To Lead or not to Lead-that is the Question

Last week I talked a lot about the organization I work for and how important internal communications can and should be. This week I want to keep that topic going and add a bit more to it. As you’ll recall, I work in higher education, specifically in enrollment management and admissions.  I deal with an external audience daily (students, their family members, their employers, etc.) and recently have been getting adjusted to a new type of internal audience within my organization. If you want to know more about that experience, click here for last week’s post.  Within this internal audience I have noticed that there are some people who work in my organization who are clearly leaders in their departments. They are respected, their opinions are valued. These are the people who you go to when you need advice or help on an issue. They are invaluable members of the team and I, personally, am very grateful to them. Without them, I would not feel as confident with this new internal audience as I have been. But what makes a good leader? Who are these people and what makes them tick? And most importantly, how can we become a good leader ourselves?

According to some folks, a good leader is all about “being forward looking…[this] is the attribute that most distinguishes leaders from non-leaders” (To Lead, Create a Shared Vision.)  I would tend to agree. Leaders are those people who are able to see the “big picture.” These are the visionaries, the ones who can see the finish line before we even know we’re in the race. A quick Google search of “best leaders in America” shows some interesting results.  You have some obvious contenders like Oprah and Bill Gates, but then there are some you might not have ever heard of, like Jeff Bezos and Mohamed Nasheed. What makes a good leader is ultimately this: do they have the ability to not only envision the future but get other people to envision with them? A leader is by definition “the person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country.” And you can’t lead without followers. You have to have people buy in with you in order to lead effectively and to achieve that “big picture.” Yet this is also what leaders struggle with the most. “The data tell us that what leaders struggle with most is communicating an image of the future that draws others in - that speaks to what others see and feel” (To Lead, Create a Shared Vision.)  The best way to connect with people and to get people to buy in with you is to connect with them in the here and now – and you go about doing that through communication. It all comes full circle.

Communication is vital to all aspects of organizational life. Literally everything hinges on it. Without good communication outside or inside your organization, your organization will not thrive as well as it could or should.  This concept is vital. “Arguably more so than resources, policies, or organizational structure, our success or failure boils down to the individuals who lead us and their ability to communicate” (Strategic Leader as Strategic Communicator.)  Good leaders are expert communicators. They are able to tell stories, to relay their passion for whatever dream or goal they have in mind and relay it so well that others want to help them achieve that dream. An example that comes to mind for this is Former President Obama. He was able to articulate his passion and belief in his hope for the future of America. He was able to turn that unified dream of his into a rallying cry of “Yes we can” that lasted for two terms. Even if you don’t agree with him on policy, party, etc. you can’t deny that the man is an expert communicator. Being able to communicate is so crucial for any leader’s success. You have to be able to “educate, inspire, and build advocacy” (Strategic Leader as Strategic Communicator) for your “big picture” within your organization.

We all deal with leaders on a daily basis. Be they our co-workers, bosses, president of your Home Owners Association, or that one mom at PTA, leaders are everywhere. They must be because they are vital to furthering our world into the future. Without leaders where would this world be? Would we have put a man on the moon? Would Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream be a reality? In my organization, the biggest leader in my department is a co-worker. She has been with the company for decades, loves what she does, and does it well. When any of us are feeling down or having a bad day, she is right there to remind us what we are doing this all for – the students. She is a constant pillar of strength for all of us, and we could not look up to her more. Yet she is an admissions counselor by trade, just like me. She doesn’t have a fancy title, a corner office, or a higher salary. She is not a manager, nor is she over anybody. She is the same level hierarchally as the rest of us in the department and yet she is a leader. Too often leadership is confused for management. Management is not leadership, though the two must happen together to truly make any organization great. Management tends to focus on the more day-to-day aspects, the nitty gritty of running an organization – these aren’t the “big picture” people. Too often I think we see organizations who are “over-managed and under-led” (Management is [still] not leadership.)  By focusing on communication, and really harnessing it, we all have the potential in us to be great leaders. We may not all have the charisma of Oprah or the brains of Bill Gates but we all do have the capacity for becoming great communicators – communicators who can tell stories, educate our peers, inspire passion in others to help us achieve whatever “big picture” result we want. What a world we live in, knowing that that’s a possibility for all of us.

Thanks so much for sticking this one out with me! See you all next week!

