This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the podcast here.

Daniel Kelley is the Director of Strategy and Operations for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)’s Center for Technology and Society (CTS). CTS works through research and advocacy to fight for justice and fair treatment for all in digital social spaces. Daniel leads the center’s work to fight hate and harassment in games. In 2019 and 2020, Daniel was the lead author of the first nationally representative survey of hate, harassment, and positive social experiences in online games. He also manages the center’s game research and conducts advocacy with the game industry, civil society, government, and the broader public to push for an all of society response to ensure that online games become respectful and inclusive spaces for all people. He is a member of the advisory board of Raising Good Gamers and an advisor to the Fair Play Alliance. 

Jordan Shapiro: This is a fascinating interview we’re going to play today, with Daniel Kelley, the associate director for the Center of Technology and Society at the Anti-Defamation League. One of the things that I love about this conversation is that I think we all know about the bullying and the trolling that happens online in general, which also happens in real life, but what we get from Daniel is a really fascinating question of how you start to evaluate, analyze and recognize the patterns involved in problematic behavior in an online space – in gaming and social media.

We talk about hate speech, misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, etc – how we can start to think about them, what’s trending, what people’s experiences have been. I think people are going to find this conversation really fascinating. Especially as we think about questions of how people get radicalized online or how people fall down the rabbit hole online, this conversation really sheds some light on what that experience is like and what the ecosystem of online social injustice looks like.

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Daniel Kelley:  I’m Daniel Kelley. I work at the Anti-Defamation League, which is a 100-plus-year-old civil rights organization with the mission to stop the defamation of Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment to all. In the Center for Technology and Society where I work, we focus on that same mission. But in digital spaces.

We’ve been working on that since the 1980s when we were looking at billboards. In the 90s, we were talking to AOL. And in the 2000s, we were talking to social media—Facebook and Twitter and the like. Since 2017, I’ve been focused on looking at online games as digital social platforms, and how can we bring ADL’s history and expertise in fighting hate, to online games as digital and social platforms?

Jordan: What first brought you to my attention was the recent Free to Play report.

Daniel: One of the central pillars of our work is an annual nationally representative survey in the US of adults who play online multiplayer games. I think there’s a tendency, especially in the US, to blame video games for everything. If there’s a moral failing or a shooting or any kind of problem in our society, we will blame it on video games. So it was important in putting together the survey that is both looking at positive social experiences in online games, and hate and harassment. To push us towards the really fact-based quantitative grounding for talking about ‘what is it like in online games or social spaces?’

In terms of the results, we found 95% of American adults have positive social experiences in online games. Whether that’s making friends or feeling they belong to a community or discovering interests—discovering things about themselves or others. I try to make that the grounding for the work that we do, fighting hate and harassment in online games.

Some of the games are the bad space where hate is happening and where young people are being radicalized. Bad things happen in games as they happen in other digital social spaces. The reason why we do this work is because we want these positive social experiences to be universal across all folks, [including] people that are being pushed out of these spaces and out of these meaningful social positive social experiences because of things like hate and harassment.

Laura Higgins: We know these spaces have never been more important in terms of socializing and spending time with your community and all of those things. And if it’s a place where you don’t feel safe, that’s a real issue. I think all of us would really love to see those spaces all working together, and with organizations like yours to improve their spaces and make sure that everybody feels welcome and safe.

Daniel: That’s the grounding that I take to this work, which is we want to fight hate. Hate is real in online games. Harassment is real, but there are real, meaningful, positive social experiences that should be available to all folks. We do find real high levels, exceedingly high levels, of hate and harassment in online games. 81 percent of American adults in 2020 reported some form of harassment in online games. 68 percent of American adults reported severe harassment. So that’s being discriminated against on the basis of your identity, being physically threatened, sustained harassment, stalking, these kinds of things.

In the last year, there have been three major studies focused on the coping mechanisms that players have in online game spaces. It’s so the norm for there to be hate, for there to be harassment, that what researchers are turning to is, ‘how are people coping right now?’ Or, given that this is the norm, ‘how do people, especially, gamers and streamers of color, how do they navigate racism?’ That is a given in these spaces. What we’re trying to push the companies and the public and sort of all of society to do, is try and change these norms because they are harmful. It’s not acceptable that this is the norm.

Jordan: You hear a number like 68 percent of adults experience some kind of discrimination. What does that look like?

Daniel: So we’re going to talk about discrimination based on identity. There have been a number of great qualitative studies by one of our fellows, Gabriela Richard, who did great work in this. Kishonna Gray and others who have looked at it from a qualitative perspective, talking to people who are targets.

One of the things that comes up again and again is this talking on the mic phenomenon. So in online games generally voice communication is one of the main modes of communication. Generally, the two modes that folks work in are either chat, like a text box where you type in text, and it appears in a flowing scroll of text. Or people speak using a microphone. When people, especially people from vulnerable and marginalized communities, come off the mic and start speaking in these spaces, suddenly their fellow players will treat them differently because of the way their voice presents.

There was a study where a Hispanic person was describing his experience and he was being targeted with anti-black racism. Because of his voice and because of the way he spoke. When you speak in a space, people make assumptions upon your identity. And it may not even be targeted because of your specific identity, but rather whatever biases or sort of ideologies the person you’re playing with has been exposed. You may be subjected to those perspectives and to being discriminated against in that way.

Laura: The Fair Play Alliance is doing [work on] some of these similar themes around healthy and positive communities. One project, which I believe they partnered with the Anti Defamation League, is the Disruption and Harms in Online Gaming Framework. Could you tell us a bit about that, please?

Daniel: Part of our work with social media and translating that to game companies is having discussions with companies about how they approach addressing these problems in their games. Sometimes if you’re looking at a large game company, that’s like a triple-A major game, there can be different ways that they talk about hate and harassment, even between titles.

Assuming you have a report feature, when someone reports hate and harassment in the game, how do you determine what that thing is, what that behavior is that’s being reported? And how do you determine what the consequences are for that action? I think right now game companies are in kind of an early social media place where they have one rule for, like, everything bad. Or just a handful.

I think Laura, Roblox is unique in this. In that you actually do have a fairly robust content policy. And actually explicate certain types of content, which I imagine also plays into your enforcement. But right now, [for] most game companies being able to understand what is going on on your platform and how to approach addressing it—that is still a huge problem.

So the idea was to create a framework which would allow companies to define different categories of harms in their game. We call it in the framework, ‘disruptive behavior,’ meaning anything that disrupts the intended experience of a game and then ‘harmful conduct,’ which is more in the realm of what I’ve been talking about around hate and harassment and those kinds of things. Part of the work for us this year and in concert with the Free Play Alliance, is to bring this framework to companies and to encourage them to adopt it, so that we can really get to a common language around hate and harassment in online games.

Ultimately, one of the goals to push to is measurement, which is so important. That’s part of the reason why we’re doing these surveys. Everyone is like, oh, things are bad, right? But like, how bad? And is anything working? I would love for the survey to become irrelevant because we have so many metrics from game companies around hate and harassment and how what they’re doing is working.

Laura: I think it’s going to be a really interesting process when this does start rolling out as the mainstream among games companies. The first thing, I can’t believe: it’s free. So that’s a really amazing way to get it in front of companies, because quite often we work with games companies all over the world who are really small. They might have 10 staff, and so whilst they might want to prioritize safety, they might not think it’s a priority in terms of finances, or even know where to start. 

The other key bit is getting people to really recognize what those disruptive behaviors are and actually calling it out. Saying ‘just because you put up with it until now, there’s 10 percent or 15 percent or 20 percent of the people on your platform who’ve had that, and they’ve left and they’re never coming back.’ How about we don’t do that to anybody and everybody just has a better experience on the platform?

Daniel: We actually did quantify that number. In the survey, we found that 22 percent of players quit playing certain games because of their experience with harassment. That’s a number that I know I’ve heard from folks who are in the industry that they use when they’re doing their own internal advocacy at companies. In addition to the moral argument, that hate and harassment are bad, there’s also a business argument, which is, this is also bad for business. People are leaving. Almost a quarter of your players, adult players, are quitting your game because of their experiences there. So, it needs much more investment from the industry.

Jordan: We’re living at a time in history that is difficult in terms of xenophobia, in terms of radicalization, in terms of nationalism. Everywhere around the world, we’re seeing these things spring up. Do you think that there’s a relationship between that and digital media?

Daniel: In the survey, we do ask about people’s exposure to white supremacist ideology in online games. We found that 9 percent of players were exposed to white supremacist ideology in online games. The high level of hate and harassment and the low level of exposure to white supremacy ideology, speaks to something else.

The New Zealand government put out a really wide ranging and expansive report on the Christchurch mosque shooting last year, where it goes really deep into the shooter’s journey of radicalization. And I think one of the things that echoes the data is that the shooter was radicalized in mainstream social media — Facebook and YouTube. But it also speaks to the beginning of his journey, being a gamer and being an online gamer. So I think what we see is not that games are a space for explicit radicalization, but that they’re a space where hate is normalized and then can allow for individuals to be radicalized in other spaces.

From what I’ve seen, it’s not that explicit radicalization or recruitment happens in online games. But that it’s one pillar of a space where hate, hateful ideologies, are normalized, or not challenged. And thus, allows someone to go along the path where they can start to accept those ideas as normal and then be more formally radicalized on more traditional social media.

Jordan: Many of the same things that lead to that kind of radicalization we’ve also seen lead to very good things, like people able to find support groups. How do we balance what’s great in so many ways, showing us what’s powerful and strong, but also provides the possibility for this kind of radicalization?

Daniel: I think one of the interesting things that we found was looking at Discord. It’s a social platform but is rooted in gaming [with] the same sort of affordances that make it a space where, [there are] these private servers where you can choose who comes in and make it potentially valuable to extremists or people who want to organize around a hateful ideology. [But those are] the same affordances that make it valuable for people who are targeted in other spaces. 

We found that when we talked to a group of folks who are trans streamers, they were like, ‘Discord is great because we can choose who comes into our space and we can set our own rules.’ It’s a really hard problem because you want to be able to create spaces where people can control who they interact with and how. But how do you avoid then, those same spaces being used for hateful and heinous ends?

I think that’s where tech companies really have a role in terms of, having values, and understanding what their values are. We believe in a very values-driven approach to social media content moderation, and I guess I’m thinking about the events of what’s going on around de-platforming.

Recently, we saw the de-platforming of the platform Parler. What was interesting there is this call from Apple and Google to implement more stringent content moderation policies or practices. Couldn’t the various game stores — couldn’t an Xbox and a PlayStation, the Epic Store, others, as part of their vetting process to allow games on those stores, create best practices for content moderation that would be required of all games in order to be in those spaces? Like a values-based way to use various leverage that companies have to ensure better play spaces for all people.

Jordan: When you look at the whole digital landscape and everything you know about it, everything you’ve learned from your research, are you more optimistic or more pessimistic?

Daniel: My optimism is in the fact that games are, I think, right now where social media was 10 years ago. We have very visible precedents to look back on now for what happens if the industry doesn’t take really significant steps to address it. In 2006 when Facebook was saying, ‘we’re going to go beyond college campuses for the first time,’ were we imagining that a big input into the 2016 and 2020 election would be this platform? Were we thinking that this platform is going to cause or be implicated in genocide in Myanmar? So game companies can look at the example of social media and really be aggressive in addressing the same mistakes that we see in social media. I’m really optimistic that we have a lot of information about how to do it poorly.

In the past, typically the game industry hasn’t spoken out on national tragedies. It was notable, in the case of the murder of George Floyd by law enforcement, that most major game companies at the very least made a statement. Some of them made donations. Some of them made commitments in terms of their products. A [similar] example is talking to somebody who was a target of harassment in games and them saying, “You know what would be great? It’d be really great if the game companies would come and say publicly that they stand against death threats.” The fact that companies are coming out and speaking on these issues, shows forward momentum.

Laura: What do you think are going to be the big developments over the next couple of years? What do you think are going to be the big changes we can look forward to?

Daniel: I think one of the things that we’re going to see is the expansion of audio as the area of content moderation. I think we’re going to see a massive push towards better tooling and better processes. And I guess the thing that I really hope for [the industry] is transparency. These platforms are huge, have huge impacts on our lives. Their decisions are huge. They need to be transparent in how they are making decisions, and in the degree to which there are problems, and the degree to which they’re getting better based on their efforts.

If I could wish upon a star… right now, we don’t know, for example, how much anti-Semitism is there on Facebook in New Jersey? We don’t know. Being able to get to that level of granularity with games, being able to say: this is how much hate, these are the communities being targeted, and this is what we’re doing about it. And here’s what’s working, and here’s what’s not working. If we can get to that place in a year, then we might have a fighting chance.

Jordan: Well, I have to say thank you. This is actually an inspiring conversation. You know, it’s sort of surprising. You sit down to talk about hate speech and end up inspired about possibilities. And that’s great.

While young children are off school over winter break, many families will be looking for activities to keep kids learning and having fun. On cold winter days, creating art or music together using a touchscreen app is one way for caregivers to connect and support the cognitive and social development of their early learners. 

Research on Joint Media Engagement (JME) from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center demonstrates that media can provide important social, emotional, and cognitive experiences for children when shared with family. The term Joint Media Engagement describes what happens when people learn together with digital or traditional media. Parents can directly influence their young children’s learning when they engage in activities together such as watching movies, reading books, or playing with apps on a touchscreen device like a tablet or smartphone. 

However, few apps are specifically designed to support JME between parent and child. Design features like fast pacing, limited user roles, and awkward shared positioning can make it difficult to play together. Even when the design of the app is more JME-friendly, young children often resist parent involvement, causing conflict and discouraging co-play. 

