Informants were forcibly struck
By inadvertent socio-cognitive barriers
Where assumed nuances facilitated sensemaking
Within the same systemic design community
The organizers initiated the webinar
Effectively problematizing group interaction
Playing the role of existential gatekeepers
Making use of information and communication technologies
Informal knowledge is reinterpreted
Within a group's particular context
Socialized to a degree by volunteers
Providing practical learning experience
Demarcating, at once, well integrated empirical findings
That a majority of members would endorse
Immersed in exploitation spanning boundaries,
The sphere of academic discourse
Sometimes technology gets in the way,
There are ghosts in the machine, it seems
Or perhaps gremlins are the proper genus of the species
For when, in your haste to wish your interlocutor
Simple encouragements and the best of luck,
Your typed message got garbled by the darned computer
Transformed into choice obscenity before you could react
And now you wish that the whole interaction was something you could retract
Flush with mounting embarrassment
And awkwardness that you're unable to deflect
All that is left is to bemoan it:
The occasional regret of auto-correct
...
Sometimes when you're confronted with a choice,
You rashly decide to take the easy way out
Unwilling, as you are, to listen to other voices
Or even entertain a scintilla of doubt
You find yourself beefing up and promoting a patent scoundrel
Marshaling fraudulent arguments on the basis that he's a lesser evil
And now, without shame, he's hellbent on crudely screwing the pooch
The bodies are piled up high,
Unmitigated disasters while he cheerfully loots
The uncouth rascal,
The hatchet jobs write themselves for even middling pundits
But now you have to stay silent as you were well and truly complicit
Call it buyer's remorse:
The occasional regret of claiming to know what's best
...
Sometimes you decide to invade a smaller country
Might makes right and it will serve all your cronies
Fictitious claims, weapons of mass destruction
Vague but imminent threats and human rights violations
Ignoring, in your rush, all evidence to the contrary
Riding roughshod over any attempts at diplomacy
Wars of choice never lead to mission accomplished
After this catastrophic war on the wrong target, you are fully tarnished
Beyond the blood and lost valor,
Your nation now entirely lacks credibility
Hell, even Putin can rightly accuse you of being part of an axis of hypocrisy
While badging his aggrandizing crimes with the same patina of manifest destiny Oops, a cautionary tale:
The occasional regret of the self-righteous mindset
Release, when it comes, is best served with a grain of salt
For it's been so long brewing that anticipation is pungent
Sweeten to taste with local honey, something fit for a prince
Or substitute with some unrefined beet or cane sugar
Grind slowly in a mortar of regret
Using a solid pestle for the best blend
Crush and pulverize the sense of alienation
If need be, pound heavily and enjoy the sensation
Simmer until the stock in trade has been clarified
A half cup of consommé should be more than you need
Bitter fruits are to be avoided if at all possible
Not every guest can handle the likely fermentation
A few drops of concern should be sufficient to allay any anxiety
Pair with a tart topping of wist to highlight the sourness
Loneliness should sizzle to properly savor the contrast
If you prefer astringency, serve medium rare but use only the freshest cuts
Consider the sense of purpose and remember your roots
Answers emerge languidly from the recesses of the mind
Albeit golden memories make for the perfect pairing
Don't restrict yourself, indulge your imagination
Someday soon you'll surely return home and recapture the feeling
When you can drop the mask and, unfiltered, embrace normalcy
And testify in earnest conversation, a return to innocence
Relief and equanimity, the main ingredients of catharsis
Kinshasa Mboka Ya Makambo by Franco (live)
The live rendition always stops me in my tracks, the simplicity of the performance, the way he grips the audience taking his time to cajole, lament and celebrate his return. He never forgot his roots, his people and this city of many troubles. Franco is sorely missed, a legend in African music.
