Amanda Lenhart has been studying the relationship between kids and digital technology long before it was cool. She is a Senior Fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. She is also the former Head of Research at Common Sense Media.
I’m really excited to share this interview not only because Amanda *really* knows this space, but because she is quite literally the only person I know who has parented through different micro-generations of the internet. She parents four kids, ranging from 13 to 30, in a blended family. Practically speaking this means that the internet and technology looked different when each of her kids came of age. Her eldest came of age before the ubiquity of smart phones, the two in their twenties came of age during peak social media, and her youngest just got her phone. As she said “... this isn’t my first rodeo, in fact… this is my last rodeo.”
I absolutely loved this interview, as it sheds light on how Amanda shifted her approach with her kids, through the very same decades that the internet took over our lives.
💡“Aha” moments
We talk about phones and social media as if they are a package deal, when they are not. We can separate them. (This takes *a lot* of time… ughhhh.)
The term “social media” is used to describe a lot of platforms that are very different from each other, from TikTok and Instagram, to Reddit and Discord, to streaming platforms. This complicates the discussion.
YouTube often flies under the radar, but is an entry point to all sorts of other media and social media platforms.
Generative AI is perfectly crafted for moments of embarrassment, which are a hallmark of early adolescence.
Parasocial relationships (when a person develops an emotional bond with a celebrity/fictional character) are not new, but chatbots are taking them to a whole new level — fast.
Some kids are more susceptible to algorithmically-fed content. Researchers are trying to understand what’s going on here.
✨Highlights
“I think it’s important to fast forward to my youngest. This is 10 years later. This is a totally different rodeo. It’s just different, right? The climate around cell phones, mobile phones, smartphones is different. What social media is and does and the algorithms on it… totally different…” - Amanda Lenhart
“... one of the things that felt very important to us was that she in particular struggled to regulate unfettered access to video, particularly algorithmically fed video. And that we wanted to just lock that down from her, make the phone a little bit less exciting. So keep it as a really functional tool that handled basic important needs that are clearly a priority for early adolescents, but also try to help her grow a little grow up a little bit more before she was off diving into algorithmic content.” - Amanda Lenhart
“I feel like we’ve alighted the conversation about getting a smartphone with getting social media. They’re not the same thing… you can disentangle them.” - Amanda Lenhart
“... we should talk about whether we want to call YouTube a social media platform because [...] pretty much every single child in America uses YouTube and... right? It is sending your kids lots of information and is prioritizing short video and so it is a gateway to other forms of short video and other social media platforms for your kids.” - Amanda Lenhart
“... when we say the word social media, we mean things that are so different, they should not actually be categorized together.” - Amanda Lenhart
“TikTok is a short algorithmic video feed that is so optimized to what you like and watch that it basically knows what you like better than you do. It’s incredibly attention-holding, more so than pretty much anything else that we have in the market right now. [...] This algorithmically generated sort of hyper focused feed is sort of one aspect of social media. And then there’s the more social ones, right? Things like Snap, Discord, even Reddit. Though I think the fact that we might even include Reddit in that it’s really different, then where do we put Twitch? So Twitch is a streaming platform and there’s other streaming platforms that sort of sprang out of the game.” - Amanda Lenhart
“... young people can also create really strong bonds and sort of what we call parasocial relationships, which is like, unidirectional, like emotional connection to people who don’t know that you exist, right? Like, a lot of times we think about it with celebrities, like your crush on, you know, Taylor Swift is a parasocial relationship. But young people can have those with influencers and other people who are sort of micro-famous online, and that also can be complicated.” - Amanda Lenhart
“... what it’s doing is distorting reality for kids at a time that they are learning how to navigate the world, how to connect with each other, how to create relationships. And part of what’s been bugging me for a while, including things like even Snapchat, which everyone’s like “oh, Snapchat’s great.” Like, fine, yeah, they have all these security features, but they also literally stack rank your best friends and tell kids who your best friend is based on what? Based on Snapchat’s definition of what friendship is? But that intermediation, I think, has been really grossly overlooked because, probably because it’s so intangible.” - Emily Tavoulareas
“... we are entering an era that I think is about to get really, really complicated around social and emotional relationships with non-human entities, right? We are less uncomfortable with you having a really, really strong relationship with your stuffed animal when you’re six. Cause again, we create these effective relationships with things we care about. Kids get attached to objects. But it’s a different kettle of fish when that thing responds back to you.” - Amanda Lenhart
“... all of these things help people to reach out and connect to other folks. So I don’t want to eliminate that from the conversation. Similarly, AI has the potential to do a bunch of wonderful things in terms of extending and expanding learning. I think helping us to do our work more efficiently and better. But that said, right now it is an unfettered tool that has just been sort of splotted into our, into our communities and our neighborhoods and our kids’ lives. And, you know, I think sometimes we build things before we think about what’s really going to be the impact of them. And I think this is one of those things.” - Amanda Lenhart
“... we had a whole conversation about like, ooh… these outputs are not trustworthy and you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to get. And it can be hard for you as somebody who’s a learner and just learning something new right now, right? If you’re asking it a question about something you don’t know anything about, how are you going to know whether to trust the output?” - Amanda Lenhart
“... [Generative AI] is perfectly designed for that moment of deep embarrassment and importance of peers and the sense that you’re being watched by everyone. That’s the hallmark of early adolescence in particular…” - Amanda Lenhart
“Is it necessary for kids who are 12 to be opted into this by having Google jam that technology right into Gemini? And ta-da, there it is. These are choices that companies are making, investors are making. These are choices. It doesn’t have to happen this way.” - Emily Tavoulareas
“… a lot of the conversations are focused on a particular product. They’re focused on a product. They’re focused on a company. Oh, it’s OpenAI. Oh, it’s ChatGPT. Oh, it’s Meta. It’s TikTok. It’s the iPhone. No, it’s all of it. It’s all of it. It’s a whack-a-mole situation where you’re not solving a problem by addressing TikTok. All of these companies have different flavors of the same situation that you’re describing. What is your purpose as a company? And what is your primary incentive? And when the business model is such that, having my user, no matter how old they are, as many users as possible on my platform for as long as possible, you can’t untangle that.” - Emily Tavoulareas
“... the incentives for these companies are to make enormous sums of money very, very quickly and pay back their investors and their shareholders with giant payouts. And if you can’t show that you’re increasing your stickiness and you’re increasing the number of users and how long they spend on your site. Anything that you’re doing that drops any of those numbers down is like a non-starter. Even if you’re like, by the way, kids are dying. It doesn’t matter. Like it doesn’t matter. And so, or it does matter, but it’s like a PR problem, not like a moral problem.” - Amanda Lenhart
“Why are these products being held to a different standard than a doctor would? If you’re giving medical advice, when I read the Kash Hill article I’m thinking… if a doctor had done this, they would be locked up, full stop. They’re not allowed to do it. Why is this product held to a different standard than a human being? Why have we decided that that’s OK? Have we decided that’s OK?” - Emily Tavoulareas
“... when honestly you teach people that money is the only thing and that humans are in the way of you making money… they are only a thing to be gotten money from as opposed to a thing to be cared for, which you have a fiduciary responsibility in other non-monetary ways. Then I think that’s just an obstacle. That’s just a PR problem you need to mitigate.” - Amanda Lenhart