Internally Yours

In case I haven’t talked about it before, allow me a few moments to give you a little synopsis of my working life. I work for a state university here in Alabama and have done for over 5 years now. I originally started out working in what we call “satellite locations,” smaller locations outside the state of Alabama that housed 4-7 employees and facilitated online learning at the university for students located near the satellite locations. I handled everything from recruitment, to admissions, from testing to graduation. Anything a student who was, say, 3 hours away from the main campus, needed from the university I was their girl. I worked for two different satellite locations with similar operations up until last November. That’s when my now fiancé and I moved to Alabama for his job and I was transferred to our main campus. My job functions are still very much the same. I still help students navigate from recruitment stage, through admissions. But now I don’t have to also focus on graduation and retention. I have an office located in my administration building that handles that. I don’t have to come up with creative flyers for my recruitment events. I have a dedicated department that is able to do that for me now. It’s been quite an adjustment, going from working with the same 4-7 people day in, day out, to working in a building with literally hundreds of employees working on different aspects of student management every day, aspects that before I had handled myself. It’s tested my communication skills and allowed me to see how even though I have worked at this same university for 5 years, I had no idea just how different it is between the out-of-state locations and what goes on at the campus. This week, I wanted to talk a little bit about communication itself, particularly internal communication. I’ve noticed over the last 6 months that I depend on it more and more to get my daily tasks done and have learned so much about different strategies to improve it, if and when the need arises.

Working in higher education, and in management functions within higher education, I can tell you firsthand how important communication is in day to day operations. Without good internal and external communications you lose out on a lot of valuable time. Communication is at the heart of what we do but too often I think we can all get bogged down in the external and lose sight of the internal. Internal is proven to be just as important as external communication, particularly in crisis situations. You have to let your employees know what’s going on often times before the public knows so they can be prepared. But if you don’t have a good foundation for facilitating internal communication you can’t do that effectively.  Having good strategies in place to facilitate internal communication is a key component to ensuring you don’t get bogged down in office “politics” when the time comes to really get down to business. So let’s dive in to some tactics that can help you and yours when and if the time ever comes when you have to re-evaluate how you are communicating within your organization.

First things first…what is your company culture? I think a lot of us when we hear the words “company culture” think about Silicon Valley. Facebook and Google in particular are notorious for their inspiring company cultures (Facebook vs. Google.) They focus not only on the work but on the people they employ- one big aspect of this that you’ll notice is that they trust their employees. They have some of the most amazing benefits packages in the world and everybody knows once you get a job with them you don’t ever leave. These companies have fostered and maintained a company culture that is “a climate of openness that encourages the free flow of communication and information in all directions” (Promoting Internal Communication.) If you have an organization who is secretive, who only tells certain employees what’s going on and expects it to filter down to everybody else, that is not a very open culture. My university is sometimes guilty of this. Certain employees will hear something in a meeting and then the next thing you know that statement has filtered down until it doesn’t even resemble the true statement anymore. Instances like this create panic amongst employees and often lead to poor decisions. Having good systems in place during the training and hiring portions of an employee’s tenure will ensure that good communication and open company culture are promoted. You want people to know right off the bat what their getting themselves into and who and wear to go for correct information.

Secondly, you want to make sure everybody has a chance to be heard. Feedback is a great way to do this at the managerial level. Asking for the type of feedback you want or expect and scheduling specific times when employees can voice that feedback is critical for any organization’s internal audience (Communication and Leadership.) It allows that open company culture to thrive and continue to grow. It also let’s your employees feel like they are valuable members of the organization. Dysfunctional communication is a killer for any organization or company. And as with all things it “occurs the most as the number of people involved grows” (Recognizing Dysfunctional Communications.)  This is something I have been adjusting to in my new location. There are so many more people to interact with daily than there ever were before. I find myself asking “Is this ok?” a lot more than I ever have before. I am still learning what everybody does and asking for feedback about how I am interacting with them and if I am helping or hindering their work has been invaluable. It has helped me strengthen my communication skills and has hopefully helped my coworkers just as much as it has myself.

Last but not least, once you have achieved a good internal communication system or level, you want to maintain it. Constant observation is crucial for maintaining a positive company culture and a positive internal communication experience (Promoting Internal Communication.) Identifying any sticking point that may have occurred recently is a good place to start. Is somebody unhappy at work and self-sabotaging their projects? Is there a system that isn’t working for your company that you thought was working just fine? This has happened to my university in recent months.  A simple process we thought was helping admissions was actually hindering it. Luckily our higher ups were able to recognize that we had a problem and have since been able to re-work the process in a manner that works for all parties involved. Like everything, evaluation is needed and shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly when it comes to communication.

