 Good morning everyone and thank you so much for joining us today My name is Heba Hussain and I'd like to welcome you to the New America Foundation for a very very timely discussion On the digital lives of teenagers New America as many of you may know is a public policy Institute that encourages new ideas and groundbreaking Thinkers to address the next generation of challenges facing our nation and the world at large So I'm part of the policy team at New America's Open Technology Institute or OTI Among other issues, we here at OTI think a lot about how to make sure that new technologies are a positive tool For users and communities as a whole so we're especially excited about Dina's book and this event Really excited so without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Mary Madden from the Pew Research Center Who will introduce our panelists and get the conversation started Thank you so much Heba and thank you to everyone at New America for hosting us here today For those of you who don't know me, I'm Mary Madden I'm a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center's internet project here in DC And I'm joined by my wonderful colleague Amanda Lenhart who is the director of the teens and technology research that we do at the Center I'm joined today also of course by the wonderful Dana Boyd and we are honored to have the opportunity to discuss her Groundbreaking new book. It's complicated the social lives of networked teens Dana is a long-time collaborator and friend of the Pew Internet project and Her research on youth has been so influential for so many years that I can't possibly Convey the the range of her achievements within the few minutes I have here today But her condensed tweetable bio is that she's a principal researcher at Microsoft Research a research assistant professor in media culture and communication at NYU and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center in Her spare time while writing and preparing for the release of this book. She also decided to start a new research Institute called data and society Now this book is about networked teens And it's been eight years in the making in many ways It reflects the fruits of Dana's innovative approach to being a networked researcher And as long as I've known Dana. She's approached each new project as a humble listener Eager to learn engage and be in conversation with those. She studies as well as those who study her work What makes this book so unique is the way that it provides a platform for the voices of youth on these complex issues Now these issues are complicated issues like privacy bullying Inequality But Dana is a masterful guide and she helps us to break down many of the myths Associated with teens and technology use and she helps us to understand the larger societal context For what's been happening so that we can understand the way teens engage with the technologies of today and the technologies of tomorrow So without further ado join me in welcoming Dana Boyd Thank you so much. Thank you Mary and thank you Amanda for joining me and thank you to new America foundation for having me here I guess I want to start by giving some context to this book And then I'm actually looking forward. We'll start a little bit of a conversation here and then a conversation with all of you I was one of the first generation of young people who grew up online And I got onto the internet as a teenager in part because my brother did the terrible terrible thing of using up the phone Line when I was a teenage girl making ridiculous speaking sounds that I didn't understand And I got very frustrated with him until one point I sat down with him and he showed me what he was doing And it became this amazing Opportunity to see that the internet was actually made of people and that was this great eye-opening experience And for me, although it's actually really funny I've got a high school classmate here in the room Who I did spend some time online with but most of my experiences online were with Strangers people who at the time it just wasn't a big deal to talk to different people around the globe and indeed You know I spent time in particular with two really memorable interactions one during the first Gulf War talking to military personnel living Abroad helping me understand the politics the geopolitics of what was taking place You know in the ways that you know a naive teenager was asking really dumb questions At the same time I had this a phenomenal encounter with a transgender woman who allowed me again to ask Unbelievably inappropriate questions whereas I worked out and started to understand gender and sexuality and the body and these were really transformative interactions for me as a teenager So I went to college in order to study computer science in order to build the systems That you know I spent so much time being a part of and then I kept finding myself more and more curious about what it was That people were doing this project began sort of on the tails of another project where I was looking at the rise of social media I was looking at early sites like Friendster and eventually would end up looking at my space and continuing on And during that period my advisor came to me and said hey We have got this funding to look at young people of you Do you have any interest in young people and I was like yeah I would love to understand how Teenagers are making sense of these sites now that they're more mainstream to understand their identities and in many ways I began this project expecting that young people would be as transformed by These new technologies as I was and the fact that these were more mainstream would mean these huge transformations In public life and in youth culture in general And I think that probably the most shocking thing to me Embarking on this research project was to realize that the more things change the more they seem to stay the same And that many of the things that we saw young people doing involving social media Were the things that young people had always done hanging out joking around gossiping flirting just having fun with their friends And so then it was a matter of figuring out why is it that they're going to these online media? And of course you'd hear a lot of public rhetoric that it's this attractor that it's you know It this is what pulls them in this is it's all about the technology And I was like this doesn't actually make sense based on what I'm seeing in fact What I kept hearing from young people was that they would much prefer to be together face to face with their friends They would much rather hang out But there was something that they weren't allowed to and they started giving me these laundry lists of the personal dynamics in their own houses That made it very difficult their parents were afraid They couldn't they couldn't go anywhere people lived far away and there was all of these excuses and explanations So I started looking at what were the transformations of American society over the last 30 years that helped explain this and what I saw was pretty interesting to think about and Maybe notable for many in the room who grew up with some of these changes Which is that you know it started with curfew Laws we saw an implementation of curfew laws in the 1980s in order to in many ways restrict young people's access to different kinds of public spaces The response in the 1980s slash key culture was such that you know We had all of these you know understandings that we should overly structure our youth We should make sure they're involved in tons of activities, so they don't get themselves into trouble Meanwhile the combination of suburbanization and school choice meant that for an average teenager Their friend was going to live at a much larger geographic distance that even if they could get onto a bike They weren't going to easily be able to get to their friends the rise of double-parent working meant that you know getting your parents to Drive you someplace became really difficult. Of course most places don't have public transportation You know on top of this we have all of these commercial enterprises saying we don't want young people to be a part of these Environments malls kicked young people out You know places didn't want them if they didn't have money And we saw decline in young people's ability to actually spend money a part of this was changes in terms of young people's opportunity to get work So for example, it's very hard to imagine an upper middle class The idea of allowing a 12-year-old to babysit a two-year-old in contemporary situations And yet this was completely common, you know 30 years ago and that change is really important And of course, that's the black, you know the black market money even the more legitimate money Thinking about the idea of working in fast food Which I certainly spent my teenage years doing was it's become impossible for many young people Not the least of which is because those jobs are now held by 50-somethings who have been destroyed by the current state of the economy So you have all of these forces sort of pushing against young people's ability to truly get together to hang out with their friends and Up pops the internet and what you see is that rather than the serving as this allure What it has done is provided a certain kind of relief valve It has allowed young people to find a place of their own to hang out with their friends to socialize And yet as you've seen that, you know, sort of take place and unfold we've started to see parents and parents journalists Educators start to panic about the technology to blame the technology as has the thing that's like absolutely devastating for young people's lives Without appreciating all of the reasons that young people have gathered And so that's you know where I started this book and then when I did structurally the book in which I'm sure we'll get into in Conversation is I went through a whole host of different, you know anxieties that I kept hearing back at me It usually starts with kids these days, right and kids these days do terrible things of a variety form, right? You know, they must be addicted to technology. They don't care about privacy You know bullying is rampant and terrible all of you know online safety issues are flourishing You know those are sort of the negative narratives you hear on the positive end You hear these really utopian visions of the internet must you know save all of us. It's the great equalizer these kids They're digital natives. They understand everything and I was like regardless of whether we talk about the extreme utopian or dystopian This doesn't sit right and so I wrote this book to take all of those public notions And those anxieties and try to tease them out with gasp data Which is really sort of the bulk of this project is you know, you know Almost a decade now of research into different aspects of things and triangulating not just my work, you know But amazing work of my collaborators and friends and trying to really tease out what we can understand about each of these phenomenon What has legs what has grounding and what is much messier than we might think with that as an opening I'll sort of turn it over right into Amanda And I get to sit down get to sit down We're gonna talk we're gonna ask a bunch of questions. Thank you Dana That was I think an amazing introduction to To what's actually a really remarkable book And I have so many questions, but I think let's start I think I want to go back to this idea that you talked about about the internet One of the memes that we hear about the internet is that it's this great connector It shows this great potential for connecting young people to other people onto new ideas that will help reduce prejudice and racism Because partly in the words of the famous cartoon on the internet. No one knows you're a dog, right? So that people can be you know, they're removed from the the politics of the body But I think you found something different perhaps of teens and I hope you'll elaborate on that for us, you know For most young people they go to technology not to interact with strangers Not to even go through the process of performing fake identities But in many ways just to socialize with their peers and because they're there with