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For as long as humans have existed, we have been part of communities. We are evolutionarily wired to collaborate around common interests that have kept us safe, happy, and alive for hundreds of thousands of years. Communities allow us to tackle challenges that are too complex for any one of us to address alone, from providing public safety and equitable public education to stopping environmental degradation or eradicating a disease through medical advances. Communities form around shared interests or experiences, like living in the same neighborhood or sharing a common religion. We participate in PTAs to build a new playground at our kid’s school or join GoFundMe groups to cover the expenses of a neighbor who has a health crisis.
Of all the migrations from the physical to the digital world, perhaps the most important for us to understand is the migration of our communities. Just as in physical world communities, becoming a member of a virtual community doesn’t always come with an obvious sign-up form. When I watch a video on YouTube about choosing what type of dog is good for a family with young children, I become part of the broader YouTube community, as well as a subcommunity of people who care about dog breeding. I may stay at the periphery by just watching watching videos or reading posts from others. But as I add comments, ask questions, or start to share content of my own, I become a more active member of that community.
Communities Need Shared Spaces
In 1989, sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day.1 In his book, Oldenburg talks about the necessity of having shared community spaces he calls “third places” (home and work being the other two). These third places are parks, shops, libraries, and any other space that allows us to come together and interact with other members of our various communities. Oldenburg maintains that third places are essential to host the communities that our functioning society depends on.
The digital world is chock-full of third places. They are the platforms that we all use to engage with others, including Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Goodreads, Wikipedia, Nextdoor, and Reddit. They also include thousands of topic-specific spaces like Buusu (language learning), DeviantArt (visual design), and Ravelry (knitting). And let’s not forget our virtual mall—Amazon—where a huge community exists around discussing products (read the reviews of the “three wolf moon shirt” on Amazon if you want a fun example of that). Virtual community spaces are just as real and play just as important a role in our lives as their physical predecessors.
Author and entrepreneur Eli Pariser focuses on lessons we can learn from creating effective community spaces in the physical world to create effective community spaces in the virtual world. According to Pariser, successful physical community spaces require significant attention to three critical design elements: the functionality of the space, the quality of the programming that takes place there, and people who take ownership of the space to keep it welcoming and clean.
Pariser points out that as we’ve migrated our third places to the virtual world, we’ve spent our time focused on the first design element—the functionality that makes collaboration possible. We’ve created the tools to post and share content, create playlists, and “like” other people. But unlike physical shared spaces, we haven’t focused nearly as much energy on improving the quality of content or identifying who is responsible for maintaining a safe and welcoming experience for people who participate in our online communities.
Becoming digital citizens means recognizing that our virtual spaces aren’t just transactional websites, but community spaces that are critical to the ongoing health of our society and need to be cared for. It means understanding that the value of our virtual world isn’t just entertainment, but the test kitchen for ideas that enrich our lives and improve the lives of those around us. As such, how we act and what we do in our virtual communities really matters. We need common agreement on certain behaviors that are expected of digital citizens and a concerted effort to teach and model those behaviors for our children if we hope to reduce our growing list of digital dysfunctions and create a virtual world they will be happy to grow up in.
Learning How to Act in Shared Spaces
Healthy communities always establish shared expectations for the behavior of their members. A church group may have an expectation of loving your neighbor as yourself. If you’re a member of a soccer team, you agree to play by a certain set of rules, not only the written rules of the game, but also the unwritten rules of how you agree to engage with other members of the team—arrive on time for practices, tell the opposing team “good game” even when you lost, do what the coach asks of you in practice, and so on.
Our training for how to act in community spaces happens mostly informally by following the example of other community members, though there have certainly been explicit efforts to establish community norms in the physical world over the years. George Washington wrote Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation in 1746 based on a similar French work. His 110 guidelines aimed to instill norms of decency and appropriate manners for engaging in early third places. Emily Post also did her best, as did Miss Manners, in what nostalgically looks like a simpler, more forgiving time. The Bill of Rights establishes norms for the community of citizens of the United States. If you live in America, you are governed by the moral and political obligations of the contract.
