>> Kirsten Wiley: Good afternoon. And welcome. My name is Kirsten Wiley and
I imagine the Microsoft Research visitor speakers series. Today we welcome
John Palfrey here to cuss with us the digital natives, the first generation of
children and young adults to grow up in the a wholly digital age.
Their exposure to infacility with today's most advanced technologies has given
them a radically different view of life on this planet and has also led to a variety of
concerns from parents, such as are parents right to worry about Internet
addiction. And I'm going to add one of my own. Is it okay for your five-ear-old to
want to set up a website called ryan.com?
John Palfrey is professor of law and vice dean at Harvard Law School and a
faculty director at the Berkman Center for Internet and society at Harvard Law
School. He also chairs the Internet safety technical task force made up of
leading Internet service companies and non-profit groups focussed you had on
children's safety.
So please welcome me in welcoming John Palfrey to Microsoft Research. Thank
you.
[applause].
>> John Palfrey: Thanks. Good afternoon and thank you so much for the
chance to come and talk about this book with such a brilliant group here at
Microsoft. Many good friends and some new friends as well in the audience, and
we're very grateful to have this forum. Also to talk with people who aren't here in
the room. And we've got high hopes for having a conversation together.
One think I wanted to just point out is that technology little game here that we're
going to try playing, which is a live question tool. If anybody has a laptop in the
room, please feel free to log into it. It's the URL is up here, it's
cyber.law.herber.edu/?/borndigitalms. And if you are remotely watching this, I
hope that you might actually log into the question tool. And if you want to lob in a
question synchronously that would be great and we'll try to figure out how to get
that into the conversation as well.
So the book that I wrote with my friend Urs Gasser who is a professor in
Switzerland is called Born Digital, and the idea behind the book really was to
counter a series of myths that we think have been pervading kind of the public
discourse about kids and technology.
Our idea was, after having heard so many stories about how these kids are bad
or how these kids are in danger or how these kids are dumber that we wanted to
figure out who has done great research out there much in the way that I'm sure
MSR does at the beginning of a project and scans what other brilliant minds have
done up with, and then to do our own research and then to figure out which of
these myths ought to be busted, which of these myths should we take down and
which ones are actually serious, what are the things that we as parents, as
teachers as technologists ought to worry about as our kids are growing up in
totally digitally mediated ways.
So that was basically the premise, to say let's talk about what is emerging as a
culture war, culture war with our kids as pawns in this discussion about whether
they're in fact a worst generation somehow or somehow better so by mode what I
want to do is talk about some of those myths and what some of our research
showed.
I'd love to be interrupted at any point in the room with hands waved or on the
question tool be delighted to be interrupted as I go along. Then I want to show
you a few provocations, things that young people in fact made as part of this
process and then open it up relatively quickly for questions and have just a
conversation about it.
We thought about this book less as a research book for academics but more as a
book for parents and teachers and really to be a conversation starter. So I hope
we'll -- I hope we will do that all here today.
Okay. So for starters, here's some of the myths that we took up and some of the
myths that we sought to bust. The first one is really the simple one of saying
very often I think people talk about kids as all the same in this respect, that if you
were born in a certain moment in history that you use technology in a very similar
way.
Obviously this is for many in the room a simple statement, but there are only a
billion people on the network to begin with, right, so out of the six billion people in
the world, there are lots of people who don't have access to the technology,
Contero [phonetic] and others who work in India have seen this and worked on
this digital divide problem, the literal divide.
But I think there's another aspect to this, which is as we talk to young people we
found that there's a fairly large gap in terms of skills between those who are born
with the right moment in history as their birthday and who have access to the
tools, so you might have it in a library or in your school, but who don't actually
have the same skills as other kids. We saw a very wide range of the abilities and
sophistication to deal with how to learn and how to be safe in this environment.
So I think the first sort of key myth is not everybody born after 1980 on the planet
is a digital native. There's nothing kind of native to it, it's a population, not a
generation. And it's a great of people who have a position of privilege and that
we ought to worry actually about those who are on the other side of this
participation gap as Henry Jenkins and Ester Hargaty [phonetic] and other good
scholars call it. So that's kind of myth number one is that we're talking about a
population, not strictly speaking a generation obvious I think to many of you here.
The second myth is that these kids are bad, that somehow by virtue of having
been born at this moment in history that declension is happening, right, that this
generation is worse. I think there's always this sense from an older generation
about a younger generation, oh, my God they have access now to television,
they must be horrible people. If you scroll back in American history, you know of
course the first generations were worried about religious declension, right, they
weren't as religious in 1760 as they were in 1660 and so forth. So we've got this
history of always worrying about this badness.
There's also the sense that every time a new technology comes into the world
that there's a moral panic around it. And I think it's fairly clear from the research
we and others have done that these kids aren't bad in any meaningful sense. It
is true that sometimes when our conversations are mediated by digital
technology so that it's sending an e-mail and before you know it you hit send and
you cringe and you say oh, my God did I really send that, we've all had that
regret that sometimes we're meaner through these technologies than otherwise.
But I don't think this is something that we can extrapolate out.
And we should talk about the topic of bullying. We'll return to this in another
context. But I think on the badness front, many people have jumped on this idea
that cyber bullying is this new terrible phenomenon and it's quite right that most
of the research shows that more people, more young people are getting into
bullying situations when they are online. But I think one of the things that we
found in talking to kids about it, is that the bullying is not any different particularly
than the school yard bullying, right. It's simply that it's exposed in this
environment that all of a sudden it's something that parents and teachers can see
happening in front of them and it's recorded so later on you can come back and
see it.
And the dynamics, though, are very similar to the school yard environment. It's
just that where some of the social things are happening. So I think no -- myth
number 2 is I don't think there is data to suggest that these kids are bad or
meaner in ways than another generation or they're just facing different context
and different challenges.
Myth number 3, that these kids are somehow more in danger than they were
before. Chuck Kausen and Jules and I are participating in something that is
called the Internet safety technical task force and this is 49 state attorney
generals absent Texas have entered into a joint statement, query as to where
Texas is on this the, but entered into a joint statement with My Space initially and
then Facebook subsequently, and the output of that is a group of us who are
working over the course of this year to figure out whether technologies have a
place in terms of keeping kids safer online. And one of the things we've been
doing on this is reviewing all of the literature and all the research around whether
kids are more in danger today than they were before.
And it's quite right that there are terrible things that happen to some things when
they go online, they get lured into offline encounters and people do bad things to
them, absolutely there's data to show that that happens, absolutely there is data
to show a growing number of young people who are getting bullied in online
environments. But what I don't think is there in the data is that kids are any less
safe today overall than they were a decade ago so that it is the case that kids are
not safe, that there is risk in kids lives and is happening in different environments.
But it's not the case that this is wildly different than it was a decade ago and that
many of the tools and common sense that parents and teachers bring to it might
in fact work just as well today as they were before.
Myth number 4 that I want to do, let's see, Lilly is laughing so I'm going to pause.
Did you see something that we should take up here?
>>: [inaudible].
>> John Palfrey: Oh, yes, that's true. That's true. Okay. So Roman. Is Roman
in the room, just out of curiosity? Or Roman is remote? Or Roman is not saying
who they are. This is authentication. Anyway, hi Roman, if you're out there.
Says have you had a conversation debate with Mark Bauerlein, the Dumbest
Generation; if so, how did it turn out, if not, what things would you want to ask,
slash tell him?
I look forward to having this conversation. I haven't. I did download on my
Kindle the Dumbest Generation and have read it. I disagree with it. I expect
that's obvious. I'm about to talk about how I think this generation is not dumber
than any other generation. I think it's an interesting conversation to have. And
there is some data in that book that I think is worth taking up.
One of the things that I think is worth wondering about is there's a fair amount of
data that suggests that young people are less likely to read a book cover to
cover, right, that the people today are somehow less likely to engage in the kind
of sustained argument that takes this form, right? And you know, as people,
someone who has written a few of these, you know, that's sort of troubling, I
guess, but I think a few things are wrong with that argument.
First of all, I think it is facile to say it's a dumber generation. I don't think there's
any way that the data add up to dumber kids today than they were before. But
that was sort of going into the data and saying I just don't think it says that.
But the second thing that I think it misses is really some of the insight that Lilly
and others here have, which is that kids are learning in just different ways in
some cases and it's not that sometimes that's -- the or that's always better but it's
different, right, that kids actually are getting information in different formats.
