We are excited to share a new essay collection, openly accessible online, that explores the timely topic of Youth Wellbeing in a Technology-Rich World. This volume is intended to offer a constructive set of responses to current discourse about youth and technology that tends to get bogged down in finger-pointing at tech and fixated on sweeping, one-size-fits-all solutions that may do more harm than good. Below, we share excerpts from the editors’ Introduction.
We have published this collection as an MIT Work in Progress, where we invite readers to dive into the contents and share reactions and comments. The review period will end on September 30, 2024. To share feedback during this period, you will need to create a PubPub account.
Concern over young people’s relationships with technology is not at all new. It has been a regular focus of US public discourse and policy debates ever since young people led adoption of digital and social media in the late 1990s. But these concerns, and adult desire to limit and regulate young people’s technology engagement, have been amplified by the growth of youth mental health issues since the 2010s, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite lack of convincing evidence, a dominant narrative that technology use is driving a teen mental health crisis has taken hold. This narrative has persisted even in the face of a countervailing scientific consensus1;2 and lived experience in how technology is increasingly essential for learning, creation, and social connection. The narrative neglects the diversity among youth in their experiences, dispositions, vulnerabilities, and ways of using technology. It also diverts attention from well-established and critical drivers of wellbeing and mental health problems, including poverty, educational pressure, climate anxiety, hate, and political polarization. To be clear: specific features and uses of technology can amplify or mitigate these stressors. However, these dynamics can’t be understood through a simple narrative of technology addiction or harm, and can’t be resolved through blanket, adult-driven, age-based prohibitions or screen time rules.
As longtime researchers of young people’s lives and uses of digital media, we are committed to uplifting more grounded, textured accounts of the relationship between media and wellbeing.3;4;5;6 We are clear-eyed about both the benefits and challenges that digital and social media can present for youth’s physical health, mental health, social connectedness, learning, and civic development, among other outcomes. But we seek to elevate research that details where, how, when, and especially for whom those benefits and challenges manifest. Such research is essential both for public understanding and for technology design, intervention development, and policy.
This essay collection came together as part of a movement to bolster young people’s wellbeing in a technology-rich world. Essays provide readers with relevant, foundational insights from developmental science, sociocultural perspectives, wellbeing research, dignity theory, and more. The collection also describes relevant approaches, methods, and measures (e.g., youth codesign, critical race theory, critical digital literacies) for researching youth wellbeing, as well as constructive design frameworks for technology design, online communities, and interventions.
Insights across the collection make the case for four necessary frame shifts around tech and youth wellbeing:
From Technological Determinism to Social Shaping of Technology
Headlines suggesting that social media or screen time “drives” or “causes” a teen mental health crisis position technology as an independent force with homogenous effects. This approach fails to recognize that technology is both shaped by and shapes society and culture in unequal and heterogenous ways.7;8;9 Technological determinism in this vein is beguiling because it offers a clear villain and positions adults as saviors and young people as incompetent and vulnerable victims in need of protection. It also absolves adult educational and public welfare institutions of responsibility, and deflects attention from well-documented mental health risks such as poverty, racism, homophobia, transphobia, achievement pressure, sexism, and loss. The essays in this volume offer an alternative, unseating technology as an independent agent and recognizing our collective responsibility by examining social and cultural history and context, and the role of diverse actors, including young people, in shaping technology.
From Individual Screen Time to Sociotechnical Drivers of Wellbeing
Understanding technology as inseparable from social and cultural context means recognizing that its shape and influence varies based on context. The essays across this collection underline a parallel core truth about youth wellbeing: it is situated and contextual, shaped by developmental forces and diverse factors – social, cultural, and environmental – that play out uniquely based on setting and for youth with different backgrounds and dispositions. The essays take on board the specifics of young people’s inner lives and contexts beyond their screens – as well as dynamics that cut across online and offline life; identify the wellbeing impacts (both positive and negative) of tech defaults, design features, and specific technology-supported activities; and highlight particular qualities of communities (both offline and online) that are instrumental to youth wellbeing.
From One-Size-Fits-All to Tailored, Asset-Based Solutions
Recognizing how technology experiences vary among youth with different backgrounds and dispositions means resisting one-size-fits-all solutions and interventions. Much of the public discourse on teens and tech suggests that all teens share common tech predilections and risks; that they are all “digital natives” addicted to their phones and games. Such narratives fail to recognize the profound disparities in who dominant platforms are designed for, whether due to the algorithms of anti-Blackness (Tanskley) or the ways in which platforms ignore the particular developmental needs and social contexts of children and adolescents (Reich et al.; Radesky). The authors in this volume argue collectively for design and interventions that maximize autonomy and agency, tailored to the unique strengths of particular groups of children and adolescents. This can be understood as an “asset-based” orientation, which recognizes that young people and other marginalized and oppressed groups have unique strengths, and should not be understood by their deficits that need to be “fixed” by adults and more privileged groups.
