Appealing to Youth
For any sex education program or intervention to be successful it has to appeal to its target audience. There were many different points of view on the best way to do this from different presenters. Some people emphasized the importance of having flashy, good looking, and highly interactive websites. Others showed how they used group blogs and free services like Yahoo Groups, Facebook, Myspace and Flickr to create information and services. The problem with the former approach is that sex education organizations rarely have the human or financial resources to keep up with new technologies.Of course everyone benefits from the fact that they’re delivering content youth are motivated to look for: sex information. In some ways the problem seems to boil down to how to connect the right audience to the right content.
Some of the questions raised by these discussions include:
- How can we begin to envision partnerships with for-profit companies that won’t scare off boards of directors or bring the wrath of anti-sex groups to bear on the for-profit companies?
- In the end how much of these issues come down to not enough funding for comprehensive sex education?
- What role could user-generated content play in keeping sites fresh and developing new strategies for connecting youth with sexual health content?
Reconciling Sexual Panic with Utopian Ideals
There was an interesting tension not talked about explicitly at the conference between the fear, shame, and silence that surrounds sexuality in the U.S. and the often Utopian vision of those who develop new technologies. It wasn’t until I started spending time at tech conferences and interviewing designers and developers that I realized that a lot of people who work in emerging technology have a Utopian vision of their work and the future. It makes sense. They spend their days developing technologies to help us achieve our goals with greater speed or ease, or to offer people more information or opportunities. What technology so far isn’t so good at is meeting us at our most irrational, unconscious, and conflicting places. Sexuality is a site of immense power, pressure and pain (as well as joy). Technologies need to begin to take into account the multiple contexts and environments within which sexual interactions happen. I didn’t hear anyone talking overtly about this difference between the attendees from the technology world and those from sexual health, but I think the challenges many of them face as they try to collaborate and find the institutional will and the funding for their projects are tied to this underlying tension. I missed Dr. Marty Klein’s talk about sexual panic so I’m not sure if he addressed this, but I think it’s an area worth exploring more the next time I can get a bunch of sex people and technology people in a room.Missing but not Forgotten
While the programmers of Sex:Tech did an outstanding job finding a diverse group of speakers on a wide range of topics, some content inevitably gets missed. Here are a few of the topics I didn’t hear much about at this year’s Sex:Tech that I hope we can hear more about at future conferences.Web 2.0
In every workshop I attended and both of the plenary talks there was a constant refrain “we need more youth voices, and participation.” The videos which opened the conference clearly show that youth are able to provide the attitude and meaning, if not the actual content, of sex education. Yet there wasn’t a lot of web 2.0 talk. People in public health are using technologies but they still don’t have much of an awareness of the technologies that youth are using to create their own content. There wasn’t a lot of discussion of how user-generated content could be integrated into sexual health interventions.
Virtual Environments
The actual technology being utilized by most of the presenters was relatively old school. Very few people talked about the role of virtual environments in their work, and this seems like an important area for future consideration. For example, virtual environments have the potential to completely blow the lid off how we conceptualize and create interventions for diverse populations. Similarly, the discussion of what constitutes an “authentic” youth voice has to start taking into the account the multiple ways youths represent themselves online in virtual environments.
Security Issues
Many participants commented on the double-edged sword of anonymity online. On the one hand, many presenters (myself included) see that anonymity can make services more accessible for people who can’t out themselves by asking sex questions. On the other hand, we all know that nothing that happens online is completely anonymous. There wasn’t a lot of discussion around security of information and how we can protect youth from both negative sexual consequences and negative consequences of searching out sex information online.
Social Scientists and Computer Human Interaction Folks
Attendees weren’t all wearing their professions on their sleeves, so I may have missed a few of them, but in the discussions during workshops and plenaries the perspective of social scientists and computer human interaction professionals was missed. The former group would have a lot to add to discussions of identity, voice and diversity. The latter group has lots to share about the meaning of computer-mediated service delivery. There’s a small but growing body of research that indicates that computer-mediated sexual health interventions work, but we know nothing about why they work, or what meaning participants take away from these interventions as opposed to human interventions.