One thing that our research showed very plainly was if you asked a bunch of kids
how did you look up some topic that you were interested in, so we used the
Spanish American war as one example, if you were given a high school report to
go look up the Spanish-American War, what would you do? I suspected it's
obvious to everyone in this room that 100 percent of the kids we talked to,
whether they were here in the US, if they're in Switzerland, they were in the gulf,
they were in Shanghai know they went on one of these things, right, they opened
up IE or Firefox or Opera or whatever else they had they would go to their
favorite search engine, Google or MSN, whatever, they would type in
Spanish-American War, they would look at the series of 10 things that came up,
they would find the Wikipedia entry for Spanish- American War, they would click
on it and then you finally got to some variation. And I think this is where I would
engage the dumbest generation conversation which is I think that what is
interesting to watch is this is where the participation gap plays out for me. It's
that some kids are very sophisticated about what they find at Wikipedia. You get
to the Wikipedia page for the Spanish American war and in fact at that point you
say, you know what, my class mate could have been here a few minutes before,
could have made some edits just to mess me up and I'm not going to take this as
the gospel, right, this is possibly something that's not actually true. I'm going to
go find some other sources. I'm going to scroll to the bottom of the page, find the
other links that are there, triangulate, come back to it, maybe actually read some
books or something else about it and kind of put this together. And the most
sophisticated kids absolutely tell you that story.
The less sophisticated kids, though, are the ones who really just do cut and paste
it, right, they say okay, I went to Wikipedia, there it is, that's the encyclopedia
entry, they kind of translated that directly, and I think this is where the challenge
comes back to parents around teachers is to say are we giving kids the skills to
figure out how to learn when this is one of the first sources you get to, right, and
are we giving them the skills to discern from credible, to non credible links at the
bottom of the page and are we giving them the skills that say actually you know
what you should walk into a library, right, you ought to go browse on some
shelves or even digital shelves that might have, you know, different books here
because you might learn something and it might in fact introduce serendipity into
it. And I'm not sure we've gotten to the point where we're teaching kids to do
this.
And I love the notion when [inaudible] was showing us earlier is having a game
on the xBox, am I giving away something, I am non- public here, but having a
game for the xBox which enables kids to create something, right, to create their
own kind of a game and she's described the way that kids can make the way to
blow up things and that's kind of exciting and then you can pass the game to
other people. I really just think that there are different ways in which young
people are getting this information, processing it, remaking it and in the most
sophisticated cases that they actually may be learning much better by virtue of
this process than before. But it's that they learn -- the they're learning differently.
And I think we as schools and technologies and parents and so forth, we need to
-- we need to engage that.
So those are four myths. I want to pause and make sure I'm not missing
anything else critical at this point. Great. We'll come back to some of those
which I think are of interest. Kim, did you want to [inaudible] something?
>>: No.
>> John Palfrey: Okay. So I wanted to take up in a way the question that Lilly
had on there which is the process actually of writing this book and thinking about
what it says about what a book is at this moment. You're a fancy book seller
here, and of course we will continue to have books that take this format. But one
of the things that struck us, especially after doing the research and doing it in a
collaborative way with lots of be students involved in the research itself was that
the fact of having it in this kind of analog form, the thing that's on the shelf and is
sold at the back of the room is sort of an artifact, right, it's a wonderful artifact, it's
a great technology, it's great that it takes this form. And I now run a big library
and we have 1.7 million volumes and still we count in terms of the volumes that
we have and we still spend millions of dollars to but the volumes. But if you think
about it, the book itself is really no more than a series of bits, right, it's a series of
bits that we've collected over time, so it starts with an idea that there are these
myths we'd like to bust some of them and bring some sort of conversation to the
topic. So we go out there and we read what everybody else has read, right, and
we do a literature review and we take some notes about that. We've been using
base camp as our sharing but it could be SharePoint or, you know, whatever
else, MOSS now I guess it's called. So we use different tools to share it.
And then you know, we sit down and we have a conversation about what do we
want to say about it, right, and then we kind of wrestle it into another format and
you write the book and it's 388 pages on a Microsoft Word document, right, and
we put that up into the cloud as well, and that's shared up there in base camp,
and then we find somebody who's willing to put it into this format for us, right, and
then send it to Kim Rickets, an send it, you know, all around to different -- to book
stores.
But the fact of that printing is sort of an artifact of the past in a sense. And we
also recognize that some kids are actually going to come at this topic very
differently. We recognize that some of the kids we talk to on our research are not
going to read it in a book. We actually wanted kids to interact with these topics
and to help us.
The other thing that we recognized at that moment was at the point at which we
hit the publish button, right, and it turns into this book, it's frozen in a difficult way
and it's obsolete so I recognize though it came out last week, it is an obsolete
book. So we wanted to address this by saying let's make the book actually be a
series of digital things. It's borne in a digital format. And we've put it into some
different formats over here. So we like wikis at the Berkman Center where I
work. I know that Lilly and others like wikis around here, you have a cool Internet
wiki project going.
So we actually started before writing the book in the regular Microsoft Word
format we started doing it in media Wiki and as we did our research and asked
our questions and so forth you put the entire book but roughly speaking by a
chapter up here so on each topic we created a page and as we were writing
different things up and reading different resources, we put it in this format so that
anybody could log in, create an account and edit our book, in essence, as we
were writing it.
It's not exactly the book in the format of, you know, 388 pages for copyright and
other reasons which we could get into, but we put it up here with the notion that it
would live in some fashion, it would live as a place that people, particularly young
people could have a conversation about it. One fun thing that happened last
week with the Wiki, which I think also gets to this nature of the book question, is
we got an e-mail across the transom from a guy who writes for O'Reilly. His
name is Andy Orum, and he had some slightly cranky things to say about our
book, which was fine. He said I'm writing a review and I'm going to put it on
O'Reilly. I was sort of prepared for this, which is the book was written for parents
and teachers and if you read it as a technologist you might have the reaction that
says nothing is really new here, so it was sort of his review is you're not saying
anything new. For a technologist, that's fine.
And he said but what I'm going to do is see if you're going to eat your own dog
food. I'm going to put the review before I publish it in O'Reilly up on your wiki and
people can have at it. You can edit it and kind of play with it and so forth. And
sure enough, it's a little hard to see from here, but you can log into
digitalnative.org and see it. Andy put his review in the making up here and lots of
people, myself, young people, other researchers and so forth put comments as it
went along. And I don't think anybody actually edited his wiki entry, this was a
curious thing, most people just sort of commented after in italics.
But sure enough, a week later, he published the same thing to the O'Reilly site.
It was edited by virtue of this collaborative process with young people and others
and came out in a slightly different form than if he had pressed publish on that
Monday. So I think there's a fair amount in this format and this mode that might
portend good things for the future of books that we absolutely need to press
publish in this format, it's a wonderful technology. I like my Kindle but its battery
tends to die on long plane flights and it's actually a bummer when I actually wish I
had some of these hard copies there.
But I also think that the process of putting it in a format like this may be an
interesting thing for having the ideas be, you know, the focus of what a book is
rather than having it be format specific. I don't know, Lilly, could I pause there for
a moment. Would you talk about the wiki that you guys have going and how that
kind of fits into the same story?
>>: Well, I guess, you know ->> John Palfrey: Or do we have a mike actually.
>>: So you know, we're doing a wiki at Microsoft.
>> John Palfrey: Can we see it on the screen or no?
>>: Yeah. Let's see. Can I steal your thing?
>> John Palfrey: Uh-huh. It's down here.
>>: Introduce myself? I'm Lilly change and I run a research group called
creative systems and the things that we work on here in the team relate a lot to
design and social computing. And so one of the things we've been doing is we're
creating this wiki, usually it's wider and so the picture's -- but you can kind of see
what people have posted and we just sort of describe the wiki and what the
purpose is, and then you can also see new changes that people have and
confront attributions that different people have made.
And really the goal is to kind of collect, you know, everything about Microsoft
that's public and have people in the company sort of edit it and author it. And so
I guess kind of like you were saying, it's just -- it's a living place and the way that
people discover and find information is often sort of biased by where you sit, so
the more open you make the information, then the more it can kind of be a
discussion, you know, the more you can figure out what's going on.
So like, you know, you guys should all just go there, micropedia, click on your
page, write something about yourself or your project or your group and then just
see who else comments on it or, you know, go to a project that you're interested
in. So you should just check it out.
>> John Palfrey: I'm imagining some wild typing in the audience here, people
editing their entries.
So Lilly we were walking over here and you said you're a wiki lover. Why are you
a wiki lover and would you mind giving us some critique on our digital native's
wiki, how we might make it a better conversation with young people?
