Futures of Learning

Yesterday, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force released the final report of the results of their work reviewing the risks that children and youth experience online, and evaluating different technical solutions for addressing these risks. The task force was led by John Palfrey at Harvard’s Berkman Center, working with Dena T. Sacco, danah boyd, Laura DeBonis, Jessica Tatlock, and a network of technology companies who have a stake in these issues.

The executive summary of the report provides a good high level summary of the findings of the task force, so I won’t recap that here, but I wanted to note just a few things that I found notable about the effort as a whole and the outcomes of the effort.

The task force began with an effort to survey the state of what we know about child safety online in order to inform the policy and technology development conversations. Though this may not seem particularly notable, this kind of careful review of research, particularly research on on-the-ground behaviors, is not done frequently enough in policy debates at least in the domain of online participation. They state, “Although numerous studies are currently underway and much research is available to address online safety concerns, very few of the findings enter public or political discourse. This is unfortunate, because the actual threats that youth may face appear to be different than the threats most people imagine.” Too often, public discourse centers on high-profile but marginal examples. These might be positive examples of kids doing unusually creative things online, or negative examples of online bullying, but rarely do we see nuanced and balanced portraits of what life online is like for the majority of kids who do not fit these exceptional categories. The task force was clearly trying to work from an established evidence base of actual behavior rather than our hopes and fears of what kids might get into online.

What the task force found in their research review is very much in line with the findings that my group recently released based on our three-year study of youth new media practice, that included many case studies of online participation. The task force focused on quantitative studies that looked at the distribution of risky practices across different populations, so it was not a review of qualitative cases. But I do think it is important to say that this review of a dimension of the quantitative work is in line with qualitative work in the field as well. In their review of the literature, the task force found that bullying and harrasment among peers is the most frequent threat that kids face online, and that sexual solicitation largely occurs between young people, not as a predatory relation between a much older adult and a teen. In our work, we found that teen online participation fell into two broad clusters - friendship-driven and interest-driven. While interest-driven sites such as fan sites and gaming and hobby sites were places that youth might connect with unknown others and adults, they did not connect to these sites as spaces to look for sex or romantic partners. By contrast, social network sites were places where kids flirt with one another, but they see these sites as spaces to connect with others their age, or perhaps slightly older or younger, but not as a place to connect with undefined others. They also thought that adult strangers who tried to connect with them on these sites were creepy and deviant. By contrast, many of them described how these peer groups in social network sites often replicated the kind of “drama” (or bullying) that they experience among peers at school. These social norms that kids described to us are clearly reflected in the task force findings.

The way in which the research review of the task force is corroborated by our qualitative work is one indicator of how bodies of research can productively inform policy debates. I think it important to look broadly at the patterns in research, human behavior, and technology trends over time, rather than to fixate on an individual study or a case. In the case of research on new technology, people often mistakenly feel that the most current study, on the most current technology is the most relevant for the policy decision of the day. I think this is a dangerous assumption in all fields, but particularly in an area that is undergoing rapid technological flux. Policy needs to be informed by the more resilient patterns in society, technology, and culture, rather than on the online site or application that happens to be popular at the moment. Youth behavior has been remarkably consistent across the past few decades, though the communication platforms young people use have changed tremendously. For example, many kids have moved from sites like Xanga to MySpace, and on to Facebook, or they have moved from IM to text messaging. While the platforms have changed, their social behavior and norms have remained consistent. Any legislation that is targeted at the current “MySpace problem” without looking more broadly at how kids socialize with their peers is going to miss the mark.

An example from a different domain might help illuminate this dynamic. It recently became illegal to “text message” while driving in California. This is an add-on to the existing prohibition against voice calls without the use of a headset. But what does this mean exactly? Is it okay to send an email, Twitter, or check my Facebook profile on my iPhone. “No officer, I wasn’t text messaging, I was tweeting!” The intent of the legislation should have been to limit the use of technologies that require text input or text access while driving. Even some rudimentary research on mobile device use and behavior could have informed policy makers of the importance of legislating not around a specific application, but around a set of core problematic behaviors that jeopardize safety.

I think this task force report is definitely one step in the right direction of providing smart and grounded input into policies that are informed by a grounded look at underlying social, technical, and cultural dynamics rather than isolated cases or specific technology platforms and fixes.

