 All right, I think we're gonna get started. Okay, so welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Hall, and I'm a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, and a visiting scholar here at the Berkman Klein Center for the year. I wanna start out with some gratitude and thank yous. I wanna start by saying thank you to Nick and to Tony and to Shelby and all of the staff here for putting on this fantastic event. I wanna say thank you also to the Jory Weinstock who played a huge role in helping shape and craft the kind of content that you're gonna talk about today. And I also wanna thank everyone here in the audience for showing up on a rainy day, and it's not terribly great to go out in the rain that you came, and I thank you for that. And everyone online, thank you for being here and to be part of this, I think, important discussion. So it was 20 years ago, not too far from here, when Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook. It was 10 years ago this month that Facebook acquired WhatsApp. It was six years ago that musically migrated its users to TikTok. It was five years ago where 80% of Americans had a smartphone. Four years ago this month, we were all locked down in the midst of a pandemic and all of our social life got transformed into a online life. Today, 6.3 billion, billion, with a beat, billion people use one of the meta platforms. 250 billion people today are daily users of Weibo. And a range of social media platforms and functions is larger than it's ever been from YouTube and TikTok to Reddit and LinkedIn. And from the beginning of all of this, social and mobile media inspired both dystopian and utopian imaginations, from connected presence to alienation and traffic, from a loan together to it's complicated. Mobility and online access has shifted norms of communication. We had to figure out when we should take a phone call, how quickly we should respond to a text, what we should share online and what we shouldn't. We had to reconstitute and reformulate boundaries of time and space, both professional and personal that were once taken for granted. And the people wanna know, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, there is one strong consistent voice out there and they have made a decision and definitive conclusion that social and mobile media is toxic, detrimental, harmful, and destructive. Legislative pressures mount from attorneys general lawsuits to the state of Utah's new regulation and now the Bill and Congress to ban TikTok, the public wants to know what to make of the social and mobile media transformation. The most comprehensive, thorough international research, evidence on social and mobile media have concluded that there is no singular, universal, undeniable toxic effect. Causal and longitudinal effects are inconclusive at best. However, consistent with many things that involve complex forces of agency, choice, creativity, the best answer of the effect of social media is well, it depends. Exciting new research has recognized that social media is best understood in context. The effects of mobile and social media depend on the person, the place, and the communication goal. It depends on the platforms we choose and who we're talking to. A focus on context shift the conversation from what technology is doing to us to what do people do with technology. And so today I am thrilled to introduce this panel of six amazing scholars, scholars who understand the history of the internet, scholars who challenge simple notions, scholars who are deeply contextual in their work, whether that be the school, the workplace, the family. These are scholars who understand the importance of nuance, context, agency, and community. And with that, I'd like to introduce our first speakers. Kerry James is the co-director of Project Zero and the managing director of the Center for Digital Thriving at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her work focuses on young people's digital experiences including opportunities and challenges for their well-being, social connections, and civic lives. With Emily Weinstein, Kerry is a co-author of the book Behind the Screens with Teens Are Facing and Adults Are Missing which offers compelling insights drawn from thousands of teens. Dr. James is a major force in translating research evidence into practical tools and wisdom for family and educators. And as a parent of two tweens, I personally really appreciate that work. So please welcome Kerry James. Well, thank you, Jack, for that kind introduction and for that louder, maybe move it up a little bit. Gratitude to Jeff. Thank you for that kind introduction and actually for that very compelling and super motivating introduction to the conference today. It felt like a rallying cry, really just sort of supporting the work we do. And I hope we can go to the first slide. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. Yeah, no worries. Oh, and I'm gonna need... Yeah, that's honest way. Okay, great. Thank you so much, Ned, for covering everything. Okay, well, thank you so much. It's great to be here. I'm gonna say a little bit more. You're getting a sneak preview. I know, I know. I have a patient. It's really compelling. Yeah, that's why you're eyeing me. That was my goal. Is this gonna count against my goal? Can I guess your time? Yeah, the presentation, but the product. Yeah, this one. See this guy right there? Yeah. There we go. Yes. Great, okay. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Jeff, for that introduction. I'm gonna say a little bit more, a few more specifics about the work that I do in a moment. But first I wanna take you back a couple of years to a story that I thought of when Jeff reached out and said he wants to do this conference on social media in context. So this is gonna take us back to 2020 when my colleagues and I were doing a focus group with young people about the practice of collecting digital receipts as grounds for social cancellation. So one teen told us about a full blown scandal that erupted in her high school when one of her peers posted a beach selfie that on any other day might have been benign, completely un-conversial. But it was the day after George Floyd was ordered. The teen's close friends replied with what you would see as typical praise and over-the-top flattery about the beach photo, but the blowback from a wider peer group about the timing of what appeared to be a frivolous self-centered post was severe. So context really mattered to this story in a couple of different ways. Obviously, the larger context of Floyd's murder and the public response that was unfolding, local context mattered to students in that high school shared different perspectives about the event, but also about how one should be in the world, including on social media in the wake of an event like that. Another teen living in a very different community context told us that posting about Black Lives Matter at that moment to his community on social media felt important to do, and yet he, I quote, it felt like feeding a fed horse since all of his peers seemed to share his perspectives. And yet posting was still an expectation because staying silent was seen as taking sides. Some teens told us indeed that their friendships were on the line based on what they posted or didn't. Obviously, we're at a different political moment right now, but these kinds of dynamics and issues are still very alive in our world. And we continue to emphasize the importance of tuning into the details of young people's experiences in context. So with that opening, I'm gonna say a little bit about myself. I'm a sociologist by training. I have been studying teens' perspectives on growing up in a digital world for over a decade. I've been doing it mostly with this person, Emily Lines, and she's a developmental psychologist, so we bring these different lenses to the work we do. We've mostly been doing this with qualitative methods that foreground young people's voices and stories. We have recently launched a new Center for Digital Thriving and it's comprised of an intergenerational and multidisciplinary team. We bring very different lenses to this work that we're doing, but we all think of ourselves as critical optimists. I can say more about that in the Q&A if people are interested. Our mission at the Center for Digital Thriving is to create relevant knowledge that centers youth voice and resources that we hope pave the way to a future where young people can thrive however technology fits into their lives. Our work is grounded in a bunch of guiding questions. What is it like to grow up in a radically connected world, especially for adolescents? What's hard about social media specifically and why? We think about our research as breathing life and texture into a lot of the big trends that people obsess over, the big statistics that folks pour over. We're really interested in getting into the weeds of what it looks and feels like to be a team right now. When we get close to the details, it changes the way we understand the big data sets and the big statistics. My hope is that the stories that I share in my talk will do that for us, will ground today's conversation, found us in the details of King's experiences and importantly suggest directions for interventions. And that brings me to the last cue that guides our work. How can adults be more helpful? So our home base at the Center for Digital Thriving is within another center called Project Zero, which is at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It has existed there for decades and focuses on doing translational research, building new understandings and tools that have impacted the world. The Center for Digital Thriving's work operates squarely in that tradition of research into practice. Okay, so getting into the research. A couple of years ago, Emily and I had the opportunity to conduct a new study and we ended up collecting data from over 3,500 teenagers who were based in the US and when we were sifting through the data, we noticed that teens' responses to a particular question, their answers really surprised us and we had been researching teens in tech for over a decade but their answers to this question, what worries you most about grilling up in the digital world? When we were sifting through the data, we had so many aha moments and we realized that we needed to partner with teens in order to understand what we were seeing. So we recruited a youth advisory group of teens with different identities, backgrounds from different parts of the US to engage in cointerpretation of the larger data sets. They dug into the data with us and they helped us make sense of the stories we were seeing. And this partnership, like we won't go back to doing research the old way, this partnership was transformative in a way we understood our data. We kept asking the teens that we were partnering with this question, what are adults missing that you most need us to see and understand? And the answers to that were just tremendous, really transformative, our book behind their screens is filled with stories and evidence that answer this question anymore. But I just wanna highlight a couple of themes. One is, I'm just sort of looking across these themes, the both and quality of growing up in a connected, loveless, loud and clear. First of all, so many positives, socially, emotionally, for learning, specific engagement, Jeff's work on the positives is really important here, but we've heard this loud and clear from teens. But the good stuff nearly always coexisted with challenges, challenges like the pull of the screen, teens feeling like they struggled with that pull. And then when it comes to friendship dynamics, that devices are crucial conduits to nurturing their relationships with their close friends and peers. And teens can face a number of dilemmas that make being a good friend really complicated. So I wanna stay with this topic and drill down into the details by way of three especially revealing sites of where the good stuff and the challenging stuff can collide. So the first one is group chats. And group chats are crucial context for teenagers. They're probably crucial context for many of the people in this room. We know from a technical standpoint, unless you're my mom, it's pretty easy to set up a group chat, but the social dynamics around group chats are much more complicated and multi-layered. Rather than me just telling you stories, we wanna hear from teens themselves. So I, we have been collaborating with a fabulous podcast called This Teenage Life. If you haven't listened to it yet, you need to be listening to it, it's incredible. And we're gonna hear some voices from teens now about group chats and see if I can manage this. Today, the teens discuss what group chats they're in, the stress of texting in a large group, feeling excluded, some personal experiences where group chats got toxic and how group chats can be a positive force. I mostly use group chats to connect with friends from home and my family, but I think my favorite group chat has gotta be the This Teenage Life WhatsApp group. It's so fun to hear what everyone's up to, see photos in the day, cute pets and talk about issues that matter to us that we wanna make episodes on. I think it's a really good example of how group chats can make us feel more connected. With that said, I've certainly had my fair share of upsetting experiences in other group chats, whether it's gossip, arguments that spiral because it's hard to gauge the tone of texts or people purposely excluding others. Keep listening to hear our teen participants explore the complicated world of group chats. I mean, I definitely use group chats, like I'm probably part of like 30 and a 40 and most of them are all like the same groups of people, but just in like different like variations and then maybe like three people added in this one and then like on Snapchat, like you can do like group chats where you literally just send like pictures back and forth and I'm in like two of those with my main friend group. I've had the opportunity to just be friends with like very genuine people that have definitely still felt like this sort of, this fear of not being part of the group quote unquote, that was sort of instilled by the group chat. Like the group chats kind of took the place in high school that like tables took in middle school in the cafeteria, if you know what I mean. It can be nerve wracking to text a large group. I always worry if I'm being funny or interesting enough. Sometimes I've just been completely ignored. Recently I sent some information about a concert to a larger chat of people I know from college and asked if anyone wanted to go. No one responded and then three hours later someone else texted about something completely unrelated and people started texting about that. I felt so embarrassed. Luckily I found someone else to go with me to the concert and likely the people in the group chat were just distracted or missed the text but it still hurt my feelings. In big group chats, I will like try not to text as much. If there's something that I'm like, that I want to say I will think about it over and over again until I say it because especially when it's like people I don't know or people I do know that like I'm not too close to I'll be like, wait, what if they like make fun of me or what if they think that I'm weird for this and stuff. So it's a bit like very cautious. You don't want to not say anything because then it's like then you're not contributing and then maybe they'll like on add you as just like you're not part of it anymore. But then if you say something then it has to be like the right kind of like humor because like with different like people or groups of people like everything is just like vastly different. And a lot of times I'll like change up, you know what to talk about or like what they like to talk about or like common interests that I have with those groups. Group chats can also be breeding grounds for gossip and exclusion. I remember in high school theater we used to have a group chat for anyone in the show but then another group chat would be made that you could only be added to if the senior lead actors thought you were cool enough. I felt so excited when I was added to the group chat until I realized it was actually really mean. They would use it to gossip about other people make mean jokes or plan separate cast bonding events that excluded people. Eventually I got removed from the group chat for being a ghost which means they basically didn't like that I never texted anything. Honestly, I was relieved. One of the most positive forces in my life is the group chat I have with my four friends from high school. We all live in different places and time zones and it's hard to find time to call or get together in person. Our group chat allows me to know what they're doing throughout the day and feel connected to these people I love so dearly. Just like the This Teenage Life group chat, every time I read through my friend's texts it brightens my day a little. If used respectfully and kindly, group chats can be really special spaces for connection. It's amazing. Today the teams discuss what group chats they're in, the stress of texting in a large group, feeling excluded. Okay, so I wanna give voice to or make visible some of the things that stood out to me. I've listened to this recording a number of times of things that stood out to me. Quotes like group chats took the place in high school the tables took in the middle school cafeteria. I always worry if I'm being funny or interesting enough. No one responded. One of the most positive forces in my life. You don't wanna not say anything because then maybe they'll unadd you. I will think about it over and over again until I say it. So group chats are a really powerful window into the reality that tech is both hands, especially when it comes to friendship dynamics. So a couple of dynamics of no so many positives. They're special places, places for emotional support, connecting around shared interests. But we also heard in those voices about posting stresses, keeping up with the group chat, posting at the right time in the right amount, like not too much, but you'll get unadded if you don't say anything if you're a ghost. What to say and how to say it. In our research, we've heard this phrase second and third guessing what you post as really representative of that kind of stress about what to say. We also hear challenges of interpreting or reading the digital realm. These kinds of stresses really speak to two different grinds that teens talk about in our research. A social grind, a grind around, a felt pressure to be in the loop and keeping up socially to be included, but also a friendship grind. A felt pressure to be connected, to be there for others and in the right way. And I'll share a little bit more about that. Now, of course, there's been a lot of scholarship. It helps us make sense of these dynamics. Folks like psychologist Yal and Reich argue that social media creates new venues for age old friendship dynamics. Things that we want from friendship, like validation and affirmation. And yet, at the same time, the digital is not just a new venue. Jackie Nisi and her colleagues have a really powerful transformation framework where they talk about how the features and affordances of tech can transform the dynamics of things like affirmation and validation. Things like metrics can do that. So what's new is a little sort of, read receipts are a shining example of a digital feature that can transform relational experiences. So in the podcast, we heard one team share that she was so embarrassed that no one responded to her host in a group chat. So not really knowing what a non-response means is a common perennial pain point. This is amplified in direct messages. So the dynamics of being left on red, essentially being left hanging can trigger feelings of vulnerability. Even mind reading, they opened my message. They left me on red. They must be mad at me or we're no longer friends. We're in a fight, something's going on that can lead to this automatic negative spiral. So read receipts in many ways are where that natural sort of second guessing and caring what friends think really collide with digital features and make things hard. Being left hanging is just one genre of ambiguity, one genre of not knowing that teens told us they struggle with. Another form that stood out in our research in a really powerful way was when friends struggle in public. So this brings me to the last story I want to share. And it's a story from a young woman named Ally. