 My name is Sandra Cortesi, I'm the Director of the Youth and Media Project here at the Berkman Center. Welcome and welcome, especially Carrie James. Many of you probably know Carrie as a Research Director and Principal Investigator at Project Zero. Others might know her through other work she has done at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, or you might know her through some of the amazing work that has come out through the Good Play Project. I met Carrie about five years ago when I just arrived here in Cambridge. We were hosting at Berkman a workshop around youth and digital media and Carrie was a participant of that workshop and I distinctively remember that after the workshop Carrie comes to me and gives me a CD with all the cool work she has been working on and asks me to take a look at it, which I of course did and after looking at it I remember specifically two things. One is that I for sure had to sleep less and work more if I ever want to accomplish just a mini portion of what Carrie has accomplished and two, that it's crucial the work we do around youth and digital technologies that I want to continue the work she has been doing for so long and I just arrived and started doing at that moment. So with that, Carrie, thank you for being a source of inspiration for many of us and thank you for being here today and presenting the book. I have three logistical and now four logistical announcements to make so usually we would start with a round of introduction but you can see how this might be a little bit challenging because we are so many here today which I think is great. So at the end there will be a round of questions and discussion so if you're going to ask a question please introduce yourself before asking the question. Second this is being webcasted and third with it this is also being recorded so it's going to be available on our website later online and fourth but also very important at the back you can buy her new book if you're interested so that is also available to you that option. So with this, Carrie, we're very excited, she's a little bit, her voice is a little bit what's the English word for that, not perfect yet but it also gives her the option to not answer your questions if they are not nice. Thank you, welcome. Can everyone hear me? No. People in the back can, in the back, can you raise your hand if you can hear me? Okay. If at any time you have sent, oh, oh, they're here. If at any time you can't hear me, feedback, certainly go like this to let me know. And I'm, you know, in terrible timing, I have never had this happen that a sore throat comes, you know, the day, basically, that I'm giving a talk but I'm going to do my best or I'll power through and I want to thank Sandra first for that fabulous introduction. I really had no idea that I was such an inspiration for her and I just feel honored about those words she shared. So thank you. And I want to thank all of you for being here today, colleagues from Project Zero, folks I don't know as well as some unexpected people who I do know and I didn't expect them to be here so I'm really excited to share some ideas from my book. So just to get right into it, Sandra gave a great introduction but I just want to add a few notes. So I'll be focusing my talk today on the research that we did as part of the Good Play Project at Project Zero and that really formed the basis of the book Disconnected but I also want to call attention to two other areas of my current research because they're quite relevant to some of what we found when we did the Good Play Project and some of what I wrote about in the book Disconnected. The first project is part of the Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network where we're looking at how civically and politically active youth are leveraging social media as part of their participation and the second project is this project Out of Eden Learn which is really about how we can create venues for young people to engage in meaningful cross-cultural exchange and so I'll say a bit more about that particular project at the end and explain why it's called Out of Eden Learn of all things. Then on a more personal note, I want to add that I'm also a parent. I have two girls ages five and nine and my nine-year-old in particular is really steeped in the digital landscape at this moment. She's pretty adept at scratch. I think that's what she's doing on her screen there but lately she is completely obsessed with Minecraft and she has really digging in not only to Minecraft the virtual world but also into the community around the game, the community on YouTube. She's actually started to create her own YouTube videos by screencasting herself in Minecraft so she's in deep and I've been curious to see some of what's happened with her, some of her observations. She's really in many ways veered into some ethically tinged situation. I just wanted to call out that as I think about some of the issues I'm going to talk about today, I wear a couple of different hats. I'm a sociologist, I'm an education researcher, but I'm also a parent and some of those hats sometimes sit uneasily together on my head so I just want to put that out on the table before we get started. Just a quick overview of what I'd like to accomplish in the next 30 minutes or so. I'd like to enter the problem space that I try to address and disconnect it by sharing a couple of stories that I think highlight and frame the areas of concern that I've written about. Then I'll provide a little bit of background into the research that I've done in this area. Then I'll share a couple of substantive insights from the book related to the broad theme of participation and focus in particular on how youth approach speech in network publics and we'll really look at some perspectives from youth. I'll share some quotes so you can get a get a sense of some of the data that we looked at and how we made sense of it. And that'll lead me into a discussion of different ways of thinking about the moral and ethical dimensions of online life including thinking shortfalls. Finally I'll talk about a broad vision of for developing more conscientious approaches to online participation. Then I'm going to share a couple of specific avenues that my colleagues and I are experimenting with in order to support respectful online dialogue in particular. And then we'll open it up for discussion. It's a rich agenda but I'll try to move fairly quickly. So to get right to the heart of the matter I'm going to begin with two and a half stories that I think call attention to some of the mixed potentials of social media and it's two and a half because two of the stories are connected to one another. One wouldn't have happened without the other. Both are from a couple of years ago but I think as you'll see recent events across the US make them quite relevant and even poignant. Story number one. In September 2011 it came to the attention of the NYPD that a group of New York City police officers had been creators and active participants in a Facebook group called No More West Indian American Day Detail. The apparent purpose of this public Facebook group was to complain about being assigned to patrol the West Indian American Day parade, an annual event in Brooklyn. Posts on this public page referred to parade participants as savages and animals. Quotes included drop a bomb and wipe them all out, let them kill each other. The group had approximately 1,200 members, 60 active participants' names matched those of known police officers. Other participants were described as civilians and other city workers including New York City firemen. The Facebook page came to light by lawyers investigating a case involving one of the officers. As soon as the