I have really taken these three processes to heart in regards to internal communication and I hope they help you as much as they have me. Have a great week and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Big Fish, Big Pond

Public relations always sounded pretty simple to me in my Freshmen year of college. “It’s just talking to people about your company or organization”, I said. It’s basically just a lot of press release writing and maybe giving a couple of interviews or two a week. No big deal, I thought. By my senior year, I was interning with a county Economic Development office and had no idea what I was about to find myself in. About halfway through my internship, scandal hit. Our Director was facing accusations that she had mishandled and gotten rid of very important documents regarding a local land deal that would prove to have very large implications for the county and its Economic Development. I’m not going to go into details for privacy reasons, but let’s just say she no longer works for the county or anywhere in Economic Development. It was a huge ordeal not only for us as an organization but also for me personally as I had never experienced a crisis like this before. Suddenly I went from writing pretty frivolous press releases and blog posts to typing out transcripts of taped local talk radio interviews with people who were saying pretty negative things about us in the press. These transcripts I later found out were used in the subsequent court case as well as in response interviews given by our Public Relations Director. That experience taught me just how quickly you can go from “OK” to “Oh No” in an organization. And it all started with a negative article in the paper.

I hope you enjoyed that little anecdote because it helps me segue way into our topic this week: Public Relations. I personally majored in Communications/PR in my undergraduate and so I know a few things about how PR works. I also work in a very outreach heavy, Public Relations-esque capacity for my job now.   I recruit and deal directly with Enrollment for a higher education institution. Dealing with students, their families, and their various issues as well as dealing with the general public and their inquiries has made me a much more patient and attentive person. 

One of my campus’s big selling points that makes my job pretty easy: nature trails!

I have also been in charge of certain aspects of social media for my organization before. That job was one of the more stressful if you can believe it. Being responsible for representing my organization was a big task and one that I did not take lightly. I was always aware, and still am, of what is going on with my organization not just internally but outside as well. What did people do before Google Alerts?! I am hyper aware of how my organization is being represented out there in the "big pond" and I think most people with Public Relations backgrounds are. It’s a big piece of the puzzle to making sure that your organization runs smoothly, and is able to maintain itself if crisis hits.

While my organization has been lucky in that we have had no major scandals directly impact us in recent memory, others are not so lucky and need the help of established pros when the time comes. Public Relations is a steadily growing industry. From 2008 to 2009 it increased in revenue by a combined 7% (Why journalists don’t make the best PR pros.)  Public relations practitioners are crucial members of any organization. These are the people who help you not only when your “down and out” but when you’re on top too, to make sure the “down and out” doesn’t stick around forever.  In today’s tech heavy world, that means more and more PR practitioners find themselves on social media almost constantly. All it takes is one blog post, video, or tweet to make a nightmare for your organization. Take SeaWorld for instance. Once the critical documentary Blackfish hit, you were hard pressed to find anything positive about SeaWorld for years to come. They are still feeling the effects well over four years later and have instituted heavy change to maintain what little credibility they have left (Anatomy of “The Blackfish Effect.”) The Blackfish Effect is a lesson to any and all organizations. It might as well be a “how-to” on effectively taking down an organization with a viral campaign. There is truly no protection from social media, no matter how big or small you are. But there are ways to handle your organization’s position and presence on social media so you are ready when and if the time comes.