High tech Luddite, you might well say
Finally fed up, it was was my then-fiancée
Who got me my first mobile phone that Independence Day
Tired as she was, frankly, about my anti-social ways
She put me on the Friends-and-Family plan and said "Say no more"
Reader, I married her, months later, and carried her across the door
I work with cutting edge software but continue to be a late adopter
Friends often remark about my puzzling inertia
Looks of concern and wonder, as if I were allergic
To all those shiny gadgets, must-haves, and flashy widgets
Those social networks, elite apps, and newfangled platforms
I'm always out of the loop and unaware of the latest norms
I guess that I'm altogether immune to the fear of missing out
And trust that when I do move they'll have finally worked out the bugs
Vinyl and hefty speakers, my sound system dates from a bygone era
When veritable dinosaurs roamed the land along with other chimera
The kids joke that I write in my dusty notebooks with ancient quills
Preferring manual over automatic as I do, an aesthetic of low frills
This studied indifference has served me well but sometimes beggars can't be choosers
Sixteen years later, I finally got the courage to ask to be an authorized user
For, with a cracked screen and sharp spikes that make it a danger zone,
Apparently I still need permission in order to upgrade my vintage phone
Since the “social media is bad for teens” myth will not die, I keep having intense conversations with colleagues, journalists, and friends over what the research says and what it doesn’t. (Alice Marwick et. al put together a great little primer in light of the legislative moves.) Along the way, I’ve also started to recognize how slipperiness between two terms creates confusion — and political openings — and so I wanted to call them out in case this is helpful for others thinking about these issues.
In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”
The language of “harm” in this question is causal in nature. It is also legalistic. Lawyers look for “harms” to place blame on or otherwise regulate actants. By and large, in legal contexts, we talk about PersonA harming PersonB. As such, PersonA is to be held accountable. But when we get into product safety discussions, we also talk about how faulty design creates the conditions for people to be harmed due to intentional, malfeasant actions by the product designer. Making a product liability claim is much harder because it requires proving the link of harm and the intentionality to harm.
Risk is a different matter. Getting out of bed introduces risks into your life. Risk is something to identify and manage. Some environments introduce more potential risks and some actions reduce the risks. Risk management is a skill to develop. And while regulation can be used to reduce certain risks, it cannot eliminate them. And it can also backfire and create more risks. (This is the problem that María Angel and I have with techno-legal solutionism.)
Let’s unpack this a bit by shifting contexts and thinking about how we approach risks more generally.
Skiing is Risky.
Skiing is understood to be a risky sport. As we approach skiing season out here in the Rockies, I’m bracing myself for the uptick in crutches, knee wheelies, and people under 40 using the wheelchair services at the Denver airport. There is also a great deal of effort being put into trying to reduce the risk that someone will leave the slopes in this state. I’m fascinated by the care ski instructors take in trying to ensure that people who come to the mountains learn how to take care. There’s a whole program here for youngins designed to teach them a safety-first approach to skiing.
And there’s a whole host of messaging that will go out each day letting potential skiers know about the conditions. We will also get fear-mongering messages out here, with local news reporting on skiers doing stupid things and warnings of avalanches that too many folks will ignore. And there will be posters at the resorts telling people to not speed on the mountains because they might kill a kid. (I think these posters are more effective as scaring kids than convincing skiers to slow down.)
No matter what messaging goes out, people will still get hurt this season like they do every season. And so there are patrollers whose job it is to look for people in high-risk situations and medics who will be on hand to help people who have been injured. And there’s a whole apparatus structured to get them of the mountain and into long-term care.
Unless you’re off your rocker, you don’t just watch a few YouTube videos and throw yourself down a mountain on skis. People take care to learn how to manage the risks of skiing. Or they’re like me and take one look at that insanity and dream of a warm place by a fire or sitting in a hot tub instead of spending stupid amounts of money to introduce that kind of risk into their lives.
Crossing the Street is Risky.
The stark reality is that every social environment has risks. And one of the key parts of being socialized through childhood into adulthood is learning to assess and respond to risks.