lawyer's discovery became known to the officers, the page was deleted. However, the lawyers had made a digital copy of the page, which they shared with New York Times reporters. Ultimately, 17 police officers faced disciplinary action by the NYPD. So we live in a world in which public online spaces are leveraged and by non-anonymous or identifiable adults in ways that are arguably astounding. In ways that might lead us to ask, what were they thinking? We have a further example from Steubenville, Ohio, where in 2012 an intoxicated teen girl was sexually assaulted by high school football players after passing out at a party. At the assaults for committed, several bystanders took photos and videos with their cell phones, which they shared on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and via text messaging. A 12 and a half minute video in which onlookers joked about the assaults was posted on YouTube. So Steubenville is another example of how digital tools can be used in extremely dehumanizing ways. Yet this case also inspired an example of how participatory media can be used for goods specifically to push back on misogynist attitudes that support rape and or rape culture. In 2013, as the Steubenville rape trial was underway, a University of Oregon college student, Samantha Stendahl, was closely following news reports about the trial. Outraged by the details that were emerging around the case and what the football players had done to this young woman, she was really inspired to respond. So she created a 26 second video entitled Simply Unneeded Response, which I need a response to. Hey, Rose, check your pass out on the couch. Guess what I'm gonna do to her? Real men, treat women with respect. Okay, this video posted on YouTube on March 22nd, 2013 received over 700,000 hits within two days of being posted. At this point, it's been viewed nearly 10 billion times, which I think you could probably see on the YouTube site. And it actually won a Peabody Award in 2013. So put together, I think these stories, these two and a half stories, really point to the double edge nature of the web. While network media can be used to perpetuate misogynist and racist ideas, they can also call wider attention to the prevalence of hateful attitudes. And this is a point that's been made really well by Susan Benish, who's a Berkman fellow here and gave a talk last spring about dangerous speech. I think further social media can be tapped to spread powerful and socially positive counter narratives to some of these ideas. But the key question is what are the impacts of cases such as these that model different uses of the web? How do they affect the way we think and how do they inform our choices? I'm particularly interested in how young people think about cases like these, and how their own online choices are informed by them. And I'm also curious about how the distinct qualities. Quicker issue, I'm not getting a response. I'll just continue to talk, we'll get the slide events, there we go. I'm also curious about the distinct qualities of digital content and digital context that you are perhaps thinking about, perhaps not thinking about, as they make everyday decisions about posting photos, about commenting, about status updating and the like. More specifically, how do young people attend to the potentially problematic dimensions of environments, of communicating environments that are asynchronous and text based, where content can be taken out of context and detached from its original creator and author. How do they attend to the interpretive gap? The distance between our intended meaning when we share content and the variety of interpretations people can take away from it. How do you seek to bridge the arm's length quality of online life? The distance between ourselves and others. The distance between what we do and our effects on other people, which are often quite invisible to us. How do they think about the public or the potentially public nature of online content? And what audiences are they keyed to? What audiences are they thinking about? As I'll discuss further in a couple of minutes, these kinds of questions are at the end of the day. They're questions about moral and ethical sensitivity. What kind of sensitivity we have to those themes. I think notably the NYPD and Steubenville cases really suggest a lack of attention to many of the core qualities of digital content and context. Especially the public or potentially public nature of online content. The cases also reflect a level of disinhibition that I think is likely supported by that arm's length quality, the distance between ourselves and others that's a feature of online communication. However, it's not my view that such qualities of digital content or context are inherently problematic or inevitably lead to poor judgments, negative speech, negative forms of disinhibition. The affordances of network publics are also invite youth to share socially positive messages. And other features of online life really can encourage us to reflect before we speak. For example, the asynchronous nature of communication gives us an opportunity to reflect should we take it up? So the other key question we need to think about and that I've been thinking about in particular with respect to young people is what are our habits of connectivity? How do we leverage some of these qualities? How reflective are youth when they're posting content related to this? What is the pace of their engagement? How quickly are they moving? And is their attention spread across a number of different activities? So this gives you some background to some of the questions that really informed the work that we've done. Okay, so a few words about the research that informed this connected. So the Good Play Project was carried out of Project Zero with Howard Gardner, myself, and a great research team, including Margaret Rundle, who's here today, Katie Davis, Berkman Fellow, Earhart Grave, and others. And it was a project that was carried out over six or seven years. And we conducted qualitative interviews, had in-depth conversations with over 100 young people between the ages of 10 and 25. We also spoke with 40 adults, specifically parents and teachers of middle school students. Really, in order to understand how they were thinking about some of these issues. In some cases, we asked them the same questions that we had asked young people about how they think about moral and ethical issues. We also partnered with Common Sense Media and other folks of Project New Media Literacies, Henry Jenkins Group, to develop some educational resources for schools. So our key questions were really zeroing in about thinking, how you think about their online lives. I'm still having problems proving things forward. Another question that was critical is, to whom or what do they feel responsible online? And how do they think about the moral or ethical dimensions of various situations that they're in? Are they even attuned to dilemmas that may be on their hands? So how do I move forward? There we go. Just hit this card. Okay, we'll just go with that. So in the book, I really explore the findings from our research in relation to three particular topics. The first one is privacy, how do young people think about their own privacy? And importantly, given my focus on moral and ethical themes, I was really interested in how do young people think about, to what extent are they sensitive to the privacy concerns of other individuals, given that they can share content about them. Property, how do young people think about the concepts of ownership and authorship given the copy, paste, download, remix, affordances, many of which are positive, but many of which cause conflict that exist in network publics. And