>> Peter Lee: I'm Peter Lee, and I have really the great pleasure of
introducing our visiting speaker. I'm saying visiting, I'm hesitating there
because Danah is actually one of our own. She is visiting from the other
coast, but feels very much close to us.
So let me introduce Danah Boyd to you. She is a principal researcher at
Microsoft research and part of our social media collective, which is really
turning into a dynamic and a very thoughtful and impactful group of people
looking at a broad range of social science and social media issues.
Danah is also a research assistant research at NYU in the media culture and
communications program and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for
Internet and Society. She is, I think, broadly acknowledged as a leading
authority, perhaps the leading authority, on the interaction between American
youth and social media. In particular, in the dynamic of that interaction in
the broader context of a society and a society of adults that sometimes has
certain preconceptions and fears about what that all means.
In fact, I think we'll hear something about that today as she tells us about
her book: "It's Complicated, the Social Lives of Networked Teens. For her
work, Danah is on top of our own research and her own field study, also
extremely active in the world and in various communities. She's been
recognized by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top TR35 innovators,
Fortune Magazine called her the smartest person, the smartest academic. I
guess that's not quite a person [laugher]. The smartest academic in
technology. She is part of the Social Media Global Agenda Council of the
World Economic Forum and on the board of the directors of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center.
But for all of that, of course, what's most important to know is her Twitter
handle, which is @zephoria, starting with a Z. And my first lesson, when I
joined Microsoft and interacted with her for the first time by email, was to
learn that her name begins with a lowercase d and a lowercase b.
So with that, please welcome Danah Boyd.
Thank you. [Applause]
>> Danah Boyd: Thank you, Peter. Good afternoon. Thank you all for coming
out. I'm really delighted to be able to be here and talk about my book and
to be able to spend so much time sharing what I've been doing for the last
decade with all of you.
Now, I've been told that there are different reasons why some of you are
here. So I want to get a sense of who in the room is here for what. How
many of you are researchers in one sense or another? How many of you are
parents and worried about your kids in one way or another? How many of you
been told that you should come here for some privacy related reason because
you get credit in some way in another [laughter]? How many of you have been
guilted into coming because you are my friend [laughter]? They're in the
front row. This is how this works.
I want to put this book into some sort of context to give you a way of
understanding it, a way of relating to it and hopefully to encourage you to
read it. I also want to do it in a way where we can have a conversation. So
I'm going to give you this overview and then invite you to start asking
questions pretty quickly into the process.
First some context. I was one of the first generations of young people who
really grew up online. I got online in the early 1990s because my brother
was doing the terrible, terrible thing of using the phone line to make beep
beep sounds with his computer. I didn't understand what was going on and I
march into his room and I was like, "What are you doing?" He showed me a
world of Hughes Net and bulletin boards and I realized that that computer was
made of people. It made me much more interested in what was happening with
that device.
So I spent my teen years hanging out in all sorts of online communities
talking to strangers. And the reason I thought this was interesting is that
it was not a big deal, the fact that they were strangers. It was not
something we thought of at that moment. For me, as a teenager growing up in
rural Pennsylvania, it was extraordinarily empowering to have these
conversations with people from such different world views and different
experiences.
So this was during the first Gulf War. I spent a lot of time talking to
folks fighting for the U.S. military in the Middle East, trying to understand
geopolitics. I spent a lot of time talking to a transgender woman who helped
me answer and understand gender and sexuality by asking unbelievably
inappropriate and naive questions. But these moments of being able to
understand a world beyond my own what were made me fall radically and
magically in love with this technology.
I went to Brown to study computer science in the hopes that I could build the
systems that I was so passionate about. And then I started doing a lot of
visualizations, trying to understand relationships between networks. I
started visualizing the early grasps of environments that I was involved in,
Hughes Net, mailing lists, email, et cetera.
I received a phone call in December of 20302 from one of the sponsors of the
media lab. I was at the media lab by this point. Who said there was a new
site launching called Friendster and I might find it really interesting. I
checked this had out, and, mind you, for the timing of it all, the first
Village Voice article written about Friendster was in June of 2003. So this
is six months before that. I was like this is a really fascinating
environment and it has all of the feel of a lot of the early social
technologies. So I was really intrigued by it. So I started, you know,
playing around on the site. I started documenting what I was seeing. I
started documenting what I was seeing on my blog. And this is also sort of a
funny history of it. I actually started blogging in 1997 before anyone knew
there was a thing called blogging. So here I was blogging about this thing
that was emergent within social media and I got a phone call from somebody
being like, Hey, can you help us understand these new technologies? Can we
hire you to do focus groups and research and whatnot? I'm like, I have no
money, I'm out of grad school, sure, of course. I had no idea of what I was
doing, which made the whole thing pretty entertaining. I basically ended up
doing a crash course in trying to learn how to do qualitative methods on the
fly.
Then I realized that I actually wanted to go back to grad school and maybe I
should learn how to do this more properly. So I went back to Berkeley and
trained under a group of anthropologists in order to understand the cultural
logic, the understanding of why people use technologies in the way that they
did. All the meanwhile, I was studying what was happening with all the
social media issues, the questions of blogging, but my advisor came to me and
he said, Hey, I've got some funding. I really want to look at young people
and their relationship to technology. Would you be interested? I was like,
Sure, I'd love to see how much it changed since I had grown up online. I
could take a break from all the social media stuff. That would be really
fun, right? I would go back and look at LiveJournal and Zango, which were
sort of the things of young people, Instant Messenger, that kind of thing. I
sort of signed up to do this project, basically just as teenagers started to
get onto MySpace. So what ended up happening is that I was well positioned
to watch the rise and fall of MySpace and the rise and, I would argue now,
fall of Facebook. Now in this moment where we're seeing the proliferation of
a ton of different apps. In this project, I wanted to understand this at an
intellectual level. I wanted to understand what were the cultural dynamics
playing out.
But the thing that I quickly came up against was all of these anxieties by
the public. The press started covering social media by talking about all the
terrible things that kids do online. Indeed, parents started coming to me
anxious. Policymakers started trying to find new ways of legislating these
new technologies. And I kept scratching my head, being like where is this
disconnect? How can we understand this?
That's why I decided to do something sort of more public, which is that for
the longest time as a scholar I write a lot of journal articles, I write a
lot of traditional academic output. But I wanted to be able to put this
material into the hands of people that might be able to use it, be able to
make a difference in young peoples lives. I wrote this book very much sort
of building off of a decade of research, a way of looking at young people
across the United States. And we can talk about methods, for those of you
who want to. But I really wanted to sort of do a deep dive, connect what I
was seeing on the ground with what people were seeing in other research
communities and try to address these different points of anxieties.
So each chapter in this book takes on a different concern. Sometimes these
are concerns where we are really worried about kids. This is about, you
know, the idea that they might not care about privacy or that bullying is an
issue, issues of sexual interactions online, these kinds of concerns about
kids. But there's also the questions of all of the hopes that we have.