As strategic communicators we need to be aware of how to handle our position and presence on social media. The big things that I think any strategic communicator should be aware of when handling their organization’s social media platforms are branding, engagement, and learning (Managing Yourself: What’s Your Personal Social Media Strategy?)   Building the personal brand of your organization is crucial. It helps you tell the story about who you are, why you do what you do, and how you do it. It’s the thing that makes you different from all the other fish in the sea and what keeps your audience loyal year and year. Engaging on social media is another huge factor. The whole point of social media is engagement. We want to talk to people rapidly and simultaneously and when we post to an organization we expect a response fairly immediately. PR practitioners have to be aware that whoever is responsible for engagement of their organization’s social media platforms has to be on call 24/7/365. Social media never takes a day off. Learning is another key tenant to managing your organization’s social presence. You can’t just talk to people and expect them not to talk back. Being open to learning about your audience or customers, really hearing what they have to say, and taking those lessons back to the powers that be is a great way to utilize social media to further your organization. It will also serve you well should crisis ever hit. Understanding how your customer thinks and expects to be talked to online is a great indicator of how they expect to be treated and talked to in the real world. It allows you insight PR practitioners have never had access to prior to the invention of the Internet and an opportunity we should never take for granted. Being able to talk to your audience or customers and take responsibility to fix the situation is key to handling a crisis, big or small, and we now have the capability to do all that in seconds through social media. Understanding that your brand, how you engage and learn with them, will all serve you and your organization well should your own personal Blackfish ever occur.

Hoe you guys liked this week’s post! See you next Sunday!

Sources:

Managing Yourself: What's Your Personal Social Media Strategy? 
Nach: Dutta, Soumitra, Harvard Business Review, 00178012, Nov2010, Bd./Jhrg. 88, Ausgabe 11

Caroline made me do it

Everybody has that one friend. They are usually the person who knows all about anything remotely new immediately. This is the person you ask before you buy anything electronic or gadget related for example. They always know what’s the most up-to-date product on the market and more than likely have some experience utilizing it in their day-to-day life because they waited in line the day it came out so they could be one of the first to try it. Some would call these people “hipsters.” Hipsters are those who knew about that new thing before it was cool to know about said new thing. Technically hipsters shy away from mainstream culture and trends, but in doing so, they often end up dictating culture and trends. An example is “distressed” denim (jeans with holes in them.) This style was made popular because hipsters shunned mass department stores and favored thrifting clothes, which were in various states of disrepair or “distress.” The look became popular and viola – now you know how American Eagle and Hollister came up with holey jeans! Hipsters are just a form of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are defined as “a person whose opinions about something such as a product or issue have a big influence on the opinions of others” (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/opinion-leader.) They come in all shapes and sizes. The guy that works at the Apple Genius Bar who showed you how awesome Apple Music actually is is technically an opinion leader. Your local barista who made you try that coffee drink you didn’t think you would like but now love is an opinion leader. If they influenced you to try, buy, or in general change your mind about something, they are considered an opinion leader. But how do these opinion leaders operate in today’s social media saturated world?

I’m going to give you an example of an opinion leader that I utilize quite frequently to demonstrate how opinion leaders utilize social media. I am big into skincare. I’m the girl who doesn’t think twice about dropping $85 on an ounce of serum in the name of good skin. I’ve been a follower of Caroline Hirons for just over three years now (check out her blog here.) She’s a big deal in beauty land. She’s a 40-something mom of four, who worked retail for years and is now a trained facialist and makeup artist. She has a blog and YouTube channel which amass millions upon millions upon millions of views each year. She’s witty, but down to earth. She’s no nonsense when it comes to product reviews and she’s built an almost cult following. When she recommends a product, it’s almost guaranteed to sell out within the week, if not the day. It’s been dubbed “the Caroline effect” (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-3344840/I-m-beauty-s-answer-Delia.html.) She has an amazing instinct for knowing what women want out of a product and she goes out of her way to make sure the reviews she writes are thorough, honest, and always enjoyable to read. Caroline is an avid social media user. When she posts a new review on her blog or a new YouTube video with her current skincare favorites (my personal favorite videos) she makes sure to let her followers know. She posts an Instagram story about it, a photo or video snippet to Instagram, tweets out the link, and boom! Thousands of women immediately have a new favorite product. Caroline’s background in the industry (she’s a trained facialist, has worked with dozens upon dozens of brands, and has industry cred) allow her to be a trusted opinion leader, as does her overall personal narrative. Personal narratives go a long way in making opinion leaders. Personal or “character” narratives are defined as “enduring personal stories or accounts that we may understand as being related to particular expressed character types” (Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities.) Caroline’s character narrative is that of a guru, helping guide us all to the land of good skin, while maintaining her wit and charm as a working mom.   It establishes a connection with her and allows us, as her readers/followers, to understand her not only just as a product reviewer but as a friend, somebody you would want to grab a drink with. People trust their friends, and I trust Caroline Hirons to a fault.

