Raising Humans in a Digital World

by Diana Graber

  I try to help my students exercise these muscles by using crap detection’s handy acronym, C.R.A.P. An unforgettable tool to assess the veracity of online information, C.R.A.P. is a set of four questions you can ask yourself whenever you encounter something dubious online. Variations can be found all over the internet, and here are mine:

  Currency

  •How current is the information?

  •How recently was it was posted? Has it been updated?

  Reliability

  •How reliable is the information?

  •Does the author provide references or sources?

  •What proof do you have that the information is reliable?

  Author

  •Who is the creator or author of the information? What are her credentials?

  •Who is the publisher or sponsor of the information? Is this a reputable information source?

  Purpose/Point of view

  •What is the purpose of this information? Is it intended to inform, entertain, or persuade?

  •Does the information sound like fact or opinion? Is it biased?

  •Is the creator or author trying to sell you something?

  Personally, I rely on the C.R.A.P. test a lot. Like most people, I’m a sucker for salacious headlines. But if they seem suspicious, I give them the test (please bear in mind, online misinformation is nonpartisan, examples exist on both sides of the political aisle). Here’s one example:

  One day while scrolling through my Facebook feed, a friend’s post caught my eye. The headline she shared read: “Shock Revelation: Obama Admin Actively Sabotaged Gun Background Check System.” Intrigued, I clicked on the article and discovered it was posted on a website called Conservative Tribune.14 While the website and article appeared current enough, neither seemed entirely reliable. The site was full of clickbait headlines sporting words like “vile,” “stunner,” and “disgraced.” I checked out the author, and his humorous bio and few Twitter followers (only three people when I checked) made me wonder if he was a true journalist. So, I looked up Conservative Tribune on Media Bias/Fact Check. This is a media bias resource site—one of many online—that claims to be an independent outlet “dedicated to educating the public on media bias and deceptive news practices.”15 There I learned that Conservative Tribune is a “questionable source” that “exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, overt propaganda, poor or no sourcing to credible information and/or is fake news.” I also discovered that the site “consistently fails fact checks, glorifies violence against Americans and Muslims,” and more.16 Finally, a scroll back through the Conservative Tribune website revealed a distinct purpose and point of view.

  The article seemed like crap to me.

  Back on Facebook, I returned to where the article was posted and in the upper right-hand corner selected “Report Post.” A box popped up that read, “Help us understand what’s happening,” under which I selected “It’s a false news story.” Facebook presented me with some options. I could block, unfollow, or unfriend the person who posted the story. I didn’t select any of those options, because I don’t want to end up in a filter bubble. Instead I selected “Mark this post as false news” and was done.

  This entire process didn’t take much longer than it took you to read what steps I completed. It felt good, too! It’s the small part I can play to help curb the flow of fake news stories online. I encourage my students to take action when they see false information online, too. It’s important for them to use their critical thinking muscles and to feel like empowered digital citizens.

  BEYOND CRITICAL THINKING

  Years ago, after my husband and I signed Journey School’s strict media contract, I read Stephen Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You. Boy, was that a buzzkill. Despite a few transgressions, I’d begun to feel pretty comfortable on the “no media” high horse I was riding. As time went on, more and more people were coming around to what the Waldorf folks have espoused for years—that technology and young kids are a bad mix. At first, just a handful of tech insiders were saying as much, but soon more voices chimed in, from Apple’s Tim Cook (who said he didn’t want his nephew on social media) to Microsoft’s Melinda Gates (“I probably would have waited longer before putting a computer in my children’s pockets”).17 It was becoming vogue to think of media as the enemy of childhood.

  Then Johnson introduced me to the “Sleeper Curve” theory, a term he derived from the Woody Allen film Sleeper, a mock sci-fi movie “where a team of scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge.”18 “Jeez,” I thought. Could I be missing the nutritional merits of media, too?

  Henry Jenkins, the media guru introduced in Chapter 2, figured out the answer to this question long ago. In addition to identifying the “new media literacies,” he coined the term “participatory culture.” This, he says, is an environment where people not only consume media but also create and distribute it. Currently, we live in a participatory culture. It offers wonderful opportunities to make and share content. Never in the history of humankind have ordinary individuals had this kind of power in their hands. It has transformed the definition of literacy, and to miss out on its benefits would be a shame.

  “If you look at the definition of media literacy,” explains Erin Reilly, “it’s not just about being able to critically inquire about the media. . . . It’s also about how we can create and participate and act within the media that we engage with. Media literacy is about relationships. That’s where media has gone today. It’s moved from individual expression and consumption to social engagement and community involvement.”19

  To better understand what Reilly is talking about, it helps to look at the phenomenon of fandom. Fandom is a subculture of passionate fans who bond over their favorite books, TV shows, movies, bands, or any other form of pop culture (“Potterheads,” fans of the Harry Potter book series, are a good example). In a participatory culture, fans don’t have to wait for their next book club meeting to share their passions. They can express and share their enthusiasm with thousands, sometimes millions, of other fans in myriad ways online.

