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World Economic Forum: More than Meets the Eye

I spent the last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. When my friends (y’all) learned I was going, some were supportive while others were horrified. A few called me an outright traitor. Given how much mythology there is around this event, I want to take a moment and briefly share my own experience there.

If you read news articles about WEF, you get the impression that it’s a high stakes event where many of the world leaders gather to discuss governance and finance. (Journalists especially love to highlight when said leaders snicker or snark at one another.) Indeed, there is that part of the event, but that wasn’t actually the event that I attended. I spent the week primarily talking with civil society leaders, NGOs, representatives from the UN, and esteemed scholars. For example, I did a Refugee Run sponsored by Crossroads and the UN Refugee Agency which was a (gentle) simulation of life in a refugee camp followed by a few former refugees (including one child soldier) telling their story. I attended a Civil Society event where I spoke with representatives from human rights organizations, the union/labor movement, and NGOs working to address some of the hardest problems in society. I had a lunch with a university president talking about the role of technology in higher ed. I had dinner with an esteemed physicist, an author I admire, and a network scientist where we talked about how to engender and support creativity. I gave advice to a group of women trying to combat the societal valuation of consumption. I brainstormed with a group of young attendees who had done amazing work in the education sector around the globe. I attended a dinner with complexity analysts, newspaper executives, and brain scientists where we talked about how fear functions in society. I share these things not to brag, but because my conversations in Davos were inspiring, creative, and stimulating. I came out of the event feeling as though I was able to contribute to discussions among people who were truly working to make the world a better place. My hope is that my presence there affected others in the same way they affected me.

This is not to say that WEF/Davos is not an odd – and at times, deeply problematic – place. It is. It’s many things good, bad, and ugly. While I have never met a WEF employee who makes me depressed or angry, I cannot say the same for some of the attendees. The Forum desperately wants people from different sectors to learn from one another to address the world’s problems, but there are plenty of attendees who are more interested in maintaining the status quo. WEF evolves each year to try to find new ways to bring a social conscience into economic discussions, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wants to listen. For example, Desmond Tutu inspired the audience with his remarks about the importance of bringing women into the political and economic sphere, but I can’t say that the majority of those who needed to hear it were listening. To give this issue some context… Less than 20% of those in attendance were women. Among the young global leaders and global shapers (chosen by the Forum), it was close to 50/50. Many of the speakers (chosen by the Forum) were women. But among the corporate delegations (chosen by companies’ executives), I wouldn’t be surprised if the number was less than 5%.

Comparing WEF to any other event is hard, but I cracked a smile when Nick Bilton remarked that WEF is a lot like Burning Man. In so many ways, he’s right. A lot of people overwhelm one extreme weather location and battle non-normative conditions (Davos is crowded, covered in ice, and extremely difficult to navigate) to interact with others. In both events, there are so many different kinds of communities colliding – sometimes interacting and sometimes not. And both cost gobs of money to attend, thereby excluding all sorts of people. What differentiates the two events is how status is negotiated. At WEF, boundaries are explicitly managed: you are in or you are out, you are important or you are not. You are told over and over again whether or not you matter and access is strictly enforced. Bourdieu would call this “cultural capital.” Most people view Burning Man as much more open and accepting, but it too is governed by status games. The difference is that you don’t know whether or not you’ve been included in whatever is high status. Burning Man – like a lot of underground culture – is all about being “in the know.” Thornton would call this “subcultural capital.” You may instinctively think: “At least anyone can go to Burning Man!” That’s not true. Not only are the tickets expensive, but they’re now a lottery; both are exclusionary mechanisms. You may retort: “But BM tickets are only $400ish; it costs tens of thousands of dollars to go to Davos!” If you try to show up to BM without a ticket, you literally cannot get in. If you make your way to Davos, you can get into a surprisingly large amount of the event with only a hotel pass ($55). Yes, it’s brutally painful, but I met countless people squatting the event and engaging with folks outside of the core sessions. More importantly, I met numerous people from the public sector or civil society who were fully covered – their flight, hotel, and entrance completely paid for because they were doing good in the world without a large paycheck. Even BM attendees who come in for free because they work the event have to pay to get there and pay for their equipment. BM espouses openness while WEF is unabashedly elitist. I appreciate BM’s effort to become its idealistic self, but I also appreciate WEF’s brutal honesty regarding who it is.

