Raising Humans in a Digital World

by Diana Graber

  Tell Social Media Stories

  As unexpected as it may seem, many kids—even those already using social media—are unfamiliar with the terminology of the digital activities they are so adept at engaging in. Even if they aren’t unfamiliar, you may be, and that’s why it’s important to review social media terminology together, so you can all be on the same page. Then you can get to the fun part of this activity, telling social media stories.

  1.Review the following common terms with your children, to make sure you both understand social media’s full impact:

  •Social media site: Any website or application where users create and share content, including comments. Video sites like YouTube and online games that allow contact between players are social media sites.

  •Tag or Tagging: When you “tag” people (or things), you create a link to their profile. If you or a “friend” tags someone in your post, the post could be visible to the audience you select plus friends of the tagged person. This will impact your digital reputation as well as the digital reputation of the tagged person.

  •Screenshot: A screenshot (sometimes called a screen capture) is an image of a computer or mobile phone screen that can be saved by the person taking the screenshot. Various programs can be used to take screenshots, but it is also easy to do without any special program at all. This is how images and information posted on social media apps that claim content “disappears” (e.g., Snapchat) are saved and can potentially be shared elsewhere.

  •Upload: When you upload something to the internet, you are moving or copying a file from one computer or device to another (or many others!).

  •Post: This is a piece of writing, an image, or another item of content published online, typically on a blog or social media website. When used as a verb—as in “to post something online”—it means you are publishing something to an online forum.

  2.Now that you and your children know the general terminology, share some stories! It’s easy to find stories about social media mishaps in the news. You might even ask your children to share stories they have seen or heard or share your own. If you need a good social media story, you are welcome to use the one that follows. It is one of the true stories we discuss in our Cyber Civics classes.

  Teasing Mark

  Mark, a sixth grader, tries out to be a junior lifeguard in his hometown and is the only boy in his class to make it. He is excited and proud of this accomplishment, and so are his parents. His mom uploads his picture to her own social media site, tags him, and writes, “So proud of Mark for making the junior lifeguard squad today.” Some of Mark’s friends see the post and think he looks funny in the picture, so they screenshot it, post it on their own social media accounts, and write sarcastic comments. Someone even teases him by posting this falsehood: “Dude, I saw you cheating on the first-aid test!” Other kids see this post and share it with their friends and followers.

  3.Discuss your stories. If you use the story above, the following questions can serve as discussion starters:

  •Who is at fault for spreading the misinformation that Mark “cheated” on his first-aid test?

  •Do you think people who don’t know Mark well will know his friends were teasing?

  •List some of the long-term consequences these posts could have on Mark.

  •How could this situation have been handled differently?

  Design Your Digital Billboard

  This is one of my favorite in-classroom activities, as the artwork it yields decorates our walls. You can do this activity at home as well.

  1.Tell your children to think of their digital reputation as a giant billboard on the “information superhighway” that anyone driving by might see. This billboard will display an accumulation of everything they post online, or that others post about them, essentially advertising them to the world.

  2.Let your children think about what they want their billboard to say. Will it tell the world they’ve done well in school? Spent time volunteering? Excelled in sports? Or will it share things they may not want the world to see?

  3.On a large piece of white paper, draw a blank billboard (a rectangle with a post holding it up). Tell your kids to customize their billboards by filling it with images and information they would like to see displayed about themselves in ten years. Such information might include a Facebook post about an award they’ve won, a YouTube video of them performing with their popular band, or an online news article about their work feeding the homeless. Encourage them to be imaginative and creative. Remember, the sky is the limit!

  Chapter 4

  Screen Time

  I have come up with my own take on food writer Michael Pollan’s famous maxim: “Enjoy screens. Not too much. Mostly with others.”

  —ANYA KAMENETZ, THE ART OF SCREEN TIME1

  The first time I noticed how screens can interfere with a truly incredible real-life experience was in 1990. I didn’t have children of my own yet, nor did I teach other people’s kids. Back then I was the director of marketing and television for Surfer Publications (the job was as awesome as it sounds), and one August afternoon found myself on a plane with my soon-to-be husband and four professional snowboarders, headed to the ski slopes of New Zealand’s South Island to shoot an episode of Snowboarder TV, a series we produced for ESPN.

  During our flight from Auckland to Queenstown, we flew over New Zealand’s magnificent Southern Alps. It was a gorgeous winter’s day with not a cloud in sight, highly unusual for this mountain range. With my face pressed against the cold window, I marveled at the icy spires and vast glaciers that appeared close enough to touch. Suddenly, the massive 12,349-foot Mt. Cook appeared in view, its icy flanks piercing the cobalt-blue sky. It was incredible and undoubtedly one of the most spectacular sights I’ve ever witnessed.

