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Those of you who are following Twitter will note that I said that since my time has been
squeezed slightly, I'm going to speak fast so pay attention! I won’t speak too fast.
I was originally asked to talk about this, which is rather an intimidating title, so
I decided to talk about this instead because it's a bit more accessible and actually
might be meaningful to us all. And what I hope is that I can say something today that
will set off the afternoon and that will give us all something to think about as we explore
the possibilities that exist in this glorious, new space we have created – the online world,
the space made possible by the fast computers, by the almost unlimited data storage capacity
we have, by the superfast networks that are coming or promised or will eventually arrive,
and by the abundance of digital data that surrounds us in the world every day and which
we create and curate ourselves.
The internet is one of the ways in which we tell ourselves stories, and as Joan Didion,
an author who is incredibly important to research, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.
We try to make sense of the narrative. The stories are the thread that helps us make
sense of the world, and increasingly the network and the affordances of the network are intimately
interwoven with the stories we are telling. It becomes impossible to separate them out.
The lives we live are as much online as they are offline. But the nature of story, the
understanding of what story might mean is not easy. This is young Ludwig Wittgenstein,
the philosopher, a hero of mine and someone whose philosophy still I think can inspire
a lot of serious thinking about how we engage with the online world. And if Wittgenstein
tells us that story is not a simple word, well, nor is safety. Our understanding of the
terms we're using in this vitally important debate about young people and their engagement
with technology needs to go back to those basics. We should not, you should not assume that
we know in advance what it is we're trying to achieve, or what the words that we use
mean or how they are understood by the young people we're working with. Words mean what
we use them to mean and those meanings shift over time. So when we ask how we can build
a safer internet, we're actually asking a very fundamental question about what do
we mean by safety and what is the nature of the internet we’re trying to make safe?
And both of those concepts are, I think, far more fluid than policy makers can often appreciate
and that the technology providers sometimes realise.
I've been online for a while. This is a website from 1994 called GoldSite Europe from
Cityscape, whom some of you may remember. I first saw the web in 1993, but I’d been
using the internet since 1984, when I was a student at Cambridge University, and it
was nothing exciting and nothing particularly interesting – it was a way to move files
around. It was only with the advent of the World Wide Web that we really saw the life-changing
possibilities. The fact that you could images on there, the fact that interactivity was
so easy that you didn't need to understand computers in order to be able to use it, the
fact that there was a wealth of creative talent being poured into building websites extending
the range of possibilities and reaching out to people in their ordinary lives, coupled
with the continuing increase in the speed of computers, ease of access to the networks
– particularly here in the developed western world – all of those factors conspired to
change the world amazingly quickly. But of course it hasn't stopped. I started working
with Childnet international in 2005. My daughter was one of the first people on their children's
panel. She's now 20. And at the time we were concerned about SMS messaging, we wereconcerned
about Microsoft Messenger as being a dangerous place for children, we were concerned about
home use of the internet. Yet a few days ago Stephen Carrwick-Davies, who's the former
CEO of Childnet International, sent me a report he'd written, a report called Munch, Poke
and Ping, that looked at the way young people in pupil referral units are using technology
and the dangers they face, and his works focussed almost entirely on their use of BlackBerries.
These are not BlackBerry warriors, they are BlackBerry gangs. And I understood very little
of what they are doing. I had to look up some of the terminology. The phrase 'munch',
'screen munching' was a new concept to me, and I like to think I’m up with the
kids, or down with the kids, or whatever the jargon is. I like to think I understand what's
going on. And what that showed me is that things are moving so fast that we're in
real danger of solving problems that no longer exist and not seeing problems that are just
emerging. Soon, for example, homes will be equipped with this, the Microsoft Kinect,
and we'll be having 3D video messaging services running form home consoles that require no
technical sophistication, no technical understanding to use, but will be going directly into people's
living rooms or, increasingly with consoles, into children's bedrooms. And they'll
interact interface seamlessly with all the devices, with the next generation of mobile
phones and things like that.