One way of reading this post is as a justification of WEF and, in some ways, it is. Don’t get me wrong: there were a lot of people there who I think are to blame for the global economic crisis we’re in. And there were people there who have done serious damage to our planet in so many ways. But there were also people there who I think have radically changed the world for the better. It’s easy to hate WEF, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. I continue to be impressed by the thoughtfulness of the people at the WEF and Professor Schwab’s attempts to bridge divides. He and the WEF genuinely want to make the world a better place. We can reasonably argue about whether or not their tactics are effective, but declaring the institution evil achieves nothing.

How Parents Normalized Teen Password Sharing

In 2005, I started asking teenagers about their password habits. My original set of questions focused on teens’ attitudes about giving their password to their parents, but I quickly became enamored with teens’ stories of sharing passwords with friends and significant others. So I was ecstatic when Pew Internet & American Life Project decided to survey teens about their password sharing habits. Pew found that one third of online 12-17 year olds share their password with a friend or significant other and that almost half of those 14-17 do. I love when data gets reinforced.

Last week, Matt Richtel at the New York Times did a fantastic job of covering one aspect of why teens share passwords: as a show of affection. Indeed, I have lots of fun data that supports Richtel’s narrative — and complicates it. Consider Meixing’s explanation for why she shares her password with her boyfriend:

Meixing, 17, TN: It made me feel safer just because someone was there to help me out and stuff. It made me feel more connected and less lonely. Because I feel like Facebook sometimes it kind of like a lonely sport, I feel, because you’re kind of sitting there and you’re looking at people by yourself. But if someone else knows your password and stuff it just feels better.

For Meixing, sharing her password with her boyfriend is a way of being connected. But it’s precisely these kinds of narratives that have prompted all sorts of horror by adults over the last week since that NYTimes article came out. I can’t count the number of people who have gasped “How could they!?!” at me. For this reason, I feel the need to pick up on an issue that the NYTimes let out.

The idea of teens sharing passwords didn’t come out of thin air. In fact, it was normalized by adults. And not just any adult. This practice is the product of parental online safety norms. In most households, it’s quite common for young children to give their parents their passwords. With elementary and middle school youth, this is often a practical matter: children lose their passwords pretty quickly. Furthermore, most parents reasonably believe that young children should be supervised online. As tweens turn into teens, the narrative shifts. Some parents continue to require passwords be forked over, using explanations like “because I’m your mother.” But many parents use the language of “trust” to explain why teens should share their passwords with them.

There are different ways that parents address the password issue, but they almost always build on the narrative of trust. (Tangent: My favorite strategy is when parents ask children to put passwords into a piggy bank that must be broken for the paper with the password to be retrieved. Such parents often explain that they don’t want to access their teens’ accounts, but they want to have the ability to do so “in case of emergency.” A piggy bank allows a social contract to take a physical form.)

When teens share their passwords with friends or significant others, they regularly employ the language of trust, as Richtel noted in his story. Teens are drawing on experiences they’ve had in the home and shifting them into their peer groups in order to understand how their relationships make sense in a broader context. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone because this is all-too-common for teen practices. Household norms shape peer norms.

There’s another thread here that’s important. Think back to the days in which you had a locker. If you were anything like me and my friends, you gave out your locker combination to your friends and significant others. There were varied reasons for doing so. You wanted your friends to pick up a book for you when you left early because you were sick. You were involved in a club or team where locker decorating was common. You were hoping that your significant other would leave something special for you. Or – to be completely and inappropriately honest – you left alcohol in your locker and your friends stopped by for a swig. (One of my close friends was expelled for that one.) We shared our locker combinations because they served all sorts of social purposes, from the practical to the risqué.

How are Facebook passwords significantly different than locker combos? Truth be told, for most teenagers, they’re not. Teens share their passwords so that their friends can check their messages for them when they can’t get access to a computer. They share their passwords so their friends can post the cute photos. And they share their passwords because it’s a way of signaling an intimate relationship. Just like with locker combos.

Can password sharing be abused? Of course. I’ve heard countless stories of friends “punking” one another by leveraging password access. And I’ve witnessed all sorts of teen relationship violence where mandatory password sharing is a form of surveillance and abuse. But, for most teens, password sharing is as risky as locker combo sharing. This is why, even though 1/3 of all teens share their passwords, we only hear of scattered horror stories.