  Many kids today enthusiastically embrace the opportunities a participatory culture offers. For instance, peek into the world of The Guardian Herd. This is a series of fantasy novels for youth, written by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez, that star magic flying horses, or Pegasi. These books have spawned numerous vibrant online communities, where examples of individual expression and social engagement are off the Richter scale.

  “It started pretty quickly after Starfire,” Alvarez told me. Starfire is the first book in the series. “Kids immediately wanted to respond creatively to the story, so I was pretty quickly receiving fan art. Kids would email me pictures of the characters.”20 Alvarez, who has her own children ranging from ages thirteen to twenty, says the average age of her fans is probably around eleven. These young readers send her drawings of their own original characters. “Using the constructs of the story, the type of herds that I created, and the type of naming that I used for my Pegasi, they make up their own characters, decide which herd they were in, and then give them a Pegasus name based off the series.”

  Alvarez’s fans go to impressive lengths in creating their Pegasi. “One kid made all of my characters out of Legos, I’ve seen clay, and one child made my main character out of mosaic tiles,” she told me. Along with these handmade creations, her fans create art digitally, too, using websites like Doll Maker. “It’s a fantasy tool maker where you can make fairies,” says Alvarez. “You can make unicorns, you can make Pegasi, you can make different characters.”

  Many of Alvarez’s fans share their creations on a site called DeviantArt. com, otherwise known as DA. It’s the world’s largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts. Her fans have posted thousands of images on DA, and many include vivid descriptions of the characters they’ve created. “The great thing is they get immediate feedback on their wo
rk,” Alvarez told me. “I think kids can actually get better faster when they get feedback, instead of just doing stuff alone in their room and not showing it to anyone.”

  In addition to art, Alvarez’s books have inspired a wealth of “fanfiction,” when fans of a piece of fiction create their own story based on the original and share it with other fans. Many of Alvarez’s fans share their work on Wattpad, a free app that lets budding authors publicly share their fiction writing in a blog-like format, and read and comment on other people’s work. Per The Guardian, Wattpad has been “discovered” by teenage girls, who have turned it into a “global sensation” in young adult literature.21 “What I love about fan fiction is that kids get to explore their own alternate endings, write about side characters, and make up back stories,” says Alvarez. “Jumping off an existing world is easier for young writers than making up their own from scratch. But through this process, they learn worldbuilding and the writer’s technique of asking, ‘What if?’”

  You can also find an active community of Guardian Herd fans on Fandom, a wiki-hosting site (think Wikipedia), where users share their passions and encyclopedic knowledge of books, television shows, and movies. According to Alvarez, fans also share their book-inspired work on Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Snapchat, and other sites. An active fan community even posts to the message board on her website. “It’s not even a year old, and I’ve gotten almost forty or fifty thousand views on that,” she says.

  It’s important to note that some of the social networks mentioned here require kids to be at least thirteen years of age to use them. Alvarez always encourages her fans to get their parents’ permission before going online. But not being old enough to join social networks doesn’t stop some of her youngest fans from emailing their creations to her.

  Engagement with her readers, and her readers with one another, “has exploded with digital media,” says Alvarez. “Kids are becoming authors, illustrators—and they’re connecting with other fans to share their work. Many even have their own fan groups. Others read their stories and beg them to write more.”

  One of Alvarez’s fans who boasts her own following is thirteen-year-old Lilly from Oregon. Alvarez sent me a link to one of Lilly’s videos on YouTube—a well-made work called “How to Make a Guardian Herd Pegasus” (I’m married to a guy who has eight Emmys for cinematography, so I don’t compliment media lightly). I also went to Wattpad to read some of Lilly’s fanfiction and found it so well written that what Alvarez told me next was no surprise. “She has become inspired to be an author . . . she met another fan online. Both girls are about the same age, and they just wrote a book together, their first book.”

  “I wish I’d had this when I was a kid,” says Alvarez. “I feel like it’s opened the door for our society. For kids to create art, to find their own tribe, their own fandom. Plus, it’s encouraging creativity.”

  The passion and creativity inspired by Alvarez’s books reminded me of a story Reilly told me about her son’s friend, who is similarly passionate about the Netflix series Stranger Things. “This boy even dressed up as the character Lucas for Halloween,” said Reilly. When he discovered that no one had created a fan Snapchat following for the series, he started one himself.

