ALA Conference 2009: Demystifying the 'MySpace Mindset';
ALA Annual Conference: Panelists say teens should not be thought of monolithically, privacy on social networks should be easier to manage
Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 07/13/2009
- Teens more safety-savvy than popular media suggest
- Need to better manage reputation on social networks
- The poor may be the most vulnerable
So, as some popular media accounts suggest, is the younger generation tumbling down a slippery slope that includes oversharing of private information, “sexting,” and positioning themselves for exploitation?
No, contended two experts speaking yesterday at a discussion titled “Who Cares about Privacy? Boundaries, Millennials and the MySpace Mindset."
High school librarian (and author of I Found It on the Internet: Coming of Age Online, ALA 2005) Frances Jacobson Harris said that the popular media too often look for the lurid interpretation, while teens actually have grown more safety-savvy.
In working on the second edition of her book, she asked teens questions about technology that inevitably led to insights about privacy. (Here’s her presentation.)
While the conventional wisdom may be that teens do not have any photos, contact information, or other personal information online, “I kind of think this is an anachronism.” She pointed to newspaper coverage that provided much of such information.
Myths vs. realitiesThe reality, she said, is that predators don’t typically troll social networking services (SNS) for victims. Rather, they use much more direct methods, such as chat, email, and IM. When faced with potential predators or discomfiting come-ons, teens just block them, she said.
Also, cyberbullying is “nothing more than the bullying we know all along,” an extension of face-to-face bullying, she said. And teens are not equally at risk. Those who become victims tend to exhibit other risky behaviors in their offline lives. That, she said, is where libraries can come in, setting good examples for safe behavior online.
Most teens, she said, are pretty conscious of boundaries, and will use email or private messaging rather than post information for all to see.
New technologies such as Facebook and Google Docs have become helpful and, in the case of the former, ubiquitous. Facebook is the most common way students typically communicate with friends out of school—and, it can be used, for example, by students to get assignments they missed.
Setting boundariesThen again, some students overshare; Jacobson Harris pointed to a student’s series of status updates on Facebook, offering all-caps messages expressing anger with his project partners. And she had been “friended” by the student.
She recounted her dilemma upon learning of the message. She shared it with teachers she team-teaches with. “I would not say anything to the student unless I thought he was in danger,” Jacobson Harris reflected, but one of the other teachers, a coach, “has a totally different ethos.” The coach told the student he should not dis his friends so publicly.
The coach didn’t tell the student the librarian had told him, he just said it’s all over Facebook. “I discovered that student had un-friended me,” Jacobson Harris reflected.
Should teachers and librarians be Facebook friends with students? Jacobson Harris quoted social media researcher danah boyd, who points out that, if you run into a student in grocery store, you’re not going to stop talking to them. Social networks are the modern equivalent—but, she said, you should enter into the students’ space only as a mentor and only as invited.
Looking at the larger issueCultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan also warned against fitting facts into a predetermined narrative. For one thing, he counseled against framing debates as generational, suggesting that we “exoticize young people” as a group even though they’re very diverse.
Even if most people don’t seem to care about privacy, he said, “that really doesn’t matter in the privacy debate, in the technology debate, or in the long run.” He suggested that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are “not there for the majority… they are there for the emergencies, they are there for the anomalies.”
The larger meaning of privacy
Vaidhyanathan suggested that “privacy is a really useless word” because it doesn’t reflect the wide range of meanings and uses attached to it, including intellectual autonomy and safety.
He suggested that people had five separate interfaces for managing their reputation responsibly: versus the state (e.g., the police); firms (commercial institutions like Google and even the supermarket); the family; friends, and co-workers; and (via Boyd) powerful authorities such as teachers, coaches, and scout leaders.
“As Frances pointed out, you get a square like Facebook and MySpace and a lot of this gets jumbled up,” he said. “It’s ‘peer to firm,’ but pretty soon we’re inviting friends and teachers in.”
He said it was important to remember that just because someone overshares in a certain context—such as reporting on MySpace a bout of drunkenness—it doesn’t mean he or she doesn’t care about being misunderstood out of that context.
“Think about how many teens in 1979 or ‘89 or ‘99 knew or cared about McCarthyism or blacklists,” he told the audience. “When you were that age, did you care about the dangers of someone finding out what you were reading?”
The influence of the tools
While social networking services do offer good tools for managing reputation, it generally takes several clicks to get there. “They designed these systems really well for people who know how to work systems really well,” he said.
Moreover, “within social network sites, there’s a technological bias to add to your networks,” he said, which pushes people to share beyond context. Generally, the more technologically adept people, generally the wealthier and better educated, are better able to manage those challenges.
Need for policy change
Vaidhyanathan said some big policy changes are need, notably shifting defaults, which should not be set to maximum exposure of personal information. Such technology should be upfront and easy to manage—and encompass such technologies as store discount services.
He said that we have to remember issues of class, given that one in four children in America is born in poverty. “Poor people, and poor young people especially are less likely to have the skills and perspective to manage the technology and therefore their public faces.”
He noted that poor people are more likely to use MySpace than Facebook, to use text messaging than Twitter. “Poor young people are much less likely to imagine the stakes of a soiled reputation,” he added.
“We are all in this together,” he said. The problems may be more acute for young people but everyone is challenged by new technologies and implications of reputation management
“We all need to push for stronger laws and tools,” he said. “It can’t just be a process of sermonizing and berating young people. None of us have been on Facebook for five years. No one has encountered the full range of possible social benefits and possible social harms… By treating young people as a distinct alien force, we’re not doing them, or us, a service."
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