At foundry10, an education research organization based in Seattle, we sought to learn more about how app designers and parents can better facilitate JME when using apps with children. In an observational lab study, “Let’s Draw Chocolate Milk Together, we analyzed the behavior of parents and children ages 4-5 while they played together with two artistic production apps.

DoodleCast is an open-ended drawing application with options for starting including storytelling prompts, a blank page, or a photograph taken by the user. The app includes a color palette and drawing tools. The drawing process is recorded, with sound, for playback and can be used for creating a message or story.  

Pitch Painter is an open-ended music composition application in which drawing with different colors and corresponding instruments on a grid creates music that can be played back in different ways.

We chose to use creativity apps for this research that were grounded in constructivist and constructionist theories of learning, because they met several JME design criteria such as allowing both partners to enjoy the experience, create together, contribute to the creation in their own ways, connect their creations to the real world, and talk as they create. 

Parent Strategies for Playing Apps with Kids

In our study, we found that co-play rarely happened without parent facilitation. By utilizing the following strategies, parents have the potential to make family playtime with apps more enjoyable and expand the social, emotional, and cognitive benefits of JME in the future.

• Choose apps wisely
  Decide what app you will play together and for how long. Choose apps that allow you to create something like a drawing, song, story, or other kind of art. In addition to DoodleCast and PitchPainter, other great apps for artistic co-creation include: Lipa Theater, Relationshapes, LiveDoodle, Elmer’s Photo Patchwork, Singing Fingers, and Loopimal.
• Find a comfortable shared position
  Next, find a comfortable shared position that makes it easy to play together. For example, put the tablet on your lap and let your child play, or let your child hold the tablet and sit so you can reach the screen. Encourage your child to take turns with you.
• Let your child lead
  While parents and children can take turns as equal partners, most young children prefer to take the lead while parents coach. Parents can facilitate JME by following along with the child’s creation process (e.g., using the eraser to clean up mistakes as the child draws) or helping to make something that was not originally intended by the app design (e.g., filling in the entire drawing space with one color).
• Assist with technical challenges
  With parent assistance, children can accomplish tasks that are too challenging to figure out alone. In our study, when parents offered support using Pitch Painter by showing the child the association between colors and instruments or the various replay options in the sidebar, children stopped playing to listen and engage with their parents.
• Make connections
  Ask your child to show you what they made. Help your child see connections between the app and their own memories or things you do every day. For example, “Let’s write your name.” or “Does this game remind you of when we went grocery shopping yesterday?”

These parent strategies can go a long way to facilitate family JME. But app developers can take artistic co-creation apps even further by implementing a few key design features. 

Design Criteria to Promote Joint Media Engagement

In our research, we identified 16 design criteria for JME by evaluating eight sources with overlapping research findings. We used these criteria to select the artistic co-creation apps for the study and share them here for further reference. To promote family JME, digital media should: 

1. Be child interest-driven 
2. Be developmentally appropriate
3. Be free from distractions like pop-ups 
4. Be interactive
5. Have simple controls / be user-paced
6. Have a theoretical grounding in the learning
7. Include multiple planes of engagement
8. Support co-creation 
9. Encourage shared positioning 
10. Support different roles for partners 
11. Connect to the real world 
12. Promote joint attention, collaboration, and dialogic inquiry 
13. Provide structure for adult scaffolding or self-exploration sciences 
14. Allow child to grow/develop through use 
15. Provide contingent, meaningful feedback all partners enjoy the experience 
16. Fit into family culture, values, and norms

Design Features to Facilitate Family Co-Creation

Photo: Foundry10

Prompts for turn-taking
Parent-led co-creation was particularly successful when parents used the strategy of promoting and structuring turn-taking and shared positioning of the device. Designers could support their effort by providing “scaffolds to scaffold” within the app like explicitly prompting two users to take turns or hold the device in a shared position.

Prompts for child to ask for help
Any app features or tasks that prompt children to seek assistance can facilitate joint play. We observed that children stopped playing and listened to parents when parents offered technical assistance with the device or app features that supported children’s goals for their play. Design possibilities to facilitate this kind of engagement include non-transparent features adults and children can explore together, a challenge or task that can only be solved with the help of a caregiver, or perhaps an explicit prompt to work together.

Prompt for Co-Players to Make Connections
Although parents can and should support children to make connections between digital media experiences and their everyday life without prompting from apps, in-app features can help. Prompts where co-players are encouraged to make connections and tap into everyday experiences that are inherently interesting to children could facilitate JME.

Artistic co-creation apps are a great way for parents and young children to play and learn together. By using effective parent strategies and evaluating current apps on the market for JME-conducive design, playing together on apps can be an excellent way for families to connect at home. 

Riddhi Divanji is a research coordinator at foundry10. She is interested in evaluating youth outcomes, exploring how learning takes place within and across settings, and building community partnerships to better support young people as they move through their education. Her current projects involve exploring the implementation of emerging technologies in K-12 classrooms and the development of social-emotional and academic intervention programs.

Samantha Bindman is a Director of Research at foundry10. Sam’s current projects include exploring EdTech tools and successful classroom implementation and value for learning, the promise of dramatic arts for engaging young children in learning, and the role of technology in family life.

Sydney Parker is a Staff Writer at foundry10. Prior to joining the organization, Sydney wrote about people, education, and comedy for publications including The Guardian, The Atlantic, Seattle’s Child Magazine, Real Change News and more. 

Kiley Sobel is Senior User Experience Researcher at Duolingo. Previously, Kiley worked at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center as a Research Scientist. Throughout her career, Kiley has conducted integrative research about kids, families, co-design, collaborative play, learning, disability, accessibility, and inclusion.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the series here. 

Amanda LaTasha Armstrong earned her MS in Child Development with an administration specialization from Erikson Institute and is a doctoral candidate in New Mexico State University (NMSU)’s Curriculum and Instruction Department. Her work includes the intersection of early childhood, learning design and technology, and multicultural education. She is NMSU’s Learning Games Lab coordinator, where she leads user-testing and teaches summer sessions on game design and evaluation with youth. Amanda is also a research fellow with New America’s Education Policy Program, contributing writer for Edutopia and Britannica for Parents, and member of Britannica’s Early Learning Advisory Council. She was a member of the Technical Working Group to refresh the 2017 STE Standards for Educators, a 2020 NSF CADRE Fellow, and founding member of KidMap.

Jordan Shapiro: Today we’re going to talk to Amanda LaTasha Armstrong. I don’t know anyone who’s asking the questions as well as Amanda about representation in games and online platforms. We have so many fascinating moments with her here. We talk about representation and the question of choosing skins and avatars. We talk about what it means for people to see people who reflect themselves in games.

Laura Higgins: In terms of representation we branched into what that looks like as women, and feminism. We also talked about the digital divide. It’s one thing to see yourself represented on a screen, but that also assumes that you have access to screens and time to see these things and be involved in the creation. It was a really broad and interesting conversation.

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Amanda LaTasha Armstrong: So I currently am a doctoral candidate at New Mexico State University, where I have two lives, I like to say. I have one life where I work at the Learning Games Lab, as the Games Lab Coordinator. We create games, animations, other digital interactives, educational interactives for schools, for home, and with different audiences ranging from preschoolers to young adults. I do our user testing of all those products as well as teaching our summer sessions that focus on design with children and youth.

Then I have my other life, which is in the College of Education, where I am a doctoral candidate, and I’m focusing on looking at preschool apps, character representation within those apps through a lens that combines together both child computer interaction as well as Black feminism. And I really enjoy that within the College of Education, there is a program where I could merge a focus on early childhood, technology, and multicultural critical pedagogies within that framework.

Laura: What do you think are really good resources you’d recommend for both parents, educators, anyone who’s trying to work with young people at the moment?

Amanda: This question is always tricky for me because it really does depend on the families. A lot of the articles that I particularly write for Britannica really speak to families and just give them resources and ideas of tools of what to use. And so those are ways in which I express the different ways that families can have resources that speak to them.

So, for instance, I recently did a piece that was talking about looking at diversity in children’s apps and where they can go. I referenced places like Common Sense Media and I also reference museums that people can look for as well. So thinking about how we have apps, we have different forms of media like Netflix or YouTube or places like Roblox or Fortnite. And so those are all different places that they can go to, but they’re also these sorts of informal educational spaces that have resources available online that if parents can’t necessarily access them physically, they can go to the spaces digitally.

Jordan: You said from the beginning that your work is really this intersection of education and Black feminism. I’ve been in this digital learning play for a long time, and this doesn’t come up nearly enough.

Amanda: Well, I would say that the journey started unexpectedly. I didn’t expect to be including Black feminism. I really came to New Mexico State to explore their critical pedagogies in multicultural education, which is where I started as a lens. Before I came, I was at the TEC Center at the Erikson Institute, where I was working with Chip Donohue and doing a lot of work in early childhood and technology and specifically looking at how it’s integrated in informal settings—informal classroom settings, as well as at home with families. I noticed that there wasn’t as much conversation from a strength-based perspective of working with diverse communities, nor really speaking to issues that resonated with me and my experience as a Black American growing up in America and using these digital tools with my family and things that I was noticing and looking at and how I wanted to further examine them.

When I started working specifically with the early childhood part in these studies, there’s a faculty, who isn’t there anymore [currently at UT Austin], Michelle Salazar Pérez, who does work that looks at Black feminism in early childhood. I gravitated to her work and how she was articulating these ideas about how do you shift the perspective from how we always look at young children to really thinking about narrative, thinking about communities, thinking about how do we get the children’s perspective into it? How do we also look at these larger systems that impact families and communities, that sometimes we don’t look at?

What I noticed that wasn’t really being talked about, that I wanted to talk about, were these structural issues. When children, even if they’re in an environment where they’re learning about technology, there are still these power dynamics, there are still these social structures that we need to consider. Even if we want to make a classroom neutral, it isn’t, because we live in a world that has these inequities, that has these forms of oppression, and children bring that and experience that in a classroom setting. And they experience that when they’re engaging with technology, and they experience it even with the technology they consume.

Thinking about media and analyzing who’s represented, who gets to talk more often, not only is the environment that children are experiencing in the classroom having these power dynamics and social issues, but also the technology and the media itself also can perpetuate that. There wasn’t enough conversation, and I wanted to figure out, how can I articulate that?

Sometimes I think that’s also a part of Black feminism that isn’t talked about often, which is solidarity amongst other communities. And how, for me, when I have a Black feminist lens, yes, I do look at it from a perspective of people of the African diasporic experience’s with technology, if they’re seen or not. But then it also goes to these larger questions about who else isn’t seen, what other sub-identities within our group, within our cultural group aren’t seen. So thinking about gender, thinking about class…

Jordan: We often hear the term intersectionality used to describe where all those things cross, or we just talk about critical theory as a blanket for all of it. But it seems to me that you’ve picked the word Black feminism, and I’m assuming that’s intentional. So I wonder if you could speak to why that’s what you’re saying.

Amanda: I understood Black feminism because of my own lived experience of growing up in St. Louis. I went to a predominantly white institution for my undergrad and had some experiences, specifically centered on technology, and mostly on how Black people were represented in mainstream media. And those who may not have experienced being around Black people or people of African descent, that that media gave them their interpretation of what it meant.

So then when they met me or my peers, they had an idea of what we were like. I remember not meeting that expectation, them misidentifying me. Often not believing that I was fully Black or African-American, arguing with me about what I should be like. Those were very distinctive experiences. I remember crying from the amount of stereotyping I experienced.

Growing up in St. Louis, you have a sense about yourself. As a Black person, growing up, you learn how the system is structured, places to go that aren’t safe. I learned how to navigate the world so that I could at least be in safe spaces and be around people where I felt safe. And then I went to an institution where I couldn’t cocoon myself in the same way. I did have a lot of friends who were of the African diaspora there, but I didn’t have the same kind of luxury of going to a neighborhood and community and isolating myself from being stereotyped, and so it was in front of my face. And that, for me, was a distinctive experience.

When I came to the PhD, I realized that [Black feminism] was kind of this connecting piece and people were articulating things I had experienced. And also what I was seeing as a professional, when I was at these conferences and meetings, I wanted to say that there are these other larger systemic issues or larger structural experiences that impact children’s experiences when they come to school. Or that when we think about how we design curriculum or when we think about what technology is designed that impacts their experiences. And I didn’t have a way to articulate that. And what Black feminism allowed me to do was find a way to both connect to something as well as to say, “This is why this is important, and this is how it impacts and influences children.”

Jordan: Can you speak to some examples? For those parents who are listening, for those educators who are listening, say a bit about how these structural power dynamics get embedded into the technology.

Amanda: What the research has shown is how media tend to not have equal representation of different racial groups or different gender groups. That’s pretty apparent.

Black feminism helped me to be more critical in how I looked at [specific traits], or how I even grouped them, to not be subjective, but to be really obvious and say here are the traits that are associated with these sorts of groups and then to see who is seen. What that means, or how that shows up for families is that knowing who is seen and who is erased.

People may not be aware that is even an issue to even think about because they’re trying to produce something that appeals to multiple children. So you may either use a blanket character that represents a general population or maybe you have an animal or some form.

The main thing is that we have to think about how media is a part of a larger system. I found it really important to use Black feminism to interrogate and say we’re not just looking at this one experience children are having with this one particular thing at this one particular time, we’re thinking about how it is a part of a larger ecosystem that may show only certain groups in limited and narrow ways or that may not even show the specific group at all.

Laura: I wanted to talk a little bit about particularly about how firstly, we need more representation *everywhere*! But actually, on Roblox for example, we don’t have real images. It’s all avatar-based, and we very much encourage people to be whoever they want to be. And we speak to lots of young people all the time, in real life, who tell us they feel confident and safe because they can express themselves.

