Is social media messing up today’s teens?  Adults, it seems, love to pontificate on the benefits and ills of emerging internet-based communication platforms  on young people. But how often do they bother to listen to the teenagers they claim to be concerned about?

Well, this is their chance.

Over this past week, the members of my daughter’s YouTube collaboration channel Fellowship of the Ning have recorded their thoughts on camera, and provided a candid and personal perspective of how social media is affecting their lives.

This is essential viewing for anyone who speaks or writes about teenagers and social media.

There’s quite a lot to get through – you need to set aside some quality time to watch all the videos (remembering of course that each video maker set aside an awful lot more quality time to make these for you to watch).  And you have to remember that these are teens talking about their own concerns in their own voice to their peers – you are a guest in their world. You also have to remember that this group only represent a subset of teen internet users.

Nevertheless, the videos paint a very different picture of social media and teens that you get from many supposedly expert commentators.

By way of background, last week, my daughter Jade posted this short video, asking the channel’s subscribers to share their thoughts on social media:

She asked three specific questions:

1. Why is social media important to you?
2. How has it changed you or your life?
3. What is your response to these articles:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains

http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-facebook-teens-20110806,0,7575848.story

[I pointed her toward the articles and talked with her about the questions, but that was pretty much the limit of my involvement here]

Over the next week, her five collaborators responded, each with their own unique style and perspective – followed by Jade’s own response.

I have my favorites of course. But without exception, each one leaves me humbled by the honesty, insight and sophistication expressed.  No-one – no-one – who talks with assumed authority on social media and teenagers should do so without first viewing these, and the many other videos out there made by teens for teens on what is important to them, and why.

Sam (USA)

Ella (UK)

Andrew (Canada)

Francisco (Argentina)

Kieran (UK)

Jade (USA, with a UK bias)

If you know of other YouTube videos of teens talking to teens about social media, please post in the comments. Thanks!

Update 8/25/11 – Link to LA Times piece now working!

If you are a teen who uses YouTube (or know of one – maybe even your own teenager), please think seriously about posting a response to this video:

(You can also watch it directly on YouTube here).

Over on the Risk Science Blog, I’ve just posted a piece about Baroness Susan Greenfield’s views on the internet and society.  Something that concerns her a lot is how the internet, gaming and social media might be affecting teenagers.  But hardly anyone it seems actually bothers to ask teens what they think.

The video above was posted by my daughter Jade on her YouTube collab channel.  She has been talking with her fellow collaborators for a while now on asking their followers for thoughts on social media and being a teenager.  I’m afraid my interest in Susan Greenfield’s ideas tipped the balance, and encouraged them to get a move on with posting the three questions in the video.

This seems like an important opportunity though for teens to talk about social media on their own terms, and in a way that will help “experts” who think they know what is going on from actually finding out what it’s like for teenagers in today’s hyper-connected world.

So please encourage anyone you know to watch and post a response.

And check back in a few weeks to see the result.

Thanks!

Living online is changing our brains – at least according to Baroness Greenfield in an interview posted today by New Scientist.

Leaving aside questions over the extent to which Greenfield’s concerns are driven by misapprehension or plausibility, the interview put me in mind of a rather wicked quote that appeared in a presentation I saw many years ago.  Unfortunately, I have long since forgotten the source of that quote, and so ended up spending a number of hours trawling the web (and asking around on Twitter) for it this afternoon.

I’m not sure that what I found is what I was looking for.  But it has the same effect.

Here’s the quote that I did come across, with a couple of choice words redacted:

“We have reason to fear that the *********** which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”

So when was this written, and what is missing?

Here’s a hint: the subject of the concern is information.  But is the author talking about the internet?  Or television?  Or some earlier information technology?

The quote is actually from a tome by Adrien Baillet, was written in 1685, and concerns the dangers of an overabundance of books!

The full quote is

“We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not.”

This appears in a deliciously titled paper titled “Reading Strategies for Coping With Information Overload ca.1550-1700″ by Ann Blair, published in the Journal of the History of Ideas – Volume 64, Number 1 in 2003 (pp 11-28). (the quote comes from Adrien Baillet, Jugemens des sçavans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs (Paris, 1685), I, avertissement au lecteur, sig. avij verso; see Françoise Waquet, “Pour une éthique de la réception: les Jugemens des livres en général d’Adrien Baillet (1685),” XVIIe siècle, 159 (1988), 157-74.)

Unfortunately, the paper is behind a paywall and so not easily accessible.  But it addresses very real concerns being expressed in the 16th and 17th centuries over how the new age of information unleashed by the printing press and scholarly works might ruin society if not handled correctly, and coping mechanisms for dealing with this.

In many ways, these challenges seem to mirror at least some those experienced at every stage of technology-driven information generation.  And in fact Ann Blair’s paper concludes

The perception of an overabundance of books led to more books being used in a great variety ways. Alongside the well-established methods of thorough reading and note-taking, which engaged the personal judgment and effort of the reader, early modern scholars also relied on shortcuts to “process” books so as to retrieve items of use with less investment of time and self. In some cases personal judgment was sacrificed when readers relied on the labor of others, notably professional compilers and amanuenses. In other cases the integrity of manuscripts and printed texts (notes, letters, and printed books) was sacrificed, when passages were cut and reused to save some of the labor of copying. At the same time idiosyncratic systems of abbreviation and note storage also heightened the private nature of reading. The proliferation of inventive methods of and aids to study, whether unique to individuals or spread more widely through official or unofficial teaching, can help us understand better not only the conditions of production of early modern scholarly and pedagogical works, but also the deep roots of the ways in which we, too, cope with what we now call information overload.

Baroness Greenfield may be onto something, or may just be suffering from the distress of belonging to an outgoing generation.  Either way, it’s hard to see how we can look forward to living successfully in an information-rich society without first looking back.

]]> http://2020science.org/2011/08/03/frying-your-brains-on-information-overload-old-perspectives-on-a-new-issue/feed/ 3 http://2020science.org/2009/05/16/wolfram-alpha-should-have-called-it-deep-thought/ http://2020science.org/2009/05/16/wolfram-alpha-should-have-called-it-deep-thought/#comments Sat, 16 May 2009 11:25:21 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=1528

Last night, Stephen Wolfram threw the switch on Wolfram Alpha – a ground-breaking… no, make that game changing… “search engine” that computes answers to questions rather than simply drowning you in a torrent of possibly-relevant web pages.  Itching to give it a whirl, I asked some of my friends on Twitter to suggest some questions to ask it.

This is the screencast of what happened (press play to start):

Mmm, maybe now we’ve got the ultimate answer-machine, we need to work on the ultimate questions a little more…

Frivolity aside, this is a stupendous achievement.  OK so it doesn’t handle nonsense questions that well (although all credit to the Alpha team that it at least handles some of the more “important” ones!) and it needs a crash course in “love.” But what it does do is cut through the digital dross and begin to make sense of the mountains of information data buried in the web.  And I suspect that this is just the beginning.

Congratulations Wolfram – you could have just ushered in the next phase in the evolution of the Web!

Many thanks to everyone on Twitter who sent me questions – especially @kulinowski, @chronsciguy, @eronarn, @silentypewriter, @physicus, @crc8 and @quinw

And a quick note to @physicus – Alpha may struggle with the problem of dispatching small rodents, but Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind of Science works a treat!