>>: Yes. I have become a wiki lover. I don't know what's happened to me. I
think what I love about it is it's really easy -- first of all the way you author
information I think is different when you author it to be shared. So you compare
that to an e-mail. A lot of times I'll write an e-mail which is really useful for
everybody, but I don't really author it in that way that it could be understood by
everybody. So I think you author things in a way that they can be understood by
everyone and then you also author it so that it can be broken up into lots of little
pieces. So what I love about your wiki, you know, is you kind of just break it
down all the time ->> John Palfrey: We're live over here. Sorry.
>>: Oh. Yeah. So just the table of contents at the top level and then the ability
to kind of drill in to the different chapters. So, you know, it's not -- it's not linear in
the way that a book is. I can decide what I'm interested in and just sort of drill
and see and search it. And all this information can be decomposed and you can
search for it and find it from anywhere. So a lot of people might come to these
topics not because they know anything about the book, but they might just be
searching on digital safety and it might come to a page and find it that way. Just
like with Wikipedia, most people don't go to the home page of Wikipedia to find
things, they're coming in to Wikipedia from all different places.
So I just love the -- I love the scenario of the book review, right. I mean typically
those would be completely disaggregated and you would never be able to
actually -- I just wanted to go read it, I wanted to read, well, what did he say
initially, what did everybody -- how did they comment on it, what was that
dialogue, and what was the review. I'd love to see that for any review of
anything, right, because so often you're just presented with the facts at the end,
but you don't know for those who care why, you know. And it's great to see all
the additional research and you know the additional opinions and thought that
went into kind of the final output. So I think just like most products or anything
that you make sometimes the process is more interesting or the process that
happens after it gets published. So what's the discussion afterwards and what
change happened because of the book I think is really interesting to see.
>> John Palfrey: Any other thoughts on this wiki business? And sort of the
future of the book? Any willing to pipe up? Not on that one. I'm just going to
check the question tool to make sure we're not missing something good from the
asynchronous side. See if it comes up. No, that's not displayed. We'll try in a
moment.
So I wanted to push ahead a little bit in the story and say as we were thinking,
also, about this digital native crew, the people who we saw learning in this slightly
different way, we wanted, also to give them a chance to tell the story, not just in
the wiki, but to try to translate it. So I think we all have this intuition that young
people may not be as likely to take the book off the shelf and read it cover to
cover. Maybe they're more likely to read a chapter at a time or something and,
you know, maybe there's good in that and bad.
But we also wanted to give them a chance to put it in the three to five minute
video format, right, the sense that some of their colleagues might be well more
likely to watch something on YouTube than to read this, and we wanted the same
research to come through in a way of format that might actually get them talking
about it. So we hired a bunch of interns this summer and we gave them a little
lunch money and the chance to hang out in the Berkman Center, and we
basically threw the book at them and we said, look, we've written this book, read
it and figure out what interests you, what in this book is something that you think
is, you know, worth interpreting and retelling and make a video and make a video
that tells the story of one of the chapters.
So I want to show a video in a moment which is -- I had nothing to do with other
than throwing the book at this person and giving them some computing
equipment, this was their version of our chapter on digital dossiers. And the
young woman involved is named Conner Tuari [phonetic]. She's a high school
student from Egypt. She -- family is from India. She's a wonderfully smart young
creative person as you'll see in a moment, but she had no particular technology
skills before this happened. Should was not somebody who had been going to a
technical school and was you know a computer programmer, this was somebody
who was a regular smart kid from another culture who comes to the United
States, is given a series of tools and an idea and a job to interpret it.
And I want to just play you, if we can beg forgiveness for three or four minutes of
video, what Conner Tuari says about digital dossier.
>>: It's about all of us have a digital dossier, but many of us have no idea what it
even is. Your dossier is the accumulation of all the digital tracks you leave
behind and this accumulation did not just start last week nor even a year, it
started before you were even born. The line between your digital dossier and
your identity is constantly shifting. One way to see the implication of this
movement is to imagine how information goes into the file of a child born today.
Let's call him Andy. The first entry into Andy's file occurs while he's still five
months into the woman. It is a sonogram. Probably framed by his parents or
even forwarded via e-mail to their closest relatives. The same picture will also be
copied in Andy's hospital folder and into file for the pediatrician who will take over
after his birth. As the new baby grows, so to the number of items in his digital
file. Andy's bar-coded bracelet lists facts like gender, time of birth, surname and
more. Friends and family will come to meet the baby, bring gifts and take more
photos probably with phones or digital cameras. These photos are then also
uploaded to other Flickr feeds or Facebook albums as part of the welcoming
process.
Andy's parents will use their phones to spread the news with SMS text
messages, saying something along the lines of healthy baby boy born 6 pounds
at 5:30 p.m. friends will also post to the Flickr feeds which will conveniently
contain the multi attitudes of Andy's pictures. This process of capturing and
spreading pictures will continue for Andy's entire life with pictures of the first time
Andy sits, stands, walks, and talks. As Andy grows, he will now be able to
independently share information about himself. He registers as a user in new
pets where he fills out his name, age, birth date and other details. Half of the
blanks may not be even necessary to fill out, but Andy does not notice the
significance of the asterisk as described at the bottom of the page. And so Andy
grows bigger, taller and broader. And with had him grows his digital dossier. As
an adolescent he is sucked into Facebook where he poses pictures, videos and
information about his likes and dislikes. Facebook in turn deposits cookies into
his web browser tracking his activities. He signs up for a GO account and
regularly uses Google to research information needed in school assignments.
Google in turn keeps tabs on all the searches Andy makes from his IP address.
In college he buys books from Amazon, which asks for his mailing address and
credit card number. Andy's credit card company adds even more details to his
dossier, the date, time, location and price of every purchase he makes. And as
Andy moves around, the GPS in his cell phone enables his service provider to
know where he is and how many times he has been there recently. He is also
filmed by surveillance cameras whenever he walks into secured college
buildings.
When Andy gets married, his dossier expands to encompass all the information
about his wife, and they start a web blog together to share their thoughts and
opinions online. Together they compile shelf upon shelf of digital tracks, files that
are recorded and stored under their names. And when Andy has his first baby,
aptly named Andy junior, the cycle is started all over again. These data points,
some publically accessible, others safeguarded to various degrees by companies
and agencies that collect and store this data, make Andy's identity as it forms
even before he himself begins to shape it. And Andy's digital dossier will even
grow after his death. Photos or videos of the funeral, RIP messages on MSN
messenger or his Facebook date his posts. Andy probably never new how large
his dossier was. How aware are you of the tracks you leave behind? Want to
learn more about your digital dossier?
>> John Palfrey: So this video made me incredibly happy, I have to say. Not
because of the topic, which is serious, which lot of people in here at Microsoft are
working hard on, but the notion just sort of the educational notion that with
extraordinarily widely available technologies and no particular skill, smarts, but
no particular skill a kid could take this set of concepts, do her own research, she
pulled lots of examples that I hadn't put into the book and create something as
evocative as that, you know, with basically a few months of time, right, or maybe
a month of time. There's something in that, I think, that is the core story here or
the core story that I took away from writing this book was that in these kids is not
a dumbest generation but rather is a set of skills and ability to tell the narrative of
their times, the ability really to take the story of their generation and to tell it in
these really interesting ways. We just have to figure out how do you engage that,
how do you make it so that that creativity is the leading story not the fact that
there are only, you know, paying attention to 140 character, you know, Twitter
posts or whatever, that I think are what others may focus on.
I wanted also then to show just one other of these videos, in part because it's
kind of fun to watch videos but because I think it's also demonstrates a second of
the big issues that we came up on, which is going to be obvious. This is the
second part of a three part video. I'm not going to play the -- all three, but I think
its importance will be obvious.
>>: The hardest part I realized immediately was the sense is of isolation, which
is that you felt kind of cut off from your peers, or at least I did. It felt to me as
though everyone was doing it and somehow I was caught. There was like a
persistence of a stigma in a way which is like do I want people to know this about
me, isn't it kind of embarrassing? It felt someone embarrassing to be caught, to
be named in the newspaper, to be kind of the victim of this.
Half the people that I talked to about it would ask me, you know, what should I
do? But on one hand I wanted to tell them, you know, hey, be safe, like you
probably don't want to do it. But on the other hand, I had a very different
reaction. I didn't want to help an organization that had hurt me. I was supposed
to kind of like infect the mentality that file sharing is okay with this entity virus.
No, it's not okay, it's dangerous. And I kind of ultimately decided to try to go
somewhere between those two paths. I eventually started telling almost
everybody I knew, you know, people would say something to me like how are
you doing, man, how has life been? I'm like pretty bad, I got sued by the RIAA.
And you know, their reaction would usually be like whoa, whoa, dude.
