Into the Digital Future: Understanding the “Missing Middle” with Michael Preston

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.