then finally, this broad theme of participation. So how do you think about their codes of conduct, their speech in particular, how they treat one another in network publics? And those were the three themes that I address in different chapters in the book. So these big questions, as you've noted from my language, were really focused on youth because they were the main individuals we spoke to. But the story I tell in the book is also a story about adults, the influential adults in their lives, and how they think about these issues. So today's focus is gonna be on that broad theme of participation. And in the book, the main way in which I explore participation is I look at how youth approach speech. Their own speech, and that of peers and other individuals who they're in networks with in online contexts. And in analyzing young people's narratives about speech and talk on the internet, I detected the presence of four different mindsets or dominant stances about how they thought about and treated speech on the internet. So the first one is play nice. And I think this approach is really articulated well by Trey, a 15 year old we spoke with. You talk to someone on Facebook, as you would talk to them in person. The same thing online. You don't treat someone like a jerk just because you're behind the microphone. Some people use social network sites as an attack system to attack people and cower away because they can't do it in real life. So what Trey conveys here is a really strong sensitivity to that feature of digital communication, the distance between ourselves and others. And his approach or his mindset is really a concerted effort to try to close that distance. And as part of that, he conveys a twist on the classic golden rule. He says, do unto others as you would do to them face to face. Do unto others online, as you would do to them face to face. So Trey's moral principles for interactions really mirror those that he subscribes to offline. Be kind, be respectful, play nice with other people. This mindset was fairly prevalent among youth of all ages who we spoke with in our study. They often shared moral concerns about the effect of their content for people they knew well, their closest friends, perhaps their family members, intimates. And pausing to reflect on other people's feelings was sort of a thinking routine for these young people. And it's really important, it's arguably an essential one, especially given that feature of distance that Trey pointed to and was really aware of. At the same time, given that online speech is poised to affect others whom we don't know all that well, we also were interested in whether there was thinking that went a little bit broader. And so that's where the mindset that it's a community came in. It really considers the implications of speech for a wider network. So here we have our ethical exemplar Trey again. He says, I'm responsible to anyone who uses Facebook and my profile or whatever. If I have something bad or offensive there, it affects everyone. So Trey really conveys a pretty wide sense of responsibility here. It pushes beyond his nearest and dearest. His perspective is that we're not just among friends online, it's actually a community that's public or potentially public. And the things we say or do are poised to affect other individuals. I think implicit here is the idea that our actions or even our inactions actually help to set norms. They actually suggest what it means to be in a community. For example, both posting and scrolling past full speech can indicate that it's fair game in a particular community. And Trey shows a sensitivity to that reality. So I think reflecting on these broader issues is arguably another essential practice in the digital age given the reality, as I've said, that our content can really reach out to have a wider way than the small circle of people whom we know. However, beyond our exemplar Trey and a few others, and I'll note those others were youth who were especially invested or involved in a particular online community. Beyond those folks, the mindset that it's a community was relatively rare among the youth we interviewed. Now this is not to say that they were thoughtless about the effects of their speech or the speech of others. But their thinking was typically keyed either to that small circumscribed group of people whom they know well as Trey articulated with the play nice mindset or it shifted in another direction. It was sharply self focused or consequence oriented. So this is where the mindset of will I get into trouble comes in. Now this came up across our sample but it was especially vivid when we presented tweens so 10 to 14 year olds with a hypothetical scenario about a hate group that was set up that targeted a teacher at their school. We found that the most common response to this was articulated quite succinctly by Danielle, a 13 year old who said somebody will tell the teacher and they'll get into trouble. So certainly this stance is not surprising. And it's arguably natural. But I think troubling are the cases where this kind of thinking was singular. It was the exclusive focus where the thinking didn't really extend beyond consequences. And this is a concern that I bring up throughout the book and across the different topics that we studied. Yet even more worrying than the prevalence of that self focused or consequence focused thinking was the attitude that it's just the internet. And I think this is articulated beautifully by John, an avid participant in online forums, who was a 19 year old college student. He said most of the time when people see something online, their main reaction is to laugh. Because most of the stuff on the internet, you have no sway over it all. So you just laugh and move on. So John elaborates further when he talks actually about the prevailing sense of responsibility on the web. He says on the internet, each person feels 0.001% responsible. They're more like, I'm on the internet, there's really nothing I can do. I know nothing about this person. I'm just gonna stand back and be a casual observer. And the internet does turn a lot of interaction into casual observation. Or at best, interested, but still removed. So I think here John represents the belief that that distance between ourselves and others that's this sort of indisputable feature of mediated communication really sharply reduces our sense of responsibility. But it also reduces our sense of agency. You have no sway over what you see online towards troubling interactions. In turn, he takes a real casual observer stance, interested but removed. It sort of speaks to a passive bystander disposition that by his account is normative in these online forums where he's an active participant. Now, although John's voice is the most specific and detailed on this point, we saw shades of this attitude across all of the young people, or most of the young people, who we interviewed. Typical comments included language like the internet isn't real, what happens online doesn't matter, so one shouldn't take it to heart. Further, it's just a joke stance towards online cruelty and even hate speech came up fairly often. So I share these quotes to give you a sense of the data, but also really to point out that there are echoes of broader findings across the study. When we talk with youth, not just about speech, but about how they handled privacy, how they thought about posting photos of their friends and other people who they know or people who they don't know, how they thought about property issues and appropriation on the internet. So there are echoes of our findings across those other topics as well. And so in short, we found that when youth made decisions, their principal frame for these issues was