Monday, September 28, 2009

Youth, adults & the social-media shift

No wonder adults, born and raised in the 20th century's mass-media environment are struggling to wrap our brains around current media conditions – and what "Net safety" should look like under them. We're in the middle of a Gutenberg Press-style media shift, multiplied by 3. Author and media pundit Clay Shirky talks about the four previous media shifts that "qualify for the term revolutionary," all of which were either a) asynchronous one-to-many or b) realtime, one-to-one "conversations." They were 1) that Gutenberg-enabled first shift to mass media (text) more than 5.5 centuries ago; 2) then real-time, two-way or conversational media (telegraph/text, then telephone/audio); 3) then recorded mass-distributed media other than text (photos, sound, film); then 4) the one-to-many mass media we grew up with, recorded and sent through the air (radio and TV).

Media shift on steroids
The Internet, Shirky said in his talk last June, does two revolutionary things, but I'd say three. Shirky's two are: 1) blends real-time two-way conversation and one-to-many mass media to create real-time, many-to-many media or conversations and 2) is the distribution platform or pipe for all other media as well. The third piece is implied in Shirky's first one, but I think it's so significant or even radical, especially where online youth are concerned, that it deserves to be highlighted: the "many" in realtime, many-to-many media are the producers, marketers, and distributors as well as the consumers of media now. Anyone can be any of the above now, and many active social-media users are often all the above simultaneously. What determines the size of "viewership" is not control of the distribution channels so much as viewers' attraction to the content and desire to help spread the word (these days, though, often it's a hybrid of both conventional and new-media conditions, e.g., singer Susan Boyle's success on both the "Britain's Got Talent" TV show and YouTube).

E.g., the new 'TV'
University of Southern California media professor Henry Jenkins zooms in on just one medium, television, in a fascinating piece at the Huffington Post about how it is not just something watched on TV sets anymore and how it's distributed as much by social networks (real-life social circles) as by broadcast networks. And he gives lots of examples of transmedia properties (TV shows' own videogames, comic books, podcasts, and Web series). As I read, I thought of Japan's cellphone novels: serial novels "written" via cellphone, one screen at a time, the best of which go from blogs to books and probably eventually old-style TV shows and movies.

Big adjustment for adults
But just as interesting about this media revolution is the way we adults are handling it vis. our kids. I think youth use digital social media more fluidly because they're experimenters, and digital media are experimental – they require active not passive use. To really make these media work for you, you don't just take delivery; you need to experiment, play, produce, and collaboratively mess around with music, text, video, blogs, sites, games, virtual environments, and all the devices they're on – which is really fun and compelling for youth. Maybe because "our" media are much less demanding, we grew up thinking of them as mere entertainment, and we project that view a lot onto our children's media experience. We're binary in our thinking: we somehow think they're either working or playing, and we trivialize or even fear and block their use of media.

Our one-way, top-down media also had relatively few companies producing them and controlling their distribution, with government regulating those companies. So at a recent meeting on Capitol Hill, I noted that some of us adults think that problems in today's media can simply be fixed by people in authority (parents, companies, regulators, etc.), and distribution of bad stuff, e.g. adult content (which is no longer produced and distributed only by companies or only by adults), on all these dispersed, multi-directional media can be controlled or blocked at the "source." But now the source – whether or good or bad content – is often a kid. As for professionally produced media, certainly government can still regulate some of it, but only media produced or mass-distributed by responsible companies, aka conventional media – not the media that parents are generally most concerned about.

Media companies ≠ media producers
Youth produce all kinds of media, most of it ok, neutral, or constructive, some nasty, less of it unethical, and even less illegal. It's complex, like their lives, not given to simple characterizations - see the New York Times's commentary on a New Jersey high school's "slut list," a case in which teen behavior around social status, gender, and sexuality deserves more consideration than the media through which those behaviors are acted out. What youth do communicate and produce in digital media largely mirrors their real-world social lives, though they often fictionalize and sometimes exaggerate parts of them (see "Fictionalizing their profiles").

That deep, rich, disturbing picture is, for many of us, harder to look at than the professionally produced, regulated images of our past. But in many ways it's good that this reflection, communication, and production are much more exposed than ever before – so people can conduct research, parent better, consider technical and other protections, and find ways to help young people respect and protect themselves. Two things are certain: Government can't regulate the producers of the new media environment, and 2) those producers' ears will tune out media-safety messages coming from the media environment of their parents.

Related links

  • An example of a mass-distributed, many-to-many video conversation in YouTube: MadV's "One World" (see Clive Thompson in Wired)
  • "School & social media"
  • "Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"
  • "How teens use social network sites"
  • "*Serious* informal learning"
  • 2 comments:

    1. Great piece. And I agree about how we (adults, the Royal we) tend to think the Govt. or producers can or will regulate the more problematic content but that will likely not happen and in the case of the Govt, should not happen w/out careful consideration of the potential implications of content/publishing and free speech.
      And while parents can't follow their children around everywhere online or offline to regulate what their children are exposed to or how they behave, I think responsible business owners CAN take more responsibility regarding what gets published on their site.
      In a private business offline, we don't normally expect to go in and see a big wall with questionable content (photos, text, etc.) unless it's clearly labeled an adult place of business. We expect the business owner to regulate what is posted on their doors, walls, etc.

      We have accepted a different set of rules for the web, perhaps using the excuse of volume as a way to avoid responsibility. Some video and photo sites on the web are making quite a bit of money allowing illegal and exploitive content to be uploaded and charging users for unlimited downloads of this content. These sites are online trading places for underground child porn and other exploitive videos or photos and the site simply claims "we have millions of videos/photos uploaded daily, we can't possibly keep up." All the while, making quite a bit of money. And now, users are encouraged to participate and reap some of the financial benefits by uploading UGC to these sites.
      Illegal photo and video businesses aren't new, of course. Snuff films were huge in the 70s. Child porn and exploitive content is a huge business offline around the globe. What is new is the critical mass/number of people who can upload, sell, and download illegal vids/photos via the web. And we have the added factor of exploiters finding communities of like-minded people online and feeling a sense of 'okay-ness' and camaraderie with their new found community supporting each other in the behavior.
      And while I am vigilant regarding my concern for the issues of child and all forms of exploitation being much more prevelant offline, I don't understand how online companies can not be held responsible for the content they allow to be published. Not just held responsible by their Government, but by their users as well. We spend more energy and time on who's going to win American Idol than we do about which online businesses allow and therefore contribute to the exploitation of children, women, and animals (and a relatively small percentage include men as well). It's a dark subject that makes us uncomfortable but our collective youth (and many adult women) are exploited daily and used as a way to make a profit. Luckily it's a very small percentage but those few need our mighty voices on their behalf.
      While we celebrate the expansion of technology and creativity of youth and technology, I hope we keep in mind our responsibilities as stewards and role models with the wonderful gift we've created, our world wide web.

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    2. Thank you for your comment, Rebecca. Agree on many fronts. Have been wondering for years about the question of user protection and corp. responsibility in this new media environment and feel the online-safety discussion needs more input from the industry in order to have an informed discussion about it. The answers will look very different coming from different points in the spectrum of corporate responsibility. Some questions I've long had are - since no UGC provider can ever guarantee 100% youth protection - what level of protection does, or will, society (or gov't) deem acceptable and what would that cost? And if the cost caused some responsible companies in certain countries to close their doors, does that send youth off shore to less responsible providers, defeating the original intent? I don't think there will be a truly productive discussion on industry best practices till such questions are addressed with the candid input of responsible Web 2.0 companies. Tx again.

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