9
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “Change is the only constant in life.” It’s hard to think of any area where that is more applicable than in parenting and technology. It is admittedly hard to discuss the intersection of technology and parenting, knowing that the subject itself is a moving target. Toby Negrin, Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product officer, says that the internet is in its adolescence at best. So, as we wind down, let’s take a minute to look toward the future of our digital world.
Unanswered (and Evolving) Questions
We will certainly see some interesting technological changes over the next decade. Keyboards will likely become obsolete, as voice recognition continues to improve and we become better at learning how to speak to devices. There will be a continued blur between the virtual and physical worlds. Wearable displays will layer digital information on top of our physical environment, and handheld devices will know when we are in an airport or a grocery store and accordingly provide a different experience. Many much smarter people than I have spent lots of time predicting what the tech of the future will look like (so if you’re interested in that, visit Wired or Popular Mechanics).
To me, the most important elements of the future for us to consider are not the new digital devices, but the ways our digital society will continue to evolve. Instead of making specific predictions, I will frame our look forward by sharing some tough questions that our children will need to be prepared to answer as they grow into leaders of our virtual world. There are, of course, many potential questions, but these four underscore the urgency of providing our kids with a foundation of digital citizenship skills.
Who Should Have Access to Our Data?
As more moments of our lives play out in digital spaces and more data systems become interoperable, our digital footprint can easily provide a complete picture of who we are and what we are doing at all moments of our lives. Digital platform providers and governments alike will be able to gain an increasingly detailed view of all our actions. There are benefits to having detailed and interoperable digital footprints. For one, there is the potential for making the world a safer place. Data trails can help identify people who are using digital tools for fraud and other malicious purposes and warn us of risks before members of our family are harmed by them. Facial-recognition technologies, which are already powerful enough to identify specific individuals in a crowd walking down the street, can be a godsend to help find a family member if they are ever missing or in danger. Facial recognition is already widely used in airports to prevent criminals from illegally entering the country and to speed up immigration lines. Whole cities in China are now deploying similar technology to reduce crime.1
But there are also some serious risks to having a digital snapshot of our lives available to governments or private-sector companies. For starters, digital algorithms make mistakes. In 2020, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was wrongly arrested for theft when he was mistakenly identified by a facial-recognition algorithm in Detroit.3 The fact that Williams is a Black man additionally raised questions about whether the algorithms made a mistake or whether the incident was a manifestation of racial bias in the design of the algorithms themselves.
Second, information in our data footprint can outlive its usefulness. Yes, our data trail can help identify someone who may be using the virtual world to scam or harm us, but how long should our digital footprint persist? Is there a point where someone should be forgiven for a past mistake? If your child is flagged for making an inappropriate post on Instagram in junior high, should that be factored into his eligibility score when applying to college or for a job? Should we have the right to audit or remove parts of our digital footprint? Do we own our data, or is it the intellectual property of the entities that collect it? What protections need to be in place to make sure our data isn’t used to manipulate our political beliefs or exploit our fears and weaknesses for commercial gain? China has received lots of media attention for using citizens’ digital data streams as part of a social credit system where law-abiding citizens are rewarded and those who are not behaving appropriately lose privileges. As other countries look to this example, how will we find the line between using our data to keep us safe and creating unauthorized mass surveillance? Deciding who should have access to our data and for what purpose is one of the most important questions we will have to ask as our digital world evolves.
What Do We Do When Truth Becomes Harder to Verify?
A second tough question that our children will face, along with us, is what to do when our current approaches to verify truth can no longer keep up. As discussed in chapter 4, today’s digital world is awash in viral misinformation. But for now, the reason is not because the truth is hard to verify as much as the fact that we have not put value in making the effort to do the verifying. What happens in a future digital world where manipulated information becomes nearly impossible to verify using current techniques? Deepfakes, as they are known, are digital media that are so perfectly fabricated they are essentially indistinguishable from real media. They could be a video of a national leader threatening to declare war on another country, a doctor giving a press release about incorrect ways to respond to a pandemic that could actually lead to its spread, or a financial leader making a false report that destabilizes global markets.
