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Youth Work in a Digital Age
But that's not what this is about. My questions aren't to do with what we'll be doing with technology in the distant future, but how we're using what's already here, or about to arrive, right now. Christian youth work has often adapted to the 'new' long before the rest of the congregation, as we've heard Paul's call, in 1 Corinthians 9, to engage with the world and its culture. ‘I have become all things to all men’ he says, ‘for the sake of the gospel.’ In that era it meant that Paul engaged with the Greek and Roman cultures he was in, being able to sit and talk knowledgeably with the Athenians or Ephesians. These days, perhaps he'd be a dab hand at texting and posting his thoughts on his own Bebo page. One of the reasons new innovations are so hard to predict is the speed at which they arrive and become part of their lives. Cast your mind back to December 2005 when Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim launched a video sharing website called 'YouTube'. By the summer of 2006, just a matter of months later, there were 100 million video viewings every day! At the last count, the site was hosting 69 million videos. And, of course, the same astonishing rates of growth apply to the likes of MySpace, Facebook and a host of other web-based phenomenons. That speed has, I suspect, caught us out. Culture has always changed, but often at a pace that gave us time to reflect on it’s practical and spiritual implications. It was 125 years before the landline telephone reached a billion users. It took just 21 for the mobile phone, and only 3 more years to reach the second billion. The sheer pace of new technology is now leaving us, as youth workers, trying to catch up. There are two issues at stake here. One is figuring out how all these new technologies impact the practice of youth work: like how we'll use social networking sites to work with teenagers and, if so, how we'll develop safe and appropriate ways of working in such unknown territory. But beyond that there's also a question about how young people themselves are going to be affected by the advent of this new digital world. For example, what difference to the formation of a young person's identity does it make to be able to create an entirely different virtual identity online? What happens if the invented self becomes more ‘real’ than the real self? Like Zhang Xiaoyi, a thirteen year old from China who jumped to his death last year after playing for hours online to ‘join the heroes of the game he worshipped.’ What's new?Ten years ago most of us didn't own a mobile phone. Now over 90% of twelve years olds are inseparable from theirs. Recent research hinted at a drop in smoking among teenagers because the mobile has replaced cigarettes as a means of gaining status among peers. Mobiles are a far more significant technology than computers for young people. That's because most of the industry now expects mobile phones to become the main way teenagers access the internet. Bigger screens, better software and lower rates will make browsing the web on phones the norm. It's especially suited to young people who, according to research, tend to use a surprisingly limited range of web sites: mostly social networking, encyclopaedias, music and games. Many of these already have specially adapted versions to make browsing on smaller screens easier. Teenagers also prefer texting and instant messaging to email, both of which work well on mobiles. The impending arrival of wimax, wifi networks that can cover a few miles instead of a few hundred metres, will make the internet access through phones cheaper and easier. That's only a small bit of what's going to happen to the mobile phone over the next few years. In Japan, they are already used as debit cards: just pass them over a reader and you can pay for goods in a single swipe. Meanwhile, the recent addition of 'Locate Me' to the Apple iPhone is a reminder that mobile companies can use the signal from your phone to find out exactly where you are, to within 20 or 30 metres. After a series of successful trials, advertisers are looking at being able to text you with special offers linked with stores nearby. For example, walking through your local shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon you'll receive a text giving you 20% off in the local GAP store for the next 30 minutes. You get the message because your phone company knows where you are and has done a deal with GAP. Perhaps the most powerful impact of that location technology will be the way it can link up with programmes like 'Messenger', Microsoft's incredibly popular way of talking online with your friends. It means that young people can see who else in their buddy list is nearby, perhaps also in town for Saturday afternoon, and enable them to arrange to meet up. It's already working in major cities in the US. Turns out some of my opening predictions weren't so crazy after all. Of course the big news right now is the exploding world of social networking. While Facebook's demographic tends to be older, Bebo remains king in the UK, though MySpace and Piczo are popular too. A third of teenagers in the UK now have some kind of online profile and that figure is set to soar in the next couple of years. A teenagers credibility is already inescapably linked to how many 'buddies' they have on Messenger while, for the less fortunate, cyberbullying is a growing problem. But something else is happening online that is going to impact young people. Entire worlds are being created and populated in virtual 3D environments. According to companies like MTV, it's the next stage in capturing the attention, and cash, of their teenage audience who they hope will embrace these supercharged virtual experiences to meet and connect with friends. Think of it, in MTV's terms, as 'Pimp my social networking'. Of course, if you're into online gaming, you're already used to roaming strange worlds and interacting with other players who may be sitting somewhere on the other side of the planet. One of the biggest, 'World of Warcraft', has over 10 million subscribers playing an adventure game within the world of Azeroth. Yes, that's