Next Great Thing

NGT attended the YPulse Mashup this week. The keynote talk was a tête-à-tête about “Convergence Culture” between Henry Jenkins and Danah Boyd. One of the most salient points they raised concerned youth and adult interaction online. In the US, our attitude towards such conversations mirrors real life (as it often does)–we think “Stranger Danger.” Meanwhile, in Asian countries, cross-generational contact is much more prevalent. On South Korea’s Cyworld, for example, participation ranges from ages 8 to 80 and it’s very much socially acceptable. Adults are seen as advisors, not predators.

The fear mongering in our culture produces stories about sex predators on chat rooms and pedophiles on MySpace. In truth, this is a proportionally small portion of adult users. As Henry points out, words like “Digital Native” and “Digital Immigrant” (terms dropped often during the conference) put up a wall between young and old. In reality, both have a lot to contribute and much to learn from one another. Isn’t knowledge exchange the nature of the Internet?

A later panel on “Totally Wired Life” also spoke of creating more dialogue between teens and adults online. Kids are fairly naïve in terms of privacy, they said, but are starting to erect more walls. 66% of online teens are restricting access to their profiles and putting less private information online. To make the web safer, it was proposed that we think of teens as citizens (rather than victims). The ultimate goal of this would be to create a “participatory web” between all its citizens.

Indeed, a more open and hospitable web would set many minds at ease and do some good. But why do youth love the web so much? Isn’t the nature of teens to define themselves in opposition to adults? Perhaps the Internet is this generation’s rock and roll. While mom and dad went backstage at Dead shows, their kids are friending bands on MySpace. In both cases, parents are not welcome. Youth aren’t getting more private to hide from predators, it’s more to hide from their parents. In fact, teens are now starting two SNS profiles: a “real” one and a “front.” (Apparently Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has the same thing.) There is definitely good reason to encourage online collaboration across the ages. There are also good ways to go about it. Befriending them on Facebook isn’t one.