Before I was sued by the RIAA I never interrogated what I was doing, really. It
was un-- it was an activity that was largely unreflected upon. And as -- when this
was going down, I remember thinking wow, I did something wrong. And I still
believe that I did something wrong. Like I didn't have a right to take that music.
What's just dangerous here is there's a voice of establishment speaking down on
you which is raining a morality of this is right and this is wrong. You don't own
this, you can't take it. You can't make with it. And when you read these articles
in Wired Magazine, New York Times you know major news sources with the
music industry losing money I'm shocked that they can't see the obviousness of
we alienated the most like lucrative consumer pool being teens and young adults,
and when you alienate your primary consumer tool, it's hard to both get them to
buy the Britney Spears album while you're busting them for downloading the
Britney Spears album. You know, and I think these things need to be rectified.
>> John Palfrey: So I wanted to show this one last because it made me happy in
the way that Conner's did, although I think it's equally creative and interesting in
a young person sort of telling the story of again something that lots of their peers
have no doubt experienced. But really to make a slightly different point. Which I
started with talking about some myths that we were busting. There's some myths
that are out there that happen to be true, right. So just to put it as plainly as
possible, of the kids that we talked to and interviews and focus groups basically
100 percent said that they got their music the same way. The vast, vast, vast
majority of kids said they got it when they were given the cloak of anonymity
through LimeWire, Kazaa or something, you know, pretty much illegally and they
pretty much knew it was illegal in the way that they -- in the way that's acted.
So there really was the fairly pervasive activity of doing it in this way that one
expected. The only variation to this, and this won't be of any surprise at all to
those of you here was there's a few kids in every group who got it legally. But
they got it through iTunes, you know, they didn't get it at Tower Records, they've
liquidated their stores, where they got it through their Zoon and in every case
those kids have been given some money, right, they've been given some money
on a gift card that was then loaded up, and they were doing the exact same act,
right, they were just downloading music whether it was from the music store that
you guys offer or music store that some other paying service offers or from
LimeWire or Kazaa.
And this made us reflect on if you put kids into the position of having the
conversation about it, will they think about it any differently, right? And what I
think we saw with Zack McCune here was a recognition that it was actually
wrong and yes, he had to pay a fine. But he got involved very much in the
conversation about file sharing through the making of this video. And this
actually comes around to a project that we're working on with some of you here.
Through your LCA group we've been working with Tom Ruby and Jeffrey Manny
and others on how could we in fact put kids in the position of being a creator and
have them think a little bit more thoughtfully about piracy, but also having them
think a little more thoughtfully about the creative act of actually being the people
who are making something and then having those rights.
So we're making a curriculum, an online curriculum in the form of some games
which put kids in the position of creating some digital work, much like these
videos, and having them think about the rights that come in from other sources,
whether they're licensed officially or creative comes or otherwise and then
licensing those rights outbound. It seems like this is another example of the
kinds of things you're playing with here at Microsoft Research as getting kids
involved in the making of the content in fact could help them think about the fact
that there are artists or there are creators on the other side who need to make a
livelihood. And I've been amazed by the extent to which when you do put kids in
this posture, they start talking about it very, very differently. It's no longer the
recording industry is the man or this big company is the man, but it's rather, oh,
yeah, I can see how as a creator I would have these balancing interests. Maybe
I want to become famous, I want to give it away, or maybe I want to become rich,
I want to sell it in some fashion.
So that was sort of the outcome that we had from the piracy conversation. Can I
pause there. Any -- yes, sir?
>>: [inaudible] difference between the scenarios, though. If you give a kid a card
for iTunes you're effectively buying a song for a dollar. But if they are going to
buy a CD for one song they want, they're buying a song for $10 or $15. And you
know, what I've seen from kids that are downloading stuff, their reaction is more
against I want one song not 14 crappy ones and one good one. That's the
pressure that they're undergoing. And that once they get away from -- iTunes
opened up the opportunity and Zoon, too.
>> John Palfrey: Right. Zoon has got right in.
>>: To allow you to buy the thing that you want. And I've found that the pressure
from the kids that I've talked to is considerably less about stealing anything, it's
just they want [inaudible].
>> John Palfrey: Absolutely. I mean I think it is about availability, it's about
format, it's about access, and then what can you do with it ultimately, right? So I
think it's a really good example why they don't buy CDs, but it's also why the
attempts of downloads that we know were the original attempt by the recording
industry didn't work, right, it was -- or the formatting, you have to buy $15 worth
or $19 worth. Absolutely. It's -- there is something of a distinction there. Sir?
>>: One time I signed [inaudible] I joined a music service and then I turned it off
after a while because I wasn't -- and they asked me the question of why are you
leaving us. Two of the choices were -- there were a bunch, but two of them were
you have more time than money, you have more money than time or something
like that. And I thought that was a great question. I checked the I have more
money than time. I don't have enough time to use the service. And in all the
examples you've shown of kids and kids you've talked to, it seems to me that the
one common thread among all of them is they have more time than money, and
in fact, even the ones who legitimately get music get it from someone else paying
for it.
>> John Palfrey: Right.
>>: In the same way that, you know ->> John Palfrey: And it's always like the crappy lacrosse playing girl, and you
know, whose dad has been giving her the money and then all the other kids look
at them in the focus group and like you're just the rich kid, forget it, you know, it's
sort of ->>: But even in terms of the one you created the thing about digital dossier, it
took some months to do that.
>> John Palfrey: Yes.
>>: Months that people who are older almost necessarily won't have. Even
those that participate on a wiki probably have more time than [inaudible] it seems
to me that if there's a gap, it's in the gap of the amount of time available to devote
to these things. Particularly a conversation time thing which takes more time
than other people have. Did you look at that in any of the studies in terms of the
kids and how they act and how that abundance of time that they might have that
older generations simply don't have affects their perception of these things and
the amount that they participate in?
>> John Palfrey: Yeah. [inaudible] you were raising your hand. So let me put
you on the spot.
>>: [inaudible] you know, I think it's interesting that we do a lot of e-mail and
that's a lot of time [inaudible] and I think sometimes there's a bias to think that,
well, you know, writing your wiki entry is less -- maybe it's just about learning a
new tool and changing habits. But I do think kids in some sense, from what I
see, are just more comfortable [inaudible] and the ability to reuse content is much
higher and [inaudible] so for example if you think of I can change my status in
Facebook, now all 400 people are going to see it it's one message that goes out
to a lot of people but I wouldn't ever e-mail 400 people, it would just be weird and
[inaudible]. So I do think, you know, we should think about how much time you
[inaudible] going to be [inaudible] and see. You know [inaudible] more time we
into it be [inaudible] sometimes [inaudible].
>> John Palfrey: That's really interesting orientation and question, which is, you
know, if you have more time do you do nor creative stuff, right? What do you do
with the time that you have in and we didn't do any AB comparison in our data
sets too small and so forth to say if you had more time, would you spend it doing
this and so forth. But one thing that seemed clear to me is we have these kids in
school many hours a day for, you know, a couple hundred days a year, right?
There's a lot of time when they're actually doing some form of learning and
they're doing lots of learning outside the school environment, too, right? They're
getting news and information all the time and many of them are, you know, doing
creative kind of recreating things.
And I think it came back to me in the sense of are we using that time well in are
we in fact teaching kids the kills to sort between different bits of information some
more credible than others. Are we giving kids the skills to realize you don't just
have to receive the information, you actually can create it yourself or recreate it
and be part of the conversation in that way.
So I am not positive that it's because they have more time or have less time, I
was just thinking, you know, are we using all the time that we do have and the
time that we are doing these things. In the category of myths that I was hoping to
bust or otherwise, I should admit one thing on this score, which was I came at
this research hoping to find lots and lots of kids who are doing wildly creative,
incredible things, right, and I'd just be able to write a celebratory book, you know,
civic activism is just alive and well on the web and creativity is this great wedge
into an active bunch of citizens or semiotic democracy is going to transform the
world and we sort of sought out some of these kids and you know what, there
aren't that many kids doing incredibly create I have things. You have to structure
the environment, you have to give them the space to do it, you have to give them
the encouragement. And there's nothing new there, right? That's parenting,
that's teaching, that's being a librarian, that's being a mentor is giving kids the
space and the encouragement to do it.
The other aspect of this sort of myth in the making, and you know, this is really a
sense that a lot of us Web 2.0 enthusiasts have been putting out the kind of kids
have gone from consumers to creators, right, so we're busting our own myth in a
sense. When I asked that question about the Spanish American War and how
you got the information, after looking at the Wikipedia page and figuring out what
they did to find the information, I then said so how many of you have ever edited
a Wikipedia page. So how many people in this room have edited a Wikipedia
page. So this is a pretty good crowd. I don't know, maybe a quarter of the
people in the room. And Microsoft Research building 99 have actually edited.
