Having a Facebook page is not an effective strategy for engaging young people in your health issue or concern.

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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. 

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)

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:

1. On-line is an adult world and it’s not for you;
2. Engaging with adults online is scary and risky; and
3. 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. 

Youth friendly spaces!
The "obesity epidemic" is a terrible frame,
but these researchers are truly
examining the relationships between
place and health.

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.

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. 

Any model of privacy that focuses on the control of information will fail. (boyd, Networked Privacy)

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.

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.

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.