Into the Digital Future: Finding Balance in the Digital Future with Sonia Livingstone

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?’

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.