Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.29.11 | “Sexting” is a dirty word. And I’m not just talking about the content of the sexting itself—the sexually explicit messages or images sent via a cell phone or another digital device. In discussions about youth and digital media, “sexting” is often invoked as a scare tactic—clear evidence that allowing young people to engage with social networking and other online tools is dangerous and foolhardy.

So it is with much relief that I read Jan Hoffman’s in-depth and thoughtful reporting in The New York Times of a dramatic sexting incident among middle-schoolers in Lacey, Washington. It is the latest in a series of Times articles examining online bullying, and it includes online sidebar stories on states’ efforts to deal with minors sexting and additional interviews with kids about who engages in sexting and why (the disconnect between those two sidebars is striking).

To sum up a complex story, Margarite, a 14-year-old eighth grader, sent a naked photo of herself to a new boyfriend, who then forwarded it to another eighth-grade girl, who then sent it out to her entire contact list with the message: “Ho Alert! If you think this girl is a whore, then text this to all your friends.”

The image and text soon went viral—well beyond the halls of their middle school. After temporary arrests of three of the students involved (not Margarite) for violating child pornography laws and a great deal of soul-searching among families, the school and the community, Hoffman has discovered that very few participants or close observers are blaming the technology for the painful consequences that are still lingering. 

They are, instead, pointing to a variety of cultural, social and personal factors that can provide a productive blueprint for putting incidents like this one in perspective and provide guidance for parents and youth on how to navigate digital media responsibly—and ethically.

First, the cultural context. As Hoffman smartly notes, our world is “steeped in highly sexualized messages”—many of which publically promote the very sexting behavior that adults fear among youth:

“Take a dirty picture for me,” urge the pop stars Taio Cruz and Kesha in their recent duet, “Dirty Picture.” “Send the dirty picture to me. Snap.”

In a 2010 Super Bowl advertisement for Motorola, the actress Megan Fox takes a cellphone picture of herself in a bubble bath. “I wonder what would happen if I were to send this out?” she muses. The commercial continues with goggle-eyed men gaping at the forwarded photo — normalizing and encouraging such messages.

“You can’t expect teenagers not to do something they see happening all around them,” said Susannah Stern, an associate professor at the University of San Diego who writes about adolescence and technology.

“They’re practicing to be a part of adult culture,” Dr. Stern said. “And in 2011, that is a culture of sexualization and of putting yourself out there to validate who you are and that you matter.”

The act of sexting, furthermore, is also steeped in the gender dynamics of the larger society. Hoffman references recent studies by both the Associated Press/MTV and the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American life Project that show the prevalence of texting among teens, but notes that the numbers don’t address the key “double standard” at work:

Boys and girls send photos in roughly the same proportion, the Pew survey found.

But a double standard holds. While a boy caught sending a picture of himself may be regarded as a fool or even a boastful stud, girls, regardless of their bravado, are castigated as sluts.

Photos of girls tend to go viral more often, because boys and girls will circulate girls’ photos in part to shame them, explained Danah Boyd, a senior social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

In contrast, when a boy sends a revealing photo of himself to a girl, Dr. Boyd noted, she usually does not circulate it. And, Dr. Boyd added, boys do not tend to circulate photos of other boys: “A straight-identified boy will never admit to having naked photos of a boy on his phone.”

Finally, and maybe most importantly, Hoffman discusses how the cause, in many respects, has very little to do with digital media and much more with the behavior and ethics of the youth involved:

I hate the word ‘sexting,’” said Andrew J. Harris, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, who is leading a study of the practice among adolescents to help develop policies to address it. “We’re talking about a lot of different behaviors and a lot of different motivations.”

There is the high-tech flirt. The troubled attention-seeker. A couple’s consensual exchanges. Drunken teenagers horsing around. Pressure from a boyfriend. Malicious distribution. A teenager who barrages another with unsolicited lewd photos or texts. Or, as in a 2009 Wisconsin case of “sextortion,” a boy, pretending to be a girl online, who solicited explicit pictures of boys, which he then used as blackmail to compel those boys to have sex with him.

Studies vary on what percentage of teens have sexted, ranging from 4 percent to 33 percent, depending on the age group. While most of the sexting is between boyfriends and girlfriends, not all of it is. Nearly one in five sext recipients (17 percent) age 14-24 say they have passed the images along, and more than half of those say they have shared the images with more than one person, according to the AP/MTV survey in late 2009.

It was “passing it along” that landed the Washington State teens in hot water, charged with dissemination of child pornography, a Class C felony.

As the NYT story points out, the legal issues surrounding sexting are murky, given First Amendment-protected speech. That murkiness underscores the new territory kids suddenly find themselves operating in. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society offers a thorough review of the legal parameters along with some potential remedies in its June 2010 paper, “Sexting: Youth Practice and Legal Implications.”

The immediacy and reach that digital media afford require new thinking about ethical behavior, as the teens in Washington learned the hard way. Therefore, while the legal ramifications play out on the larger stage, much work must be done to help teens and young people by developing a digital media curriculum that incorporates new literacies for this digital age.

Plus: Talk about timing. To help spur the complex conversation that needs to take place, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has just released a new clinical report, “The Impact of Social Media Use on Children, Adolescents and Families,” which appears in the April issue of Pediatrics (here’s the news release).

The AAP emphasizes the positive impact of social media on the lives of youth:

Engagement in social media and online communities can enhance communication, facilitate social interaction and help develop technical skills. They can help tweens and teens discover opportunities to engage in the community by volunteering, and can help youth shape their sense of identity. These tools also can be useful adjuncts to—and in some cases are replacing—traditional learning methods in the classroom.

While the AAP also notes the negative consequences of experimenting inappropriately online, it ultimately recognizes that social media is an inevitable part of the lives of youth.  The answer for the AAP is digital literacy, for both youth and their parents. It recommends that pediatricians “help families navigate the social media landscape”:

• Advise parents to talk to children and adolescents about their online use and the specific issues that today’s online kids face, such as cyberbullying, sexting, and difficulty managing their time.

• Advise parents to work on their own “participation gap” in their homes by becoming better educated about the many technologies their children are using.

• Discuss with families the need for a family online-use plan, with an emphasis on citizenship and healthy behavior.

• Discuss with parents the importance of supervising online activities via active participation and communication, not just via monitoring software.

As a supplement to the report, the AAP provides a detailed guide on “Talking to Kids and Teens About Social Media and Sexting.” Some of the advice makes sense—like talking with kids about news stories such as the case in Washington state. But some advice—like collecting cell phones at ‘tween and teen gatherings—is more likely to ensure that young people never gather where such rules are applied.