Born Digital: A review for the moment

Born Digital: A review for the moment

(Note from Andy: I plan to put this up on the O'Reilly Media news site in a couple days. I'm seeking comments in today's open fashion. Feel free to write on this page, use the discussion page, or even email me at user andyo, domain oreilly.com.)

Born Digital postulates a watershed between those born on or before 1980 and those born after. Although the book is advertised as a guide to the latter for those born earlier, I suspect that the marketing became unmoored from the authorship. That's because the book's arguments culminate in the message that its lessons need to be learned by "digital natives" most of all, and that they are the ones best positioned to alleviate the social dislocations caused by digital media and the Internet. [Note from Diana Kimball: This is eminently true. As with many books, this one was targeted at the people who perceive a problem in the first place, and look upon it with unease and apprehension. In this case, that amounted to parents and educators. However, I hope the book goes a step further, by avoiding fear-mongering and instead giving a better sense of the lay of the land. Parents can only parent better, and teachers can only teach better, if they can take the impulse of fear and transform it, through the reading of a book like this, into better understanding. By making themselves more effective resources, they will perhaps be able to transmit the right information to their children/students at the right time (thus serving up the content of this and other books in appropriate, situationally relevant soundbites), rather than broadcasting fear.] The last chapter also makes it clear that the authors--John Palfrey and Urs Gasser--expect their work to be read by the young people they describe in the work, not to mention being augmented, enhanced, and remixed by them. Not in book form, perhaps--everybody knows young people don't read many books. (First of all - love the idea of doing this! Second, "everybody knows young people don't read many books"? I'm 100% digital native, ONLY read books on paper, and see a lot of my peers - on the bus, in cafes, etc - doing the same...I'm kind of surprised by that comment. I think there's great interest from the digital native demographic - JCY) (AO: My claim was meant as a joke--somewhat. Harry Potter is obviously doing fine, but a lot of publishers in many fields are noticing an aging population. I don't think I'll soften the statement, even if it's an exaggeration, because it has to push forward the point about who the audience is.) [DGK: Right on with this point about the audience, but I concur with JCY that paper books may be poised to enjoy a period of retro cool. The problem: the DNs who are enamored with books are probably the ones who are least at risk.] Perhaps that's why the publisher, Basic Books, aimed its advertisements at older people--people they imagined were standing outside the digital revolution, regarding it with perplexity and anxiety.

But the digital natives can discuss the book on the associated Digital Native web site. And so I went ahead (although I'm a digital immigrant with a memory going back well before 1980) and created an account on that site so I could post this review there for comment. (First memo to those trying to appeal to Digital Natives: sophisticated ones disparage closed formats.) (Thanks, Andy -- we appreciate your using this format to share your review and to push along the conversation. John Palfrey)

Theses of Born Digital

Extricated from the potentially distracting question of what's natural or native to each generation, the topics in Born Digital will be familiar to anyone interested in Internet social policy: (I think one of the strengths of this book is that it is very explicit about the fact that it considers both pros and cons of what's happening. I think stating that up front here may be helpful. -- Eszter Hargittai)

• The rush to post personal information

• The dangers of lifelong "dossiers" of medical, legal, and purchase data

• The problems of children viewing obscene and violent content

• Copyright violations and copyright holder over-reactions

• Online harrassment and stalking

• Young people's predilection toward sampling content, whether in music, news, or education

• Information overload

• The urge to create and to collaborate (a wealth largely untapped by educators)

• Online political activism (pursued by only a small group of youth, but a growing and important group)

The book is a good summary of how ordinary Internet users are handling these issues, some with sophistication and some with naiveté. Palfrey and Gasser are educators, parents, and lawyers, in that order. They believe that the first ring of defense around the vulnerable young Internet user is her own friends and online peers. Their most robust solutions are aimed at that ring--hence the reason this text should be read by Digital Natives. [DGK: as a child—even before I turned 10—I loved reading books on parenting. It felt so sneaky to get the inside scoop. It seems possible to me that Born Digital might have some of the same appeal for kids, or at least teens: it's not dumbed down (in that it's chock-full of lawyerly info and citations), but it will still make them feel smart for "getting" it already. I'm not saying that this scenario is likely, but I know I would have enjoyed getting the "real story" as a teenager, while simultaneously basking in the affirmation of my up-to-the-minute knowledge.] Parents and teachers have an important role in the next ring of defense, particularly when young children first go online and need help developing a street sense for the Internet. I find the authors' suggestions for learning to be the strongest part of the book. But even there, many of the tasks that the authors lay on educators involves creating a structure and forum where youth can help each other.