We use a variety of strategies for communicating norms of our physical communities today as well. On a trip to London, I was met by a poster in an underground station teaching riders to “Help others off the train if they feel ill.” Similarly, there are signs on all of the escalators at the Hong Kong International Airport telling travelers to “take care of children and the elderly.” I saw this “sign-posting” strategy on a recent drive through Utah where a billboard with a picture of Mister Rogers, a legend for encouraging friendship, had the text “Friendship, pass it on!” Similar “pass it on” billboards have popped up across the country inviting us to serve others, overcome trials, and be healthy. The norms of my own neighborhood, like staying alert for crime, supporting the community swim team, and mowing my lawn in the summer, are communicated through town-hall-style meetings and newsletters. Parents and teachers spend a lot of time preparing young children for the behavioral norms of school. We teach kids to pay attention to the teacher, take turns at the playground, and be kind to kids who look or talk differently from us.
When we don’t actively and continually teach behavioral expectations for shared community spaces, though, they fall apart. This is particularly challenging since the responsibility of maintaining the quality of shared spaces can always be justified as someone else’s problem—what the British economist William Forster Lloyd called the “tragedy of the commons.” In the 1800s, Lloyd observed farmers overgrazing animals on shared land, making it unusable for everyone, while carefully managing the amount of grazing on their own lands. When everybody is responsible for something, there is the risk that nobody is, to the detriment of everyone involved.
Viewing our online activity as participation in a virtual community, and not just the random surfing of websites, is a critically important first step to improving the quality of our life there. We should feel involvement and ownership as members of a given virtual community and be keenly aware of the tendency toward tragedy of our virtual commons. As we coach and prepare our children to be successful in the virtual spaces, we need to teach a set of norms and expectations for our behavior that are essential to bring the missing conscience to our digital world. We will explore them in detail starting in the next chapter.
Teaching Digital Norms in Digital Spaces
At this point, you might be wondering why I’m making such an effort to call out the differences between the physical world and the virtual world. Is it really necessary to distinguish between the two? And moreover, if we just teach our kids to be good humans, shouldn’t that apply equally whether they are in virtual or physical spaces? Understanding the answer to these questions is fundamental to ensuring our children’s digital well-being.
First, we have to understand a bit about how our brains work. To explain, as an illustration, I’ll use the story of my friend Chris going to church. Chris actively participates in a lesson about being kind to his fellow beings. He holds the door while a young family slowly files past. On his way out, he stops to help an elderly lady down the steps to the parking lot, clearly demonstrating what he had been taught by the sermon. But as he’s driving home, someone cuts him off a few blocks from his house. Chris honks and yells at the person who cut him off, clearly not in line with the lesson from church. What has happened here? Is this not the same man who held the door open and helped the lady down the stairs? Has he forgotten all of the lessons he just learned? Hardly. This example illustrates a phenomenon from research on human cognition: when our environment changes, it is harder to apply concepts learned from a different setting.
Learning in Different Contexts
Cognitive research has shown us that we learn most effectively when we are taught in the context where we will use the knowledge. Think back to a math class you had in high school or college. You learned as the teacher spoke, wrote things on a board, or assigned a worksheet. When you were tested, you were asked to demonstrate your knowledge in a very similar format to how you learned it—maybe the very same worksheet, but with some answers missing. With a bit of study, you were probably able to do a good job on the test. But if you were asked to apply the concepts in a real-world setting, you may have found that you struggled or didn’t make the connection to use those math skills at all. Even though the underlying concept may have been the same, when the words were different or it was presented as a spoken versus written problem, knowing how to solve it became more difficult.
In fact, the concept of learning in the same context where you will need to perform has such a powerful effect that many schools are beginning to implement project-based learning, where they teach key concepts through simulated real-life events, not worksheets and written tests. It’s the same reason airlines spend millions of dollars on simulators for their pilots to practice landing a plane safely in an emergency as opposed to taking a written test on how to do it. The closer you can mimic the environment where the skills are needed, the more likely recall will happen.
For this reason, it is important to make the distinction between the skills that we teach in the physical and virtual worlds. It’s not reasonable to expect that our children will be able to translate the norms we teach them about their behavior in the physical world to the very different context of the digital world, if they’ve never had the chance to practice there. If we want our kids to be tolerant and kind in virtual spaces, we have to teach and model tolerance and kindness in those virtual spaces. We have to have open discussions and give them examples of what effective digital behavior looks like in our digital third places.
