John Palfrey

John Palfrey is one busy guy, with an impressive gig. In 2008, he was named the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. And when he’s not teaching courses on intellectual property and Internet law, there’s a good chance he’s overseeing the L school’s research library. Palfrey, along with Urs Gasser, executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is coauthor of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Basic Bks., 2008). To find out what young people really think about the technology that surrounds them, the two researchers spent a few years interviewing about 250 teens worldwide. They also talked with parents, teachers, librarians, and other adults who work with kids to discover their take on this brave new digital terrain.

If you’re planning to attend the American Association of School Librarians’ (AASL) national conference (November 5–8 in Charlotte, NC), you’d better grab a copy of Born Digital. It’s already been tapped as AASL’s “One Book, One Conference” selection, ensuring its place as one of the most talked-about titles of the year among media specialists. We caught up with the library director/law prof/wunderkind (he’s only 36) in Cambridge, MA, where he lives with his wife, Catherine, and their two young children, Jack and Emeline. What inspired you to study digital natives? It really came about from three different perspectives. As a relatively new and young law teacher, I noticed that the kinds of techniques we use in the classroom were clearly changing, and the way in which students were interacting with information and with one another was changing, too. A second perspective is thinking about it as a librarian. In so many aspects of studying the Internet, all roads seem to lead to libraries and librarians as a very important constituency and important players in all of this. And as a parent—I have two young children, one seven and one four—I came to this in a way through a debate, if not a dispute, with my wife about how to raise our kids in a digital age. She’s an early childhood education specialist and has strong views about limiting screen time. As somebody who studies using new technologies, I’m eager to impart the skills to them to navigate this world well. So it was apparent that not only are there abrupt changes occurring in usage patterns, but also there’s a lot of disagreement as to what is the right thing to do. I’ve heard a lot of parents and educators say, “I’m not a digital native. You can’t expect me to learn new tech skills.” Have you run into that? I’m not a huge fan of the term “digital natives.” We didn’t come up with it, but we decided to embrace it and, in essence, to try to give it some resonance that would work with the data that we were finding. I think it’s constructive as a way to talk about the differences between digital natives—those of us like you and I who are involved in building the digital world—and digital immigrants, those people who come to it much later in life and who often struggle with the parlance and the interfaces. Part of what we were trying to do with this book was to show that the gulf actually isn’t so wide, in really fundamental ways, between the most native of digital natives and the most troubled of digital immigrants. What joins these communities are the same old values that have always joined us, and the fact that we use technology differently or relate to information or one another differently doesn’t mean that we can’t have a conversation. What do you say to people who insist they can’t relate to the digital world? My response to those who feel like they are too far out of the game to ever engage in this brave new world is to say that’s entirely false. In fact, it’s very important, particularly to the extent that you are teaching young people as an educator or teaching them as a parent or spending time with them as a peer in any way. You do have to engage with technology to some extent in order to have a meaningful relationship. Very often, these young people, these digital natives, will be glad to be your guides. You don’t have to be up to speed with the latest technologies, and it’s not that you have to turn over your life to a digitally mediated environment or way of living completely. It’s simply that there may be interesting things that these young people can show you, and there may be interesting things that you can do with these technologies. danah boyd, one of your Harvard colleagues, has written that online places often serve as hangouts for today’s kids. On the other hand, you discovered that many digital natives had experienced information overload. So is the Internet a comfortable haven or a source of information anxiety for young people? The notion of the hangout is completely right to me. The way that young people are interacting with information and one another is very much immersed in this media space. They are quite comfortable while they’re in it, and there’s a very strong sense of discomfort when they leave it. We’ve heard many instances in our research of people who went on vacation for a week without their mobile device or access to Facebook and how disconnected and uncomfortable they felt. Will there be a long-term fatigue associated with having all of this information available and accessible over a long period of time? We simply don’t have data about what the long-term impact of living in this very different way will be. You found that most digital natives think it’s fine to download digital information and music—even if that means ignoring the copyright law. From a legal perspective, does that frustrate you? I see two phenomena, which I think are related but distinct. Phenomenon number one is the extent to which young people perceive that while unlawful, it’s somehow OK to download music in which you don’t have a copyright