  “This boy is sharing his passion, gathering information about something he loves. There’s a lot of learning skills going on there,” says Reilly, “all driven by passion.”22

  Listening to Alvarez and Reilly describe how the web offers boundless opportunities for youth to express creativity and passion, I couldn’t help but wonder at the headlines that dominate the same web where this creativity and passion is thriving. Every day we read about teens depressed or ruined by their smartphones. It’s as though we’re stuck in our own episode of Stranger Things, where there are two parallel universes: one where everything appears grand, and another where everything appears hellish. Stranger things, indeed.

  PRODUCING VS. CONSUMING

  If you learn one lesson from this book, please let it be this: Technology is just a tool. A hammer can be useful in making a beautiful structure; it can be used to destroy one, too. He who wields the tool holds the power of creation or destruction in his hands.

  Think of that the next time you look at your kids’ devices and wince. Try to remember they could be using them to make wonderful videos, write elaborate fanfiction, and draw magical pegasi. Encourage and help your children to partake in the benefits of the “participatory culture” that Jenkins writes of: “A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).23

  While many kids intuitively avail themselves of a participatory culture’s benefits, many more need nudging. So show them how they can participate online. Inspire them with stories of others who are contributing to a vibrant web of ideas, resources, and knowledge. This is what we do during our final year of Cyber Civics. One of the awesome online resources we study and where they can see, to borrow Jenkins’s words, that “their contributions matter,” is Wikipedia.

  THE WONDERS OF WIKIPEDIA

  Wikipedia is the quintessential example of a participatory culture at work. Anyone, anywhere, who is connected to the internet can contribute to Wikipedia, making this free online resource “as good as a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts.”24 Wikipedia embodies the argument James Surowiecki makes in The Wisdom of Crowds, that “groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”25

  The nice thing about Wikipedia is that anyone who knows something about anything can be an editor. This year, while the Winter Olympics were underway, I told my students that I was probably one of the few people in the world who knew something about two relatively new Olympic sports— ski cross and boardercross. Years ago, I worked in sports marketing with Jim “Too Tall” Essick (in case you are wondering, he is tall). Our small firm, Recreational Sports Marketing, produced sporting events for corporate sponsors, including ski races that Essick thought we could make more exciting by pitting four racers against one another on the course at the same time, like motocross. Since my job was to take his ideas, put them on paper, and try to convince brands to sponsor them, that’s what I did. I flew to New York and pitched his idea to a handful of companies. They all turned me down. But years later, one of the companies I’d pitched produced Essick’s concept themselves, exchanging skis for snowboards and calling it “boardercross.” A few years after that, it became an Olympic sport, with “ski cross” following shortly thereafter.

  Essick read all about it on Wikipedia, and I felt badly about giving away his idea. “How often does someone have the opportunity of thinking up the idea for an Olympic sport?” he asked. “It would be nice to get credit somewhere.”

  I decided to give him the credit he deserves by becoming a Wikipedia editor and writing the short history that appears on the ski cross page today.26

  My students were surprised to hear that anyone, even their teacher, can author content on Wikipedia—and that I know anything about snowboarding. I hope I inspired them to try doing both!

  SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

  Today my classes at Journey School are large, sixty kids per grade, so it takes longer to know each student as well as I’d like. Sometimes I peg kids all wrong, as I did with Mark. A lanky boy with shaggy blond hair, he talked endlessly about YouTube, so I assumed he was binge-watching something ridiculous, or worse, like watching the horribly offensive “Jeffy” videos that are all the rage with many ten- to twelve-year-olds. When I took the time to ask what he was watching, he told me he’d discovered some videos on how to
make a computer from spare parts. Which he did.

  Because incidents like this one are happening more often at Journey School, the school’s perspective toward media has slowly shifted. For grades K–5, the school still asks for elimination of electronic media during the school week, from Sunday evening to Friday after school, so students can use that precious time to hone the social and behavioral skills they’ll need when they do go online. However, for its middle school students, the school encourages media “production” over “consumption.” Here’s how the media policy reads today:

  In recognition of the maturing capacities and needs of the twelve- to fourteen-year-olds, we encourage and will support parents to dialogue with their children in grades six to eight about the appropriate use of media and technology. . . . We suggest that your child should participate in media, not simply consume media. We recommend limited one-way media from Sunday evening through Thursday night (watching a movie). However, rather than simply consuming media, we encourage participatory media throughout the week (creating a movie). There is a vast difference between creating a short video that captures your friend’s multiple attempts to surf (and final success), than simply watching a movie.27

  Shelley Glaze-Kelley, Journey School’s educational director whom you met in Chapter 1, says the school has made a dramatic turnaround. “Our kids have gone from binge-watching YouTube to becoming interested in coding, blogging, filming, and art production,” she says. “Over a five-year span, the culture has changed from a mostly consuming media culture to a much more productive one.”28

  I encourage you to make this shift, too—encourage media participation vs. consumption—within your own families and communities. When you do, stand back and prepare to be amazed. Because that’s when really good things start happening online.