So within our sample of you know a hundred kids or whatever in these in depth
interviews maybe two or three of done any editing of a Wikipedia page.
And then the follow-up question was how many people have made a substantive
edit like you added a fact or you added something. How many people have
made a substantive edit to a Wikipedia page? So actually substantially failure
people, so maybe a fifth of those who said they did made substantial edits. None
of the kids we talked to, not one, nobody had ever made a substantive edit to a
Wikipedia page and when you asked what did you do, they changed a period to a
comma or something. They were the OCD kids who didn't want to make a
mistake or something on this page, right. So it wasn't that there's this huge
ground swell of all of us, you know, kind of using these wonderful social
technologies as much as we wanted to see that and celebrate it, it wasn't there.
And so one of things we've ended up saying in this book is in the context of civic
activism, in the context of innovation or creativity, yes, the accordances are
there, the technologies gives us to do it, yes, there are shining examples of
brilliant kids that are doing it, but it's not a ground swell, right, we just don't have
the data to do that to me as the glass half full person or even the glass like tiny,
tiny, tiny bit full person, I'm thinking that's a seed of change, right, that's
something that we can encourage as teachers and parents and so forth to make
the case for why all this is really important.
Did you have a hand up in the back?
>>: I just wanted to mention that sometimes the rules are different [inaudible]
and she was using LimeWire and she said it was legal. She went [inaudible] was
not [inaudible] didn't use it at all and I think removed it and went to a certain
university and didn't know that actually they were [inaudible] the files in their
machine were accessed by SQL and then she got into -- she was sued as well.
And she did actually had no knowledge of participating in something illegal.
>> John Palfrey: This borne out very much in our research. I glossed over this
fact when I was talking about piracy, but there's a huge range of how confused
these kids with about legality. And it's not that surprising. Copyright is a complex
topic, right? Not very much of us went to law school, even those who did we
have trouble figuring out intellectual property, even those of us who are paid to
teach it have problems working out the doctrine, right? This is a very complex
thing. And the most important doctrine in some ways for this story is the fair use
doctrine, right in this is to say once if something is per se illegal, what in fact is
one of the excuses? Well, fair use is a four factor balancing test, right, it's the
right to hire a lawyer it's not exactly something totally intuitive for all kids. I mean
if you think about copyright, it's one of these things that was of no import or, you
know, didn't attach for any kids 200 years ago, right? It was only relevant to
people who wrote maps, charts, and books, right. Whatever the things that were
covered by copyright. That's just totally not true.
200 years later, if you're interacting with these digital media every single day
creating and recreating and ripping it off, whatever you're doing, every day
copyright matters to you. And there's wild, wild confusion, you know, among
kids. So that's we're thinking about it as a curricular matter, is there a way that
through a game or through something engaging something creative, we can slip
in some other doctrine to say, you know what, it actually is illegal to do that, but
here's what's not illegal, here's what you can do under the law, these are the -you know, the rights for the defenses, whoever you see it that you do have. And
in fact, we encourage you to take them up and act on them. Sir?
>>: [inaudible] I don't know if you're in a question period.
>> John Palfrey: Absolutely. The whole thing is a question period I think.
>>: A slightly different issue but it the -- you talk about [inaudible] a lot of
decisions, a lot of choices. I was just wondering if you saw any research on
whether being exposed to a lot of multi tasking or decision making with the many
options, whether you can get better at it, whether kids get better at it or adults get
better at it, because that seems like a critical issue.
>> John Palfrey: It's a great question. So our data set is very small. It's subject
to lots of critiques like convenience sampling and so forth we have nothing over
time, so I can't answer it based on our own research. There are lots of great sort
of educational theorists and so forth seemed more peppered. Of course many
years ago through a whole crowd of people who are doing research in this area
right now that I would point you to if you're interested in digging in more to this
the MacArthur foundation did a series of six books, digital media and learning
series. Our colleague Dana Boyd is one of the authors and others. And there's
tons of great data that have been done on different subtopics here that would you
know sort of maybe get you an answer to that question that I don't have.
One I would say just a couple things about multi tasking which certainly came up
substantially. I think multi tasking is one of those attributes of digital natives that
we talked to, and you know, sometimes it's constructive and sometimes it's really
lousy. So it's pretty clear if you are teaching a class now at the Harvard law
school, I would not have so much people looking at me, you know, it's just not
that. Everybody is like Seth, they're looking down into their laptop. I mean, it's a
very weird thing to give a lecture to have what is a semi-Socratic dialogue with
everybody looking into their laptop. And in many cases they have multiple
screens going, right. And every once in a while you'll be talking about something
serious like the future of democracy and some people start laughing, right. And
you know, either some IMs are going back and forth, they're making fun of my tie
or you know somebody sent out an interesting twitter feed or updated their
Facebook status or whatever. So, you know, I think that there are instances in
which young people are using the technology to multi task during class which are
definitely not good, right? There's no extent to which when I am talking about a
complicated legal doctrine that it's a good idea that they should be IMing with one
another to make fun of my tie, right? Forget about me for a moment. That's just
plainly not paying attention the way that you are.
On the other hand, if you're in a classroom where you're able to use the
technology in a way that people are looking stuff up, people are triangulating,
people are bringing new facts into the class, people are maybe expressing
something in a different environment or maybe trying to use the question tool,
you know, I think there are ways that we can make multi tasking work for us.
Just as a humorous society on multitasking, one of the interviews was doing in
south Korea, talking a bunch of young boys, they were describing multi tasking
and they were showing me windows. They had many IM windows going at once.
And the game they had was how many IM windows could they have with different
girls without messing it up so that one girl knew they were talking to other girls.
And there was like eight or nine. It was really quite extraordinary how many they
were coming up with. Please.
>>: Yes, I'm interested in how -- I don't have any idea, how they are parsing their
information. For example, I grew up in the old days, but, you know, I remember
one of the things I remember so closely -- clearly is my professor when he would
-- you would ask him a question and he would look up like this, and you would
watch him thinking. And that's one thing. And another thing was all the research
I had to do to get information now I would just go to the computer and go find it
maybe. But I gained so much knowledge and so much experience just by going
through that research and most of what I discovered in the Jules of my education
were from that process. And the thing that just concerns me is that kids aren't
getting that or they're not experiencing that. Or maybe some kids are just
because that's their nature, but on the whole it's like it seems like everything is so
fast and rapid, it's like, you know, respond immediately, contribute immediately.
There's not this kind of like thing, process, thinking process that's encouraged
that I see.
>> John Palfrey: So this is another one of those like great, impossible to answer
in a short way kind of questions, and you know, and I think this is a really good
example where interdisciplinary research is so crucial, right, so it's something you
guys do here, it's something we try to do at the Berkman Center, which is to say
this is a problem that faces all of us, whether we're a law teacher or you're a
researcher here or your business is you know, how do kids come across
information and how do they process that particular information, how do they get
more information, how do they then form judgments and so forth, and how does
the speed, this faster rate of interaction affect that. So I think you'd have to be
part neuroscientist, part, you know, psychologist, part educational theorist,
whatever, kind of put it together and we should figure out how can we work
together to answer a question like that.
I'll give you just a couple of short observations though from the research we did,
which again is just sort of qualitative and it really was you know trying to dig
deeply on a few things but without huge kind of force of large sampling sizes.
One was I was struck by the need for contemplative spaces. The extent to which
one of the threshold questions we ask kids was do you have on you at this
moment a digital device of some sort, right, something that attaches to, you
know, some network. And, you know, basically a hundred percent of kids had
some form of a cell phone or a PC or a you know Blackberry or Sidekick kick or
whatever on them, very few Blackberries among our example, but my own
crack-berry problem is evident right here. So there is some extent to which it's
an always on sort of connectedness. Lots of kids. I wake up first thing, I open
my PC, I see who friended me overnight, who commented on my blog, that kind
of thing.
And you do wonder, are there enough contemplative spaces out there? We work
at a research center that studies this technology at Harvard and it's a great, fun,
vibrant place. I totally love it. You walk down a hallway and it's like 50 people
hitting you at all different angles and it's totally crowded and vibrant and people
coming up with good ideas.
And we had a visitor a few years ago who is a professor from Switzerland, very
eminent senior professor, and I was having lunch with him at the end of the
several months he spent with us. And in the elegant way that Europeans do, we
were having a glass of wine at lunch, a nice restaurant, so forth, and I said to
him, professor G, you know, what was your reaction, did you like it? Did you
have fun? And he kind of looked at me for a second in that way that you were
describing, kind of looked up and had a moment of a think. He said, yeah, it was
really interesting. I learned a great deal. And he said but one thing that struck
me was I never saw anybody reading at your research center.