What do you think about being able to be yourself in the real world, but also, how important is it that you can express yourself online in different ways?

Amanda: This is a larger conversation. But what we really need in a larger way, [is to be] having these conversations about nuances within different cultural groups, that we’re careful about the groups that are presented in different pieces and we’re not perpetuating stereotypes within them. Like I think about my experience of people taking on the identity of Black people. I’m just speaking frankly of an experience I had – where they had this idea of people wearing chains. They have this only one specific narrow view of what people are, so when they are being something or someone, then they’re being this very narrow, stereotypical view.

I think it’s being mindful of when people are developing products — are we perpetuating typecasting? or [having a] conversation about cultural appropriation—what does that look like and how we are doing that?

I think that that isn’t something that happens once. But consistently to have these critical kinds of conversation, and to also be aware of what’s happening socially, so that you’re in tune with ‘these are concerns, or these are topics that people are talking about. Are we contributing to the topic and making and trying to move it forward, or are we harming…?’

I think we need to continue to have these sorts of conversations and we need people to take them seriously and make serious choices around how we can do less harm. Because I think if you have a good intention, that shows and then you consistently iterate on that and get better either with the product itself or maybe with the next product, you get better. But if we don’t have these conversations because people are worried about doing something wrong, then we’re going to continue to do the same thing.

Laura: So I always like to ask this one: your crystal ball moment. What sorts of things are coming up in the next couple of years? Where do you think we’re going to go with EdTech? And also, how do you think we can really improve young people’s lives right now, looking towards the next year?

Amanda: Well, I guess if I want to think about what I would like to be different, like what would be a reimagining for me, for a year from now, what would I like to see? I would like to see that we’ve created policies that help support early childhood centers and programs, schools, and having access to quality materials and to broadband. And to not only think about urban communities, but to also remember to think about rural communities as well. And to also have materials in which people are culturally responsive – [to have] a lot of conversations about what is culturally responsive and how to create those sorts of learning environments.

The other thing is we can revisit some of these pedagogies that look at technology or something like SAMR [the Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition Model] and then think about what does that mean when you’re applying something like Universal Design for Learning [UDL] and what does that look like with technology? I think maybe we can also learn about what types of assistive technologies are out there that have been working. Maybe those can also be modified and adopted. I think UDL is one approach that is not as common as it could be. And I think that that is something that speaks to me, even with my lens of Black feminism and child computer action, because it really centers it around the learner and how we create experiences that support different ways in which children and youth obtain information, relate to information, and express information.

Jordan: So if there was one thing you would say to parents and educators who feel uncertain about technology – what are the things they should pay attention to?

Amanda: I would say thinking about intentionality and thinking about the content itself. For families, I always ask them, what are your values? What is important to you? What do you want to pass on to the next generation? And how can you use digital materials to cultivate that?

So if your family really loves science and the solar system, use the tools that are available, whether it’s through public-funded institutions or maybe other sorts of resources to foster that. I think thinking about technology and media as another tool and another way in which you can have communication, learn about a specific area, and build a family connection and also learn historical and *her*storical information.

I would like to say that, yes, I have a Black feminist lens, but I do feel like sometimes the pedagogy of care and love— that really is the centering of a lot of the work that I do. It is really from a space of no matter who the children are, from whatever community they come from, I feel that children know when you are interested and when you care about them. And as an educator, as a researcher, as a family member, I feel that it’s important for me to always make children feel that I care about them and that they’re valuable. And that comes in so many different forms, depending on the child and depending on the family. And I feel like technology and media is another space where that has to be illustrated as well.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the podcast here.

Laura Higgins: Kimberly Voll is the co-founder of the Fair Play Alliance. It was wonderful to have Kim on and hear about her experience as a very experienced developer. Not just building some very well-known games, working for some of the best-known companies in the world, but just to share some of her experience of what that’s been like both as a woman working in the industry but also as a mentor. Her interest is particularly around combating toxicity, and the work she’s doing now is really groundbreaking.

Jordan Shapiro: I was really excited about the gender stuff that came up in this conversation. When we started to do this podcast in the middle of the pandemic, I had no idea we were going to get to so many questions about equality and social justice. I was really glad that we were able to bring some of that into this conversation. Let’s get to it.

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Kimberly Voll: It’s awesome to be here. I’m really excited to talk to you both today. My name is Kimberly Voll. I am a kind of a combination game developer/ researcher who focuses a lot on artificial intelligence and how we think and why we do the things that we do, including a lot on cognitive science and the brain and how those aspects relate to video games and digital society more generally.

Laura: So can you tell us just a little bit about your journey with game development?

Kimberly: At the risk of overly nerding out, I don’t think I could start without mentioning my earliest development and my love of games, which really came from an old machine from Texas Instruments, the TI-99/4A, which was my first true love in this world. I was quite young then. It was just the most incredible thing that I had ever seen. Here was this space where you could create worlds that weren’t possible anywhere else. And I think it just blew my little mind. I couldn’t get enough of it.

As early as five, I had found this menu that would pop up and you could press one for a game or two to load BASIC. I kept poking my parents, ‘what is this game, BASIC? I want to play BASIC!’ And when I would load it, I would just get this blinking cursor. ‘What do I do? Is this an adventure? What is this?’ And neither of my parents have technical backgrounds at all – they have zero interest in computer programming. But they did give me enough to tell me that it’s programming and they took me to the library and took out a book on BASIC and pointed me to the right spot. And so I would spend all day poking at something only to get it to print my name with some little stars next to it, and then run and grab the whole family to show them what I had accomplished.

That left me with this just incredible sense of the possibility of spaces of technology – just these magical worlds that you could transport yourself into, and even better, create. When I started having a slightly more mature but still pretty terrible self-taught version of programming, I started to make text adventures and gradually got more and more into just making games as a hobby.

So, games have always been a huge piece of who I am, how I identify, how I think about the world. And not until I was much older did I ever stop to reflect on that role. It was just sort of a thing that I did, and it turns out not all my peers were interested in those things and I just couldn’t get it. It wasn’t until I got to actually to my PhD when I was exploring topics and I was thinking [about games formally]. At this point, I’d done an undergraduate degree and in cognitive science I’d done an honors thesis. So I’d gone pretty deep on the research side, and was lucky enough to be able to move directly into a PhD.

I remember thinking then, can you do research in games? What does that mean? That would be spiffy, because I sure like games! I never forget bringing it up to one of my supervisors and them telling me at that point that it was inappropriate for a young lady to pursue games as a career or research topic.

One of the things that I have focused on in my career, is why people do the things that they do, and particularly in the context of games. So I worked at Riot for about four years, I joined in 2015 or so to work on player behavior. Player behavior for me was this beautiful intersection of all the things that I love about games. How can you first and foremost understand the patterns and behaviors that you’re seeing within the context of these digital spaces? And then second, how can you influence them for the better? How can you actually drive healthier communities? Greater social cohesion? Greater player wellbeing?

Riot had done a lot in this space. I think at that time they were one of the definite leaders, having even just a dedicated focus on the challenges of hate and harassment in games and just the general negativity that we often see emerging in digital spaces. I joined to work on League of Legends at that time, and just really [to] figure out what was going on and what was left to try.

Jordan Shapiro: Can you tell me a bit about the kinds of things you found?

Kimberly: In just a few decades, really, we’ve gone from being a non-digital to a digital society where you see that digital spaces and video games are now part of the social fabric of the world. When you look at estimates – I think it’s one hundred and sixty billion dollars was the rough estimate of the [value of the] gaming industry. I mean, these are huge, huge things. These are not toys. These are rich, thriving social ecosystems that require respect and care and intentional approaches to how we address them.

A lot of the non-verbal cues, like body language, are absent or greatly diminished in a digital format. Even over a camera, you’re losing so many depth cues and where a person’s eyes are focused, and that read of the room that you have when you’re in the same place. You can’t just look around you in a digital setting and get a sense of what’s going on or how others are reacting to what you’re seeing. So if something transpires in the game that makes you uncomfortable, you don’t have that bolstering of seeing others are also uncomfortable and then getting that signal that, hey, maybe this is inappropriate.

One of the other challenges in digital spaces, is because of that simplicity of communication and the lack of richness, you don’t have those other cues of how what you’re saying is truly impacting people. We see this with social media, more generally. Some people talk about the post-truth world. A lot of what’s happening there is that everyone gets equal billing in the digital context and we haven’t yet matured the tools to be able to create or recreate or figure out what a reasonable facsimile is in a digital context, in the same way that we have done in non-digital settings.

Laura: So could you tell everybody about the Fair Play Alliance and what our aims are?

Kimberly: The Fair Play Alliance is a cross-industry initiative across the gaming industry and broader gaming ecosystem where we are all united around a shared goal to foster inclusivity, prosocial behavior and reduce hate and harassment as a core part of how we make games and gaming environments.

Really looking at the entire game development pipeline from the initial conception, all the way through to a game as a service or a game that exists out in a live ecosystem, and is being maintained and supported and growing by the industry around it, and of course, the amazing players within. All the way to its sunset when we wrap up that game and we’re no longer going to offer it. When I was at Riot, I was focusing on these things on a pretty daily basis—reaching out into the industry to talk to colleagues and understand what was going on in their games, what were they doing about these things, and just trying to find others who were tackling these problems day-to-day.

That’s a lot of what we think about within the Fair Play Alliance. What are the responsibilities, what are the opportunities? But through a lens of game development, how can we make games differently in a way that unlocks these opportunities and fosters greater player well-being and community wellbeing across the entire industry?

Jordan: I understand you have a new project with the Disruptive Behavior Framework. Can you tell everyone a bit about that?

Kimberly: The Disruption and Harms in Gaming Framework is an unprecedented cross-industry initiative to catalog and understand the various elements that are causing disruption and more serious forms of actual harm across video games.

So we’re trying to understand: what’s going on in games? What are the forms that it can take? What are the channels through which this can emerge? And then what are the impacts, the things that we need to be conscious of?

We really lack the tools and a deep enough understanding to know what to do next. It’s very, very rare, if not next to impossible, to encounter a developer for whom the notion of reducing hate and harassment isn’t a no-brainer. You say, “Oh, shouldn’t we make games a better, safer, more efficient space?” And everyone’s like, “Yes, absolutely.” But the next question is, well, how do we do that? Great question.

Really, there’s already a lot of folks doing work in this space. And what if we were to be able to pull it all together into one spot? So that was a lot of the genesis of the framework. Another element too, was, we lack a shared language. So often we talk about toxicity in games. And that’s a fine, casual term. But it’s incredibly ambiguous. It’s not discerning enough.

Jordan: So it sounds to me that this is an incredibly important thing to do, not just in terms of the responsibility of developers or platforms thinking about that behavior, but also, [because] this is no longer the box in the store. This is the landscape of childhood at this point. If we want to start to think about, ‘how do we best care for children, how do we best raise children who have ethical values, who are kind and compassionate?’ we really need to identify what life looks like in these spaces. We really need to know a lot more about the phenomenology of play and toxicity.

Laura: Being part of the Fair Play Alliance steering committee and working with Kim on some of this project, it has been fascinating. We’ve had these discussions amongst peers who were all working with this really shared goal and vision, just trying to define some of these terms. One term would lead to a 20-minute conversation because they’re just so huge. We all see things slightly differently.

Kimberly: Hundreds of hours of conversations of folks across the industry volunteering their time, experts from civil society and academia as well, lending their weight and expertise. We had the wonderful opportunity on this journey to partner with the Anti-Defamation League on this, who have been just an incredible source of information and connections and support as well. So it’s been a nearly two year effort to get this out the door, but we’re very excited and we hope it is the best representation on behalf of games and, of course, on players to really help usher in a more modern and healthy space for gaming.

Laura: So what advice would you give to the people listening on how they might even think about getting into game development? Particularly, we want more women in tech across all of it, so how do we encourage people to take up those STEM subjects and get involved?

Kimberly: I think there’s two sides to think about it. So one, on behalf of the younger folks who are thinking about getting into this career and what that path looks like, I think the first thing is to not be afraid to try to make things. There’s so many different tools out there today that are accessible, that are freely downloadable, that anyone can pick up and start poking at and playing with. And so don’t be afraid to explore this space. [For educators and parents] one of the most crucial things that we can do is get kids exposed to it early.

But on the other side, we often talk about the pipeline problem in game development. We are not good enough right now when it comes to diversity within game development. And it’s definitely something that I think everyone is very aware of and equally are trying to figure out the best approach to. There are things that you can do way downstream. I run a studio as well, and so when I’m looking to hire, I try to diversify my process and at least reduce biases and hold ourselves accountable.

But there are very upstream things that I think need to change as well, which is how we think about and represent and present these things in school settings; how as parents thinking through how we represent the opportunities to our children, how we talk about these things. For so long we have been in this rut where everything has become just hyper gendered and there are these silos, these roles in which people are supposed to subscribe. There are studies that show as early as two years old, people are making gender-based selections on the basis of what they’ve been exposed to.

Being conscientious about how we present roles in the gaming industry as viable careers, regardless of how you identify, and ensuring we’re doing that from a very young age, because it doesn’t take that long to go from two-years-old to applying for your first job. That window is so critical. And that’s where we really start to fundamentally alter the pipeline. And then the opportunities explode for us to have much healthier, more representative, more inclusive workplaces, which, of course, then feeds into the games that we’re able to produce as well.

Laura: Crystal ball moment. What are the innovations that you would like to see or think we’re going to see in the next couple of years?

Kimberly: What a great question. What a time too, for innovation. Things are going so quickly and as much as I feel for and share the hurt of recent events, they have at least shaken some things loose, I think, on a global scale that are fueling innovations in spaces that have much needed them.