I know that this practice strikes adults as seriously peculiar, but it irks me when adults get all judgmental on this teen practice, as though it’s “proof” that teens can’t properly judge how trustworthy a relationship is. First, it’s through these kinds of situations where they learn. Second, adults are dreadful at judging their own relationships (see: divorce rate) so I don’t have a lot of patience for the high and mighty approach. Third, I’m much happier with teens sharing passwords as a form of intimacy than sharing many other things.

There’s no reason to be aghast at teen password sharing. Richtel’s story is dead-on. It’s pretty darn pervasive. But it also makes complete sense given how notions of trust have been constructed for many teens.

(Image Credit: Darwin Bell)

We need to talk about piracy (but we must stop SOPA first)

Much to my happiness, the internets are in a frenzy about the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (aka SOPA). Congress is currently in recess, but the House announced a hearing on the potential impact to the Domain Name Service on January 18 and everyone expects the Senate to begin discussing a similar bill “PROTECT IP Act” when they return to DC on January 24. There’s a lot to these bills – and the surrounding furor – and I’m not going to go into it, but I recommend reading the actual bill and Open Congress info, the Wikipedia article, EFF’s blog, and the various links at Stop American Censorship. Tomorrow – January 18th – a bunch of geeks are planning a SOPA Blackout Day to voice their discontent.

I abhor SOPA for the same reasons as other geeks. I’m horrified that Congress has crafted a law that will screw with the architecture of the internet in ways that will undermine free speech. I love Josh Kopstein’s post “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.” And I’m glad that geeks are getting vocal, even if – as Clay Johnson has pointed out – geeks don’t quite get how Congress works. I’m stoked that the White House has asked for a civil conversation around piracy (while also opposing SOPA’s key pieces). And I find it utterly hysterical that Rupert Murdoch has come to geeks’ turf (Twitter) to convey his pro-SOPA opinions, even as Obama steps in to state that he opposes SOPA.

In talking with non-geeks, I can’t help but be fascinated that the debate has somehow been framed in the public eye as “pro-piracy” vs. “anti-piracy.” Needless to say, that’s the frame that Murdoch is advocating, even as geeks are pushing for the “pro-internet” vs. “pro-censorship” frame. What’s especially intriguing to me is that the piracy conversation is getting convoluted even among politicos, revealing the ways in which piracy gets flattened to one concept. Teasing this issue out is especially important when we’re talking about regulations that are meant to help with piracy. There are many different aspects of piracy, but for simplicity sake, I want to focus on two aspects that feed into bills like SOPA and PROTECT IP: piracy as a competitive issue vs. piracy as a cultural issue. This can often be split as software piracy vs. media piracy, but not always.

There are actually reasons to not be in favor of all forms of piracy, even if you’re an unrepentant media pirate. Imagine that you are an appliance manufacturer in the United States. You make things like toasters. You are required to abide by American laws. You must pay your employees at least a minimum wage; you must follow American safety regulations. All of this raises the overhead of your production process. In addition, you must also do things like purchase your software legally. Your designers use some CAD software, which they pay for. Your accountants use accounting software, which they pay for. Sure, you’ve cut some costs by using “free” software but, by and large, you pay a decent amount of money to software companies to use the systems that they built.

You really want to get your toasters into Wal-Mart, but time and time again, you find yourself undercut by competitors in foreign countries where the safety laws are more lax, the minimum wage laws are nonexistent, and where companies aren’t punished for stealing software. Are you grouchy? Of course you are. Needless to say, you see this as an unfair competition issue. There aren’t legal ways of bending the market to create fair competition. You can’t innovate your way out of this dilemma and so you want Congress to step in and make sure that you can compete fairly.

Combating software piracy in the supply chain is a reasonable request and part of what makes bills like PROTECT IP messy is that there’s a kernel of this issue in these bills. Bills like this are also meant to go after counterfeit products. Most folks really want to know what’s in baby formula or what’s in the medicines they purchase. Unfortunately, though, these aspects of piracy quickly gets muddled with cultural facets of piracy, particularly once the media industries have gotten involved.

