For those of you who don't follow my banal thoughts and minutia details of my life on Twitter, I have just returned from being on the road for two weeks. After our Boston event, I visited my grandmother in Maine, my in-laws in New Jersey, spoke to school librarians in Florida and visited my other grandmother, great aunt and cousins. The upside of travel for me is that I am able to get that rare "totally unwired" time offline on airplanes where my partial attention issues are tamed and I can focus. On my flight home, I read the 50-something page white paper just released today by the MacArthur Foundation. My friend, danah boyd, was one of the researchers/authors involved, and sent it to me a few days early. I'm going to post a very quick summary since you can now access the paper online, but wanted to comment first.

Since publishing Totally Wired over a year and a half ago, I have spoken to thousands of parents and educators about what teens and tweens are doing online. I have attempted to calm their fears, answer their questions and listen to their concerns. What's both refreshing and slightly perplexing about this research is that while reporting from the youth perspective and attempting to allay the reality that "Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games," I can imagine many of the adults I've spoken to reading the research but not feeling all that reassured by the report's failure to address any of the pitfalls of teens living in an "always on" digital culture (and I'm not talking about the debunked hysteria over online predators). Alluding to arguments that youth may be a social construction and that "Simple prohibitions, technical barriers, or time limits on use are blunt instruments; youth perceive them as raw and ill-informed exercises of power," makes sense from an academic perspective but doesn't quite succeed in convincing a parent who sees their child texting more than talking, involved in a case of nasty cyberbullying or stumbling onto internet porn (at a very young age), that it's all good.

Maybe it falls on people like me, Anne Collier, Derek Baird, Common Sense Media and others to take this research, digest it and broadcast the findings to the parent/educator populations we speak to on a regular basis in ways we know might make it more impactful. Personally, I'm up to the challenge and am excited to incorporate these findings into my upcoming talks. And now, a short summary from their press release…

There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.

- Adults tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.

- Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.

Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.

- Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.

- The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.

Young people are motivated to learn from their peers online.

- The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.

- Young people respect each other’s authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.

Most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet.

- Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.

- Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.

- "Geeked-out" learning opportunities are abundant – subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.

Related:

'From MySpace to Hip Hop' In A Couple Paragraphs

Categorized under: Totally Wired, Web, Youth Marketing

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you are a Facebook user, comment using your Facebook account.