(Note: This article is the transcript of a talk given at Penn State)
Good afternoon! My talk today is based on research that I have been
doing for the last four years concerning youth and social media. This
talk is an implications talk, not a research talk. So for the scholars
in the room, I should warn you that I won’t be diving into the research
directly. (If you’re interested in the research, check out http://www.danah.org/papers)
I have been asked to talk with you today about teens because they
are tomorrow’s college students. I am going to focus on American teen
culture in order to narrow the scope, but we can get into international
dynamics during the Q&A if you’d like.
Today’s teens are growing up in a world where social media is
everywhere. Regardless of whether or not they have access to these
technologies or how they engage with them, there is little doubt that
social media is playing a significant role in the changing landscape of
American youth.
There are many ways to respond to this shift. The most popular
response is panic. Every time a new genre of social media emerges and
is adopted en masse by teens, many folks run around screaming that the
sky is falling, the sky is falling! Of course, like clockwork,
everything calms down once the old fogies begin adopting the
technologies that they feared back when they were adopted just by the
youngins.
Even those who aren’t running around like chickens with their heads
cut off are often convinced that EVERYTHING has changed because of
social media. Even after adopting social media, many are absolutely
convinced that the world of today’s teens is completely and utterly
different than it was “back in my day.” And, of course, it always was
better back then, right? ::wink::
Many of you have come to this symposium to hear about all of the
amazing newfangled things that are happening because of technology.
There are indeed some neat things going on. But, at the end of the day,
the today’s teens are not that much different than yesterday’s teens as
a result of technology.
Today’s teens are still more interested in their friends than their
lessons. They’re still resistant to power and authority at variable
levels. They still gossip, bully, flirt, joke around, and hang out. The
underlying dynamics are fairly consistent. That said, technology is
inflecting these practices in unique ways. And my goal here today is to
talk about these inflection points.
I want to begin by talking about the everyday social. What are
today’s teens doing? I am going to then offer a structure for thinking
about the shifts taking place before moving on to talk about the
implications for learning and teaching.
Social Network Sites
I am going to focus on social network sites as a case study, because
they are still the most massive and relevant case study we can work
with. (This might be changing soon with mobile but we’re not there yet.)
First, you’ll notice that I’m saying “social network site” instead
of “social networking site.” This is intention. While you might be off
using Facebook and MySpace to network with business colleagues, high
school mates, and the hotty that you think you might want to date, most
teens are not. They’re focused on their friends. They use these sites
to connect to people that they already know from school, church,
activities, summer camp, etc.
One of the most problematic mistakes adults make when trying to make
sense of social network sites is to presume that kids interact on these
sites just like they do. This ain’t true. Teens are using this space as
a social hangout with their pre-existing network.
There are four features of social network sites that are relevant for us here today:
1. Profiles. Social network site profiles are where youth write
themselves into being. Think of the profile as a digital body. Up until
this point, you are an IP address and an IP address can’t be dolled up
for show and tell. With a profile, a teen can express who they are.
Keep in mind the audience. This is about showing off to known
individuals. Thus, when teens saying that they’re 95 and from Christmas
Island, they know they’re not and their friends know they’re not. They
don’t care about data accuracy for the system – they care that their
friends get a sense of who they are. Profile decoration is akin to
decorating one’s bedroom wall or locker (back before that was a fire
hazard). It’s all about self-expression for friends.
2. Friends. Social network site Friends are not the same as your
closest and dearest. There are all sorts of reasons to list others as
Friends, not the least of which is because it’s socially rude not to.
Don’t assume that when people indicate that they are connected on this
system that they like each other. One way of thinking about Friends is
as intended audience. This is who teens think that they are hanging out
with. Of course, this is also Ground Zero for psychodrama – there’s
nothing fun about having to answer the question “Are you my Friend, Yes
or No?” from someone you know but don’t care for.
3. Comments. Most adults look at the comments on teens’ profiles or
Wall and get all uppity. Sure, the conversation typically boils down to
“Yo, wazzup?” “Not much.. you?” “Nothing… I’m bored.” “Me too.” But
be honest with yourself – those conversations that you just had in the
hallway about the weather… were they so much more meaningful? I don’t
think so. All of this is a process of social grooming. It’s a way of
acknowledging one another and connecting while also letting everyone in
the room know that you’re not a pariah. I mean, imagine if we all went
into the hallway and stood by ourselves and didn’t make small chat.
Wouldn’t we all feel really awkward? Right. So think of these Comments
in that regard. Teens know how to have deeper conversations – this just
isn’t where those necessarily happen.