When I look ahead, I think a big part of it is going to be a combination of breaking down the stigma, the historic stigma of games, and opening up space for parents to get more involved and enable vulnerable conversations for parents to less be intimidated and more understand and be present to guide children through their developmental journey, much of which is today digital and understanding that. Finding a better hybridization of digital and non-digital, is going to be a very important part of what we see over the coming years.

So I think some of that innovation is going to come in the form of us really continuing to unlock this deeper collaboration and working with the platforms and larger gaming companies as well to really provide for the greater industry on behalf of players to give those foundational tools that we need to really create safer and more welcoming spaces and really unlock the potential that games have. Because games are incredible. They transcend cultural differences and physical distances. They bring people together, even strangers, around shared goals and I think have this incredible magic. And they’ve inserted themselves in society in such a way that I think if we are intentional and we are thoughtful and we are collaborative and across all elements of society, we are working together, I truly believe that games can actually change the world.

Jordan: What do you think we need to add to the conversation that you don’t think anyone’s having?

Kimberly: I think it’s really a deeper, more mature look at games as social ecosystems. I think too often it is an oversimplified dichotomy of, games are either clearly ruining society and should be somehow completely removed, or they’re the best thing ever and you can’t say anything disparaging about games.

Like anything in this world, it’s somewhere in the middle. They are neither destroying society nor are they perfect in every way. But they are a powerful, important part of today’s life. And I think being able to recognize that and bring the same maturity and care of thought that we do to all of our shared social spaces, and all of the places where our children, and even us, are spending time and really understand what is going on there.

What are those gaps? How do we close those gaps? What are the ways in which all of the things that make us human are not being fully realized in these digital spaces and put that same focus and care and attention and effort into those things? That’s really where we need to be. And we need to stop shirking the conversation and just falling prey to these two extremes and really talk—like, let’s talk about what healthy gaming looks like.

Games are very much a part of society. And if we don’t take this care now, we’re setting ourselves up for a lot more difficulty and a deeper [version] of the problematic patterns we’re seeing today. And I think, worst of all, we’re leaving children behind who are growing up in this digital world.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn about the full series here.

Laura Higgins: The work Michael Preston does around youth perspectives and technology is really important. This is one of those conversations that’s going to appeal to all different audiences —a lot of parents, and actually for a lot of industry people, I think there’s a lot they can learn from listening to Michael as well.

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Michael Preston: I am the Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which is a research and innovation lab within Sesame Workshop. Sometimes people misconstrue us as the research arm of Sesame, which actually has a very rich and long tradition of doing formative research and evaluation work on all of the content we produce for kids. The Cooney Center is different in that we’re a more recent incarnation. A good way to think about it is, [we look at] what happens after the kids grow beyond the Sesame Street universe and into the wild world of digital and independence and making media choices for themselves and continue to learn and grow in other ways and go into school and all those things. So we, over the years, have covered a lot of different topics, but lately we have been focused very much on a partnership with public media and health and wellbeing and design practices for innovators. So we are busy thinking about the future and trying to aim for a positive vision for how we want things to be for kids.

Jordan Shaprio: So can you tell us a bit about where the Cooney Center is going?

Michael: The biggest project we’re focused on right now is a partnership with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a network of public media stations around the country. We’re trying to facilitate a conversation and a way forward together with them, first based on research we’re doing in two strands. One is focused on youth media practices and the other on station engagement with the goal of figuring out how to serve teens and tweens.

This is an audience that public media has been really acutely aware of as a missing audience—the kids that are not served well by public media. There’s not that much for them, I think partly because it’s so hard to serve the big kids – they’re diverse and their tastes change, and as they become more independent, it’s harder to do things for them.

Jordan: It almost feels like all the public media is ‘how do you teach kids to read?’ It’s all for little infants, toddlers. There really isn’t much for kids as they start to deal with some equally, or maybe more so difficult developmental struggles.

Michael: That’s right. So there’s tons of great stuff for the little kids and it crosses cultures, and, within this country, it serves kids across an age span that ends around 7 or 8. And it’s roughly tied to between when they go to school and when they get access to a device, which we know is becoming a younger and younger phenomenon now. [With] that they choose a whole diversity of media, and it’s interactive and it’s communicative.

The accelerant is adolescent development: they become middle school kids, and older, and seek their communities and their tribes, and unique things that make them individuals. So we have this theory that the way forward with public media will be to think less about them in a homogeneous way and just broadcast to them, but to actually do something that’s much closer to where kids are, that’s participatory and differentiated to give kids more opportunity to take the reins.

Our findings from the public media work so far show multi-devicing, obviously, is key. You might see a kid on their computer and phone at the same time, and they might be running five different apps at the same time: homework, YouTube, chatting with friends, et cetera, all at the same time.

So other ideas we’re actively thinking about [are] health and wellbeing. There’s this real need in the digital space to define health and wellbeing, and to get beyond the platitudes of screen time and how we’re oppressed by our use of digital media. I mean, Jordan, you’ve written books about this, the idea that what kids do in digital spaces is what they do in non-digital spaces, but it’s also the whole range of what kids want to pursue.

Jordan: Can I ask a sort of provocative question about that? I’m imagining what a public TikTok would look like? There’s a voice in my head that goes, ‘nothing like TikTok is ever going to get made unless it’s made by the disruptive innovator private sector!’ But I wonder, is it that nobody’s really tried to hit this teen age from here? Or is there something essential about adolescence, puberty, that is just better served by the entrepreneurs than by the caretakers?

Michael: That’s a great way to look at it. And that’s a discussion we’re having for the future of public media. ‘What are the core values that define it?’ is more the standpoint rather than how do we make the thing that is captivating for kids, *but* it’s public media. So even in some of our interviews, kids aren’t that aware of the existence of public media or what it means. Going back to the values of public media to educate and enrich and inform and entertain, to think about how to bridge those values into those other spaces where we can serve kids developmental needs more thoughtfully, but we can also do it in the tech ecosystems that they’re used to, and not try to reinvent the wheel and try to attract kids to this safer ground.

There’s also another area of public media concern that we are interested in, too, which is reaching the kids who tend to be marginalized. And public media has a rich tradition of representation more than commercial media. Events of 2020 in the US have only drawn a stark line around that, that the ability to tell stories where kids can see themselves across all kinds of communities and orientations and to invest so that more kids have opportunities.

So we don’t really drill down to, what’s the TikTok of public media? Although we can learn a lot from TikTok, both as an approach, as well as the content that’s there. One of the great things we learned from our research so far is how really information-seeking kids are. That they are constantly learning new skills, new things they like to do, new ways to connect and do things, whether it’s musical instruments or crafting. They see learning outside the boundaries of school and the fact that they have the ability to go find almost anything and pursue it lightly and casually or in great depth is an amazing opportunity.

Laura: We need to really understand what it is young people want, what we need. We need to listen to them a lot more. And whilst research and surveys are great, it doesn’t really get into the heart of where young people are. And so giving them that opportunity to tell us exactly what it is they want, and for them to see the different opportunities available to them, I think is really, really important.

Also, wellbeing has never been more important, not just for young people, but for all of us. Allowing young people to understand that it’s okay to not be OK, [for] all of us to take responsibility for encouraging them to acknowledge that and to give them safe places and advice and places where they can go to talk about these feelings and concerns. I think as adults, professionals, and certainly, industry, we have a huge responsibility to protect and support young people.

Michael: It shouldn’t be a special thing that we listen to young people, especially as they grow into a place where they’re more conscious of their own voice, and their opportunity to use it. So it’s incumbent upon us to develop spaces where that’s possible, and not have those kids be outside of these conversations.

One thing we also heard in our research with young people, is that they’re looking for [safe spaces] where they can have conversations they wouldn’t have with parents around sexual health and gender and things about political identity formation or just being confident in being yourself in the world. These are all things that are so important. And one of the wonderful things about the Internet, it’s a complicated space, but the fact that you can find those places and find people you can commune with and aspire to be like and so forth is really great.

Laura: Can you talk to us a little bit about the power of play and why you think it’s important for young people?

Michael: So the topic of play is so fundamental and becoming so top-of-mind, I think for a lot of different reasons. It’s not a backlash, but it does feel a bit like a reaction to the way schooling has become so reductivist around performance and certain core academic subjects, and that we’ve gradually squashed all opportunities for play and for improvisation and trying new things and just challenging ideas. It’s kind of been pushed out of the learning space generally.

We know that learning through play, as it happens from the beginning, and playful play is in some ways fully interactive with learning. They go together from an early age and it’s only later that we stop valuing it as much. And it’s not something that’s just the providence of little kids.

So starting from that standpoint, I think that it’s really important that we think about what play means and what its opportunities are. And how it bridges the physical and digital spaces and how those are probably less salient to kids than it is to us, since the kids only know a world in which digital experiences are happening side by side with the non-digital.

Laura: How do we bring back play as an acceptable thing? What do you think the barriers are? What is it that’s stopping educators and parents from allowing that freedom?

Michael: It’s a great question. I named school systems and schooling as one of the chief aggressors against playful learning, because we hardly make room for those ideas. And it’s almost like we don’t trust kids. We have become so compliance oriented, and so focused on outcomes, and optimizing for a pretty narrow definition of success through academic achievement, ironically motivated decades ago in the US by a desire to raise the floor and help ensure that we had better outcomes across the board. We have so much disparity in this country for sure around educational achievement, and it’s immoral that we have so many kids who are not prepared or not reading at grade level or they’re just not really ready to graduate from high school.

I feel like some of the well-intentioned folks who have tried to engage in this education reform effort have squeezed things out a bit. Technology is another possible reason, because anything that you make on a computer is designed, and it tends to be designed to have certain functions, and they can specify what it’s going to do. And it tends to narrow the field in which you can operate. So the rise of a hacker culture around tech is, in some ways, a direct and playful and subversive response to the need to sort of program everybody.

Laura: If you had a crystal ball, what would be one prediction you’re going to give me about what the landscape might look like [in the future]?

Michael: I do think it’s interesting to think about what we’ll have learned from [the pandemic]. Whereas it felt very constrained and restrictive and sometimes oppressive and scary. But we’ve also figured out new ways of doing things, for play, for work, for getting our business done each day, from telemedicine to socializing online and new and funky ways. so I think maybe we’ll be reevaluating everything, that there will be new ways of doing things. I would love to think that we will have taken the opportunity to re-evaluate a bunch of things that we maybe valued before, but we can maybe value less now.

Jordan: What’s the thing you think our audience of parents and educators should be thinking about? What should they know? What advice would you give?

Michael: I have three teenagers. I really love it. As they become young people, young adults almost, we just have even better conversations at the dinner table now than ever before. To really push in, and have them show me [what they’re doing with tech] or play a game together that I wouldn’t otherwise see. Parenting doesn’t stop because they go into these digital spaces that are a little bit harder to see. But to be able to just ask to be part of it, and take it seriously, and not be dismissive, but then to say, “I’m really interested in that, too. Can you show me?” I think parenting in the digital age means digging in.

This post was originally published on GettingSmart.com

Across the United States, children are returning to school. For some, it will be their first time since March 2020. The past year and a half has been a challenging, if not devastating, disruption for families, teachers, and administrators. Now we’re all hungry for a return to normal.

But at what cost? Normal, for vast numbers of American students, is not something to which we should aspire to return. For too long, our society has been willing to ignore persistent inequities—specifically, the lopsided distribution of education resources that the pandemic amplified so clearly. We’ve seen the disproportionate suffering of youth who were already marginalized by poverty and systemic racism. We’ve watched as schools literally became the means of survival for the most disenfranchised children.

Still, many pundits, education journalists, experts, and thought-leaders have already returned to a perspective that reifies the past. When they’re not writing about mask mandates, they offer a steady stream of op-eds about learning loss and the need for remediation. This is precisely the language that has long framed an ineffective, paternalistic approach to education inequality.

What they’re missing is that, for underserved youth, returning to these conversations means the same old discrepancies in achievement and the diminished futures they foretell. For all children—regardless of their race or socio-economic status—it means a school experience that fails to adequately prepare individuals to survive and thrive in a world threatened by a climate crisis, rising authoritarianism, partisan political division, misinformation, tribalism, and nationalism.

In April, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the Center for Global Education at Asia Society convened more than 40 top education leaders—including researchers, administrators, reformers, philanthropists, policymakers, EdTech developers, and more—to identify priorities for establishing a new education mindset for the 22nd century. But we wanted to avoid the old debates, which have defined the conversation about teaching and learning for more than a century: “hard” vs. “soft” skills, rigorous vs. playful, STEM vs. SEL. Instead, we wondered: What education system do we need not only to prepare for the future but also to ensure the human race has a future?

Key to this conversation was the idea that it is time to rethink the ways we center young people in their education. How can we reframe the conversations about learning, community support, and policies that will really allow our children to flourish and reach their full intellectual and human potential? We established three recommendations to help teachers, parents, caregivers, administrators, funders, and policymakers think differently about what normal can and should be.

First, if students don’t understand themselves, they can’t understand others. And without empathy, there is no working together, no collective prosperity. Let’s move beyond the tired question of skills vs. personal development. Education should not be premised on a view of the child as either a future worker or an individual in need of social and ethical development. We all know that a fully realized human being is both. Skills and values are interconnected. Productive civic engagement and economic contribution require autonomy, agency, and reflexivity.

Second, we should embrace the notion that learning happens everywhere, all the time. Recent research on youth during the pandemic shows that given the opportunity and the right support, kids take learning into their own hands—when kids use technology and digital media, they often choose how-to videos on TikTok or deep dives on YouTube. There’s an alternative to the “pandemic learning loss” narrative, a narrative that relies on a narrow and problematic understanding of what constitutes “learning.” The new normal needs to move beyond the false division between formal and informal learning, school-based and self-directed learning. Let’s replace this outdated way of thinking with a new model of education ecosystems which embrace, rather than avoid, nonlinear and connected modes of communication.