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna read the story as we told it in our book. On a Friday evening in February at the start of school vacation week, 13 year old Ally was unusually preoccupied with her phone. Her typically happy face shadowed with worry. She tapped her phone screen repeatedly. After a few minutes, she looked up. She turned to her mom who was driving home, driving her home from gymnastics practice. Mom, Jalen is posting stuff. Jalen and Ally had been friends since kindergarten and even self-proclaimed BFFs for a period when they were in third and fourth grade. Although they had drifted apart over the years, they remained friendly. Now they kept up through social media posts. Jalen was fairly quiet at school but he opened up online. Over the past few months, he had occasionally posted a worrying Instagram or Snapchat story. One read, I can't do this anymore, I can't. There were several more like that. It was clear that Jalen was struggling but what did these posts really mean? Ally really struggled to read them. And then on a particular night, Jalen's posts were really different. The first one read, I can't do this anymore. I'm so close on killing myself, this is too much. And another said, I very badly wanna overdose myself. I can't do this anymore but I also don't want to. Jalen's situation was a true crisis. It turned out he was actually posting some of these Snapchat stories from a local emergency room where his mom who knew he was in distress had taken him. But she and the doctors who were treating him had no idea that he was posting these stories on Snapchat for a large audience of peers, including someone who had been close to him, Ally. Social media did not create Jalen's mental distress but provided a unique venue for him to share what he was feeling. Now the alleged role of social media in the current adolescent mental health crisis is ongoing fodder for alarmist news headlines like this. But stories like Ally and Jalen's bring us beyond the sweeping headlines. They layer in necessary texture. They give us new ways of seeing and thinking about those headlines. Ally's experience clarifies how challenging it can be to see posts like that. It's almost like reading the tea leaves, trying to make sense of what's happening. There's also this issue of empathy. So we think a lot about the pull to the screen being about design features. But for Ally it was really empathy that was pulling her to her screen and wanting to know is Jalen gonna be okay? And then of course the diversity and variability in the ways that social media interacts with youth mental health is also rarely captured in the headlines but the details really, really matter. We know from our research and from the research of many people in this room that there's so much variation in what teens use social media for and the kinds of experiences they have online based on their identities, whether they're identities by race, by gender, by sexuality. We also know there's tremendous individual variation in the ways that particular tech features like read receipts and such are experienced. And there's new research, for example, ESM studies that really look at and find so much individual variables in social media wellbeing and connection. So this is given my colleagues and I, a lot of motivation to build tools that are really key to the particulars of young people's experiences in different places. We've been thinking, I'm gonna skip ahead or we've been thinking a lot about the concept of digital agency and building a variety of resources that help give young people in their contexts and with their different challenges, more meaningful choice and tensionality and control over the way technology fits into their lives. I'm gonna end there and I can say more about this in the Q&A or after the discussion with time for this. Thank you so much. See how close I can stand without trying. Okay, that's good. I'm gonna introduce you because we couldn't. Okay, so sorry. But you know, go ahead and stand this part. I just didn't want to stand so close that we'd have a screaming feedback. All right. So our next presenter is Linda Sharmarin. I'm a senior research scientist at Wellesley, Center for Women and the founder and director of Media and Wellbeing Research Lab. Her research focuses on the social, technical and adolescent health. She explores overlooked and hidden populations and how social identities affect well-being. She consults with the Jed Foundation, a non-profit that protects the emotional health and prevents suicide amongst teens and young adults. And while getting to know Linda's research assistants and students, I can say that her lab is committed to making actionable steps towards improving the well-being of young people and advocating for young people in the broadest sense. So who's welcome, Linda. Can you hear me? Okay, so I was thinking about how, which hat I was gonna put on today? Because I'm a researcher, I teach college students, I'm also a mentor for high school and middle school youth, and I'm a mom of between. And a lot of times the questions that I get asked on a daily basis come down to, should we connect or not connect? And a lot of times people think it's a simple answer. And sometimes it's about, who are you talking about? Who are you asking? This is the best choice for young people. And also it ends up being about context, about it depends. That's usually the answer, but a lot of people don't feel comfortable with that. They want easy solutions and they want quick answers. So last year, leading up to last this year, there's been a lot of advisories going out for many different sources, national organizations, from different interdisciplinary backgrounds. And they all have sort of like that running theme of, are we supposed to be connecting or not connecting? And so there was, you always have shares in general, a couple of years ago, looked at youngness and isolation, especially during the pandemic, and even cited this one study about the lack of social connection. It's like, absolutely, you have to have 15 cigarettes a day, leading to early death. I mean, that alone would make me jump and be like, okay, how do we get socially connected? And, but then when you talk about things like social media and technologies that are supposed to reach across the divide and connect people, people are often assigning this kind of label to technology as fostering loneliness. Away from that technology, that is the demon, but sometimes it can be the antidote, you know? And maybe this is how you can network with people and be social in ways, especially during the pandemic, where that was the only way to connect with people. So, and then we had an advisory from the American Psychological Association with political psychologists, and I happen to be one of the co-authors of this advisory. And one of the answers, you know, to connect or not connect is, it depends, right? And it's not necessarily a good or bad, you know, aspect of social media. It's not all good. It's not all good. It's some more in the middle. It's sometimes at the same time, both, and just what Carrie Danes was saying. And it really depends on who they're interacting with and who you're seeing and what kind of strengths and vulnerabilities that they come to the screen with. And what psychologists are trying to, you know, even as a group themselves, they also don't agree on what to do with their clients. They see all the negative stuff when they see clients, right? And so it's hard for them to imagine a world of, oh my gosh, some, most of you are doing fine. Most of it's pretty unmanvane. Most of it's very everyday. And even people with mental illness, you know, in advisory, we say, oh, these are opportunities to actually practice in your social skills and maybe, you know, in a very controlled way. And most of the time, the message is, it's gonna be very triggering to try not to be on screens as much as possible as if it's the goal for everybody to not connect. And then there is that, the one that certainly, I don't came back and also kind of piggybacked on the APA one about, you know, okay, there is an alarming trend. We need to like see what is happening here. There's a mental health crisis. And in the end, what I wanted to focus on for this particular advisory is that they wanted to raise alarms that people should be not connecting as much because there is a lot of harm to be done and that there are exceptions to the role as if there are certain people that, oh yeah, for some people, it actually is very life affirming for like a small group of people. And for some people, maybe girls is a small group of people that sometimes, you know, it could be really, if these recommendations are not for everybody, then for some people, maybe there are some exceptions. You know, there's a lot of research about different groups, like Carrie was saying, you know, it's a color, I want to query you, if you know, that are finding both identity affirming, you know, content and you know, things that might not be helpful for their identity exploration. But I want to kind of put it out there that is it really that big of an exception? You know, that it actually could be helpful and nurturing and environment. I think it's hard for people to accept that it's not just for a small few that actually it could be a complicated experience. And then we've got the pediatricians. So we've got this new narrative, America Academy of Pediatrics, is saying, okay, this visit to connect or not to maintain it, it's actually a new norm. Everybody's on technology, it's about maintaining it. You know, if they're trying to tell the musicians, okay, instead of asking when you're in your annual exam, you know, how much are you on screens? You know, it's screen time kind of debate and kind of looking at people with the shameful kind of attitude. It's actually, you know, there's risks and benefits to everybody, no matter what age you are on social media, right? And as you were saying, there's very little, you know, to explain it, very little variants in personal mental health explains, you know, their poor or positive well-being. And actually there's a U-shaped curve we're trying to showcase that sometimes it actually is worse but like you can be, you can be a little bit too much on and you can be not enough, not on it enough. So there can be harm at the both extremes. And so I thought it was really interesting that all these advices are kind of coming, coming at the same time. All these adults trying to help our young people manage themselves, right? And so, you know, one of those a lot of questions, you know, that people come up, you know, and all these, you know, kind of events, you know, parents and educators, you know, is it more critical to encourage positive use or prevent negative? Now, probably answer is, if you want it all, if you want it all, you want to prevent negative, you want to encourage positive. But I think most of the media attention is a lot on that's prevent negative use, you know, that's locked down this product, this is a, you know, and forgetting that there is a lot that we need to remember that people, if you're telling them that what they're doing that works for them is not good for them, that could be back pedaling a lot of progress that you might have made on these technologies that are designed for connection. And then you're saying, no, no, no, but the whole point is that's all, you know, as little on our phones and that is possible as if that's like the ideal in every situation. So when I look at this, you know, when I look at Pew, you know, it was just almost a little bit like an informal advise, you know, every year they're always coming up with their baseline, kind of, this is what's going on out there. And just like what Carrie was saying with the both and, I'm also saying yes, and changing the narrative. Yes, teen roles are more likely to say, it makes me feel it's more supportive, but there's also a lot of drama. So it's both, it's a yes. And I mean, for some people, just the negative alone, like the one got worse than their own life, you know, 28% and 25% of all US teens, that already is a no-go. It's okay. If there's any chance that my kid is gonna have the worst about their life and for that family, their values, okay, maybe it won't work with them. But it's important for families and educators now that, you know, both can be possible. And let's just remember not to only highlight the negative as if we're chasing some ideal where it has to be perfect. You know, that has no harm whatsoever, because almost no product in the US actually can see that they could do that. And so if you look at girls in particular, you know, I'm from Malsy College, well, the Center for Women. And even when you're looking at girls who come to this media, this wonderful study, asking girls about all these different, you know, kind of technological features that most people have a lot of like worry and stress about. And a lot of it has to do with, you know, yes, they understand there's endless foaming, but sometimes they're foaming because they're trying to escape from negative emotions and they're doing some coping techniques. Maybe they needed to de-stress, you know. There's so many ways in which it's, yes, there's some negative things about filters, you know, both overly concerned about parents, you know, a lot of comparisons, but it also could be a fun way to express yourself, you know, and it really, I think a lot of adults also have these ideas that in their world, like it's a negative thing for young people, you know, because maybe they will not understand that it's filtered, but if you ask the young people themselves, a lot of them have a lot of knowledge about how everything's all filtered and everything knows, they know how to, they're actually the ones that help perpetuate, you know, some of these fun conventions. Racistly content, yes, there's racist content and that's definitely something that's passed through, you know, the users and the algorithms and et cetera. There's also identity affirming content. And so it really is about how to navigate youth to go where they will feel affirmed and also to realize that racism is online and offline. And studies have shown that the more you talk to people about race and racism, the more they're able to handle it when it happens. Because if you avoid that topic and you avoid that it exists, you're putting them in a bubble and then when that actually happens, they don't even know what that was, you know? Okay, so going back to social context matters, it means a lot of you in this room, it's probably not new, but I just wanted to make sure that that when people, when policies make sweeping kind of recommendations, it might, you know, sort of put some families into distress, you know, for instance, it's not traditional families. If there's policies that say that parents are the ones that know best, sometimes parents really are not the ones that are guiding the young person, their technology, you know, education, the social media education, it could be that we need educators and, you know, school counselors, coaches, you know, things like that. In person, maybe it may actually not be better for everybody, I think that that's a, that is a, it's kind of a value, I would say for certain generations that, oh, in person it's always better, more positive, more safe. But for some people, the physical environment actually is not more safe and not more accessible and impossible to affect the people who may have physical limitations or maybe their neighborhood is not safe to walk around in and people have this nostalgic idea that we're all supposed to be shooting hoops and, you know, think Frisbee and, but in some areas actually that third space of being online is gonna be the place where everybody's at, there's additional differences too. So in some places, you know, rural places perhaps are places that don't, won't accept people for different kinds of identities that they might have, like names of sexuality. They can face a lot of harm if sometimes the media, which that connects them with groups that are like them is shut off that something that you should not worry about. So this, this is just a, a very mini version of what we, do you know and don't know, there's a lot out there, but the ones I wanted to talk about is just that, just like the media headlines, we know a lot about what's harmful, social media, but there's a lot of research on that. But really less is known about, oh, just the everyday, non-problematic, pro-social uses of social media. And there's no consensus about, you know, in what circumstances, who is a, you know, who should be designing all these technologies for, at what ages, these stages, I mean, very little about resilience and social connectedness, which will help with that advisory about loneliness, you know, that I talked about earlier. So when I, when I do these launchable service I've been doing since 2019 with about over 1,000 teens and teens. And I call it already like a new advisory because it's, you know, coming from, from our, our lab, I guess. And when you ask them, what would they want to know about what, what kind of, what kind of advice do they want, you know? So do they want to connect or do they want to try to not connect? And the most, the most common and a year after year, it's always about how can you make the world a place to live and how to improve self-esteem. Almost every single year, those two are always one and two. And then on this side, there seems to be a lot more, you know, people wanting to know how to be with each other, how to support each other. And there's fewer people lower on the list, you know, about 10 options to, to come take more breaks, reduce time, you know, avoiding being comments and, and users. Those are the things that I think a lot of schools spend a lot of time on, adults that not connect, you know, and maybe to just avoid, you know, avoid just in case, you know, even though it might be positive, let's just avoid, just to make sure that we don't have any harm going there. And so it's just something to think about as we, as we ask the youth themselves, when these are 11 to 15 year olds, and you know, maybe we can have some way to, to bridge some of those gaps. And, and what, what we do in our, our lab, we've been doing since 2019 is, this digital well-being workshop in which we, we pair up, you know, young college students to mentor high school and middle school students. And it provides