These moments about how the Internet was going to be our saving grace. It
was going to, you know, radically transform, you know the questions of
inequality in this country. The idea that young people are digital natives,
that somehow things fall from the sky and they magically understand
technology. I wanted to take each of these different concerns and sort of
untangle them. Where was this myth rooted in something that was really real?
Where was things far more complicated? Part of it was because as I started
on this fieldwork, I realized that my experience as a teenager was not what
everybody was experiencing. In fact, what had really changed in the five
years from when I was teenager to when I started the project, and then of
course the ten years since, what had really changed significantly was the
fact that it had become mainstream. And young people have gone online
basically to socialize with their friends. That is where we are today.
So then I started figuring out, we needed to untangle why it is that young
people are going and spending so much time online. Indeed, a lot of adults
will come to me, being like, this is terrible. They're all online. Why are
they not doing what we did as kids? It must be something about the
technology. There's a lot that has changed in the last 30 years in the
American society that we don't account for. It's really important to lay
some of that out to then understand these other implications.
Over the last 30 years, we've seen the rise of curfew laws, the increase of
young people not being allowed out into public places after certain hours.
We have seen an increase in suburbanization, and with it the aspects of
school choice and schools actually being built far out in suburbia. The
result of which is for a lot of young people in this country, they're not
able to walk to school with their friends. Their friends are more likely to
live at a much greater distance that even if they could get on a bike, they
can't get to them. Therefore, they're increasingly dependent on their
parents' cars to get them to places. Parents are more likely to be working,
which makes it really challenging in coordinating these dynamics. Public
places have started telling young people that they are not wanted. Malls
have restrictions. Questions of trespassing laws have radically changed
parking lots and other public hangout spaces. We have an amazing amount of
fear mongering that has come in and restricted young people. The access to
expendable capital has changed, which is that when I as growing up, by the
time I was 12 I was babysitting. I can't imagine most of the middle class
communities I go into now allowing a 12-year-old to babysit a three-year-old.
Of course, that's the black-market money making of babysitting. Then there's
the whole universe of things like fast food which has really changed because
we actually have those jobs for 50-somethings now. We can't imagine our
young people participating in it.
Another sort of radical change is that in response to latch key culture in
the 1908s in the U.S., we started over-structuring young peoples lives and in
the hopes that this would keep them safe and keep them occupied. Especially
in middle to upper class communities, young people go from very early in the
morning, when they shouldn't be biologically awake, until pretty late at
night in very structured activities. By the time they are done with
homework, they are done with dinner, it's nine o'clock, all they want to do
is hang out with their friends. Rather than sneaking out their windows,
breaking their legs, what they end up doing is spending all their time on
these technologies. They end up finding that this is the place where their
friends are.
In the beginning of my research, what was really interesting about this
dynamic was that it was a relatively public act of participating in these
environments, because adults didn't notice. They weren't paying attention to
what was happening. By the mid-2000s, when we started really being anxious
about young people and their relationship to technology, all of a sudden
adults became part of the picture. The one thing that radically changed over
the decade that I was doing this work were the issues about privacy, which is
that when I began this teenagers were not really thinking about privacy with
regard to adults because they weren't really worried about. They were just
trying to find their friends by any means possible. This was the one place
where they could gather. By the time their parents were on Facebook, they
were sort of struggling with a different issue, which is that they wanted the
ability to speak to their friends and they had to deal with their parents
simultaneously, and they had to deal with regardless of what the privacy
settings required in the systems, all it required was for mom to look over
your shoulder and it ruined everything. Or for your kid's sibling to think
it was really funny to get onto your account, right? And that also caused
absolute mayhem. So what I saw was this amazing shift of young people
switching from thinking about hiding or restricting access to content to
restricting access to meaning, ways of hiding in plain site.
So let me give you an ethnographic example from this that I think is sort of
fun, especially in a really geeky room, which is that I was talking to a
young woman in Boston. She is of Argentina dissent, which is important to
note because her mother has no reference to British culture, no understanding
of British culture, and more importantly geeky culture at-large. She and her
friends are relatively geeky. Now, she and her boyfriend had just broken up,
and she wanted to find a way to tell all of her friends that she was having a
lousy, lousy day. She wanted their love. She wanted their support. She
wanted their validation. So she was trying to figure out how to express her
emotions. Now, if you haven't spent time with a lot of 16 year olds, you
will find that a lot of them spend time thinking about the perfect song lyric
to express emotions, right, that's the with a best way to convey it. She was
trying to find the right song lyric. She knew if she put up a sappy song
lyric, her mother would flip out. It had happened before. She'd put things
up, her mother would think she was suicidal. It just doesn't work well. So
she was trying to find a song lyric that allow her to signal to her friends
that things were not doing so well but not trigger her mom. So she puts up
song lyrics from "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." For those who
don't know the Monty Python reference, this is a song in the Life of Brian
when the key character is being crucified. There is nothing happy about this
song, right? But she puts up the lyrics, her mother reads them literally and
immediately sends a comment on Facebook, "It looks like you're having a great
day." And her friends immediately text her, right? It's this beautiful way
in which she was able to signal something in multiple frames.
And I think that this is really important because this is one of the ways in
which I'm seeing privacy start to play out in magnificent ways amongst young
people. It started textually. In fact, you will hear things like
sub-Tweeting, which is a way of sort of encoding things. The use of
pronounces is particularly popular, right? Basically, Oh, my gosh, can you
believe what she said? Oh, no, I can't believe what he did. Right?
Clearly, there is a conversation there and everybody knows what's going on
except me, right? That is part of the change that has happened. So these
young people are extraordinarily visible because they're dealing with
immediate power, and they find ways of encoding their material.
Meanwhile, of course, we're actually seeing a shift right now to visual
culture. This, I think, is a really interesting trigger and shift in what's
going on. It's now about Snapchat. It's now about Instagram and Vine. It's
the idea of putting up visual material. What's really funny in this is that
there is a lot of references here that you don't have a clue what you are
seeing or why you are seeing it.
So I was silting with a teen boy who had put up a picture of a doughnut. I
was like, what's up with the doughnut, right? He was like, oh -- of course,
he has this long story of friends and jokes, things that [indiscernible]. I
didn't even understand what he was taking about, but he knew when he put up
this picture of a doughnut that his friends would burst out laughing, which
is indeed what happened. This is this way in which we're seeing these kinds
of communicative acts in very visible environments.
What's really important to know note about this is what we see with each new
technology, young people are desperately trying to find a way of finding a
place of their own, a place where they can just hang out, a place where they
can joke around, a place where they can do all of the dumb things that all of
us did when we were teenagers, only they are doing it through different
technologically mediated ways and ways that often look foreign and strange to
adults.
I think that one of the struggles that I found in research this book is that
young people kept coming to me and being like why do my parents think I'm in
so much trouble because of what I do online? I'm not. I'm okay. Can't you
just tell them? So I wrote this book in hopes to reach out to the public to
say by in large, guess what? The kids are all right. Those who aren't are
making visible online how much they're struggling offline. If we want to
make a difference in young peoples lives, let's not blame the technology,
think that the technology is the thing that it the magical transformation.