Sorry to wax poetic up there, but my devotion to Caroline Hirons is a great example of opinion leadership and how it can impact the market. The “Caroline effect” I mentioned above? That effect is what companies who get reviewed by Caroline come to expect. It means your products are about to fly off the shelves and your profits are going to soar. It’s a very, very good thing. It’s also fairly cheap marketing. By having somebody like Caroline, who has already done the work of cultivating a captive audience, utilize your product, you as a company can capitalize on the after effects. Opinion leaders like Caroline are partaking in a form of Word-of-Mouth communication. For more than half a century it’s been maintained that Word-of-Mouth affects the majority of all purchase decisions (Networked Narratives.) People like Caroline just do it online now versus in person. The advent of social media has changed the way in which most of us partake in Word-of-Mouth interactions. Now instead of calling that hipster friend of yours to discuss whether or not you should buy into the hype of the newest iPhone (what are we on now? 7? 8?) you can just browse online for your favorite tech blogger or scroll through your YouTube subscription box until you find that one channel with the Genius Bar guy you love to watch on weekends. Trust is being formed online with people like Caroline Hirons every day. There’s a reason why YouTube beauty gurus are able to afford $1 million houses (Zoella anybody?) Consumers trust their opinions and brands know that. Utilizing these online, social media opinion leaders can only help brands and their marketers. Is there a potential for blow-back? Sure. But at the end of the day, isn’t any press good press?

I hope you all enjoyed my take on opinion leaders and social media. See you next week for another post!

Source:

Kozinets, Robert V., et al. "Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities." Journal of Marketing 74 (2010): 71-89.

Guess who's back?!

Remember how I said I might not be updating as frequently as I used to last week? Surprise! I’m still going to be posting here once a week on http://paigewester.blogspot.com/ for a little while longer! If you’re new to my neck of the Internet woods you can go read a little about me on my About Me page or go read my first post titled “I am not throwing away my shot” (which, yes, is a Hamilton reference.) If you remember, this blog started out as a way for me to work through different types of emerging media that are available and how we, as strategic communicators, can utilize them to their full potential. I would now like to take the blog and turn it around a little bit. I would like to focus these next few weeks on Leadership and Media Strategies and how we can utilize these strategies in our day-to-day lives as strategic communicators for various organizations.

Diffusion of Innovations theory. Did you just die a little on the inside, because I know I did the first time I read that phrase. Diffusion of Innovations theory is actually pretty interesting though if you give it a chance and can be one of the most useful theories for us as strategic communicators. It effects just about everything in our lives, from technology we use to the food we eat. Plus, it’s a great jump off point for us with this new blog direction! Diffusion of Innovations theory is based off work by Dr. Everett Rogers. Originally published in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations (1995,) the theory itself offers three valuable insights: what qualities make an innovation spread, the importance of peer-peer conversations and peer networks, and understanding the needs of different user segments (A Summary of Diffusion of Innovations.)  So let’s break down the theory and what this all means for us.

Diffusion is defined as “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (Diffusion of Innovations.)  Essentially diffusion is how things like new advances in technology, etc. are trickled down into mainstream society. There are four main components found within this diffusion definition provided by Rogers: innovation, communication channels, time, and social system. All these elements culminate to form the Innovation-Decision Process (Detailed Review of Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations Theory and Educational Technology-Related Studies Based on Rogers’ Theory.)  The Innovation-Decision Process is a five step one: 1) knowledge 2) persuasion 3) decision 4) implementation and 5) confirmation. Each of these steps in the process is also accompanied by five characteristics of innovations: 1) relative advantage 2) compatibility 3) complexity 4) trialability and 5) observability. Since I just listed two lists I’m not going to bore you with the intricate details of each one. For the most part they are fairly self-explanatory but if you are interested in going in depth about any of these concepts I highly suggest checking out any of the readings listed above.