Fundamental Flaws in Our Approach to Teaching Digital Citizenship
In all this discussion, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that many efforts are already being made to teach young people how to operate online. Parents and teachers alike are growing increasingly aware of our digital dysfunctions, and they’re starting to have these important conversations. But while well intentioned, there are two fundamental flaws that often show up in our current approach to teaching digital citizenship. I will point them out in the hope that we can join together to chart a better path forward.
More Than Online Safety
The first common error with our approach to teaching digital citizenship is overfocusing the conversation on online safety. We may be tempted to spend the majority of our time teaching skills like not sharing personal information online, not posting something they might regret later, or not talking to digital strangers. Teaching kids basic principles of online safety is important; in fact I consider it a key component of digital citizenship. But online safety is just a fraction of the skill set our kids need to thrive in today’s virtual world. Online safety is a bit like the warning on the visor of the car that tells us to fasten our seatbelts. It’s required; we do it before anything else, and we would be irresponsible to ignore it. But it’s not where we spend the bulk of our energy when learning to be a safe driver. The vast majority of our energy is spent on the more complex skills that require practice, like how to read signs, properly control the car, and navigate to where we actually want to go.
As parents, we need to broaden the conversation beyond how to stay safe. Real digital well-being is about using technology to enrich our lives and make our communities better. It’s about using technology to build healthy relationships with friends and family, and being able to quickly find the right sources of information to learn new things and make good decisions. It’s about balancing our online and offline activities appropriately. These are life-enriching skills that go far beyond just being safe. As important as safety is, if we aren’t able to articulate a broader, more meaningful vision for the use of tech to enrich our children’s lives, there isn’t much point in even teaching online safety in the first place; we could just resort to digging a hole in the backyard to bury our digital devices.
A List of “Dos,” Not “Don’ts”
The second common error in our current approach to teaching digital citizenship is that much of what we teach is framed negatively. We tell kids all the things they shouldn’t do: “Don’t post where you live.” “Don’t look at inappropriate pictures.” “Don’t spend so much time on your phone.” Don’t, don’t, don’t. Teaching digital citizenship as a list of don’ts is misleading. Though well-intentioned, the “list of don’ts” approach may actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Here’s an experiment. Try to not think of a small pink elephant. One with an umbrella in its trunk. The umbrella is open and decorated with panda bears. How are you doing at not thinking about what I’m describing to you in great detail?
My father attended a private religious school in the 1950s. Once a semester, the clerical leaders would give the students a list of all of the sins that they should never commit and a list of books they were not allowed to read. As my father recounts, the students took more diligent notes that day than they did the entire rest of the year, but not for the reasons the school leaders had hoped. The students were getting ideas for behaviors they had never considered and a reading list for summer vacation. When preparing youth for success online, there is a real risk in presenting a list of the things not to do, as it may become a list of ideas they had never considered before we planted them. This approach reinforces the bad without ever showing what the good looks like.
Another risk of the “don’ts” approach to teaching digital well-being is that you can’t practice not doing something. Learning the skills of digital citizenship takes practice and happens over many years. Imagine if we tried to teach kids to play the piano by telling them all the ways to not do it correctly. To learn to play the piano, they have to first learn the names of the notes, then learn how to read music, and above all practice. The same is true with learning to become an effective digital citizen. (For another example, see “A Positive Approach for Preventing Cyberbullying” below.)
A Positive Approach for Preventing Cyberbullying
In reaction to rising cases of cyberbullying and teen suicides from horrible abuses online, there has been an uptick in teaching anti-cyberbullying in schools. While I’m glad that the education community recognizes the seriousness of this particular issue, anti-cyberbullying campaigns are a Band-Aid solution at best. For starters, we shouldn’t wait until kids start getting bullied online to begin a conversation to try to stop it. We should be spending at least as much energy creating a virtual world where cyberbullying never starts in the first place. After all, that’s what we do with other critical life skills. We don’t teach anti-illiteracy; we teach kids to love reading. We don’t teach anti-laziness; we model healthy exercise habits.