their classmates from school They're friends from summer camp. They're you know They're you know peers from religious organizations, etc They assume that the people they're interacting with know who they are and the result of which is that they don't feel like They have to go through a process of telling those friends who they are The way that I saw it is this amazing kind of identity work over different technologies at different times So I'll begin with my space which used to ask these very specific questions like where are you from? How much money do you make? You know what is you know all of these like what is your age and it was you know built off of the older versions of Friendster, which had a dating component to it, right? So now you're think about it You're a teenager your friends know exactly who you are So how much money do you make clearly you make $250,000 or more, right? Obviously You know that aspirational desire is really strong You know you're a teenage boy and you're asked how old you are of course You think it's very funny to say you're 69 right like that's clearly makes a lot of sense and you're told to say where you're from and You know your you've got this crazy pull-down menu Where ha ha isn't it funny to choose the first or last thing so all of a sudden we have all these teenagers from Afghanistan Or Zimbabwe right because that's clearly what you should list or Christmas Island because who knew there was such a cool place It's Christmas Island and so we see this sort of playfulness in this identity, which is not about deception It's not about trying to lie or trying to create these fake fake identities But in many ways to say why do these sites need to collect this information in the first place? and so we see this moment of you know because you're there with your friends you're not trying to fake identities you're there trying to Hang out with them and you're trying to deal with these different contexts that you know you're operating in simultaneously And so to come back to dig a little deeper on that question I think you started to hint at this in the beginning of your question But I think some of the things that you start to talk about in your book or around the ways in which a lot of young people Even though I think we have the sense that young people we hoped would sort of meet people who were different from themselves Through the internet and learn about different cultures that in fact that's not so much what you found in some of your work I think you know One of the places where I saw it to be most heartbreaking and challenging has to do with LGBT identified youth So, you know when I was growing up the internet was a place where you came out It was a place where you made sense of your identity It was a place where you got support even you know, I grew up in rural, Pennsylvania And for me it was just an amazing place to meet other queer identified folk and try to make sense of what I was experiencing and our understanding about myself And that was really common and in fact so much so that we saw this decline in suicide Rates with young people who were coming out online as they were working out their sexuality So one of the things is that I started to imagine that when I would go back into the field that I would see this massive decline That these queer youth would have found amazing amounts of support and what I found is that the Moral panic that really occurred in the 2004 2005 Period had you know been so Successful at telling young people that strangers are dangerous that I kept talking to these you know LGBT identified youth who They would get beaten up at school. They'd be you know kicked out of their homes They'd be going through miserable situations in their in their home home community And then they would you know, I was sick Well, did you find community online and they were like oh no dangerous your strangers are dangerous like I can't talk to strangers and I was like wait your home life has reached a point of danger. Why are we going through this other moment and The place where I'm still struggling with it And this is data that I'm still working through and I'm hoping that some folks will be able to help me figure out was that There was a moment where Dan Savage came out with a campaign of it gets better And I saw all of these young people who were experiencing pretty horrible things in their home communities Create it gets better videos hoping that community would come to them Hoping that they would get support and validation and love and of course what ended up happening is they made these videos They put them up on YouTube and rather than finding their their peeps online They just ended up getting attacked more in their home environment, and I tracked a whole slew of reported LGBT identified youth who died by suicide in the year after and found how many of them had kept making those videos And I just I'm really struggling with the implications of that And I'm really struggling with the fact that we've spent so much time in that stranger danger of mode without Appreciating the value of connecting to people especially for youth who are really marginalized So I want to come back to talking a bit more about moral panics We've you've touched on them and talking about some of the predator panics that we had in 2004 and 2005 I think we both saw in our and all of our work that it really moved into being about a fear around cyber bullying and pure related harms Can you unpack for us sort of? Where where should we be worried and where should we not be worried? Where are these panics in some ways justified and and can you talk a little bit? I think for the audience about what a moral panic really is right, so let's start with the online sexual Predator moral panic. There was this image that got created and news media did not help that there was this 40-something-year-old usually a white male who would reach out from the computer and grab a child and do terrible things to them Right and this was the image that kept you know playing out But when you actually looked at sexual crimes against children that had any connection with internet This was not what played out So first off you'd hear these numbers like one in seven kids have been sexually solicited online or one in five was the First number one and seven was a couple years later This is actually based on amazing research from a colleague of ours David Finkel for the crimes against children research center What people don't realize when they just hear that number they imagine that one in seven children have been you know Grabbed by some you know 40 something actually almost all of that number are sexual solicitations by peers Many of which people don't think of as problematic at all But even those which are dealt with as problematic are mostly peers those that aren't peers are almost always 18 to 24 The number who are above that age are such a slim minority That's one way of looking at it the sort of another more important way is actual crimes against children What are the sexual crimes that occur? Involving the internet and again This is this is small numbers compared to what we see in terms of sexual crimes that have nothing to do with the internet But even those that take place involving the internet are pretty consistent in their pattern They're teenagers who often portray themselves as older Engage in sexual interactions online Meet up with an older guy who is usually honest about his age Meet up knowing it's for sex and do so repeatedly saying that they are in love right now when you dive deeper There's a lot of reasons why this is problematic There is a reason why statutory rape is is a law in this land But what happens is that these young people are themselves? Usually facing abuse at home addiction issues mental health issues a variety of things that are going on What that moral panic is is that it shifts us away from the realities of what goes on and says this idea that all kids are Vulnerable actually there are young people who are deeply deeply in trouble and what has happened with the internet Is it made visible a lot of this but rather than paying attention? We've diverted our attention to thinking about you know children who are many ways are not in trouble And rather than addressing or fixing the problems we get into this most moments where we're like Oh, we'll just age segregate the population which has all of these other unintended consequence Consequences and so I think it's really frustrating to me because there are young people who are deeply hurting now Let's also go back to that sexual solicitation issue if we want to deal with sexual victimization of young people We have to account for the fact that most sexual victimization that young people will face will be at the hands of their peers And we don't talk about that at all We don't talk about how to deal with the fact that your classmate may be the person who will rape you And how do we actually deal with that or have those hard conversations? Instead, it's a lot easier to go after and rally and block the technology or ban it for what are in many ways mythical Understandings of what happens and what goes on online So I want to talk a little bit also about the term addiction You have a whole chapter with this is the title and I think you and I share a sentiment that that perhaps that's not an Appropriate way of talking about What's really going on particularly with young people and the internet? But can you talk a little bit more about about addiction and technology sure? So this all started right kept hearing this this notion that you know These technologies especially the phone devices like just like they're just this addicting object that people just want to spend all their days in And I thought I was really intrigued because what I found as I talked to young people is that when their computers stopped connecting to the internet or when their you know phones, you know ran out of of Minutes in that period of time All some of these objects became totally uninteresting. So what I was about the internet what I realized it wasn't the internet per se But the ability to connect to one's friends and what you started to see is that young people, you know When we're talking about this narrative by and large what young people want to do is spend all of their time with their friends And there's a whole variety of reasons in which young people's unstructured time with their friends has really you know is gone Today compared to what it was even 30 years ago And so this sort of fascinating dynamic of young people who are deeply drawn to anything that will allow them to connect to their friends Now does that mean that some people have unhealthy relationships with their friends? Oh, yeah, young people have often struggled with these dynamics of how important it is to be cool the questions of popularity the questions of status That is nothing new and that plays out fully online Likewise, you will see people who you know are looking to escape And they're looking to escape in ways that you know for which entertainment is a complete You know delight and one of the things you will see with gaming is this desire to escape Particularly in households or communities where there's tremendous amounts of stress or pressure But I think part of what's challenging is that we again go back to the technology is the thing rather than looking at the underlying Dynamics the explanations of what's going on and my invitation to people you know with that chapter is to step away from this frame That's so heavily focuses on the technology and Appreciate what are the complexities and challenges of young people's lives that make the ability or desire to connect So desirable There's another term that I'm not a big fan of that you also talk about in your book But that I I also would love to hear you unpack more It's the term digital natives gets thrown around and it's you know that that young people are in fact somehow inherently have a great understanding and natural a natural Affiliation with the internet and that all older adults are immigrants who can't possibly fully understand the the world of technology in the same way that that young people do and I think Problematized this this kind of