Let's use this as a window into young peoples lives in order to embrace them,
in order to help them, in order to challenge them, and in order to give them
tremendous opportunities.
With that, there's so many different directions that we can go. I want to
see where you want to go. The mics pick up from the air, so just try to talk
loudly and I'll try to repeat your questions. Who in the room, what
direction do you want me to go? Go.
>>:
Hi.
This is great.
>> Danah Boyd:
Thanks for coming.
No problem.
>>: I'm here because I'm the parent of a teen who is very socially
networked. Snapchat, Twitter, sub-Tweeting, which is something I just found
out about. Thank you. What I struggle with as a parent and I wonder what
your research shows is the extent to which parents really ought to be
monitoring versus letting them have their independence and their own space.
Because Snapchat scares the hell out of me.
>> Danah Boyd: I'm going to attack this in a couple of different ways. I'm
going to start with a very simple bit of Snapchat, and then I'm going to get
into your broader question. Snapchat is actually a really beautiful
transformation of technology. I think it's under-appreciated about what it
does. Adults are the ones sending naked images. By and large, teenagers are
not. What teenagers are doing is saying why do we need to save every
photograph that ever excepted. Why does this need to go permanent. I think
that there is really an interesting moment, because all of these technologies
to date have been about persistence. I kept seeing young people trying to
find innovative ways of getting around persistence. Then all of a sudden
they have this tool where they can sort of make things more ephemeral and try
to keep it lighter weight. That's one.
There's a second really important thing. If you're following a lot of
people, I don't know how many of use Twitter or Instagram or whatnot, when
you've got these streams of things, you're just flying them by. You're
paying no attention to anything. It's just going. You might like things
here and there, but otherwise you ignore it. When you get something on
Snapchat, it says pay attention to me for six seconds. That's all you've
got. Pay attention. It's a really interesting way of saying, I am saying
that this is for you and I'm asking you to give me your attention. I think
that's a really delightful thing.
Now, in light of your sort of broader and more important question, which is
how do we understand what it means to monitor young people, today's young
people are more age segregated than any previous generation in the United
States. What that means is that young people have very limited opportunities
to interact with noncustodial adults than in previous generations. So their
interactions with adults primarily are parents, teachers or other people who
hold immediate power over them. This becomes really challenging as we
transition to the high school years. There is no doubt that the high school
years are about trying to find independence, trying to find your own footing,
trying to find your way of relating to the world. When we make this just
about your peer group, it creates all sorts of screwy dynamics. What we need
to be doing is finding other ways of supporting young people to have a lot of
adults that they can turn that are not just you. This is something that we
should be thinking about how to engender very early on. The first piece of
advice that I give to parents is that from the time your child is tiny, build
an entire network of other cool adults that they can turn to, the aunts, the
uncles, the older cousins, the coaches, the youth ministers, whatever fits
into your community, find those other adults. The reason is that once you
get to the high school years, they are going to invite those cool people into
their accounts, even as they kick you off. They are going to basically -those other adults are not going to tattle on your child when your child
swears, but they are going to tattle when something looks really serious.
And so that structure becomes really, really important. I think it's one of
the things we underestimate in today's environment. Now, in terms of sort of
how you deal with this as a parent, part of it is that I get from young
people all the time their frustration that their parents don't trust them.
Their frustration that their parents, even when they are well intended, are
not giving them the ability to be independent. I think that it's actually a
fair critique in an American society. It's really tricky I'll say with my
college hat on. Nothing drives me more bonkers than dealing with American
youth at the age of 18, showing up on my campus and having never experienced
any form of freedom, because they don't have handle it well.
One of the challenges is that you actually have to socialize your children
into freedom. And it's not a magical age. It's not like all of a sudden
they're 13 and they can go and do whatever. It's a process. It's a process
of letting them go a little further and seeing how it goes and sort of
saying, hey, that's enough, and trying to go back and forth. You want to
encourage a situation in which they get bumps and bruises but don't break
bones, right? It's this moment of how do you give them enough freedom and
sort of figure it out.
Now, the process of achieving this, no parenting checklist can actually solve
this for you. I hate the whole world of parenting advice that's like here's
a checklist. So what I want to argue is that you have to start with your
values. What are your values in your household? What is important to you?
What are the different mechanisms that you can use to get that? Some parents
use social contracts which are really an interesting experiment. Some people
use a lot of different symbolisms. For example, one of the things that I've
often offered parents about online material is the piggy bank solution. The
piggy bank solution is to go and buy a piggy bank, the kind that actually has
to be broken to get into, right? Go and put this in your house and say
everyone in the house, parents and kids, put their passwords in this piggy
bank. And put the date on them so that when you change your password, you
can put the new paper in without it being confusing. Put all those passwords
into it. What we're going to say if I feel like I'm worried about you, I'm
going to break that piggy bank and get access. I'm not going to use this
just as a moment of surveillance. I'm going to use this in order to say,
hey, things have reached a level of discomfort. And the funny thing is that
by you putting your passwords in too, they can also say, hey, I'm going to do
this and I'm going to hold this over you, too. Now, this is does not work in
all households. It really depends on the dynamics within your environment
and your house. But the thing is that moment of building something that's
symbolically about trust goes an amazingly long way.
So this is -- what are of the symbolisms of trust? What are the ways in
which you can support that? What the communicative strategies that you can
work with in your household to achieve that? There's not going to be a one
size fits all for this room, but I would strongly encourage all of you to
find ways to slowly give your children freedom over an extended period of
time. Because when they're 18, it's not like they have a magical
understanding of how the public world falls down from the sky. It really is
a process.
Okay.
So one, two, three.
>>: You talked about some of the changes in the environment, you know,
geographical distance and being able to make money, the physical meeting
points, et cetera, et cetera, and all that's driving kids maybe towards some
of these technologies. Have you done research in other colleges and
geographies where those changes may not have occurred? What differences do
you see in adoption of these technologies and ->> Danah Boyd: No. It's a good question. I spend a lot of time with other
researchers. I have not done fieldwork in these other countries, but I spend
time with other researchers that have. We spend a lot of time comparing
notes.
Certain things are sort of really funnily weird about the United States.
Although the UK and Australia do a pretty good job of emulating us in ways
that are not particularly good around all forms of fear mongering. Outside
of those three countries, what you end up seeing is a lot more freedom and
physical space, so the results of which -- for example, Italy. Italy was on
mobile phone so much faster than the United States, because their kids had
freedom to physically roam. The U.S. was actually one of the latest
adoptions for all forms of texting and mobile phone usage. Of course, our
economics around the mobile phone were also really weird. Because think
about it. I'm going to pay ten cents to send and to receive messages? So
I'm going to send you a message, here, pay ten cents. That's just weird. We
were the only country who did that, and it really stifled text messages in
really notable ways. So things actually were more about the mobile phone in
other countries in ways that they weren't in the U.S., whereas young people
in the U.S. were more likely to have access to a computer in middle to upper
class environments and be on that much more intensely than anywhere else.