right, there are more people playing that one game than the entire population of Greece! But that's old news. What is the happening now is the development of 3D worlds as places for social interaction, business and fun. If you're a younger teen, you'll be into Habbo Hotel (86 millions users worldwide), a cartoonish environment where you create a person (in web-speak an 'avatar') and wonder around different rooms playing games or just chatting to other people who happen to be there at the same time. The best known 3D environment is Second Life, a sophisticated and fast growing immersive environment where you can do pretty much anything you do here in the real world: go shopping, start a hobby, buy and sell, watch TV or even go to church. It might sound fanciful, but the major corporations think it's important enough to be involved. So Reuters has a news bureau, Toyota has a track where you can test drive its cars and the BBC Radio 1 have held a whole music festival on an island in Second Life. A school near me is giving students the chance to see a planned rebuild by creating it first in Second Life. Unlike Habbo Hotel, there's a sophisticated local currency - the Linden Dollar - that can be exchanged for hard cash in the 'real world'. In other words, it's a genuine economy that, by next year, is forecast to have an annual turnover of $7 billion. The prediction by a highly respected research firm, Garnter Research, is that by 2011 four out of five people who use the Internet will actively participate in Second Life or some similar medium. A recent Dutch study found that 57% of Second Lifers spend more than 18 hours a week there, and 33% more than 30 hours per week. Not bad for something that isn't 'real'. As the graphics and technology get better (and that's the big issue right now), companies are predicting that the interaction that takes place through instant messaging and on social networking sites will begin to move into 3D environments. What's interesting is that, just like Second Life right now, young people will be able to create their avatar to be whatever they want: taller, thinner, sexier or even a different sex. You can be what, or who, you want, in this new world. As we'll see, it's both liberating and terrifying in its potential. ‘We are competing with the real world to create a better place for your mind to live.’ says Philip Rosedale, one of the creators of Second Life. Why it mattersSo it turns out that the teenagers we work with are soon going to be holding mobiles that pay for everything from cinema tickets to clothes. And when they're not being used for that, they'll be opening up virtual worlds and connecting them with nearby friends. What on earth are we to make of all this as youth workers? On the one hand, we should remember that youth work is, and always will be, about getting to know young people and sharing our lives and faith with them. That's not going to be different even if you end up holding your youth group meeting on an island in a virtual world somewhere in Cyberspace rather than Coventry. But it would also be foolish to pretend these aren't profound changes to our culture. And that we'll have to think about how dynamics, the content and priorities of youth work are going to be affected by these changes. Here are some of the issues that I've begun to wrestle with as a result. 1. Competing for community A new study by YoungScot highlights the potential threat online communities pose to traditional youth groups, who risk losing out to social networking sites as young people spend more time meeting and talking online than in person. As these sites get more sophisticated, and as 3D environments develop, could we find it harder to attract teenagers to the church hall on a Friday night? Will we have to think about holding our youth group online in a 'Second Life' style world? Remember, what might seem like a strangely unsatisfying way of connecting to adults is where young people can feel most at home. ‘I can be myself more online than in real life’ one lad said to me. It may not all be bad. Might we find more honesty and openness in group discussions that are held virtually than in the 'youth group room' at the back of the church? Whatever the answer, there's no doubt that how young people frame and construct their idea of community is going to be very different in this new digital age. 2. Issues of identity The changes in technology we've talked about enable me to have a 'digital self', the 'me' that exists online in virtual worlds, in chat rooms, and on social networking sites, which may be different to the person I am face to face. That's going to have profound implications for how young people form and express their identity. Perhaps, being positive, it could help. Young people are constantly trying out different versions of themselves with parents and friends: it's part of their journey towards finding their own sense of self. The digital world might provide a safe place explore moral choices or experiment with what the philosopher Pascal calls 'the invented version of the real'. On the other hand, what if my digital self simply panders to, and nourishes, an imagined and distorted 'me'? What if that version of 'me' becomes bigger and more important? Could young people end up disconnected from reality, aided by the visual power of these technologies to find themselves literally 'lost in space', investing all their emotions in an imagined world. It would seem likely. The challenge will be how we can help young people safely explore their sense of self in cyberspace. 3. Consumed by culture The internet is driven by advertising revenue rather than subscription - most things are free provided you're willing to submit to the advertising. But new technology is going to take it to greater levels. The fact that young people are pretty much surgically connected to their mobiles means that they will be at the mercy of advertisers day and night. Targeted texting to phones linked with a young person's location will increase the pressure. The popularity of online gambling among young people is a worrying trend too. How are we going to help teenagers navigate this world and find their identity in Christ? Can the Christian faith offer an alternative life model to consumption? And, in this new digital age, will it be compelling or loud enough? 