Third, let’s rethink where the power and responsibility for education lies. We need a rigorously inclusive model of “local education authority” that enables kids and their communities to determine their future. Let’s move beyond school district bureaucracies and the massive disparities based on property tax revenues they represent. The governance of education systems is not just a safety net accounting for individual achievement, but also as a springboard for the kinds of action that today’s kids innately know they want to take: to make the world safer, healthier, more embracing of difference, and more equitable. Only by sharing power and responsibility for education, in a radically cooperative fashion, can we transition our children to be the makers of a 22nd century worth living in.

Taking the comfortable path of least resistance back to normal imperils our future. We need a new, inclusive approach to education for the 22nd century. Our children’s future and the future of the human race depend on it.

Tony Jackson leads Asia Society’s work in education which strives to enable all students to graduate high school prepared for college, for work in the global economy, and for 21st-century global citizenship.

Jordan Shapiro is a Senior Fellow with Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast provides has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the series here.

Alicia is the Head of Kids and Families Strategy at YouTube, where she focuses on helping children and their parents and caregivers realize their rights to more safely learn, connect, and play online. She was previously the Public Policy Lead for Kids and Families at Google, where she worked on issues ranging from online privacy to fighting online child sexual abuse and exploitation. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Technology Coalition, where she oversees the implementation of the Research Fund in collaboration with the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children. Prior to joining Google she worked as a researcher, advocate and educator both within and outside of academia – most recently in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Alicia is the co-author, with Professor Sonia Livingstone, of Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives and the co-editor of Enhancing Digital Literacy and Creativity: Makerspaces in the Early Years.

Laura Higgins: Today we’re speaking with Alicia Blum-Ross. She is a Public Policy Lead for Kids and Families at Google. This was a really interesting jewel of a conversation about both the findings of her book which talked to parents and their experiences, but also the responsibility of somebody working in a big tech company whose role is purely around keeping kids and families safe.

Jordan Shapiro: I would encourage our listeners to “listen underneath” on this interview. On the surface, there’s an interesting conversation about technology, the experience of childhood, the future of childhood and how technology impacts that. But there’s also a conversation running through this entire interview about the way that family has changed, the way that parenting practices have changed, and how the relationship between parent and child has shifted beyond just the technology question.

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Alicia Blum-Ross: I am Alicia Blum-Ross, I am a public policy lead for kids and families at Google.  I also am the recent co-author of a book called Parenting for a Digital Future, How Hopes and Fears About Technology Shape Children’s Lives with Sonia Livingstone, who I think you have spoken to before. I have spent my career working at the intersection of education, youth and community work, media studies and all things family-related and tech-related. So it’s been pretty exciting to move from the NGO and education world to now, two years into my very first job in the tech industry. And I think about both child safety, but also kids and families experiences across the universe that is Google and YouTube and all the many products and partnerships that we have across that.

A lot of my career has been around media literacy and working with children and young people directly to help them both understand the media environment around them, and now technology, the environment around them. But also, how to create and express themselves through media as well, and, increasingly through technology and all things digital in recent years.

Laura: So you mentioned that you co-authored the book with Sonia. Can you tell us a bit about the book, how you managed the whole process?

Alicia: I had done my PhD working directly with young people who were at risk, and doing youth media production. I’d been working at youth centers and through after-school programs in London, whereas Sonia has obviously had a huge long history in terms of understanding media impact and the effects from a psychology background. So I brought more of an ethnographic lens.

It was a great match in terms of disciplinary background and interests. And I think we had both converged on this interest in parents, partly because we felt for totally different reasons that parents felt really under-researched, to the extent they appeared at all in the literature, it was sort of as a way of getting to the kids. The parental mediation literature would introduce parents a lot, but it’s really about their kids’ media practices. [It] isn’t about their own interests or desires or passions or beliefs or struggles. So I think we both saw that gap.

It was interesting also that we were obviously both mothers, but our children are very, very different ages. I had quite young children. My twins were [about] 2 years old when we started writing the book. So it actually was fascinating for both of us also to be doing these interviews, where her children were in their 20s at that point. She would get all these advice questions from the parents that we interviewed, whereas I got a lot of sort of commiserations and more like, ‘what do you do?’ and ‘do you follow your own advice?’ Like, ‘how would you let your kids have that kind of thing?’

Laura: Were there any big surprises for you in the work you were doing?

Alicia: I think that a real honor and pleasure of the book was getting to spend so much time with such a diverse cross-section of families. Just getting to actually do that kind of deep listening with so many different families, really hammered home both how just totally diverse and completely individually, a lot of families were approaching these issues. But also for me as a parent, [it] hammered home that there wasn’t really a lot of right answers. And also, crucially, what people say they do and what people actually do in their homes, when they’re in a safer space, was pretty different.

There’s been many gifts of writing this book, and certainly writing with Sonia [who] has been just an incredible friend and mentor to me over many years. One of them has also been a gift of my own parenting, of actually feeling pretty cool about letting go of a lot of preciousness that I might otherwise have had. Because I had actually read all the literature.

Our bibliography is very long in the book, and you realize the research is massively inconclusive about any real long-term effects in terms of moderate amounts of digital media use, and then also just getting to hear from so many different families having such a range of experiences with their kids. I think [that] also allowed me to go “actually, it depends a lot on the other circumstances in the family.” And the technology itself is immaterial in some sense in terms of the long-term outcomes for the kids.

Jordan: One of the things that I loved about it, is that it wasn’t an advice book. It wasn’t, here’s how to parent, here’s what’s best. It was a much more of a meta account of how parents are responding to parenting through tech. I wonder if you could say a bit about some of the findings.

Alicia: So we didn’t write an advice book. And I think that currently, we didn’t feel well-equipped to write an advice book, but we do get asked for advice a lot. We try to to some extent, to give some insights based on what we learned. But I think that [others have] done an excellent job of that. Devorah Heitner, Anya Kamanetz—there’s some really great, well-researched and super thoughtful books already in that space.

I think what we felt we could bring to it as academics was the embedded-in-the-daily-life-of-families perspective, and then also that very in-depth discussion with the secondary literature and bouncing back and forth between the two. But also, I think one of the big things that we were trying to do in the book was also connect this to wider understandings of the world, and what’s sometimes called late modernity.

We are in a particular historical moment where there’s these great social changes that have happened over the last 20 to 50 years. And actually a lot of those great social shifts—the shrinking of the welfare state, the loss of social support, the fact that families are more likely to migrate and be further apart from family and from their families of origin and social support than they ever have been before. And that, crucially, this is the first generation that’s forecast to be less financially prosperous than their own parents. That’s a huge change.

One of the big findings of the book was actually that all of those great social shifts are so impactful on family life, but they’re largely invisible to parents. And what parents can see is that their kid is holding something glowing that seems to be taking a lot of their energy and attention. And that’s the thing that they focus on as being the great change from their own childhood to their child’s present. That was one of the big things that we were trying to do in the book is actually put that micro- interaction, that struggle over the screen, in the context of these great social shifts that actually, and arguably, are much more impactful in terms of family lives and prospects, but that actually the technology conversation becomes so focal. And so we’re trying to ask why and with what effect is that such a focal conversation for parents?

Laura: So you work for Google [as the] Public Policy Lead for Kids and Family. I’m guessing that keeps you busy, along with being a parent and an academic. What does a day look like for you?

Alicia: I’m in California, but I have colleagues all over the world, so it’s a pretty long day often. I’m doing a lot of work with colleagues in Europe and beyond, so I will start at 7-ish often with calls. And then obviously I have a lot of colleagues in Asia as well. So we’ll do evenings and try not to do both on the same day, but [that’s] not always possible.

I divide my time between, I would say, three main buckets of activities. I do a lot of advising with the products teams who are creating experiences for kids and families, like YouTube Kids or Family Link, working with them to help think through products and sometimes marketing initiatives or outreach programs. They might want to do something like Be Internet Awesome, one of our keystone outreach programs.

I’m the main point of contact for a lot of expert organizations like FoSI or ParentZone in the U.K. or Common Sense Media and others—Connect Safely—a lot of those NGOs. So that’s camp two of what I work on—doing that expert outreach and bringing folks in to help consult on various kinds of decisions that we might be making or partner on resources for parents.

Part three of what I do is a lot of government affairs type work. For example, we made some changes on YouTube recently around how we treat mature content and access to mature content. And so some of that was global and some of it was in relationship to the implementation of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which is a mouthful. But that’s an EU law, which is recently in scope. So I will either directly do meetings with government representatives or I will help my colleagues who work in the various regions to prepare for that and think about how they can come and explain what we’re doing on the product side and in the way that makes sense and is understandable.

Jordan: What are the big issues right now for kids and media that have to do with government and policy?

Alicia: Especially learning from Sonia, I think of the child-rights framing throughout the work that I do. And when we speak about child rights, we think about [how] children have the right for freedom from things like exploitation, whether that’s financial exploitation or sexual exploitation and abuse. And they also have the right to have freedoms, to do things like express themselves, be creative and participate in the world around them.

One of the things tricky about my job is that those things can often be in direct tension with one another. So, for example, because I work on child safety, I have a lot of work for Google this year on our work as part of the Technology Coalition, which is an industry organization dedicated to fighting child sexual abuse material. Those are really horrific examples that while they affect too many children, are still a small proportion of overall children that use the Internet. And, there’s a temptation when you work on these really tough child safety issues to say, ‘lock it all down,’  walled-gardens are the only way forward. Part of what my job is doing, is keeping in tension that natural instinct to really protect children and to really create very, very safe, very locked down, very ring-fence spaces for them.

At the same time acknowledging that there’s a lot of benefits, both in terms of child development, but also for society in general to allowing and enabling children to participate in these more creative civic, even just social activities, even it’s just like a very basic kind of hanging out with your friends kind of way. And that’s the really fascinating part of my job—trying to hold both of those competing rights in tension and trying to figure out a way to both get safe experiences, and create safe experiences, but also experiences where children can grow up and can gain independence and can grow and flourish. And it’s not always easy to get both in the same experience, but obviously we try.

Jordan: So it sounds like parenting. I don’t want them to break their arm, but I also want them to fall down the stairs a few times.

Alicia: A lot of the digital civility work has that resilience at its core. It is inevitable in the course of a life spent even partly online, that you will have difficult interactions, that there’s no way about it. Now how difficult those interactions are, there’s a big spectrum there, because at the worst end there’s something like grooming or sextortion or something that can be very deeply traumatizing, very long-lasting impact. Sonia talks about risk versus harm. So that’s something that’s probably low risk. Most children will never have that kind of issue, but very high harm.

Whereas something that is high risk but low harm, is likely to be experienced by more children. So, “I saw pictures on social media of my friends getting together without me and I felt really left out.” Pretty much everybody is going to experience some point where something unkind was said to me, or even if it wasn’t meant to be unkind I perceived it in an unkind way. Or, “I was looking at social media stars that looked like they had their lives to put together, and I feel like I’m such a mess.” That’s high risk in that, everyone probably of most ages, frankly, will definitely experience that. But it’s low harm in the sense of, most people and most children are fairly resilient and even if they have highs and lows, will more or less be able to kind of take that and understand that this is part of social life.

Obviously, some children are less resilient than others and need more support and scaffolding to understand how to take in and understand that the world can be hurtful and that they need to figure out how to gain other coping mechanisms, et cetera.

Laura: Regulation’s really front of mind for all of us who work in the tech industry. There’s a lot of discussion, particularly in Europe, but very much in the US as well, about regulation and duty of care towards platforms and all of those sorts of things. Do you think that regulation is necessary and helpful, or should we be allowed to do it more ourselves?

Alicia: So certainly in the US context, where you see these different states that are coming up with different standards, I think from an industry perspective, it is really helpful to think about, actually there’s elements of GDPR that could work super well, and how can we rethink standardization there? Because otherwise it’s completely impossible to function as a business when you have just these sometimes totally competing standards.

Just going back to the issue of child sexual abuse material, for example. In some countries, we have limits on how long we can retain the data for. And then other countries are requiring that we legally retain it for twice as long as the limit in the other country. And so, to the extent that we can get to a more standard framework that makes it much more operationally effective to be able to do [for] these large scale businesses. And obviously, Google has locations in many places in the world—it is really important to try to get that harmonization of different standards.

I think also one thing that thinking about children and technology really highlights is that, while the tech industry obviously has a huge role to play there, and I think it’s really important that we think long and hard about what our role is in family life. I also think it’s crucial to think about the other institutions in children’s lives that also have a role to play there. So, the fact that there isn’t a national digital literacy curriculum—there’s not a national curriculum in the US as such necessarily, but there’s so much more that we could be doing in terms of digital literacy and Common Core. Even the UK digital literacy curriculum arguably, there’s a lot more creative and critical media literacy that could be built into that too.

So I think we’re at the beginning of an era where that is also a government conversation. This is the world that children live in. These are the different kinds of ways in which they have to understand how data is collected and how that might be used, how advertising works, how algorithms function. I think there’s so many kind of critical pieces of knowledge that, we from the platform side can try to provide information and indeed more transparency around, but there’s also just a huge role for educators and people who speak directly to children and young people, to actually understand and be able to help kids understand those questions as well.

Laura: Crystal ball moment. What do you think will be the big innovations, things to look forward to?

Alicia: One thing that came out a lot in our book is that there was a lot of talk about “alone together,” and how everybody’s kind of locked up in their rooms with digital devices. And actually, when we did surveys of parents, we found, oh, there’s a huge spectrum of different ways, actually, that families keep in touch. Yes, they text, and yes, social media. But they also stop by and have potlucks and have dinner together and all kinds of stuff.