So if you see even something like Facebook, which went across the globe, the
usage patterns around Facebook are so different per cultural context, even
when you stabilize across youth. For example, in a lot of, you know,
southern European countries, it was really always about a photo sharing app.
It was about getting together with your friends and taking pictures. The
idea that selfies only became an American thought this last year is crazy,
because that stuff has been going on for a long time everywhere else with
different words. So there's these weird dynamics of it. What you realize is
that these technologies fit into what the social practices look like. And
those social practices play out differently in different cultural
environments with young people.
You know, I struggle with it because there are other dynamics that play out
also differently. We can talk about that sort of later, which is issues like
bully. Bullying looks very different around the globe in part because of how
we age segregate where other countries do not have the same sort of age
segregation. Their dynamics around meanness and cruelty look different.
Also, for that matter, socioeconomic status really affects these issues.
They are all kind of different. Most of what I'm sort of laying out for you
are the things that most significantly affected middle and under class
American society. Working class American society has had sort of a different
contour around all this. It does vary and I'm happy to sort of offline talk
with you about specific countries, if you are really curious.
>>: You mentioned the hyper local names for the doughnut. Can you compare
hyper local to so, say, global names? How many of these start local and go
global and how many go the other direction?
>> Danah Boyd: So I'm going to orient it around teenagers and the teenagers
practices. One of the favorite things was when I started talking to
journalists about Twitter. They were like, oh, we hear Twitter is really,
really popular amongst teenagers. I was like, yeah, but they're not using
the service the same way you are. They're like, what do you mean? I was
like, they don't send URLs out. They were like, really? Then what do they
do? I'm like there's this thing called hash tags.
So one of the things that was really funny in early days of Twitter when
young people starting getting on it, they started playing with hash tags.
They did so in order to actually play with a larger audience. Justin Beiber
was a driving function of a lot of this. There was a lot of playfulness
beyond that. What was really interesting about that kind of meme culture is
that it was predominantly driven by youth from more urban environments and
more working class communities. And part of it was that they were less
afraid of being out in public.
When I would interact with teenagers about this, they would basically say,
you know, what do I have to lose, right? This is a great opportunity. I can
connect. I can be a part of something much bigger. They were much more
willing to do that kind of playfulness. There's one other really important
factor in all of this, and that is 4chan. For those who are not familiar
with 4chan, do not look it up. Read the Wikipedia entry and please don't go
any further. You will feel much happier about the universe this way
[laughter]. 4chan is basically the underbelly of the Internet, and it has
all of the logic of a 15-year-old boy, which means complete with a lot of
15-year-old boy humor and 15-year-old boy sexuality desires. So like I said,
don't look it up. But the thing that was really interesting about 4chan is
it was created by a 15-year-old boy who at the time didn't want to tell us
mother that he was running an international system out of his home. And so
in order to not let his mother know this, he couldn't ask for more server
space. And so he did something really funny. He made it so that in the
forum that he had created, once things went off the front page, he deleted
them because he didn't want to store them because he couldn't afford to store
them. That would require more servers and more band width and a whole
variety of other things. In order for things to get them back to the top of
the page, people needed to repost it. What people quickly realized was that
if they reposted it, they could modify it. And many of the most absurd names
that we've seen that have become highly visible, think lolcat, right, those
pictures of cats with impact font. That came out and that originated in
4chan. What's really phenomenal about 4chan and a lot of its cultural
ecosystem is that just like my cohort of geeky kids decided that we would
hack the security economy for fun, therefore getting us into a lot of trouble
as teenagers, this cohort has decided to hack the attention economy. As they
purposefully try to play with different memes, they would try to see ways of
disrupting up, my favorite of which was when they decided to punk Oprah
Winfrey.
Oprah Winfrey had been on one of her sort of scare mongering, terrible things
are falling from the sky, kids are in trouble messages for a while. And so
amongst the 4chan community, they basically decided to convince Oprah that
Pedobear was coming. Pedobear was the idea of a -- meant to be sort of cute
looking bear that was described as a pedophile. And so they were trying to
basically mix the furry meme with the pedophile thing, and it was -- we'll
stay out of the details. Anyhow, they did this across all of her forums.
They basically started this whole mechanism, and they managed to get Oprah on
live TV talking about how this new terrible threat of people wearing furry
costumes were out for kids. It was one of those moments where you're like,
oh, please tell me you just did not do that.
And of course, this
managing to get him
"Never Going to Get
did this. And this
is the same community that had fun with Rick Astley,
another award in ways that you never thought the singing
You Up" is going to be a good idea ever again. But they
was that playful group.
So there's these memes that happen as sort part of everyday cultural
dynamics, and the ones that come from the underbelly because they're having
fun.
>>:
[Inaudible].
>> Danah Boyd: The thing about 4chan is there's a bazillion of them that are
local. Well, they are not geographically local. They are socially local.
There's a bazillion of them that are socially local, but the big ones go
really, really, really big.
>>:
[Inaudible].
>> Danah Boyd:
>>:
That was totally local.
That's what I'm more interested in.
>> Danah Boyd: Those dynamics, I mean, that's most of it. Those little
playful things. It's just the end jokes, it's the humor. It's for fun.
for it.
Go
>>: Before you mentioned bullying and what's your take on [inaudible]
technology for bullying and he would love for you to expand on that.
>> Danah Boyd: Sure. So the question, for those of you in the ether, is
about bullying. I want to sort of put a context of bullying. I think this
is one of the areas that is currently most misunderstood.
Bullying is one small piece of a broad spectrum of meanness and cruelty.
Bullying is one of those weird terms that actually scholars have purposefully
located and tried to define in order to be able to measure it systematically
over the last 30 years. What is really ironic is that researchers and
teenagers usually never have the same language for things. And this is the
one exception to it. Bullying is defined by scholars as psychological,
physical and social aggression repeated over time by people of differential
physical or social power. Needless to say, teenagers don't say that. What
they say is it's the big kid picking on the little kid. It's the cool kid
picking on the geek.
What's challenging is that popular discourse around bullying right now uses
that word to refer to every aspect of meanness and cruelty from teasing to
criminal harassment. The challenge with using it for that broad spectrum is
that the interventions you need to do across that spectrum are very, very
different.
Now, why is it important that teenagers use this language differently? They
actually refer to meanness and cruelty with a variety of different languages.
They will refer to bullying when they feel like they're in a state of being
seriously disempowered either as the victim or because of a variety of issues
that are going on as the bully themselves. Young people will often use
language like "drama" or "pranking" or "punking" or just a whole slew of
other localized terms to refer to the things that are more interpersonal
conflict, best friends that fell apart usually over liking somebody else or a
variety of other sort of social issues.
What's challenging is that when adults come in and look at that dynamic as
bullying, they choose a victim and they choose a perpetrator. They often get
these dynamics wrong, and especially as we've moved towards more punitive
measures, we've mad made a mess out of it all. Of course, harassment,
criminal harassment should be dealt with as criminal. Then we end up with
these moments of treating all forms of meanness within the frame of that
criminal.