concept and I think I'd love to hear for you here. You talk about it you know when I was working on this project one of my Friends and collaborators John Paul free he decided he was going to work hard to reclaim digital natives And that if you reclaimed it He could help people appreciate that what it meant to be a part of a generation for which technology was a part of Life meant that people could would be willing to engage with and understand that this is a part of their world And what happened is that he ended up becoming a tool in media dialogues that? basically misinterpreted his Attempts to critique his attempts to problematize his attempts to reclaim the concept And so I sort of came back to it to John and I was like I think you lose I think we need to actually just say that this this term is a terrible one and move on the reason why is that you know Another colleague and collaborator of ours Esther Hargitai wrote this beautiful piece where she asked the question You know digital natives or digital naïves because she'd been doing large-scale survey work with Freshman in college as well as as younger cohorts that showed that today's youth are really Unsophisticated at very basic technical capacities everything from how to architect a search query To understanding how to manipulate key parts of technology Things that we take for granted you know for you know my Generation of kids who were sort of coming online We had to do a lot to figure out the technology in order to get the devices to work right? We had to get very innovative You know even if we didn't build our own computers We it wasn't like our parents understood how to connect the modem up So we did a lot where we're trying to make it work And then of course you know I my first $700 phone bill that my mother you know was completely horrified by meant that I had to find a way to You know get it so that my mother wasn't the one getting charged for it Which you know in in great teenage logic meant that I had to figure out how to give the bill to somebody else You know and thus was figuring out the culture of freaking And we start to see these moments of actually understanding the technology in order to participate in it when these technologies went mainstream It's great that young people desk did less illegal things that were not necessarily the better Smartest ideas of my teenage years, but what it means is that they're very able to use you know Whatever the popular social media is to connect with their friends, but they have no understanding of how these systems are architected The logics behind them the ways in which an algorithm works The even something as simple as the biases of what happens with the you know the stream of Facebook content We are not sure what's popping up at the top It doesn't mean they're not experimenting that doesn't mean they're not trying to figure it out But they don't have some magical You know knowledge just because they're of a particular age cohort and what is frustrating to me is that we've used these frames of digital Natives not just to you know hold up young people as somehow, you know magically empowered, but to remove the Responsibility of adults to help educate young people about the technologies that are shaping our world And so I think that this becomes deeply frustrating to me because I actually think that we need technical literacy Critical, you know digital literacies media literacies more now than ever and yet we have totally You know removed ourselves of that responsibility in light of the fact that these kids seem to understand technology better than we do And I think that that is societally irresponsible I mean, I think there are still a subset of kids who are very into technology who know about it who understand it But that's not that is not by far in a way at least according to some of the internet data that we've got That's not by far in a way the vast majority of that way It's like you know that was similar to you know my cohort where there was a handful of us who were really deeply engaged And I'll say you know one of the things I've noticed about the young people who are really technically engaged is that let's be honest They're actually causing as much trouble as my cohort did and I spent a lot of time hanging out with young people who are part of 4chan For those who don't know what 4chan is don't look it up read the wikipedia entry. It'll be much safer But it basically is the underbelly of the internet and what's so phenomenal about it is that it's people who are really trying to You know manipulate the system So my cohort spent their teenage years trying to hack the security economy to hack into major You know government apparatus this cohort really grew up trying to hack the attention economy And that meant trying to figure out how to position information in ways that would mess with people and my favorite of Which in light of the moral panics that we've talked about Was you know a group of young people on 4chan who decided that Oprah Winfrey was spending too much time You know getting her you know getting so upset about all things predator So they decided that they would try to punk her by getting her to talk about how all of these predators were coming And they were going to attack all of us and they filled her forums with all this information And sure enough she did an entire special on this mythical predation story that these Teenagers had created and they were all proud of themselves right and they you know not only did they do that They they hacked time magazines top 100 lists just to prove that they could you know And we saw this happen in the mid 2000s and then you know things started getting a lot more serious Politically wiki leaks occurred Sure enough we've seen you know summer of surveillance Which many people in this room have been deeply involved in and all of a sudden these these 4chan kids who had spent so much time hacking the attention Economy suddenly switched and we saw the birth of what is anonymous with the capital A We saw a lot of political activism and we are seeing a whole dynamic of Whistle-blowing as civil disobedience So there is this amazing cohort of young people who did build technical chops Trying to figure out how to work within these systems really through a level of interest But we should not assume that they are at all you know mainstream with a the community writ large And I'll actually talk a little bit about political activism because you do touch on that a little bit towards the very end of the book and which I think you make some points around How first of all that young people are often not seen as politically active But I think your example that you've just given us here today through this participation through 4chan it through Technological means of political activism that young people are in fact engaging in political activism Yeah, you know There are young people and this is in the same ways the technical issue as well Which is that there are young people who are politically motivated and technology becomes a tool which they can enact that And what's been phenomenal to watch over over these different periods is how young people will get creative with the tools That are at hand to try to engage their their peers But this doesn't always go well And this is one of the things that I think is really fascinating because we talk you know abstractly about how we want young people to be Politically engaged but no not that way right as usually the sort of double-handed remark and I watched this in particular in light of What was happening around in immigration reform in in the US? So there was a bill that came up HR HR 4 4 3 7 I love the titles of things in this town that make them so oddly memorable in weird ways And this was a question about you know how we would think about immigration and it would the implications would play out pretty significantly for undocumented youth and their families and so I started to see a lot of Let you know young people trying to galvanize and engage over this bill and at the time Spanish-speaking radio was really activating a lot of adults for a protest in May of I'm gonna blank on the year So forgive me But they were trying to you know activate all of these adults and young people went Hey, what about us and many of them were actually documented youth of undocumented parents So they were really struggling with their their cross position And so they use at the time my space to try to figure it out Like they could actually spread messages and try to get people to repost things and try to connect people to engage in a moment of activism and Indeed they managed to get a word out about a protest that they wanted the stage on a Monday morning Where they wanted everybody to walk out of school And I think it was at 9 a.m. Or whatever and they did and thousands of young people across Western states and particularly California walked out In protest and they they took over in Los Angeles They took over the highways and block traffic and they you know managed to get themselves in the media But rather than it being narrated as this is this wonderful thing of seeing young people being you know actively engaged It was this terrible thing of young people skipping out on school They didn't even know what they were doing or what they were standing up for they were just using this as an excuse And of course if you know anything about California politics schools are docked money Every day for the day for a child being absent so there was a political interest from the school districts for the problem of young people having left school because it meant a Loss of money for them But what was hardest to watch was Mayor Villegosa who responded to this situation by saying Caesar Chavez would be ashamed of you That how dare you you you are in this country to get an education? And it was a really intense situation because young people are like You want us to be engaged and you don't want us to be engaged? I don't understand and it was a very fair question And it's something that I think will continue to pop up because young people's activism what makes it powerful and makes it Effective is also what makes it actually terrifying to the powers that be because it means using tactics to get attention That are not necessarily what are determined to be normative or acceptable tactics, right? It means pushing boundaries But that is fundamentally what activism is about and I see these tensions that emerge when young people do engage in activism Because they usually use tools in new ways that adults hadn't previously thought about So I want to talk about attention as well. I want to come back to this idea of the attention economy I think you've brought it up. I've heard other people obviously talking about it We see the internet as this thing right that the economy the currency of the internet is attention what How much do adolescents and teens really have a sense that they are participating in an attention economy that they Are there ways in which they're trying to game the system that they understand? Do they understand from from your experience? How much they're being both watch? Do they understand the ways in which corporations are at work in in how they present themselves and Observing how they present themselves online, you know, so Chris who've now go out at Berkeley has done these amazing surveys Trying to understand whether young people are more sophisticated about you know different aspects of surveillance corporate, you know uses Marketing data and whatnot has found that my large young people are as sophisticated adults, which is to say not very and That Generally speaking I found that to be true But one of the things that I found when I talked to teenagers about this is they were like look This is our one place where we can hang out with our friends great It's commercial. It's the one place where we can go What do you want us to do and there was a you know a fair response so that you know, you know frustration of just like yep It's capitalist you you want to have a problem with it raise a problem with capitalism like this is this is not our fight This is our place where we want to get together with our friends that said young people are aware of you