And this was something that has stuck with me since he said it was, you know,
we sent a lot of time processing, talking, interdisciplinary, you know, doing
whatever and writing stuff up and writing books and doing research and so forth,
but are we stopping and doing enough reading. And of course one thing was it
was generational, right? I'm reading all the time, it just might be a PDF on my
laptop that he says me looking into my laptop or it might be, you know,
processing lots of little bits of information in various ways. I am constantly
reading, but, you know, are we reading in the same way, are we contemplating it
in the same way. You know, do we have the open spaces to think as much?
And you know, that -- I am still wondering about that. Do we read enough. The
other just similar anecdote more than anything the Harvard law school library,
which I now -- I'm director of has this unbelievably big, huge reading room. It's
just a beautiful old space and it's got lots of books and so forth. And it's packed.
It's absolutely packed with students. I've never seen then doing this, taking
something off the shelf and reading it. But they're there. They're there and
they're studying in these spaces. And I sort of wonder why. Like why do they
come to the library? The connection is no faster, it's not like the Internet is better
in there. But there's something about the physical space and contemplation that
that is an intellectual hub, right, they're there using the technology in very similar
ways, but it's somehow about creating an architecture where kids actually think.
And lastly, many of our classes have laptops down. In fact, we have contacts in
which teachers are just wonderful Socratic teachers of contract law, and it's much
better that we do it this way, that we shut off the computer for that period of time.
And I really -- I know, I think one of the challenges back from the research is how
do you figure out what is down time, down time away from the technology in
contemplation? You know, when do you kid the kids outside and just make them
play ball, right, or whatever else, ride a bike or put the laptop down. So I think
your question is a great one.
>>: [inaudible] it will just use the technology area with a lot more energy and a
lot more thoughtfulness.
>> John Palfrey: Absolutely. I think that's exactly right.
>>: How is technology widened the generational gap any mean, parents didn't
have the same experience their kids did.
>> John Palfrey: Yeah.
>>: They're not feeling as connected, so they probably can't sit in their parents
chair and understand, and so how is that, how has that created any additional
[inaudible] generational gap?
>> John Palfrey: I think the distance is creed mostly, to be honest, by the
parents. That's created by the parents and the teachers who come at an
experience and say this is so weird. Like what you're doing is so weird and
remote. I suspect it's not true of most Microsoft employees with their kids. I'm
not worried about you at all. I am worried somewhat about teachers who have
been teaching for decades and decades in schools wonderful devoted teachers,
but when they say kids learning in this way, they just say you're dumber, right,
and say I don't have a way into that conversation.
I do want to pivot to the safety conversation in a moment, because I think this is
one of the places where the generation gap plays out where there's a lot that
parents and teachers could be imparting to kids if they just start the conversation,
if you just get into the mix to some extent. So I don't blame the technology so
much, I just think that a lot of times parents check themselves out and teachers,
too.
>>: So bridge the gap, it's more important educate parents than the kids.
>> John Palfrey: We wrote this book for parents and teachers, I mean
absolutely. My friend and I as we were trying to figure out what to right, we were
sitting in a bar having a beer and saying like, so what book are we going to write.
And he looked at me and said we have to have the courage to write a book for
parents and teachers. Forget about the academic, forget about the
technologists, that's the audience ultimately. That's my theory but could be
wrong.
>>: [inaudible] was a teacher for years. She told me [inaudible] destroying my
daughter.
>> John Palfrey: Was it?
>>: No.
>> John Palfrey: Good news.
>>: I said to her, you know, my daughter was 10 or 11 at the time, and I said ask
her about the auction house and how to capitalize on the various [inaudible] of
money per week and per day and per item. And half an hour later she walked
away and said God that kid knows her stuff.
>> John Palfrey: Pretty interesting, right?
>>: Now, she was a teacher for years and she [inaudible] own household my
mother the teacher doesn't understand what my 11 year old is picking up on her
own. I didn't teach her how to manipulate the auction house and rip everybody
off [laughter].
>>: She figured it out [laughter].
>> John Palfrey: Fabulous.
>>: But if you had, say, you have a presidential campaign level of funding to
solve this problem, where would you start or do you even think that's necessary
[inaudible] itself?
>> John Palfrey: What's the it that we want to fix?
>>: The complete misunderstanding between teachers and the kids that they
teach.
>> John Palfrey: To I think as with anything in a time of transition, you need
experiments, right, you need lots of different things that are working to see what
pops. I think that's why a research center like this is perfect. I'm dying to know
how this game works out with blowing kids up -- blowing things up. It will be very
interesting to see if that's a good one or a bad one and the [inaudible] and so
forth.
One thing I really want to do but haven't got the money or the time to do
something called the youth technology corps. And the idea basically is whenever
we've gone in with young people to schools and parent teacher groups or places
where you have, you know, teachers and students to talk about safety or any of
these very specific issues when you have dynamic young people who describe it
and will show off a Facebook profile that will show how you get, you know, some
music on to your Zoon or whatever it is, it is unbelievable how quickly just light
bulbs start going off and conversations start. It seems to me so dead simple that
what we need is, you know, is crack into the conversation. Now, there are a
zillion demands on people's time, there's too much in curricula already, parents
and teachers have too much to worry about, but I actually think this is a really
important thing for the economy and safety of our kids and so forth.
So I would love to see the youth technology corps which is you know a bunch of
kids who are 16 to 21, or whatever, who spend their summers or, you know, part
of their -- it's kind of an internship going around to lots of different schools and
just like forcing this conversation to some extent and say let me show you world
of war craft, let's go through it and let's have a conversation about what's
happening. Seeing that conversation and that context for what's going on you're
absolutely going to get really interesting, you know, common sense, you're going
to get absolutely interesting pushback from kids and so forth. So that would be
my like fund it, Barack, please, or fund it, McCain, please, kind of project.
>>: I'm interested to know whether you have a sense or anybody if the room has
a sense of how long the generation gap is likely to persist. I mean lots people
who have children who are 25 or 30 and [inaudible] Facebook or [inaudible] or on
Facebook and it was a -- is there a natural point in which it kind of goes away a
little bit or are those people suddenly so busy this their jobs that they lose total
touch with [inaudible].
>> John Palfrey: [inaudible]. I haven't really thought on this. Yeah?
>>: I was a high school computer science teacher for a while years back and the
generation gap I don't think will be a problem in 20 years because the older
teachers are retiring and the younger recent college grad teachers are all coming
in as [inaudible] Facebook, their students and everything, and so I don't think I'll
be a large problem. And on the other thing I was thinking of bringing back here,
your comment on what [inaudible] data, I think the problem in lies with the
teachers, right? It's an online encyclopedia. We don't teach kids how to do
these things, how to edit things on Wikipedia, and it's not the most, you know,
intuitive thing to go and do Wikipedia and edit things and, you know, how the
whole process goes.
To a kid it's like you go into a library and [inaudible] on the encyclopedia.
Librarian would not be happy, right?
>> John Palfrey: Right.
>>: And so I think one part is, you know, including, you know, technology growth
and curriculum in schools as a part of, you know, history and stuff, you know, like
a teacher can be showing, you know, this [inaudible] search Wikipedia but the
Internet and stuff. So I don't think [inaudible] right now that includes all these
things that [inaudible] to be create I have and ->> John Palfrey: [inaudible] a lot of this time in schools that I saw, computer
class is like a separate classes. It's like if you go over there to a computer lab as
opposed to think this is just life, this is research, it should be in any class where
it's relevant and not in those classes where it's not, right?
You know, it seems to me that this is a modular thing. It's just a matter of sort of
thinking what is the digital media skill that we need to kind of in this environment.
>>: [inaudible] generation gap as [inaudible] goes on.
>> John Palfrey: Could be. Could be.
>>: We haven't even seen anything yet.
>> John Palfrey: It's amazing to reflect on the speed of change that you guys if
part are responsible for, right? I mean if you think about with the printing press it
goes from, you know, hundreds of years between the invention of the printing
press an Gutenberg's first Bible, you would think it's a matter of years, decades
for this just extraordinary change that's happening. We have no idea where
we're going to be 10 years from now. It's just sort of amazing.
>>: Have you asked where [inaudible] like what is the second generation.
>> John Palfrey: It was not part of our questions. It was not. Although it's -- that
would be interesting. I think it's going in part where technology companies like
yourself, nudge it, I think it's in parts where your customers nudge you. You
know, I think it's an iterative process, but I think it has a lot to do with social web
and technologies that are being developed to propel us forward in that particular
way. But, you know, I'm no prognosticator. This was really meant to be an
empirical thing to describe how it is and to see what the problems are coming
from it.