Consider walking down the street in a busy city. As any NYC parent knows, there are countless near-heart attacks that occur when trying to teach a 2-year-old to stop at the corner of the sidewalk. But eventually they learn to stop. And eventually they learn to not bowl people over while riding their scooter down that sidewalk. And then the next stage begins — helping young people learn to look both ways before crossing the street, regardless of what is happening with the light, and convincing them to maintain constant awareness about their environment. And eventually that becomes so normal that you start to teach your child how to J-walk without getting a ticket. And eventually, the child turns into a teenager who wanders the city alone, J-walking with ease while blocking out all audio signals with their headphones. But then take that child — or an American adult — to a city like Hanoi and they’ll have to relearn how to cross a street because nothing one learns in NYC about crossing streets applies to Hanoi.
Is crossing the street risky? Of course. But there’s a lot we can do to make it less risky. Good urban design and functioning streetlights can really help, but they don’t make the risk disappear. And people can actually cross a street in Hanoi, even though I doubt anyone would praise the urban design of streets and there are no streetlights. While design can help, what really matters for navigating risk is rooted in socialization, education, and agency. Mixed into this is, of course, experience. The more that we experience crossing the street, the easier it gets, regardless of what you know about the rules. And still, the risk does not entirely disappear. People are still hit by cars while crossing the street every year.
The Risk of Social Media Can Be Reduced.
Can social media be risky for youth? Of course. So can school. So can friendship. So can the kitchen. So can navigating parents. Can social media be designed better? Absolutely. So can school. So can the kitchen. (So can parents?) Do we always know the best design interventions? No. Might those design interventions backfire? Yes.
Does that mean that we should give up trying to improve social media or other digital environments? Absolutely not. But we must also recognize that trying to cement design into law might backfire. And that, more generally, technologies’ risks cannot be managed by design alone.
Fixating on better urban design is pointless if we’re not doing the work to socialize and educate people into crossing digital streets responsibly. And when we age-gate and think that people can magically wake up on their 13th or 18th birthday and be suddenly able to navigate digital streets just because of how many cycles they took around the sun, we’re fools. Socialization and education are still essential, regardless of how old you are. (Psst to the old people: the September that never ended…)
In the United States, we have a bad habit of thinking that risks can be designed out of every system. I will never forget when I lived in Amsterdam in the 90s, and I remarked to a local about how odd I found it that there were no guardrails to prevent cars from falling into the canals when they were parking. His response was “you’re so American” which of course prompted me to say, “what does THAT mean?” He explained that, in the Netherlands, locals just learned not to drive their cars into the canals, but Americans expected there to be guardrails for everything so that they didn’t have to learn not to be stupid. He then noted out that every time he hears about a car ending up in the canal, it is always an American who put it there. Stupid Americans. (I took umbrage at this until, a few weeks later, I read a news story about a drunk American driving a rental into the canal.)
Better design is warranted, but it is not enough if the goal is risk reduction. Risk reduction requires socialization, education, and enough agency to build experience. Moreover, if we think that people will still get hurt, we should be creating digital patrols who are there to pick people up when they are hurt. (This is why I’ve always argued that “digital street outreach” would be very valuable.)
But What About Harms?
People certainly face risks when encountering any social environment, including social media. This then triggers the next question: Do some people experience harms through social media? Absolutely. But it’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen. As every school principal knows, you can’t solve bullying through the design of the physical building.
Returning to our earlier note on product liability, it is reasonable to ask if specific design choices of social media create the conditions for certain kinds of harms to be more likely — and for certain risks to be increased. Researchers have consistently found that bullying is more frequent and more egregious at school than on social media, even if it is more visible on the latter. This makes me wary of a product liability claim regarding social media and bullying. Moreover, it’s important to notice what schools have done in response to this problem. They’ve invested in social-emotional learning programs to strengthen resilience, improve bystander approaches, and build empathy. These interventions are making a huge difference, far more than building design. (If someone wants to tax social media companies to scale these interventions, have a field day.)