Now, what happens online is really tricky. When I started this research, I
expected that things would be far worse because of the Internet. I had heard
all of the anxieties. I heard the conversation about how things could just
go from school into home, et cetera. What has surprised me is that there has
been a phenomenal number of scholars who've done really systemic research,
national surveys, rigorously done from a variety of different angles and have
found that if you stabilized the definition of bullying, we have not seen a
rise in bullying in a significant way over the last 30 years. What's more
challenging in light of all this is that when you survey young people now,
you will find that they continuously report that bullying is far worse at
school with greater emotional duress and with longer term consequences.
So what's going on here? What happens is that if your child gets beaten up
in school or comes home with a black eye, you know something happened. If he
comes home grumpy, you sort of write it off as being another day in school.
When you see what's happening online, you have traces of it and you think you
understand the issues at play, but you often don't. That creates these huge
misinterpretations of what's happening.
Now, the other sort of issue of what happens because this meanness and
cruelty extends from school into the home life through the technology. I
would argue that's probably true. And for young people who are really
hurting, that is a significant factor in what goes on. Yet one of the things
I kept hearing from young people is that so does their support networks,
which is that when people are mean to them online, when they're at home their
friends rally around them. So that becomes advantageous. Those things
aren't just extending in terms of meanness, but they're extending in terms of
support. This is where I stumbled onto something that sort of blew my mind
and became a huge challenge for me.
A couple of years back when Formspring was [indiscernible], it's quite a lot
like azdot fm, for those who are familiar with this. This question and
answer service was regularly addressed in the media as being this terrible
site of the worst and the worst of meanness and cruelty. I was really
confused by this anxiety, this concern. And the reason why is that with
Formspring, when you receive a question, it only appears on your profile when
you choose to answer it. So I kept scratching my head. Why are young people
responding to the meanest of meanest messages that they might get? So I
called up Formspring and I said, Hey, can we talk? Can we try to figure this
out together? We puzzled it together and they went back and they looked at a
lot of the data of the ones that I identified that were particularly
egregious. And they came back to me with something really startling. The
same IP address was writing the message as the one that was responding to it.
In other words, what we were see was teenagers were anonymously bullying
themselves online and then responding to it. And sure enough, what followed
was unbelievable amounts of support from their friends. And so we saw this
dynamic of digital self-harm. Young people who would be cruel to themselves,
say things anonymously that were bad about themselves, in order to then rally
their friends.
So then Elizabeth Englander went and helped me survey a larger population
about this. And in the earliest rounds of this, we found that 30 percent of
young people in that first survey admitted to doing this. And that's when we
were like, what do we do with this, right? So what does it mean that we've
got this dynamic where meanness and cruelty and being able to stand up and
respond to it are part of the ecosystem?
Here is where I back up again. Meanness and cruelty is not just something
that's experienced by young people. We have actually turned this into a
national pastime. We think that meanness and cruelty is the way that we
should convey news. We think it's entertainment because this is what we put
on our reality TV shows. Worst, I go into tons of homes and sit at family
dinners and whatnot and hear parents complain about bullying and how terrible
things are with kids while sitting there talking smack about their bosses and
colleagues at work. Meanness and cruelty is very much modeled around all of
these young peoples lives in a ton of different contexts. And guess what?
Their emulating it everywhere. They are emulating it in ways that get
support in really complicated ways.
I really struggle with this because I've started to come to the realization
that we cannot intervene as a way that we think about young people only. We
have to think about this societally. Indeed, the researchers who have been
doing interventions on bullying have found that when you do things like
social and emotional learning interventions, what is really critical is not
just focusing on the young people, but it has to be a community-wide project.
It requires teachers. It requires parents. It requires religious leaders.
It requires everybody coming to the table and participating in this process.
What kills me is that around the rhetorics of cyber bullying, we have used
this to drive legislation in pretty much all of the U.S. states, that require
punitive approaches, especially by schools, in ways that actually are showing
to make things much, much worse. So I really struggle this dynamic because
if we want to actually make a difference around bullying, if we want to make
a difference around meanness and cruelty, our current punitive approach is
going to make everything so much more terrible.
>>: Can you tell me where you think like in two, three, five, years this is
going to be? Like where our teens are going to be?
>> Danah Boyd: So the question is two to three to five more years where are
things going. Couple of things is that everything is going to go visual. So
the idea of textual as being the dominant way of participating is going to
disappear more and more for the very simple reason that being visual is a way
of avoiding a whole set of search queries right now. Of course, many of you
in the room are working on undermining that one. So visuals are a way of
having some sort of control over things.
Things are also going to be about the phones. But what's really fascinating
about the combination of visual and the phone is that we're going to see a
lot of production of visual that sort of allows you to play with things. I
mean, my geo cities hat on of like the old days is absolutely rolling over
laughing at the idea that animated gifs, now called gifs, are back. This is
great. But the idea of gifs being back is a way of sort of playfully dealing
with visual media. I'm seeing a lot more of that.
I'm going to see a lot more of playing with sort of the obvious constructs of
how things should be. We're not going to see a one size fits all application
like Facebook again. I think that that's -- I don't think the business
community has gotten their heads around this, certainly not the venture
capital community. I'm still trying to get my head around $19 billion
[laughter]. We're not going to see a one size fits all app. We are all
going to see a whole slew of different apps. Part of it makes sense. You
know, think about it. You're a teenager. What is fun about hanging out in a
space where your mom is also hanging out with her besties? Like that's just
weird, right? So the thing is that we see this sort of movement to try to go
to a place where it's sort of more your place. But that also means that
we're going to see, you know, differences across socioeconomic spectra,
across communities, et cetera.
The place where I sort of raise a warning sign around this is that people
will be paying attention to the sites and services most used by the
privileged youth. I think this is going to be a really tricky set of issues.
I saw this when we were split between Facebook and MySpace and it's going to
get uglier in this way. But I do not expect a one size fits all. I see
certain tends, but not one size fits all apps. Back there.
>>: Sort of the disassociation that's happening with teens in terms of -like I have two 13 year olds. And they don't use their phone to actually
speak. They use it for text and for data and for liking things on Instagram.
And they are also in that stage, right, where they are starting to like boys
and that kind of stuff, right? But they will say things and communicate in a
way textually that they cannot do [indiscernible], which is really super
troubling for me. And do you think that's going to just continue and get
worse?
>> Danah Boyd: So I was sitting with a teen boy, and he was working on
trying to flirt with a girl that he had a crush on. He basically spent an
hour trying to craft the perfect 160-character message that looked like it
was casually written, right [laughter]? That was an amazing moment of this
is fascinating. One of the things you realize is that there is nothing fun
about flirting. It's awkward. So especially if you are a teen and you're
trying to figure out how to sort of flirt with somebody else and doing that
in person and being rejected and all of those questions of anxiety that many
of us in the room haven't gotten over. That is challenging. And that moment
of taking that risk and being rejected, there's a way of setting an emotional
distance from it that becomes very valuable through this textual medium.