Since the rise of Napster, the media industry has been in a furor over media piracy. Not only do they get pissed when people rip and distribute media content on the internet, they throw a fit whenever teenagers make their own music videos based on their favorite song. Even though every child in America is asked to engage in remix in schools for educational purposes (“Write a 5-paragraph essay as though you were dropped into Lord of the Flies”), doing so for fun and sharing your output on the internet has been deemed criminal. Media piracy is messy, because access to content is access to social status and power in a networked era. Some people are simply “stealing” but others are actually just trying to participate in culture. It’s complicated. (See: “Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property” and “Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates” to go deeper.)

Most in the media industry refuse to talk about media piracy beyond the economic components. But the weird thing about media piracy is that Apple highlighted that the media industry could actually innovate their way around this problem. Sure, it doesn’t force everyone to pay for consuming content, but when was that ever the case? When I was in high school, I went over to friends’ houses and watched their TV and movies without paying for them. Even though the media industry is making buckets of money – and even though people have been shown to be willing to pay for content online when it’s easy – the media industry is more interested in creating burdensome regulations than in developing innovative ways for consumers to get access to content. (Yo HBO! Why the hell can’t I access your content legally online if I don’t subscribe to cable!?!?) I guess I shouldn’t be surprised… It’s cheaper to lawyer up than hire geeks these days.

Of course, it’s not like there aren’t a bazillion laws on the books to curb media piracy. What frustrates the media industry is that they don’t have jurisdiction over foreign countries and foreign web servers. Bills like SOPA aren’t really meant to curb piracy; they’re meant to limit Americans’ access to information flows in foreign countries by censoring what kinds of information can flow across American companies’ servers. Eeek. I can’t help but think back to a point that Larry Lessig makes in “Republic, Lost” where he points out that there are more laws to curb media piracy on the books than there are to curb pollution. Le sigh.

Don’t get me wrong: there are definitely piracy practices out there that I’d like to see regulators help curb. For example, I’m actually quite in favor of making sure that companies can’t engage in unfair competition. I agree with the White House that certain kinds of piracy practices undermine American jobs. But I’m not in favor of using strong arm tactics to go after individuals’ cultural practices. Nor am I interested in seeing “solutions” that focus on turning America into more of a bubble. Shame on media companies for trying to silence and censor information flows in their efforts to strong arm consumers. This isn’t good for consumers and it’s certainly not good for citizens.

As we go deeper into an information age, I think that we need to have serious conversations about what is colloquially termed piracy. We need to distinguish media piracy from software piracy because they’re not the same thing. We need to seriously interrogate fairness and equality, creative production and cultural engagement. And we need to seriously take into consideration why people do what they do. I strongly believe that when people work en masse to route around a system, the system is most likely the thing that needs the fixing, not the people.

These issues are challenging and they require people to untangle a wide variety of different conflicting and interwoven practices. Unfortunately, challenging cultural conversations are really hard to have when the government chooses to fast track faulty legislation on the behalf of one industry and to the detriment of another. SOPA has turned into a gnarly battle between old and new media, but the implications of this battle extend far beyond the corporate actors. My hope is that SOPA goes away immediately. But I also hope that we can begin the harder work of actually interrogating how different aspects of piracy are affecting society, business, and cultural practices.

In the meantime, I ask you to stand with me to oppose SOPA. Learn what’s happening and voice your opinion. Legislative issues like this affect all of us.

Nancy Baym, Kate Crawford, Mary L. Gray to Join Microsoft Research

::bounce:: I am *ecstatic* to announce that Nancy Baym, Kate Crawford, and Mary L. Gray are all joining Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, MA. See Jennifer Chayes’ announcement. ::bounce::

Three years ago (this week), I joined Microsoft Research to help integrate social scientists and computer scientists. I have known about and admired MSR since my undergraduate days when I was studying computer science. From the perspective of a researcher, it seemed like heaven-on-earth. As I slowly shifted disciplines, I was saddened to think that I had moved myself away from MSR so I was utterly delighted when, in 2008, I learned that Jennifer Chayes wanted to start a lab that brought computer scientists and social scientists together in new ways. I was even more ecstatic when she invited me to help with this endeavor. Over the last three years, I’ve invited numerous scholars to come to MSR as visitors, postdocs, and interns. In particular, I’ve focused on bringing in social scientists from fields that haven’t commonly been in conversation with industrial researchers. This loose network of folks have come to be known as the “Social Media Collective.” Much to my absolute pleasure, Nancy, Kate, and Mary are going to come to MSR to join the Collective.