Cho-Han Hae-Joang et al, Seoul, Korea: Yonsei University Press, 2007

I visited Korea recently. Since it was a short stay, I did not have much chance to update myself with busy observations on ever-changing technosphere in Korea as I would usually do. Yet I managed to meet a young cultural studies researcher, Kim Hee-Won who has been keeping a sharp eye on the Internet world and its young inhabitants, thanks to Larissa Hjorth’s kind introduction. Chatting with/interviewing Hee-Won in the midst of my jet lag stupor was more than refreshing, and we simply could not agree more about the dearth (and urgency) of serious research on new media practices and cultures in Korea in the shadow of the hyped image of wired Korea.

One of interesting points from our conversation that grabbed me was Hee-Won’s view on the generational identity of young Koreans in their 20s with regards to their new media practices. Hee-Won reads their intensive attachment to such new media services as Minihompy, messenger, and SMS and their often obsessive attempt to be constantly connected as a form of performing a reciprocal “check-up of (their) survival for another day.” It is generally true that these new social media intensify the sense of ‘constant on’ for users across generations. Yet as Hee-Won suggests, this practice may reflect the desire for the emotional comfort from assuring one’s presence within the network. In particular, this interpretation makes quite appealing sense when it comes to Korean youth in 20s whose insecure social status, resulted from increasing unemployment rate since 1997 economic crisis, has become a widely acknowledged social issue. In other words, Internet has provided the major playground and outlet for this frustrated generation.

Our speculation on this specific group of youth got me rethinking and reassured about the simple principle of our study on digital media and youth: the importance of considering historical and cultural specificity of diverse groups of young people under the umbrella of the term ‘youth’ as well as recording the transformative and transient nature of media practices. Certainly, Internet would not be the same space for Korean teenager who is born into it with many other available options of digital media and the twenty something whose primal new media experience began with the burgeoning Internet.

Moreover, I am glad to find my question is not wasted yet more profoundly addressed in Internet and Asian Cultural Studies, an anthology Hee-Won kindly gave me. Written in Korean by renowned as well as young cultural studies researchers who are mostly rooted in Yonsei University’s Graduate Program in Culture and Gender Studies, this book provides a great historical standpoint to what they call, “holding back” moment of Internet culture in Korea. Declaring the end of the first stage of Internet fever, it attempts to surmise the legacy of wired Korea in early 2000s and record the transition of the Internet from the wild new space for various voluntary and civil experiments to the striated space for tired/accustomed patterns overrun by the commercial logic, at the threshold of institutionalized “networked era.”

Each article based primarily on ethnographical field research presents so many interesting findings and rich details of what have constructed newly emerging alternative space for Korean and Korean youth. Yet, an anthology format always makes it hard to dwell on each argument. To briefly introduce the gamut of researches, the book includes Cho-Han Hye-Joang’s thought-provoking review of the history of Korean Internet culture with focus on specific ‘agencies’ and ‘sites’; Kim-Cheong Hee-Won’s comprehensive analysis on Cyworld community; Hwang Sang-Min’s, an author of the Dehanminkook Cyber Sinillyu (Korean Cyber New Generation), qualitative study on online community, Gaming(Maple Story), and the role of play for learning and identity formation in cyberspace; Park Geon-Ha on Progamers’ world; Yun Te-Jin on the transnational consumption of popular cultural products, especially reception of foreign television drama content across Asia; Kim Hak-Sil and Lee Chung-Han on active consumption and re-appropriation of Japanese entertainment content by young Korean fans; Kim Hyun-Mi on the lagged establishment of accompanying laws and policies and shifting cultural values in Internet space.

In spite of limited space here, I would like to highlight Cho-Han Hye-Joang’s works as her article presents overarching themes of the book. Cho-Han is a renowned cultural anthropologist who has been delving into the issues of gender and youth culture in modern Korea for the last 30 years. She is one of few anthropologists who not only keep critical eyes but also act out pronouncedly on the emerging cultures and changes of Korean society along with Internet and new media technologies. For example, Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture (Haja Center), where Cho-Han is the founding director, is one of exemplary institutional projects that run alternative and innovative learning programs for young people.

