'Tourists' could respect 'natives' more

A commentary in The Guardian this week was music to my ears. Bronwyn Kunhardt, co-founder of the UK nonprofit Social Media Consensus, cites Pews Internet & American Life research to begin to quantify all the good things young people are doing on the social Web, where they are the premier social producers and creative networkers, aka the “natives.” Pew found that “55% of online teens have created a profile on a social network site such as MySpace or Facebook, compared to 20% of online adults. Of particular interest in this medium of self-presentation are the connections these kids seek to establish and augment: 39% of online teens share their own creations online. In other words, friends, and potential friends share artwork, photos, stories, or videos. This compares to the 22% of online adults who do this. Of the young people questioned 26% say they remix found and discovered online content into something they can characterise as their own creative expression. Only 9% of online adults do this.” And yet it’s the adults, the tourists who don’t full understand this space and only hear of its downsides, who are setting policy. Not good. So here’s the music in my ears: Kunhardt writes that “our role as responsible ‘tourists’ is to respect the natives and do what we can to understand their lives and their ‘habitat.’ Warnings about risk will always fall on deaf ears if we can't also articulate and celebrate the benefits.” We need at least to get going on researching and articulating those benefits (I tried to do the latter in my recent “Lifeline” article.)