The Social Media Collective focuses on research related to socio-technical issues, primarily from a social scientific perspective. Most of us use qualitative research methods, but there are also quantitative, computational, and experimental folks among us. We primarily look at topics related to the rise of social media, but we do so from a variety of different disciplinary lenses. Our work tends to have implications for a wide array of audiences: scholarly, technical, policy, business, and public. Nancy, Kate, and Mary are three of the leading scholars in this arena and I’m ecstatic that they’ll be coming to MSR to advance this line of inquiry.

  • Nancy Baym is a communication scholar, currently at University of Kansas. She helped define the field of internet studies with her work on personal connections, fandom, and online communities.
  • Kate Crawford is a media studies scholar, currently at the University of New South Wales. She weaves together a diverse set of interests to examine mobile media, intimacy, and listening, with an eye towards public policy implications.
  • Mary L. Gray is an anthropologist, currently at Indiana University. Her work on rural queer youth has helped complicate our understandings of marginalized populations’ use of technology.

Each of these phenomenal scholars has a long history of helping us understand the relationship between technology and society and I’m sooo soooo soooo excited that they’re coming to MSR. As all of you who know me know, I love MSR. I also love Nancy, Kate, and Mary. So the combination makes me feel like a kid in a candy store.

MSR is a truly special place: an interdisciplinary home base for folks who are interested in studying issues related to technology. I still remember the day that Nancy, Kate, and Mary came back from talking to a group of computer scientists and mathematicians about the very meaning of “communication.” Needless to say, social scientists don’t use that term in the same way as mathematicians. But instead of being horrified, these three were glowing because they ended up diving deep into the kind of intense conversations that only scholars relish. That’s when I knew that MSR was the place for them.

Microsoft Research is so lucky that Nancy, Kate, and Mary are coming to MSR. And I’m super lucky that I’m going to have three more awesome colleagues. ::bounce::

I am Generation Flux

I love talking with smart journalists. When they’re good at what they do, journalists can really prompt me to think deeply (and differently) about issues. Nothing makes me happier than coming out of a discussion with a journalist with my brain on fire. My conversation with Bob Safian from Fast Company did precisely that. I left that chat high as a kite with all my synapses buzzing. The funny thing? I didn’t know why he was asking all of those interesting questions. Then, a few weeks later, I was asked to do a photoshoot. And that too ended up being way way way too much fun. Totally silly. The groomer even got me to wear heels for the first time in 15 years. (When I was 18, I wore heels as part of a beauty pageant – yes, I entered a beauty pageant on a dare – and I fell off the stage. I haven’t worn heels since.)

Anyhow, that fabulous conversation and playful photoshoot ended up turning into a cover story for Fast Company: “The Secrets of Generation Flux.” I can’t tell you how honored and humbled I am to be featured on the cover of Fast Company along with some folks who I greatly admire: Beth Comstock, Baratunde Thurston, Raina Kumra, Bob Greenberg, DJ Patil, and Pete Cashmore. Plus, it makes me smile so much to be surrounded by so many fearless, goofy folks doing their thing because they believe in what they do. And I can’t tell you how good it feels to be recognized for being a troublemaker after so many years of being told that my rabble rousing would produce no good.

I am a very lucky girl and I thank my lucky stars for letting me be as successful as I’ve been. Who would’ve thought that I’d end up seeing my face on the newsstands?? ::giggle::

I’m back….

OMG do I love vacation. A chance to live a different lifestyle, explore the world, and refresh my brain. This year’s adventure began in Easter Island where we traversed the island looking at the amazing Moai statues and engaging in all sorts of discussions about the fraught/uncertain history of the Rapa Nui people.

Next, we headed back to the mainland of Chile and ventured down to Patagonia where we managed to do the famed W trek in Torres del Paine, finishing only hours before the park was shut down due to a fire started by a tourist. It kills me to think that most of the amazing trail we trekked is now burnt to a crisp.

After finishing the W, we ventured into Argentina, first to El Calafate where we got to listen to Parito Moreno crackling its amazing glacier sounds. And then we headed up to El Chalten in order to trek all around Fitz Roy where we miraculously got a brilliantly cloudless day for our trek to the base.

