Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

8.11.10 | What About the Children? Anne Collier asks all the right questions in her recent post at NetFamilyNews.org on “Developing Self in the Digital Age,” a response to a recent New York Times Magazine piece by Peggy Orenstein—“I Tweet Therefore I Am”—in which Orenstein contends that social networking “has shifted how we construct identity.”

Orenstein references the research of sociologist Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self and author of the forthcoming book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other,” which is based on interviews with children and parents about their use of social media.

“Among young people especially [Turkle] found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion,” writes Orenstein, who then quotes Turkle directly: 

“On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.”

While not disagreeing with the notion that young people need to find that right balance between external and internal forces in their lives, Collier is skeptical of the idea that new technology is necessarily tipping that balance in one direction: “Using the word ‘manufactured’ in relation to the self (instead of “developed” or “formed”) prejudices the discussion, and implying that our children are forming identity entirely differently now because of the technologies they use just seemed to me to go too far.”

To explore this debate further, Collier interviews social media researcher danah boyd, who makes the point that “the self was never constructed independent of a social context.” boyd also points to the work of David Buckingham at the University of London’s Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media. In the introduction to the MIT Press Journal “Youth, Identity and Digital Media,” Buckingham writes that in our struggle to find our “true self,” we also seek “multiple identifications with others, on the basis of social, cultural and biological characteristics, as well as shared values personal histories, and interests.” 

On one level, I am the product of my unique personal biography. Yet who I am (or who I think I am) varies according to who I am with, the social situations in which I find myself, and the motivations I may have at the time, although I am by no means entirely free to choose how I am defined.

Buckingham also argues that we need to see children as “significant social actors in their own right, as ‘beings,’ and not simply as ‘becomings’ who should be judged in terms of their projected futures.”

For Collier, this provides a positive takeaway for parents. The best way to protect children from the perils of the modern, complex and yes, digital world is to empower them to become “active agents for good in their own experiences online (and offline).”

The Line Between Concern and Condescension: A recent article in The Guardian on teenagers and technology, however, is a telling example of how difficult it is not to condescend to youth when talking about the dangers of social media.

While the article does a good job in the end of letting the teenagers speak for themselves and show their own capacity for understanding the pressures and complexity of their mediated lives, at other times it only discusses social media as a tool that sometimes hinders (and sometimes helps) adolescent development, rather than as a legitimate—i.e. adult—tool for effective communication.

Resisting the Disney Magic: At first glance, a recent article by Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock, “How Disney Magic and the Corporate Media Shape Youth Identity in the Digital Age,” seems to ignore kids’ agency altogether.

The authors argue that Disney is exploiting digital media “to dominate public discourse and undermine the critical and political capacities necessary for the next generation of young people to sustain even the most basic institutions of democracy.”

They continue on, charging that “A virtual army of marketers, psychologists and corporate executives are currently engaged in what Susan Linn [director of the coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School] calls a ‘hostile takeover of childhood,’ seeking in the new media environment to take advantage of the growing economic power wielded by children and teens.”

Giroux and Pollock conclude their analysis, however, by stating that they only way to combat these powerful forces in the digital public space is to start seeing kids as their own instruments of change:

Strategies for challenging the corporate power and the consumer culture Disney propagates in the United States and increasingly across the rest of the globe must be aligned with a vision of a democracy that is on the side of children and youth. It must enable the conditions for young people to learn and develop as engaged social actors more alive to their responsibility to future generations than those adults who have presently turned away from the challenge.

A Look Back at the Rights of Kids: In this discussion of youth agency, it would be remiss not to mention that Jon Katz saw our present struggles all the way back in 1996.

Writing about “The Rights of Kids in the Digital Age” for an early issue of Wired magazine, Katz believed that the freedom represented by the web and its social networks required a “new social contract” that recognized and respected youth. Even before the rise of most of the digital media we know today, Katz saw the great, empowering potential of kids’ gravitation toward the online world:

Children are at the epicenter of the information revolution, ground zero of the digital world. They helped build it, and they understand it as well or better than anyone. Not only is the digital world making the young more sophisticated, altering their ideas of what culture and literacy are, it is connecting them to one another, providing them with a new sense of political self. Children in the digital age are neither unseen nor unheard; in fact, they are seen and heard more than ever. They occupy a new kind of cultural space. They’re citizens of a new order, founders of the Digital Nation.

After centuries of sometimes benign, sometimes brutal oppression and regulation, kids are moving out from under our pious control, finding one another via the great hive that is the Net. As digital communications flash through the most heavily fortified borders and ricochet around the world independent of governments and censors, so can children for the first time reach past the suffocating boundaries of social convention, past their elders’ rigid notions of what is good for them. Children will never be the same; nor will the rest of us.

While we haven’t reached that youth utopia yet, Katz provides a healthy reminder of what’s at stake.