The outer rings of defense are provided by technology companies and government. It's always nice to see lawyers talk about the limits of the law (one has the confidence that they know what they're talking about) and some of their conclusions are surprising.

For instance, Born Digital provides a retrospective on omnibus privacy laws, which were developed in Europe and spread to most countries except the U.S. during the 1990s. These laws attempt to provide a top-to-bottom set of protections that cover people's purchasing histories and other "dossier" information, an approach that would seem the only way to prevent the relentless mining and recombination of information from various sources.

But Palfrey and Gasser report that the current consensus runs against these laws. Their breadth puts many social valuable activities at risk. I reported on a backlash against EU-style privacy laws as far back as 1998, but I was not aware until reading Born Digital of its strength.

Read the book to find a couple of other surprises on the other side of the laissez faire debate as well. For instance, the book suggests that governments can make a positive contribution to child safety by requiring video game manufacturers to rate the level of violence in each game.

I mention these controversies partly to see whether people will post silly comments in knee-jerk fashion, or actually do some background reading first (whether or not they read Born Digital itself). You see, one of the weaknesses ascribed by the book to Digital Natives is their tendency to form opinions by sampling a paragraph or a page from many different sources. The quality of their opinions depends on their skill and open-mindedness in choosing sources. (Is this only a tendency of Digital Natives? I suspect that most people reading this review won't be Digital Natives yet many older readers are also quite likely - I know from blogging to a relatively large audience - to express their knee-jerk reactions in writing. -- Eszter Hargittai)

But I don't accept that sampling by itself produces insight. You have to be willing to visit original sources, study an author in depth, and force yourself to pursue the implications of a particular line of argument. Palfrey and Gasser also understand this aspect of true learning. I found a hint of it in their call to keep parts of traditional education alive; Palfrey confirmed my viewpoint in an exchange on the Digital Native wiki. (Andy: This wiki has been very useful--I just rewrote this paragraph to take John's comment into account.) (I think this could use a bit more detail as per John's note below especially regarding the banning of laptops in some classrooms. When I read this paragraph, it wasn't nearly as clear which parts of traditional education you/they were referring to than once I read John's paragraph. -- Eszter Hargittai)

(This is a crucial point, and I'm glad you call it out, even if it seems only to be hint in the book. At Harvard Law School, there are extraordinary teachers who use the Socratic method with a ban on laptops in the room -- and they're right, in their classes, to do so. There are places where technology does not belong. Where technology does belong, we need to be doing a better job at helping young people to sort credible information from the less credible -- to do just the hard work that you describe. I now run a library, and am convinced that's part of the job of librarians, too. -John Palfrey) [DGK: Agreed, completely crucial point, and the one I've seen my own teachers struggle with the most. I see the teacher's prerogative of what technology to allow in the classroom as analogous to the prerogative of an editor: sometimes, you just have to make an executive decision on what you will cut in order to allow other aspects to flourish. Banning laptops, however, also requires the teacher to make a strong case for her specific teaching method—not to mention examining whether or not traditional "notes" are a necessity for her class. If a teacher tells me that I shouldn't be taking notes, I should be listening, and then gives an hour-long lecture worth listening to: I'm sold.]

Is the book effective?

Partly to deal with my own feeling of information overload and partly because I'm an editor by trade, I take an instrumental approach to books. Will Born Digital satisfy the audience of digital immigrants or outsiders to which Basic Books addressed its advertising: parents, librarians, copyright-holders? And will the book satisfy a more digitally literate audience who are already embedded in the world it describes?