And then we headed up to Buenos Aires. Needless to say, lots more happened amidst all of those adventures, but I’ll leave you with one final fun image. This is of me wearing my Selk’Bag (a fabulous alternative to sleeping bags for those who can’t sleep like a mummy).

Anyhow, I’m back and will be back to work momentarily. I hope you had a fabulous holiday!!!

I’m on Vacation!! (Until January 10)

Penguins and statues and glaciers oh my! I’m off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of … OH MY GOD I AM ON VACATION!!!! Can you hear my enthusiasm? My complete and utter joy? Cuz I’m bouncing up and down here. For the next month I will be here:

And here:

Yes, that’s Easter Island and Patagonia. OMG OMG OMG.

During this period, I will be properly off the grid. No email, no internets, no nothing. More importantly, during this period, I will be taking an Email Sabbatical. What this means is that my INBOX will not be receiving any email. None. Zilch. All headed off to /dev/null for a cruel digital death. If you need to reach me, email me after January 10.

I know that asking for people’s patience on this one is hard, particularly for those of you who don’t know me and think that I’m a cruel evil diva for needing a break. But I’m a workaholic who works constantly during the year. In order to function, I need to take time off. And the only way to get a proper break is to vacation just as hard as I work. And this means saying goodbye to email and, more importantly, not letting myself anxiously worry about all that’s waiting for me when I return.

Vacations are precious. Life is precious. Have an amazing holiday season and I look forward to seeing you in the new year!

Photo Credits: Peter Albrecht and Stuck in Customs

Four Difficult Questions Regarding Bullying and Youth Suicide

Over the last couple of years, I’ve laid awake at night asking myself uncomfortable questions about bullying and teen suicide. I don’t have answers to most of the questions that I have, but I’m choosing to voice my questions, fears, and doubts because I’m not confident that our war on bullying is taking us down the right path. I’m worried about the unintended consequences of our public discourse and I’m worried about the implications that our decisions have on youth, particularly in this high-stakes arena. So I’m asking these four tough questions in the hopes that we can collectively step back and think critically about how we’re addressing bullying as a public issue.

1. What if the stranger danger / sexual predator moral panic increased LGBT suicide?

When I was growing up online, talking to strangers allowed me to getting different perspectives on the world. As a queer teen, the internet allowed me to connect with people who helped me grapple with hard questions around sexuality. I very much thank the internet for playing a crucial role in helping me survive high school. In 2001/2, I visited the online forums that I grew up in, only to find that they were filled with hateful messages directed at LGBT youth by religious ideologues who, quite simply, told these kids they were going to hell. I learned that LGBT networks had gone underground.

As the sexual predator moral panic kicked in in 2005, youth started telling me about how all internet strangers were dangerous. They swallowed the message they’d been told, hook, line, and sinker. What really startled me were all of the LGBT youth I met who told me that they had no one to talk with… I’d ask them if they connected with other LGBT folks online and they’d look at me with horror before talking about how scary/sketchy/bad strangers were.

By many accounts, the early internet seems to be correlated with a decline in suicide among LGBT youth, perhaps because of its ability to connect LGBT to information and support structures. What if the stranger danger rhetoric undermines that? Who do LGBT youth turn to when they’re feeling isolated? Is it possible that the culture of fear we’ve created has increased suicide rates? If so, who’s responsible?

2. What if “It Gets Better” increases emotional devastation for some LGBT youth?

Most LGBT-identified teens who have committed suicide since the “It Gets Better” campaign have been involved in the campaign in some way. Jamey Rodemeyer notoriously made a video before he killed himself. Countless adults (and youth) have celebrated “It Gets Better” as a powerful message filled with hope. But “It Gets Better” isn’t the same as “I can make it better.” Abstraction and patience don’t help when you’re in pain Right Now.

When you’re 14 and coming to terms with your sexuality, six months feels like a decade and 4 years feels like eternity. Along comes a message of hope and it’s really exciting and you get pumped up, like the way you feel when a new song comes on the radio that you feel really speaks to you. You dive in, you create your story, you make your own video. And then what? The humdrums at school continue on and you continue to get teased, only worse this time because you publicly pronounced your story. You felt like you were part of a movement but no one reached out to you, no one helped you make it better. No community was made, no support group was developed. You’re still alone. No one seems to care. You crash and burn.