In her article, she raises two questions: how has Korea established the infrastructure of the Internet network so fast and where are the Internet venture companies and online netizens who built and grew out of this environment now? While there have been various academic and journalistic attempts to unearth the secret behind the success of IT-power house Korea, Cho-Hans’s answer to the first question resonates to those views that pinpoint the operating discourse of techno-nationalism underlying rapid technological developments, which I also see as the central drive behind the development of mobile technology in Korea. It is no doubt that the nationalistic and collective (state-leading yet with active engagement of market and citizens) model, which had once worked well for the rapid industrialization of Korea, did the same trick for the informatization during the 1990s. What Cho-Han adds, based on her rich experience as an educator and early adopter of the Internet at every stage, is her reflective examination of the role of the ‘civil’ sector - the vigorous civil and voluntary experiments in online space of early days (1998-2002)- which she characterizes as the process of establishing “condensed modernization,” “cyber democracy,” temporary self-regulated space,” and “alternative public space.”

In spite of many strong points, however, this book bears one noticeable weakness: the limited attention to the ‘Asian’ aspect of given issue. Betraying what the title promises, it mostly focuses on Korean phenomena. When the Asian and transnational perspective comes into play, it only tackles Japan-Korea cultural exchange. Nevertheless, this anthology expresses its commitment to connecting Korea with other Asian contexts by providing the substantial analysis of Korean case that could potentially illuminate similar social changes undergoing in other Asian countries. Yes, it is true that what we learn from early examples could light up the following discussions yet it would only be the beginning step of what we expect from future comparative researches. 

In Born Digital, authors John Palfrey and Urs Gasser take on a number of big questions related to young people and technology. Identity, privacy, safety, learning, and innovation, as well as several other topics, are addressed in this effort to invite and inform dialogue between young people and their parents, teachers, and other significant adults in their lives. Being a Digital Native can open up a world of possibilities for certain young people who enjoy unprecedented autonomy and access to information. However, this autonomy and access is often threatening to adults to whom the practices of Digital Natives are unfamiliar. As the subtitle indicates, Born Digital is a guide to understanding Digital Natives; it is a kind of travel guide for the grown-up and uncool to navigate unknown territory and an intervention intended to allay some of the fears fueling current moral panics.

I had the opportunity to work with both authors at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program in 2007 when they were right in the middle of writing this book. I can remember chiming in during a seminar discussion about the Digital Natives Project (the research project out of which Born Digital is…well…born) with what is apparently a common question about defining Digital Natives—how to account for differential access to technology. With grace obviously developed through practice responding to graduate students’ obnoxious questions, they defined Digital Native for me. It is this same definition that underpins the investigation presented in Born Digital. A Digital Native is “a person born into the digital age (after 1980) who has access to networked digital technologies and strong computer skills and knowledge” (p. 346).

This definition takes an important step away from declaring all kids to be Digital Natives by stipulating the need for access to networked technologies and particular knowledge and skills. Palfrey and Gasser point out that birth date does not equal birth right in the world of Digital Natives; a number of economic and educational factors will influence whether a kid will have the access and knowledge necessary to operate within networked culture. While this acknowledgment of the larger sociocultural and economic factors that influence kids’ access and use of technology is an important step away from the heavy-handed technical determinism that characterizes much of the discourse about young people and technology, I would have liked to see a more sustained critical assessment of the complexities of access and the assumptions that position certain knowledge and skills as more important than others.

One place to start this assessment is with the term “digital native” and its counterpart, “digital immigrant,” which is used to describe people who have not been “born digital,” but rather come to technology with an outsider’s perspective. Both terms—native and immigrant—need to be better unpacked in terms of their political meanings and relationship to identity. Some of this work has happened already; however, the publication of Born Digital presents a ripe opportunity to reengage with these debates. 

The Digital Natives project is itself a good example of the mediated and networked world the book is about. The project, housed at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has among its many outlets for communication a blog, a wiki, profiles on various social network sites, a Twitter feed, and a YouTube channel. The project also sponsors various “3D” events, such as forums, intended to bring interested parties together to discuss issues related to Digital Natives. Born Digital is, therefore, one of many ways of disseminating information from the project. Through its use of diverse multimedia outlets, the project models the on-and-offline hybridity that is associated with Digital Natives’ approach to life.