opportunities to help co-design, you know, new ways of looking at apps, new ways of, you know, jump to other people. And back in 2019, the youth, it's always about what they want to do that year. So every year it's a lot of work for us because every year it's a different thing because it's about what they want to do and what they think is important. So 2019, definitely the main thing was, how do I get off my phone? So that was the main thing. It's like, okay, please help us, you know, design some kind of, you know, app or, or, you know, device, you know, to have us to stand for lately. We've been, they've been asking for, how do we understand how it all works? Like this past year, 2023, they wanted to know about algorithms. They wanted to know how to game algorithms. They wanted to know, they wanted to have a voice into the tech industry about how much they wanna tell them what they actually want rather than, you know, it being sort of like, you know, pushed on them as if they don't have an agency, you know. So, and so here are some examples of what some of the groups did when we did it by age. You know, some of them aren't even on phones, or on social media, that's six and seven grades, some of them are on phones. And we asked them, if you would propose a new app, what would you do? And what would the algorithm look like? You know, for instance, the six and seven graders they wanted to know about how to support body well-being and, you know, make sure that there's options that suggest body-positive videos and healthy ads and body-positive apps. We have the eight figures here that wanted to redesign, you know, Instagram, so, you know, promote and also body-positive apps, but also they wanted to get surveyed. They wanted the tech companies to tell them at each session, how do you come right now? What's your move? What do you want to be looking at? And as opposed to just giving you pushing content that they think that you wanna look at because of your demographic or something like that, they actually wanted to have something a little bit more tailored. And the ninth and 10th graders wanted more mindfulness timers and content moderation features that warns about sensitive content because they have bumped into a sense of content and they've been there long enough to know that, well, it actually would be nice to have some warning signs. And so what we're finding as we do this every year, the young people are not as much about, okay, let's take screen breaks as much as they wanna be a part of the conversation ecosystem. You can also do campaign awareness. You know, these are some ideas about how young people could just kind of put out, you know, raise the social awareness about issues that they care about and hear ways that educators and parents, you know, could kind of think about these social media acts as not just, at least the time, a lot of times people have that as that back of their mind, but it could be social activism and, you know, it's belonging and new communities. And I think of how I'm so excited at this point in our lab. We have, you know, young people like Shinriya Villayoba who's right here in the audience who has been amazing as a representative at these different, you know, tech panels out there. They happen to be, it's so funny how you can't see that. Well, I advanced to different slides. And I'm ashamed enough, oh, there we go, let me share again. Sorry about that. Yeah, and so she is doing these panels not as a side story to the adults who know what's best for you, but as somebody who's a student, you know, a youth researcher who knows where, you know, her voice can be in the digital ecosystem that she's trying to be a part of. So she was a part of that all tech human panel and then also all of my people found my safety institute. And she's also one of the co-leaders of the digital well-being workshop that we're running right now. I'm an after school club that the young people in college are leading with the middle schoolers, their future, you know, cohorts that they're always so excited to mentor because it seems like the next generation only seems to know more about everything that's available on social medias and they're actually learning from each other. And Jamili actually has a bunch of flyers in case anybody wants to take in me. And please, if you know of any middle school girls and also we have this one session for our BTU of all genders too. Another way that you can maybe make a difference in the world and get their voice out there is we're trying to include them in our blog series, you know what, at work. There's a blog series called Loom Change Worlds and we had a bunch of students kind of write something as a sort of a prologue or their thoughts about these advisories that came out and Paige just dropped this, we just dropped this Tuesday on March 26th, this blog about how she felt about the Susan General. And in the end, she felt like, even though there's a lot of negatives reaching over the Olympics positive effects. And so I invite you to go check out her perspectives. And lastly, I just wanted to think about how we want to apply you voices, you know, make sure that they are, there are people that you can develop, you can help them develop the skills to learn about their own technology. They can decide to be mindful and also they can design with you. The advise boards are a major plus and I'd love to be able to talk with any of you who wanna maybe start one out and also our digital workshops and I just wanted to know more about them. They actually are things that have cut across many different states. We've had people from nine different states. And so wherever you are in the world, you think you can be a part of it. And I just want to acknowledge my team and our funders who people are always wondering about that and follow us on Instagram. The young people are actually the ones that run our Instagram account, which is all research focus and the latest data that comes out. And you can also email me too if you have any questions. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Linda. All right, our third speaker and also the last of this session and then we're gonna have question and answer up here with all three of our panelists is Dr. Lee Humphreys from, who's a professor and the chair of the department of communication at Cornell. She's a worldwide expert on mobile phone use in public places, emerging norms in social media and mobile media and the privacy and surveillance applications of location-based services. I personally love the way that her research historicizes social media into a broader context of communication practices. Dr. Humphreys is a theoretical powerhouse in my opinion who understands how people integrate communication technology into their everyday lives. Her 2018 book, The Qualified Self is a personal favorite of mine. So please welcome me. Yes, thank you all. I'm so excited to be a part of this panel. I don't work with youth directly in my research but they are always part of my work because I deal in the everyday and if you have children that they infiltrate in wonderful ways the everyday. So I have been studying mobile and social media for a really long time. So when I started studying, that was my phone, that Nokia, and I was studying this social networking app that was on a phone and it was in Singapore and in Indonesia where I was doing field work and then I was also doing work on things like dodgeball and Foursquare and then eventually Twitter. All of these are now largely dead. So I put them up because I was trying to understand at that time why on earth people would use these technologies because it seemed really weird to me and I will just add I think of myself as a child of the 80s even though I was born in the 70s and I spent hours as a teenager on the phone, like hours and hours on the phone. So it wasn't screen time but hours of my youth were spent both watching television and talking on the phone sometimes at the same time. So I've been studying social media for a very long time and some of the concerns that are not just about youth but more broadly is this concern around that kind of narcissism that if you are posting about yourself and seeking or needing feedback from others that there must be something pathologically wrong. So we're no longer staring into the reflection in the water instead that we're looking at our phones to come to understand who we are today and it's only in the reflection of likes and responses that we can really know who we are and hence that must be bad. So when I started studying Twitter, it was in 2007 and 2000, yeah. And it was at the time and this will show you to date myself, a micro blog is what they called it and in part it was because it was originally cross platform. So as someone who'd studied mobile phones it was one of the first cross platform social media platforms. We can call them that at the time. And so I started reading more about blogs and researching blogs and a few research blogs. You then see ties to journals. So live journal was at the time one of the most popular social media sites for this. And so I started reading more about journals and diarying practices historically. And in particular, I was drawing on feminist historical work by Anna McCarthy and Margo Cullen which looked at how women in the 19th century used diaries very differently than we think of contemporary diaries today. So like today I think of it as like this little pink notebook with a lock on it and I pour my innermost thoughts about who I really have a crush on. Instead, if you look back historically, one women didn't just write about themselves compared to let's say men, but they wrote about their families, their communities, their networks. It was a much more social account of the world around them. And the other really important thing is that they shared their diaries. So young women who would get married, would keep a diary, send it home to their parents as a way of knowing what they had been up to. And it was not uncommon during the Civil War as some of you may know, that they published diary entries from soldiers in the war as a way of getting news about what was going on in the Civil War. So the notion of sharing diaries in journals was very much part of the contemporary practice. These were not solitary, introspective modes of communication. They were interpersonal exchanges. People would write in the margins and send them back. Ways that people would maintain social networks across time and space. So for me, this was really helpful in thinking about what social media are. The other important sort of framework that I draw on are called ordinary studies. And this is out of the UK, Ben Haimar's work. And here part of the argument is that we, if we look at what people do on an everyday basis, we can kind of understand the routines and practices that give a lot of meaning, but are often overlooked when we look at massive events, revolutions, elections, which very much dominate the discourse and research around social media. And so what I look at is what happens in between? Why are people on their phones to begin with? And how can we begin to understand those kinds of practices as meaningful and creating the base from which when things occur, people are already online? And then the third concept, and this is just because I'm a communication scholar and I think it's really important, is that when we share messages, it is not just to exchange information. Within communication, we have this concept of a phatic communication. So phatic communication is communication that is less about the content and more about the relationship. The fact that I call my dad at least three times a week is not to like tell him, oh, this is really important. It's because it's my dad and I talked to him and I want to talk to him regularly. And the fact that I call him shows him I'm thinking about him and it reinforces our relationship. We can talk about the weather, we can talk about what we had for dinner, we could talk about this annoying work thing that I'm dealing with, right? It kind of doesn't matter. What matters is that I call him or that he calls me. And so when we think about sometimes knowing the intimacy of other people, that is what, so when I call, I'm traveling right now, so I call, what did you have for dinner last night? I kind of care what my husband fed my children, but when we know these kinds of intimate details about one another, that is a sign of the intimacy of our relationship. That is what fatic communication is about. And so again, as people share pictures of their, the flower that they saw on the walk to work or what they had for breakfast, it's less again about the content and more I'm gonna share something from my everyday life that reinforces our connection. Okay, so I know this isn't really gonna work with the online, but I have a quiz and because I'm a professor, you know, so we have quizzes and so I have a quiz for you that I'm gonna show you a post and I want you to raise your hand to tell me if you think it is a diary entry or a tweet, okay? I must say, it's quite apropos, I must say I find this weather to be very disagreeable. How many of you think it's a tweet? How many of you think it's a diary entry? That's a tweet. Okay, next. Cold, disagreeable day felt very badly all day, lay on earth all day long and lay on the stove all day, nothing took place worth noting. Tweet or diary entry? How many people say tweet? How many people say diary entry? Yes, that is a diary entry from 1896. Had an early morning today, went for breakfast at Mid-Tay Tariq, passed invitation card to my youngest aunt and visited my grandma. Tweet or diary entry? How many people say tweet? How many people say diary entry? That is a tweet. What, what? Yes, I know. Next, the deal of the miracle here visiting today. Tweet or diary entry? How many people say tweet? How many people say diary entry? That is a diary entry from 1792. And you can tell it's the hyphen in the today, normally the grace of the hyphen, right? But it's just to say that we talk about the weather and have for a very long time. More importantly, we've complained about the weather, right? And we talk about who visits us and who we visit. This is part of what we do and people have been doing this in their diaries for a very long time. And the thing again about diaries is that they are not always personal and private. They are shared and all of these diary entries I actually got from the archives. I don't think anyone writing these diaries thought their diary would end up in an online archive that is searchable by someone like me. So I think broadly about what social media are. I think broadly about how baby books are a wonderful example of how the people who create them are not the subjects of them. And yet their identities are absolutely reflected in them. The great thing about baby books, I'll just say there's a wonderful archive at UCLA of baby books. And I'll just say I'm a third child. My baby book has my name on it and that's about it. So most of the baby books are for first children and they are almost always incomplete which means nobody ever finishes the book because we all know once that kid starts moving there's no time to write. They're just playing defense. So I think about the similarities that in ways in which we use media, media that are social to document our lives and to share it with others. And those others might be a contemporary audience, they might be our future selves, they might be our children, right? But this is how we learned about the smallpox epidemic was from diaries, right? And so it's just to say this is one of the things that people do on social media. It's not everything by far but it is a common thing that people do is I'm going here, the weather's lousy, I just saw this beautiful sunset, right? Those kinds of things that people share are really often kind of under the radar of what goes on on social media and yet it helps us feel connected to one another. So I wanna talk about a couple of things. So first is this diary. And the diary is from 1862. And there's a couple of important things to note about this diary. I don't know if you can see on the bottom pages, it says hey, one and a half and hey too. So I grew up on farm, so I know farmers love journals. They keep track of the weather and they keep track of what they did on the farm. And this allows farmers to aggregate and to begin to know things about weather trends, about how to farm by documenting and reading it over time. One, one and a half loads of hey is a lot of, that's a lot of hey, that's like a full day work. Two loads is a lot of hey to do. And particularly if you're not doing one with machines, right? And so this is not big data per se but what it allowed farmers to do is to track trends over time. It's about the aggregation of information that allows you to see trends over time that you can't in your lived experience. And I want to compare that to the my school years frame. Okay, so this is a Lawrence frame that as of 2016 you could still buy at Walmart. And what this is are the school pictures of a girl from 12 years of her life. Again, thinking about this as the aggregation of information over time. But more importantly is the familial unit that helped to make this possible. So the first couple of years you could imagine not necessarily but likely the mother helped the child get ready for picture day, right? And then there's that agent with your child wants to get themselves ready. And you say, okay, that's what you really wanna wear. And they, I'm gonna say in this one it was sixth grade, but I couldn't be wrong. And you begin to see this evolution not only of a young person, but of the family that kept these photos for 12 years, keeping them collected and in a place and organized. So this is not just about the subject but how it reflects a broader family unit that made this possible. Again, aggregation of information over time but also it reflects our relationships. And our family units. The one thing I'll just say briefly about baby books which I think is really interesting as well is that when infant mortality started to decrease in the early 20th century, which is a wonderful thing, right? Children, the rhetoric of children started becoming that they are precious because prior to that many children died. And so the vitality of a child was not a reflection of parenting or parental practices but nearly of the child itself. And so one of the things that happens is that we see changes in how the baby books talk about the babies. So originally you would see baby fell down the stairs this happened to the baby and it was just, oh, the baby did this. And then maybe, I can tell you babies did not stop falling down the stairs, right? They still, they rough and tumble and do things and they can't be on them all the time but we stopped documenting it because now it's a reflection of the parent. And so it begins this interesting question around who is that baby book for and whom does it represent? It is both the child and the parent that's represented in that document. And it's often, again, particularly, it's in the handwriting of a parent. I mean, increasingly now these are all digitized, right? So there are digital baby books that emerge. But again, who is creating them? Who is curating them? It's not the subject. So I want to suggest that these, and this is the title of the book, it is about that it's the qualified self. So I was gonna contrast that to, oh wait, I don't know what that's like, but the quantified self, these ideas that