it's really sort of forced me into is a model that if you want a four year old to unplug, you have to unplug. There is no sort of like, all right kid, I'm turning off the internet, you go find something else to do. That doesn't work. If you're gonna find something else to do, you're gonna be doing it at that point. And so that's both a great impetus as a parent to sort of say, okay, time to actually wake up and start actively parenting and having that interaction. But it also sort of gives you a sense for just how unhealthy your own technological interactions are and sort of keeping track of how many hours you sort of end up on the screen. I'm gonna head home tomorrow on Saturday and Sunday. I have my kid by myself, my wife's out of town. And I'm already sort of mentally like adjusting to how little screen time I'm gonna get during that period, which is a blessing, but it's being sort of imposed on me. So it is this really interesting sort of relationship where I totally understand why people are talking about it for kids. I totally understand why people would sort of shape it as a punishment. But I wonder if what it actually is really best for in some ways is sort of putting the ball in your own court and sort of saying, can you examine your own relationship with technology, your own relationship with screens through your kid and how your kid handles it? It's a great answer. And very close to my own for sure. I don't like artificial constraints on an environment like, say, filtering as a general matter. Ethan referenced a few books that we worked on about national level filtering, but my sense is that the libraries, obviously you guys have been the great fighters in this arena, it doesn't make sense to me when a high school decides to put filters on the internet and try to keep kids away from porn or whatever else. It just doesn't work. And I also think it's not a great reflection of the kinds of choices that they need to make. So those kinds of responses are not attractive to me as part of parenting. However, I think it is essential that we teach kids to unplug and to be off of devices. I think modeling is super important. One of the things I've done at our high school is I invite kids, a couple of times I've invited them on Sunday afternoons for 90 minutes for device free time at my house and say, come play with football or touch football or whatever and drink apple cider. And it's funny, 50 kids each time have streamed over to our house, delighted that they have 90 minutes without their cell phone. And every once in a while, a kid will have brought one by mistake and it'll start ringing and they'll be totally embarrassed and turn it off. And it seems like a silly thing to do and it's not telling them they must leave their dorm or that I'm gonna cut off the technology in their dorm. But I do think having spaces and times that are differently mediated and mediated without devices is actually really important. So my strong preference would be to use as much moral suasion as possible and as many carrots and whatever it might be and the carrot might be, the drew really wants to be with daddy in the woods or whatever in Williamstown. Whatever it might be, I think that's a vastly better approach than the sort of pulling out the court. I suppose are there instances when a kid really is addicted in some fashion to a particular game or otherwise? There are lots of debates as to whether or not that's actually possible. In the United States, we have generally decided it's not when the American Academy of Pediatrics and others have not treated it that way. If you're in China, they see it very differently in South Korea. So you can have that debate as to whether or not there are physical or psychological things going on where you need to pull somebody out. But I think in the vast majority of cases, it's about creating a great and attractive balance for kids, if possible. Sasha? Hi, I'm Sasha Kosanzichak, assistant professor of civic media and a faculty affiliate at Berkman. Always fascinating to hear from both of you and combined, it's like a Voltron. It's awesome. So the question that I have is about the broader field of folks studying digital media literacies. And I've had this discussion with Henry Jenkins as well, and I've had it with folks over at Berkman. I'm a social movement scholar as well as a media maker and an activist. And I tend to start from what social movements are doing, spend time with the social movements and learn about, well, what are the interesting innovative digital media practices that are emerging from social movement spaces? And then how can those be shared more broadly? How can the sort of prototype practices or tools that emerge there, if we did have resources to support them and further develop them, what would they look like? And I guess I often end up frustrated by the broader digital media literacy conversation because I feel like the response to the observation that young people have always been leaders in social movements. Every transformative social movement in human history has had young people taking key roles in it from the civil rights movement through the LGBTQ movement to the immigrant rights movement today with dream activists sitting in and congressional offices and DHS offices and live streaming it. So it just kind of goes on and on and on. So young people appropriate the tools of the day to circulate their movements. And the response to that observation is often, okay, yes, that's true, but it's marginal or it's only a tiny group of young people that do that. And what we really care about is what's happening sort of across the broader space of all youth. And in the past, I've always been sort of content to kind of say, well, okay, I can hear that. I'm looking at it from this angle which is what social movements do. And the broader field is looking at, if we randomly sample across the population of all young