Instead of teaching anti-cyberbullying, we should teach what to do to prevent bullying in the first place: that the accepted norms of behavior in our virtual spaces include being kind and honest with others. And, yes, of course, when people don’t live up to those norms, there are consequences because our digital community does not value other types of behavior.
Let me share one example of a school that made the flip from a negative approach to teaching digital citizenship to a positive one. La Cañada is a National Blue Ribbon School outside of Los Angeles, serving approximately four thousand students every year. La Cañada’s mission is to develop students who are uniquely prepared for the twenty-first century by focusing on the development of communication skills, creative problem-solving, and civic engagement. As they tried to make sure the students were prepared to be healthy technology users, district leaders Jennifer Zine and David Paszkiewicz realized they needed an approach that would give students opportunities to practice becoming contributing participants in virtual spaces. Instead of telling kids to stop cyberbullying, they began to teach how to be good online friends through their Building Cyber-Friendships initiative. They practice how to write thoughtful messages and recognize the importance of listening as well as posting in order to create meaningful online conversations. As students participate in the program, they explore different roles they can take in a digital space and learn how to recognize that their individual actions can have a positive impact on their friends and the broader online community.
Taking a negative approach to teaching digital citizenship is also problematic because it just isn’t a very compelling message. In the 1980s, David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, professors at Case Western Reserve University, conducted landmark research to make this point. They noticed that when trying to turn around struggling companies, traditional business consultants would identify all the things that were going wrong and present the leadership with a list of the problems they should fix. But Cooperrider and Srivastva found that they could actually get the companies to turn around faster by calling attention to the things that they were already doing right instead of the things that were wrong.2 Their approach, which they called “appreciative inquiry,” is now used by business consultants around the world. You can change behavior faster by doubling down on the positive aspects of good behavior than by spotlighting all of the bad things that should be stopped.
Finally, when it comes to setting the expectations for online behavior, whatever we teach our kids becomes the baseline that their behavior is anchored to. There will always be deviation from that baseline. Children will make some choices that exceed our expectations, and in other cases, their choices will fall short. But what we teach determines the starting point. If we start right at the “do not cross” line, we have no buffer before our kids enter truly destructive territory. Years ago a transportation company was interviewing new truck drivers. The route was dangerous and included traveling along many steep cliffs through a mountain pass. As the manager interviewed each applicant, he asked them, “How close can you drive to the edge of the cliff as you come around the mountain?” The first candidate replied that he was so skilled that he could drive within two feet of the edge. The second candidate bragged that he was so skilled that he could bring the tires within two inches of the edge of the road. The third and final candidate answered, “I drive as far away from the edge of the cliff as I possibly can.” The third candidate was offered the job.
Describing the digital attributes we want our kids to embody places the starting point well within safe ground. Even when our kids make mistakes, they are still far away from the digital cliff. This doesn’t mean that we can’t ever define limits that can’t be crossed, but if the majority of our energies are focused on defining and modeling the expected attributes of a healthy digital citizen, it will become the self-fulfilling prophecy.
A Once-in-a-Generation Window
Ensuring the success of our children and a more hopeful future digital world is reason enough to start a new conversation about how we are teaching digital citizenship. But there is a reason for additional urgency now: the increased access to internet connectivity in schools and at home.
While I was working for President Obama, one of my roles was to develop a National Ed Tech Plan—a vision and guide for how to use technology in schools.3 When used effectively in schools, technology can be a powerful solution to many long-standing educational challenges. Through technology, schools that can’t afford the latest textbooks can have access to the most up-to-date online resources. Schools in rural areas that often struggle to find highly qualified teachers can access expert teachers via Zoom. In one instance, a STEM school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was able to remotely operate a $2 million scanning electron microscope located at the University of Southern California because both institutions were connected to the same high-speed network.4
As we were putting together the National Ed Tech Plan, though, we found that schools like the STEM school in Chattanooga were outliers. Most schools lacked the reliable internet connections needed to use any tech for learning. A teacher in South Carolina drove home this point most memorably. I had been invited by the Horry County school district to share some of the ways that technology could make learning more engaging for students. The group of teachers assembled listened patiently as I shared examples of schools like Chattanooga that were transforming learning through the smart use of tech. When I finished, a teacher in the back of the room raised her hand and asked me if I had “ever tried to drink peanut butter from a straw?” Before I could ask what she meant, she explained that drinking peanut butter from a straw was what it felt like to try to access the internet from her classroom. The room erupted in applause.