these traces that track how many steps we are help to understand and reflect who we are. I think these photos and these baby books and these scrapbooks and photo albums do similar things and are similarly incomplete. We treat them sometimes as if they are who we are and yet we know they are to some degree authentic but they're also strategic in nature, right? We only curate particular versions and we always have, right? They, to qualify something needs to describe it, so let me qualify that statement, I'm gonna give you some context to it, but it's also very selective. And then these traces are also evidence of who we are. Our feet were really that tiny. I really did, you know, if I take a selfie, I really didn't give a talk at Harvard, right? These things, these traces are evidence, but they are also highly subjective. So with that, I want to say thank you. Good, we've got three panelists to come up here, if I could. All right, excellent. We have about 20 minutes or so for question and answer and then we're gonna take a quick break and I want you all to come back for the second half which will start in about two, 40 minutes. That's what I was worried about. That's what I was worried about. I think if I stand over here, I'm okay. Yeah, okay. So the first thing I wanted to do is actually see if there are questions from the audience here in person. I know that Nick is gonna look at the questions that are on Zoom, but I wanted to give the chance for the audience to ask me particular questions from the panelists so far. If not, I have one that's ready to go. Yes, please. Hi, I'm friendly. I'm a student here at Harvard now, so work at the Digital Wellness Lab, Linda. I'm a Boston Children's Hospital. I was thinking a lot kind of about the threat between all of your talks and if we allowed adolescents to make their own digital space that was only populated by other adolescents, what might happen? Because I think a lot of the kind of bad actors that I perceive on social media and in social media spaces are, or like that you're like kind of nefarious, really icky, harmful stuff that are adults. And like the more socially normative stuff are teens, like teen on teen kind of aggression and upset. So I'm just curious if the three of you have any thoughts about like what a space might look like or if it would be, I guess, quote, better or worse than what we have now or if teens are just allowed to have their own social space online. I'm looking in particular at Linda, given that she's been inviting teens to kind of really answer this question over several years, but I wanna just say I appreciate the question because it calls out the rule of adults and adult assumptions in how spaces are designed, even resources and interventions are designed for youth. And so I just wanna applaud that line of questioning. And now Linda will share the answer. And then we, that's an intriguing, terrifying and intriguing and exciting, all in one, because I think a lot of the policy making around youth safety is about giving more than predators and giving them some harm or ads that they are collecting private data from them. And so all adults, you know, and however, there's a lot of research that's overlooked about the peer-to-peer, you know, harassment that, but it's the normal everyday stuff in the school hallways too. So it's like a lower boundary. But I think, I think in the end, if young people could figure out a way to hang out with each other, they would find ways to make separate channels, you know? So not everybody who gets along and it's not all one app. It's like many different rooms and side chats and you'll find your place. And at least there won't be this infusion of, you know, marketing schemes and getting an hour out of the hole of things that adults wanna speak away from as well. So. Yeah, I guess one of the really interesting things that I learned in my project, again, is not a direct answer to this, but to think about the role of these companies in it and that there are alternative models that have existed in the past. And so one of the examples that I talk about is the company Kodak, which, yeah, camera company, and in the early 20th century, they produced almost all the amateur cameras and photography. They sold the film, they printed the photos. So if you think about it, they had access to almost all the content, but their business model was one where they sold the technology, they sold the film, they sold the printing service, right? They did not mine the content and sell it for advertising. And that is a very different, right? So when I started this project, I thought, oh, what's different is that these network platforms now have access to things and that has never happened before. And that's not entirely true. So there are examples of companies who have had incredible access to incredible intimate data about people and have not commodified it. And I think if I would imagine a platform that is good for people, it wouldn't necessarily be one that commodifies the content because that shapes certain incentives and practices that are really hard to break away from. Yeah, and I would add to that too. I think one of the things that's been really interesting to think about these conversations about the children's agency or teens agency should be is very rarely thinking about of what would they develop or what would they have if they could even have it. We don't have a whole lot of options. We also don't think about it as being an infrastructure, right? We don't think it is something that people should have a right to have a certain way of access to social media or to one another. Certainly not how we think about it right now. Great question, another question. Yes, in the back, let me break you this. Thank you all for your contributions. I guess this is a question primarily for Linda but maybe for others as well. You mentioned this idea of how social media can also potentially be a coping mechanism. If a child or a teen is in a toxic environment, it might not be all that bad. They're kind of zoning in. But I do wonder about that. I wanted to push back on that point because I guess for those of us who were teens prior to social media, if you were in a toxic environment, you would just go outside. You would do things with friends that were outside of that environment if you could. And I want to kind of ask about the element of social media being primarily, it's primarily about, as I understand it, like talking or words communications or visuals, but it's not doing things together, like physical proximity, physical activity, things that I think are really crucial for development. So just on the issue of how do we cope with this issue of teens and children doing less things together and doing more talking. Thank you so much for that question. I would say that sometimes it's a very passive activity to be scrolling and bearing it into a window in other people's worlds. And that's the kind of vision that people have of using technologies and using your phone to kind of check out other people. But then there's also the use of social media to actually do things together, like they might be on Discord and gaining, you get to put their homework while they're gaining and or they're using social media to kind of advance that they're doing in person together. Or I would say that nowadays, when you ask a young person, this is something that I discovered like very recently about how it depends on your generation. If you are using technology in your room by yourself and you connect with other people, if you're at a certain generation, you're gonna, if I ask, are you alone? You're gonna say, yes, I'm alone. There's not many in this room, but we get to a certain age and they're taking some of their friends, they're in their room and you ask them, are they alone? And they say, no, I'm with my friends. Because they are actually interacting and talking. And like you were saying that, it's very, like learning about each other's intimate details. You know, it might be kind of, silly to maybe not say I'm a server, but talking about what they ate or what they're wearing that day. It's about getting to know people and literally building social media is the way that some of them feel more comfortable doing. Have you seen teenagers that kind of in a room, circle and they're all on their phones and they're chatting with each other? That is something that is very strange and alien to certain people. And almost feeling like it's a travesty, but for some people who are socially anxious, for instance, or they wanna have privacy, other people don't want other people to know what they're talking about. It might be a tool. So I'd love to add to that. Thank you. Okay, and this is sort of a good moment to say thank you, Jeff, for putting this panel together because I learned so much from listening to both of the talks. And one of the things that's really relevant here, that Linda was talking about, like that sort of being together. And I didn't have the language for it that me that you gave phatic communication. That sort of like, it almost doesn't matter what's being changed. It's that connection that really matters. And if you are in a toxic environment, that toxic environment could be your home, your bedroom can be a safe space, and the connection that you're forging even through something that says, for some researchers, as controversial as Snapchat streaks, which are seen as artificial or maybe even a burden. But that slight connection can be hugely meaningful. And so I just wanna like elevate some of what Linda's saying and this language that I feel like I got around this sort of the importance of connecting, regardless of what the content is. The only other thing I'll add is there's a rich vein of research on young people's civic lives and civic development and the ways in which social media helps support that. I shared a story to start my talk that was a little bit more difficult around some of the challenges. But there is plenty of work, including work that I've done myself around the digital civic intersect as a space for empowerment and connection with the wider world. I will only add one piece to that, which is that I think a lot of times these discussions are framed as either war rather than both and. And I think that that's actually partly on researchers. I think researchers have done not a great job of saying let's think about social media in the context of all of the other communication we do throughout the day. So we present this, I think, unfortunately as researchers as a loss of this means the gain of that or there's no alternative. Or we know actually there's a ton of correspondence between your online and offline communication and who you talk to, what do you talk about, and all those kind of things. I think Nick said we have an online question we're gonna go to. Yeah, we have a bunch of great ones coming through. The first one from Christelle, thank you to each of the panelists for their presentations. It's curious to hear your expert thoughts on age verification and age assurance and the push and pull between adolescent privacy and safety. Platforms have a rudimentary age gap for all users but we know many adolescents will fabricate their age in order to access social media and specific adult places within those platforms. Would love your thoughts of what would be an optimal course of action for upholding an adolescent's well-being in that context? Well in my ideal world, there would be no reason to lie about your age. It would be a fun environment for people to just be themselves and not be worried about somebody using their data for marketing or communication or having a bid being used in a nefarious other way, your image or your thoughts, your connections. And I would say age verification is a very slippery slope because it also impedes on people's right to, other companies will have access to your personal information about your age and I think in general, if we were able to create that space that we're talking about earlier where it really is a new space and they almost have their own rules of engagement and it's not about the companies trying to get the next generation of consumers and get them really young so that we can never get off that site and to just have it as a playground with all the intricacies and social obligations and disconnections that actually happen. I think in the end, if it weren't so tied to the bottom line, I think age verification might not be as big an ideal. If people would just be who they are, then the ads will be either marked educational only for this age and there's nothing else that's gonna come through that and be seen by this group of people, that would be the best case for me. So for companies to not make so much money off of it, but to young consumers. Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts on this and I say this both as the parent of two children who are under the age of 13 so who are not legally allowed to be on any social media. And by social media we're talking about YouTube, we're talking about Pinterest, we're talking about Gorilla Tag, which my nine year old is obsessed with. It's this VR game where they literally play tag in this and he gets all sweaty playing it and it's really fun. But it's on my account. So I think there's a lot of presumption that it's youth who are trying to get around it and I think there are a lot of parents who are like, oh my God, let me just sign you in. And then mom, what's your password? Those kinds of discussions. So it's not always youth who are trying to usurp the mechanisms, it's often parents who are like, I got this, just log in. And part of it has to do with this need to log in. It's the need of these platforms to know who we are not necessarily because of again, the business model of these platforms, it's tied to an account, like I couldn't set up a family account for YouTube, right? I can't set up family account, you know? And then if they do, they assume that I need to track everything that my child does and approve everything as opposed to we actually have conversations about what kinds of content I want them to want. And then you hear things and you're like, never repeat that word, right? Like the part of co-viewing that you do with your kids, that you do with television, that we do with music, it allows us to have conversations with our kids around difficult topics that we wouldn't necessarily just bring up on our own. Like we can use these ugly content to address things in the world because there are ugly things in the world. And we cannot keep people from them. And so what we want is to prepare them so that when they do encounter racist content, we have had those conversations to prepare them and to help them respond. So I guess the age verification thing I really struggle with both as a parent as well as someone who studies media to think about, again, why are they there? What do they accomplish? And for whom do they do the most benefit and harm? I was hoping we could take one last question before our break. Hi, I'm a PhD student here. I also work with Jeff and work with Carrie. My question is about the kind of active and passive use because one observation in the reason three, four years, like it's like people start to use more passively in terms of social media. And I observe myself just screwing, you know, browsing. Like if I spend 90 minutes per day just viewing the content produced by others, I might only spend five minutes to really post something. But most of our research and the kind of established models are about the kind of active use. You know, we know why people post and we have like in your work, you Lee, you compare that to the kind of baby books. Like those are just amazing and fantastic. But like now with more passive use and just viewing, what should we do? Like do we need a new model to categorize the content or we just kind of ignore the fact? Like I'm kind of confused about this trend in general. Thank you. I imagine we have things to say. So yeah, you're right that there is so much more about the elevation of active use as being better. But you know, when we think about old media and we as the expert on this, when you sit down and read a book, I mean, that's passive, but it's not. I mean, I know that as a sociologist by training cultural sociologists for a very long time, pre-digital have been talking about cultural engagement as active and that you're always engaged when you're reading a novel with the characters in the book and having all kinds of thoughts. So my mind goes to what is it that's being engaged with just because you're sitting there looking at a screen doesn't mean that there's not a lot going on in your head. And to bring back to the sort of like the surround, the ecology, the conversations around media use that Lee was emphasizing, that would be another feature to sort of bring out that agency component of quote unquote, passively engaging with media. Yeah, thank you so much. I mean, we know and this has been actually a trend for a very long time that like 5% of the people produce 90% of the content, right? So we know this about the internet more broadly, right? But I think it's really helpful to think about again, how two thoughts. One is how different social media feeds look to different people. Like I look at my husband, like he's also a communication professor. I think we have, our feeds are so different and like this is what you look at, like why, right? And so that I found really interesting. But media have always been a source of common connection and conversation. So sometimes you watch things together, right? Like the Super Bowl or a television show. But more importantly, you encounter content and then it's this shared cultural resource that you make jokes about and that you reference and that you're like, oh my God, did you see that? Can you believe it? Like that was awesome or that was hideous or you know, whatever it might be, there's this shared social connection just from watching. And the other thing I guess I'll just say, and this is particularly about women's media. And I again have thought extensively, I read every magazine that my mother had which was like Women's Day, Family Circle, Red Book, Home and Cart and I like grew up on these magazines as a kid while watching television, you know? And I'm just like flipping through them. Most of them are ads. Sometimes they're just pretty to look at. Sometimes the ads are pretty to look at, right? And it's like, oh that's so pretty, you know? What is pretty changes over time, right? But it's just to say that and I guess I'll just say there were huge concerns about women's magazines in the 80s contributing to anorexia, bulimia. This did not start with Instagram. These have been ongoing trends about women's bodies and how we try to control them and how we try to set expectations about what they look like. Media is not the first to do this. We have for a long time tried to control women's bodies. And so it's just to say like, it's not surprising that it's happening on social media. Lots of things happen on social media but social media is not the cause of the anxiety, the mental health, right? There are lots of other things that are the cause. So we shouldn't be surprised when it manifests on these platforms. I see what's happening, see what's happening. Really quickly when I asked young people, hey, why are you passively looking? What prevents you from going on it? And they say, my parents won't let me. My parents won't let me post because they're digital footprint and it's gonna curse you