I want to take a few of the ones just up here for a moment. So the question on
the left, you've repeated four myths in your book and that's very affirming. Do
you from your work have an idea that the social impact that the tools in the
parent [inaudible] will have? So I think this is in a way the thesis of the book is
about the fact that we face a choice. I think we genuinely as parents and
teachers and technologists, to less extent lawyers, we face the truth as to
whether or not we want to embrace the technologies in a way young people are
using it or do we resist it, right? That in lots of respects if we can figure out how
do we embrace creativity, innovation, you know little seeds that I thought were
maybe going to be, you know, great oaks already which aren't, you know, are we
going to embrace those, I think there's a very bright future.
I'm quite worried, though, about overreaction to some of the negative things. So I
think this might be a useful pivot and I'm probably going to put Jules on the spot if
he doesn't mind about safety. Which is I'm extremely interested in this question
of keeping kids safe online. So even though I had it in the category of myth that
kids are more in danger, it's clear they're in danger, right? It is clear that there
are just as any young people growing up, there are bad things that can happen to
them and as a parent of two kids I don't want bad things to happen to my kids.
So, you know, it's not that there's not a probably there, it's just not that it's wildly
different or much greater than it's been in the past.
So on the questions we've been trying to take up, and I'd love to hear thoughts of
this crew, is, you know, what is technology's role in that? Obviously education is
super important, obviously there's much that parents and teachers can do, but
what can Microsoft do, what can your industry do, really, as part of this. And
Jules has been working on at least an answer to this, which we're taking up in
public in a few days on September 23rd. So I was hoping you might give us a
little preview to the brainstorm you guys have had and what you're thinking.
>>: So the framework in which we think about kids safety at Microsoft generally
is around the tools to empower parents, education and research is to empower
parents [inaudible].
>> John Palfrey: [inaudible] interesting case of I don't know if it's better for
people who are remotely but if they're on the mike. It's too interesting to miss.
>>: [inaudible].
>> John Palfrey: Oh, yes. Category.
>>: Jules Cohen. I work in TWC. Trustworthy computing. The W is really small.
It is worthy, but just not like capital worthy. The joke's not following. Any way,
the way we think of safety, TWC basically falls into three buckets. We think of it
in terms of tools to empower parents, we don't think of ourselves as playing the
role of parents at all, we sort of -- we provide some tools, we pride educational
and resources and parents and educators to use those tools and teach kids and
themselves sort of you know how do safer online, and then we provide a variety
of resources to law enforcement and governments.
But one of the thing I think John is talking about in particular is one of the
questions that came up sort of as a result of the rather loud media discussion
around predation was are there ways to create, you know, significantly safer
spaces for kids online and safer in this context is used kind of, it's more the safer
from that adults piece as opposed to safer if each other obviously [inaudible]
conversation will persist sort of regardless of where you are and that's a function
of putting the right tools, you know, inside the products and the right moderation
of processes in place and the right ways to call for help.
But there was this question around how do you keep kids safe from adults who
may cause them harm. And obviously you can't really keep kids safe who are
looking to sir couple vent a process that you put in place. It's hard in the world to
keep people safe from them self. Kids are adult any way you cut it. But there's a
classic people who we think we'd like to keep safe to help keep safe and it's a
classic who wants to be safe. So the question is is there a way to create safer
digital play grounds for kids who themselves want to be safe and have, you
know, parental relationships where the parents are trying to find places for them
to be safe? And there was this notion of is there a way to create sort of digital
playground all environments where you know those kids can exist but it's hard to
get in if you're an adult.
And in the press you've read and folks in regulatory positions and others have
called for an age verification, is there a way we can verify the age of everybody
on the Internet and use that as some way to separate the populations. And it's
pretty hard to do. It's pretty hard to separate people based on any attribute and
this is the one that rises to a level where you need some pretty concrete
evidence to -- I mean age verification is really identity verification. You can't
know how old somebody is without really knowing who they are. And it's pretty
hard to know that I'm the one standing behind this laptop right now as opposed to
John, who you might guess would be standing here.
So and there are ways to do it for adults. In the US it's not super hard to verify
an adult with a fairly high degree of accuracy if you're in a credit database, I can
-- you know a private company can look at your credit report, generally rate a
bunch of multiple choice based on it, ask them to you and if you answer them
correctly it's unlikely that someone else would know that I have a loan from X
bank which may or may not be in business today ->> John Palfrey: You get to answer that first question on the left there, Jules,
since he brought up banking.
>>: I can't read and talk at the same time.
>> John Palfrey: You don't have to. It's a joke.
>>: Anyway. So anyway hopefully the bank is still in business. But with a fairly
high degree of accuracy you can prove that an adult with a credit history is who
they say they are. But kids aren't in those databases and for good region. The
digital dossier for a child as we learned about in the video didn't extend that far
yet and certainly shouldn't.
There are, however, some sort of times in society where online we sanctioned
moments in time where people can look at documents that say, oh, this is really
who it says it is, this is a child and we have a ceremony that exists and meets
space and there you can think of what they are. Oh, getting a driver's license.
There's a ceremony. You go to the DMV hand over your documents and maybe
they hand you a card back if you can back up into parking spot correctly.
Or registering for school, you know, you show up, a parent shows up, a child
shows up, birth certificate and whatever other documentation is necessary,
maybe a utility bill or whatever they're looking for proof of residency. And there's
somebody who is trained to say how old is this child and look at the
documentation and actually make a judgment. And there's and in person
proofing moment. And it's really hard to have those kinds of in person proving
moments online. You can generate a fair degree of trust or, you know, various
things like the credit history thing or on eBay a fairly high degree of trust or
reputation systems.
But they all sort of -- they don't get you there. So in order to really generate the
amount of trust that we think is necessary to get to credit credential that's a
concrete credential for a child that they could use in sort of a online space to
prove their age, we think you have to look I know, reusing trust that exists offline.
And if you could create a world where people who are in positions to issue and
create that trust offline can also issue it in the form of digital credential then
perhaps children could in turn use the digital credentials to off into more secure
digital play grounds of the type that we're talking about.
All sorts of, you know, should they do that, is it a good thing for society, is it the
right thing for privacy reasons, how about resourcing indemnity, there's lots of
problems in this arena. But conceptually, you know, hardened credential that a
child could do to off into a digital space that probably doesn't include any PIIs is
sort of one way we think about solving that problem. I'll stop there.
>> John Palfrey: No, that's awesome. I would love -- do you mind staying up
here, because I would love to here what -- we're about to hear from Microsoft and
16 other companies about ideas like this on September 23rd in front of a bunch
of attorneys, general and the public, so forth, so you're hearing the idea that your
company is about to put forward about kids and safety. And I'd love to hear, you
know, sort of initial reacts. That ->>: And that was probably the shortest version of that [inaudible].
>> John Palfrey: It's an unbelievably complex topic and it was nicely distilled
down. So I would be really grateful for reactions, whether this is a good way to
go or less so.
>>: I have a question. So have kids given feedback on some of these spaces?
Because in some sense they are put to work.
>>: Let me give you ->>: I was going to say in order for it to work you just need to know sort of how
that breaks down at different ages.
>>: So that we just separate the user experience from the auth. And I'm mostly
talking about the auth. From a user experience perspective, I hope that some
really enterprising company or Microsoft or somebody else comes up with a user
experience that's worth the time to use such a robust auth to get into. We
haven't asked kids for feedback on the auth. And I'm not the user experience
expert. So not specifically. But in particular we're talking about the
authentication process as opposed to what you get into.
>> John Palfrey: The point is one could imagine a space that Lilly and company
would design and test and be completely wonderful and the kind of plumbing that
you're creating would be something in the background that would kind of make it
more likely to be a safe experience. You're not talking about the fund so much,
you're talking about.
>>: Correct.
>> John Palfrey: If that makes sense. So there would be a collaboration here
between MSR and the [inaudible] right?
>>: Small WC.
>>: [inaudible] earlier question whether this the generation gap is likely to
disappear into [inaudible] I wonder if all the privacy issues are likely to disappear
certainly be less front and center than they are now, and maybe some of your
research ties into this. I've heard it anecdotally that there's a huge generation
gap as far as expectations of privacy.
I've talked to my own kids, you know, they know who you are on that site. Duh.
Of course. And they seem to have a much lower expectation that there's what
that they have privacy.