know Different aspects of how their data is being watched some of those are accurate some of those are inaccurate They're most deeply concerned about people who hold immediate power over them This is parents teachers college admissions officers military recruiters You know local law enforcement, that's who they're concerned about because that's who they see in an immediate way Corporations government writ large they don't feel like they have anything that can make a difference in this That said they love mucking with the data just for fun And that's actually where I see you know a moment of resistance that I think is really beautiful Sometimes it's just to play with one's friends. So, you know, I I love this example of a sitting down with a teenage boy and Gmail is one of the few things that doesn't get blocked in a lot of American schools because Google ends up being useful for other reasons And so they don't block it whole and so you know I find these teenagers who during the day would use Gmail not because it was their preferred communication choice But because it worked and so I was sitting down with this boy and he was Trying to send messages to his friend in school and he wanted his friends to get inappropriate advertisement just just because it was funny Right and so he you know would write these messages out and he would you know make them in white tech So they would be seen as invisible just to get his friends to get diapers ads because nothing is funnier to a 15 year Old than diapers ads, right? You know in this way of being aware enough about advertising culture in order to play with it That doesn't necessarily mean a sense of empowerment another place where I saw this pop-up has to do with Facebook which is that whether they were right or wrong and I could never confirm it from the company young people had figured out or Believe themselves to have figured out that if you put brand names in your posts They would appear at the top of the news feed So you know you'd write like la la la la whatever you want and then you'd add Nike to it just in the hopes that maybe Somebody would actually see it and it's that moment of awareness that moment of recognizing the algorithms Even if you don't understand them even if you don't understand what actually works where you start to see this just you know peripheral Sensibility that it's happening that doesn't mean young people feel necessarily a sense of power ability to change it at the end of the day What they're more worried about is is mom than anything else Because mom, you know even when she's well-intended Intended tends to misinterpret nearly everything that is seen and that is where the points of frustration become you know really real And I think that's that's exactly what we and you and I have talked about this a lot in terms of really Focusing not just even on attention but on concepts of privacy The concerns that you have I think I mean what I think would sum up at least our findings And I think your findings as well as that kids care about privacy just not in the same way that adults do They're not worried about the same institutions. They're worried about mom And so you know to delve more specifically into privacy. We've talked about it a little bit But you know what are some of the tensions that teens face about privacy online? What are some of their practices around online privacy that you saw? you know in the early days of social media Parents weren't paying attention. They hadn't figured any of this stuff out and so what ended up happening is like you know their content online was completely legible to me because they were Completely upfront about what they were talking about and over the decade in which I was doing the work Really the thing that was most noticeable on a shift is that young people became much more sophisticated About realizing that their audiences were much broader than they wanted them to be in particular It didn't matter how much you knew about the privacy settings all it took was for mom to look over your shoulder at home And that would undermine anything you had done within a system So young people started doing all of these sort of more sophisticated, you know techniques trying to Control, you know how you know the social situations in which they operated and that's why it's important to note It wasn't just about the control of information. It was control of social situations So it was in control of the interpretation not just the data itself And indeed one of the most significant shifts I saw was that rather than trying to control access to content or trying to You know restrict access to content what young people started to do was try to restrict access to meaning to make certain that you had to Be in the know to understand what you saw online and I give this through a case in the book Which I think was is just beautifully illustrative of this Dynamic of though, you know, we've talked there's been a lot more practices that are much more mundane But this is illustrative especially for sort of a geeky identified crowd which is that this I met this young woman named Carmen She's of Argentinian descent, which is important for this story She knew that her mother would not recognize British cultural references let alone geeky references And she wanted to convey something to her friends without upsetting her mother The challenge with it is that she's found over time what she writes something that's emo or emotional Her mother tended to overreact in deeply problematic ways So she and her boyfriend had broken up and she wanted to tell all of her friends What was going on so that she could get sympathy and love and support and validation And so she wanted to post a song lyric that would sort of express her emotions online If you haven't spent time with teenagers song lyrics are the best way to you know express all forms of emotion You just need to find the perfect one And so rather than posting something it was really sappy or depressing which would of course trigger her mother's You know into thinking she was suicidal it had happened before and it was deeply frustrating She decided instead to post a song lyric from always look on the bright side of life Now for those who don't know the Monty Python reference This is a song sung during the life of Brian in which the key character is being crucified There is nothing happy about this scene at all But what happens is her mother immediately jumps on and says it looks like you're having a great day And her friends immediately text her right because the song lyric seems so happy And yet it's telling a much more complex story to the people who understand what's going on You know and we've talked over the years because a lot of this happens at all of these different layers We're starting to hear language like sub tweeting We hear you know all of these different sophisticated ways of encoding things by using pronouns where you really have to be local Now that's one of the ways in which to use you know the sort of social dynamics But there's actually also technical ways in which people do things that you would never expect with the technology You know one of my favorite examples is actually from here in DC For those who don't work with foster with youth in foster care when you're in You know when you're a guardian of the state that means you're the state is your guardian And there's a lot of pressure in those situations for the state to get access to your online Materials and this one woman I met here in town was frustrated because every time she would go into the office For different kinds of support or in the transitions regarding her foster families She would be forced to log in to Facebook and she was just frustrated with it So she decided she'd had enough of it. She was gonna be done with Facebook Now if you've tried to delete your Facebook account, you'll find that they guilt you right? You don't really want to you know delete your account. Look at all the people that will be so sad You won't be there and there's all these things. You'll miss out. You don't have to do it You can just deactivate your account So she got an idea and she deactivated our account and the next day she logged in she Reactivated her account. She was on it for two hours. She deactivated her account the next day She logged in she reactivated her account that she deactivated and she'd do this every day And what she found was that she could turn Facebook into a real-time activity And that when anybody was searched for her at any other time for all intents and purposes She wasn't on the site. She didn't exist people couldn't send her messages People couldn't ask her for things and she could play as though she knew nothing about this site And it was a really funny moment because I said to her said well, you know What happens if somebody happens to be searching, you know when you're logged in at the same time? And she's like they only look from like in a nine to six. I only log in after seven, right? She's like no no adult actually you know deals with it then and whether or not she's right doesn't matter What points out is that she's trying to control that context She's crying to control that social situation And what I kept running into is all of these young people Working within the dynamics of their particular community Trying to achieve privacy by any means possible in light of the people that hold power over them So you talked at the beginning and have talked I think at length at times about the ways in which the internet had this Wonderful sort of expansive feeling for you and this expansive opportunity for you when you were growing up Do you think that that exists for the majority of kids today? Is that something that kids that some kids can achieve that? No kids can achieve based on the ways in which we as a society are parenting youth and the ways in which the technology kind of operates and works upon them That's a good question You know It's been really challenging for me to make sense of parenting culture in America because there's so much stress so much pressure So many anxieties that are projected onto youth and that youth have to experience and navigate There is no doubt that there are some young people who find a way to be free in spite of it all But it's really hard and I think I'm thinking about a conversation that I had with a mother Who she Really wanted her daughter to have freedom. She wanted her daughter to be allowed to roam free She saw she thought that this whole culture of fear was was deeply problematic And she was bound to let her you know daughter have complete reigns on the internet Literally be able to go out and bike in her community. It was no big deal What she found was that her daughter stopped being invited to birthday parties her Stop daughter stopped being invited to be a part of other family's households And it was part of this problem where her daughter was then seen as this wild child who is deeply dangerous And would be a bad influence on other kids Children or other parents children and so she found herself putting in restrictions on her daughter's behavior So that her daughter wouldn't be seen in this way by her peers And it made me really sad to see that because one of the challenges in all of these dynamics is that we're dealing with a collective action problem This is not about a particular decision of a parent This is about a dynamic within a broader community And this is one of the things is that even if your child is able to go out and roam if she's got nowhere to go If nobody there to hang out with she's not particularly interested in doing so and so I really struggle with it I think I struggle with how to navigate this world because you know this isn't about You know all of these individual parents making decisions but coming together and saying that actually for the health of our society We need young people to be a part of public life We need young people to have a lot more freedom than we currently give them And I don't I mean I don't know how to solve that problem I think part of the goal of the book is to to try to at least start that conversation How effective I'll be that I don't know help the pendulum swing back. Yes I can hope so well I've asked a lot of