people, we don't find high incidence of that type of stuff. But I'm less convinced lately by that response because I think we have, one, we have so much to learn from those practices and in terms of what's really gonna work and what we can think about, what do we need to teach? So the question is, how do we teach new digital civics? I don't think it's by making it up in the lab. I think it's by learning from what's happening on the ground for movements. And the other answer more has to do with sort of the politics of funding and research and visibility, which is that if we don't talk about the individual young people as well as the organizations that they're a part of who do this type of work in our research and in our publications and in the hackathons that we organize and in all the different spaces where we're trying to do this work, then some of the most powerful, innovative, interesting stuff just remains invisible forever. So I'm especially, I've talked with you about this a bunch and I'm especially curious to hear your thoughts on this dynamic of how can we center the voices of youth movement activists in the conversation about digital media literacies. So wonderful question and I can see the threads in your work and I see threads in Henry's and others that might bring this into relief which is really interesting. At least for me would come in part down to a question of what's your theory of change and if one believes that 10,000 Wikipedia's including S.J. Klein back there can change the world of information and libraries and the way in which we think about what knowledge is and by the way I think that's possible, then I think it's relevant to look at an elite of which S.J. Klein is a key member and graduate students in Germany and wherever else Wikimaniacs are, that seems to me relevant to library science or it's relevant to information science or however you define it. If you believe that something happened in the Middle East and North Africa over the last few years that's relevant to the way autocrats relate to populations, call it whatever you like, whether it's an Arab Spring or something else that there was relevance to what some young people did along with older people in Tunisia and Bahrain and yes, Egypt and yes, other places, then I think it's a relevant conversation even if those kids are elites which they almost certainly are in those environments. So it doesn't seem to me all that hard a case to say that's a worthy case study. That's a worthy conversation about change that we ought to have and even if it's not every reader of USA Today or whatever the truly broad descriptor we wanna use as a proxy and it's only the readers of, I don't know, whatever it is, the New Republic, I think we ought to pay attention to it and I realize that's sort of an elitist thing to say on some level but it's also something that says, I think that's how changes happen through human history. I don't think it has to be that 10 million people are standing up and doing something. I think it's often that a relatively small group of people stand up and do something and their practice does change the arc of history in meaningful ways. Now, could we and should we do more for a completely different set of reasons to improve digital literacy, we must. So let me go back to some of those danger points that we talked about and I think this may be where Henry Jenkins and Esther Hargitay and others are pushing. One thing that's pretty clear from our research and I think others too is that if you look at that safety topic or that one about data security or about privacy, it's pretty clear that the more sophisticated kids make better choices when it comes to privacy or they make better choices about high quality information. They make better choices about keeping their self safe online and I think that's where the concern for me lies in digital media literacies. If we don't have teachers and parents and others who mentors, coaches who are conveying a set of activities in this maybe more prosaic, you know, set of activities in life, I think that's problematic at a broad level but that's not to say that in this activist zone it's not relevant because a small number of people who happen to be elite are practicing this higher craft. So Sasha, I mean we have talked quite a bit on this topic and one of the things that I found myself thinking about as you were sort of explaining this idea which I think is really interesting in this notion of looking at activists as alpha users and sort of getting a glimpse of where we're going. I think the reason it doesn't come into the debate about youth is that the debate about youth always becomes about your kids. So kind of the first time I spent any time with Dana Boyd was 10, 11 years ago. We were at some sort of conference where we were the two youngest people there and I was my insecure and self-conscious self and I said Dana how do you cope with an event like this? How do you talk with people who are 20 years older than you are and you know speak with authority and get listened to and she said oh this is really easy. I just tell them what their kids do and they have no idea what their kids do and I explain their kids to them and that's the main way to get their attention. And it's a great trick and it's sort of been Dana's career for the last 10 years and so she's pivoting onto some other issues but really for the last decade what she did was basically help parents go oh my God I don't understand my kids at all and help me understand them. I think what's hard is that parents look at their kids instead of go oh my kid isn't a dream activist, my kid isn't a GLT activist and sort of say so there's nothing in there for me and I think one of the things that you and I and other people who have studied social change and media probably haven't done well enough yet is made the activist as alpha user argument yet and sort of made the