We’re already beginning to see this happen. Recently, the leader of a British energy company transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to a bank account at the “request” of the company’s CEO. The voice, created using deepfake technology, made the fraudster’s voice identical to the voice of the actual CEO.2 How will we know what to believe when fabricated audio and video are indistinguishable from the real thing? How will we keep from escalating political tensions? Even prior to deepfakes, misinterpreting social media has already come close to causing war. What technologies will be needed to verify the authenticity of a friend or family member before trusting that a call from them is legitimate? Is there an encryption that we should be adding to video or audio files to detect when they have been manipulated? Should there be designated secure platforms for critical national messaging instead of using commercial social media platforms to distribute official communications?
How Should We Pay for Our Virtual Spaces?
In many places throughout this book, we’ve talked about the challenges caused by the underlying advertising-based business model of our virtual shared spaces. At the current rate, the continual optimization of our shared communities around increasing ad views may eventually destroy the third places that are so critical for a functioning society. In his powerful TED Talk, tech philosopher and father of virtual reality Jaron Lanier states that we cannot have a functioning society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way it can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.4 Companies that serve ads on their site are essentially brokers of eyeballs and clicks. The entities purchasing the ad space determine the content of the ad and are financially driven to optimize that content to get the most-effective results (clicks) for their money. Do we need a fundamentally different way to pay for the internet?
Stefan Thomas, an expert on web monetization, believes that for 15 cents a day, we could remove online advertising from the internet. Thomas believes that by using a browser extension to track the pages we visit, his system could transfer a small payment—maybe just a fraction of a cent—from our digital wallet to the content creator based on our visits. According to Thomas, this would be equivalent to what most sites today receive from ad revenue anyway. And if the $5 per month is more than we’re willing to pay for a better web experience, the same technology could support a model in which we earn credits by participating in certain activities (moderating content in a virtual community or reviewing products that we’ve purchased, etc.) and distributing those credits to the sites we visit. This approach could even allow site creators to develop multiple versions of their site—a basic experience or an enhanced experience for those who choose to share additional credits with the site creator.
Are there other business models we should consider to pay for the sites we use as community spaces? Do we have the right balance between the number of virtual platforms that are publicly owned and those that are commercially owned? Are we willing to pay for virtual experiences that prioritize ensuring civil discourse? Are there ways to incentivize companies to make preserving humanity a core design element?
What Is the Value of Being Human?
Perhaps the most important question that our kids will need to grapple in their digital future is “what value do humans have in a virtual world?” Compared to the three previous questions, this one may sound esoteric, but I mean it very literally. Consider that for hundreds of thousands of years, humans have held a monopoly on essentially every complex skill—speaking, reasoning, problem-solving, engineering, researching. We’ve never had to question the value of human skills because there was never any competition. However, in a world of artificial intelligence, our unique monopoly no longer exists. AI can already drive safer, provide better customer service, conduct better market analyses, and close retail sales more effectively than humans.
A new company called NEON recently launched a line of artificial humans that can be used to take on a variety of complex tasks. These artificial intelligences are designed to look like and interact like real humans, but they only exist in the virtual world. Each virtual human has specific skill sets; they learn, adapt, and remember what they have learned. Imagine having a Zoom meeting with an architect or an accountant who looks and talks just like any other person you’ve met on a video call, except they’re not human. Whether our children go into careers in music or engineering, accounting or graphic design, they will be working on teams that are not entirely composed of human collaborators. So, in this new world, it is entirely reasonable to ask what value humans bring. Are there uniquely human skills? Are attributes like empathy, humor, creativity, and love our unique value-add? If so, how can this awareness push us to double down on the skills that are particularly human in order to differentiate ourselves from our AI counterparts? Are there certain decisions or actions that should be reserved for humans only?
These four questions are certainly not the only ones that we will need to ask as our virtual world continues to evolve. But they represent the types of issues our children will need to be ready to address as they help us shape the future of our digital democracy.
The Same Principles Still Apply
If you find the challenges of our future online world overwhelming, you’re not alone. And I am completely aware that I’ve had the nerve to present these issues without even proposing clear solutions. I include them merely to make the point that if the next generation is going to be prepared to grapple with the challenges of preserving a functioning digital and physical society, there is urgency to build a foundation of digital citizenship now. The fundamental skills required for answering these and other tough questions are exactly the same ones we’ve been exploring throughout this book. The principles of becoming digitally balanced, informed, inclusive, engaged, and alert don’t just help our kids be happy and healthy now, but create the societal bench strength to address future challenges for years to come.
· By teaching our kids to be balanced digital citizens, they will become familiar with the concept that we constantly need to check and monitor our digital habits. It will become second nature to be on the lookout for any digital activities, now and in the future, that start to dominate their lives—and they will have the awareness to make necessary adjustments.