Getting “high” on a movement can be devastating for youth if there’s no support structure there when they fall. The Trevor Project did a great job of providing some of the needed support infrastructure, but communities themselves often aren’t prepared to support youth. Social services are underfunded. Schools are strapped for cash and getting rid of guidance structures. Parents are stressed out. Community groups are not always tolerant of questioning youth. Is it possible that hopeful messages like “It Gets Better” result in more devastating crashes, particularly for youth in not-so-supportive communities? Does the positive narrative outweigh the possible existential break that can come with being disappointed that things don’t get better?

3. What if the media spotlight around bullying causes harm to youth?

In January 2010, a Massachusetts-based girl named Phoebe Prince killed herself. The highly publicized story suggested that she was an innocent victim who was cruelly tormented by her peers. The story was told in such a cut-and-dry manner that it should’ve raised suspicions in anyone’s mind, but people glommed onto the narrative. Shortly later, the local District Attorney charged six students with various crimes in the case. But did they do what they were accused of doing or was this a witchhunt cloaked as justice? Those kids’ lives have been wrecked by the investigation, publicity, and charges. If they are the devils incarnate that the press want them to be, arguable they deserve it. But what if they didn’t? (If you want to read phenomenal coverage of this, check out Emily Bazelon’s 2010 feature series.)

In the summer of 1999, I was at a rave in a field in Colorado. I was in my tent, writing in my journal, when a group of kids asked me if they could come in. We got to talking and I learned that they had all been students at Columbine on that fateful day when the sanctity of their school was destroyed. I asked them about what it was like to be there and they said that it sucked, but nothing sucked more than the aftermath. They started telling me about how the press hounded them, how they couldn’t hang out with friends, how they had no place to go anymore because the press would sit on their lawns and beg them for more details. Paparazzi at its worst. The kids in my tent had all dropped out of school because of the press. WTF?

On one hand, it’s great that there’s public attention being given to bullying, suicide, and the hardships that youth face. On the other, I can’t help but wonder if the spotlight does additional damage. Does the spotlight help us find effective interventions or just force people to create bandaids? Does it increase justice or result in more kids’ lives being destroyed? Does it showcase the challenges that youth face or obscure them in caricatured forms that lose their nuance? In an effort to tell the story, do we create angels and demons that destroy any hope of creating change?

4. What if us adults are part of the problem?

I spend countless hours talking to youth, thinking about youth, and speaking out on behalf of youth. Nothing makes my heart ache more than seeing youth suffer. I can also still vividly remember my own experiences as a “weird” teen growing up in Pennsylvania who was regularly ostracized and teased. I remember what it was like to feel powerless and to reach that precarious state of anomie. I don’t want anyone to have to go through that which is why I’m so deeply committed to this struggle.

That said, I think that it’s outright dangerous to get so lost in our mission to combat bullying that we stop looking into the mirror. What are the norms that we set for young people when we talk poorly about our friends, family, neighbors, or colleagues at the dinner table? When we engage in road rage while driving? Why is it that we accept – if not encourage – meanness in our political sparring? Or on our TV talk shows? Why do marketers put their money behind reality TV shows that propagate the value of relationship drama as entertainment? Look around at the society we’ve created and it’s filled with harshness. To top it off, look at how much we pressure our youth, particularly middle class youth. Hyper-competition starts early and is non-stop. And look at how increased economic pressure in this country creates new tensions, particularly for working class youth. Then add in the fact that puberty is where all sorts of mental health issues start to appear. Where are the support structures for youth that go beyond the family? We’ve defunded social services left right and center.

In short, we’re creating a societal recipe for disaster even while we publicly pronounce our crusades to end bullying. We don’t need more pundits and journalists and politicians telling us we need to end bullying. We know that. We need to start building out the infrastructure to make it happen. And to realize that it’s a systems-level problem that is not easy to solve. There’s no silver bullet, no magical solution. It can’t be instantly stopped at the school door. It requires collective action, with an eye towards making the world a better place. It requires all-hands-on and a commitment from everyone – and I do mean everyone – to take responsibility for their own actions, values, and attitudes within society. Bullying doesn’t stop by blaming others. It doesn’t stop by creating new regulations. Or inventing new demons. Or scaring people shitless. It stops by collectively agreeing to engage in acts of tolerance, love, bravery, and respect. And that’s far harder to do than passing laws, prosecuting teens, or writing fear-mongering stories.

