Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

At risk - and yet over-protected too?

Thursday, March 15, 2007

DATELINE: Austin, Texas -- Teenagers using the web are IN CONSTANT MORTAL DANGER! Teenagers using the web are FULFILLING THEIR INNER POTENTIAL! Such are the contradictory convictions that prevail widely and get hyperbolically vented in America's media. An effort to find a sensible truth between these extreme opposites, was made here at the South by South-West Interactive Festival (SxSW) which this week attracted its legions of sophisticated digirati, nerds, geeks, and every other life-form that's energized by the internet.

The annual festival - which has grown enormously since starting in 1987 as a purely music event, adding film along the way, and then 14 years ago staking out a firm claim on cyberspace as well - devoted a significant session to under-18s' web-use.

A provocative notion was bruited by one of the cyber-community's favorite analysts and commentators, danah boyd of the Annenberg Center for Communications at the University of Southern California (and yes, that's how she prefers her name to look - partly from belonging, at 27, to the lower-case texting generation, and partly from having a typographically insistent mother).

Boyd (pictured above) suggested that our society is actually - though these weren't the words she used - taking a step backward in time when today's teenagers go online in ever increasing droves. And it's by no means a bad step back.

How so? Boyd sees the brushfire of youthful internet-use as a corrective to what she calls "a deeply age-segregated" United States, created when almost universal high school education took hold in the 1940s. Before then, according to Boyd, young people experienced much more socialization growing up in the company of adults, and weren't yet turned into a separate category on their own, inter-reacting intensively and almost exclusively with just their peers.

"Don't talk to strangers" may have become a necessary caution from parents to children in "real" life on the streets today, but it can obviously be taken too far. And online, it's hard to see how it can be very meaningfully applied. There's a world of gradations, suggested Boyd, between using web-connectivity to, say, learn at first hand from a soldier what it's like to be among the boots on the ground in Falujah, and arranging online to meet someone for sex. And educating young people about the range of people they might meet is as important - and just as possible, Boyd maintains - for the web as for the streets.

Boyd has fast become a voice worth listening to on these questions. The Financial Times anointed her "The High Priestess of Internet Friendship" in a headline (a moniker not much to her liking) and the MacArthur Foundation has hired her, among a clutch of select experts, to produce a widely anticipated report, with a price-tag of $50 million, about the internet's impact on young people's learning processes both in and out of the classroom. (In the interests of full disclosure - I should say I'm related to her, by marriage).

SxSW was also an opportunity for Boyd to introduce to a wider audience her mentor and one-time supervisor (for her Master's in computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the vastly but subtly influential Henry Jenkins, who heads the Institute's Comparative Media Studies Program, and last year published the incisive study "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide". Describing himself, Jenkins says: "I'm a walking, talking oxymoron - a humanist from MIT".

In the separate session where Boyd interviewed him, he highlighted how the nation's epidemic of fear (which tabloid journalism, especially, encourages about the web) is making us scared of our young men (seeing the 'net as a hatching-ground for Columbine-style murderousness) and meanwhile scared for our young women. Neither reaction is proportionate, Jenkins insists.

AMONG THE WIDE VARIETY OF SPIKY, BRAIDED, PONYTAILED and/or multicolored hairstyles proliferating at SxSW, a handful of restrained, actually rather severe-looking cuts stood out. A team of US Army representatives had signed up to attend, notable among them web developers and designers, plus Lt Col John Robinson, who is Director of Media Services for the Chief of Army Public Affairs.

That is the army division responsible, among other things, for the radio show "Cav Round-Up" (as in the 1st Cavalry Division) that's broadcast daily to troops from Baghdad. Just recently, in a sign of the Army's net-savvy chops, Lt Col Robinson put the show onto Apple's iTunes service as a podcast, making it available of course worldwide. "It's important to our soldiers and their families" the colonel said, "because we are entering and developing a new and innovative way to explain their mission to the American public, as well as our global audiences."

One of the Army's own websites, which the division put up last year, is now looking more important than ever. It's called www.ThatGuy.com, and is an attempt to campaign against the increasingly serious spread of alcoholism and drug addiction among soldiers. I wrote in THE MEDIA BEAT last August about this epidemic, prompted by the arraignment of ex-Army private Steven Green from Houston, Texas, on charges of rape and murder - an almost unbelievably gruesome crime perpetrated against a 14 year-old Iraqi girl and her family that followed a binge on so-called "hajji-juice" (locally brewed moonshine). Green is still awaiting federal trial, but two other soldiers have already pleaded guilty to murder.

This case and other alcohol- and drug-related outrages have now galvanized a resourceful New York Times reporter, Paul von Zielbauer, who had his first war-reporting experience in Iraq during 2006, into using the Freedom of Information Act to get a big picture of crime involving alcohol and/or drugs among the serving military. Across both war-zones, Iraq and Afghanistan, he discovered that alcohol and drugs now feature in more than a third of all criminal prosecutions against soldiers.

A Pentagon health report, published less than two months ago, reveals that binge drinking in the Army shot up by a striking 30% from 2002 to 2005, and - in the report's hesitant wording - this "may signal an increasing pattern of heavy alcohol use in the Army". It certainly may.

 

Dr Thomas Kosten, a psychiatrist with the Veterans Administration medical center in Steven Green's hometown of Houston, Texas, says that booze and dope comprise a form of self-medication for the stress of the soldiers' job: "The 'treatment' they take for it is the same as they took after Vietnam. They turn to alcohol and drugs."

It cost the Pentagon $2 million to launch the ThatGuy website ("That Guy" being a familiar figure, the potentially dangerous drunk we perhaps all know). The site proclaims, perhaps a little forlornly in the circumstances, that it provides "viral tools" and "encourages young enlisted personnel to reject binge drinking because it detracts from the things they care about".