From Top-Down to Community-Driven, Participatory Design
An asset-based orientation means a shift from top-down, adult-driven approaches to technology and policy design towards approaches driven by young people’s knowledge, agency, agendas, and expertise. This orientation begins with a recognition grounded in youth-centered research: that young people have knowledge, skills, and perspectives often inaccessible to adults, particularly when it comes to new media and technology. This volume features essays that describe critical, humanizing, and participatory approaches that bring youth expertise to the table, in ways that acknowledge and remediate structural inequalities and power dynamics between adults and youth.
Overview of the Volume
The four frame shifts around technology and youth wellbeing described above are cross-cutting themes in this collection. We believe these evidence-driven and equity-oriented frameworks should inform related research, tech design, and policy debates, and offer a challenge to a well-meaning but often misguided dominant narrative.
The volume is organized according to three forms of research and design practice.
Section 1 – “Understanding Young People’s Experiences with Digital Technology” includes essays focused on empirical research on young people’s engagement with digital media. The section starts with an essay by Jenny Radesky on Digital Wellbeing in Early Childhood. Sophia Choukas-Bradley offers an overview and analysis of research on adolescents, and the relationship between social media use and body image. The essay by Bradley Kerr and colleagues unpacks the implications of using different kinds of social media use measures for our understanding of the relationship between adolescent mental health and wellbeing. Complementing the essays in this section focused on the field of psychology, Vikki Katz and Luna Laliberte offer a qualitative, sociocultural look at college student experiences with technology during a specific historical period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Section 2 – “Dismantling the Default Setting” includes essays with a critical analytic perspective that diagnose prevalent design biases and offer alternatives. Tiera Tanksley applies a critical race approach to tech design and offers a vision for empowering Black youth to (re)design technologies in abolitionist directions. Cherise McBride and Earl Aguilera take on ed tech design, distilling humanizing principles to guide both the design of technologies and their use in educational contexts. In their essay, Monica Clark and colleagues highlight humanizing collegial pedagogies that support young journalists’ reporting on, with, and for wellbeing. Finally, taking a developmental lens, Stephanie Reich and colleagues argue against one-size-fits-all design and for approaches to defaults that meet youth where they are and lend them more control over their digital experiences.
Section 3 – “Co-Developing Solutions with Young People” focuses on efforts to design technologies, stories, and educational programs that grow from the assets, wisdom, culture, and perspectives of diverse young people. In their essay, Katie Salen Tekinbaş and colleagues describe design features of “care(full)” online communities created by and for youth. In Emily Weinstein and colleagues’ account, teens’ perspectives, pain points, and wisdom directly inform the design of interventions to bolster their wellbeing as they engage with social media apps. Young people’s experiences with cruel relational dynamics both offline and online inform Tijana Milosevic and colleagues’ efforts to design effective anti-cyberbullying interventions. Similarly, in Linda Charmararan and colleagues’ essay on action research in the context of a youth advisory board, youth expertise is centered toward the design of relevant digital wellbeing interventions.
Read the essays here and sign up for a PubPub account here to share your feedback.
References
- Odgers, Candice L., and Michaeline R. Jensen. 2020. “Annual Research Review: Adolescent Mental Health in the Digital Age: Facts, Fears, and Future Directions.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 61(3):336-348.
- Orben, Amy, and Andrew K. Przybylski. 2019. “The Association Between Adolescent Well-being and Digital Technology Use.” Nature Human Behaviour 3(2):173-182.
- Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson. Living and Learning with New Media: A Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
- Ito, Mizuko, Crystle Martin, Rachel Cody-Pfister, Matthew H, Rafalow, Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Amanda Wortman. 2018. Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning. New York: NYU Press.
- Ito, Mizuko, Candice Odgers, Stephen Schueller, Jennifer Cabrera, Evan Conaway, Remy Cross, and Maya Hernandez. 2020. Social Media and Youth Wellbeing: What We Know and Where We Could Go. Irvine, CA: Connected Learning Alliance.
- Weinstein, Emily, and Carrie James. 2022. Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (and Adults are Missing). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
- Pinch, Trevor J., and Wiebe E. Bijker. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other.” Social Studies of Science 14(3):399-441.
- Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857020277
Post by Carrie James and Mizuko Ito
Carrie James is Carrie James is Co-Director of Project Zero and Managing Director of the Center for Digital Thriving at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is Director of the Connected Learning Lab and Professor in Residence and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair in Digital Media and Learning in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.