This becomes both a blessing and a curse. I say this because, you know,
watching young people sort of experiment with this, make sense of it. I'm
also watching them do it because they don't have options to hang out in
person outside of school. And you know what, school is not the best place to
flirt. So there's this challenge of where do they have moments of truly
being able to hang out with their broader peer groups. That goes back to
sort of the changes I was talking about. But one of the places where it's
actually been sort of turned on its head and where I'm trying to figure out
how to ramp this up, especially for those of you who do more learning
algorithm type work, I'd love to talk to you on this. I'm on the board of
service called Crisis Text Line. This is a place for young people to text
with counselors. This is a lot like the old hotlines. What we've learned is
even historically young people weren't calling hotlines. They called them
once they were actually considering suicide. But getting them to sort of
back up before you're at that level of crisis and work through with
counselors to get help was extraordinarily difficult. We made a bet that we
could actually do this via texting in a really significant way.
We have not even begun advertising the system that we've put in place, and we
receive over 100,000 text conversations with counselors per month with youth.
This is young people who are reaching out for everything from how do I come
out in my community to, you know, I'm dealing with my mom abusing me to I'm
thinking about suicide. And that emotional distance that at one hand can be
so challenging can also be something that allows you can people to connect,
to make a difference, especially when young people are really, really
struggling.
Now, the thing about -- the reason I'm going to sort of refer back to the
learning folks is that we also realize something important about the data
that we could acquire this way, which is that we can actually start to see
what kinds of counseling are working with what youth based on the data
analysis that we see in terms of what's coming in. When do they turn off?
When do they not engage? What is not working in terms of those distances and
those dynamics? We can also start to see patterns across the country, and we
are indeed seeing patterns around LGBT issues, around bullying issues, places
where communities aren't handling it. So there is this amazing moment to
then think about how to deal with young people holistically and to use this
moment of distancing.
Now, what I would say back to your broader concern in terms of your children
is that, yeah, it's going to be different. I hate to say it, but it's going
to be different for the rest of their lives. Many of you have to actually
interact with your bosses via email or with other colleagues via email. You
have to interact with people in a textual medium even if you'd rather pick up
the phone. I always have to say it's fascinating for me in this company when
I get calls from the sales organization. I'm like, phone, wow, you called
me? I'm like what are you doing? And I'm reminded that some -- there is
division even in this company about how we operate. And many of us do
communicate by text. These are different ways of communication. They have
different strengths. They have different weaknesses. How do we make certain
to put them into the context where those strengths can be really used? How
do we make certain that young people are pushed towards environments where
that's not the perfect environment for this?
But this is where I come back to that issue of letting young people be
hanging out with their friends. The book starts out in Nashville, because it
starts out when I was at a high school football game. Which one of things I
continuously see in the U.S., parents are saying, oh, young people, they
won't get off their devices. But whenever I go these environments where
young people are allowed to sort of roam with their entire class, they are
not on their devices. They are talking to each other. They are socializing.
They are flirting. They are doing a variety of things. They are picking up
with their phones to coordinate. They are actually answering them and
whenever they answer them, the next thing out of their mouth inevitably is,
"Mom!" So that is the only one who is ever calling. And they are taking
pictures. But the thing is that the more time that they have to do those
face-to-face environments, the more that they will learn this.
Communication, interaction, you have to learn it. And we can't just sort of,
you know, create a sort of separate isolation box for young people until they
turn 18 and then expect them to be able to socially navigate this world.
They won't.
>>: I'm curious if you've done research on what is the age that kids kind of
transfer from the peer to peer, like at a very young age, to primarily having
their social interactions, you know, via technology or textual interaction.
>> Danah Boyd: So first, it's important to realize that the transition from
acknowledging that your classmates are just classmates to acknowledging a
whole process of friends does vary. You hit it in versions around elementary
through middle school. There is a gendered aspect to this. Girls recognize
sociality statistically at an earlier age than boys. I say it's gendered
because there's a lot of variation around kids who do different kinds of
gender identities. You see this factor playing out in significant ways.
There is no magical age. You will find 14 year olds who are extraordinary
social, and you will find 14 year olds that are like, Huh? What? People?
And I have to say as a geek and as many of the other people in the room, we
might have probably been on the delay end of thing statistically, and so I
think it's sort of a really tricky thing.
In terms of face-to-face versus technologically mediated, it really comes
down to the environment they are in and how much freedom they have at that
point where they start paying attention to their friends. I will acknowledge
that this is a collective action issue, which is that if you as a parent
allow your kids to go out and be able to do whatever they want, but none of
their friends are allowed to, guess what? It's always going to be about the
devices. That's one of the big challenges I see in a lot of more privileged
communities. It's not really about the devices. It's about where can I go
to see my friends? What kind of freedom do I have? And how much is
somebody's mom going to be looking over all of our shoulders? I keep saying
it as mom because that is what I hear from young people. It's really about
moms.
Interestingly, I will say, as a little side note, grandmas are like an
amazing special case in all my fieldwork. They are allowed to look in on
anything. They are allowed to comment on anything. Grandmas are especially
cool. So the thing about it is like get your parents involved, like get your
parents involved as just being wacky and crazy, because they are amazingly
loved. So I feel like we need to sort do a lot more adopting of older people
and to get them to sort of hang out. Because they are allowed to be crazy.
But this variation is less about the technology and the age and more about
the kind of social constructs, not just for your child but the whole group.
Yes?
>>: I have question about the need for external validations. Will that go
normally for teens, what they call people of all ages, the very fact that
Facebook has the social media that's so active. I did something and I want
external validation of that [indiscernible] and I see people under pressure,
teens and adults like, somebody posted something, now I'm morally compelled
to like it, because if I don't like the friend would feel bad. So pressure
among teens, how many friends you have. So there's some kind of competition
going on that when, okay, I have 20 friends and I have -- on my post, I have
50 likes versus yours which got only three. And people kind of again on the
other side of the spectrum kind of liking things without even reading it
because it is my duty to like it, and I'm not liable to read everything that
you have posted. A real example is somebody posted, Hey, mom died, and two
things happened. When five minutes there were ten people who liked it. So I
don't know how if somebody's mom dies, what is there to like? That is
something to feel sad about. For the person who posted it and the first
thing you should be doing is arranging for the funeral and maybe crying your
heart out, rather than seeking a validation from your friends, Hey, my mom
died. So among the teens is that need for external validation kind of
brewing or do you see that it has always been there just that the medium has
changed?
>> Danah Boyd: So the question for the ether is about external validation
and the process of liking. So couple of different things to keep in mind.
First, there's an amazing amount of [indiscernible] scholarship by a man by
the name of Robin Dunbar, and he talks about how monkeys do a lot of
grooming. Humans do a lot of gossiping. It actually provides a lot of the
same mechanism. We tell stories, we share, because if I make myself
vulnerable to you, you will do so in return as a way of building these
connections. Humans are social creatures and that becomes really critical.