The main focus that I want to talk about concerns the Innovation-Decision Process and those who embark on this process. First up are the innovators. These are the visionaries, the dreamers. The innovators “often lavish great time, energy and creativity on developing new ideas and gadgets. And they love to talk about them.” To me, the innovators are the Steve Jobs types. Next you have the early adopters. These are the people who are always “on the lookout for a strategic leap forward in their lives or businesses and are quick to make connections between clever innovations and personal needs.” AKA Hipsters. These are the people who knew about stuff before it was cool to know about them. After the early adopters you have the early majority-the rest of us who are “pragmatists, comfortable with moderately progressive ideas, but won’t act without solid proof of benefits.” Between the two “early” categories you have almost half of the population who participate in a given Innovation-Decision Process. Now let’s move on to the other half.   The late majority “are conservative pragmatists who hate risk and uncomfortable with your new idea.” These are the people who take a lot of work to adopt any kind of new anything. The want to fit in though, so eventually they’ll come on board. Last but not least are the laggards. What a nice name right? These are those guys who “hold out to the bitter end” (A Summary of Diffusion of Innovations.) These are those who may never get on board with your new innovation no matter how hard you work to impress them. Each type of “personality” is different and not everybody is the same personality for each innovation they may encounter in their lives. The important thing is that each personality will exist somewhere in the process and we have to be aware of who they are and what they want in order to get our innovations off the ground.

Now that I have metaphorically talked your ear off about Diffusion of Innovations and the very basics of the theory, how do we apply it and all it encompasses to our jobs as strategic communicators? The biggest, and in my opinion most obvious, takeaway is how important peer-to-peer communications and peer networks are to the development of innovations (see the personality types listed in the above paragraph.)  Without the early adopters and innovators talking with their peers and family members, some of the most innovative stuff to ever happen might not have gone mainstream (think of the iPhone, Facebook, etc. Those spread because people who were first to use them told their friends about them and so on and so forth until everybody now utilizes these two innovations.) It re-establishes the fact that even though we are now officially in the digital age, more “traditional” forms of communication are still the most useful. Talking with others is still the best way to distribute ideas and to invoke change. Thing about your organization that you work for. Do the best innovations come from a memo telling you what to do or do they happen more organically? I know in my personal experience, my company recently transitioned to a new CRM system. While we were all put through the same basic training, after about a month you could clearly see who the early adopters were and how they were helping the early majority, late majority, and laggards understand and utilize this new technology to its fullest potential. Each innovation is different but the personalities who help the innovators achieve the Innovation-Decision Process rarely change.

Hopefully you were able to find something useful in all that! I hope you enjoy the new direction the blog is heading and stick around for the next few weeks to learn even more with me! Have a great week everybody!

Auf Wiedersehen

These past nine weeks have been quite an adventure. I (and I hope you too) have learned so much about emerging media. From social media and networking to how technology affects children growing up today, we’ve dived into it all. My favorite topic I think was crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, and politics. It all tied in so well with what is currently happening in the United States political arena right now. Without citizen journalists would we have known about the impact the Women’s March was going to have? Would we have understood how desperate the situation at Standing Rock was getting? The answer isn’t a black and white “no,” but it’s also not a firm “yes” either.  I think the future of technology, the future of the web, lies in the people who utilize it.  The press is relying more and more on citizen journalists in the wake of their current predicament with the new administration. For the first time ever, people are getting direct, day-to-day updates from the President via Twitter. People are writing more and more about how they feel, how they wish to help, and encouraging others to help as well. As with most things, the power lies with the people and with more data being uploaded every day the web will only improve with time. I personally can’t wait to see what happens next in media.

But, sadly, my journey into emerging media and what that all means for us as professional strategic communicators has come to an end with this post. I have decided to take this project and switch gears for a while. As a result this blog won’t be updated as frequently as it once was but it’ll still be around, don’t worry! I hope you stop by again soon and see where this next journey takes me. Until next time!

A Blessing and a Curse: Children and Technology

This week all of my readings focused on children and technology. How does it affect them? How can we better utilize technology with our kids but also keep them safe? How do kids view technology in their own lives? A lot of research has been done over the past decade or so to dig into this relationship that exists between our kids and their technology. One of the reasons scholars see this as an important area for research is because children are very susceptible to outside influences (mainly friends but sometimes others whom they meet online) and most children are not knowledgeable enough to distinguish between a friend or somebody out to hurt them online. They aren’t properly equipped to deal with maliciousness delivered through technology and this raises a lot of questions for adults and parents alike on how to keep kids safe. There are a ton of benefits to raising kids with technology. A great example that I think about is one of my four year old nephew’s toys. He is learning how to creatively problem solve with this really cool toy called the Code-a-pillar.