  Appreciating the rarity of the day, the pilot of our small aircraft opened the door leading to the cockpit, so the dozen or so passengers could enjoy more of this breathtaking view. But the snowboarders, all young men in their late teens and early twenties, missed the whole damn thing. Instead of taking in this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, each one of them was bent over the popular handheld device of the time, the Nintendo Game Boy, busy at play and oblivious to the world beyond their screens.

  “How strange,” I remember thinking.

  If someone had alerted me back then that this would become entirely normal and commonplace teen behavior when I had my own kids, I never would have believed it.

  FAST-FORWARD TO TODAY

  Given all the digital distractions available today, kids miss the wonders of the physical world all the time. Getting them to realize this is no easy feat, as I was reminded last year when an angry seventh grader named Nick leaped out of his chair during one of our Cyber Civics lessons to announce to his classmates, “What Ms. Graber just asked us to do is illegal!”

  You see, I’d just asked Nick and his classmates to abstain from using all digital media for twenty-four hours, over the weekend, and to write one paragraph about the experience. This was the same homework I’d been doling out to seventh graders every September for the past seven years. When I first assigned this task to my own daughter’s class, back in 2011, the students accepted the challenge without complaint. They were even excited about it. But every year since, this homework has been met with declining enthusiasm.

  Actually, calling my students’ reaction “unenthusiastic” is the understatement of the century. They were livid. They spent most of our hour together trying to help me understand why it was impossible for them to give up screens for twenty-four hours:

  “But I have to get my text messages.”

  “I can’t be out of touch with my soccer team.”

  “How in the world will I take and post photos?”

  “What about my Snapstreaks?”

  “My online gaming friends will think I died.”

  “This is child abuse!”

  One earnest young girl, tears welling up in her big brown eyes, told me, “It’s the o
nly thing I look forward to on the weekend.”

  Although I was prepared for some resistance, this class’s response caught me and Shelley Glaze-Kelley, who was co-teaching with me that day, entirely off-guard. You’d think we’d just asked each kid to chop off a hand. But considering that those appendages are usually clutching a phone, I guess that’s what this assignment felt like to them.

  When one girl volunteered that she had a friend whose teacher had challenged her students to give up using money for twenty-four hours, I finally felt like I had an ally in the class. “That must have been much more difficult,” I offered.

  “No way,” she said. “Giving up my phone would be way, way harder.” I asked her classmates if they agreed. They did. Unanimously. “Wow,” I wondered. “How in the world did we get here?”

  WE HAVE SMARTPHONES TO THANK

  Smartphone ownership has become nearly synonymous with adolescence. In a few short years, the number of teens with smartphones has skyrocketed. A 2018 report from Pew Research Center finds that 95 percent of teens either have or have access to a smartphone. This represents a 22-percentage-point increase from the 73 percent of teens who reported having smartphones in 2014–2015.2 Even before teens had their own phones, most cut their teeth using tablets or their parents’ smartphones and computers.

  According to the same Pew report, 45 percent of teens say they use the internet “almost constantly.” That figure has nearly doubled from the 24 percent who said the same in Pew’s 2014–2015 survey. Another 44 percent of teens report going online several times a day. In all, roughly nine-in-ten teens say they go online multiple times per day.3

  If you think this is unique to the U.S., think again. Internet usage via the mobile phone is two times higher in Asia and Africa. Many countries in these regions simply skipped using desktops, then laptops, and went straight to internet-connected phones, as they are cheaper and easier to acquire and use. Today, studies indicate that anywhere from 1.6 percent to 11.3 percent of adolescents in China, Taiwan, and South Korea are considered internet “addicted,” and China was the first country to declare internet addiction a clinical disorder.4

  The scene I found so odd years ago—teens with heads bent over a screen, missing everything happening around them—doesn’t even raise eyebrows today. And the time teens spend gazing at screens seems to increase exponentially every year. I observe this with the kids I teach, and the data I collect from them confirms it.

  Every year, I ask incoming seventh and eighth graders to write down everything they do from the moment they wake up to the time they go to sleep on a typical summer’s day. This is important because, frequently, screen use goes unnoticed. Screens are in supermarkets, restaurants, and gas stations. Kids use screens not only to text, but also to check the weather, find directions to a friend’s house, and to Google anything they are curious about. Daily living and screens are increasingly and inextricably entwined, and have been since these kids were babies. So, unless they log their activities, they have no idea how much time they spend using screens.

  This is an activity I’ve conducted annually over the past seven years, and every year the number of screen hours students self-report matches national averages, not only at our school, but also at many others that teach Cyber Civics. Last year, however, the data I collected floored me. In one class alone the average time spent using screens per day was a whopping 11.5 hours per kid.