for the next 20 years. And so there is this issue of another generation kind of telling the one now that, what works for me and my generation is gonna work for you. And but really nowadays, is it kind of work that model? This is the next one. Of one last round, we'll pause for speakers. We're gonna get started in 15 minutes. All right, everyone. We're gonna all take our seats. We're ready for the second round. I actually labeled the second half of this conversation online communities, remote workers and public health. So we have three speakers that are kind of moving outside of the adolescent and family and child domain and I think much more of a public context. So the first speaker in this second section is Connie Newton and Hadley. He's an organizational psychologist and a research associate professor at the management and organizations department at Boston University's Questrom School for Business. Dr. Hadley serves as a faculty research fellow at Questrom's Human Resource Policy Institute. Her insights on remote and hybrid work are essential readings, I'd argue, for anyone who wants to understand the potential for technology to connect us at the workplace and the actions that organizations can take to facilitate community, because I think are particularly relevant issues in this time and place in post COVID era. So please welcome Dr. Hadley. Thank you so much. I really am thrilled to be here. I just said to Jeff that I do feel like I just came here to absorb all the knowledge. It's almost a shame I have to give up some of this time here to speak. I just want to listen. But thank you to the first three panelists. Excellent informative talks, inspirational talks and thank you, Jeff, for pulling us together. And I do feel like I've made some friends as part of this process and I hope those of you who are here in person or those online also feel part of the community. So as Jeff said, what I'm going to be focusing on though is something a bit different, which is work. And I do a lot of research on all aspects of employee wellbeing and mental health. And I saw one of the questions that was posted online during the first segment was saying, can you define wellbeing a little bit more concretely and specifically? And that's a valid question. I would say the model that I would use is thinking about mental health and wellbeing is encompassing financial health, mental health, physical health and social health. And what I'll be talking about today is largely about the idea of loneliness and its opposite, which loneliness by itself is not, is a social health issue, but it also does have mental health repercussions. So as much as I want to satisfy the audience member with giving a precise definition, I'm still going to blur some of those boundaries in this talk. Now I am not a social media expert like the first three panels and I defer to their judgment all things related to most of the traditional form of social media. However, this being invited to talk today did inspire me to dive a little bit deeper into this concept of what a social media channel or platform might look like in the workplace. But most of my work is on remote work and thinking about the way people communicate through the remote work kinds of media channels. All right, so I often get asked to speak about loneliness. And then usually the people who bring me in, if they're from a corporate group, will also save me PS, can make it not a bummer. So I'm unlearned to start off my docs talking about connection first, and then diving into the bummer talk about loneliness. And there's a lot of good things to say about connection. It is an incredibly powerful, powerful unseen of an agent that can enhance the lives of people at work and make the work go better. So just two snapshots of some research that's been done in this area. The first one is you may know the agency Gallup. They've been doing lots of research for many years. They have a state of the workforce report that comes out every year. They have a proprietary survey tool as well. One of their questions on that survey tool is do you have a best friend at work? And lots of our information about that, that friendship aspect of work comes from their data over time. And as they've looked at it over many years pre-pandemic and forward, we do see that it's highly correlated with lots of aspects of work that organizations want, like higher performance, as well as lots of aspects of work that people want, like having more fun at work. Now, Nancy Bang, you're gonna hear about in two panelists and I did some research as well related to relationships at work. And we did, in a study that took place during the pandemic, an analysis of people talking about how they felt in terms of connectivity and social support with their fellow colleagues during that very stressful time in the early days of the pandemic. And as we correlated that to other types of outcomes, we could see how strongly related to, for example, job satisfaction. And similarly significant but at a lower ratio of correlation would be to burnout. So we have now, I think, really gotten our arms around how important social connectivity is. And the question is, how do you build that? Before I can get to that though, I'm gonna talk about what happens when you don't have it. So the opposite of this story. I will also make reference to the report that Linda already highlighted from the US Surgeon General's Office that came out last year. And although it talks to every aspect of society in school systems and communities, in hospital and healthcare systems, there's a whole section on what organizations and workplaces can do. And the Surgeon General for Beck-Murthy says, we really need to make social connection a strategic priority at all levels of the organization. And that's one of the things that I am focused on in my research is amplifying this to a strategic priority. This is not a nice to have. This is actually something that is quite critical to executing on every other aspects of the organization's aims. Now, work loneliness. I wanted to define that for you because I do think definitions are important. Precision's important. I just finished writing the first ever chapter on work loneliness for the Cambridge Handbook on loneliness that should be coming out in sometime the next year with Sarah Wright, researcher at the University of Canterbury. And so we reviewed all the academic literature to date on workplace loneliness and came up with her own definition as well as some conclusions that I'll share with you. So in terms of the definition, we are using the subjective feeling of having inadequate social relationships in a work context. And that's a pretty vanilla definition, but there are some important parts to it I wanna highlight. The first is the subjectivity habit. And this, it trust me matters a lot when you're talking to employers. They want objective data. They want to be able to discern who is lonely by looking at them. Do they sit by themselves at lunch? Do they answer my emails when I respond in a prompt manner? Those are not signs of whether someone's lonely or not. There's so many other confounding factors. Only you can tell if you are lonely. The second aspect I wanna highlight is the inadequate aspect of social relationships. And this allows for people's needs for social relationships in a work context to vary. We all have different social needs in a private context, but in a work context, people have really strong feelings about whether or not there should be work relationships. We're definitely just talking about that. There should be friendships, what kinds of friendships, how much of time should be devoted to socializing. So we can take that into account by letting loneliness vary against whatever your target is, whatever your need is, whatever your aspiration is. So in the recent study, for example, we surveyed people, they're loneliness levels. We also measure their need to belong in the work context, which is a measure of your social needs. And the social needs did vary and had zero correlation, not zero, but it was not significant correlation with loneliness. So no matter what your needs are in a work context, you can still be lonely and you can still not be lonely. And then finally, the work context matters as well, because I think there's a misconception out there that lonely people are lonely all the time. They're lonely at home, they're lonely out and out on the streets and they're lonely at work. And that's not true either. The data that we have so far is there are often significant correlations between people in different public and work contexts, but by no means is it 100% correlation. And many of the people that I study, in fact, this new study that Sarah and I have done, we collected stories of connection and disconnection. The same people, sometimes in the same job, could talk about times they felt lonely and times they didn't feel lonely. It is a very variable state. So I also, one last misconception to highlight here is that some people, I'm sure nobody who's well informed here in this group would say this, but some people think that we only became lonely at work during the pandemic. It's a new phenomenon. And Vivek Murthy actually has been our US Surgeon General twice, including during the Obama administration. And he wrote a seminal piece published in Harvard Business Review in 2017 calling out work in the loneliness epidemic. Cigna, this is a healthcare company who's tracking loneliness for year after year and they could see that over half of the population they studied of US workers were lonely. I started doing some research with Mark Mortensen from NCI Paris right before the pandemic coincidentally. We had no idea it was coming, but we started collecting data in fall of 2019. And we were specifically looking for knowledge workers who worked on teams, because Mark and I often study groups of teams at work. And we thought, well, surely, the teams would provide that kind of basis for connection that would show lower loneliness rates. And we were really astonished and discouraged by the fact that 76% of our respondents said they still had trouble making social connections at work. And then we went on to continue studying this during the pandemic. So the implication here is that it's not going away either as we return to offices and as the pandemic proceeds. So I hope that we'll continue to spend some time trying to think about this and solve these problems. Now, I wrote an article then I can go into detail here because it's readily available online in Harvard Business Review talking about some of the steps that organizations can do. And I do think it's really important to frame this as an organizational problem, not a personal problem. And you cannot tell everyone to go out and make some friends. No, that doesn't, if you're a parent of teenagers that doesn't work in there either, but it definitely doesn't work when your organization tells you to do that. But there are lots of things they can do starting with data collection, using a validated tool to understand who is lonely already and looking at the intersectional variables attended for late with loneliness. You might find that you're underrepresented minorities who are lonelier or your frontline workers are lonelier and people who work remotely are lonelier. There are a lot of different factors that can contribute to that. But without the knowledge, you wouldn't know how to target it. And then thinking about the culture that you're creating. And the idea of psychological safety and inclusion really means making a safe space not only to speak up, which is often what psychological safety's thought about, like admitting mistakes or raising questions. It's also about reaching out because there's such a high amount of vulnerability involved in making a social relationship. And if you think it doesn't happen at work that you feel like you were back in middle school or high schools in these contexts where you're talking about, where you second guess and you third guess that outreach, do you wanna get together for coffee? People still do that in the workplace too. So having a climate of psychological safety allows people to feel less likely to run the risk of punishment or shame attached to those efforts. And then I talked about orchestrating empathy and other techniques you can use to try to bring people together in a structured and prompted manner that kind of removes some of the voluntary nature of making relationships as well to overcome some of those inhibitions. A big one that we found also is talking about team structures and there's lots of things that you can do to reach, to change how your team actually is designed and operates to facilitate better connection. And then one of my favorite things to say in every organizational career by speak to is think about your incentives. How much are you actually rewarding people who build strong personal relationships with each other? How much are you carving out time and paying people for those encounters? And how much are you promoting and valorizing the people who have those, who are making those contributions? And that's also, by the way, one of the key messages from Nancy and my paper, I don't know if you were gonna speak about that too, but what we talked about there is, okay, so Nancy and my paper talks about differences in gender too and who's rewarded for investing in the social climate at work. And we find that oftentimes women are recording fewer promotions and rewards and bonuses attached to investments where as compared to men, yet they are doing often more work towards social connection. But in a lot of ways, also different work. So we find, for example, that men are more likely to welcome newcomers. Men might be more likely to organize an online gaming meetup or to give career advice. So really thinking about how you're assessing people and tracking this kind of information is critical to reforming our workplaces. But now what about technology? That's the point of our sessions today. How does technology intersect with these issues? And I'm going to, as I said, look at it from two ways. Looking at remote work as a form of technology and technology-mediated communication and social media tools specifically. So loneliness and remote work in my own studies, I find so much variability. So in this one study that you did that was published last year in Harvard Business Review, we were looking at 100% remote workers for the most part, although not a lot of them were. And we found that when we asked them where they were most socially fulfilled between going to the office if they had one or going to working from home or working from a third space like a cafe or co-working site, their rank order was third space most, office second and home third. So one of the implications of that is when people say remote workers are lonelier, it depends on what they're doing while they're remote working. They could actually be remote working to the colleagues but making new friends and working alongside people that really add value to their social life while they're doing that, physically maybe someone else. And another study that I have what found zero correlation or relationship between people who are 100% remote hybrid and 100% in the office. And another study that I don't have on the screen because it's still very much a work in progress but the early indications in this healthcare system is that the employees who are fully remote are actually less lonely than those who are fully on site. And we've been trying to understand with the organization why that might be true. And it's in healthcare system as I mentioned and so I think there's something about what's happening in those hospitals when people are working that's creating more alienation and loneliness versus those who are allowed to work 100% remotely. So there's also a different, there's a different culture, different set of jobs. So the answer is remote work good or bad for connection is it's depends again, but at the least a pleasing answer for most people but it is very true and that's what my data shows. So let me show you some more about this new study that I've already mentioned a couple of times to Sarah Wright. So we looked at breaking down hybrid into two categories mostly remote versus mostly in the office and we calculated people's loneliness among a thousand US office workers. And this is data that we collected starting November 2023 through January of this year so it's recent data. And you can see here this hockey stick that shows that the 100% office people are the lowest in loneliness on our measures and their highest is the 100% remote. Both those, the rent bars with the P values is showing whether there's a significant difference or not. And so what we're really saying is that all the difference lies in the 100% remote group. 