[During the pandemic we] have not had a lot of opportunity for that latter half—that popping by, getting together at school gates, etc. My hope is that we go back to that more diverse [experience] and I think people are absolutely dying for it. I think if there is an opportunity for it, I don’t think that we’ll find the very, very mediated relationships that we have right now. The joy of actually getting together over food is going to come rushing back as soon as people can do it.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the series here. 

Quazar is an actor, artist, puppeteer, and radio presenter—as well as a developer on Roblox, an online platform where millions of people from around the world come together to play, learn, and explore with friends, all in user-generated 3D worlds.

Jordan Shapiro: This interview with former Roblox developer Quazar was such a fascinating interview.

Laura Higgins: There were some really interesting takeaways from it – about what it’s like being a young person who’s perhaps a bit diverse, trying to find their way both online and building that community, as well as finding themselves all at the same time. It was really interesting and a funny conversation too!

Jordan: I think it’s going to be a pleasure for parents to listen to, to get in the head of somebody who’s a developer, but also for kids to listen to this one. They’ll realize that they can really relate to other people’s struggles.

Laura: The wonderful thing that we got out of this conversation was that it’s good to be different sometimes. Different can be so creative and so empowering.

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Laura: This week, we have a special guest who is a Roblox developer, a longtime member of the community whose name is Quazar. The thing we’re going to be talking about is all around online identity and how the idea of being able to try on different personalities and personas can really help young people to find themselves—and actually all of us as we’re spending time online.

Jordan: I’m really excited about this episode. You know, I remember back in the day when we were all first getting involved in social media and online things, and the whole thing [people worried about] was, “oh, it’s so anonymous! People are going to pretend to be anyone they want! They’re going to pretend to be kids, but it’s really going to be a 40-year-old guy!” Just crazy assumptions about what was going on with people. You still hear it with people saying everyone wants to be like the Instagram stars, and Instagram’s so fake. And of course, a lot of research shows that people online are not fakers, that actually it’s a much better representation of who they are.

Some things I just wanted to mention: if you really look into the theory of psychoanalysis or in psychology, they talk about something called persona, which is usually defined as something between the mask we put on to protect ourselves from the outside world and also the mask we put on to show ourselves to the outside world. And I think we’re talking about all of these things together – it’s fascinating to think about how they come to be in an online space.

So it’s a really, really great pleasure to introduce our guest. His name is Quazar. I’m going to ask him to talk a little bit about himself and what he does and who Quazar is.

Quazar: Well, hello, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. My name is Quazar49 and I’m a Roblox developer. If you don’t know what Roblox is, it’s an online site where people can make their own worlds and make their own games entirely for free with a fantastic bit of software.

So I’m an artistic character and I’ve always been into different projects. And recently I’ve come to find a website called Roblox where I’ve been able to explore and just generally kind of reinvent myself in some manner of ways, as I have done over the course of the past. For example, when I was five to about 10 years old, I was wearing top hats and tails while walking through town. During my teenage years, it went a bit more punky and now it’s gone back to kind of 80s-neon-new wave-crazy-colourful insanity.

So what you mentioned earlier, Jordan, yes, we do all have phases, if you like. But in a way, I think the word “phase” in itself is kind of a derogatory term for such a thing, because in many ways, you may think a phase obviously doesn’t last. But in many ways, especially with both online and offline gaming, and different bits and pieces, these things can form a person and they can change a person drastically, which is certainly what I’ve come to find out.

Laura: I’m really lucky to have met you in real life a couple of times and we’ve gotten to know each other over the last year. And I’ve always been very lucky that you’ve been so honest with me about some of the experiences that you have, not just about finding a character and trying out all these different characters, but also some of the things that shaped some of those choices. Do you feel comfortable telling us a little bit about some of the stuff that was going on in the background that led to some of those decisions?

Quazar: Absolutely. And it only strengthens the impact I hope. So, I just want to start by saying that if anyone younger is listening to this or any parents listening to this have a child that may either dress differently, speak differently, look different. Regardless of how different your child or you may be listening to this, the strength comes from the bad experiences. And the thing is, you can be all creative and fantastical, but I wouldn’t obviously be as strong or as confident as I am without having to have some of the issues.

Just to set the scene here, I am a 20-year-old with long blond hair who collects 1970s and 80s memorabilia… That’s just to let you know that I’m sitting in a room surrounded by all this 70s junk: Betamax, LaserDisc stuff, I’ve got a Smash Martian doll over there. So there’s a lot of stuff that sets me apart from other people. So things that happened mostly were both physical and verbal bullying, constantly, every single day in school. It was absolute hell. Purely because people just didn’t like the way I was or who I was. It was very, very derogatory, featuring many unmentionable words that mostly ranged from, well, insults based upon my sexuality because everyone thought I was gay because of how I spoke, or different things. They always just mostly took the mick out of me for base-level things.

But others went a little bit further. They shoved me into lockers and I would come home with bruises on my arm, or the most serious things would be people constantly chasing me home from school on their bikes or kicking me in the shins in the hallways or in the ankles. So, the physical stuff was there as well. But the stuff that hurt the most was most likely the verbal bullying and the assumptions that people have based on how you look. My constant thing, especially now is, why should I compromise who I want to be, just because it may cause me some pain.

Granted, it was really hurtful. I mean, it constantly happened every single day. And the thing is, as I’m sure it will seem to many other people out there, it seems as though your world is *that*. It is just your world. You are constantly isolated from everything, especially when you don’t have any friends.

Jordan: When did you start to get involved in having a digital life, an online life, what did that look like in the earliest days? I assume there’s two narratives: the online you and then offline you. I’m interested in how they played off each other or divided from each other or the relationship between them.

Quazar: It actually began with YouTube. I ran a channel where I played a character called Quazar — this name has kind of been attached to me for a long time. There wasn’t anything to do with modern gaming, it was actually to do with me sitting down in front of my iPad 2 camera and filming these little reviews on old video games or old related things such as 70s soda streams and different commodities that I would pick up in jumble sales and charity shops and car boot sales. And I got told to drink cleaning products due to that as well, because people eventually found out, and ridiculed me in school for it. Especially because those videos were riddled with wonderful pre-14-year-old voice cracks. You can imagine.

And after I ran that, from about 12 years old up until I was about 15, I eventually began to do some more offline stuff. I did eventually find an interesting group of people in school that led me down the path that I took, which was being a rock singer. I’m a rock and metal singer for this group. Funnily enough, I did two different groups where I also played fictitious characters. One was called Persona 41. He was an escaped automaton from a 40s freak show. And he used to move like a robot.

But the point is, I’ve always been playing characters. And eventually, I finally found different platforms where I could explore myself in different ways. While these punky bands were going on, I was in this really dark period. I thought, ‘I just want some other project. You know, I just want something else to do’ that is maybe a bit lighter than the stuff that I had really kind of gotten into.

Eventually, I found my way onto Roblox and created something called Vision Park. It’s a 1980s neon-themed theme park with insanely unsafe rides and loads of references to the 80s, from old brands that have long expired, to musical genres, to a flipping Rick Astley reference, if you can find it. So there’s a lot of stuff in there. But the point is I wanted to do something more colorful.

So after these bands eventually died off, I assumed the role of a *different* kind of Quazar, still under the same name, but this blue-skinned guy who wears a colorful and sparkly suit, with a big top hat, and magnifying glasses that he wears over his eyes.

So eventually this led me to a more positive and creative thing, and along with a couple of other things that happened in the background, things started to look up a bit more and things started to be a bit more positive. And, especially now with a fan base that I’ve been able to grow, which is over, you know, over about two thousand strong, really strong fans, with over 2.2 million visits on the game itself, it’s encouraged me to definitely revert back to that innocent ‘60s, ‘70s-collecting Quazar that I was previously, and bring myself out of a dark era. So it’s definitely been a source of therapy in many ways.

Jordan: Yeah. It’s so great to hear you tell that story. I was thinking about the research I’ve read that talks about online experience and identity and frames it as something called “projective reflection,” where at first we take a piece of ourselves and we project it onto the image or the avatar, and then reflect it back and we integrate parts of that avatar into our own identity. So I’m sort of curious to hear a bit about… well, I know your skin hasn’t turned blue! But, thinking about the Quazar avatar, has some of that reflected back into you? Who are the two sides of Quazar now?

Quazar: Well, I mean, what is a character and what really isn’t has affected me, it’s massive. I mean, everything from the design of the character when I first began means something. The fact that I have blue skin—most people on the websites and on the games have normal colored skin, you know, that reflects them in real life. But I always kind of consider myself the outlier or the outcast. So I decided to go for blue skin because it represents the outstanding thing. I’m always kind of outside the norm. So, yeah, the character at first was definitely a massive representation of me.

And what I portray on my YouTube channel, which I might sneakily plug here if that is permitted, called Clock Tower Entertainment, everything on that channel is a representation of me. But in terms of the Quazar character influencing me, the only reason he still exists, for the most part, is because of the younger people who follow me. And I feel as though Quazar as a character, not even as a character as myself, is me, but with all the really dark stuff kind of left out because that’s a lot of exposition that no one wants to know.

Quazar is effectively all of me heightened up to ten, with a massive amount of overly crazy colorfulness. But the way that he’s affected me is through the fans. You see, he wouldn’t still exist and I wouldn’t be talking here, and I wouldn’t still be on the website most likely, I wouldn’t even be creating things in terms of a virtual game landscape, if people hadn’t encouraged me and followed me. And these are other outcasts, and other people, or other kids who feel as though they are the odd ones out. And I feel as though, in many ways over the three years that I’ve been doing this, I certainly don’t think I would still be doing it if people hadn’t taken an interest and said, oh, that’s actually different and cool.

Laura: One of the beautiful things when you open your minds to these sorts of conversations and meeting new people and new experiences online, is that you realize that we’re all quirky and different in our own ways, even if it’s very subtle and quiet. For some people, it might be that they themselves are really introverted. So that’s why they have these really outlandish characters online. And actually it might help to build that confidence through this projective reflection that Jordan was talking about. It might actually help to build their confidence.

You’ve already said you are quite expressive and whilst not necessarily confident in some ways, but really physically and in the way that you dress, very expressive. And so you echo that in your character.

Quazar: I’m not looking for attention. I’m not looking for fame or money or anything. I haven’t earned a penny. I literally haven’t earned a penny from anything I’ve done online. But it’s been a massively important part of my life. That’s what I like to say to my fanbase, because some people come at me saying, “Quazar, I’m suffering with gender dysphoria,” or “My parents don’t understand me,” or “I don’t believe in the religion that my family does,” etc. And these younger people, mostly kids, are scared or they’re nervous or they don’t have the self-confidence that I have. And I feel a sense of duty in a way.

Jordan, what you mentioned, saying ‘how has Quazar affected you, as you’ve come to bring him to life?’ You know, it is still me. But at the same time, Quazar is more than myself at this point. It’s a symbol of difference, and strangeness, and uniqueness, and the fact that you can be whoever you want to be. 

You can be just the way you are, and it’s totally fine. Some people will be bullied in school like I was, but they won’t have the confidence to keep going in on mufti [non-uniform, casual] days with what they want to wear. They’ll fake sick days – been there. They’ll do all this different stuff to try and avoid the torment. And for some people that may get so dark that, you know, they end up resorting to rougher things.

But the most crucial thing is that online identity, whether it’s in-gaming or YouTube, or anything, whether you’re playing a character or you’re just being yourself, it’s a fantastic form of escapism. But also, as soon as you’ve escaped for a while, you can end up learning something from that and you can build confidence and you can take something away from the online world to bring into your real life.

Jordan: Yeah, you’ve done such a great job just now, of really describing this positive projective reflection – this idea that it’s any kind of identity exploration. And there’s a very positive thing in having an online place where you can experiment with that, where the stakes are low, where no one is going to throw an egg at you necessarily, or they might not know who you are.

Laura: So obviously you’re doing a great job of evangelizing and helping young people who are in a similar situation to feel more confident in being themselves, or experimenting to find themselves. But what can platforms do? You talked a little about what Roblox does in terms of letting people experiment, but have you seen other experiences, perhaps when they are the opposite, when they shut down that creativity?

Quazar: In many ways, I believe that the issue mostly lies within the populace, the mass populace. I hate saying this, but the algorithm, which is a very overused term, or the mass amount of attention, for example, the front page games, things need to change or rotate more often. It’s totally fine bringing attention to things in terms of a gaming website. You know, you’ll have the most popular games on the front page or something, but I believe there should be some kind of system in place.

I believe that the different or the less popular should be focused on more. I feel as though if YouTube advertisements or different things, promoted smaller channels more often, you’d be able to get that nice wide variety of different things.

Laura: We as a platform have done a lot in this space. And I know that there are others that do the same and encourage that creativity and the right to be whoever you want to be online as long as you’re pretty much a good person. But I know that there’s still a long way to go, as you say, to normalize the unusual because that’s what this is about, is saying there is no such thing as normal. We should celebrate everyone’s differences in all of these diverse communities that we have.

Quazar: Just be a freak, just be whatever you want to be. At least in terms of me and Jordan and Laura, we like you as you are. You don’t have to be anything spectacular. You don’t have to be famous. And if you think that’ll bring you happiness, you know, and you want to pursue it, if that’s your real passion, go for it. My saying is: pursue yourself.

Jordan: What I hope is that what our listeners get from this, is some of the really positive stuff that happens in the online world. Again, I’ll just reiterate, we get so much of this negative side of this idea that everything online is about trying to create these sort of unbelievable aspirational pictures, or trying to get profit, or trying to make everyone look like a Kardashian. And the bottom line is that’s just not really the case, and that’s not why kids are attracted to it.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast provides excerpts of the conversation that have been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here. 