4. New Feed. When Facebook launched the News Feed (and MySpace
copied it), micro-blogging emerged on social network sites. These
“status updates” provide a reverse chronological stream of the state of
being of one’s network. Many of these are mundane notes, details about
food, comments on life, the universe and everything.
Most of you are familiar with this kind of structure through
Twitter. Many of you have already send a bazillion Tweets today – we’ve
all been watching them. But before you go thinking that you’re down
with the kids, let’s get one thing straight: according to Pew, the
median age of the Twitterverse is 31.
That’s right: this ain’t kids’
world.
Take a moment. Do not assume that youth will adopt every new form
of social media. In fact, they won’t. There are very good reasons for
why they don’t use Twitter, not the least of which has to do with the
fact that their parents think it’s cool. Of course, Ashton Kutcher
might change this. But for the most part, teens aren’t here and aren’t
humored with being this public.
So why are they here? What are they doing here? The first thing to
understand is that there’s social pressure to be where your friends
are. This ain’t new. It’s about the mall, about the school dance, etc.
You don’t exist if you’re not where your friends are.
Skyler (18, Colorado): If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.
Tara (16, Michigan): Like everyone says get a Facebook. You need to get one.
Of course, just because teens want to gather with their friends
doesn’t mean that social network sites are the ideal place. Often,
being offline together with friends is much more preferred.
danah: If you could choose between hanging out with friends or being online with them?
Tara (16, Michigan): Oh, hang out, for sure (laughs).
Lila (18, Michigan): But if you don’t have the option, then you can just go online.
But they still have good reasons for getting together online with
friends, not the least of which is because they aren’t allowed out.
Teens often turn to them because they don’t have other spaces in which
they can gather with peers.
Amy (16, Seattle): My mom doesn’t let
me out of the house very often, so that’s pretty much all I do, is I
sit on MySpace and talk to people and text and talk on the phone, cause
my mom’s always got some crazy reason to keep me in the house.
Of course, at the end of the day, social network sites are a great
hang-out place, a great place to coordinate, and a great place to
share. In fact, there’s a lot about the way in which youth interact
here that signals that it’s just like any other public space. Now
here’s where we need to think about structure. How are these
environments similar or different to other public spaces?
Properties and Dynamics of Networked Publics
There are five properties and four dynamics that you need to keep in
the back of your head for thinking about these types of publics.
1. Persistence. What you say sticks around. This is great for
asynchronicity, not so great when everything you’ve ever said has gone
down on your permanent record. The bits-wise nature of social media
means that a great deal of content produced through social media is
persistent by default.
2. Replicability. You can copy and paste a conversation from one
medium to another, adding to the persistent nature of it. This is great
for being able to share information, but it is also at the crux of
rumor-spreading. Worse: while you can replicate a conversation, it’s
much easier to alter what’s been said than to confirm that it’s an
accurate portrayal of the original conversation. This is the
cornerstone of bullying.
3. Searchability. My mother would’ve loved to scream search into the
air and figure out where I’d run off with friends. She couldn’t; I’m
quite thankful. But with social media, it’s quite easy to track someone
down or to find someone as a result of searching for content. Search
changes the landscape, making information available at our fingertips.
This is great in some circumstances, but when trying to avoid those who
hold power over you, it may be less than ideal.
4. Scalability. Social media scales things in new ways.
Conversations that were intended for just a friend or two might spiral
out of control and scale to the entire school or, if it is especially
embarrassing, the whole world. Of course, just because something can
scale doesn’t mean that it will. Politicians and marketers have learned
this one the hard way. And what does scale is often totally
humiliating. This was learned by the kid with the light saber. Of
course, for those who have been watching the Interwebz these days, you
might have been pleased to watch the Susan Boyle meme take off. It’s
nice to have moments where the world seems kind and self-reflective,
isn’t it?
5. (de)locatability. With the mobile, you are dislocated from any
particular point in space, but at the same time, location-based
technologies make location much more relevant. This paradox means that
we are simultaneously more and less connected to physical space.
Those five properties are intertwined, but their implications have
to do with the ways in which they alter social dynamics. Let’s look at
three different dynamics that have been reconfigured as a result of
social media.
1. Invisible Audiences. We are used to being able to assess the
people around us when we’re speaking. We adjust what we’re saying to
account for the audience. Social media introduces all sorts of
invisible audiences. There are lurkers who are present at the moment
but whom we cannot see, but there are also visitors who access our
content at a later date or in a different environment than where we
first produced them. As a result, we are having to present ourselves
and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual
audience. The potential invisible audiences can be stifling. Of course,
there’s plenty of room to put your head in the sand and pretend like
those people don’t really exist.
2. Collapsed Contexts. Connected to this is the collapsing of
contexts. In choosing what to say when, we account for both the
audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate
in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not
others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one
another and it’s often difficult to figure out what’s appropriate, let
alone what can be understood.