Of course, there are harms that I do think are product liability issues vis-a-vis social media. For example, I think that many privacy harms can be mitigated with a design approach that is privacy-by-default. I also think that regulations that mandate universal privacy protections would go a long way in helping people out. But the funny thing is that I don’t think that these harms are unique to children. These are harms that are experienced broadly. And I would argue that older folks tend to experience harms associated with privacy much more acutely.
But even if you think that children are especially vulnerable, I’d like to point out that while children might need a booster seat for the seatbelt to work, everyone would be better off if we put privacy seatbelts in place rather than just saying that kids can’t be in cars.
I have more complex feelings about the situations where we blame technology for societal harms. As I’ve argued for over a decade, the internet mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. This includes bullying and harassment, but it also includes racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and anti-trans attitudes. I wish that these societal harms could be “fixed” by technology; that would be nice. But that is naive.
I get why parents don’t want to expose children to the uglier parts of the world. But if we want to raise children to be functioning adults, we also have to ensure that they are resilient. Besides, protecting children from the ills of society is a luxury that only a small segment of the population is able to enjoy. For example, in the US, Black parents rarely have the option of preventing their children from being exposed to racism. This is why white kids need to be educated to see and resist racism. Letting white kids live in “colorblind” la-la-land doesn’t enable racial justice. It lets racism fester and increases inequality.
As adults, we need to face the ugliness of society head on, with eyes wide open. And we need to intentionally help our children see that ugliness so that they can be agents of change. Social media does make this ugly side more visible, but avoiding social media doesn’t make it go away. Actively engaging young people as they are exposed to the world through dialogue allows them to be prepared to act. Turning on the spicket at a specific age does not.
I will admit that one thing that intrigues me is that many of those who propagate hate are especially interested in blocking children from technology for fear that allowing their children to be exposed to difference might make them more tolerant. (No, gender is not contagious, but developing a recognition that gender is socially and politically constructed — and fighting for a more just world — sure is.) There’s a long history of religious communities trying to isolate youth from kids of other faiths to maintain control.
There’s no doubt that media — including social media — exposes children to a much broader and more diverse world. Anyone who sees themselves as empowering their children to create a more just and equitable world should want to conscientiously help their children see and understand the complexity of the world we live in.
In the early days of social media, I was naive in thinking that just exposing people to people around the world to each other would fundamentally increase our collective tolerance. I had too much faith in people’s openness. I know now that this deterministic thinking was foolish. But I have also come to appreciate the importance of combining exposure with education and empathy.
Isolating people from difference doesn’t increase tolerance or appreciation. And it won’t help us solve the hardest problems in our world — starting with both inequity and ensuring our planet is livable for future generations. Instead, we need to help our children build the skills to live and work together.
Put another way, to raise children who can function in our complex world, we need to teach them how to cross the digital street safely. Skiing is optional.
A carapace of insight
Built incrementally and revisited anew
An exoskeleton of wordplay
Whose affirmation frames our point of view
A dense network of thought
Fleshing out an informational mesh
Such is our asylum
There's no time for buyer's remorse
Snap judgements galore, we write our own stories
Judicious case studies, arguments by analogy
Feverishly devising impressionistic narratives
Changing the frame with our oblique perspectives
It's a reflection of these fragments of identity
Collecting pieces of a dream in search of community
Crumbs of solace gathered from probing conversation
Forging liminal links while chasing word fugitives
And so we weave together strands of allusion
Erecting barriers of layered protection
A comfort suite of irrepressible storytelling
Refining the mesh that is social living
This note concludes concludes another collection of toli, my fourth collection of poems, a year in the life. I started May 2021 with The Lobby and ending on May 2022 with another covidious folktale. It took in tragedy and its aftermath in South Africa and Ghana as well as my usual meditations on small things. Hopefully it will escape hypertext into physical form sometime soon... I call it Buyer's Remorse.
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