Strategist, analyst, author, speaker, connector — David Kleeman has led the children’s media industry in developing sustainable, child-friendly practices for 35 years, as president of the American Center for Children and Media and now as SVP of Global Trends for Dubit, a strategy/research consultancy and digital studio. When he began, “children’s media” meant television. Today, he is passionate about kids’ wide range of possibilities for entertainment, engagement, play, and learning. David is advisory board chair to the international children’s TV festival PRIX JEUNESSE, on the Children’s Media Association board and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s National Advisory Board. He was also a Senior Fellow of the Fred Rogers Center and Board Vice President for the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

Jordan Shapiro: David Kleeman, the Senior VP of Global Trends at Dubit, was among one of the first to ask important questions around how the pandemic was affecting the digital experience of young people. There’s a lot of people talking about it now, and there was talk about it throughout, but Dubit jumped right in, asked all the right questions and did the research. David presents that so clearly here and talks about those real differences with real important questions.

….

Jordan: David, you’ve been involved in kids and screens and children’s and children’s media for longer than anyone I know. So how did that happen?

David Kleeman: It’s a long and multidirectional history. But basically, when I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a preschool teacher and it was very unusual at the time. This was the mid-70s. Men didn’t want to be preschool teachers. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Harvard had no idea what to do with someone who wants to be a preschool teacher. I was lucky enough to discover one of the creators of Sesame Street who was teaching at the Ed school there and was a dean at the Ed school. And in the course of an hour’s guest lecturer in the class I was taking, I decided I’d rather teach through media than teach in a classroom, which was in the long run, a very good decision for a lot of kids.

So I’ve created a career where I can help people who do have that passion to make something, do their best, work, better understand child development, better understand the environment that kids are using media in. I’ve been incredibly fortunate. So for 25 years, I ran a creative professional development center for people who make children’s media, putting on seminars, workshops, screenings. When I was no longer able to keep that going financially, I was fortunate to find research companies that understood the value in bringing together all the people with a stake in children’s media: child development, child health, education, research, production, distribution, digital.

Jordan: So tell us a bit about what you’re doing now.

David: I’m the senior vice president of Global Trends for Dubit. Dubit is a British-based company that’s a research and strategy consultancy and a digital studio. So we make games, apps, virtual worlds, VR, AR for kids. I sit in between the research side and the studio side, trying to put a story to what we’re learning from our research. Our biggest research project is a global trends study that every six months we look at 2,000 families in the US and about 1500 in the UK and several other countries each time around. What devices kids have access to, how they use them, when they use them, where they use them, who they use them with, what brands and content are their favorites.

My job in Global Trends is to put story to that, to try to figure out what the patterns are and what can be helpful both to our clients, which are mainly media companies or toy companies or things like that, and parents as well. So I split my time speaking to parent groups, educators, and to companies that are making things for kids.

Laura Higgins: You have a new report out about unmasking kids of 2022. What sorts of things have you seen in this latest study?

David: Well, we’re finding some interesting things. What we found in a qualitative sense, is families are really doing their best to make this time as special as they can manage to make it—given budgets, given all those things, any money that they would have been spending on going to the cinema or going on vacations, they’re putting towards things at home that make them feel good. They are buying bicycles in huge numbers. Instead of just having a let’s watch a movie tonight, they’re having a movie night where they’ll sleep in the basement and bring in pizza and hot chocolate and make a real event out of it.

Laura: One of the things that I saw in your report that I thought was really interesting was this return of classic toys and games. People are going back and rediscovering things that perhaps have been lost for some time.

David: At least when we did our survey just a few weeks into the pandemic, kids were returning to video games that they hadn’t played in quite a while, Pokemon and things like that. Because, first of all, they were probably running through content at an alarming rate. And so when you’re finished everything else, then you go back and look for things you’ve done in the past. But second, this applies to toys and games. It applies to television, it applies to video games. They’re looking for comfort. Kids’ world has been completely turned upside down and they’re looking for the things that give them an anchor, a feeling of security.

Jordan: So is it just sort of moving from one platform to another?

David: They’re moving across all the platforms looking for the content that makes them satisfied in the moment. We have a model that we talk about called “emotional scheduling.” It turns out that kids have a far more innate and developed sense of what they need at any particular time than we might have given them credit for.

But they’re spreading it across multiple platforms and they are watching the streaming services, they are watching linear television still, they’re going to YouTube. My favorite quote from the entire set of research we’ve done during the pandemic, was the teenager who said, “I’ve finished YouTube. When does the next season start?”

Laura: Do you think we’re going to keep some of these [pandemic] behaviors or do you think we’re just going to immediately revert back to the old ways?

David: I think it’s a combination. From all that we’ve been seeing, families are eager to make this a special time. To feel like when it’s all over, to kind of put it behind them. But at the same time, they’ve discovered they really love a lot of the things that have happened during this time that have brought them together.

For years, we’ve been hearing from families, both kids and parents, that the main thing they want is more time with each other and that it just doesn’t seem to happen. Or if they are spending time together, they’re all on their separate devices. Now, kids and parents alike seem to be…. just really, truly spending that time together. That I think will absolutely stay.

I think one of the things that fascinates me most to watch happening is when kids go back to school. Because they have been in control of their own learning to some extent. When they go back into the classroom, I don’t think they’re going to want to sit in rows and listen to the sage on the stage. I think they’re going to be hungry for project-based learning, group learning, self-directed projects, and the ability to be a little more flexible.

Laura: Did you have anything from parents of young people that they’re worried about at the moment, where perhaps COVID was really impacting on them?

David: We’re just starting to parse out what we’ve seen between March or April 2020 and October 2020. And our head of research who runs our trends study was quite literally in tears reading some of the qualitative responses from kids about what worries them. The surface things are, “I can’t see my friends.” “I really miss my friends and I want to be back in school.” But a surprising number of kids talked about, “I’m worried that my parents will get sick, that my grandparents will get sick.” “I’m worried that I’ll die.” It’s just things that we have not had to hear so explicitly from kids in the past.

When we did some qualitative interviews with parents, what they were saying was, “I want my kids to have a break [from information about COVID]. I want them to know that other kids are going through this same thing, that they’re not alone. But, I also don’t want them to be constantly seeing stories about it, I don’t want it necessarily to be worked into the entertainment media that they’re watching, the storytelling media. Because I want them to get a break from it.”

But we’re at the same time, seeing some interest from the industry in creating news for kids, which in the US we haven’t had for a long time. The UK has had Newsround forever. And Newsround has been doing an incredible job of keeping families informed. And Newsround was always popular not just with kids, but with their parents as well. [In the US] ABC has started a news [show] for kids. And I think what they’re understanding is you can speak in an age-appropriate level. You can do it without scaring kids, but you need to treat kids with the respect that they know what’s going on and they want to be informed.

Jordan: You have such a meta view because you’ve been through so many of the changes that have happened in children’s media.

David: I try to have as much fun with that as I can when I’m speaking, particularly to parent groups. I spoke with Early Childhood Australia and had some fun with it, to talk about the similarities between the toys that we played with growing up and the toys now. The media that we used, that I used with my kids growing up and the media we use now.

I know there’s great fear about Alexa and the smart speakers, and are we outsourcing parenting if we let the devices tell stories to our kids? So I put up the picture of the device and then I switched to a picture of a Fisher-Price cassette player. That’s what put my kids to sleep when I couldn’t read them one more story. They listened to music and cassettes.

If you go back and look at toy telephones, when I was growing up, I had the Fisher-Price dial telephone that you pulled behind you on a string. But there’s a whole history of them now leading up to the plastic smartwatch. None of them do anything. They’re not technology-enabled. They’re just there for the very same purpose that they always have been, which is to let kids imitate the adults they see around them. So I always talk about how child development doesn’t change. It’s the context. The channels.

Jordan: How about cultural attitudes around screen media? The screen media has certainly changed. Has it just been the same sort of debate for as long as you can remember?

David: I think there are things that we didn’t have to think about 20, 30 years ago that we do now, such as data gathering and analytics and things like that. But a lot of the debate is exactly the same. We’re still talking about screen time after all this time. And when you look at the number of things that screens bring to kids’ lives, and allow them to create as well as consume, there’s just no point in measuring it with a stopwatch.

One of the positive things that’s come out of the pandemic—Jordan, you’ve written about this very recently—parents are paying more attention to what it is that their kids are doing with media and they are stopping and playing along with them. They’re joining in the games on Fortnite, or building in Minecraft or figuring out what Roblox is all about and starting to see, “Oh, wait, I had underestimated what this was.” We’ve been hearing for a while, for example, parents who would have limits on the amount of time their kids could spend on things. But when they would stop and watch, for example, building in Minecraft, it’s “I see how actively engaged they are. I see that they are really trying to puzzle out how to build something. And so I step back and I don’t put limits on it.” So the debates are largely the same, but I do think parents are starting to pay attention in a more nuanced way.

Laura: In my role at Roblox, we talk about this idea of the metaverse. We’re not just a place where people can create experience and games, but we have real social and entertainment elements as well. So, it’s kind of a one-stop shop for a lot of young people. Have you seen an increase in those sorts of things? How important do you think those sort of safe online social spaces are?

David: The phrase that I’ve been using is, “Down on the corner is now up on the server,” where kids used to be able to get together at the playground, out on their block and things like that. They can’t do that at this point. And so they’ve been flocking to social gaming spaces and they’re making it their own.

I’ve long had this feeling that you can design whatever you want to design, kids are going to figure out how they want to use it. And, you can respond to that and accommodate them or you can try to block it. But it’s a whole lot easier to keep a customer than it is to regain one that’s angry. So it’s much better to respond to them. They realized very quickly that their opportunity for being social with friends was in Roblox, was in Fortnite, was in Fortnite Creative, where instead of a gaming experience, it’s a more relaxed invite-your-friends over to be on your island with you. The waiting rooms in Roblox where you’re getting ready to play a game, become really strong social spaces.

Dubit produced a report on brands and Roblox, on why it’s an important place for companies to be, to be looking and to be present. We had to reprint the report about three weeks after we finished because the monthly active users have gone from 115 million to 150 million. That’s just an insane rise in use. Everything is going up.

It feels to me that everyone is in the kids space now, so you really have to be careful about your platforms. But I do think that the primary platforms for social gaming have been quite responsive to paying close attention to how kids are using it and heading off any possible problems. And you can look across the realm of that – Messenger Kids from Facebook launched in 70 new countries after the pandemic started, and has been trying to build in more interactive work around kindness, around patience.

So, across all these platforms, they really offer a lot of important things for kids. There are platforms where you can co-view a movie on Netflix or something, but games are much more about the communication that goes on. You don’t talk during a movie, you talk during the game. And you may start by talking about the game, but you end up by talking about anything you want to talk about down at the playground. You want to excel in it. It’s in some ways like sport that you want to show your prowess. You want to both support your teammates, but also maybe brag a little bit. So all the elements that you would have seen in a social dynamic, can get recreated in a game dynamic.

Jordan: I really want to hear from you, David, about some of the opportunities for the future of screens, the future of digital media? [You’ve spoken publicly] about how producers take risks, risks in addressing questions like gender and trauma and those kinds of, “Fred Rogers risks.” I want to know the social justice opportunities that are in the future of screen media, video games, where it still could go?

David: I think kids demand it. You’ll lose your audience very quickly if they sense one of two things, either that you lack diversity and attention to these issues or that you are pandering to them and are taking a superficial viewpoint. Because they are quite smart about it.

One of the media pieces to come out of the pandemic that I’ve been talking about most often that takes risks on a number of different levels is a production from Sinking Ship Entertainment in Canada, that’s called Lockdown. Lockdown was conceived, sold, developed, written, produced, edited, and aired within about six weeks. And it was shot entirely by teenagers in their homes with smartphones that were provided by Sinking Ship, and other equipment, ring lights, and things like that. It looks like a million-dollar series. But it was done in six weeks. And it is built around the story of the pandemic. It begins with the first day of lockdown. And it’s a mystery story.

But it’s all told in the platforms that kids and teens are used to right now. So it takes place over video chat, over TikTok, with gameplay. With all those different things. And at the same time, while it’s covering the story of lockdown, there are elements about racism. There are elements about family economics, there are elements about family health, really seriously treated elements. And because it was on the air in six weeks, it felt incredibly timely to the people who were watching a YouTube original production. They’re now in Series 2, which is going to be much more explicitly about Black Lives Matter.

I’ve been writing lately about the idea that the three-year development process for a children’s television series is not really sustainable any longer, that the idea that you have an idea and by the time you have developed it, pitched it, gotten feedback, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s three years later. And any sense of relevance, any sense of feeling like you’re a part of kids’ lives today may have been lost from it.

So they’ve found what I refer to as “agile production,” a way of making a series that is deep and thoughtful and tells a complete story, but doesn’t take three years to do.

Laura: Crystal ball —looking into the future. In terms of tech and media and where we’re going to go, what’s your vision for the next couple of years?

David: Mine has to do with handing over more control to young people. I’m thinking about the things that I saw on the last trip I took before everything locked down. So one of the things I saw at Toy Fair this year was—you can color in a picture using different colored markers and snap a picture of it and turn it into a playable video game. There’s also something called Play Table that is a big screen that sits on top of the coffee table. It comes with a lot of games built-in, but also with RFID chips so that you can create your own games, you can take your toys and invent a game and build it yourself on the play table.

I’m excited by the innovation that people are undertaking during the pandemic. I am excited by their sensitivity in a lot of cases to what kids need, to what they’re feeling right now. And I hope that we carry that forward, that it doesn’t become, “OK, there’s a vaccine now so we can go back to the kids-don’t-want-to-know about the world around them.”