case that activists are really good way to get a preview of where the future of something is going. Even if we make that argument I don't know that it's gonna come into the youth dialogue because the youth dialogue it gets so personal so fast and I was sort of sitting here and I've been on stages a lot with JPE over the last decade or so but actually very few since I've had a kid and I'm realizing that I'm answering some of these questions totally differently that I would have answered four years ago or really even two years ago since kids are basically lumps until about age two and it has everything to do with suddenly I'm answering it in the context of that individual so I think that's another obstacle whenever we try to have this conversation about digital youth anytime you're speaking to a parent or an educator you're speaking about a concrete kid who you probably don't know and it's a whole other layer of interpretation in the conversation that makes that conversation harder to have. I would also say I think it's totally right and then sometimes when you're trying to have the conversation about these wonderful kids then what you'll do is you'll create a panel of wonderful kids and you'll put a bunch of really sparkly young people on the stage with a bunch of older people who are wild-eyed at what they're actually doing and then they knock it out of the park. These kids are awesome and they each have done whatever their social movement was and then immediately the conversation afterwards is yeah those kids are great but those aren't my kids or those aren't the kids that I know. Those are only special ones you put on the stage and to some extent that's true that they may not be normal kids but they are I think potentially changing the world in really interesting and potentially different ways and I think we ignore them at all of our peril and interesting myself. Let's go over to a question over here. Well, I just wanted to say that I think that the problem is very parallel because you have social movements that we have a ton of social movements and some of them are using innovative technologies and some of them aren't and it's hard to sort through all this information and identify what's going to become popular, what's working, all this stuff and this is the same problem that you have with something like cyberbullying where you have all this information and I mean you said this point earlier that actually parents are cyberbullying is just kind of like bullying that's translated onto the internet and people are actually much more aware of it and it becomes very visible but that doesn't seem to totally make sense to me. It seems like it's hard to pick out patterns of children being bullied and it's hard to pick out patterns of like social movements being useful and it's the same problem of figuring out what to look at like which of the information is visible in basically this homogenous zone of webpages. Would you've been saying some more because I don't follow quite the homogenous zone of webpages. Just though there's so much information on the internet and if you're a parent and your kid has like extensive like Facebook page and all these other sites in Snapchat and whatever, you can't really tell what's upsetting them sometimes. Like some of that like cyberbullying that you sort of implied was really visible earlier doesn't, I don't really see how it is more visible than normal bullying. There's a really important insight in that which I glossed over but let me hit directly which is sometimes when you talk to kids in an interview or in a focus group setting and you'll observe something that's on a screen that looks like it may be bullying and it may be a series of comments to a video that they posted and the comments are pretty mean and you'll say to the kids is that how do you react to that and they'll say oh that's fine that's just kind of how we talk to one another. And then you will see something else that may be slightly harder to interpret but it actually really cuts. Really really is something that's upsetting. So I think you're quite right that one of the things that's hard to parse as adults is the context matters so much to these kids in these environments and things that bug them might not bug you and vice versa. So you're completely right that it's hard to parse. I think the key point though for me is as recorded media there is that conversation where there's often not otherwise and there's something you can see and focus on where there's sometimes not in the offline space. I think that's the distinction there and I think it allows for adults to see something that otherwise they couldn't get quite such a handle on. They're imagining something as opposed to seeing it directly. Now whether that we make good inferences from that is another story entirely and whether or not in fact we're gonna be helpful to kids is another story entirely. This is part of my reaction to this sort of conversation about big data which is yeah we've got a lot more data about education or about any of these things but can we do anything with it that's useful. Are we able to be good analytically with it or we're just gonna make bad inferences based on more data. That would be a terrible outcome and I think we have to be careful of that with kids in the bullying context too. One of the spaces in which you could actually imagine big data being useful though is that part of what happens is there's a really interesting challenge between the specific case and the trend. So I do a lot of work studying digital activism, work with a colleague Mary Joyce who's put together an amazing sort of set of case studies of more than a thousand sort of instances of digital activism around the world. And when we talk about digital activism we talk about Tunisia and Nawat and how a bunch of rogue bloggers help break down a dictatorship but you start looking through this database