100% remote group has significantly more loneliness than 100% office and the people who are spending only a couple of days remote but there's no difference if they're hybrid. And then within that group, there's no difference between 100% office and the people who are hybrid at different levels. So the one thing I will say that I don't like are mandates that use the excuse of building collaboration to make people come back five days to the office. You do not have strong data that indicate that's necessary or useful. And so I think that there are complications of course that can be attached to all these different types of schemes but we really need to be thinking about what happens during the work day when people are working wherever they are working and that's what's gonna tell you what drives connection. So one more thing from this study is we actually not only asked them their dominant work mode but we asked the percent of interactions, including meetings they have had with colleagues over the past month that were done face to face. Because as you know, we can go to the office instead of on our screens. And so the lonely group face time, so we then bifurcated the high on our scale the highest people on loneliness were called the lonely people and the people that were the very low ends called the not lonely. So 47% of the people who were lonely, sorry, of the lonely people, 47% of their interactions were actually done face to face. And what do you think the non-loneliest percent of face to face interactions was? Anybody in the audience can guess? It is high but not by very much. So what this means is that we had 43% and 53% of interactions that were not done face to face, that were done via tech. So again, the question is not whether tech is good or bad is a channel and how are we using it? So we will have to continue to collect data like this at a more of a nuanced level to really understand is there a magic percent of time we should be spending face to face with each other or does that even not matter over time? Will we get so good at tech mediated communications that in fact it swamps the benefits of in-person? So next I want to talk about social media and social media channels. There's been a little bit of attention but if you want to do a dissertation this is a good area for you because there's still very little real information available in the scholarly literature or the managerial about social media tools specifically designed to build connection in the workplace. So these are a couple of articles that you can check out and we do know that there are certain vehicles that are either already in existence or are being manifested by some major power players. So LinkedIn we need to think about as a professional work-based social media platform. It's definitely risen in recent years in terms of usage but typically it's quite beyond the boundaries of the work organization. Within organizations we have Slack as a communication channel that it can become a social media channel if it's people devote a Slack channel to like pet photos or something else that's not very work specific. We have Microsoft Teams of course that has its own ways of communication that they bought Yammer which is like an internal sort of social media connection platform and then Workplace by Meta. And more recently Zoom has launched their work Vivo that's another of their platform extension to try to build connectivity in the workplace. And then I wanna just say with my, I'll go a little bit quicker here. I have, this is a new area and I'm not the expert in this area yet but I will say I already have some concerns. So the first concern I wanna highlight is the idea of commercializing connection. And this is very much parallel to what we talked about with young people. Are we now going to somehow monetize the connections that people are making at work? And this is an example of a company called Swaybase who may have very valid reasons and maybe lots of people who want to do this. But essentially what they're trying to do is create employees as influencers. And so they are all talking great about their company publicly and they're rewarded for becoming, having prominence outside talking about the company and it can set up competition even within the company to be an influencer. And similarly in terms of gamifying connection I worry about that as well. And here's an example of a company called Pupla and if you read below here it says we're driving the right behaviors that lead to the outcomes that companies want not necessarily employees want with personalized scorecards. So how well connected are you at work? Let's make sure we keep track on that. Another one is reinforcing clicks in homogeneous groups. So a company that is a startup came to me a couple of years ago, Trova. And by the way again you should all do your own research on that promoting or disparaging these particular companies. I'm just raising concerns. So when they came to talk to me they said we really want to create like a, almost like a Facebook center within companies where people can say, hey I really like the Celtics or hey I really like gardening, let's get together. And I said that's great and I love the idea that people can find each other for interest. But what if it's I want to play golf and solve the white man playing golf together on the weekends. So how are we thinking about bridging connections across yourself ascribed aspects of homophily in workplace. And I really hate for a tool to be used to create further factions. So opportunities, it certainly is a potential to bring to people together from across not only the organization but across the world in a way that I find really compelling. My collaborators are in Dubai, Paris and Auckland right now. And that wouldn't be possible without technology. We also know that they can provide forums for non-work conversations and events that people are also craving. I mean, think about Gow's best friend at work. That means that this person is talking about more than just work together. And forums can be created within a work bubble that will allow more of those conversations. Or maybe at ERG groups could use those employee resource groups. It also I think can have a really powerful role in destigmatizing loneliness and encouraging and educating about connection. So I do like that very much. If somebody invests in a tool and promotes it they're also hopefully going to promote healthy practices of connection. And then finally, next to final, I like the fact that it could potentially be kind of like a guide that people can use to keep themselves accountable for making connections and putting in effort. So private information and private goal setting could be helpful. As well as this frankly a really big benefit to automating logistics, as opposed to in a social realm at work time is such a precious commodity. And so I might actually want to find people I want to get to know and learn about and I might want to actually get together with them. But I don't have time to coordinate our calendars and make it happen. So perhaps social media could save some of that burden. And so my takeaways from putting together this talk here was first of all, I do think we need to continue to collect the data that the jury is still out on whether remote work is good or bad for human connection. I think we should be continuing to make but I would argue small bets and small experiments on social media at work. I do get nervous about major companies moving in and making major encroachments on the social climate of an organization without knowing the full set of potential effects. And then finally, I just want to echo some of the talk that other people have already given which is that technology in a workplace just like everywhere else really is a conduit for connection. It shouldn't be the source of connection. I don't want to make a friend with an AI chatbot at work. I want to make friends with real people at work. Thank you. I don't want to make friends with an AI chatbot at work. It's good. All right, our next speaker, it is Dianne Francis who is an associate professor of communication studies at Northeastern University with a joint appointment in public health. She conducts applied research on the intersections of communication, race and health, specifically social media and mental health. Dr. Francis is an expert on how communication strategies both traditional and digital can be harnessed to mitigate health disparities primarily amongst black populations. Her work is a really important bridge between online and offline lives and well-being and it understands the potential of social media to promote health and health in its audiences. Welcome, Dr. Francis. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I want that. I might want that. He puts up your audience, my wife. Thank you so much for having me here today and Jeff thanks again for putting this together. As you said, my work is centered on the intersections of communication, race and health and I occupy a space where I constantly think about the role of communication in advancing health equity. And so this is where these ideas around what can social media do in that space? The question of how do you answer so what is well-being and I constantly go back to the World Health Organization definition of health and the idea that health encompasses total social, emotional and mental well-being and not just the absence of disease, right? Just because you don't have, you don't have diabetes, you don't have cancer, you don't have, that's not necessarily well-being. It needs to, you need to be able to thrive. I like that we're thriving. One of my research projects actually has the acronym Thrive in it. People need to be able to thrive and how can social media enable that type of thriving? That's the space that a lot of my work connects with. The conversation earlier around relationships and understanding relationships and networks is vital but I'm making the argument that we also need to consider the content of people's conversations and the content matters as well. I come from where we've been studying the relationship between media exposure and health outcomes and a lot of times we ask a question how likely are people to talk about our health campaigns, how likely are people to talk about health messages and we know the social pathways linking exposure to mediated information and health behaviors, for example. And we know that interpersonal interaction, social interactions matter but for whom it matters and when it matters and why it matters needs deeper thinking and deeper explanation and this is where I started thinking about, well, maybe if we understand what people are saying in our conversations that can help us untangle some of these things and what people are saying in their conversations matter deeply for minority communities. There's the assumption that minority folks, black folks, my research focuses mainly on our black communities that we don't talk about health or we don't talk about mental health in particular. Mental health is taboo, mental health is something, it's so much stigma that's going on in the community to really talk about these things, right? So if the research is saying we don't talk about it then let's develop all these interventions to get people talking. Well, maybe people aren't talking and we should listen to them if they are talking but we need to identify where are they talking and what are they saying in their conversations. This is vital, black men, the assumption, not just black, black men, why don't black men open up maybe because it's mental health stigma? I saw his headline and I thought maybe think about, certain people are indeed talking about mental health. One of the groups that's talking about mental health is in the context of black men is black male celebrities. This is a Facebook post from a hip hop artist named Kid Cudi and in 2016, he posted on Facebook that he was suffering from depression, had suicidal thoughts and was checking himself into rehab. Black male mid-thirties, someone who was successful, who was considered outside thriving, successful but he's someone who talked actually in the media about his mental health for a number of years. In 2014, he'd received an award from a mental health organization for his mental health advocacy but there was still the assumption that black men don't talk about mental health. There's great ABC documentary on hip hop at 50, at 50 years and this is round table with hip hop musicians talking about mental health and they were tracing the lineage of hip hop musicians mentioning, you know, I'm down and you know, I'm just lying that I'm down and I can't get up, you know, there's two topics talking about mental health, there's NWA talking about mental health but very few people paying attention to the fact that this content included mental health information. So when Kid Cudi announced in 2016 that he was checking himself into rehab, a lot of people started taking notice. This one Facebook post had at the time that I grabbed this 582,000 likes, you know, 65,000 comments, 133,000 shares. Imagine if this happened today. It was novel at the time. A lot of the responses came as expected globally but a lot of the responses came from black men. One of the studies I did asked black men what was your reaction to this? Were you going to look for information in regards to this kind of announcement? And they were saying, yes, you know, we're told the narrative that, again, black folks don't do this, right? Black folks don't, we don't want information. We don't ask doctors about it. We don't talk about it within our families. You know, we barely talk about it with our friends. Why would we ever want to talk about it? It's taboo, it's just, you know. And yeah, a third of the study participants were saying we actually went out and looked for information about this. This is actually better findings than most media campaigns we'll ever get. The several who does campaigns, like we just, we don't see that type of reactions. People were looking for information online on the internet and social media primarily. So thinking about content and that question of, what are people saying, what are people finding in their information? Ask the follow-up question. What information were you looking for if you're going online and if you're encountering information on social media, what information are you looking for? Many of them, of course, were looking for information on the artist's health, Kid Cuddy, but they were also looking for a range of depression information. That's vital information for public health professionals to know, to know one, that black men are looking for information online and two, this is the information they're actually looking for, you know. What are the symptoms of depression? Do I know that? And how does it manifest in males? How does this depression manifest differently by gender, by sex, right? How does it manifest in males? How do black men show up in depression? Depression symptoms, treatment for depression. Am I at risk? What are the risks factors for depression? So they're actually needing that information. So the content of what they were looking for mattered in this context. The other part of this, though, there's online information seeking and online interactions and online content. But then all of that one announcement, a hashtag image. And we're seeing this now. It's like, this is novel in 2024, right? It just seems like folks are just creating a hashtag. But again, if we have this narrative out there that black folks are not engaging with this content and black folks are just not the stigma in the community and we're not talking about mental health. Well, someone created a hashtag that encouraged black men to talk about mental health. Come here to confess. Come here to seek information. Come here to get help in regards to your mental health. Do you think they engaged in this? Did they respond? In a matter of a few days, 20,000 tweets, which again, things going viral, it seems like, oh, this is, but think of the context, right? This was 2016, a time when the idea of virality was still in its nascent. But it's good to have that information because you know that if it happened once, it can happen again. And how do we replicate that kind of environment? So 20,000 tweets in a matter of a few days, responding, the majority of them were black men. We know from research that although we can't identify fully people's identities in certain social media contexts, given the deep research that's been done on black Twitter, my friend and colleague Meredith Park has been researching this, we know that certain hashtags put in certain groups of people. And so we knew that the people engaging with this content were in fact black men. So I was always curious, what are they saying? We have the big data that tells us, you know, they're engaging, that tells us the networks, but what exactly, what are the content that they're engaging with? What are they saying in the conversation? And many men were willing to disclose their own mental health conditions. They were willing to say, like kid cutting, I have depression, I have suicidal thoughts, I'm checking myself into rehab. They were also willing to say, I'm seeing a therapist, I'm seeing a therapist, I'm seeing a psychiatrist, you know, I'm taking this medication and this is how long I've been taking it. Or they were willing to say, my father died at age 23 from suicide and he could not get help. And so they were engaging in this deep disclosure of their mental health conditions. We can see, as we've seen in other content, we see people offering support online and offline and we see an acknowledgement of the role of culture. But the argument I'm making is that we really need to consider what people are actually saying in those conversations, because this is where we get the information to be able to pass on to a public health professional to be able to enhance black health and wellbeing. And I like this, I pull this with, because I use it as a title for one of my papers, Twitter's really therapeutic at times. We can debate what Twitter is today and... But, you know, you know Twitter and being able to make an argument that social media, in general, can be therapeutic at times. We've seen from the data on adolescents earlier how they're using social media, how they're using digital media for at times therapeutic purposes. So this was Black Man. The other example I'm going to give, and then I'll wrap up the broader, expanding this out, is focused on black women. The literature on black women, the data on black women, we're more likely to talk about mental health than black men, we know that. But it's still important to understand sort of what the content, what are they saying in the conversations, because that matters if we're going to be engaging the black community in addressing mental health and wellbeing. For black women, you're castigated, essentially. But yes, you're talking about it, but are you talking about it with your children, your families, who are you talking about it with? Okay, going back to what are you talking about? If you say you're talking about mental health, what are you talking about? There's a deep sense in the black community now that in research community, but in black community, of the acknowledgement of the impact of intergenerational trauma. And this headline, I liked it because it gets at where, it's sort of foreshadows, so where the online conversation and social media conversations were going. The sense that if a lot of the problems sort of starts at home, can we have a conversation around intergenerational conversations around health and wellbeing? So the other study I'm going to introduce to you gets at that, in terms of how do we get people talking and what can we get people talking about if we're going to talk on social media and if we're going to investigate the content? Again, following with a line of research on mediated content and the links between mediated content and social interactions, I wanted to investigate this one hashtag, Queen Sugar Talks, which emerged from a very popular show called Queen Sugar, and they had one episode that focused on sexual violence and trauma among a young black woman and it turned out that all the black female in the cast as part of that storyline had also experienced a sexual trauma and then it involves about psychological trauma among young black males. So they built an entire episode on that and the episode focused a lot on the discussions of talking about at the family unit, at the community unit about mental health and trauma and healing from trauma. And so I investigated this, you call it investigative, so what are people saying in these conversations and how can that help us get towards black healing via social media? So they wanted to address intergenerational trauma, of course, right? So it's themes that come up in the conversations that the black women will have. Why is this important? Because again, if the theme, what we're hearing from many communities is that, we don't talk about this, well, we do, we are talking about it and we are asking people to address these topics, address intergenerational trauma, promote intergenerational conversations and foster intergenerational healing. This is what people are telling you they want, listen to them. You know, when someone tells you who they are, listen to them. When people tell you what they want, listen to them. Listen to black folks if they're telling you that this is what we're talking about, these are the conversations. Now, the caveat is that it's on social media, the group who are talking about this are people who are exposed to this episode and engaged with this, but they represent a segment of the community who can go out and be able to talk to others in regards to health and healing. So, one of the key points out of this study was the need for more conversations like this. And, you know, someone mentioning the more we talk, the more we heal, right? And so this is where I want to go with this, with the rest of this conversation is the idea that, you know, talking, having, you know, Jeff's working, we have talked about the need for more interpersonal conversations about healing in social