Distract Teens From Net Danger With Net Engagement

This is a guest post by Alex Steed who at 25 years old, is a product of the net generation. Since his teens, Alex has used writing to explore global social change movements and youth engagement. He is executive editor of MakeSomethingHappen.net, where he writes about online organizing and the power of collective action.

Paranoia is futile. Because I trust the network that helped raise me, as archaic as we will remember it in ten years time, I am excited, not scared, for a new generation of kids raised online.

Sure, my hyper-connected upbringing wasn’t perfect, and once in a while I am surprised I survived it. I had a couple of internet relationships that turned into ill-fated face-to-face meetings that were poignant learning experiences about meeting people online. Despite these sketchy experiences, I am still excited for all young people engaged online. The internet has the power to positively engage youth on a global level.

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When I got my first computer, my father, then in his 60s and freshly divorced from my mother, figured the computer was like a school in a box. The hours a day I spent online was time devoted to education. He had no idea how to double click and he sure as hell had no idea that the glowing box was a portal to the outside world. The aforementioned “incidents” did not happen because he was was careless; they happened because he trusted the all-knowing education machine I was glued to nearly ever minute of every day. He wasn’t all wrong.

My father’s belief in the computer as an education hub wasn’t as misguided as it could have been. Having dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to fight in the Korean War, he was often of little help with matters relating to school. Challenged with an essay contest during my sophomore year, I turned to an Internet message board community for help with the editing my submission and with that essay I won a scholarship to go to a state leadership camp. There, I learned about engagement and volunteerism. Afterward, I re-prioritized my recreational activities; I stopped shop-lifting and smoking pot and I put my effort into fundraising and volunteering. That camp—and that message board—changed the direction of my life for the better.

Empowered by my experience offline, I took my newfound confidence online. I learned about politics that were contrary to those native to the rural area I grew up in and found talking points to use against the white supremacists I worked with at a local restaurant. I had email exchanges with political activists I had met in the nearest cities and they helped me form more open opinions. With the eventual advent of music sharing (I could download a 3 minute punk song in a short 25 minutes!), I would hear music impossible to find on the radio, thus exposing myself to cultures unfamiliar to a kid from the country. I learned about straight-edge culture, something wholly alien at my high school, when I was most susceptible to getting into the drunk driving accidents/fights common among my peer group. I became cultured and worldly in a pre-9/11 world.

It is for this reason that I am excited for these millennials, whose activities I both study and am endlessly inspired by, who have the world at their finger-tips. At its most hyped and unattended, the Internet can be exactly what I took it for: an unmonitored and unregulated Pandora’s Box. At its best, it is all-empowering and all-engaging—a distraction from its own alternative shady allure. The same way positively preoccupied youths have less time or incentive to do drugs or have risky sex, teens busy with fundraising for Myanmar, rallying for Tibet, fundraising for the church, or informing about issues close to their hearts, have less time or incentive to engage with the monstrous, wild-eyed perverts we’re all sort-of scared are praying on the youth. With a little more direction from my parents, I might have had less dark experiences and engaged in ones that were more constructive, but who really knew back then? We were all experimenting, readying the plane for the next batch.

Now we have some sort of idea what teenagers are capable of and it is in all of our best interests to positively engage them and to step back a bit, so as to not let our outmoded ideas of what change is or how it functions, or our over-hyped concerns and paranoia, stand in the way of their potential. If we challenge them on their own terms, checking in and answering and asking questions from time to time, not only will we have less reason to worry, we might learn a thing or two for ourselves.

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Alex Steed is a freelance journalist, Internet communication consultant, and activist based in Boston, Massachusetts. He currently serves as executive editor of MakeSomethingHappen.net, where he writes about online organizing and the power of collective action. Since his teens, Alex has used writing to explore global social change movements and youth engagement. He has directed or worked with youth media projects including Blunt Youth Radio, Just Naive Enough, Angioplasty Media, and Hip Hop Without Borders. In the past several years, he has enjoyed varying levels of involvement with the Northwestern Global Engagement Summit and Maine Youth Leadership. He is presently in the process of developing a cross-country study of millennial-activism. He can be found at: http://alexsteed.com/