and basically it's a lot of people founding Facebook groups and 500 people sign up and nothing happens and it helps sort of confirm a lot of this activist critiques. And I actually think bullying may fall into some of the same places. I think there's an enormous amount of sort of routine nastiness that simply characterizes teenage years. I know that my teenage years were pretty nasty and unpleasant and I suspect that they're still nasty and unpleasant but the things that turn into newspaper stories are these outliers that suddenly become how we understand the trend. And these outliers are horrific and just to sort of make it clear but it's actually very hard for us to sort of understand how indicative or how non-indicative they are. And this is actually really a weakness of media, right? The natural way to write a newspaper story is let me tell you a horrific story. Oh and by the way this isn't just isolated, it's a trend. Well in many cases it's just a horrific story and actually it's not necessarily representative of a trend or it may actually be counter to a trend but because we are so wired for narrative it's very very difficult for us to see it another way. So one of the places where I do think that data may actually help us on this is to get into a situation of better context around this. What's ordinary, what's expected, where do we go? CMS has just shown up in force. I now have sort of three CMS students queued up and here's the trick guys. Much as I love you, we are hitting the seven o'clock mark. So this is what I'm, no, no, no, no, no, no, stay standing. What I was gonna ask is for everyone just to give a question quick, we're gonna queue up three questions and then we're gonna give John a chance at them. So let's go to you, then we'll go over there. And you have to, last word then. Well, we'll work something out. Thanks for your sharing and I'm a first year CMS student. I want to ask a question for our kids and is it proper to put everything in one basket to call them Boolean digital? Should we divide them into Boolean Facebook or Boolean mobile apps or Boolean mobile games and put them especially Boolean party animals? Even in digital age like that. And my question is how much can you explain the variants of the digital age people, youth? Great, thank you. So that question is basically is born digital enough of a category? Do we have to start thinking about subdividing into different technologies and mobile and Facebook? And let's go over here please. My question is sort of children are these kind of strange legal animals, right? They're not really, they don't have the same amount of rights and independence as adults do. And I guess then my question is sort of two parts. One, you can sort of see this sort of kind of more dystopian future where parents can keep track of everything their children do online or it's a constant war where you try to. And also one where teachers can see when you downloaded the assignment, what you were doing when you weren't in school and to what extent, you know, where does that end? And then my other question is sort of what's the role of legislation here? Like I know there was a case in California recently where they were, you're allowed to delete everything that a child has done online. The eraser button. Yeah, which, you know, is also probably futile but not legally futile. If you'd erased legally, maybe you cannot be prosecuted or have it held against you in court later. Just sort of wondering like is legislation that's meant to guide behaviors or modeling useful and what's sort of the role of that? Awesome, got it, Ansley. Chelsea. Okay, just really quickly. In the beginning of your talk, you brought up two different factors for what distinguished somebody was born after 1980 as a digital native or not. One was access and the other was skills and kind of the way the internet is used. So I'm wondering, this seems to be like a pretty important issue when you start to talk about is the internet a force of, you know, providing a better future or something that's gonna continue to reinforce many of the social inequalities we see. And I'm wondering if you've seen any interesting trends as kind of the first kind of round of the digital natives have come into maturity and toward the workforce and things like this, what are some of the differences you might be able to see in the way that a digital native versus somebody who isn't a digital native from 1980 is able to kind of prosper and maybe be upwardly mobile in society. And then also what kinds of interventions are you seeing might be most promising in kind of addressing this issue of a disparity in the way the internet is used across kind of class lines. And is that limited? So I'll just stop there actually. There's about 11 questions. That's so good. That's so good. We'll talk fast. Let's figure out which one you want to take on. That's great. But I also want, you said something about slactivism critique and I wonder, has your man changed by virtue of seeing Mary Joyce's data? Do you buy the slactivism critique more than otherwise? Yeah, so my take on this, I'm now using a different pair of terms on this and I'm using the terms thick and thin engagement. And so by thick engagement, I mean where someone comes to you and sort of says, gee, we've got a problem. We really need to figure out how to solve this. Can you help us think about it? Can you come up with something creative? Let's think about some new way to do it. And I think thick engagement is great. I think it's wonderful. I think it's one of the best things about the internet is potentially being able to go out and get someone's full mind, head, soul involved with that. I also think there's a room for thin engagement. And I think thin engagement essentially says, no, actually I've got a campaign and I just need you to line up behind me because I've got a great idea and if I could just get 