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According to danah boyd*,
young people are largely using SNS (social network sites) to connect with their own
circle of friends – the ones they interact with off line. SNS create another
“place” for young people to hang out, gossip, flirt and do all of things young
people need to do to negotiate peer relationships and work on their identity.
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The National Campaign isn't the only offender. State public
health departments wanna be here, too! |
“Having a FaceBook page” isn’t about engaging
young people. We in the public health community tend to think that by being
there, we can connect, raise awareness, deliver our health messages, educate
and so on. But boyd’s research shows that this is not why young people go to
SNS. I'm extrapolating to say that our presence there is unimportant and largely irrelevant to
them.
(Glynis note: It may be possible that our presence
– usually representing our specific health concern (or our funding, to take
a more cynical view) – may play some sort of “branding” role – since young
people express their identity and “coolness” by wearing or showing
representations of people, products, issues that they feel reflect them. boyd does talk about this. But
that’s about their choices and preferences – which isn’t something we
are going to affect through a FaceBook page.)
While we as organizations or health
topic experts may not be a point of connection, the individuals in our
community that engage directly with young people off-line certainly are.
Boyd describes the successful
efforts of teachers, parents and youth pastors. She attributes their success to
the deeply held principles of youth work:
Adults must be trusted by young people and respect the “place” where
they are engaging. For SNS, this means adults must understand the norms,
conventions and even coded language created
by young people. Any attempt to control, shape or constrict young people in
this context breaks that trust and therefore, the connection.
It is the rare adult who is willing
to give up that control. I’d argue that only our best, most engaged youth
workers (and possibly teachers) have that skill.
I’m not suggesting we take down our
FaceBook pages.
If we seriously want to use SNS to
connect and engage, we’ll need to seek
out and recruit adults and young people who are already parts of these
networks. Then we should support them. With money. With resources. With access.
And, most importantly, with voice.
Resources aren’t the only barrier.
Society – and our own discipline – creates enormous barriers to adults (other
than parents and a few others) connecting with young people.
It’s not only socially suspect,
we’ve built entire systems, laws and structures to keep young people out of
adult places and spaces. Boyd points out that our health efforts to educate
young people about online (as well as offline) “stranger danger” have
unintended consequences:
Stranger danger educational campaigns contribute
towards producing public space as “naturally” or “normally” an adult space
where children are at risk from ”deviant others.” (boyd, p. 275)
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We're scared of teenagers, we're scared
of what might happen to them, and
our fear dictates how they respond
and react to us and systems. It's even
disrupting what we know to be
a core developmental strategy:
connections to caring adults. |
Our stranger-danger message
translates to young people:
- On-line is an adult world and it’s
not for you;
- Engaging with adults online is scary
and risky; and
- Any adult that attempts to engage
with is “deviant.”
Sadly, health strategies intended to
“keep kids safe” are more acceptable and mainstream than our efforts to
encourage and enable connections or support peer interaction. As advocates of
“healthy youth development” we need to redouble our efforts here. It’s an
uphill fight and seems counterintuitive – but we need to stop emphasizing safety and continue to frame health promotion as what
bests supports development.
Teens are socially isolated for their safety and for the safety of adult
society, child development is used to justify this policy, but little
consideration is given to the costs of such restrictions and the ways in which
limited access to broad social contexts curbs cognitive development. (boyd, p.
246)
It’s not really about FaceBook,
after all. Our conversations about “figuring out how to use SNS as a way to improve the health of young
people” are misguided.
What we really need to be talking
about is how our underlying systems,
structures and policies do or don’t support development. SNS is just one
part of those structures – but it is a compelling and revealing one.
For example, boyd declares that the
reason young people have readily adopted SNS is because there are very few
places where they can engage with their peers on their own terms, without adult
intrusion and control. They’d rather be parks, they say, but between curfews,
lack of transportation and parental stranger danger fears, it’s not possible.
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Youth friendly spaces!
The "obesity epidemic" is a terrible frame,
but these researchers are truly
examining the relationships between
place and health. |
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Does our work create or support youth-friendly spaces where young people
can work on their developmental needs to connect with peers? I don’t recall these types of
questions on our health surveys. I don’t see our “science based programs”
considering peer interaction as core components. In fact, we’re still fighting
about how important it is to include “relationships” in our sex ed curriculums.
I propose that even the simple step of highlighting the presence or absence of
these places should be core to our public health approach.
I also believe that our community
has a lot to learn by doing as boyd does – lurking, observing, learning and
understanding.
Are we learning from young people?
boyd
describes in great detail how young people, in navigating SNS, must “create”
their on-line identity and navigate relationship using adult-constructed
platforms.
The simple act of creating a
FaceBook page forces a level of self-reflection and analysis that the
youth-serving community continually trys to re-create in youth programs.