I'm afraid the book will frustrate the outsider audience. Although it aims for pragmatism and balance, its readers will complain that it offers inadequate solutions to cyberbullying, peer-to-peer file sharing, and the distribution of pornography and hate speech. [I'm reluctant to "edit" someone else's book review, so I'm commenting in brackets, here (instead of creating a discussion page, which takes comments away from specific spots in a doc. Anyway, this nails an inherent problem of this point in conventional-to-social-media history. The advent of the participatory Web (Web 2.0, the social Web, etc.) is and isn't a sea change. It isn't, really, as you say, Andy, because stuff just keeps changing and 1980 is a little artificial, but it is because it's grassroots, user-driven and user-generated, thus so very tough to regulate (intelligently if at all) and make "safe." I find too that busy parents - who are my readers as well - are frustrated because there are no quick fixes that any book can offer. The reason is, the "problems" digital immigrants, authors, online-safety advocates are addressing aren't technological. They're also most often not criminal. They're behavioral.-Anne Collier]

(Andy: Thanks for the comments, Anne. The wiki format isn't well suited to something expressing personal opinions like this review. The review is obviously from my point of view--not a neutral point of view!--and the page should reflect that opinion. Your way of commenting, and Diana's, strike me as the best way to use the wiki for this review. I could create another page covering the same issues but on a more NPOV fashion so people could edit it freely.)

(AO again: It seems you agree with me that the "outsiders" and "immigrants" are likely to feel frustrated because of the open-ended proposals in the book. I wasn't sure in writing this critique whether that point actually weakens the book. I'll have to think about it more. I might insert a sentence about how the book is robust and valuable, but may be perceived as frustrating.)

They could even be confused by the authors' assessments and categorizations. They offer reassurances that online activities in each area of concern are basically the same as their off-line counterparts. One of my favorite sentences is, "Too often, the Internet is a metaphor for all that is hard to understand about youth culture." (p. 220) And yet--the Internet "changes the contours," exacerbates problems, brings them into the home from outside, etc. Such continual "on the other hand" statements make one wish for a one-handed lawyer. [I think your favorite sentence is true. On the children's online safety front, we find that - because so often the technologies and social tools youth use, such as social networking, are new to parents - the technology is the focus rather than how it's used. The metaphor I use is "the phone company." When an argument between two users occurs in a phone conversation, do we call the phone company to resolve it? Yet, in our ConnectSafely.org forum, we hear about so many requests to social sites to take down this profile or stop that harasser; what the posters don't realize is that the second an imposter profile gets deleted a new one can pop up in its place. The solution is nothing a social site's customer service dept. can ultimately fix (unless physical harm is threatened, in which case law enforcement can get involved). Social sites - like IM, chat, email, virtual worlds, MMOGs - are just a new platform for the behavioral stuff that humanity's been dealing with since before we were monkeys, probably! Still, the social Web does change some things - significantly, in fact - by perpetuating and making public everyday mistakes kids can make (and always have made) because the impulse-control part of their brains isn't fully developed yet. danah boyd refers to the 4 key change factors as "searchability, persistence, replicability, and invisible audience" (see her interview with Alternet <http://www.alternet.org/story/46766> last year).AC]

Ultimately, the authors leave us hanging with their tantalizing suggestion that "we must synchronize the legislative process with the rapid pace of development of Internet technology and the dynamic use of it by Digital Natives." Who is "we," and what do the authors believe will work better than the deliberately ponderous legal process that careful constitutionalists have built up over the centuries?

Also thinking as an editor, I worry that readers who haven't interacted with the basic technologies will find themselves lost among the explanations. I would have advised the authors to add a set of appendixes that take the reader through the basic steps of the more sophisticated current technologies. Tag a photo with a name and watch it appear on friends' sites. Show a list of weblogs and what turns up as they are filtered through an RSS reader. Would it be so difficult to include a few screen shots? Of course, the precise user activities change from month to month with new interface candy, but a clear view of a snapshot in time is critical to grasping the technology's impact. [I don't know if screenshots would be any better. We had a lot of them in our MySpace Unraveled book, and we never got any feedback about their being particularly helpful. I've come to the conclusion that the best possible way for parents to get comfortable with the social tools their children use is to talk with their kids about them, see if the latter will show them how specific tools and technologies work. Parents also need to know that the way they may use IM, chat, wikis, etc. at work isn't necessarily the way their children use them socially, so even tech-savvy parents need young guides through social media.AC]

Readers with more background could easily skim the book and throw it down, saying, "Yeah, I know all that." This review may persuade them that there's depth in it to explore.