3. Blurring of Public and Private. Finally, there’s the blurring of
public and private. These distinctions are normally structured around
audience and context with certain places or conversations being
“public” or “private.” These distinctions are much harder to manage
when you have to contend with the shifts in how the environment is
organized.
I want to take a moment to drill down in on this last one because I
think it’s important and confusing. All too often, we hear statements
about how privacy is dead. This is patently untrue. Consider this quote:
Bly Lauritano-Werner (17, Maine): My
mom always uses the excuse about the internet being ‘public’ when she
defends herself. It’s not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a
girl needs her privacy. I do online journals so I can communicate with
my friends. Not so my mother could catch up on the latest gossip of my
life.
Bly is pointing out that the tensions between public and private are
messy. More than anything, she’s highlight how they’re about control.
That’s key. Remember that youth see privacy in terms of control –
control of space, control of information, control of trust.
MySpace Versus Facebook
Now, if you were paying attention, you’ll notice that I put Facebook
and MySpace on par. My guess is that most of you are on Facebook and
eschew MySpace. Many of you might even believe that MySpace is dead.
Let me tell you that this is NOT true. Quite the contrary, especially
when we’re talking about youth. Yet, there’s something really
disturbing going on here. These are two distinct public spaces that
have attracted two different populations (with a decent amount of
overlap). These distinctions have to do with history and adoption
patterns, but they are also a reproduction of divisions within American
society.
To get at this, I want to present two quotes from teens living in education-driven, upper-middle class environments:
Anastasia (17, New York): “My school
is divided into the ‘honors kids,’ (I think that is self-explanatory),
the ‘good not-so-honors kids,’ ‘wangstas,’ (they pretend to be tough
and black but when you live in a suburb in Westchester you can’t claim
much hood), the ‘latinos/hispanics,’ (they tend to band together even
though they could fit into any other groups) and the ’emo kids’ (whose
lives are allllllways filled with woe). We were all in MySpace with our
own little social networks but when Facebook opened its doors to high
schoolers, guess who moved and guess who stayed behind… The first two
groups were the first to go and then the ‘wangstas’ split with half of
them on Facebook and the rest on MySpace… I shifted with the rest of
my school to Facebook and it became the place where the ‘honors kids’
got together and discussed how they were procrastinating over their
next AP English essay.”Craig (17, California): “The higher castes of
high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy.
The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high
school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are
more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious. Like Peet’s is more
cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop,
and like Macs are more cultured than PC’s, Facebook is of a cooler
caliber than MySpace.”
There are all sorts of ways in which we can dissect the language
that they are using, but what they are pointing to is a dynamic that
exists that we’re not so good at talking about: the reproduction of
socio-economic status and class divisions in digital worlds. For those
in the room who come from an education background, you may be familiar
with Penny Eckert’s work on “Jocks and Burnouts” – this is the same
dynamic taken online. The majority of kids aren’t cleanly jocks or
burnouts but the tensions between these two extremes set the narrative
through which most youth respond. The same is occurring with MySpace
and Facebook.
You might be thinking: so what? Why does this matter? These are “natural” segregations anyhow, right?
Social network sites are not like email where it doesn’t matter if
you’re on Hotmail or Yahoo. Teens who use MySpace can’t communicate
with those on Facebook and vice-versa. So if you don’t participate,
you’re written out of the story. This means that divisions are
re-inforced. Forget all of the rhetoric about how the Internet is the
great equalizer – it’s the great reproducer of inequality.
More importantly, I’ve listened as many of you have talked about
doing things on Facebook because “everyone” is on Facebook. What about
those who aren’t? What happens to students who enter this university
only ever having known MySpace? Are there differences in skills that
need to be taken into account? What about familiarity and networks?
What happens at school when everyone has been using Facebook for years
except you?
More problematically, I’ve heard many of you talk about using
Facebook directly in the classroom. And I’ve heard you talk about
recruiting through Facebook. What kinds of assumptions are you making?
Are you aware of these issues?
Understanding this issue is more complicated than I can express in a
45 minute talk but I encourage all of you to check out my writings on
this topic because I think it’s a pretty significant issue that many of
you aren’t accounting for. (See Chapter 5 of my dissertation at http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf).
Learning
OK. Let’s regroup and talk a little bit more explicitly about learning.
First, I want to make it VERY clear that sociality has learning
implications. Youth engage with others to work out boundaries, to
understand norms. This is how they learn power and authority, how they
learn the networked architecture of everyday life. It’s easy to eschew
this, to argue that this is irrelevant, but most people spend a decent
amount of their time working through social issues as a part of being
an adult in this society. We talk about it as “politics” usually but
it’s about people. And teen years are where this is worked out.