media spaces. And I was like, oh, I have some lines and I get that, right? You know, people are telling you they need that, they need those interactions. And I'm saying as a researcher, we need to understand the content. We need to be able to not just look at the big data, the big picture conversations, but we can get at that. We need these counter narratives because if the prevailing narrative says that we don't, going back to the beginning, black men don't talk about this. Black men are talking about it, but maybe they're talking about it negatively. Maybe it's, you know, maybe the conversations that are happening in the communities are perpetuating stigma, perpetuating, you know, not going to seek a therapist because, you know, this is not something we do. Well, here are people on social media saying, we have, we are telling you that we are actually doing this things. We are part of the community and we are providing content narratives. And we're trying to tell you, please listen to us, essentially, right? So out of this data, though, out of this research, there are a few things we need to think about as we sort of think about social media and well-being. One of them is who is participating in these conversations. I mentioned, you know, black folks, I mentioned black community, but I've always been of the belief that there is no one black community. So if you want to address well-being and consider how social media might be able to be connected to well-being, we need to consider who's participating in these conversations. And I'm always concerned from a health disparities perspective that we're not perpetuating continued conversation gaps and continued disparities. We need to make sure that we know from prior research that people exposed to media tend to have higher knowledge and they tend to gain a lot. Well, those who are engaging in the conversations, are we perpetuating the same sort of feedback? And how can we mitigate that? We need to consider the perspectives, why are people doing this? Why are people motivated to engage in these conversations, engage in disclosure around their mental well-being on social media? And what impact might that have on the people engaging and what impact that might have on the ones who actually exposed to this context? There's some work going on on that already, but I think more needs to be done, particularly from minority perspectives, looking from the ground up to really understand this. In terms of platforms, we talked about earlier, I mean, we can't control what platforms do, but we can at least try to design and consider unique affordances for having these conversations. I mentioned to it around here, but I should have probably just mentioned social media. What are the affordances of various social media platforms for having these conversations social media, Twitter, it's very text-based, right? So it was responding, they have been much easier for super people. TikTok being much more visual, what's its affordances for engaging in this type of responses, essentially, and for allowing people to open up about their mental health and its impact on both the person and the viewers. Kerry's comment stuck with me of the youth who was in the hospital room and on Snapchat and communicating to these audience around his mental health, and I'm thinking it's enabling him to process what's going on and what impact is it having on the ones who are watching and listening as well? Is it positive for them? And for many people, it's going to be distressing, but for many people, seeing him and seeing his posting is actually encouraging them to talk to their family members, talk to their friends, it might have saved someone else's life in that moment. So we need to think about the various affordances of that. And policies, how can we design platforms and modify features to better support this type of engagement? And I'm hearing from the room already that a lot of this is already going on. The big question though I want to leave you with is, how can social media contribute to black healing? How can it contribute to black thriving? How can it contribute to black well-being? We've seen, I'm very much familiar with the Surgeon General's reports on social media and adolescent mental health. I know that the work deeply on detrimental effects of social media, I've done some work during the pandemic on social media and well-being among black youth looking at some of the loneliness, looking at social connection, looking at some of those things. But I'm asking, can we try to foster an environment where healing-centered conversations can happen within social networks, within social media in a way that enables black people to be able to get out of this conversation and say, I gained something from it. This is something that can contribute to my well-being, my sense of physical, mental, emotional, thriving and not just, you know, I've got information to start off this disease, but we want a total sense of well-being out of this context. So what does that mean? What does it mean for social media to be able to contribute to black people's health and well-being? I think of, you know, the idea of creating healing spaces, safe spaces for people to come really. This, the examples I provided, the hashtags that I've, examples that I've provided, examples of healing spaces. What else can be, example, healing spaces for black people to be able to communicate? What does it mean to contribute? Well, social media has enabled for black folks to find therapists. For black therapists to be visible. I think of the number of podcasts that's emerged from black therapists, therapy for black girls being a very popular one. Social media has afforded for those types of voices to rise to the surface and we need to not discount that. It allows for a sense of community and support. These particular hashtags as well as other environments have enabled people to be able to say, I'm not alone. The key phrase in mental health is, it's okay to be okay. Well, yes, but I want to be able to know that I'm okay, but I'm not alone. Speaking of loneliness, right? You know, and social media spaces allow for that. It allows for that sense of community and communality in that. How can we create more of these spaces that enable black people to heal and thrive? It also enables actions for advocacy. We've seen folks on social media go hard on advocacy. Can they go hard on advocacy when it comes to healing for black girls? Can they show up for black people when it comes to black healing and black wellbeing? The answer is yes, but we need to consider how that might be able to, how that might happen in social media spaces. So again, I wanted to leave this talk with just a sense of the question on how can social media contribute to black healing and how can we contribute to healing-centered conversations so that we can have better of black wellbeing going forward. Thank you. Thank you so much. Our last speaker is my friend, Nancy Bain. She's a senior principal research manager at Microsoft Research in New England, where she conducts research into people, understand, and act with new technology technologies in our relationships. She is a pioneer in the field of internet research. She wrote some of the very first articles on online community in the early 1920s, she's a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and served as the second president. And A-O-I-R has a book award named after her because she's so good at writing books. That's not one. Okay, that's not one. She has educated generations of college students throughout the world with her personal connections in the digital age, which has been gone through two editions. But my favorite book that she wrote is about music fandom and technology playing to the crowd. Nancy Bain is an outstanding researcher and a leader in understanding the historical and personal implications of new media. Can we have a set of apps, please? Yes. And design review on that. Yeah, definitely. So, I'm going to just, yes. You can do that. This is cool. Come back to Zoom. Now we can. Yeah, but see what's happening. Yeah, so, then we're good. Then we're good. Okay. Okay, now we're good. Okay, sorry. Thank you for your patience. I'm the person who works for Microsoft. I've never heard of you. I'm kind of lose you. Thanks, Jeff, for putting this together. I'm very excited to be with one of us really, really fun. And the thing about going last is you end up doing a bit of repetition and also not having to do as much because so much groundwork has been laid for you. So thank you for laying all that groundwork. Yeah, as Jeff said, I've kind of been doing this for a while. It's nice to look like that and we're attached to the board. And we're not supposed to look like that. And I want to, I guess kind of pop up a level and get, not to make puns, but get sort of meta in thinking about this question. And in a sense, think about the context of why are we even asking about social media and wellbeing? So I have been looking at this stuff for a while. This is the computer on which I began studying the internet 33 years ago. And at that time when I went to the library because you have to go to the library to read things that scholars have written way back then, all of the research said what you can actually do relating on the internet, on computers, it's not possible. So I have like the lowest hanging fruit ever, which was, you know what? Yeah, I can. So the approach that I've taken over the years has focused on these three main big pots and I'll narrow it down a bit, but I'm fascinated by communication, this process of how do we create shared reality through some more exchange? This question of personal and professional relationships. I don't think of this in terms of wellbeing or in terms of loneliness. I think of it in terms of, we relate to each other all the time. How do we do that? To me, it's just an absolute miracle that we ever maintain a single relationship for any length of time because we're so near and yet we do it all the time. And this point that Lee's already made that every time we communicate, we're constructing our relationship. It's a constant ongoing dynamic of creation and modification of what exists. And then I'm fascinated always by new technologies in the way that we spring things into stark relief. They take things we've taken for granted and they can be very obvious and give us a chance to reconsider them. And new technology is really fearsome in this regard. This is a cartoon from 1927 published in The New Yorker. So a hundred years ago, hold the line a minute, dear. I'm trying to think what I have on my mind, which is to my mind, quite reminiscent of arguments about how social media is making us all vacuous and we don't even know what we have in content. We just talk for the sake of talking. Not a new concern. And it's not coincidence, of course, that it was a woman who was talking too much. These are very, very, very long histories of saying, oh, there's a new technology. What's it gonna do to us? This is my favorite example. You may have seen it. It's our old pal Socrates. You may have heard of him. And he's critiquing the alphabet. New technology, he says, on other things, you know, you will forget, forget, forgetfulness and the listener's souls. They'll trust the characters and not have any memory. It's not a memory aid. It's a renaissance made. It's not truth. It's the semblance of truth. It's like it's virtual, not real life. They'll be hearers, but they'll learn nothing. They'll appear to be omniscient, but they'll know nothing. They'll be tiresome company having a show of wisdom without the reality. This is thousands of years old, right? And we're still having this argument here today, which tells me it's not so much about social media. And yet these, when we put up the alphabet, people were freaking out about the alphabet. That's so weird, right? So here's 1998. Well, what happened to the alphabet? It got domesticated. We got used to it. It got normal and stuff to even, it's weird to even think of it as a technology, although it's absolutely a technology. When the internet came along, we had a real similar phenomenon. And I'm gonna note that today's conversation is not about well-being and the internet, right? It's about well-being and social media because we've already learned to divide up the internet into all these things and go, well, that doesn't count, that doesn't count enough. But this part, this is really bad for you, I'm sure. So this process of what Leslie had in the numbers called domestication, where this technology appears as this thing that's probably like a force on us and is gonna do things to us. This technological determinism. And then we take it home and we get used to it and we pass the remote control around and we figure out how we're gonna do it. And we get used to it and we sort of stop seeing it even as a causal force. This is captured super beautifully in this series of letters from Anne Lambers, where there's this logic of the internet is a home record. And she was getting a lot of letters about the internet ruined by marriage. My husband's having it there because of the internet. And she's saying, May 1998, my mail tells me the internet may become the principal home record of the next century. Right, here we are in the next century and boy is the internet working on this whole. By October, she's backed off, right? She's saying the internet's not a killer of marriages any more than TV was. The killer is boredom, which too many couples know too much about. So already, just a few months, she's already gotten to the point where she's going, oh, wait a minute, the internet exists in context. And if you're in a context where you've got a crap marriage, the internet might actually facilitate its decline, right? And by the end, she takes out her wonderful, get out the wet noodle. My readers have convinced me that the internet wouldn't use properly. That's a lot more to offer than I thought. What I like about these three quotes is you see this process in sort of a time lapse film of a culture, because this is the advice column, this is the newspapers, this is America's discourse, this place to discuss, this domestic affairs together. You see this process of Anne and the readers negotiating to get to the point, from this technologically deterministic, the internet is bad for marriage to this slow, whoa, wait, it depends on the context, doesn't it, place where the internet recedes into the background and becomes this other person's kind of it, not cause. Here's how I've come to think about this writ large, and this is like the view from not even 30s, this is like the 10,000 foot view. I think about all of this as a socio-technical system, which is not my own concept, a very, very helpful one, which is to say there's this ongoing process. You can't take the social media part out and say, well here's the social media part and here's all the other parts and we can look at how does the social media part affect all those other parts, any more than you can say like, how does your skin affect your lungs? We're super integrated, all these things are integrated. So even these things that we think of as these very distinct phases of technology are continuously interwoven and reshaping one another. So the development of technology and its deployment are iterative. As people live and work with technology, the technology evolves in response to how it's being used. Anticipated concerns about how it will be governed, including concerns about laws about well-being, shape what gets developed in the first place, so and then shape later how things evolve. So we had that discussion about age verification. This is a great example of the iteration processes that happen. I like this definition from Sawyer and Tyworth where they define socio-technical systems as web-like arrangements of technological artifacts, people and the social norms, practices and rules. I'm particularly interested over the whole course of my career. I had a funny experience recently of what, oh, I'm studying socio-technical norms. Let me take out my CV. What context have I studied this in before and I ended up listening everything I'd ever written? I said, oh, I get it. And this is the kind of key socio-technical process and I would say this, in a way, is why we're here talking about this question of what do these technologies do to us? Is that new technologies disrupt the norms? We've had all these ways that young people engage each other, that we all engage one another. Oh, we're really used to them. So they're invisible. And I think we often, I know we often valorize and romanticize face-to-face communication because we imagine it as sort of this default natural state as though nobody was ever beaten or ostracized or teased or humiliated or nothing bad ever happened face-to-face. It's all just like, you look into each other's eyes and eat more. Totally, totally. So, but you get these norms disrupted, right? Suddenly there's a new thing you can do and then you get a struggle over what should we be doing and this leads to new norms and normative cultures of use. Like Black Twitter, fantastic example of a normative culture of use, which remains contested and then it leads to change and then change leads to dormant disruption and this cycle goes on and on and on and it never, ever ends and it never will end and it never should end because we should never get so stale but we start developing norms. That's a good thing that we continue to evolve. I don't think any of us feel like the past just nailed it. And yet, and yet. The other thing besides norms that I'm continuously focused on is what I've come to call relational affordances which is what are the features of the technologies that can be seen as having consequences for relationships? What are the possibilities that you can do with these technologies that you couldn't do before? How should we even make sense of these technologies? In personal connections, I outlined some examples of relational affordances that you can think of as ways to compare media that can kind of help us think about, well, why would there be moral panics about young people on social media? And we know that almost all child sex predation happens in the home and not in social media. Why would the social media do that? Well, because it's interactive, right? It enables people to interact with other people they didn't used to be able to interact with before including if you're a young person, people your parents can't supervise you interacting with. So that possibility of interaction. Again, some of the freak people out about, oh my God, they're gonna call the mayor. There's issues of temporal structure. The fact that these things are 24 seven really changes potentials for who we can engage. Like many of us have had dramatic shifts in our ability to engage people on the other side of the world, for example, because we have this very fast global technology. So what kinds of social cues are available? We've had reference to textual versus visual media. Is the stuff stored or does it disappear? You can't use it because it'll be there in 30 years, right? There's no storage fear about this. Is it replicable, replicable? Can you pass it around the room, right? We're seeing this with really bad stuff and we're seeing this with really good stuff, right? We get tens of thousands of shares of man's mental health message that has really powerful positive consequences and we get the same of revenge point that has incredible negative consequences, right? So replicability's