4. Faith and fantasy Will the Christian faith be broad and relevant and big enough to capture the imagination of young people living in this digital world? As the line between the imagined and the real becomes blurred, will it change how teenagers perceive the Christian story? How do young people find what is real when they live in worlds that may be entirely unreal? Presenting the gospel may need fresh imagination in the digital age. 5. Present in person One of the challenges of much of this new technology is that is takes young people away from the 'present': where they are and what they're doing. Constant texts, phone calls and, in the future, surfing the web, are the bane of every youth worker trying to run a meeting. It's hard to figure out whether to ban phones or simply accept the interference as inevitable. If, like me, you've had to battle with an indignant teen even to get a phone switched off, you'll know what it's like. But this is more than a matter of youth group rules: there's a challenge here, and an opportunity to help young people learn how to be 'present' in a single place, not constantly connected to others elsewhere. Will silence and some of the traditional Christian meditative and reflective practices need to take on new meaning and value in our youth work as a result? 6. Promising to protect Some parents proudly tell me that they're on top of what their teenager is doing online, because they keep the computer in a family room where it can be seen. But even putting aside the fact that it's only a minority of parents who bother to keep computers out of bedrooms, none of that will really matter when mobiles become the way young people surf the internet. Early promises from mobile operators that they could filter content to children's phones have proved less than successful. How do you stop young people from exploring anything anywhere if it's through their phone? I'd like to think youth workers have a vital role to play here: many parents are either disinterested or daunted by how to help, schools don't cover it in the curriculum, so who's going to help young people navigate a world where they can see anything, talk to pretty much anyone and never tell a soul? It's like the Garden of Eden except you get to carry a miniature version of the tree in your pocket. Wherever you go, the temptation is always there. Remember that 90% of 8 to 16 year olds have seen pornography on the internet, either by choice or accident. 7. Interactive not inert In a world where young people are used to creating online content and uploading photos and videos, will we need to rethink how we share and explore faith with them? What should the youth group talk look like in a web 2.0 world. While we've always been good, as youth workers, at involving young people in games and activities, we still nearly always end up with a session where we talk and they listen. I wonder what Christian discipleship looks like through YouTube and Bebo eyes? We'll need to find better ways of interacting without compromising what we want to say. 8. Working with wisdom The speed of change has meant for many youth workers, we haven't had time to think about what is, and isn't, appropriate in the way we interact with young people online. Should we have our own Bebo page? Does it matter if we chat with teenagers through instant messaging? Where are the boundaries in this new digital world? One youth worker I know found himself chatting to young people he'd never met before, simply because they were on the buddy list of some of his youth group. Some of them assumed he was just another teenager and he ended up getting propositioned by a girl. Churches need to begin to develop online policies to make sure we don't find ourselves compromised. Sitting with a bunch of teenagers one evening, I wonder to myself where this is all going. I like to think of myself as pretty 'tech-savvy' but it's not the same as growing up in the as a young person at the heart of this digital revolution. Sam, who's 15, and has clearly figured out I'm not nearly as 'savvy' as I think, puts it like this: ‘You don't get it like us. It's normal. It's the way we live. Online is better than this, I can do more. You're too ancient to get it.’ Thanks Sam. Point taken. Even if you're only a few years older than the young people you work with, they're in a different world to you. And if we want to share and live out the gospel with them, it'll have to be in that world not ours.
Chris Curtis works for the Luton Churches Education Trust and looks much younger in Second Life than in the real world. He's currently presenting 'Totally Wired', a series of events around the UK exploring the impact of the digital world on young people. |
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In the future we'll be able to smell the internet, eat virtual food and use the information superhighway to transport kids to summer camp. We'll also wear clothes surprisingly similar to Star Trek while our phones will tell us if any of our youth group are nearby and automatically invite them over for coffee. Actually not all of that is likely to happen, except maybe the part about mobile phones (more of that later). The truth is predicting the future is a risky business and often ends up embarrassingly wrong, which is why none of us have automatic sliding doors in our homes despite what TV science programmes promised back in the 80's. So any article on the impact of technology that promises that we're going to teleport to youth group meetings in 2030 is probably both silly and irrelevant. ‘I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.’ said Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, in a much-quoted gaff from the early days of the PC. Oops. Not that anyone thought that mobile phones would ever take off outside of big business while, as for text messages, who could have imagined that in December 2007 alone, we would send 6.1 billion of them in the UK? That's about 100 for every single person in the country, including your granny!
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