  Students are equally shocked when they discover how much time they spend staring at screens. When I challenge them to ponder what screen time might have supplanted in their offline lives, many wistfully admit they wish they’d “spent more time at the beach” or “with friends” or “playing guitar.” That’s why I wasn’t at all surprised that a 2016 Common Sense Media report found that 50 percent of teens say they “feel addicted” to mobile devices.5

  COLLEGE STUDENTS SPEND A LOT OF TIME ONLINE, TOO

  Joni Siani is a vivacious media and communications professor at Mount Ida College, outside of Boston, Massachusetts. A few years ago, she noticed a marked decline in her students’ interpersonal skills, which she attributed to the increasing amount of time they were spending on their phones.

  “I started noticing that they were developing a very different relationship with what we once thought of as just a very cool piece of technology,” Siani told me. “In one short decade, it seems like they totally changed in the way they interact with one another. They are the most technologically adept generation, yet the most socially awkward one, too.”6

  Siani, who holds an MEd in psychology from Cambridge College in Massachusetts, was interested in exploring the psychological attachment between her students and their phones, so she asked them how their phones made them feel.

  “If someone took my phone away, it would feel awful,” Taylor, a young woman with brightly dyed red hair, told her. “I even take my phone to the shower.”

  Another student, a young man named Mike, said, “I have to know what everyone is doing. I wouldn’t be able to stand the anxiety of not having my phone for this reason alone.”

  Siani decided to design a social experiment she thought might help her students develop better interpersonal communication skills “not mediated by devices.” What she learned in a few short years was so eye-opening that her students urged her to write a book about it. So she did. Then her students told her, “But our generation doesn’t read, so you need to make a film!” She did that, too. Her book and award-winning documentary are both called Celling Your Soul.7

  I ran into Siani recently and probed her about the project. Since her students are about a half-generation older than the kids I teach, what I really wanted to find out was what lies in store for my students, who were already exhibiting such a disturbing attachment to their devices.

  She told me that after working with her students on their interpersonal skills—like nonjudgmental and empathetic listening—she challenged them to take a break from technology. But, unlike the short twenty-four-hour challenge I assigned to my students, her “Digital Cleanse,” as she called it, lasted a full week. Cold turkey. No phones. No internet. Nothing.

  According to a student in her class, named Steve, “When Ms. Siani told us that for our final project we have to give up our phones and all internet for a week, my immediate reaction was, ‘How can I get out of this and still pass this class?’”

  Like my students, most of Siani’s were angry about the assignment, and they told her.

  “Screw that. It’s crap. You can’t make us do it.”

  “Who does she think she is? Being older, she already knows how to be social with people in her life. How will I know what’s going on with my friends?”

  “The message this generation is getting,” says Siani, “is that they can’t connect with each other without that thing in their hands to connect with. They all feel ‘addicted.’”8

  IS “INTERNET ADDICTION” REALLY A THING?

  Yes.

  That’s what everyone thinks, anyway. One of the icebreaker questions I toss out when visiting schools and community groups is this: When you think about kids and technology, what’s the first word that pops in your head? The most commonly called-out word is addicted.

  Yet “internet addiction” is not an official clinical diagnosis. It is not included in the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, the authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders, which is used by healthcare professionals in the U.S. and much of the world.9 The only behavioral, nonsubstance-related addiction listed in the DSM-5 is “gambling disorder.” Nevertheless, the word “addiction” is tossed around casually and often regarding technology. Especially when the discussion surrounds kids.

  Dr. David Greenfield, founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, is one of the world’s leading authorities on internet, computer, and digital media compulsive and addictive
use. I met him in 2015 at the inaugural Digital Citizenship Summit in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was presenting the event’s only session on tech overuse. He explained that, while internet addiction is not an official diagnosis, a majority of people, including kids, show signs of compulsive behavior or are overusing their phones. When this behavior interferes with a major sphere of living—social relationships, academic performance, or family relationships—then it’s a problem.

  A couple of years later, I spoke to Greenfield again because I was curious whether this problem was getting better or worse. He said that with parents providing phones to increasingly younger kids, he was seeing some as young as twelve and thirteen exhibiting addictive tendencies. These kids, which he calls members of “Generation D” (D for Digital), have grown up with tech. Today, it’s ingrained into their peer culture at a time when they are particularly vulnerable.10

  WHAT MAKES KIDS SO VULNERABLE TO TECH?

  Greenfield calls the smartphone “the smallest slot machine in the world”11 and says the internet is the biggest one. Like a slot machine, both run on a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, which is a fancy way of saying that, whenever we go online, we never quite know what’s going to happen next, and that unpredictability is what keeps us going back for more. Think about that ping that announces a new text message, a social media comment, or a news update. Those notifications reward our brains with a small hit of dopamine, a chemical that leads to increased pleasure, and when we go online to see what the ping is announcing, we’re rewarded a second hit of this feel-good chemical. The anticipation of what that ping might deliver elevates dopamine even more than the actual reward of receiving a text, a “like,” or a breaking news update.