Today, some things about teens and their digital and connected lives are given. We expect that teens will be active on social media, performing the aspirational self, sharing their lives with peers, and commenting on the latest episode in a pop culture universe that plays out like a reality TV show. While the platforms continue to change, teens’ enthusiasm for constructing their own identities and aspirations, sharing their lives, and connecting with peers via digital media remains steadfast. But we have also come to expect something else, as Jacqueline Vickery meticulously details in this wonderful book—we have come to “expect harm.”
The very fact that we expect that teens will inflict pain on each other, will only be interested in viewing content that adults find objectionable (and that sometimes is), and will suffer immeasurably from their engagement with digital media says a lot about the world that adults have both imagined and, unfortunately, realized for young people. The “risk discourse,” as we learn in this book, is a regime of institutionalized power and a flourishing industry that shapes distinct policy formations, school-based approaches to digital media and learning, parenting practices, and a media industry that turns teens’ adoption of technology into primetime scripts of despair, doom, and even death. If we are to believe what we are repeatedly told by the risk industry, young people are a generation at risk and need the adults in their lives—parents, teachers, mentors, and politicians—to protect them from themselves and the harm that awaits them in the digital media world.
But Vickery pulls a jujitsu maneuver in this fascinating inquiry into the digital media lives of teens. Rather than ask “How do the risks that kids encounter through their engagement with digital media promote harm?” she asks “What if we see risk as an opportunity?” It is a brave question and one that resonates throughout this meticulous study of young people’s digital media practices.
What really stands out about her analysis is the degree to which it is punctuated by the voices and lived experiences of young people who rarely figure in public discourses about teens, technology, and risk. Think about it. Whose voices and life experiences inform policy decisions related to teens, technology, and risk? As you read this book it is clear that youth labeled “at risk” or “disadvantaged” are seldom if ever genuinely considered in the policy prescriptions advocating risk avoidance and protection.
In a carefully woven ethnography and cultural critique, Vickery focuses her knack for detailed research and nuanced analysis on the lives of our most vulnerable youth. This, quite frankly, is a revelation. It is also a breakthrough perspective that has much to offer those who consider her ideas and provocations. What happens when we think about risk, harm, and opportunity from the perspective of young people often marginalized by society? How does the risk discourse suddenly shift and compel us to rethink the very terms, norms, and expectations that power the risk industry? In Vickery’s account the lives and voices of these young people ring loud and clear. We learn about their aspirations and their frustrations. We see how their social and media ecologies have been transformed by the adoption of social and mobile media. Even though disparities in the digital world persist, we also see how young people bring ingenuity and aspirations to their digital media practices. In this book we see how educational and digital disparities as well as restrictive policies related to digital media continue to matter, but in ways that educators and policy makers seldom think about.
As she maneuvers expertly around a conventional wisdom that is often guided by sensational headlines and adult-driven fears rather than empirical evidence and youth-driven experiences, Vickery asks us to think about the unintended consequences of the risk discourse on non-dominant youth. Much of the risk discourse, by default, imagines privileged youth. As a result, educators, policy makers, and media industries seldom think about the implications of the “risk equals harm” perspective for young people on the margins. And yet, as Vickery reminds us, these young people stand the most to lose in current formulations of risk.
This book is a provocation that challenges our very notion of youth and digital media culture and, consequently what is really at stake as young people struggle to find dignity and opportunity in the world. While reading this book you are likely to ask yourself questions that have either remained dormant or simply not been articulated for far too long: What are the unintended consequences of “protecting” young people from participation in the digital world? How do discourses of risk and the risk avoidance regime reproduce social and educational inequalities? How can schools empower young people to leverage technology as agents of change rather than exist as passive victims of the technologies they use?
Our schools are built almost entirely on the idea of technologies as risk. This explains why our schools block social media, offer technology courses that are more vocational than educational, and do very little to support learning opportunities that promote higher-order digital literacy and civic agency. It explains why our schools invest in curricula that restrict young people’s engagement with technology instead of curricula that would empower their engagement with the digital world. It is hard to believe, but more than twenty years after the Internet first came into our classrooms we still look at the technology through a lens of suspicion and stress rather than trust and courage.
The risk discourse is a pervasive narrative and gives shape to a regime of power, influence, and control that is dispersed across many fields, including schools, the policy-making apparatus, and media and pop culture. The risk discourse from this view emerges as controlling, class-biased, and likely injurious to many of the children and teens it purports to protect. The risk industry is dangerous because it encourages us to worry about some things (i.e., addiction, porn, harm) and not other things (i.e., digital literacy, equity, and opportunity). After reading this book you are likely to think that the risk industry is an enterprise that, in the end, may be doing more harm than good. We learn from Vickery that the real risk, indeed the ultimate risk, is the reproduction of social, economic, and digital inequality. A generation of young people are coming of age in schools and a society that, in the name of protecting them, may actually be limiting their prospects for developing the skills, competences, and networks that are the true currencies of opportunity in a knowledge-driven culture and economy. What do we really block when we block children’s and teens’ access to networked media? What harm do we inflict when we build institutions that fail to build young people’s confidence and competence in the digital world? Answers to these questions represent the most profound and enduring risks to our children, and by extension, our ability to create what Vickery envisions: a safer, healthier, more equitable digital future.
If you are a parent, an educator, a media maker, or a policy maker, you would do well to heed Vickery’s call to think about these questions and about the harm that the risk industry is causing our kids and our culture. Harm-driven expectations do not just inspire fear. These expectations also provoke the design of spaces, practices, and policies that rob young people of their agency and disables their capacity to develop vital skills for a world gone digital. By contrast, Vickery explains how “opportunity-driven expectations” and the discursive possibilities that they inspire can provoke the design of spaces, practices, and policies that enable young people to develop the agency and skills that will serve them well in the digital age.
After you have read this book, the very framework that you use to think about teens, technology, and risk will likely be transformed. You are almost certain to ask how our schools, families, communities, and civic sphere would be different if digital media were to be treated as a “technology of opportunity” rather than a “technology of risk.” You will ask yourself “What are we overlooking in terms of risk and opportunity?” More important, this book also compels you to ask “Who are we overlooking?” This is the question that our institutions—schools, families, policy, and pop culture—must begin to ask and courageously address if we are to ever establish a social framework for thinking in more nuanced ways about what is at stake for young people and about the ongoing struggle to create more equitable forms of agency and participation in our world.
S. Craig Watkins