Yes, we can, and must, do better!

I'm sorry son, I should have done better.

These are the words that close the final scene of Adolescence which "dramatises the nauseous fear of finding out too late” (The Economist).

As I watched each of the four episodes I reflected on the conversations I had with my own children as they grew up in the digital age, and I am thankful that they were teenagers in the early years before “Big Tech” driven by profit so dominated everyday life.  In addition, I’m thankful that my own work in the Web Science space enabled me to help them develop some of the critical thinking skills with which to navigate the digital realm.

The success of Adolescence, one of Netflix’s most watched mini-series, speaks to what is perhaps the most pressing question facing parents of adolescent children in 2025 – how can we do better?

This questions is not just for parents, it is for all of us and is at the heart of what we have been asking in our Brave Conversations and related events for almost 20 years.

At the turn of the century (not that long ago!) there was much talk of “digital natives” versus digital immigrants as defined in this article by Marc Prensky. In 2000 he wrote

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Prensky felt that whilst the 'immigrants' to the digital world had to learn through adaption the digital natives “Just do it!” and they will succeed in the long run.

The hope was that the emerging generations who had little knowledge of life before the internet would just swim in the digital ocean and then teach us all how to do it. The value of the knowledge of the elders who clumsily fumbled about printing out their emails and could only focus on one thing at time was discounted in the name of progress and, above all, speed.

Whilst people like Prensky stated that both legacy content (reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past) and future content (software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics but also ethics, politics, sociology and language) are important the method of delivery needs to be reimagined.

We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us.

There is a lot to be said of this but here we are twenty years down the track and we now have an online world full of misinformation, fraud, online bullying and identity hacking which makes the internet a very confusing and unsafe space.

A recent survey showed that almost half of young people believe that social media is harming people of their age and who can blame them when so many apps and games are deliberately designed with “dark patterns”, interfaces deliberately designed to lead users (especially children) into making choices they wouldn’t make if they clearly understood what was happening.

It seems that many of our hopes of the early 2000s have proven to be unfounded and it feels to me now that is we, the 'elders' and parents who have unwittingly allowed digital technologies to progress without check, who bear much of the responsibility.

In our early Brave Conversations events we largely aimed at adults trying to wake them up to the promise and peril of the online world. We tried numerous times to work with schools and other educational institutions to get to younger people and always we got the response that 'this is a great idea, but we're too busy, the kids are too busy, we can't fit you in.'

We did have some success when we managed to bring families to our events and in Kingston, Jamaica we had the full support of the Jamaican Broadcasting Commission (see Brave Conversations Kingston 2018). But, as with our events aimed at the Australian Public Service with ANZSOG we were too early, people had not woken up and they were both ignorant and complacent about the digital revolution preferring to focus on business as usual.

There has been some movement recently and people like Jonathan Haidt, who has long been calling for the regulation of digital devices for young people are finally getting some traction. The Australian Federal Government was the first to try to regulate access to social media for young people under the age of 16. An alternative strategy is to consciously work with very young people teach them to develop digital competence which the Finnish Government is actively pursuing.

We now know that digital information technologies may be changing the ways that the human brain develops and functions.

Haidt in The Anxious Generation talks about two key trends brought about by digital devices which are impacting young people:

1. A decline of the play-based childhood
2. A rise of the phone-based childhood

Haidt calls the confluence of these two stories in the years between 2010 and 2015 the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.”

Because the adults had little or no understanding of what was going on for kids in the virtual world they ended up overprotecting children in the real world while underprotecting them in the virtual world.

It is not just the nature of the technologies but the speed with which they are developing that presents us with the greatest challenges.

Human beings have always had to adapt to change but as Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University Joseph Henrich states

The speed of change means that cultural learning is more important than evolutionary learning.  We need different suites of cognitive abilities for the different environments of the next century.  (Joseph Henrich)

But what are these cognitive abilities and how can we develop them?  Given how slowly our education systems adapt the arrival of Large Language Models and other Machine Learning Systems is currently revolutionising how we teach and learn at all levels and this will have significant social consequences.

Which brings me back to Adolescence. The story which is told is not an aberration, it is all too common. The shows' creators were responding to, and trying to make sense of, the growing violence and misogyny amongst young people, especially young men, as a symptom of broader social issues which have at their core the use and abuse of social media.

Our gaze must significantly broaden – and we must not consider the likes of Jamie to be an outlier. Instead, we must see him as a product of an entire social system.  (The Ethics Centre)

The reality is that these incredibly powerful, and in many ways wonderful, technologies have the potential to do great good but have been built on unregulated business models intended to exploit and extract as much 'value' from users as possible. Governments have been far too slow to understand this even though the European Union has aggressively been trying to enforce regulation and the current US Supreme Court case against Facebook/Meta may result in some changes ... we can be ever hopeful!

The most fundamental issue underlying the introduction of all technologies is the commercial imperative and business model - as Shoshana Zuboff once told me

"Capitalism should not be eaten raw".

I don’t think anyone has the definitive answer to any of these questions - we are truly making it up as we go!

Nor do I believe that the path ahead is going to be an easy one, but we humans are masters at adaptation and we will harness these incredible tools in beneficial ways if we become smarter in terms of how we use them.  The reality is that we must design and develop systems of education which encompass Artificial Intelligence tools which empower and embolden our young people, not surround them with the worst destructive elements of the human psyche.

We must educate the digital immigrants as well. The parents of young children have the most influence on them in their younger years, by the time they get to Adolescence it may be too late. 

As Charles Taylor argues

identity is formed by a collective. ... Human beings are defined and constructed through their relationship with others – we become who we are, by virtue of who we interact with. (Sources of the Self)

Parents are a huge part of this.

All those involved in the creation and development of our 21st Century digital tools have a responsibility to interrogate the tools they are building and ensure that they are a force for good.

We must do better. We have no choice.

Our next, and 25th, Brave Conversations will be held in Stuttgart on 5^th July, 2025 is open to the public.

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