quite self-focused or consequence-oriented, thinking in a deeply individualistic way, what's in it for me? Will I get into trouble? Will I get fired from a job? Denied admission to a college? Or experienced another negative personal consequence as a result of my tweet or my photo? And are the rewards of what I want to post worth the risk? So there's a bit of that calculus going on. Now, again, it's actually natural and understandable that youth will be considering consequences and striving to take care of themselves. And of course, a degree of consequence thinking is recommended. It's advisable. But I think our worry was when we didn't see thinking extend, when it was singular or quite dominant and we didn't see broader ways of thinking engaged. But we also were interested in the extent to which youth were thinking about intimates, as in Trey articulated with the play, Nice Mindset. How do they think about these interpersonal relations, people they know well? So moral thinking, which in our conception of this really rift off of Howard Gardner's notion of neighborly morality, which he wrote a bit about in the book Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed. So neighborly morality is really focusing on how you treat the people whom you know well. It's 10 commandments thinking. It's being kind, being empathetic, applying moral principles like the Golden Rule, as Trey conveyed. Across topics, we saw a good amount of moral thinking. The kids with whom we spoke were very adept at considering their close friends, like I said earlier, at least, when doing things like posting photos of them on social networks. And again, moral thinking is important, but I would argue it's not sufficient for participation in network public. So we also wanted to understand the degree of what we call ethical thinking. And we thought about that as thinking in abstract or even disinterested ways, taking a much more disinterested stance about the impact of what you say or do for a wider community, for a wider public. So Trey articulated this with It's a Community, but we also saw other youth engaging in this stance. So one example is we interviewed a gamer who was really deeply engaged in massive multiplayer online games. And he talked a bit about some unfair play that he observed in the game, and he expressed concerns not for his own loss alone, his own loss within the game, but he also talked more broadly about the game economy, the integrity of that gaming community and how unfair play really influences that. And that's the kind of It's a Community or ethical thinking we were interested in seeing. We also talked with a young person who spoke about seeing misinformation on Wikipedia and feeling inspired to correct it because he was concerned about individuals out there, audiences who might rely on that information and take it as true. And so that's another example of what we were interested in seeing. So despite some of these impressive examples, ethical thinking was rare as compared with the other modes of thinking. Now certainly children and tweens are still developing their capacity for doing that abstract kind of thinking that I'm talking about with ethical thinking. However, teens and young adults should have the capacity to be thinking in a broader way, to be thinking abstractly about social norms and how their actions can affect a distant community. Indeed, we found that all the older youth we spoke to showed a capacity for ethical thinking but they didn't do it consistently. It certainly wasn't a habit of mine. And I think this points to a relevant insight from the moral psychology and thinking dispositions literature that I wanna call attention to that I talk about in the book. And that's the distinction between ability or skill, having the capacity to think in a particular way versus having the sensitivity or inclination to do that kind of thinking. So research shows that high level thinking, critical thinking, moral thinking, ethical thinking is often less a matter of skill, it's dispositional. It's linked more strongly to our sensitivity to opportunity to do that kind of thinking. And then our inclination to then grapple with the complexity of a situation that we've noticed exists. So holding that distinction in mind in disconnected I really emphasize how young people's approaches to online life are often marked by two different kinds of thinking shortfalls or thinking gaps. The first thinking gap I talk about is blind spots. Now blind spots, this concept is inspired by a book by Max Bazerman and Caroline Ken Brunsel. Max Bazerman is at the Harvard Business School and it's a book that's not about the internet but it's about bounded ethicality in general and focused particularly on organizations and business decisions. Blind spots really informed what the data that I was looking at. So blind spots are really failures to be alert to the moral or ethical dimensions of a situation. So an example might be posting a video on YouTube of classmates in a fight and failing to really think about the classmates and how they're going to be featured in a network public but also the wider audience for that YouTube video and how posting that video actually suggests something about what's fair game, not only to post on YouTube but how to treat your classmates, how to engage in a fight. So blind spots are really failures to be alert to some of those issues. Disconnects are where some of those moral or ethical concerns are acknowledged and engage but then they're dismissed or other concerns are prioritized. So for example, in relation to sarcastic or explicitly hurtful online speech, one might recognize the likelihood of offending an individual or a group but then decide that the likes or the praise from friends, the opportunity to vent or amuse your online friends is more valuable or more important. So that's an example of a disconnect. Now considering the distinction I mentioned a moment ago, blind spots can be seen as failures of sensitivity and disconnects are really failures of inclination but failures of agency also are wrapped up in the inclination or disinclination piece. If you feel they can't do anything about some of the things that they see online, if they feel like they have no sway over some of the troubling situations like negative speech that they observe online then they're disinclined to even try to address them. Their default stance is walk away, ignore, scroll past the mean stuff. So I think there are some important questions that we need to be asking about these blind spots and disconnects. Questions about how they're shaped by some of those qualities of digital content and context that I spoke about a little while ago such as the distance between ourselves and others online. Our habits of connectivity, how our attention is divided or focused, are we moving in fast paced ways? Are young people in particular moving quickly when they're posting on public networks? We also need to consider the norms that exist in youth social networks and other online communities. And the importance of that peer context to their stage, the stage they're at in their identity development. Peers play an extremely powerful role in the thinking and the actions of adolescents in particular. But also, and as I mentioned earlier, I'm really interested in the supports or the messages that young people hear from adults. That's why I said that adults are an important part of the story in this book. So first, I think it's really important to explore the impact of the incidental role models, the mentors, the incidental mentors or anti-mentors that youth may be exposed to online. Individuals who, through their own actions, are modeling different uses of the internet to engage in racist speech, for