“Think before you post” – teens aren’t listening.

Original image – Wikimedia CCBY

“Think before you post” has become the “Just say no” of digital citizenship education. It provides teachers, parents, and counselors with a nice tidy slogan to repeat again and again to our children. And, it makes sense right? Anything you post online could be there forever, shared beyond our intended audience, causing serious consequences later in life.

“Think before you post” has inspired countless school projects…

TEDx Talks…

Songs…

even t-shirts.

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But, our students are all like…

I’ve been as guilty as anyone else in promoting “Think before you post,” but, analysis of student responses to Pew Research Center’s 2012 Teens and Privacy Management Survey by  Haiyan Jia and Pamela Wisniewski from Penn State University suggest that teens evaluate risks of posting to social media very differently than adults.

 “Adults often find this very difficult to understand and paradoxical because they are so used to considering possible risks of disclosing information online first and then taking the necessary precautions, based on those concerns,”

“What our model suggests is that teens don’t think this way — they disclose and then evaluate the consequences. The process is more experiential in nature for teens.”

Haiyan Jia

What does this mean for us?

While I still think it’s worth teaching students to be mindful about their sharing on social media, I fear that we too often condense our education efforts into this one, tidy soundbite.

Should students think before they post? Absolutely.

Does our teaching students to “think before they post” make a difference for some? Maybe.

What we need to do, however is recognize that developmentally, our children aren’t processing the message the same way we do as adults. We need to recognize there reality of what they’re actually doing online and avoiding generalizations.

As danah boyd writes, it’s complicated.

The best thing we can do is coach our students as individuals through their experiments on social media. We need to be there for them when things go wrong, withholding judgement, and recognizing that their adolescent thought process is much different than ours. This is exactly why schools need to engage with students about social media use, not ignore it as not being part of school. They need role models and coaches to help them sort through messy situations.

“It’s a lot like learning to swim,” Jia said. “You make sure they enter the water slowly and make sure they know how to swim before you let them swim on their own and in the deeper parts.”

How are you helping your children or students learn to swim?