Another really important set of literature I want to sort of tag and them
we'll come back into this is a work, a book called Geeks, Freaks -- why can't
I remember it? I'll come back to you if you want to know it. What he argues
-- Morey Milner, Jr., what he argues is that young people, one of the few
things they have control over in their lives is status. Everything else is
taken away from them. Status is the one thing amongst their peers that they
have complete control over. This is one of the reasons why we see popularity
dynamics, where we see all sorts of hierarchies and whatnot. All of what
works out and what is acknowledged within the status dynamics of young people
and for that matter adults are locally understood norms of recognition and
support and validation. So then we see this technology that is being used
across the globe, and it's being used very differently. So this is where the
like is a really funny one. People have this really odd mechanism by which
they can acknowledge somebody else by which they can nod. Indeed, that's how
a lot of people end up using it. They are not necessarily actually meaning
like. They are meaning I hear you, I acknowledge you. That's part of one of
the challenges that we have online, because in this situation when I'm saying
things, you are sitting here nodding along. It's a way that I can actually
recognize that you are understanding me and I can modify what I'm saying in
the hopes of reaching you. This is part of the challenge of communication.
In an mediated environment like Facebook, what ends up happening is that I
don't have a good way of saying, Are you actually hearing me? I've put this,
do you recognize it? Are you listening? So what we see is that the like
button has become repurposed to do precisely that. It is a way of trying to
acknowledge it. I might not have a comment. It might not be so important
and so significant that I can respond to you, but I want to acknowledge you
that I've heard you.
And that's where it's really tricky in this mediated environment of how do we
find a way of acknowledging each other's humanity? How do we find another
way of recognizing each other? These new tools over and over again have
found different ways of trying to work within that. Sometimes it's about
that lightweight acknowledgment. Sometimes it's a lot more about status and
concern about popularity and whatnot. This is fundamentally something that
we have seen people struggle with all over the place in every environment
we've ever dealt with. Whether it's about what clothes you wear to prove
that you have a certain kind of capital resources, whether it's about -- or
social awareness about what constitutes cool. Whether it's about, you know,
the ways in which you are in the pecking order of, you know, who owns what
car, who lives in what building, who has what job, there's all of these
mechanisms of things that are a part of our life that we use this way. For
young people, a lot of has been about these social mechanisms. What's been
very interesting is that adults have done it, too. The result of which is
that -- I will say once adults got on to Facebook and were doing it
themselves, they calmed down about teenagers which was kind of nice. You
realize that we're not that different.
I think one of the challenges is how do you deal with the question of
insecurity, the lack of confidence versus the dynamics of how to be
appropriate within your community. A lot of that comes down to the questions
of conversations. How do you say, why is that we're racheting this up? What
is appropriate about this? As adults, I'm saying, not even about teenagers.
Why are we doing this, right? Sometimes there are very good reasons.
Every sort of Microsoft group has their Twitter account where they try to get
increased large numbers of followers. I will say one of the things for those
of who are working in that space should know, I'm onto you. Most of you have
bots following you in large numbers. It's one of the things that kills me.
I started noticing of how many of Microsoft accounts actually purchase bots
to follow them to look like they are really important. So we haven't stopped
doing this even in a professional world, because we want to be seen as
important. It's one of the things that becomes really tricky, because it
plays out at our personal levels. It plays out at our insitutional levels.
And it really is about recognition.
>>: [Indiscernible] engaging successfully with teenagers [inaudible] or are
they? What do they need to do to get better?
>> Danah Boyd: The question is how are brands successfully engaging with
young people using media. They are about as successful as they've ever been,
which is to say not very. You know, if it fits into a young person's life,
it fits into the status dynamics, guess what? It plays out that way.
Sometimes it's appropriated in ways that brands are not necessarily cognizant
of.
I had a very, very awkward encounter on a marketing panel once because a
representative from Coca-Cola was very proud about all their social media
marketing activities and was talking about how many friends they had and all
this. I burst out laughing, which is not a good way to make friends on the
panel. And the moderator comes to me and says why are you referring to this.
I'm like, I've noticed how popular Coca-Cola is, and that's not the Coke
people are referring to. So that's also these moments of re-appropriation
that don't go over so well.
One of the things that I actually got confirmation at Town Hall, which was
really exciting to me, or maybe it was actually this week. So Facebook had
this sort of mechanism of what would appear at the top of the news feed. And
young people had quickly learned, and accurately so, that if they put brand
names into their posts, their posts would go to the top of the news feed
amongst their friends. So I see these teens post as being like la la,
friend, friend, friend, Nike. I'm like why is Nike suddenly in there? Of
course, they had figured out that Nike had been one of the brands that had
paid to have things at the top. So it was a sophisticated way of
understanding that kind of mechanism, which is a different way of using or
understanding brand relationships.
When brands try to interact with young people directly, they're as sketchy as
any other adult that tries to interact with them directly. So there's like a
whole why are you here, go away kind of feeling. It becomes a really tricky,
you know aspect. Young people are very aware of advertising culture. They
don't necessarily like it. Their feelings towards it are about the same as
adults. But they, you know, want to be able to hang out with their friends.
So they are hoping all of it will go away. That said, they will play with
it. So for example, whether we like it or not, gmail is sort of more
popularly used amongst young people in schools. The reason it is used
amongst young people in schools is it's one of the few things that is not
blocked. Because they don't block Google. So the result of which is I see a
lot of young people during the day using gmail to communicate with one
another. They know the ads are there, and there's nothing funnier than
getting your friends to get inappropriate ads. So if you are 15 and you are
like, I'm going to write these messages to my friend and I'm going to white
out the text and my friend will get diapers ads. Yes! Like that's funny.
So this is that moment where you see this kind of awareness, because you see
it through the playfulness. But it's a way of sort of living in a world that
is brand saturated. They know it. But the other thing is that they have got
very little control locally in terms of where they spend their money outside
of more privileged communities.
>>: You had talked about some of the different factors that affect teens
sort of across geography and across socioeconomic status, but what about
gender? Like are there significant differences that play out between
different genders and gender expressions and social media?
>> Danah Boyd: So the question is about gender. The thing I struggled with
in writing or dealing with gendered aspects of what I was writing in my book,
particularly in terms of normative gender practices, is that most of what I
was seeing online reflected gender practices [indiscernible] large, which is
to say all of the different things that we would see about how young people
socialize, the way in which they form bonds, the ways in is which they think
about entertainment versus sociality, all of that gets reproduced online. I
don't see anything that is magnificently or radically different about the
online versus what is happening offline.
There are certain obvious power differentials that come when we talk about
gender. And certainly we see this in terms of how girls' sexuality is
addressed at-large and fears around sexuality. But even as I was surveying
parents around their fears about sexual crimes against their children, I was
surprised to see how it was uniform across the board. It wasn't actually
just about girls, even though girls tend to experience the brunt of the
cultural fear around it, which was sort of surprising to me. But I struggle
with it because in some ways it mirrors and magnifies all of the dynamics
that are already at play on each one of these different issues. Certainly,
even things like bullying and drama. Drama is a gendered practice. It is a
gendered female practice. Pranking and punking is a gendered male practice.