questions and so I think Mary is going to help us figure out I don't know if you have any questions Mary you want to ask or if we want to just throw it open to the crowd to ask Their own questions. Yeah, I think let's open it up to the crowd. We have a microphone here. We are live streaming So yeah, be aware of that And then certainly if others don't have questions Hi, my name is Dave Price. I work with Urban school systems all up and down East Coast Real quickly a comment and observation and then a question a Request, could you quit writing books and quit speaking of politics and pros in here and just come with me? And I think we could make some really good changes in education because I that wasn't the whole purpose of your talk Secondly the observation when I was a teenager Lyndon Baines Johnson was president So it was a while ago, but it's a very similar situation I don't know if any one of the room remembers they were called slam books And you would write all that stuff in there and that's really all much of youth Facebook is and of course It's it's made much more But my serious question is this if you were to address a room full of educators today One of the things that you find in education is tremendous hypocrisy First of all they talk about technology and then don't let the kids use it or at least use it the way they intend Secondly, they're very fearful of it and understandably so I mean if someone is looking at porn and they go home and tell their Mother and then there's a lawsuit etc etc, but if you had three pieces or you could take four to some small number That based on your talking to young people who are the experts in it that would improve their educational experience in terms of Technology and schools I'd appreciate if you do that. I mean the number one thing, but you know this is more funding for schools You know Early on in the days early days of social media and particularly my space was before we reached this point where teachers were told that they shouldn't Interact with young people on social technologies, and I saw some really phenomenal things happen during that period and I and I give a case in the book of a teacher that I met who He had a profile on my space and his he created this dynamic where students could friend him and he was not going to You know invade their space at all, but if they invited him and they talked to him He would he would allow it and one of the students comes on to his my space and leaves a comment is like you know Yo, mr. See like why am I learning this trigonometry stuff like you know? When am I ever going to use this my mom doesn't know it she doesn't need it Like what is this? Why are you making a big deal out of this and he responds by saying, you know The reason we teach Shakespeare or trigonometry or all of these other things is because we're trying to help you think and here and he basically goes into a Metapedagogical conversation and all of these students pile on and they start this discussion And what ends up happening is is that you know in this very working-class, you know, California school It changes the dynamics for the next month of what happens in school And they're much more willing to listen to him rather than just sort of writing him off That was this amazing moment of change Likewise in that period. I saw teachers be able to see when young people are really struggling and in different ways and Take that into that environment I think the saddest thing that I've seen is that this whole idea of like any teacher who interacts with a young person outside of the classroom is inherently a predator resulting in the idea that we should never allow young people to Talk to teachers and I think this is really sad because we actually need an environment where It's not that teachers are teachers always but that they are Respected parts of our communities and that they're allowed to be present And so the very functional advice that I give especially to principals and to teachers and principals in schools is create Ignore Facebook's terms of service create an account that is purely You know you as teacher on whatever is the popular social media of your Teens cohort and don't friend a student because that's sketchy But if they come to you be willing to be present and if you see something that bothers you Don't throw a fit in that context just be The next time you see the student be like I'm here You know that and if you are worried about it turn your password over to your principal make it an open-door policy Be present so I think that this isn't one of the things that I think is important is that many educators are in there because they love Students they want to support them. They really want them to to grow up and be a part of society And I think we need to encourage that of course I realize that this is a burden so I don't think this is a matter of you know for every teacher because it's exhausting That's one things functional Second thing is is that many of the schools that I've seen Will not talk about social technologies to young people who are too young to use them Even though they know every student in their middle school is actually on them I actually think that this does a disservice to things I think we just have to acknowledge that young people are participating in these environments and that these Conversations need to happen that we need middle school youth to become critically engaged with these environments Even if they're not using them to be aware of it and it's about starting to ask questions not demanding practices And I think that becomes you know a challenge for me And I say this in light of the fact that you know especially in this town It's been a lot of time with how deeply problematic ineffective And long-term damaging the children's online Privacy Protection Act has been even in light of the fact that it is so well-intended And so I struggle with that because I want to see privacy protections You know deeply within the society, but that's not the law that gets us there in terms of a third thing to you know engage educators on I think Part of it is is you know realizing that you're never going to be the experts of every aspect of students life And it's about how do you ask the hard questions of them and engage them on the variety of other? Social dynamics that are going on not just the formal education structures and give them the tools to ask critical questions of What's going on all that said? I think that teachers are in a very hard place, especially in today's society And I I have an amazing appreciation for the hard work that they do and I really struggle to ask them to do more In spite of the fact that I would love them to do more, but I think it's I think it's hard We undervalue teachers. We don't recognize and support their their Challenging position and yet we need them now more than ever And I'd be happy to talk to you about engaging more generally Hi, my name is Ariane Higavish. I'm from the Institute for women's policy research. I thought this was absolutely fascinating and the I Guess the emphasis on saying, you know kids are kids and they just have a new medium And if they're problems, they're really problems that are outside the internet But I'm just wondering whether your emphasis on debunking the dangers or the independent influence of the internet Underplace the new influence of the internet because say if you take bullying Having the venue of the internet Strengthens what you can do And also even though yes kids now, you know, they can't congregate somewhere else So they congregate on the internet. Does it not also change in some way the way they interact? So I'm just wondering, you know that the kind of pendulum Swing back a little bit of how it might change issues I'm gonna take up bullying first and I think bullying is one of those Challenging issues because what we mean by it differs now that the first thing to recognize is that academics and people real people never have the same definition for things so when it happens It's kind of a miracle and one of the most shocking things to me that I found was that Teenagers understandings of bullying actually more mirrored Academics understandings of bullying than the adults narratives of bullying now Let me explain that academics have long defined bullying very concretely as Psychological physical or social aggression Repeated over time by people of differential physical or social power This is the big kid picking on the little kid This is the cool kid picking on the on the geek this kind of dynamic This is actually how young people understand bullying and they talk about other forms of meanness and cruelty through a variety of other language And the thing that I think is important of that is that adults on the other hand Use the term bullying to refer to every aspect of meanness and cruelty from lightweight teasing to serious criminal harassment And the kinds of interventions that we need across every aspect of that are different So let's take that narrow definition of bullying that we we can have them because we have an amazing amount of research on it Over the last 30 years if you stabilize that definition, there's been no rise in bullying This is completely shocking to people who see the media narratives of it More phenomenally is that when you talk to young people today, and there's been phenomenal surveys that have done this Young people continuously report that bullying is worse in school happens more frequently and with greater emotional duress Right, and that's pretty astonishing to think about in light of the more complex picture Now let's talk about meanness and cruelty because there's a whole host of meanness and cruelty that Piles on to the internet that has nothing to do with what we would think of as bullying and there is Undoubtedly a lot of this is much more visible and what I struggled with as I watched young people doing this They use a lot of language that emotionally distance themselves from the hurtfulness of it And you'll hear this in a gendered dynamic of drama amongst girls prank pranking and punking amongst boys And there's a way of saying going from this doesn't really bother me to this hurts a lot But I don't want to see myself as a victim So the language of bullying positions somebody as a perpetrator and somebody is a victim Whereas the language of drama allows people to escape a lot of that and that becomes really phenomenal to see So how much does the internet make a lot of this worse? What's challenging to untangle in all of this is that there is a lot of meanness and cruelty that is much more visible in every Aspect of American society today than it was 30 years ago. It starts with this town, right? I woke up this morning listening to Ted Cruz You know going off and yelling and talking terrible things about people and that is performed as our news Channels on every TV station out there meanness and cruelty for sport and politics. It is the way in which we talk about entertainment This is reality TV is a form of constant meanness and cruelty What killed me is that I would go into parents homes and they would talk about how bullying was a terrible thing by which They met all aspects of meanness and cruelty while sitting there talking Poorly about their bosses and colleagues at work not realizing that they were Setting in motion a way of being negative towards other people And so this is challenging for me because all of this pours out online All of this aspects of meanness and cruelty that has become so normalized in every aspect of society And I'm not convinced that it's really young people or the technology that's making that happen I think it's our society and I really want to step back and deal with that now to your to your broader point about You know how are certain things of this getting you know more challenging and like what's what's really different? There's no doubt that the process of learning to read facial expressions the process of interacting face-to-face is So different than than learning to do textual media, right? That's a very different dynamic It's the thing that kills me is that it's not that Teenagers prefer the textual media. It's that they don't have the opportunity for the face-to-face So we want to address