And this rate of change is intimidating even for those of us who are paid to keep track of it,
even for those of us who are paid to pontificate on the radio and television about the significance
of the latest development; it can sometimes be hard to catch up. So for those for people whom
it's only part of their job, or who are observing intermittently, it's an almost
impossible task. One thing that it implies though is that a focus on specific risks,
specific technologies, specific services or specific solutions could easily end up making
safe the places that young people have long ago abandoned. And I think we need to think
carefully about how we can avoid that problem, how we can take a broader perspective and
get a way of ensuring that young people see the benefits of the digital life that is opening
up towards them, but are not exposed to risk to a degree that we as society find unacceptable.
And that thinking about the balance of risk as these technologies emerge, flower and perhaps
sometimes fade away, is I think going to be an important part of any debate. Because it’s
clear form all the research being done that the rate of adoption of these digital technologies
is not slowing down. We might see home PC use or home internet PC use beginning to
flatten out and reaching saturation, but all of the other devices are increasing.
And the research that you'll be looking at later from Ofcom's Media Literacy Tracker
demonstrates that young people remain very very heavy users of all sorts of technology,
and in particular, according to this diagram, they're spending significant amounts of
time doing things other than watching television. And, on, the er the amount of time spent watching
television is lower than the time spent with other electronic forms of entertainment or
interaction. So TV may be a dominant activity in some households, but it’s stopping being
that. And, of course, control of television is proving more and more difficult, control
of what’s happening on the internet, control of social networking
sites seems to be proving almost impossible.
This is happening in a broader context; it's a context that some people call the digital
age or the digital world. But I don't think that we should be doing that. I think that
although we are definitely increasing our use of, perhaps our dependence on technologies
of all forms, there's no prospect that we're all going to vanish into the machine, that
we'll be subsumed tron-like under the control of a master control program and that we’ll
abandon our physical lives, our physical identities or our physical bodies. It is not a digital
world. The real world has not in any sense gone away; that's why we're all here in
this room meeting together, because there are there that being in the same
physical space as someone else offers that other things cannot – the online interactivity
simply cannot replicate. But, it's no longer an analogue world. That we rely increasingly
on digital technologies, on electronic systems, on digital data, we're actually in a hybrid
world. If it's an age of anything, it's an age of electronics.
We depend on electronic systems and what we're building on those electronic systems is a
digital culture. And it's better to think of culture rather than the world, that analogue
and digital co-exist – we have computers but we also have Mont Blanc pens, we have
paper, we also have e ink. What we have is a transition from the basis of society from
one that is largely based around analogue data to one that is largely based around digital
data, and one that's largely based on the affordances of pre-electronic technologies
to one that relies almost entirely on electronics. And I would argue that this revolution – and
it is a revolution – is of the scale of the invention of writing about 5000 years
ago, that moveable type and print were important, but when we look back in 50, 100, 200 years
at what is happening right now, we will see this at being a point at where the way societies
were constructed, the way people came together shifted irreversibly just as the invention
of writing shifted the nature of human society irreversibly. It is a once in a civilisation
transition.
And that has enormous implications for how we think about it because the last big transition
like this, the move to literacy, literally rewired the human brain. This very fine book,
Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, a psychologist looking at dyslexia, Wolf uses evidence from 0:10:03.589,0:0:10:10.740 neural imaginary and psychology and psycho-linguistics to show how the reading brain is different
from the non-reading brain, how different areas are used to translate letters on a page
into fluent reading and how the process of learning to read is, as I like to put it,
doing brain surgery without a scalpel. In the process of teaching people to read, we
change the way their brains work, and people who read idiographic or pictographic or logographic
writing have different sorts of brain function from those who read alphabets. People who
read English have slightly different brains from those who read German because of the
different syntax.
So the change from a pre-literate to a literate culture was enormous on a number of scales.
It allowed all the things we now call civilisation to emerge and we still benefit from them.
And as far as I know, no culture has returned to the pre-literate state. And I would argue
that in this world we are living through the emergence of a digital culture where the affordances
of binary storage and processing of data, where the availability of fast and reliable
networks, and the availability of devices that allow more and more of us to live in
that strange space between online and offline which Twitter and Facebook and Google encourage;
that world is one which is going to change the way we think.
There won't be just one digital culture of course, just as there's not one literate
or print culture; there'll be lots of them, but they will all be based around the same
assumptions around access to the network and around the use of the technologies. And our
children are growing up into this world, they are being shaped already by these technologies
and this is in fact the real challenge that faces us.