· By teaching our kids to be informed digital citizens, they will be prepared with a healthy skepticism for information that shows up in their digital feeds. And they will have the skills to verify and discover answers that go deeper than a simple Google search. Informed digital citizens will create new solutions for spotting deepfakes and validating digital content.
· By teaching our kids to be inclusive digital citizens, they will be a force for identifying bias and prejudice that is encoded into our digital world. They will recognize the necessity of varied viewpoints to help them learn and grow.
· By teaching our kids to be engaged digital citizens, they will grow up understanding that their devices are also problem-solving tools. While technology creates a number of complex questions that we must ask, it also gives us new ways to provide answers to the challenges. Engaged digital citizens do not just passively accept the world around them but see it as an evolving space for them to build and improve.
· By teaching our kids to be alert digital citizens, they will be aware of the monetary and societal value of their personal information, and they will give it the protection it deserves. They will expect digital tools to allow them to control the amount of data they share and with whom. Alert digital citizens will call on tech developers to do more to make sure our shared virtual spaces are safe and will be the creators of new tools to protect their own data as well.
By modeling the five attributes of digital citizenship, we can set our kids up for success now and simultaneously prepare them with the foundational skills they need to lead and shape our digital future.
Final Thoughts
I have three final thoughts that will wrap up our exploration of the roles and responsibilities for teaching digital citizenship.
It’s OK to Press Reset
After reading this book, you may feel as though the digital habits or patterns that currently exist in your family are not the ones you should have chosen. Don’t beat yourself up. We are the first generation of parents, teachers, and community leaders to raise kids in a ubiquitously digital world. We have to start somewhere. No matter how old your kids are or what patterns and habits they have already formed, it’s never too late to reset and improve our efforts around digital well-being.
You don’t have to tackle everything at once. The suggested actions at the end of each chapter of this book give over a hundred specific ideas you can implement. Pick one from each chapter that feels most relevant to your unique situation. If there are ideas in this book that don’t fit your family goals or style, that’s fine. Just pick the elements that feel most aligned and start to work on those. Maybe it’s as simple as deciding that phones don’t stay in the bedroom at night or turning off autoplay on video services. Perhaps it’s getting in the habit of suggesting apps to your kids that align with their interests or having a family challenge to do something every day to spread kindness online.
Teaching digital citizenship in our families is not about creating a checklist but creating a culture. We might draw inspiration from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s influential book How Will You Measure Your Life? He and his coauthors focus on the importance of determining the elements of a family’s unique culture and values: Do we value hard work in our family? Do we celebrate serving others in the community? What are the things our family finds funny? What is not to be laughed about? What will we talk openly about and what should be private? Christensen et al. suggest that one of the most important jobs of parents is to explicitly decide what will be part of our family culture and then align our activities to reinforce that culture.
Establishing expectations for the type of digital presence we will have is a critical part of any family’s culture. Families should be explicit about creating a culture of using tech for good and not be haphazard about teaching digital citizenship skills.
Parents Have Power
I often hear parents expressing how powerless they feel when they try to control the way devices or social media are negatively impacting their family. Parents have much more power in this situation than they may realize. Especially for young children, parents approve the apps they use and provide them with the devices they use. These are all teachable moments to reinforce ideas of being balanced, alert, and engaged, as we’ve discussed in this book. And don’t underestimate the power of modeling effective behaviors yourself. Your children will pick up on the way you use your devices—and when you choose not to—if you remember to be more overt about it (“I’m turning off my phone because it’s time for dinner,” “I’m using See Click Fix to report a pothole in the road that needs to be fixed,” and so on).
I routinely find parents who forget that they own the internet and data services that their family uses. Sometimes young people buy their own devices, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a case where a thirteen-year-old had their own internet service installed in their home. You control what comes through the data pipes. If there is digital content you don’t feel comfortable having in your home, you can control it through web filters installed on your Wi-Fi network and (for a few extra dollars a month) on cellular data plans as well. While we shouldn’t rely only on technical protections, at the same time we should never abdicate one of our easiest and most important parental responsibilities.