>>: So I wear a privacy hat in the other half of my life and I've read a number of
articles about sort of the generation gap on privacy. I think that you have, you
have an old artificial line around PII and in the old world you had this sort of
regime where if something was personally identifiable and that meant it was
attached to your name, your address, your social security number, anything that
could -- your e-mail address, anything that could get me back to you in particular,
there's harm, there's risk there. But if you have sort of an amorphous data set
that isn't attached to one of these elements of PII there's no risk. That's blurred
and it's not necessarily the -- I mean even parties as sort of slow moving if you
will as the FDC sort of said I'm not sure there's really a distinction there anymore.
And I think it's one of those things where the older generation is very leery of
things that connected to themselves and I wonder if it's maybe they have assets
they're trying to protect and maybe the kids don't or maybe -- there's any number
of sort of answers to it. From my perspective you kind of put in what you get out,
and if you put in some -- something and you identify yourself and you have a
discussion in one of these context, you're more likely to get something out of
value at the other end whereas if you remain anonymous, there's some
anonymous ones up there, you may or may not get more back.
It's hard. I don't know the answer for you.
>>: So are there -- are there certain things that you're hoping the government
doesn't do? [inaudible] they shouldn't do or things that [inaudible] would do?
>>: This is a hard, tricky question. [laughter].
>> John Palfrey: No, no, I'd like to hear it.
>>: Well, from my perspective, the kind of thing that I just described, I would
prefer if -- I strongly, strongly, strongly prefer that that could be the kind of thing
that parents would ask for and the market would generate and as a result it
would exist. And I would strongly, strongly urge folks not to think about
regulating a scenario like that where in order to get online you had to be
somehow, you know, in possession of a [inaudible] that's ->>: [inaudible] if you don't have an identification that's a safe harbor, you can do
things that you wouldn't otherwise that enables the market as opposed to
disables the market?
>>: I think that went through generally legislation that is -- catalyzes markets to
do these kinds of things is something we would consider. But in the specifics I
don't know the answer, and I would probably defer to Chuck behind you.
>>: [inaudible] regulations a two edged sword and [inaudible] Microsoft
[inaudible].
>>: On this particular point, I'm totally with you and I'm cognizant of the goods
and the bad there. On this particular point, we don't want all kids to be required
to use ->>: That kind of regulation, that's right.
>>: And he may have a difference.
>> John Palfrey: No, I would say it's too early in our task force process to
answer that question. Basically I think this process has been in the shadow of
regulations to be honest. It is the attorneys general do not or did not have I
guess the case to regulate directly in this instance or they didn't feel like they
could use those regulatory hooks. What they did was they came to a voluntary
agreement with these companies and you guys have joined the crew as good
citizens. I can't imagine -- I suppose there's business interest there, too, but
there's some extent to which it's industry coming together to [inaudible] right?
They've asked us to evaluate a series of technologies and come back to them
and say, okay, what's the state of technology. And I think the idea is can
industries step up and self regulate in it's very similar to what Chuck Kausen's
working on with Colin McClain [phonetic] and others on the principles of free
expression the and privacy. It's happening in the shadow of the global online
freedom act in that case, you know, is the congress going to legislate when you
go to China you can't turn over certain information in this situation or before that
happens can industry actually get it together, right, and figure it out?
So I'm at least in this case of the mind that said let's figure it out, let's see if there
is a role, and can we for parents, teachers, coaches, mentors, technology
companies and so forth make it safer for kids such that you don't need some
heavy handed form of legislation. I would totally agree, though, that we should
be open to what regulation means in this space. It could be technology
regulations, this [inaudible] concept that you know, code is is law. But I also think
that there are at least three things the law can do, right, it can restrict, it can
create a level playing field in the case of competition or it can enable, right, it can
be an incentive of some sort.
So I'm not against the notion of regulating, but I think what we're trying to do as
iterative process, are there a billion people, are there the Jules Cohens in the
world who are going to come up with the answer within these companies, get
industry buy in, maybe do a little development, maybe do a little testing in some
labs and so forth and solve the problem without having to do classic traditional
top down here's the law regulation. So I think that's where we are in the process.
Chuck?
>>: I mean one small intervention from the lawyer [inaudible].
>>: Not the lawyer.
>>: I think, one, I think the way [inaudible] described it is exactly right in the
sense that from Microsoft's perspective we're not allergic to regulation per se, but
that there are gradations in the types of activities that government can undertake.
Government can be a bully pull pit for education, government can be.
>>: [inaudible].
>>: A bully to encourage companies as it kind of did in this particular case. And
then I think in this -- this is in the book as well, there's a role for legislation as fart
of the blended approach and targeted in a case-by-case basis. So there may be
certain things that have to happen in order to catalyze the market and maybe
certain things would have to happen in order for providers to enter the market
and feel like, hey, this is, you know, worth doing it and I won't face liability if I
exercise due care when I go forward with this.
And I think in a sense we're less interested in the, you know, what should
government do because we have to think through that and work through the
practical questions as we are in the what types of facts are informing
government's opinion about what it should do? Are they reacting to news
reports, popular hysteria, moral panics or are they responding to the facts about
technology and the privacy and security trade-offs that are involved in various
approaches and so forth? I think that's really where, you know, we have the
most addressable gap as a general matter. What sort of facts inform the
government thinking process.
>>: Absolutely.
>> John Palfrey: Cool. So Jules, that you for that. So nice for you to do it.
>>: Pleasure.
>> John Palfrey: I just want to answer if this video will come back up for one sec.
By way of conclusion in the sense two questions that are up here at the top. Are
Vic and Celile, are you in the room or remote? In the room. Good. Maybe one
and one. Anyway, hi to the remotes. So it seems like these are tightly related
questions and somebody has made the nice connection between the two.
There's a chapter in the book to which I can refer you in which we look at the role
of young people in really three ways in the business world that's called
innovators, chapter 10. And we think about young people from the perspective of
employees from perspective of consumers and as entrepreneurs or innovators in
these spaces. And you know, one of the examples that we use on the consumer
side, and I can't remember if it actually made it into the written text of the book I'll
verify later, I think what you guys did with IE seven when you released a beta
versus of that out into the world and then encouraged criticism to come to your
doorstep, knowing that there was going to be a feedback loop from your
consumers, your own consumers is exactly the right thing to do, which is to say
that we know that many of these young people are going to be critical consumers
and they're going to sound off. They're going to say, you know, your burritos
stink or whatever the think is. And they're going to say it in public. And I think to
the extent that you can construct environment, bring them to your door and
actually make it constructive so that you're giving some feedback that then
makes the product better for them, I think that's a wonderful example of kind of
doing it the right way. And I think you can extrapolate that, you know, also to,
you know, employees that clearly there's a sense among the kids we talked to
going into the workplace that hierarchy, you know, is being broken down a little
bit, and they're good and bad to that.
I think in that case, you know, there are things where we do need to be teaching
young people that, you know, there's certain times when you do respect people
who are in authority, but also to say, okay, what is interesting about these broken
down hierarchies, what are the innovative things that you're doing that in fact can
make your business run better? So I think we're going to see a transition that's
going to happen incredibly quickly as firms are seeing their brands subjected to
this very public whether it's a bank or a technology coming, this very public
scrutiny and those that manage that conversation well are going to thrive. And I
think the same thing is true companies as employers, those who realize these
are the young people you're going to be hiring and a very large percentage of
them act in these weird ways, you know, how do you figure out a way to create a
constructive environment for them.
And I think as kind of a meta and ending point to that, I think that where we are at
this moment with this population is to say they're looking on one level for
leadership, right, they're looking for these constructive environments and you
know good leadership and parenting and teaching, all of these things. This is
available to us. And the same time, I think there's a ton that we can learn from
them. I think we can be blown away by their creativity, blown away by their
innovation, blown away by the extent to which they can teach us about these
technologies and we have to be open to and engaging that conversation and
creating the spaces for it, and occasionally telling them laptops down, go outside,
it's beautiful and have a nice day. So thank you for the chance to talk.
[applause]
>> Kirsten Wiley: Thank you, everybody. I think we have some information
about the center, don't we.
>> John Palfrey: Oh, yes, absolutely.
>> Kirsten Wiley: In the back of the room. You can obviously find them on the
web, clearly. I also want to say we have a few people coming to speak this
winter, fall and winter along these same topics. Larry Lessig [phonetic] will be
here on November 12th talking about his new book remix and then in terms of
education and computing Jay Morgels [phonetic] is going to be here early
December talking about her book called stuck in the shallow end, raise
technology and computing and how to make that -- bridge that gap. So you can
find the whole list on our share point sight and if you guys don't have that
address, just e-mail the speak rec alias and we'll get you to the SharePoint.
Thanks everybody. And John will be here signing books for people that have the
physical manifestation of the work. And thanks, John, for coming.
>> John Palfrey: Thank you so much.
[applause]