It’s also important to note the ways in which we need to learn to
learn. Social media is connecting educators and learners in new ways
and this too is extremely important. Consider, for example, this quote
where a teacher helps a student in the off-hours on her MySpace:
A (16, CA): “Pleeeeeeeeeeease tell me why pre-calculus is important to me…”
Mr. C: “… You’re not learning this stuff
because you need it every day as an adult… The reason is that
studying these things (precalculus, Shakespeare, … whatever) helps
you get good at learning how to learn. And that, you will definitely
have to do for the rest of your life. That’s practically all we do as
adults…”
Of course, that doesn’t address where and when technology is useful
in the classroom. We all know that technology can be useful in
education purposes. Many of you are deeply invested in bringing
technology to the classroom. I’m speaking to the choir on this one.
But I want to make one thing clear… Just because youth are using
social media doesn’t mean that it can fit well into the classroom. It
needs to be thought through pedagogically and y’all need to understand
how it’s being used in everyday life before bringing it into the
classroom.
Since we’re using social network sites as a case study, let me point
out one of the places where they FAIL miserably. On social network
sites, you have to publicly list your Friends and you have to have the
functioning network to leverage it. What happens if you’re an outcast
at school? Does bringing it into the classroom make it worse? What
happens if you’re forced to Friend someone who torments you because you
share a class? And then you have to face that person in your “private”
space online as well? Bringing social network sites into the classroom
can be very very tricky because you have to contend with social factors
that you, as a teacher, may not be aware of.
While I’m hesitant to introduce many forms of social media into the
classroom directly, I think that it is critical to see how they are
reshaping information flow. This is actually where tremendous
innovation opportunities emerge.
We all know that youth are searching for information in totally new
ways so I’m going to skip over that. But they are also sharing
differently. Sharing of information is very different in a world of
bits where it’s easy to make a duplicate and still retain what you
originally had. Pointers have value and sharing information can create
memes. Needless to say, youth are leveraging social media to share with
their friends and peers. Now, most of what they share might be pure
gossip, but teens also share links, references, ideas, and original
content.
Of course, while adults are increasingly using sophisticated tools
to aggregate and disseminate information, youth are predominantly not.
Teens are not familiar with RSS feed readers or aggregators like
Del.icio.us. Again, just because you use these forms of social media
doesn’t mean youth do. For the most part, teens are primarily sharing
through IM and their SNS of choice. Or simply by word of mouth.
In the same vain, most teens live and breathe open systems like
Wikipedia but have no idea how these systems work. They are typically
told that Wikipedia is bad rather than being taught how to make sense
of the information that is there.
Many of them are producing their own content without a critical
understanding of remix or user-generated content. They’re experiencing
the blurring between consumption and production but they don’t have a
framework to make sense of this or to understand how to respond to
attacks on their practices.
For all of the attention paid to “digital natives” it’s important to
realize that most teens are engaging with social media without any deep
understanding of the underlying dynamics or structure. Just because
they understand how to use the technology doesn’t mean that they
understand the information ecology that surrounds it. Most teens don’t
have the scaffolding for thinking about their information practices.
It’s critical to realize that just because young folks pick up a
technology before you do doesn’t inherently mean that they understand
it better than you do. Or that they have a way of putting it into
context. What they’re doing is not inherently more sophisticated – it’s
simply different. They’re coming of age in a culture where these
structures are just a given. They take them for granted. And they
repurpose them to meet their needs. But they don’t necessarily think
about them.
Educators have a critical role when it comes to helping youth
navigate social media. You can help them understand how to make sense
of what they’re seeing. We can call this “media literacy” or “digital
literacy” or simply learning to live in a modern society. Youth need to
know more than just how to use the tools – they need to understand the
structures around them.
You need to understand what they’re doing and why. Most importantly,
you need to not reject what they’re doing or fetishize it.
The modern world is certainly filled with neat new gadgets. Today’s
youth are certainly embracing many of them. Yet, at the end of the day,
what they are doing is a lot like what previous generations were doing,
inflected by the dynamics and features of the technology. So how do we
face the next generation living and learning with social media?
We start by opening up a dialogue. We start talking to youth about
what they are doing and why they are doing it. We ask them to teach us
about the technology while we guide them with the knowledge that we
have through experience. We start co-operating and engaging with the
shifting nature of everyday life.
At the end of the day, the biggest disruption brought on by
technology has nothing to do with the youth themselves, but with the
way in which it forces us to reconsider our position of power as
adults. We cannot simply tell it like it is; we need to re-learn how to
learn and how to evolve with the changes all around us.
(Image source: www.parenttalktoday.com)