Finally, remember that parental voice matters. If there are experiences on digital media platforms that you don’t like, or controls you wish existed but don’t, say something about it. Just do a quick search for how to provide feedback on any online service or app, and you should be able to quickly find a form or email address to use. Numbers matter, so the more parents and educators who provide similar feedback, the more likely features will be changed. And definitely take more advantage of the existing tools to flag any problematic content you come across online. Parents’ voices matter to policy makers as well. If you’re concerned that there isn’t enough oversight of the amount of advertising that your children see or the use of their data for targeted advertising, say something to your elected representatives. If you feel it’s important that your school do more to teach concepts of digital citizenship, share that with your school leaders or school board members.
Parents are not powerless. Through our words and actions, we have much more control over our kids’ digital experience than we may realize.
Use Tech on Our Terms
There is a common theme that ties all of the ideas and strategies for digital citizenship together—that in order to maintain digital well-being and create a brighter digital universe, we need to be solidly grounded in the principle of using tech on our terms.
We want our children to know how to always be in control of their digital choices. They should have the agency and strategies to call the shots on their digital experience. If young people have learned digital balance, they are in control of their actions, not ignoring important activities because a single app or game monopolizes their lives. They quickly recognize apps and services that are designed to trick them into giving up their agency by punishing them for not playing more.
If our kids are dealing with the digital world on their own terms, they remain informed; their opinions and ideas are not artificially swayed by bots or ad-driven media that are more concerned about getting clicks than providing them with useful learning experiences. They are remaining alert, not setting themselves up to be bullied or coerced into activities that they do not want to participate in. Apps and virtual platforms may be designed to limit their agency, but digital citizens who know how to use technology on their own terms see through these traps and adjust settings or engage in different online activities entirely so they remain in control.
Kids who learn to engage in the virtual world on their own terms view the standards of their family’s digital culture as nonnegotiables. They become increasingly independent and responsible over time; not making decisions because their parents are forcing them but because they understand the value behind being a force for good online and have practiced the associated behaviors for years.
Two Possible Futures
One of my favorite nineties movies is Sliding Doors. Set in London, the movie begins with Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow) losing her public relations job and heading home in the middle of the day. She enters the Underground station and runs toward her train, barely catching it before it pulls away from the platform. A few minutes later, the exact same scene repeats itself; only this time as she’s running toward the train, a child bumps into her, causing her to stop for a second. The delay causes her to miss the train, and she’s left standing on the platform. From there, the movie continues switching back and forth between her two possible futures: the one where she catches the train and the one where she misses it. Over the course of the movie, we see Helen’s life end up in two unimaginably different places, just based on having missed that train. This movie has always fascinated me, perhaps because I’ve spent much of my life barely missing various forms of public transportation. But also because I can’t help pondering the warning of how much a single decision can shape our future.
As we consider the digital world that our kids will grow up in, we are at a point where we have to choose between two very distinct, possible futures. In one possible future, we continue on our current path. We remain haphazard in our approach to preparing kids for success online, emphasizing the don’ts and focusing only on the basics of safety without exploring other critical attributes of digital well-being. We become increasingly resigned to the reality that our kids will grow up in a virtual world that has the primary goal of stealing their data and providing misinformation to generate more ad revenue. We sit back and watch as the algorithms of the digital world reinforce their current beliefs and insulate them into comfort bubbles. The division seeded by the sense of artificial rightness that we all feel when digital media reinforces our beliefs, whatever they are and however wrong they may be, will relentlessly continue to tear apart the fabric of our society.
But, then, there is another future—a brighter future. One where we decide to be deliberate and thoughtful about preparing our kids for success in the digital world. Where we recognize that teaching digital citizenship is much more than online safety, but helping our kids use the virtual world to enhance their lives and improve their communities. We focus on a positive approach, teaching the dos—the skills they can practice to become effective digital citizens. We teach them to find balance between their various online and offline activities. We hold online platform providers to an expectation that they must design their tools in a way that supports humanity and democracy. And we expect governments to play an active role in ensuring a just and sustainable virtual world that prioritizes supporting civility over profits. In this future, technology strengthens our families and helps accelerate problem-solving to improve our local and global communities.
We can choose which future we want. As the migration to our digital world accelerates through new advances in technologies, we have a limited window in which to make the decision before the train will have left the station. I’m optimistic for our future. I believe that technology will make us better people by supporting and supercharging the best of our human abilities. But technology has no conscience—that’s our job. The same technologies that can solve our toughest human problems can also divide and destroy us with a remarkable efficiency.
The digital world is now our primary residence. That will not change. But how we shape our digital future remains entirely in our hands and the hands of our children. Our children will always be digital. Let’s make sure they are also digital for good.