The book consists of twelve topical chapters and a final synthesis chapter. This organization allows readers to focus on topics of interest or exigency, making the book ideal for parents, teachers, and other practitioners who work with youth. In my reading, I saw three general themes emerge across chapters: individual changes, social changes, and potential changes. All three themes support the claim that at this particular moment, the way young people are interacting with media, technology, and information, as well as with other people and institutions is changing quickly. While I am not going to comment on each chapter in this post, I would like to take this opportunity to touch upon what I think are the key contributions within each theme, as well as to suggest alternative ways to approach and expand the ideas in the book. (After all, as Palfrey notes in the synthesis chapter, he likes to look at the book as “version 1.0,” just a start to a much larger and sustained conversation.)

Early chapters focus on what I’d classify as individual changes (although they certainly have important social components), including changes to the construction and articulation of identity and related concerns about preserving the integrity and privacy of personal information. Although the identity chapter has moments of problematic technical determinism in which core issues related to identity are overlooked—the influence and constraints of non-technical forces such as race, class, and gender, for example—it does provide a succinct overview of the many technological venues through which young people express identity, highlighting two features of such expressions, instability and insecurity.

Instability and insecurity of identity have been theorized as conditions of postmodernity; Palfrey and Gasser use the terms in more specific ways, focusing on the impact of articulating identity through digital media and the potential for losing control of one’s personal information (i.e. one’s identity) when putting information online. In subsequent chapters, the discussion turns to digital dossiers (the accumulation of one’s personal information in online databases) and concerns about privacy, elucidating the questionable (but often invisible) practices of corporations and marketing firms in acquiring and using information kids make available online. Moving beyond simple recommendations that young people stay “anonymous” online and refrain from making any personal information available, these chapters take a careful look at corporate practices that make disclosing personal information dangerous. Bringing this issue to consciousness will (hopefully) be one of the most important and enduring outcomes of Born Digital, as the threat posed by corporations is, for most young people, a much more immediate and realistic danger than that of sexual predators.

Toward the middle of the book, the focus shifts to what might be called “social changes,” or more accurately, changes in how young people socialize, communicate, and navigate in networked spaces. First tackling the issues of user-generated (or user-created) content and filesharing, the authors sketch the landscape of youth participation on sites such as Wikipedia, Second Life, and Napster with a focus on creativity, reputation, and the rights and responsibilities associated with participation in what have been called “Networked Publics.” The discussions move beyond the moral panic over copyright violation and filesharing, looking more closely at particular practices and include a Harry Potter example—always a bonus in my book.

As I see it, the key contribution within the category of social changes is the chapter on information quality. In this chapter, the authors capture the ambivalence felt by young people faced with the insurmountable (and barely organized) pile of information that is the internet. Rather than positing steps for information evaluation, as has been attempted by various information literacy initiatives, however, this chapter emphasizes the contextual nature of information and the various ways in which it can be used and raises questions about proposed solutions to the information overload problem.

Finally, the chapters on innovation, learning, and activism address the potential (and realities) of youth participation online. These are three of the current “hot topics” in the area of digital media, and certainly areas prime for continued conversation. Like the identity chapter, these three chapters occasionally swerve into technical determinist territory, skipping over important historical, contextual, and institutional forces that determine participation. While there are several brief mentions of participatory culture in these discussions, engagement with issues of access that extend beyond access to hardware to experiences and opportunities for participation—the participation gap—should be brought to the forefront. Discourse surrounding the role of technology in shaping the futures of young people—evident in these chapters in relation to employment, education, and citizenship—should always consider the ways in which unequal access and participation perpetuates inequalities in all aspects of life. The participation gap is just beginning to grab the attention of policymakers and (to some extent) technology developers. It also needs to be a primary concern of parents, educators, and young people themselves. Hopefully sustained attention to this issue will make it into Born Digital 2.0.

While based on extensive research with youth from various countries around the world, Born Digital is not a traditional academic book; this is one of its greatest strengths. There is a dire need for research that builds bridges between researchers, practitioners, parents, and young people. It is my hope that Born Digital will be the first of many successful efforts to initiate conversations and connections between these groups.