example, like the NYPD. However, we also, beyond this extreme example, we have more routine everyday examples. I mean, arguably, the commenting norms on news sites convey messages about how we should be treating one another in these spaces. And those messages can be influential to young people. But then we also have the more purposeful mentors, the parents, teachers, and other key adults in young people's lives. And our findings here are really important, I think. Nearly all of the adults we interviewed displayed ethical blind spots, both in their own perspectives about online life and how they manage their own online profiles and issues like privacy, but also importantly, in the advice they gave to young people. When we asked youth about their conversations with adults, the top messages they reported hearing were focused on stranger danger and making sure they avoided posting content that could get them into trouble. The will I get into trouble mindset was well supported. So conversations about kindness, about empathy, about community and citizenship, they were sometimes mentioned, but they were typically overwhelmed by these consequence-focused messages. So overall, the story I'm trying to tell in this book is, as I say, a glass half empty story. Well, I do point to impressive examples of ethical sensitivity, and I think I've shared some with you. Overall, my emphasis in the book is on what's missing, what youth and adults are blind to or disconnected from. And my concern that they're thinking about the web is too short-sighted, too myopic, too individual-centered. So in the concluding chapter, I talk about cultivating more mindful or ethically sensitive conscientious approaches to community life. I describe conscientious connectivity as focused on thinking about how the things that we do and say in network public can have wide implications, implications for people we know, but also individuals we don't know, and for the broader integrity of online communities. At its heart, conscientious contivity is about routine reflection, about different spheres of responsibility. I'll just expose that. Considering, as my colleagues at Facing History and Ourselves talk about, reflecting on one's universe of obligations, so that would be in line with what I'm suggesting here about reflecting on different spheres of responsibility, different audiences and stakeholders for the things that we do in different communities. Cont conscientious connectivity is also about engaging particular ethical thinking skills. And I talk in the book about three different skill areas that I think are important for developing and engaging and really encouraging. But as I noted before, skills are just the first step. Really, I think most of our energy needs to be focused on how we cultivate a disposition, to be sensitive to and inclined to engage with some of the moral and ethical issues that often come up in online contexts. So I focus some attention to thinking about how we can do this, how we can cultivate greater ethical sensibility, sensitivity, ethical motivation and agency. And I just quickly say a word or two about these three features. I think one way in which we can raise our sensitivity and that of young people is engaging in exercises that folks in behavioral ethics call ethics spotting exercises, really considering different digital dilemmas or online situations, considering the case like the NYPD case or maybe more and certainly more ambiguous cases of speech and network publics and considering different perspectives on those cases. But sensitivity is just one piece. Also, once we're sensitive to a moral or ethical dilemma, we have to be inclined to really wrestle with that dilemma, to really fully consider different perspectives on it. And I think one way in which we can scaffold greater ethical motivation is really, really making routine reflection on moral and ethical issues and particularly on moral values a really important part of young people's lives in particular. And then finally, we have this piece that's focused on agency, a sense that one can leverage the web for good, but also feel like they have some sway over some of the troubling things that they see online. And here's where I think it's really important to inspire young people with some of the digital good deeds that other youth have enacted using change.org, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube in ways that really are for a civic political or greater good. Really inviting youth to envision what a kinder, more respectful web might look like. And I think a key part of developing ethical agency is exploring productive avenues for responding to online hate in particular, pushing beyond ignore school past withdraw and walk away which I think is a common feature of messages shared with young people. So in the book I discuss a couple of different entry points for cultivating conscientious connectivity. Given that I'm in the field of education I really emphasize the roles that educators and parents can play. And as I mentioned, we've been involved in developing educational resources. So that's a strong accent in the book. However, I also talk briefly about a current area of interest in mind and that's the area of digital fronts, how we can design environments in ways that support more conscientious or mindful exchanges. So I'd like to just briefly mention recent efforts my colleagues and I have undertaken to support really respectful, thoughtful interactions in an online community for youth. So the community is called Out of Eden Learn. And Out of Eden Learn is affiliated with a larger project called the Out of Eden Walk where a journalist named Paul Salopak is doing a seven-year walk across the globe as a radical exercise in slow journalism. And Paul's emphasis is really slowing down the pace of journalism and reporting to a human level. So he's walking through the world in order to capture stories that otherwise he would miss when you're moving too fast, when you drive through places or fly over them. So we've partnered with Paul, Project Zero and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting are the two education partners. And what we've done is created an online community in part inspired by this value of slowing down and being reflective and looking closely at the world. And we've created a community around a couple of key goals, really getting youth to slow down, not only to observe the world closely, but also to listen really carefully to others. Exchanging stories with youth and other parts of the globe. So you see here on the slide, connecting young people with other young people from around the globe. So by design, we put youth in this community in geographically and socioeconomically diverse sub-communities within the platform with the idea that they exchange stories and perspectives. Another key goal is making connections between young people's lives in their own communities and bigger human stories. And so we invite them to, part of that is inviting them to engage with some of Paul's journalism, but also engage with the stories of the young people they're connected with. So the diversity of our community and our emphasis on youth exchanging stories with youth from different parts of the world makes having strong community guidelines really important. So what we've tried to do in this community is shoot for the sweet spot where youth are being authentic, but also really respectful with one another. And these principles, which are fleshed out in greater detail on our site, really mirror some of the suggestions that I've made when I've talked a little bit about conscientious connectivity. Be reflective, be respectful, speak up. Don't simply withdraw, engage thoughtfully. And we provide