not good or bad, it just is and it changes the dynamics of what can happen to people. Reach, how many people can something reach and can you do this wherever you are and you have to be in a place? These are not the only relational affordances but I think these are a set that kind of help us make some concrete comparisons and be the somewhat better grounds for thinking about if technology's having bad effects, what aspects of the technology is it that are having these consequences? Where might we start tweaking things? Okay, so once upon a time a million years ago I wrote my dissertation in the first book about an online discussion group called Rec Arts TV Soaps where people talked about soap operas and those of you who are not familiar with using that, think of Reddit, think of a subreddit and that's probably about all me, all me by nobody. And I was trying to theorize at that time this wacky concept of online community that people seem to be forming things that felt like communities to them. How are they doing this? And what I argued at that time was that there were these inputs and then there was an appropriation process where out of all those things coming in people were picking select bits through their negative practice and through that appropriation of some of these bits they were together coming up with forms of expression like the hashtag, for instance with the one that we have seen referenced, identities that were familiar to one another, one-on-one relationships with one another where people would come hang out with each other when traveling in town for example and social norms about appropriate behavior. And as I was theorizing this I was thinking about the external context at this time this is 1995 I published the first version of this paper and I was arguing if you wanna understand what's happening online you got these are computer scientists working for the government and their machine is compiling something and they can't do anything while their home compiles so they're hanging out over here talking about the soaps they launched this year. That's an important context to understand. So I was and you could see the way that those contexts played out in things like somebody's been raped on the soap opera and we're having a difficult conversation about a rape storyline and the fact that it's a predominantly female group and women have these histories of being women and these conversations was absolutely relevant to what happened. So even at a time when the internet was overwhelmingly male in this particular group you had a very you have a lot of men participating but the dominant communicative style was a feminine communication style. And many of the things that people were saying well the internet this happens they weren't happening in this group. What's happening in this group was people were supporting one another. People were trusting one another. People were forming strong bonds some of which still endure. All right, Jeff mentioned my, with about pop stars, I lost a slide. Okay, well I'm just gonna live without that slide. It's sort of sad though. I did interview a bunch of musicians for this book called Playing to the Crowd and what I was interested in here was I was going to, I had studied fans as I mentioned and I was going to music industry events to talk about connecting with your fans online. And these musicians were being told by these experts they'd get on stage and they'd be like, oh yeah, yes the record industry is collapsing and we have a global financial crisis but I've got the solution, get online, connect, engage, monetize. You'll be good, right? And connect was this like super flat just do it, just get online and connect. I was like, this is like you move to a new town and you go, I don't have any friends and they're like, well just connect. Connect and engage and they don't have friends. It's useless, absolutely useless information, right? And so I kept thinking something's gotta write about this and then it occurred to me that I was that somebody because I was the one who was there and then noticed it. So I interviewed musicians and they talked about quite a few things but I think sort of the core of a lot of what they were talking about was this shift in the context of where the boundaries are in their relationships, right? And so the picture I had up before that I have lost sadly is when an old concert hall and I don't know if there's no reason any of you would be familiar with this wonderful book by Christopher Small called Musicing where he talks about the act of making of doing music, not just of making it but of doing music together. And he sets, it's an incredible book because it's set in a concert hall and so the first chapter's about what you're knowing about in the lobby before you go in and then the next chapter's about when you go in and you just sit down and the lights go down and the chapter's about the conductor takes a stage. And one of the things that's really key in his argument is that the architecture of that space creates relational dynamics. So he talks about, for example, the fact of the backstage and of the rows of seats creates a separation between performers and the audience that didn't exist prior to that physical arrangement. He puts out the hypothesis, what if after the show the musicians and the audiences all stayed together? That would be a very different dynamic, right? That's not what we can imagine. Some of these folks with these boundaries in race with 24-7 access found it fabulous. They loved it. They were like, this is why I went into music to connect with people. Other people were like, I know I have to talk to them but it's really hard. My music should be appreciated all by itself. So there's this very dialectic, and we've heard both and, we've heard yes and. To me it's a dialectic. It's that we're always being pulled in both directions. We're made more vulnerable and we're empowered. We're given access to all these people and that's really scary. We have the option to lose our mental health and we have the option to gain resources for our mental health. And we're being pulled in all of these directions simultaneously and to think of it as social media as a unified thing that's having these effects is to grossly over-simplify the world. Oh, there's my concert hall. Okay. Yeah, so you can see who gets to talk to whom for how long, what are they allowed to do, what's okay. All of these things get shaped and reshaped by the architecture of the space, the affordances it provides. Running out of time, wrote a book about Twitter. What the heck even is Twitter? It changes constantly and this was even before Elon bought it. But one of the points that we made there was that there's these issues of design but there's also the cultures of use and the cultures of use change the design. And there's the business models and you can't forget the business model so I will close on the thought that the business models are perhaps the worst part for our wellbeing of all of this that quite apart from anything that's happening on social media, the fact that a very small set of people get so much more of the global wealth because of it is a huge problem. And I think that wealth disparity is probably the biggest threat to our global wellbeing that social media has not the number way we treat each other on it. Bam! Yeah, that's a good period. All right, I apologize for happening to Nancy earlier but I wanted to have time for some questions. So we have only about 10 minutes before our, if our panels are willing to stay we could go a little bit longer than that because we have a reception afterwards and I know people need to leave before. So I just want to start with a question. Does anybody have a question in the audience that we can start this conversation with? I know we have questions online for sure but is there a question in the audience? I had a question if that's all right though. Please go ahead. This is for Connie. I think it was the company you highlighted under gamifying connection as one of your concerns is Swaybase. I'm curious about, is it, can you place it in the context of things like fish bowl or glass door where employees are sort of creating spaces outside of the work context to talk about the work context and how we might think about something like Swaybase is not flooding the zone but it's a reaction to that sort of power and autonomy that workers are sort of seizing in some of the other places. Thank you, that's a great question that I will try to answer without knowing too much about some of the details of Swaybase but I think you're right in framing it as a reaction to. In this case I would say if you think about in comparison to glass door if people don't know us where you can post sort of anonymous reviews and sometimes on the record reviews about your company. I think it's a reaction probably to that in some ways which is saying hey, we need to get like a verified user out there who can tell everybody all the great things about our company so people wanna come and work for us and don't stop reading the glass door and I understand why they'd wanna do that because it's sort of they don't like the democratization I guess of people being able to talk about them outside but I also think that it can be the both and discussion. Maybe they do wanna create employee influencers for the outside world but let's not call it true connection internally. I mean it's, they may be verified users but they are not necessarily like really speaking to authentic truth about their experiences to others and that's a real liability when it comes to relationships. So that's why I feel like the public nature of it is just it's not that helpful. Any other questions now? I have a question for Nancy regarding the behavior temporal the affordances that social media generates in a centralized sort of realm in which we live or met up sort of almost most social media spaces. Do you think there can be different affordances when there are multiple social networks and how do we guarantee that there can be different types of engagement in different spaces with different rules to sort of explore the dynamics and which ones are beneficial versus not beneficial? I don't know if you can talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, I guess one thing I would say is that even within Facebook just as I met it just even within Facebook there are many different media with different affordances. So some people are in Facebook oh, I only use Facebook groups which is completely different from only reading a news feed. Right, so even within that people are relying on very different affordances and are finding that it affords different kinds of relational connections to pen language spaces they're in. Certainly something like TikTok that's privileging video sharing and is privileging algorithmic delivery of what you read over who you follow or what you watch over who you follow is gonna facilitate certain kinds of possibilities for connection. In my observations over many years, social media are constantly changing the affordances they offer in response to what people want to do on them. So if I think in the book about Twitter for example when Twitter launched it did not have app replies it did not have hashtags it did not have the ability to quote tweet for example or to retweet even all of those things are affordances that were built in because people were figuring out how to do them despite the fact that the technology didn't allow them to. So I'm actually quite optimistic about your question in the sense that I think that this affordances is a place where social media platforms often follow their users rather than vice versa they launch with some set they see how people are using it they reconfigure to allow other possibilities. I don't think any affordances are good or bad by nature I think that for one thing they're perceived so if I perceive something as something that enables me to form better connections with other people than it for me it is. And if you perceive that same thing as something that throws up a wall between us then it is in the same way that a car for one person is like it's great I can drive all over and get to all my friends' houses and other people are like I hate driving I'm just gonna stay home and call them out, right? Is the car good or bad for social relationships? Yes, yeah. One of the things we need to do clearly is go back to defining things going forward because what we knew as social media 10 years ago and what it is today has evolved and so we need to talk about social media but in so many different ways and so to answer certain questions are you thinking of employee-based social media? Are you thinking more of a local community-based? Or are we thinking globally? It's clear to me that we need to have definitions of social media. My grandfather if I asked me is on social media he'll say no but we want that. And you know, versus someone else like yeah I'm on social media I'm on you know, yeah Facebook group but young people's like yeah I don't use Facebook Sweet, kidding. I guess I'd like to say one of the reasons that I really pushed this idea of affordances and of naming affordances is that I think that it's a real problem in internet research when people say on Facebook, da-da-da-da, they're like Facebook, which Facebook, Facebook 96, Facebook 2006, Facebook 2026, those are entirely different platforms with entirely different sets of features and different user faces and I think it's really important that when we are studying the internet that we name the affordances because otherwise I don't think we even know how to compare. And on that I would just add it's interesting talking to researchers who have done Facebook research for decades and they're like God, I wish I took a picture of what it looked like. I wish I had a record of what it did. I wish I could say what you could and couldn't do because surprisingly the journal articles, all of that record is lost. So unless you go back in time and try to find some representation of it you don't even know from your own articles what was once possible then. Because you've lost the memory of it. And it's kind of wild to think that we even researchers have no clue what we were once studying. You had a question. Well that's scary. So I do research on social media in Cuba which is a place where mobile internet or media came available in December of 2018. And also a place because of the US embargo where kind of the commercial aspects of social media are very limited and very different. But I wanted to go to the question of language because it's kind of caught my attention how even though we're talking about social media which is the internet which is global that all of the presentations seem to be talking about an internet and social media platforms in English. And I wonder if there's something that I'm missing the research that you're doing and especially in Diane and your research in black communities often very multi-lingual, transnational. So I guess it's a question for you. Yeah, so the context, that's a great question. I will say that and it's something that I have been thinking about because the emphasis for those early studies was the focus on the end goal was thinking about health equity within the black community here in the US and thinking of how do we get towards that. So that's a public health sort of framework but I'm also from the Caribbean and spend time outside the country in a number of places. And I see social media across black communities and how it's different. And so it's something that I am thinking about how are my young family members in various Caribbean countries interacting social media that's different from how different conceptually different in some ways. Some lines have been many ways but also different. So it's something that I think about, I don't think there's any one black community. I talk about black community but I don't think there's any one black community. I'll say that. But yeah, language, I mean, English is what I work from and so even if I were to investigate various black communities and how they might talk about mental health, I would have to ask someone from a different French culture to come with me with along for the ride so that I can investigate this or someone from an Afro Latinx culture to come with me because I don't feel like, whereas I felt as a researcher I could investigate the language from these conversations, I positionality, I would be concerned stepping into a black French culture or black Latinx culture and do this such investigations because while the questions are vital I would have to put myself in the position and I'm not sure if I'm the right person to do that. Yeah, I think that one of the books that I was influenced on very early in my career was a book called Internet and Ethnographic Approach to the Internet in Trinidad. In Andela. Yes. And it sort of taught me very early on the importance of context and culture in when we study these things and going in and seeing what's happening within this culture. So you're working cubic and highlights some of this. So yeah, so that's my answer. I don't have anything to contribute to answer about the language because I do study businesses which tend to solve the universal language of English but I will say your research sounds fascinating and I would encourage you to look also at the impact of the emergence, recent emergence of the internet on the way organizations are run and the way people experience work. Yeah. I'm sorry. Obviously, please. Please. I just say that many of the musicians I interviewed were not English speakers. They're not American or British and they encountered things like nobody on Twitter speaks Norwegian so I guess I'm not tweeting but Instagram is awesome because I can post pictures. So absolutely. I'm 100% dead on language. I invent culture more generally or enormous issues. I apologize. I was only gonna add that in, I was talking about voice notes recently and the barriers of texting actually also contribute to whether or not people use importance like voice notes because of it. So you have all these interesting interplays between the way that language not the same or the same. I want to see if there's an online question before we get off. We probably should just do one last question. Yeah. A question for Connie about related to employee loneliness. How do current trends related to unionization correlate with loneliness and the role of union as a civic organization? A very wonderful question that I cannot answer but I think this is a case who we were actually talking as panelists before this about how we still have our academic silos in some ways. And I feel like the union is that people study sociologists and economists who study unionization tend to not speak to the psychologists as much in organizations. But you've given me a good thing to think about. I certainly would encourage people to look broadly at our societal trends with the lens of loneliness. And actually Hilary Clinton had a great piece in the use in the America of New Yorker about the weaponization of loneliness. And some have argued that that's affecting us politically but it also does I think affect us in terms of the organizing of unions and other groups as a reactance to feeling marginalized and lonely in a work context. But I don't actually wish I could say the correlational data point, I don't have it. All right. I want to give a round of applause for our panelists. Thank you all for standing for the audience. Please join us at the reception.