 It's essentially a caterpillar made up of removable segments that tell the toy where to go. Some segments make it go forward, others to the left or right. The child arranges and rearranges the segments making the caterpillar's path change each time to move about the room in any way they want to. They can even make it go around obstacles like my little nephew does! These toys are dependent on technology and yet they're teaching him some valuable skills.  Now this same nephew also knows how to navigate YouTube on my phone to find his favorite Halloween movie about Curious George. There’s definitely an act of balance that has to take place with kids and their technology and for the most part this balance is fairly easy to achieve…until that child turns about 12 or 13 and discovers the fun that is social media.

Social media is the big bad in the world of technology for both children and their parents. In some households, it’s a nightly source of arguing and bickering. “Don’t Snapchat at the table!” is something I’ve heard shouted quite often by parents while out to dinner. It keeps them connected but at what cost? Most parents view cellphones and the myriad apps that come with them as both a blessing and a curse. A 2008 study of 60 families with young people aged 11-17 and their parents revealed that both children and parents “regardless of geographical location (urban or rural) – considered that mobile phones were a benefit to young people, and helped to keep them safe.” (The Role of Mobile Phones in Family Communication.) In the event of any type of emergency, cell phones and certain apps are useful and vital to have. Apps like SafeTrek (https://www.safetrekapp.com/) are designed to help anybody feel safe by opening and holding down your finger on the app screen. If you lift up your finger and don’t enter your security pin it will automatically notify police of your location and send a type of “distress signal.” I used a similar version of this app when I was in undergrad and I always felt so much better for having it. This proves the “blessing” part of phones and technology being ever present in kid’s lives. It allows parents to feel connected to their kids when they can’t be there.

Now on to the “curse” bit. Technology is a huge distraction in everyday life, not just for children but adults as well. The average American devotes more than ten hours to screen time a day and that number threatens to grow (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/30/health/americans-screen-time-nielsen/.) With all that time looking at a screen and being focused on social media, kids are focused more and more on maintaining those social profiles and making sure they fit in. Adolescence is already a fraught time. You have mood swings, you’re conflicted about risky behaviors you or your friends may be experiencing, and fights with parental figures is an almost constant. Online can be a form of escape for many kids during this time. Empirical evidence has even suggested that “self-disclosure through online communication can enhance the quality” of friendships children can have with each other(Coming of Age Online: The Developmental Underpinnings of Girls’ Blogs.) In a lot of cases, it can seem like social media is all about the “me” factor for youths but in actuality it’s much more about the “we.” In Sonia Livingstone’s article Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation she states that “social networking is about ‘me’ in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group, as known to and represented by others, rather than the private ‘I’.”  Basically it’s more about the group mentality and “fitting in” than it is about standing out and that group mentality can have some pretty harsh consequences.

As we all know, either from experience or from watching others, kids can be mean to each other. It’s yet another part of adolescence and growing up.  Cyberbullying is a huge part of children’s lives and experiences on social media. Nearly 43% of kids have been bullied online and 1 in 4 has had it happen more than once (https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-cyber-bullying.) Kids know this is happening, and some participate in it just because their friends are and they don’t want to be next. It’s a very serious issue and one that needs a lot more time and attention paid to it before we can really begin to solve it. It’s a huge “curse” of being online as an adolescent. However, happiness can be found in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light (if you got that this was a Harry Potter reference, ten points to your house!) A point of light in all this cyberbullying darkness is that technology is allowing kids to discuss serious issues with their parents or parental figures through technology. There has been a huge uptick in kids communicating with parents via text or social media messenger apps about serious topics like cyberbullying. Many LGBTQ+ children broach coming out to their parents first by bringing it up via text or social media, and even teen pregnancy has been known to be brought to parents attention via text (The Role of Mobile Phones in Family Communication.) Technology has allowed children to feel comfortable enough to communicate with just about anybody, but that also includes the people who care about and love them the most: their parents.

I don’t have children yet, but I found this week’s reading to be very informational and I will definitely remember it as I move forward with my own family someday. Only one more week left before we take the blog in a different direction. See you guys then!

Sources:

Livingstone, Sonia. “Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy, and self-expression.” New Media and Society, Vol. 10, Issue 3, 2008, 393-411.

Davis, Katie. “Coming of age online: The developmental underpinnings of girls' blogs.” Journal of Adolescent Research, Vol. 25, Issue 1, 2010, 145-171.

Devitt, Kevin & Roker, Debi. “The role of mobile phones in family communication.” Children & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 3, 2009, 189–202.