some suggestions for reflective questions so that youth and educators can think more deeply about these issues. But the other thing that we're trying to do in this space is really create explicit supports for positive and meaningful commenting on the site. So in the spirit of our guidelines, we've developed a dialogue toolkit that suggests particular moves and routines, lean structures for commenting aimed at supporting exchanges that are deeper and more thoughtful and ideally more positive. So moves like probe, probe for more details. With the idea of getting insight into another person's perspective, reflect back, say what you're hearing, make sure you're on the same page. Describe how what someone has said extended your thoughts in new directions. And these moves are actually drawn from Project Zero Thinking routines. There's a line of work at Project Zero called Visible Thinking that brings together these moves together into short, elegant routines that can get thinking to go more deeply. So we're trying to apply some of what we've learned about how those routines can be effective to supporting online commenting. That's a lot more meaningful. And as part of our effort to nudge youth to think about and use these moves, we've now built visuals that represent them into the design of our platform. So built into every comment box are visual reminders of the kinds of moves we're trying to support. And when youth mels over these moves, they get a description of each move as a suggestion, as a nudge, I would say, to encourage that. So we're really excited about this effort, but we're also really unsure about where it may lead. It's relatively new for our project. Ideally, being nudged to use these moves on our site might lead youth to routinely use them in other spaces. Perhaps they're already using moves like these, but this is some way of further supporting those kinds of behaviors and dispositions. At the same time, it's entirely possible that those icons will sort of fade into the background and youth will pay zero attention to them. So we've been really thoughtful about what we could do if that is the case. It remains to be seen. Ultimately, it's an empirical question and one we're gonna be looking closely at over the next months and year as we see youth participate in this platform. So I'd like to turn to a discussion now and I really invite any comments, questions, thoughts, puzzles, I'd be curious to know if what I've shared today, especially around avenues for supporting conscientious mindsets on the web, connect with some of the things that you're doing or thinking about or any general questions you may have. Hi, my name is Ron Newman. I'm a local resident and participant in a number of online forums. What is your opinion on the role of requiring real names or not in encouraging or discouraging the kind of ethical behavior you're trying to promote? Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. So I admired Huffington Post's decision I guess was made in September, 2013 or so to move from anonymous commenting to you have to have a login, you have to be an identifiable participant to comment on that site. And I think that that suggested something important about what was happening on Huffington Post. And so on the whole, I think that being identifiable can help support more positive and respectful exchanges. At the same time, I would hate to see opportunities for anonymity or pseudonymity entirely disappear. I think that there's something to be said for having a safe space where you can be anonymous and share thoughts and ideas. And I think that a lot of people have found a lot of support in those communities on the web. And I think that Judith Donath talks about this a little bit in developing a sort of history within a given site built around a pseudonym. And I think that's perhaps one way you build a reputation within a community. You're not completely anonymous. So I think there are some mechanisms for preserving that piece. But I can see the thinking behind Huffington Post's decision and I was supportive about it. We are within the Out of Eden Learn platform. Well, first of all, it's a closed community. It's found a completely open public space. Students need to be affiliated with a class or they can be a homeschool or other kind of learning situation to join. We ask that students do not use their real names, that they create a pseudonym, and that they choose an avatar. We don't allow them to post pictures of themselves. So no selfies, which we feel like is consistent with some of the goals we're trying to achieve on the site. Walter Harper, anthropologist. How do you know, or what do you have built in in terms of your work to determine whether the children or these young people are telling you the truth or not? Can you repeat that question? Sorry. What have you built in in your work to maybe better determine whether these young people are telling you the truth or not? Yeah, when they talk with us about their online lives. Well, I guess there's no foolproof mechanism. But one way in which we've approached this and you're an anthropologist and so this might connect with your methodological approach is to ask for information in a couple of different ways throughout the interview and make sure there's some consistency with what you're reporting. And we actually, we spent a good amount of time with each young person we interviewed. We met with them twice. And each time we spoke with them for an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, sometimes two hours. So we really went in deep. And we had the opportunity I think in between the two sittings to actually look over our notes from the first interview and reflect, look for gaps and then follow up and verify some of the things that are saying. Again, not foolproof. If someone's really committed to telling us a lie, then they would probably be pretty consistent across the questions and across the interview but we tried our best. And these interviews for the most part were conducted face to face. And I think that my sense was they were pretty authentic. I was often surprised at some of the things that youth shared without concern. You're welcome. Hi, hi, Karen Feinberg, Feinberg Consulting Harvard Graduate School of Education affiliated. How do you find the balance between agency, supporting agency and safety? Can I say a little bit more? Well, in terms of what young people, what kind of groups or activities or actions they are taking that might not be proactive, safe. I'm even going so far as in terms of, I'm connected into counter-terrorism stuff lately and how young people are being pulled in through social networks into Jihadi networks. I mean, that's one piece, but it can go the whole gamut in terms of how is a parent, an adult, how do you balance that? Because you need to give that kind of agency and control over, but at the same time, the opposite question. Well, I don't know if I have a perfect answer to this question. I think I probably have, I've certainly thought about it in the context of this work, that's why I talk about ethical agency, but it's high in my mind most often these days as a parent, as I think about my daughter who, as I mentioned, is really surfing these worlds and YouTube and feeling like I'm facing dilemmas about that balance between wanting her to explore and I air on the side of letting her explore, but we have a very good relationship. And she actually came to my husband and I about four or five months ago and said, by the way, mom and dad, I found the parent control settings on YouTube and I turned them on because I was coming across videos that I didn't think were appropriate. They were swearing like, thank you for parenting yourself and then she came to us