Technology Isn’t a Replacement
As you’d expect, there weren’t a lot of technophobes at this conference (if they were there, they were cleverly disguised). But several non-attendees I told about the conference expressed a concern that we might begin to use technology as a way of avoiding having to do sex education with youth directly. It’s an interesting thought, since talking to kids about sex is something many parents (and teachers) wished they didn’t have to do, and if a computer could do it for you, would you let it? Add to that the results of studies that were presented at the conference which clearly indicate that computer-mediated interventions can be more effective than interventions led by a service provider, and you have a real argument for the computers. But it was clear from all the workshops that technology will never replace human service provision, and a computer game is not a substitute for parenting.As technology becomes more integrated into the fabric of our daily lives it’s going to become important to stop trying to tease it out and instead explore the ways we combine human-to-human interaction with computer human interaction. This raises several questions:
- In the areas where computer-mediated education seems more effective, why is it more effective? What precisely makes interacting with a computer better in these cases?
- How can we begin to develop tools and materials both for educators and families that integrate technology and human interaction?
- Are there affective pieces of sex education that are going un-addressed in person-to-person interactions that might be incorporated into computer-mediated programs?
Getting the Right Information in the Right Hands
It was generally agreed that there is a lot of good sexual health information on the web. It was also agreed that people are looking for information about sex, and they use the web to do it. One session directly addressed the issue of whether or not people looking for sexual health information were finding it, and when they found it, if they find the good stuff. What this session and comments in several other sessions pointed to was that we don’t necessarily need to be developing a lot more content at this point. Instead we need to be improving the chances that youth are going to find appropriate content when they’re looking for it.Some of the questions raised by these discussions include:
- How might we integrate available sex information into currently popular web-based applications that youth make use of?
- Is there a higher order way to distinguish sex content on the web that has little or no educational value from sex content that is designed to be educational? Is this where so-called “human search engines” can play an important role?
- How does the practice of online sex information seeking differ from off line sex information seeking? Are the words we type into search engines different than what we might write on an anonymous card we hand to our teacher? If we IM or text a sex question to a web based application do we use different language than when we ask someone a sex question in person?
Sex and Politics
There wasn’t a lot of open political debate at the conference, and the shared political agenda was about doing more to help youth protect themselves from STDs/HIV. Politics emerged more in the spaces between people working in different environments: The freedoms enjoyed by individuals running their own sites or blogs who didn’t have to worry about insurance, investors, or boards of directors getting in between them and their target audience; the privilege of the relatively well funded organizations or government agencies, the ones who get paid for their work, probably own homes, and weren’t paying for their own hotel rooms; the differences between organizations for youth and those by youth. None of these differences prevented attendees from connecting, but that may in part be because the differences were generally kept under wraps.The most overtly political presentation at the conference was a fascinating talk given by two sex work activists who presented on a blog project called Bound Not Gagged. The project, which is a group blog by and for sex workers developed out of a frustration with the media's portrayal of sex work and sex work issues, and fear that coming out as a sex worker can make you a target for arrest or prosecution. The blog, which I’m now an avid reader of, collects the opinions and voices of sex workers on a variety of topics. They have also done some exciting things using online collaboration and actively dealing with the media through their blog.
While the Bound Not Gagged presentation used sex work as an example, it was just as relevant to questions people working with youth need to be asking about tech tools:
- How can technology give disempowered and disenfranchised people a voice?
- Can technology stretch the limits of anonymity to allow us to hear from those we serve who might not otherwise speak up?
- What role can technology play in shifting the public discourse on youth and sexuality?