Because my son, Max, illustrated there studiously ignoring the Guardian to read on his iPad
the article about the iPad. This was not a staged shot. Honest! Um, my son, Max, thinks
differently to me because he has been immersed in these technologies since birth. They’ve
always been around him. I'm sure my thinking patterns have been shaped by my deep immersion
in all of this technology but I don't think it goes to the same degree as him. Now this
for some, like Susan Greenfield, is a source of some fear and panic and Daily Mail editorialising.
The rest of us are slightly more sanguine about it since we've done it before, we
managed the transition and whilst the invention of literacy and reading did change things
rather a lot, most of us would agree that it was on balance for the best. I see no reason
why this change shouldn't be for the best either. But that means that when we come to
think about how children are using technologies, we need to look not just at the technology
as we perceive it, but how they might perceive it.
That's why Steven’s report – this is the cover of it – done for the Training
and Development Agency was so interesting to me. These are young people who don't
benefit from parental guidance, who have no real control in their lives, who can't rely
on the checks and balances that many reports call on, who can't be, who are not in a
space where whatever controls there are will be set up for them by someone who actually
cares about them. And they are using the technology – in this case BlackBerries – in ways
that, as I say, surprised me, that I did not really imagine. And so I think that we all
need to take this bigger perspective. We also need to look at the research that's being
done about how young people are actually using things like social network sites. This is
a quote from Danah Boyd, a US-based researcher; she interviewed a lot of young people at risk
about their use of social networking sites and one of the women she talked to, Michaela,
said that whenever she logs out of Facebook, she deactivates her account – deep logging
off – the idea about it is that when her account is deactivated, no one can post
to her, no one can poke her, no one can tag her, no one can mess around with her online
presence. But because of Facebook's policy of not actually deleting your account when
you delete your account, which is some circumstances is criticised, she can log on again, the account
comes back and it’s only active when she is there and willing to engage. So she is
asserting control by taking advantage of a facility of the site that other people might
find an inconvenience and that people in different contexts might campaign against. If we were
successful in saying that Facebook should immediately delete your personal data when
you delete your account, this strategy would not be open to this young woman. So things
can have unexpected consequences. And what that tells me is that these young people don't
see the world as I do even though I thought I was a pretty wired guy.
Let's move on.
It's the same when we try to assert external authority. It's very dangerous to think
you can manage the internet either as a policy-maker or as the chief executive of a very large
and powerful corporation. Um, Google warning France and Google warning the UK strikes me
as being a bit odd. The river of innovation is running so fast in this area, that all
of these attempts to to use strong arm tactics seem to me to be ill-conceived. And they don't
necessary seem to help the interests of young people.
Because the problem with much of today's thinking and I have to say it's much of
the thinking I see from child protection agencies, from those who are concerned about these issues,
is it's based on an understanding of the network and how it's used that's either
out of date or that assumes boundaries that no longer exist and assumes cognitive structures
and an emotional make up on the part of children that's appropriate to the analogue world
but not to the digital culture.
We've seen over the last few years how major institutions like newspapers have struggled
and struggled to find a role in this digital culture and how many of them are failing.
In the case of a newspaper, the belief that a story is finished when it says it's finished,
that it's the only institution that's allowed to speak truth to power, that only
it can tell, only it has privileged access to knowledge betrays those analogue roots
and makes the newspaper unsustainable in a world of bloggers and story-tellers and observers
and online social networks and sites that do not play by those rules like the Huffington
Post.
The danger for all of us concerned with young people’s online safety isn't that we'll
fail to keep up with the technologies, because it's inevitable we'll fail to keep up
with the technologies, it's that we will fail to think like young people and we'll
come up with plans that have no hope of ever engaging them.
When the music industry ten years ago was faced with the challenge of finding a way
to make its product digital in a world where perfect digital copies could be transferred
in moments over fast network, it resorted to more and more oppressive legal measures
and lobbied expensively for more repressive laws controlling sharing. It got the laws
but has failed to stop the decline. We mustn't make those same mistakes. We need to work
with young people and understand them, and it's so refreshing to see so many young
people here engaged in all the processes. I hope that what we can all come up with today
will fit with what they are going to inherit from us.
Thank you.