that we have to deal with that dynamic That said there's some amazing moments of how young people are using textual media to engage in ways that they may not Previously have been willing to engage I'm in the board of a service called crisis text line Which is a texting hotline for young people who are in crisis to talk to counselors trained counselors and part of it was responding to a world of you know suicide hotlines and the decline of young people's participation in them in light of the fact that young people were Really struggling in this country and not to mention the lack of mental health support the lack of you know Social services and what we started up was an ability for young people to text to counselors What we found pretty quickly is that young people were willing to get to the point of what was going on in their lives Much faster through text than through any other medium and without any advertisement We've been slowly rolling out over the last six months. We are at over a hundred thousand text conversations between young people and counselors per month in over every topic from coming out to do different aspects of meanness and cruelty to suicide ideology and it's pretty Phenomenal to see this moment of when text can be more powerful and I'm not to say that the the internet is not is the answer to things I don't think it is I think we need to get much more back into physical environments But I don't think that we can blame technology is pushing us there I think that we really have to account for what we're doing as a society as a whole And if we don't like the society we're living in we have to fix it rather than starting to blame the artifacts of it So we actually have a question from the Twitters Derek Moore asks how globally applicable are the insights from it's complicated for teens outside the USA? The short answer is I don't know the long answer is everybody keeps telling me that it's more applicable than I give it credit for So I purposely decided to do this project looking at the US and it's it's Constructs in its constraints in part because I knew this country I spent a lot of time in 49 different states long before I did this this work And so I had a sense of the dynamics and I felt like I could actually make sense of it I spoke the language which helps a lot. I understood the cultural references And so my field work, you know, which crosses 16 different states for this project is very squarely rooted in this environment That said I have amazing colleagues around around the globe and I've spent a lot of time talking to them So Sonya Livingstone who you know, we all spent a lot of time with does a phenomenal work in the EU Working with a variety of different researchers across the EU and doing comparative studies And we found amazingly similar patterns on things that we could line up And there's some obviously differences in ways that are pretty obvious in Europe The UK is a lot more like the US than say Italy and like when I spend time in Italy I'm always amazed to see young people out in public squares. I'm like, wow, that's fascinating And you know likewise you see it in certain Asian contexts I have friends down in Australia where the politics down there have gotten pretty ugly And we've done a lot of alignment of work and that stuff aligns pretty well Obviously the cultural contours of you know, many Asian societies many African societies many South American societies are quite Different, so I don't know what applies and what doesn't and I think part of what I'm looking forward to is is people actually telling Me what works and what doesn't and getting that feedback But I just don't have the data to speak to you know, the world that said I think that a lot of the issues that I raise Certainly can spark conversations in other contexts and I'm sort of fascinated I should point out that I put this book out there and you know The first language that it was translated into was British, which I thought was fair Right like apparently it's easier to add u's and s's than to do many thing else. I was like, this is great So it'll be released in British on on Saturday but the weirder part was that the next two languages were the language I was least expecting this to be translated to which was Mandarin and Korean So this will be translated shortly into Mandarin Korean And I'm just like those are two countries was such a radically different cultural dynamics around this But then again, I am so looking forward to hearing the critiques and the feedback from you know Scholars and researchers in those communities, but so it just don't know I hope it sparked conversations, but I don't know how applicable other questions So I'm a parenting educator and have written a book on parenting So I'm obviously really interested in what your what your perspectives are on that and what I find from my research and speaking to parents is That they're they're just as a technology obsessed as their kids and you know inclined to spend time on on social media etc That their kids are acutely aware as teens are of the hypocrisy of What they hear and they're you know that they're they're so smart, but that parents are in essence at a loss They're confused and it's not that they Wanted want to draw lines in the sand and to have to police them nobody wants to do that They just they just don't know how to have the conversation. So a lot of What I try and talk about and in my book is how do you have that conversation? What is the right conversation? So I would love to hear from you It sounds like you did talk to parents and obviously talked to gazillion kids What should the conversation sound like between the parent and the entity, you know It's it starts communication that's long before we're dealing with technology it starts with making certain that you're building a robust interaction and Even before your child is really getting is of age where they can even interact with the objects It's about emulating the practices and the dynamics and the values you want within your household You know and I struggle with this watching, you know parents of small children being like Oh, I'll give up my phone when you know when we can have a conversation, right? This is like no, no, no, no, that's not how this works, right? You need to be present for your child long before they're verbal and they're seeing you on this device and they're smart Even if they can't communicate what's going on And that sets in motion a process of like what is the values of the household? What are the dynamics of a household and what is it really important to you as it goes beyond that? And this is where I believe that the you know approach to this is a values driven one as opposed to a Checklist a driven one, you know, what do we care about? What really matters? What is important and that questioning happens really early on? You know some of the most phenomenal households that I've seen They've done a lot of this through the process of questioning rather than the process of rules and I'll you know Think about this in terms of there's an amazing Anthropologist by the name of Gene Briggs who did this book called Inuit morality play and Inuit morality play makes no sense in an American context But it's brilliant as a provocation to think about things which is the way that young and a wit children learn morality as my parents asking Completely inappropriate and hard questions So for example, you know your son comes up to you and is like mommy mommy mommy. I hate Bobby He's mean and in an American context will be like it's okay You know don't worry about it You know like and and there's a lot of support in an Inuit culture the response will be well Why don't you kill him right? You can't even imagine asking that here? But the thing is is that hello could you be like why don't hate him that much? And he's like well how much you hate him right and it becomes this questioning and in that process of questioning you Realize very quickly that unless you're raising a sociopath your children will be able to respond By sitting there and thinking through boundaries of morality right and if you get a response of like great I have permission to kill this word. It's a different issue right like we'll do with that separately But most of it is starting to ask those questions And you know I think that those questions is ability to look at what's happening online being like what makes this so appealing to you You know what what's so cool? What do you what would make this this you know service better for you and like literally asking questions that are not judgmental provocative questions But like like what is awesome about this when you're talking with a ten-year-old, you know Obviously your sixteen-year-old is gonna be less interested in in responding to your assessing questioning But that conversation can happen pretty early on and sets in motion a Set of reflectivities that become so powerful for thinking about you know Having that conversation because it's not about the conversation You know like for example even the birds and bees conversation Which is always painful to watch parents be like I'm going to have that one conversation And then it's all dealt with right you know sexuality done check off There's you know, it's a process of awareness and it's a process that will continue on you know many years And I think that's really one of my challenges with regard to helping parents figure out parenting dynamics is that I wish there was a silver bullet I wish there was a checklist. I wish it was easy But I think we wouldn't love being parents as much if it was so easy part of it is the you know the opportunity to You know learn through our children and I think we have to respect that and think of it And think of technology as part of that broader ecosystem and think about how we drive everything through values and through our desire to create a healthy community Hello, my name is Maeve Duggan. I work at Pew Research Center with Mary and Amanda my lovely colleagues So as a millennial I Definitely spent my teenage years on AIM and my college years on Facebook and a lot of it Revolved around relationships and who likes who and who's talking about what? and there's also this notion of hookup culture being one of those challenging terms and That the ease of accessibility to highly sexualized Images and content and material online has all of a sudden made teens, you know highly disrespectful of one another and You know viewing each other sexual objects rather than people and human beings with feelings and emotions So I was wondering if you could speak to what you found with teens about Relationships and breakups and all of that good juicy stuff No, it's a question. I think that I'll start with some of the issues around pornography one of the most startling things that we found looking at data over time was that The number one Coralette for people getting exposed to pornography these days is looking for it, right? And so this is a big difference from when I was online where you accidentally stumbled across pornography all of the time Because you know, it was part of spam culture. There was a variety of lack of controls, etc. Etc. And now there's a dynamic of looking for it We live in a sexual image saturated society. It's you know whether we're talking about You know Advertisements for major products that are heavily full photoshopped whether we're talking about Miley Cyrus's latest ridiculous video We have we have this holistic world of sexualized images We don't have an ability as a society to have a conversation about it I think it comes back to these birds and bees issues Which is that like we will ignore the fact that our teenagers might be picking up on the fact that these things are sexualized And we don't want to talk about that and that is uncomfortable And yet now more than ever we need to have a critical conversation about what are the portraits of imagery that we have accepted In our society and that become the ideas of beauty and how deeply deeply problematic that they are and there are a lot of Families that I have talked to who have started having that critical conversation as opposed to just a birds and the bees conversation I think that's really powerful in terms of hookup