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here, and learn more about the series. 

Sonia Livingstone DPhil (Oxon), OBE, FBA, FBPS, FAcSS, FRSA, is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical, and contextualized approach, her research examines how changing conditions of mediation reshape everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy, and rights in the digital environment, including Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives (OUP 2020). Since founding the EC-funded 33 country “EU Kids Online” research network, and Global Kids Online (with UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti), she has advised the Council of Europe, European Commission, European Parliament, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, OECD, ITU, and UNICEF. She chaired LSE’s Truth, Trust and Technology Commission and is currently leading the Digital Futures Commission with the 5Rights Foundation. 

Jordan Shapiro: We have Sonia Livingstone on today! When it comes to kids and tech, she makes you start to ask questions that you had never even considered before. Especially in this interview, she talks about Digital Rights and the work she’s doing in the EU around that. I think a lot of people don’t even understand that issue well enough to think about it. She makes it so approachable and clear.

Laura Higgins: She is one of the most respected academics working in this field. She’s been involved in studies with EU kids online and then Global Kids Online, where they’re really listening, getting the voice of young people to try and effect change at a policy level.  A great takeaway from this conversation is making us all individually look at our responsibility as well as where tech has this great responsibility.

Jordan: I promise anyone listening that you will walk away from this interview thinking differently about kids and technology – there will be new ideas and new thoughts that you’ve never considered before.

……

Laura: We’re delighted to introduce Professor Sonia Livingstone. Sonia, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sonia Livingstone: I’m a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and I have been researching how families and children have engaged with the digital world for a long time now since that time meant shifting TV on the VCR. And the fascinating question, where do you put the home computer when it comes home and the tech keeps changing, family life keeps changing, so there’s always more work to do.

Jordan: We, of course, want to talk about your new book, Parenting for a Digital Future, but before we do that, we want to talk about [your] amazing work on young people’s digital rights.

Sonia: Absolutely. I’ve spent so long thinking about children’s risks and opportunities and trying to argue for a balanced approach to what the digital world can offer young people. And focusing on the question of rights has been a kind of new preoccupation. And I would say a pretty steep learning curve for me because, as I introduced myself, I’m a psychologist, not a lawyer. So in the last five to ten years, I’ve talked more to lawyers than I ever have in my life, trying to understand the legal framing of rights. And there’s all kinds of ways of thinking about rights, including political, and more critical, and sociological—but really, I came to the idea of thinking about children’s online risks and opportunities in terms of rights in order to make the normative shift, in order to not only do the research that says this is how it is, but to help argue for this is how it could be better and this is how it should be and what should be done.

I work in relation to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which nearly every country in the world is ratified, but arguably the most important one, the one where all the tech companies are headquartered. It’s a real challenge because, pretty much everyone I know in the US also thinks children’s rights are important. But in the US, the reason I understand it’s not being ratified is this whole question of children’s rights as parents’ rights, which is a really interesting question when I’m now working in relation to parents trying to do the right thing for their kids.

When it comes down to it, it says: treat kids right, treat them fairly, listen to what they have to say, make a balanced decision. It’s not so difficult. But in the online world, we haven’t been having those conversations. And that’s why the rights thing is really important. We have to have those conversations, including with kids, about what the digital world should be like, because that’s their world, especially now.

Jordan: Absolutely, and of course, it’s such an interesting struggle between thinking about their safety, their freedom, how to protect their data, how to think about the long-term implications of living so much of your childhood on a landscape that’s almost completely digital.

Sonia: For me, one of the really key lessons of COVID-19 is that young people, children, also want to live their lives face-to-face. They also want in-person connections. They want to go outside. They’re complaining about living life online constantly, I think as much as the adults are. They’re getting frustrated.

Yes, they are living their lives more digital than any generation ever; but that doesn’t mean they want it to be only digital. So there are lots of things to balance.

Laura: I know that Roblox, where I’m based, is obviously very much about children’s safety, privacy, and wanting it to be a healthy and safe place for young kids to be able to hang out and socialize. But because of my career working in online safety and the other side as well, I see that balance of respecting what young people want, but also making sure that those safeguards are in place around them, because we all have a collective responsibility to keep them safe.

Sonia: I think no one, least of all me, is going to argue that kids should not be safe. But one of the things I like about thinking about rights, is it really elaborates all the things that children have a right to—online as well as offline—and without in any way undermining the effort to protect it, puts it in balance.

So, yes, children should be safe online, but they should also be able to have access to any information they want, just like adults, except information that is directly harmful. They should be able to go out and express themselves and meet people, just like they do offline. There’s no reason to limit their rights online. But of course, as soon as we say things like that online, we think, oh my God, there’s pornography, there’s the strangers, there are all the dangers, and we want them to be more constrained online than offline.

So for me, a rights framework is very helpful in just reminding me: the rights apply everywhere. And the UN is beginning to agree. It hasn’t said Internet access is a right, but it has said all the rights offline apply online. It’s one world. It’s one child. The rights are the rights, and they should be upheld.

Jordan: Do you have any speculation for why we seem to think it’s so different?

Sonia: Well, having talked to parents for the book, in a way, I think they fear whatever they didn’t have in their childhood. So it’s not everything new, but it’s the things that seem important to a child. Technology is clearly important to our children. And what so many of the parents said is that when they look back at their childhood and the technology was primitive, or there wasn’t very much, or it wasn’t the same kind of huge complexity that it is today. So that’s part of what makes it scary.

I don’t think that mass media headlines help, because they create so much panic. There are all those headlines, [like] “there’s a pedophile in your child’s bedroom” or “the internet is awash with pornography.” When I talk to children, most have not had a bad experience, and many have not had even a risky experience. People have this very exaggerated view of how scary the world is.

But the other thing the headlines do is they also blame the parents. “You should be watching your child every minute.” “If anything goes wrong, you’re the one that gave them the technology. You’re the one that wasn’t watching.” So parents feel kind of guilty in anticipation of something going wrong. They feel that they should be on top of their child the whole time, which is why the child’s right to privacy is actually becoming one of the really contentious and important rights today.

Laura: I remember going years back when we first started working together, Sonia, the work you did on the EU Kids Online project, [having] conversations with children and parents across Europe. Now that’s actually Global Kids Online, and that sort of research is still ongoing. Were there any highlights or things coming out of that you feel have changed or are significant?

Sonia: With the EU Kids Online Network, our big achievement really was to survey European children. We surveyed 25,000 European children in 2010. We didn’t survey 25,000 children again until… well the report just came out this year, 2020. Most of the risk figures are up, and that’s super depressing and worrying.  But also access is up, children’s personal ownership of technology is up, their digital skills are a bit higher.

What we’ve always found in our research is that the risk goes up when the opportunities go up. And that’s the hard thing for parents and I think for policymakers to get their head around, because if you try to minimize the risks, you lose the opportunities. And children don’t develop skills, and then they don’t become resilient, and they don’t figure it out for themselves. And I don’t know how they’re ever going to become competent adults online because nothing happens at 18 that just makes the difference. So parents know in their heart, and educators do as well, that kids have got to have the experience and, fall over online, make some mistakes online, pick themselves up and figure it out themselves online. All those things that we understand in the playground, they’ve got to happen online, but it’s too scary.

In Global Kids Online where we’ve gone beyond Europe, and we’re really trying to focus on doing research in low-income countries, there are just so many other factors. It’s really brought home to me how important the Internet is as a source of information for many children in low-income countries. They don’t have the books instead, they don’t have the library around the corner instead, maybe they don’t even have a school with teachers. But now, bizarrely really, they may have access for a time to a mobile phone that can give them access to the world’s information and the best libraries in the world.

So I think the right to information in a low-income country is something really important. Kids are not just looking up game cheats, and fun stuff like football scores. They are looking up health information, they’re looking up information about how to help their family cope and survive in difficult circumstances. And that’s just so interesting to think, ‘how do we enable that more?’

Read about the Parenting for a Digital Future event hosted by the Cooney Center in July 2020.

Jordan: I want to move on to the book. It’s called Parenting for a Digital Future. One of the things that I found really fantastic about it is the sociology lens – there’s so much that’s a phenomenological description of what it means to parent right now. And it describes that with the actual experience, with all the variations, across different people, different kinds of people and also similarities, of course. It was really refreshing to read [a parenting book] that was really describing the situation rather than being completely prescriptive.

Sonia: As I hope you can tell, it was a book researched and written with a lot of commitment, and commitment to really getting inside homes and understanding parents’ perspectives. I should mention my co-author Alicia Blum-Ross at this point. Alicia and I really wanted to go into homes, and just listen to parents, and then be a conduit for their voice and what they wanted to say. There was a point in the middle of writing the book, where we just felt: they’re all so different, we can’t write this book because every family is so different. And then we worked harder on finding some commonalities because the parents in some ways are facing some very similar challenges, even though they respond differently.

I hope one of the empowering things for parents is just to see that lots of different responses are possible. You don’t have to always look over your shoulder and say ‘they’re doing it that way, so I should feel guilty if I’m not doing it that way, and I must try harder to be like everyone else’ because people are making sense of this digital world in ways that make sense to them in their world; according to their values, their priorities, their interest. There are lots of different ways of living.

Laura:  [When] trying to look at how parents are actually dealing with it, were there a couple of similarities that you can share with us?

Sonia: We think about parenting practices in terms of three genres, which we call: embracing a digital future, resisting a digital future, and then finding some kind of balance. And it seemed important to say these are not types of parents. So parents might do all of these things, or they might have a preference. But they’re practices in the culture and practices that parents can choose from. And they do reflect on their choices quite a lot in the book.

One might be an embracing parent and one might be more inclined to resist, and they find a way to balance together. But it also varies according to parents’ own interests and expertise. So we have some really geeky parents or parents of really geeky kids, and they love technology. I can think of one, Dannie, who I’ve talked about a lot, who just embraced the whole digital world: “the geeks will inherit the earth!” she said. “‘The digital is the future. And I want to get my kids there!” And she equipped the house. She wired up the computers. She got the kids all playing Minecraft. She sent them challenges. She loved it, and so the kids loved it.

And that’s so different from parents who are saying, “Well, you know, we’re more sporty. We want to have the outside world as well. But we understand they like technology for downtime, even maybe for family downtime when the family can kind of come together after everyone doing different things outside all day.” For some families, that was the norm. And then for them, technology was about coming back and sitting on a sofa together and sharing something on the telly, but people might be on their phone as well. So different kinds of balance.

What I’ve learned from yoga is: balancing is hard. Balancing is a constant effort, adjusting this way, adjusting that way. It’s not just doing the thing in the middle. Parents are always kind of watching their kids, wondering ‘has that been too long. Is this okay? Are they coping with that? Should I do a bit more of the other?’ It’s effortful and exhausting. And that’s what we saw parents doing.

Another of my colleagues, Amanda Third, has just written a book with her colleagues called Control Shift. And in that book they argue, ‘let’s give up on these metaphors.’ It’s not a battle with our kids. Control is the wrong idea.

In our book, we work with the idea of what Tony Giddens has called the democratic family. You know, parents are not the autocratic you-will-do-what-I-said-because-I-said-so kind of parents. No one wants to be that kind of parent. Parents want to be parents who listen to their kids, who respect their children’s views and their different interests and try to find a way of bringing it together. But it’s demanding.

One of the arguments we make is that it’s because somehow we’ve made so much of what we’re trying to do with our kids about the technology; what they want to learn, or who their friends are, or how they spend their time, suddenly all become a discussion about technology. We had those wrangles with the kids 20 years ago or 40 years ago, it was just, “you can’t go out looking like that”, or “who your friends”, or “where are you going exactly.” There’s always been those wrangles, but now parents try to do it without being autocratic, and the technology makes it all so much harder because when the kid is on a phone, you can’t see who their friends are. So it’s hard for parents. I appreciate that.

Jordan: Sometimes when I’m doing research, I go back and I find books from 20 or 30 years ago and they were saying almost the same thing, slightly different technological context, but almost making the same arguments. Where are we going to be in the future? Where do we put our focus, so we make sure that 20 years from now it’s not the same conversation, it’s not the same concerns? Or maybe we should just shift altogether to a whole different conversation.

Laura: Maybe stop talking about screentime.

Jordan: [laughs] We all agree on that one! [laughs]

Sonia: So when I began the Global Kids Online work, it was informally dubbed a repeat of a really famous study that was done at LSE in the late 1950s by Hilde Himmelweit and her colleagues, which is when television first arrived. And that book, which is called Television and the Child, was incredibly influential in my work and lots of others. It was published in 1958 about the arrival of television, and so much of it could have been written today. The arguments the parents are having with their kids and the worries about the content and the violence, and is the school work getting done.

So we could either say we’re getting nowhere because we keep making the same arguments, or we could say these are the life struggles, and actually contrary to some of the hyperbole, not everything is changing all the time. These are the life struggles and we have to research them now thinking about whatever today’s digital tech companies are and the struggles there, what the parents aspirations are.

So many things about families are changing. I’m researching with families of all different ethnicities and cultural preferences, which wasn’t the case then. So the story changes. One thing that is really strikingly different from before is that I think until about the last few years, all these ways in which children engage with media, it was sort of optional. It was leisure. They could take it or they could leave it. You could be a parent who says, I’m turning it off. We’re not having it. And what we really understood, I think, during COVID, but going forward, I think forever, is there is no turning off anymore.

The transformation now is that the kids have got to engage with it. And that’s why we’ve got to help them make it safer and we’ve got to make them more digitally literate. And we’ve got to address the wider ways in which society deploys technology because it’s not optional anymore.