75,000 other people to sort of say this is a great idea, I can use that as political pressure to sort of get where I'm going. I think there is probably forms of activism that doesn't fall into either effective thick or effective thin activism. But I think there's a lot of effective thin activism that we run the risk of sort of tiring as slack activism. So I think like so many of our friend, Mr. Morozov's critiques, there's a lot of validity to it but it's sort of been applied really sloppily and it misses these sort of nuances and sort of distinctions and all of that. So I don't want to make the case that the new path to civics is you just sort of hit the like button instead of find your way to the future. But I actually think there are cases where the like button gets you there and my favorite story on this lately is Carmen Rios who's this young woman at George Washington in DC who reacted to the Steubenville rape case by basically saying we got to start teaching high school students to prevent sexual assault and we don't do it in the classroom, we do it in the locker room because we really have to worry about this athletic culture of entitlement. So I want high school coaches across the nation to make clear to their male students and to their female students, sexual assault happens, this is not okay and she probably would not have gotten anywhere on this except for the fact that she got 70,000 signatures behind her very, very quickly and then very quickly got an association of high school coaches to the table. So I absolutely think there's a role for it and I think slacktivism misses a lot that actually can be very effective activism within that space. Awesome, well that was fast. Now having to answer your 11 questions. Okay, so I'll work backward to the first one. In terms of potential interventions that might help with some of this reinforcing social inequality, I actually think libraries are a huge part of that so the Gates Foundation working with libraries across the country, I worry a little bit about this strategy because it means that when libraries close at 5 p.m., people then go to Starbucks or Subway or McDonald's as the place to get Wi-Fi to do their homework but I do think that when a library or a public space like it that has a smart person and really good Wi-Fi can attract kids in, I think that's a really, really helpful specific intervention, right? There are a bunch of other things that have, I think as legislation been helpful to wire up communities, but I would put libraries key among them. In terms of the change already in the workforce, I think the big change in this very first little tick of kids who have born of digital being in the workplace is the breakdown of hierarchies. I think that in workforces, I think the firm is gonna change somewhat from extremely top-down types of workforces to ones that are somewhat flatter and just because I don't think kids who have been grown up in this way are gonna work as well and I think that effective managers are gonna realize that somewhat flatter structures actually work better and I think that's one of the things we'll see and whether that will affect governance more broadly, we'll see, but I think that's something that some workforces have seen. Second to the question about rights and tracking kids and teachers seeing lots of information in the role of legislation and otherwise, I think this is a really important topic. I think this is one where we need more activism. I worry a lot about the erosion of liberties in the digital era. We did not talk about the NSA today, but I think it really matters and I think that the more that we learn about kids leading a life that is gonna be recorded from the minute that they are first photographed in a sonogram through the last minute of their life in so many different ways. If that is all subject to surveillance that we don't know about or can't control, whether that's by parents or corporations or the government in all of these different ways, that's really problematic and scary. I just wanna make sure that you've got corporations in there because one of the things you do so well in born digital is sort of look at this notion of the culture being perpetually marketed to and this notion that the danger may actually be more the commercial accumulation of data which sounds in the wake of the NSA almost a little naive, but still remains an enormous, threatened, enormous question and one of the really interesting things of course is in born digital looking at a European model which has a much more affirmative right of privacy than the US model. Thank you, that's totally great. And one of the wrinkles in US law is the fourth amendment doesn't apply to things that fall in this third party data zone. So you don't have fourth amendment protections for things collected by Facebook and it's not exactly an NSA case, but it is, that's a big matter right there. Last one was about are there sub-generations should be doing born Facebook, born mobile apps and you know that's really interesting, worthy research, I would love to see people do that. I have to say we got so much abuse for categorizing it as born digital versus not that you're gonna come in for abuse if you kind of slice it that thin. But you know what, take it up and have a conversation about it and you know you may fight with Henry Jenkins but that's a worthy fight to have and particularly early in your career if you can collect some useful data and get in that kind of positive dialogue I think that can only be helpful but then again you should really listen to your true advisers on that. I think picking a fight with Henry Jenkins is a great way to end any event here in this building and with so much CMS in the house. John, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. This is really remarkable. Thank you. And thank you all for being with us. Thank you David for having us. Thank you.