Image Credit: Ashley Rose

Opportunities not to miss…

Over the last six weeks, I’ve posted various opportunities for students, academics, and other scholars that I’m co-directing/hosting, many of which have deadlines looming. I want to summarize them in one post for those who either missed them or wanted some synthesis:

Microsoft Research Postdocs.

  • Who: Newly minted/about-to-be-minted PhD students working on social media topics from a social science perspective
  • Deadline: December 12, 2011
  • More Information

Special issue of JOBEM on Socially-Mediated Publicness.

  • Who: Scholars who want to publish their work on socially-mediated publicness in a fantastic journal experimenting with open-access
  • Deadline: December 12, 2011 for brief abstracts; January 6, 2012 for complete articles
  • More Information

Digital Media & Learning Summer Institute.

  • Who: Graduate students/young postdocs doing work touching on policy and innovation around digital media & learning
  • Deadline: January 9, 2012
  • Application & More Info

Microsoft Research PhD Internships.

  • Who: Current PhD students working on social media topics from a social science perspective
  • Deadline: January 10, 2012
  • More Information

Human Trafficking & Technology Research Grants.

  • Who: Scholars who can research the role of tech in different facets of human trafficking
  • Deadline: February 17, 2012
  • Request for Proposals

Please check out this opportunities and make sure that the right people you know hear about them.

Given how many amazing opportunities I had as a graduate student and young scholar, I’m really excited to be able to give back to others. Thanks to all of my collaborators and the institutions that support us in being able to create exciting spaces for scholars to flourish.

What is the Role of Technology in Human Trafficking?

Networked technologies – including the internet, mobile phones, and social media – alter how information flows and how people communicate. There is little doubt that technology is increasingly playing a role in the practices and processes surrounding human trafficking: the illegal trade of people for commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, and other forms of modern-day slavery. Yet, little is known about costs and benefits of technology’s role. We do not know if there are more human trafficking victims as a result of technology, nor do we know if law enforcement can identify perpetrators better as a result of the traces that they leave. One thing that we do know is that technology makes many aspects of human trafficking more visible and more traceable, for better and for worse. Focusing on whether technology is good or bad misses the point; it is here to stay and it is imperative that we understand the role that it is playing. More importantly, we need to develop innovative ways of using technology to address the horrors of human trafficking.

To date, as researchers at USC have highlighted, there is little empirical research into the role that technology plays in human trafficking, let alone the commercial sexual exploitation of children. As a result, new interventions and policies are being driven by intuition, speculation, and extrapolation from highly publicized incidents. There’s no doubt that all forms human trafficking and modern day slavery are horrible, but if we actually want to help those that are victimized, we need to recognize that this is a complex issue and work to understand how the puzzle pieces fits together. My team at Microsoft Research is trying to untangle technology’s role in different facets of the human trafficking ecosystem, fully recognizing how complicated and messy it is. This is why we need your help.

Thanks to the generous support of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit and Microsoft Research, I’m proud to announce a pool of grant money for researchers who can help us understand critical elements of the puzzle. Please forward this far and wide because we’re hoping to find scholars with the skills, domain knowledge, and passion to really help us interrogate how technology is used in human trafficking. We need anthropologists, communications scholars, computer scientists, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, etc.

In order to help contextualize our RFP, we have prepared a framework document meant to map out one slice of the human trafficking ecosystem: “Human Trafficking and Technology: A framework for understanding the role of technology in the commercial sexual exploitation of children in the U.S.” This document is meant to articulate some of the complex issues and hard questions that we face in trying to understand technology’s role in one aspect of human trafficking. If you’re interested in this space, please be critical and challenge our thinking.

We are also looking to identify scholars who are working in this space, including graduate students and postdocs and researchers whose work is not yet published. Even if you’re not looking for grant money, please drop us a line if you’re grappling with technology’s role in human trafficking.

On a more personal note, I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to work for an organization that is willing to sponsor this line of inquiry. It’s amazing to work with colleagues who are all deeply passionate about really understanding this horrible practice in order to do what’s right. We’re all deeply committed to the importance of research and grounding our decisions in research. And we’re all deeply grateful to all of those out there who are determined to end the violence and oppression that comes with commercial sexual exploitation and modern day slavery.

Thank you! And we look forward to hearing from you!

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Image Source: Brandon Christopher Warren, Flickr