a couple of weeks later and complained that they weren't working because she was still coming across videos where people were cursing and but she's nine and I recognize that as she grows a little bit older, we won't, she won't necessarily come to me. So I, in the midst of that dilemma myself and I had another thought, but it just, if it comes back to me, I'll share it there. Oh, here's my other thought, that Henry Jenkins often says, and I think this is consistent with this, adults shouldn't be looking over kids' shoulders but they should have their backs and I think that's the kind of philosophy that I've tried to undertake with Ella. Like I wanna know, I'm interested in what she's doing on Minecraft, I'm interested in the videos that she's watching on YouTube around it. I'm interested in what's happening here in the game but I'm not looking over her shoulder and again, it's gonna become a little complicated the older she gets. Eric, did you have your hand up? That's right. Sorry. Yuqin Sui from MIT. So I just have a question. I was wondering if there is a specific reason why you singled out youth as a specific group because from the results you presented in this presentation seems like adults are just as irresponsible sometimes. So, and you seem to suggest that adults are being role models that passed on those ethical values to their youth but I was wondering, do you have any evidence to suggest that because in this age with social, online social tools ever evolving, it would be just a characteristic and attitude common to this generation instead of youth or adults. Can you repeat the last part of what you said because I didn't hear it. Oh yeah, so I was mentioning that the attitudes may not be unique to youth and they may not necessarily have picked up from the role models of adults. It could just be a result of the current age of ever evolving online social tools. So my question is, what is your reason for singling out the youth and for just creating our tools for youth and not for the entire internet users? Yeah, these are great questions. So the reason why we originally sought to study youth is because we felt like at the moment we began our research youth were the leading participants in these different virtual spaces. We were really wanting to understand how they were navigating norms and thinking about some of these moral and ethical issues and who better to go to than youth than youth because they were at least at that moment and I think arguably may still be more literate than a lot of adults in at least in certain online spaces and with certain technologies. So that was our rationale for focusing on youth. The other thing that I talk about in the book is I'm not, my claims and my concerns aren't just tied to digital cultures specifically. Digital cultures are merely just, you know, the norms and the ideas the way we treat one another really aren't separate from how we're treating one another offline. I think there's some unique challenging qualities we need to reckon with in digital cultures that may exacerbate some of our individualistic attitudes but I do talk about the broader culture, you know, especially in the US and I'd actually be curious to do international work using similar protocols and look at youth's perspectives and other cultures that aren't as individualistic as the one that we happen to be in. One book that was really informative for me is I was thinking about that issue was a book called Lost in Transition by a sociologist named Christian Smith and some of his colleagues and they did this longitudinal work interviewing emerging adults over several years and talking with them about a variety of issues but including issues like moral and ethical dilemmas and an astounding finding from that study was that nearly two thirds of the emerging adults they talked with and asked the question, asked them to share a moral or ethical dilemma that they had based in their lives, two thirds of them could not come up with a dilemma that was objectively moral or ethical rather what they presented, what they responded with were dilemmas that were just personal dilemmas. Should I rent an apartment that exceeds my needs and this suggests to me that this is, it's part of a broader issue within the US context in particular. Yeah, my question actually pertains exactly, oh, my name is Eric Gordon and I'm at Emerson College and a Berkman hangar on. I'm interested in what you were saying about the connection between online and offline perspectives and my question was precisely if in your interviews if the youth specifically spoke about offline examples and you made those connections between the moral and ethical frameworks that you've identified online, did those extend to people who behave well offline or behave in particular ways offline, are there very specific connections and the second part to that question is specifically the context of adult surveillance and I'm wondering how that plays out because certainly offline youth are very aware of the presence of adult surveillance for better or for worse and I'm wondering if that played out in this kind of online offline distinction. So I get, we get asked this question quite a lot so we didn't, again, as a researcher I'd love to go back to the questions that I didn't ask if we could do a fuller study. We would actually ask that question empirically of how these same young people respond to moral and ethical situations to the degree to which they're sensitive to these issues in their day-to-day lives where they're not communicating through digital means. So the data can't answer that question. So that's the first part and the second part of your question was, my name? About adult surveillance. About adult surveillance and the ethics of adult surveillance and whether that primed them for thinking about some of these issues like consequences? Yeah, I mean, I'm wondering because in, for instance, in a school setting there's what we could say that one reason why young people might be respectful say in the classroom is because of adult surveillance but online at least there's a perception that there is no adult surveillance that there are these youth-only spaces and I'm just curious as to how that impacts how you talk about this. Yeah, yeah. So I have noted with concern some of the moves of schools in particular to survey students online lives in order to catch them at bullying or sharing inappropriate photos and the like and I have some real concerns about that. Although surveillance can end up surfacing and maybe pre-empting some pretty ugly situations, I think it completely works counter to some of the things that I'm recommending in the book which is what are some ways in which youth can develop and adults the disposition to on their own be sensitive to some of these moral and ethical themes if they're always gonna rely on adults catching them before they do something. And this is why I have a big problem with turn it in as a way of encouraging youth not to plagiarize. Turn it in is just a mechanism for youth to be concerned about getting caught and getting into trouble. It's a mechanism for teachers to catch youth at something rather than having a broader conversation about what are the, what is the ethics of behind-activation in that case? So in terms of surveillance in general that's the stance that I share in the book and many of the recommendations that I make around developing more conscientious mindsets are made in the spirit of providing, adults providing opportunities encouraging youth to talk about and wrestle with these situations not look over their shoulders and make sure that they're not doing something bad. I think it's a much more reliable and durable mechanism for supporting the creation of