Creating a FaceBook presence requires young people to consider who they are,
who they want to be and who their audience is. These steps are central to the
developmental process (and extend into media literacy as well!).
Further, the strategies young people
use to friend, de-friend, and rate top friends are all part of a learning
process around relationships. Reflection, analysis and decision making all must
occur. Young people appreciate that de-friending is harmful and an
inappropriate response to low level conflict.
- They
believe that reciprocity – in comments, friending or ranking – is an expected
community norm. And these are norms they created on their own!
- They’ve
developed clever work-arounds, like listing friends or bands as top friends to
avoid the complications these lists create in their own circles.
- They’ve
decided to disregard or circumvent parts of the SNS construct that cause them
trouble or may potentially expose them.
Are we appreciating and validating these new skills and experiences?
Many of our efforts attempt to get
young people to thoughtfully engage in the idea of relationships - yet we do it
from an adult-controlled perspective.
Young people are already doing this!
Why aren’t we incorporating these practices into our own efforts? Where are the programs that build off of young
people’s expertise, experiences and accomplishments navigating SNS?
By facing decision about how to circumscribe their Friends lists, teens
are forced to consider their relationships, the topology of their peer groups
and the ways in which their decisions make affect others. (boyd, p. 220)
Following their lead in this way is a central tenant of healthy youth
development. And we can take it farther.
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Our efforts are best focused on getting out of the way
and creating venues for young people to
talk about their priorities and concerns. |
Instead of making our work
exclusively about infusing pro-social, pro-health, developmentally supportive
perspectives into young peoples’ networks, it is also our responsibility to hear and broadcast youth perspectives
about these issues.
Boyd and others believe that young
people have a distinct advantage in navigating and experiencing networked
technologies and digital publics (over adults) because their orientation is
different than ours.
Unlike adults who are re-learning how to behave in public because of
networked technologies, teens are simply learning how to behave in public with
networked publics in mind. (boyd, p. 295)
Concepts
of privacy illuminate this difference. Boyd believes that for young people privacy has to do with context and control – not
potential access. (boyd, p. 147)
This is why a young person is angry
at her mom for reading her FaceBook page. And why mom doesn’t understand her
anger, since her daughter’s FaceBook page was publicly accessible. Young people
embrace the idea that complete privacy is impossible in a digital, networked
world. What they want is some level of control over how it is interpreted and
used.
It isn’t surprising that boyd
applies this insight to larger societal concerns about privacy in a digital age
(where marketers aggregate data and target ads to consumers, where photos are
posted without anyone’s approval).
She suggests that rather than trying
to dictate controls of information, we should be attending to who has the ability - and the right – to interpret what data they think they see.
(boyd, Networked Privacy)
- Should employers be able to judge potential employees
based on FaceBook page content – which they are reviewing entirely out of
context?
She asks us to consider if there
are mechanisms by which people can challenge how they’ve been interpreted?
(boyd, Networked Privacy)
- Is there an equivalent to conversation a the
teenage girl has with her parents when confronted about a link to “legalize
marijunana” that is interpreted as “oh no! My daughter is smoking pot!"
Young
people have perspectives and insights that we will never have.
Not only have the next generation not given up on privacy, but they’re
actually trying to find ways to achieve privacy in networked publics. (boyd,
Networked Privacy)
We can not
adequately provide support if we don’t understand or appreciate these
perspectives.
As I’ve
tried to show in this post, dana boyd’s work illuminates these perspectives.
But it
isn’t enough.
It
remains our collective responsibility to create opportunities and places where young people can use their voice. At
a minimum, we in the public health or youth serving community must be a
listening audience, but whenever possible we should strive to broadcast their
voices, their perspectives, their needs to larger audiences, audiences with
authority and resources.
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After all, it's young people who won the culture war.
Public health priorities: making room for their voices,
creating access to audiences, learning how to
engage in a digital world. |
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We’ve
traditionally justified and rationalized youth leadership and youth voice
strategies by showing how important they are in supporting young people’s
development. It’s about how we as adults
support them as young people.
Dana boyd
offers us another, more revolutionary rationale.
Teenagers reveal valuable techniques for interpreting and reworking
publics. Their experiences provide valuable insight for understanding how
publics are transformed by structural forces. (boyd, p. 303)
We, as adults and the larger
community, need them.
Just as they've taught their parents how to create a FaceBook page or use a RSS feed, they will teach our society how to thrive in digitally-networked world. Our dependency on them may not be obvious to the broader community -- but the examples offered by boyd and the on-going leadership of young people clearly illustrate what we have to gain. If we want to change our systems, build support for young people and create healthy communities, it's our job to illustrate, promote and champion the contributions young people can and do make.
*Unless other wise noted, all
references here are for Ms. boyd’s dissertation:
boyd, d., 2008. Taken out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics.
For citations and brief introduction to this post, jump past the break.