After birth

In the end, I wish Born Digital reflected the ever-changing environment that modern technology presents. In the final chapter, Gasser announces, "we are moving toward an Internet that in ten years will look significantly different from what we see today." But what does that say about the book's key thesis, dichotomizing Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants? (It's not clear to me why this is a problem for the book's thesis if the book's thesis is about how new technologies raise new challenges that need to be approached at various levels carefully - see concentric circles - at times through parenting and educational institutions, but at other times through legal means. Presumably (or is anyone arguing this won't be the case in a decade?) children will continue to be concerned about what their peers think of them, some will continue to bully each other, etc. and we'll continue to look for ways to make sure that they live and grow in a safe and nurturing environment that doesn't suppress their creativity and potential contributions. -- Eszter Hargittai ) (AO: Ah, but I think the book embodies an even more fundamental thesis in its title and terminology--I added that to the sentence.)

(I wish that were possible, too! As you know, we start the final chapter, Synthesis, with this concept: the difficulty of writing a "book", in the classic dead-tree literature sense, on such a fast-moving topic. This wiki, the blog, the videos, etc. that we've set up online are our attempt to address that issue. But it's a tough one. And it goes to the very question of "what is a book in this era?" - John Palfrey)

Current adults are perplexed by the Digital Native's eagerness to post details of last night's date online. That Digital Native in the near future, married and holding a managerial position, may be amazed to find an employee from the next generation sending a minute-by-minute update of his blood pressure and heart rate to selected recipients. This employee is completely comfortable when his colleague walks in (or his boyfriend calls) to say, "What's getting you upset, George?"

My contention is that there's nothing special about 1980. [More than that, I think that 1980 to say, 1990 is a different generation of digital native than the one that follows, at least in terms of use - again, I haven't got my copy of the book just yet, just curious if that's the point you're getting at - JCY] (AO: I'm not thinking in terms of divisions between generations; that's a common way of putting barriers up between people, and I don't like it. Maybe that's because I'm middle-aged and I'm trying to think young, so I'm sensitive--but I think more about constant change that everybody has to keep up with. And everybody is under the pressure to learn new environments. That's the point of the rest of the paragraph.) The pace of technology is getting ever more frantic. The Digital Natives started in an online environment dominated by email and forums. Interactivity and socialization took a great leap when America Online bought the ICQ chat service in 1998, bringing a bit of formerly geek culture onto every child's screen. And even the use of chat could not prepare young people for the much more public interactivity of blogs and social networking sites.

I think Digital Natives will continually face challenges just as wrenching and confusing as their older counterparts. I dislike the terms Digital Native and Born Digital because they offer an implicit assurance that young people have it easy in the Internet environment--an assurance belied by the research in the book itself. The terms also put up an unwarranted barrier that risks keeping out older observers who, as the book shows, have much to offer.

Already, one major point in the book is that going online requires some street smarts, which kids develop over time. Some develop it faster than others, and some think more about the consequences of their online behavior than others.

So I don't think in terms of differences between generations--a discouraging concept that puts up barriers and divisions--but of an every-changing environment that puts pressure on everyone to learn and adapt.

As the authors say, this book is part of a longer discussion--not the history of a watershed in time, but the record of a moment. Let's make sure everybody is included.

(Note from Diana, DN intern: Post away, Andy! Wonderful discussion here, and I look forward to posting a response on the DN blog. In the meantime, I added a few in-line comments here. Thank you!. ])

(Andy: I plan to post my review to the O'Reilly site before Friday. But I like the discussion here and I'll wait till at least Wednesday so I can see what others say and perhaps make changes. These comments were exactly what I was hoping for when I posted this review here.)