interest. Secondly, that young people don’t have very much of a sense of the law, of what it means to be able to reuse this content in creative ways, to use it as part of education, to use it as part of civic activism, and so forth. It’s the second of these two that from an educational perspective strikes me as more important for us to encourage. So my frustration actually is with this weird dynamic: on the one hand, where they do more or less understand the law, they flout it, and where they don’t understand the law, they don’t take advantage of the ways in which it enables them to do interesting and important things. Do you think that’ll change? There’s a possibility that over the long term enough constructive education could get young people to be accountable for their actions in the sense of paying for their music and movies and also engaged in a positive way in reusing these materials creatively. We haven’t tried it seriously. We’ve tried very heavy-handed, moralistic campaigns about what you can’t do under the copyright laws, and we’ve tried litigation, bashing people over the head. We haven’t tried something that’s embedded in a curriculum in a constructive way that might be compelling. That’s my preferred approach. Thousands of school librarians will soon be reading and discussing Born Digital. Is there a particular question or issue that you hope they’ll explore? One of the interesting things that we don’t talk about enough in the Internet era is the extent to which if we want to fix something about the digital environment, we can just do that. One thing that always bugs me is why didn’t academics or librarians invent Wikipedia? I understand there are laws and concerns associated with Wikipedia, but it’s quite wonderful, and we certainly are learning a lot from it. Is there a challenge you’d like to issue to librarians? I think the challenge to the school librarian community would be: What should we build next together that would help create the digital library of the future, the digital library of Alexandria that many of us have hoped would emerge and hasn’t yet? And what could we do if we simply put our hands together and said, “Let’s start coding. Let’s start building something that’s a constructive, positive learning environment where young people can create knowledge, access it, share it, and engage with information in the way that we feel they ought to but where it’s not yet happening”? What surprised you most about the study? The number-one surprise was we expected to find more of the really good stuff happening than we found. For example, the creative use of the materials in the context of remix, of creating interesting, creative videos on YouTube, which take a cultural issue or object and remake it in their own image. There’s some of that to be sure, and it’s wonderful when it happens. It just wasn’t widespread in the small sample that we had. You can’t extrapolate too far, but my sense from looking at other data is there’s a lot of small-scale creativity, the kinds of creativity that mean creating a profile on MySpace or Facebook, participating in an online conversation. But there’s less of the really remarkable forms of creativity of the remix variety, and I wanted to see more of that. So, in part, my hypothesis about wonderfulness hasn’t quite fully played out in that way. What else didn’t you expect? We were looking for young entrepreneurs, the next founders of Facebook or YouTube or even Napster. Again, we found glimmers of this, but it’s not a widespread practice from our sample. One of the great promises of these technologies is that they can allow young people to get more engaged in civic life than ever before. We certainly have seen in the [Howard] Dean campaign, and then the Obama campaign, a real enthusiasm for this idea that young people will get more involved in politics because of technology. I didn’t expect to find that exactly. I think the interest drives the use of the technologies, not the other way around, but we didn’t find in our sample a huge groundswell of young people using these technologies for civic engagement. So the surprise really was to say the things that we think are so terrific about these technologies aren’t as widespread as we would like them to be, and that simply means that we need to redouble our efforts to focus on what’s great here and then to mitigate the bad parts. Is there anything you wish you could revise or update in Born Digital? We made one embarrassing error in referencing John Dewey instead of Melvil Dewey. A large number of librarians have pointed this out to us as an amusing tidbit. But it’s the only important typo that we found in the first edition. One of the things I would want to be asking about is the rise of Twitter. Online grown-ups in particular seem to be taking to Twitter very quickly. It’s taken on an important cultural place, but I think it skews to an older audience. That’s my informal sense. There have been a number of reports saying young people sign up for and then don’t use Twitter. This is something that I would love to go back and examine. Any last thoughts you’d like to share? I think the message broadly to librarians is that there is a greater, not lesser, role for professionals in this area as the digital age grows. And the more engagement that librarians have with young people in guiding them through this information environment, the better. The more we as library directors or librarians can listen to the practices of young people in these environments, the better off we’ll be in terms both of figuring out how to provide services and figuring out what things we need to correct. I think that kind of listening process is something that’s important and that the technologies themselves are pretty good at facilitating it. So to me, that’s the punch line from a librarian perspective.