Here in London, England, the Handheld Learning Conference is in full swing. Believe it or not, it's the first time I've been, and I have to say it won't be the last.
But rather than dwell on that, I wanted to talk about a great experience I had. I attended a presentation by Danah Boyd, and then had the privilege of listening to her later in the day when she was on a panel. Her talk, about living in a networked world, really got me thinking, as did her comments on the panel, which came at the end of a session about virtual worlds.
Now, it's hard to know where to start, so I'll just put this post in context. Until today, although I had heard of Danah, I'd never made the time to check out her work. That was a mistake, and I have rectified it for the future by subscribing to her blog's rss feed.
Although much of what she said was not new to me, some of it was, and even the bits that were not -- well, I started to make connections that I hadn't quite made before. I've come to the conclusion, which had until now been only half-formed, or just below the level of my awareness, that what we adults need is guidance on how to conduct ourselves vis-a-vis young people on the internet -- and they need some protocols on how to deal with us!
To explain how I got there, let me take you through a couple of the main points (for me) that Danah made in this respect, and my thoughts on them.
The world is shrinking -- but not in a good way
It's a sad reflection on the paranoia extant in today's society that whenever my wife and I see children playing in the street, we comment on how nice it is to see that. Why? Because it's so rare. (Not that one can blame parents: although the actual statistical risk of a child being abducted is extremely small, the consequences of that happening are devastating.)
Apparently, this is not simply a perception on our part. Our grandparents were able, as children, to roam up to about 8 miles away from home. These days, children are highly scheduled and highly supervised. Being under constant surveillance, the only way they can get any semblance or privacy is by going online to chat to their friends, which is quite a paradox if you think about it.
This facet of modern life has also found its way into newspaper cartoons. Like this one, from the Daily Telegraph.
Eyes on the street
One of the unfortunate aspects of modern living is the vanishing of what Jane Jacobs called "eyes on the street". My understanding of the meaning of this phrase is that there were people --- adults -- around the community who were just there. They would help to moderate behaviour by their presence, and were also there as founts of wisdom and knowledge. But they were not there in a surveillance or supervisory mode as such.
Now, I know that if you were to listen to older people and actually believed them you'd think that the past was some sort of golden age. My mother and people of her generation were always talking about how during the war people could just leave their doors open and nobody would steal anything. Well, I take all that with a big pinch of salt, but I do recollect two incidents in my own childhood which seemed to encapsulate the idea of "eyes on the street".
The first was when I was about 12 years old, and walking along the street with my friends, about a mile away from where I lived, which was in a densely-populated part of London. We were, to be frank, behaving a bit raucously, and all of a sudden someone came striding out of his shop -- a man I had never seen before in my life -- and said to me:
"Is this any way for a gentleman to behave? I've a good mind to tell your father."
"You don't even know who I am, let alone who my dad is", I replied.
"Freedman, the clothes shop in the market.", he replied.
That was a bit of a shock!
The other incident was this. The elder daughter of a long-standing pillar of the community married someone who was later convicted of shoplifting. Hardly an offence likely to get him onto the FBI's Most Wanted list. Nevertheless, the family felt so shamed by this that they sold their thriving business, and their home, and moved out of the area completely, to start anew somewhere else, where they weren't known.
So what has any of this got to do with anything?
Well, in real life we no longer have eyes on the street in the same sort of way as previously. But in virtual life, we also don't have eyes on the street, by dint of the fact that young people are taught to fear us adults rather than see us as people they could have a healthy relationship with -- even if that relationship simply consisted of a kind of peaceful coexistence in which young people felt able to approach us if and when they wanted to.
Behaviour code?
There is, quite rightly, a lot of emphasis on telling young people how to behave online, and how to keep themselves safe. But I have not seen any guidance about how to have a normal relationship, and I haven't seen any guidance for adults either. For young people, the emphasis is always on how to keep safe; for adults, it's always on how to keep safe in a legal sense.
I don't think any kind of formalised behaviour code is the answer, but I'd be interested in knowing how other people deal with such issues. This, to me, was the one frustrating aspect of Danah's contribution to the panel. She said, if I understood her correctly, that adults should not try to become "friends" with young people online (sensible) or to invite them to your group (again, sensible), but should just be there, should they wish to talk to you.
But what does that actually mean, in practical terms?
The way Neighbourhood Watch schemes work is that you have to trust the people who belong to it. A Neighbourhood Watch meeting was called in my area a couple of weeks ago, and I commented that if I was a burglar by profession I'd try and make sure as many people went to the meeting as possible!
Without trust, you would never even talk to your local Neighbourhood Watch person, let alone confide any worries to them or tell them when you were going on vacation.
How to we change the prevailing online relationship between young people and adults from one of fear to one in which the adults are seen as a form of Neighbourhood Watch? I'm not sure that that is exactly the right concept either.
Help!
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