culture. One of the things that's funny is that That notion actually comes up about every seven to ten years that this crazy cohort is engaged in so many more Hookups now than ever before except when we look at certain measures and markers. It's not entirely clear You know what's going on certain things for example Teenage pregnancy have been on the decline in really significant ways STI exposure has been you know in decline in certain communities and other communities is on the rise We have to deal with class politics there You know hookups around emotionality and empowerment have been a twisted dynamic with regard to females Female identities and female sexuality is particularly in heteronormative environments And I think it's challenging and it's a big hairball is that is the short answer I think that the way that we work ourselves out of it is by Being able to be more honest as a society about what's going on the way these images are produced The way that we use sex as different tools and tactics and we see it portrayed in media but we don't have a conversation about it and it's also really challenging to me because of the fact that there is So much gets cramped up in those high school years that college becomes this explosion of mess in upper middle-class American society And I think that that's a challenge to see in light of all of this because we have Done a disservice to young people by not giving them any freedom and then Imagine that that at 18 they go off to college and are perfectly competent of dealing with everything Which I think is terrifying And so I see it in light of another aspect of things which is the issue of alcohol in this country and out You know with my professor hat on nothing makes me more angry than our alcohol politics Because what happens is that rather than young people learning how to have healthy Relationships with the substance when they're at home they come on to college campus where they're suddenly free and long before they're 21 their binge drinking and getting themselves in all sorts of trouble regarding this having never been socialized into a healthy relationship to alcohol at all And colleges are left to deal with it in ways that they're not at all prepared to deal with it And as it as an educator I just deal with hung over 18 year olds, right? Which is not fun on any level, so I I deal with this in light of all of that And I think it steps back and thinks about how we Recognize that there is no magical age in which people are suddenly mature And so it's a matter of how you socialize people into a whole variety of things rather than Just opening the doors and letting them go free and I say this in light of the fact that you know I've seen this not just with regard to teenagers, but adults who you know for example Watch a D4 say use Tinder right now. It's a pretty terrifying thought And it's this dynamic of how you're dealing with suddenly not being able to deal with issues So this is for me. It's like how do we have a holistic conversation? About this these aspects rather than just blaming a generation or our cohorts because I don't think that this is a cohort issue I think that this is a socialized process issue Hey Dana. This is Tom Risen with us news report. I saw you at the Google Internet Liberty conference I think it was a couple years ago and yeah, I'm a big fan of the research Pew did yesterday about Internet relationships in society I'm wondering about talking about a holistic approach to socializing people What in your research? Did you notice how? Families give their kids smartphones or getting kind of ease them into using the Internet's like we've been having you know another thing with alcohol Cars or kid teenagers have had access to cars for decades and like okay. You're too young to have a car You're too young to drive you're too young to be on your own When are we gonna how was that conversation developing with phones and the Internet's and we've got like Training wheels devices for kids that aren't connected to the Internet You can play around on a little tablet or whatever. How do you see this? Developing you know the thing is right now. I think it's in the stage of experimentalism I don't think that we have a really good track record of understanding all the dynamics of it. It's You know at this point with smartphones being pretty pervasive in the upper middle class What we see is that even at the youngest of years, you know the the smartphone is in the hands and in a Family's household with a newborn right and it becomes a bright light object Indeed I say this is somebody who has my own small child for whom you know right now as I'm traveling The smartphone is understood as mommy in a box, right? You know mommy in a box checks in every day It says hello, but it's you know, it's not quite the same When you know because this object plays a role in parents life even small children start to mess with it And I say this also having gotten to experience this Last week where I was amazed that they two and a half year old managed to completely Hard reset my phone. I was like, how did you do that? Right and this moment of just being willing to pound and play on it Part of what's fascinating to me is that these moments of when that becomes a boundary object or when it becomes a point of enticement Right, which is just like oh you've restricted my access to this thing now I want it's right whether it's the knife in the household or the smartphone, right? So how do we then deal with these objects in our house in the house? In a slow process What's you know advantageous about introducing technology at a relatively young age is that you can do it in a way That's about a family activity, right? We're going to get together and you know You are six and we're gonna watch you know YouTube video together as a household as opposed to an entertainment device as opposed to a Thing of separation when that object is brought into the dynamic That's where you start to see a certain kind of respect And in some ways this is not unlike what we've talked about as media writ large, right? Don't use the television as a babysitter make it a household activity You know and I see that happening in certain communities and not in others What's been challenging to me is that of course the phone tends to get actually given to a child you first as a leash rather than actually as something that is Driven by them in different ways and that leash is a problem in in a whole variety of ways, right? We have parents literally tracking is exactly, you know, what are your geo coordinates out there? But also expecting young people to be immediately responsive to things so for example We've had a conversation about texting while driving, you know ignoring the fact that every cab driver in this town texts while driving Which I always sort of find entertaining to be here It's also pretty phenomenal to watch and every parent mind you We have this expectation that teenagers even when they're driving should be able to answer the phones when their parents call within four rings And I have watched so many kids sort of stress out about the fact that they're like they know they'll be in trouble If they don't answer the phone, they'll know they'll be in trouble if they you know if they do What is the right balancing dynamic, right? And this is that moment of like how do we then have a conversation about? What do we treat this object as a leash or when do we recognize that it has a little bit of more balancing dynamics to it? And this that's why I'm saying this is the socialization process Long before we get to the here. I'm going to give you a phone go free reign It's more about how do you integrate it into you know every other aspect of the things that are in your child's life? Slowly iteratively in a way that makes sense now I say all this and I would like to point out that this is so Class-inflected this is a middle-upper class dynamic for a lot of working-class Families the reality is is that you know, you know I meet these families where it's like the phone is the one way in which you know Mom is going to get to say good night to her you know child while she's you know doing a night shift, right? There's all of these other realities that we have to sort of recognize about what happens and how these technologies get in and for Many working-class families the internet is primarily through the phone not through the computer And so there's these places in which it's getting inflected But I think that we put too much emphasis on those devices Rather than really respecting and going with the practices and if you again if you drive it by practice You drive it by values in the household it becomes more integrated but one small other final point I saw some early-stage research and I'm curious whether this will pan out more at scale, which is that when? devices are introduced as This this ooh delightful object into you know preschool age kids They get obsessed with it when it's introduced as yet another toy They go through this process of loving it for a period of time as they do with many other toys a little bit longer than average And then it's just another toy So there's also this weird moment of how do we introduce it the way that I started to see this out in some of the high school environments was that When parents had started blocking things and say you only have 20 minutes on the computer What that meant was that the 20 minutes were entirely used for social activities and never for educational purposes Whereas when adults were saying you have more flexibility about your time The percentage of time for educational purposes was much greater So there's all of these issues that we you know We still haven't worked out what this looks like But I think that the way in which we turn these objects into being like an obsession Ends up also creating unhealthy relationships with them. Hi, my name is Vicki Stern I'm on the Montgomery County Commission on Children and Youth and I'm interested in the class piece that you're talking about We right now have a particular concern about foster kids and also other young people who don't have peer groups online So they're reaching out to strangers and therefore even more vulnerable than everybody else. Have you done some work on that? Vulnerable youth offline or vulnerable online. It's It's painful to watch and indeed the young people that I see to get into massive amounts of trouble Online are indeed reflecting a whole set of what's going on offline My approach to it all has been to say, you know, obviously, I would like to address poverty I would like to address all of these systemic issues that are happening But how do we also use those technologies to reach out to young people who are crying out for help? As opposed to then sort of just blaming them for these these problematic interactions online You know one of my sort of you know bees in my bonnet for a while has been a desire to have An equivalent of the digital Equivalent of a street outreach program online. What does it mean to think about digital street outreach? What does it mean to train a group of college age young people to look out in their home communities? For young people who are seriously running into risk connect them with social services connect them with support because you know I read into all of these youth who are engaging in large amounts of Expression of things that are not so good. I'll sort of put this as a concrete example of a community They spent some time with which is that in the height of the days of my space There was a news report of a young woman who murdered her mother along with her One of her male friends they together murdered her mother The news of course media covered that as girl with my space kills mother, which is always a delight So I dove into trying to understand what was going on And I ended up spending a lot of time with this young woman's friend group and for a year and a half prior to this incident She had documented every detail of her mother's abuse her mother's Alcoholisms her attempt to get help all of this was visible on my space And I asked her friends like so why didn't you tell somebody? Why didn't you go and talk to an adult and they were like well? We tried to