On April 1st, the 110th Congress Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet held a hearing entitled Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium.
Listening to the testimony, it was hard not to imagine what I might have shared were I asked to testify. It might have gone something somewhat like this:
Chairman Markey, Ranking Member Stearns, and Members of the Subcommittee, we at Global Kids are honored to have this opportunity to share our experiences as experts working with youth and virtual worlds.
To provide background, in 2006, following extensive research into the educational potential of virtual worlds, Global Kids became the first nonprofit to develop a dedicated space for conducting educational programming in Teen Second Life (TSL). Specifically, Global Kids is conducting intensive leadership programming for youth, bringing students from its New York-based programs into the space, and streaming the audio and video of major events into the world. This work has received significant funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, among others, and been conducted in partnership with many other organizations, including UNICEF, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the International Criminal Court.
I would like to begin my testimony with a quote from an earlier Congressional Subcommittee hearing that took place just over a half-century ago.
“Formerly, the child wanted to be like daddy or mommy. Now they skip you, they bypass you. They want to be like Superman.”
This testimony from Dr. Fredric Wertham on the connections between comic books and juvenile delinquency, and his earlier publications on the matter, helped to stoke a national hysteria around the lurid dangers of this once new medium. While barely a decade old, more than 90% of children between the ages of six and eleven read comic books, as did over 80% of teenagers. Parents in the Cold War era, unsure how to handle a variety of new social forces, found a convenient scapegoat in the colorful and ubiquitous magazines. Wertham’s testimony helped the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency hold comic publishers’ feet to the fire and led not to new regulatory policies but a new industry-administered code of conduct that shaped comic books for over thirty years.
Generation after generation seems to go through its own “cycles of outrage,” whether with the waltz, pulp novels, comic books, rap music, or most recently with video games and online social networks. New mass media come and go, gaining relative acceptance or falling by the wayside, but concerns about the safety of children and regulations surrounding their freedoms never go away.
Virtual Worlds, practically non-existent just a few years ago, are just the latest commercial media to be seen as “colonizing” the lives of youth, once again raising a variety of concerns about their impact. The growth of youth involvement with virtual worlds is predicted to surpass 50% over the next few years, so one can expect a number of concerns to be raised about virtual worlds that are similar to the mediums of the past--a threat to law and order, a threat to traditional learning, and a threat to traditional values.
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