That doesn't mean that there aren't boys and girls that are doing the
opposite, but that is how it plays out.
The other sort of aspect to take into about the gendered aspects of things is
where this fits for career youth. I want to sort of put one note of caution,
because this is something I struggled with regard to career youth. Like I
said, when I was growing up while I was a teenager online, coming out was
amazingly safe space. It was fabulous. You had amazing amounts of love and
wonderful attention. That really changed and the fear mongering that I heard
among queried youth and strangers are dangerous really affected them most
significantly.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, we saw suicide rates decline correlated with
coming out [indiscernible] for LGBT youth. By the mid-2000s, young people
that I was talking to were not willing to talk to strangers online, even when
they were getting beaten at home, even when they were getting beaten up at
school. I was really struggling with that.
And then It Gets Better campaign came in. At first I was like this is an
attempt to be empowering. That's interesting. I started to see all of these
teenagers make It Gets Better videos. At first I was like, oh, this should
be interesting. What's going to happen? I started realizing that the
teenagers who made these videos really wanted love and validation and
support, especially young people who are dealing with gender identity related
issues. But across the board of the LGBT spectrum. And rather than finding
community by making those videos, they were getting beaten up at school more.
I was like, oh, that's really difficult.
One of the pieces of data that I have not been able to work out and I'm still
sort of struggling with, but I'll put it out there is that in the year that
followed Savage's creation of this sort of campaign, I tracked reported
suicides, media reported suicides of LGBT youth. Many of the kids across
that year had made It Gets Better videos. I'm really struggling with whether
or not I've got data or not, but one of things that becomes really clear is
that these issues of trying to deal with gender, trying to deal with
sexuality in a very visible way don't always get supported online and that
reenforces what's going on offline in ways that can be pretty damning.
>>: Couple of different issues. You talked a little bit about cyber
bullying, but you didn't really catch the situation where it's not
necessarily somebody looking for validation from a friend, but true cyber
bullying where somebody is trying to alienate somebody else. As a parent,
I'm certainly very, very concerned about that. I'm also -- and you said that
this doesn't happen very often. As a parent, I'm certainly concerned about a
predator scenario. I mean, how can I protect my teen children from both of
those situations? Basically, you know, life-altering events that will have a
dramatic effect on them in this short-term and potentially long-term future.
>> Danah Boyd: First, bullying. Bullying sucks online or offline. This is
no doubt about that. There is no magical solution. I know there are people
here working in schools or working with schools. There is no magical
solution. There is no one size here is a way to protect your child from it.
There is no way of saying we can stop what's going on. What you can do as a
parent is really work on building out resilience and empathy. These are your
two goals overwhelmingly. How do you respond to somebody who is hurting you
with empathy rather than trying to retaliate? Because one of the other
things you should know is that in bullying situations, it is quite likely
that those who are on the perpetration end are experiencing situations beyond
that environment that you might not know about: abuse at home, addiction,
sexuality issues, a variety of issues going on. So figuring out how for your
child to be as empathetic as possible and that is hard in those situations.
It's very, very hard and it's a process.
The second is a structure of resilience, which is that all of us encounter
negative situations in our life. And when your children are on the receiving
end of that, trying to build out that resilience, build out the strengths,
finding the ways in which they can work with the situation and address it.
It doesn't -- you can't make the hurt go away. You can only work on trying
to strengthen and give them different possibilities. You also, as a parent,
you can't fix it. There is no way of punishing somebody and it will make it
all better. I think this is one of the things that is so hard as a parent,
because you want to be able to fix everything that's terrible to your child.
But that's one of the things, empathy and resilience. That should be sort of
the mantra of trying to work with it. But it's not easy. I can't give you a
solution to it.
Regarding sexual predation, so this was one of the ones that sort of killed
me, as I was trying to actually work through this. I'm going to go through
some of the data in order to get back at what you can do. First, there is an
often misreported number that is used by the Ad Council or rather
misinterpreted by the public member. You will hear numbers like 1 in 5 or 1
of 7 of kids are sexually solicited online. That's accurate, but it's not
what you think. Most sexual solicitations come from young peoples peers.
It's not about adults. The remaining part, most of them are about 18 to 22
year olds. And the sexual solicitations that occur online, almost all of the
young people continuously report are not emotionally challenging.
So then let's flip it. This is, by the way, the work of the Crimes Against
Children Research Center, David Finkelhor, who is phenomenal. So Finkelhor
went back in and decided let's actually look at sex crimes involving
children, involving the Internet. What he found was that most cases fit a
very stereotypical portrait. This is about teenagers pretending that they
are older, looking for sexual interactions online, usually on the services
that were popular five to ten years ago, not the ones that are popular now.
Seeking attention from older people, knowing that they are older, knowing
that it's about sex, meeting up in person knowing it's about sex and doing so
repeatedly arguing that they're in love. Now, this is not to say that this
isn't deeply problematic. There is a reason statutory rape laws exist. They
are an abuse of power. But the thing about it is that these young people
actually fit a very particular profile. They are usually from households
that are abusive. They are also usually faced with a plethora of other major
issues in their lives. The cases of young people being attacked directly by
strangers are rarer online than they are in any other context in which we
operate. That includes schools. That includes churches. And yet we focus
on the online. We can't imagine excluding young people from church or
excluding them from school, right? But we deal with this in this way that we
think we can solve it from the online world when we see these young people
sort of reaching out and crying out for help.
Another key issue, rape is real. Sexual victimization is real. Some of you
in the room will have to face this either personally or because of your
children. But the thing that's really hard about this is that you will most
likely have to encounter it not at the hands of a stranger that you don't
know, but at the hands of somebody in your community. Young people who are
victimized are most likely to be victimized by their peers. What's really
challenging to me is that, as we spend all of this time focusing on the idea
of a stranger danger, of an online predator coming and reaching our children,
we don't give them the tools or the wherewithal to deal with how relationship
issues gone wrong. You know, a boyfriend that is drunk and pushes things too
far. What do you do? A way of understanding the sexuality and the sexual
expectations of your children is really hard, preparing them for that. Not
just about adults, but about their peers.
So no one wants to talk about sex with their children. It's not fun. But
part of the big challenge in light of all the sexual victimization is that we
actually have to start talking about sex. And we have to talk about what it
looks like to have a healthy relationship, and when that relationship is
abused in particular ways because that is actually where things get really
dicey. I fear that one of the things that we use, especially around
technology and sexual acts, is that we use technology to sort of take away
the responsibility that we have on dealing with all of these other complex
issues. We can't rid technology and then rid sexual victimization. In order
to address sexual victimization, we have to empower young people long before
they are actually dealing with sex.
On that really uplifting note, I'm getting the sort of look. The exciting
thing is that I have do have books for sale, which sort of buy my book, buy
my book, which is sort of fun. I will sort of stand back there. I will sort
of autograph for anyone that wants it. I will answer more questions back
there. But sadly, I have to stop doing questions now. Thank you. [Applause]