tell people at school, but they blocked my space so teachers said they couldn't look and I was like Okay, and sure enough what I learned as the case unfolded and went to court was that the school had actually regularly seen You know Marks on her body and had called social services But by the time social services had gotten around to being able to investigate this said that there was not enough Evidence to be able to proceed of course all of this evidence was extraordinarily visible And so this is these moments where I struggle of these moments where we see young people really telling that story And so what does it mean not to hold companies responsible because engineers should not be the ones assessing this But to local by local in our communities be present and start creating eyes on the streets And that means putting in motion ways of being big brothers big sisters being community members online and offline and You know, I do see a lot of very vulnerable youth in this I mean, I certainly do with crisis text line. I do in my human trafficking project And they're it's heartbreaking, but for me what's struggling to me is is that I Expect them to engage with the technology in the way that reflects what else is going on And so I just think that it's a great opportunity for us You know in in civil society to think about how to use this to get back and and address this holistically And to learn about it again, I run down I come down to you know a resources issue and This town oh this town You know like you know our inability to support social services our inability to support mental health It's it's insidious and it's depressing And if you've got ideas of how to combat that political gridlock at nightmare, I'm all game In the meantime, I will sit and watch House of Cards and be depressed Thanks, I'm Michael Edson from the Smithsonian Institution, and I love the way you're unpacking All of these big hairy problems in very rational practical terms It's part of real life. These are real life problems that reflect themselves in new ways because of these new platforms When you sort all of that out in your mind, is there anything left at the middle that The fact the reality of this new Thing that we hold in our hands this new thing that connects us all really does make different Probably the most significant is the ability to connect to So many more people across so much more space and so much more time Right the idea that what you put up online is persistent that your ability to to bridge these networks is really phenomenal and that that creates this powerful opportunity that All too often we we squander We squander this amazing a moment where you can look into and appreciate the lives of somebody else without having to do You know a peace court trip and how do we Train ourselves to appreciate difference rather than to reinforce homophily and sameness And I think that's one of the things that you know, I struggle as this two-sided coin so for example You know, I I missed the days of my space in part because my space had this really ridiculous technical decision that allowed every that made every user user ID Created as the one after the next so the first ID was one second was to etc Which meant that I can actually randomly sample every user that was out there and this was great as a researcher But this was also phenomenal as a citizen to appreciate the world as such radically different than it was And so for example, I would go into communities in my space of people who believed it was a Christian organization Because their experience and exposure to my space was purely people who were identifying Jesus as their hero and believed Themselves to be wholly religious and they were shocked when the media coverage Suggested that my space might be something other than Christian, which of course it was pretty phenomenal when you look at different parts of my space And I think that this is this this challenge in this invitation, which is how do we Take this moment of awe where we are a small, you know globe where you know That it's not just all these individual people separated by large geographic distances But the fact that we can actually see into people's lives. We can appreciate those differences How do we use that not just be afraid of it? So I think that that is something that's really different in the same way that I think that the you know a library was a huge Transformation right this moment of being able to get access to knowledge in a hometown Which pretty phenomenal of course, you know coming from your institution like the ideas of museums the ideas of being able to have shared knowledge I think that this is where I'm also amazed at the information access That is just unprecedented and that again we swan are in really weird ways Wikipedia to me is a Phenomenal site and what's amazing to me about Wikipedia is not just the fact that it has you know Tremendous amounts of information, but that the process of how that information was made is made visible You know that just those discussion pages where you can actually see the debates and you know I describe in here You know my delight at trying to make sense of the American Revolution Wikipedia entry which because it has to resolve into English means that the British and Americans had to resolve this Right and it's fascinating. It's just like are they terrorists or they revolutionaries, right? You see this conversation unfold and I think of my own household So, you know my my grandfather's British and he brought my mother over to the US When she was a teenager and she came home with an American history book Produced in the United States and he thought that this was complete rubbish and immediately threw it away Right because of course the way that he understood the American Revolution was very different than the way that she did Or the way that American society did and yet How do we actually appreciate the fact that you can see those debates unfold? And those are the moments like that those details of the internet that I am just in awe of That ability to connect us to information that ability to potentially connect us around the globe And I think that what I'd hope is that we don't let those amazing Dynamics get lost in light of our own, you know fears and anxieties and this is pretty phenomenal It's an amazing tool that you know when you's right can do amazingly empowering things I think we have time for one more question if one more question exists Hi Dana So I am gonna just ask for as when you're looking at These teens by and large who don't have the kind of technical expertise that was required When you or I were teenagers to get online I mean one analogy that's often used as cars. So like in the 50s people were all into Repairing their cars and now people just want to drive places But I what I wanted to ask was whether or not within your travels among teens There was a subset that you found that was more technologically Savvy or in or or engaged or whether there was to what extent if at all you saw like varieties Variation in the level of technical engagement that different teens had and is you know, is there kind of like a Core of nerds in there somewhere that's gonna have a have a more direct grip on the technologies Yeah, I mean, so I always struggle with that analogy that analogy to cars which I've In part because I think that no you didn't necessarily need to tinker with your car in order to drive it That's a good thing. You know, I tend to break things more than I fix them But the ability to understand mechanics was actually really critical to the labor part of the society for a long time to what it meant to to Be able to be a participant and be independent from other institutions We have actually done a good job of undermining that entire aspect of our economy in ways that I'm not sure a good thing In outsourcing at that aspect of the economy in ways that I'm not sure a good thing I would like to not be doing the same thing with technology I would like to hope that We actually help raise more people who are technologically sophisticated Not just under the rubric of it. We need some education, but like the curiosity driven Technological Capacities are so phenomenal for being able to build things that are only in your imagination And so even when I look at schooling, you know We have of course more AP computer science courses than what we had when you and I were growing up And yet that doesn't necessarily mean people are thinking Sophisticatedly about the kinds of technical dynamics that are that are transforming society You know to sort of play off of the geek more geeky element of it There's some really phenomenal shifts that I'm seeing happening in terms of you know data analytics for example So, you know take something like databases. We have historically, you know how people engage with relational databases They required a very particular kind of architecture a kind of thought logic That meant organizing data in really phenomenal ways What happened is that below the radar below the AP computer science classes not even relevant to the computer science courses at the Universities we saw a transformation happen to a no-sequel model We saw a transformation happen to map reduce and all of these other you know technical transformations that is actually driving this Conversation about data analytics without people, you know who are using that material Understanding how that change in architecture is phenomenally insightful to this this country I don't want everybody to be a computer science, but I want computer scientists But I want everybody to have a level of technical literacy or if I say algorithm You have a sense of what I'm talking about that you can see the cultural work that is done by an algorithm And we're not even close to being there are there, you know a group of adorable geeky youth out there Oh, yeah, I love them. They make my heart go pitter-patter, right? And they're you know, they're doing it in spite of their school situations. They're doing it as a hobby They're doing it because it's fun. They're doing it because they got into Minecraft and they just fell in love They're doing it, you know because they wanted you know to break a DRM for their favorite anime And they just gonna figure out how you know come, you know any means possible that hasn't changed It's still such a small percentage of those cohorts And what I would love to do is to see that kind of tinkering mindset that kind of Curiosity and interest driven passions around the technical tools that we have available to us Sort of being nourished and encouraged and I don't see a lot of that I will also say that I really miss moments in which technologies were not so clean My favorite of which is my space, you know again, that was the sort of weird era of things The geeks in the room. My space was a technical disaster. It was built on cold fusion, which is a horrifying thought and in spite of that in spite of that part of it was it was a sequel style mechanism where people didn't even realize that you They didn't check what was in the forms before they inserted it into the tables So it meant that teenagers could quickly figured out that they could put a bold tag Into the forums and all of a sudden it changed the you know the style of the of the text and then you could put in You know more sophisticated HTML and some css and javascript and all of a sudden we saw the rise of background or layout culture And what ended up unfolding in that environment where all of these teams experimenting with their myspace profiles and teaching each other how to do these Sophisticated backgrounds and layouts and it meant an amazing amount of technical literacy all to make your page look like a horrible Geo cities explosion right and that was Fascinating, but we we need those those breaks those things where things aren't so perfect And I will say that this is true in in literacy as well Like you know fanfiction fanfiction is best done when the author has done a poor job of filling in all the details So you have to fill it in yourself the same as true with technology and that's why I'd love to encourage more of that Great, and I'm happy to sign books and thank you so much for coming out this early in the morning