ethical citizens. Does that answer your question? Hi, I'm Renee Hobbs, University of Rhode Island Media Education Lab. I really liked this talk and I wanna ask you a question but to ask you this question I have to kind of set up how I'm sitting here thinking about your work in relation to the way we teach about ethics when we're preparing people to be media professionals because I'm in a school of communication and we have to train students to be ethical media producers and today everyone is becoming a media producer even your young daughter, right? So I'm thinking about how we talk to our future photographers, journalists and filmmakers about what it means to be an ethical producer of media and of course that's impossible because I mean, look at the complexities of our media system today and think how do you help filmmakers to be ethical? How do you help photographers to be ethical? And one of the most influential works in that canon of teaching media ethics is the work of an anthropologist named Jay Ruby who in the 1980s wrote a book called Image Ethics and he invited us to think about how when teaching about ethical practices to media makers that we had to acknowledge the competing loyalties and the competing reward systems that actually exist to sustain and support unethical behavior that in fact when I'm making a film about someone I have to decide what are my loyalties to myself as a filmmaker, to my subject, the person I'm making a film about and then to my audience. And you address a little of this in the book but my specific question to you is, so my claim is actually kids and kids in this space that you are looking at are struggling with the competing reward systems that actually create opportunities for getting positive strokes for being a mean girl, right? Positive strokes for being a sarcastic jab and so forth. So my question to you is did the kids in your study recognize the complex reward systems that support or contribute to the disconnects and gaps that you found? Whoa. Thank you, I think that's a great question. I think in line with what I'm saying about blind spots and disconnects, no, not fully. But let me just follow up by adding a little bit of nuance there. I think, yes, at certain moments in their narratives and in our interviews, they did, given enough time to reflect and given a gentle push or a nudge in that direction, they did think more broadly. Whether that thinking that they shared with us at that moment then crossed over into their thinking when they're considering that reward system for meanness and they're really in that hot cognition moment where they're really primed to be thinking about their peers is unclear and I think unlikely, but given enough time and space, again, it's not a capacity issue. It's an inclination issue or a sensitivity issue. And I think many of those forces, and I try to raise them in the book that have to do with peers and with messages from adults and some of those complex qualities of these environments can really work against doing that kind of reflective thinking. I think clearly there's a capacity there, even among tweens. I mean, one of the most impressive things that we saw when we talked to tweens about privacy issues is that some of them expressed in a really articulate way the notion that privacy is social. It's a social, moral and ethical matter in a digital age and together with their peers, they had innovated and developed these strategies for preserving, for protecting and respecting each other's privacy guidelines between them around checking in before they post content that features one another. And this was with a small group of tweens. It wasn't across the sample but I think there's so much potential there for doing that kind of thinking. The capacity is there and maybe that group was particularly inclined or sensitive to these issues for one reason or another but I think it's there. I just worry about how it fades into the background given these other priorities. Hi, my name is Catherine Stein-Oder. I'm the author of The Big Disconnect, Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age. I love your work and I wanna just tell you an area I'm struggling with that I'd love to add as a area for further conversation. I'm in a bunch of schools around the country, mostly independent schools because they can build into advisory and into their human health and whatever curriculum, the time and the place to do, have conversations and really looking at how do we teach these qualities to kids beginning and second grade. One of the biggest problems I see still when you try and have these conversations in schools that I've been recently addressing is that safety is another big factor because it's one thing for kids to learn how to have these capabilities but what often happens is there's a big disconnect from how kids actually, the language they use to get them into trouble with each other online and then when they're in school but when they're given the opportunity to talk about it if they actually talk about what they really said they're up for disciplinary discharge. I can say I was cyber bullied. Kari, you cyber bullied me last night and it really upset me and we can have a talk but it's one step so far removed from when you called me a bitch in a slut. I was so upset and then we had to do this collaborative project together in math. So another thing, pardon my, I'm just giving you an example here. So one of the things I think we also really have to pay attention to is making it safe for kids to talk really directly about the stuff that they're doing when they disconnect from their better self and schools yet aren't in a place, certainly public schools especially, where they've allowed for some kind of sanctuary not to mention the teaching of this and that's for me that's been a really interesting challenge in the work that I'm doing in the schools I'm in here and around. I really appreciate your comment and I think it's very consistent with some of the things that we heard when we talked to educators. I mean, I think that the time that they have to talk about internet issues is pretty limited so they end up prioritizing the things that they think are most dire, which are the sort of individual centered personal safety issues. Don't share your phone number, don't share your address. So these arguably necessary conversations and I actually, I think like I said with my example of the tweens innovating and developing these guidelines, it's not that youth don't want to have them. I think they do and some of them do on their own but I think educators don't even need to be fully in the way but I think they need to convene youth. They need to create the time and the space to do it and bring youth together with a couple of prompts to get that kind of discussion going. There's a wonderful advisory program developed by a woman named Janice Tobin called Open Session. I just want to call your attention too. It comes out of the Nueva School in California and it's a wonderful format for facilitating these conversations in such a way that a math teacher can do it without training to be an advisor. You know that's always an issue getting conversations going in schools with teachers who aren't specifically trained to teach this. It's a great tool that I think would be nice. Great, thank you. It's called Open Session. The Institute for Social Emotional Learning. It's a format for advisory that facilitates things like this beautifully. Great, thank you. I think we have to move to close. Just looking at the time. Is there one more question? Or if folks want to approach me individually, I certainly welcome that. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Take a seat. Take a seat. It's a great question.