Upon returning to Washington, DC, our team discovered that despite our claims that the United States was among the first countries to have 100 percent of schools connected to the internet, most teachers did not have working internet in their classrooms. It turned out that if any part of the school building had an internet connection, the school was classified as a “connected school.” So, what we had really accomplished was connecting 100 percent of school offices to the internet, and sometimes a computer lab or library along the way. Under the direction of the president and secretary of education, we redefined what it meant to be a connected school (to include having broadband Wi-Fi in all classrooms). With the support of education nonprofits, corporate leaders, education researchers, politicians from both sides of the aisle, and teachers from schools across the country, we redesigned an FCC program to help subsidize the cost of internet to schools. Within three years, the United States went from 15 percent connected classrooms to 98 percent of schools with access to broadband Wi-Fi in the classroom.
Other countries have followed a similar path to prioritizing connectivity for students. Combine those efforts with the increased connectivity at home in the wake of Covid-19 online learning, and we find our children with unprecedented access to connectivity at home and at school. This opportunity gives us a unique window to rethink how we’re teaching our kids about what kind of people they want to be in a virtual space before existing habits become their norm. It’s an opportunity to set new guidelines and new expectations. It’s an opportunity to talk about more than just online safety. And it’s an opportunity to make the conversation positive. That’s the good news. The bad news is that not nearly enough attention has been given to having this discussion. We can’t address the problem by simply adding another class to the school day. This is about creating a digital culture at home and at school. And this unique window that we’ve been given will soon close. If we choose not to reset expectations, our existing haphazard norms will continue, and we will have lost a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink how we are preparing the next generation of digital citizens.
Starting a New Conversation
We cannot afford to be haphazard in our approach to teaching digital citizenship. Along with the recent increase in connectivity in our homes and schools, we have been handed a unique opportunity to examine our digital culture. Our conversation needs to be broader than just online safety and should focus on positive attributes that our kids can emulate and practice and, in so doing, improve our communities and build healthy virtual relationships. In the next chapters, we will explore five attributes that should guide our approach to teaching digital well-being:
Balanced. Balanced digital citizens participate in a variety of online activities and make informed decisions about how to prioritize their time in virtual and physical spaces.
Informed. Informed digital citizens evaluate the accuracy, perspective, and validity of digital media and have developed critical skills of curating information from the digital world.
Inclusive. Inclusive digital citizens are open to hearing and recognizing multiple viewpoints and engaging with others online with respect and empathy.
Engaged. Engaged digital citizens use technology and digital channels to solve problems and be a force for good in their physical and virtual communities.
Alert. Alert digital citizens are aware of their digital actions and know how to be safe and create safe spaces for others online.
As we explore this framework, I will draw comparisons between familiar parenting and teaching concepts from the physical world to help successfully navigate parenting and teaching in the digital world. For each attribute, I will give conversation starters and practical strategies for building them into the culture of our homes and schools. In so doing, we can choose to focus technology’s accelerating forces on improving our world and deepening our humanity.
The task of keeping up with all the potential virtual spaces where our children may be involved can seem daunting. But like most of our digital citizenship conversations, this gets easier as we apply these same five attributes to our own digital habits and spend time understanding what our children are experiencing. As parents, we can familiarize ourselves with locations like TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, or Instagram, so we understand the context of their digital communities. We can talk with our children about where they’re going online and what they’re doing there, asking questions just as we would if we were asking about a party they were going to or which friends they were hanging out with on a Saturday afternoon. This book will help you have these conversations, prepare your children for how to respond if they ever feel unsafe online, and teach them to be a force for good in the digital world.
As Eli Pariser puts it, if online digital spaces are going to be our new home, let’s make them a comfortable, beautiful place to live. A place we all feel some ownership of. A place where we get to know each other. A place we’d actually want to visit and bring our kids.