I very much enjoyed Dennis Baron’s new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, and highly recommend you pick it up. Baron does a wonderful job exploring the history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before in my essays on “Internet optimists vs. pessimists” (See: 1, 2, 3).

I have a complete review of Baron’s A Better Pencil now up on the City Journal‘s website here.  I’ve also pasted it down below.

Plato Wrote it Down by Adam Thierer

a review of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, by Dennis Baron (Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $24.95)

In the beginning, Dennis Baron reminds us in his new book, A Better Pencil, there was the word—the spoken word, that is. Oral tradition, the passing of knowledge through stories and lectures, was the primary method of instruction and learning throughout early human civilization. But then a few innovative souls decided to start writing everything down on stones and clay. Almost as soon as they did, a great debate began on the impact of new communications technology on culture and education. And it rages on today, with a new generation of optimists and skeptics battling over the impact that computing, the Internet, and digital technologies have on our lives and on how we learn about the world.

Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, begins his splendid history of these debates with the well-known tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word. The Egyptian god Theuth boasts to King Thamus about how his invention of writing will improve the wisdom and memory of the masses. Thamus shoots back, “The discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.” Thamus then passes judgment on writing’s impact on society, saying he fears that the people “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

Of course, as Baron points out, we remember this warning only “because Plato wrote it down.” It’s one of the recurrent ironies in the history of techno-skepticism that while “the shock of the new often brings out critics eager to warn us away,” those critics often embrace—or, at the very least, benefit from—the very tools that they want the rest of us to shun. Whether it’s Luddites On-Line winning Yahoo’s “Cool Site of the Day” award, or the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association promoting National Handwriting Day via the Internet, or Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto attracting unprecedented readership thanks to its availability on the Web, those who have a “common tendency to romanticize the good old ways” of doing things often fail to appreciate how new technology can benefit society—including themselves.

Baron walks us through a litany of historical examples—the printing press, the telegraph, telephones, typewriters, pocket calculators, personal computers, word processors, webpages, blogs, social-networking sites, and more—and identifies the usual pattern: we greet each new technology with deep distrust and dire warnings, but in time we adapt to the new realities. Indeed, as a species, we have an unparalleled ability to learn new ways of doing things. We don’t always like technological change, and often we deeply resent or fear it, but in the end, we learn to live with it and eventually to embrace it.

With the rise of the Internet and digital technologies, we see this pattern unfolding once again. “According to the latest generation of critics and naysayers,” Baron notes, “today it is computers that are producing texts whose value and credibility we question; computers that are giving too many people control over the creation and publication of text; computers that are wreaking havoc with our handwriting.” Contemporary critics also fret over “information overload.”

The backlash against computers and digitization began while the Internet was still in its cradle, with the 1992 publication of Neil Postman’s anti-technology screed, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman’s intellectual descendants include Internet critics such as Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, and Mark Helprin, whose works drip with disdain for all things digital. They warn of a coming dystopia where truth and authority vanish, culture crumbles, and political polarization breeds closed-mindedness and even the death of deliberative democracy.

These overly pessimistic critics turn a blind eye to both the wonders of the digital age and humanity’s ability to adapt. As Baron persuasively argues, “English survives, conversation thrives online as well as off, and on balance, digital communications seems to be enhancing human interaction, not detracting from it.” In fact, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that previous generations would have found unimaginable. As Baron puts it: “The Internet is a true electronic frontier where everyone is on his or her own: all manuscripts are accepted for publication, they remain in virtual print forever, and no one can tell writers what to do.” Such human empowerment is worth celebrating, even if it does have the occasional downside. Abundance is better than a world of scarce choices and few voices.

Baron’s retelling of the history of techno-skepticism is edifying, but it leaves one with the nagging feeling that these debates will never cease. Each generation will witness a technological watershed that brings out a fresh crop of both pollyannas and pessimists. Like Plato, however, most of us will embrace whatever’s next and move forward.

On July 27th, The Progress & Freedom Foundation hosted a Capitol Hill panel discussion entitled “Online Child Safety, Privacy, and Free Speech: An Overview of Challenges in Congress & the States.” The event featured remarks from:

• Parry Aftab, Executive Director, WiredSafety.org
• Todd Haiken, Senior Manager of Policy, Common Sense Media
• Jim Halpert, Partner, DLA Piper
• Berin Szoka, Senior Fellow, The Progress & Freedom Foundation

We’ve just released the transcript of the event, which I have also pasted down below the fold in a Scribd document reader. Also, the audio for this event can be heard by clicking below:

Download mp3

Here is the full event description:

Online child safety, privacy, and free speech remain hotly debated issues at both the federal and state level. Bills introduced in Congress to address cyberbullying concerns propose either educational initiatives or a criminalization approach. Access to objectionable content also remains a concern and a new, government-mandated task force is looking into those issues. Meanwhile, state officials, including many state attorneys general, continue to explore age verification mandates for social networking sites and some have considered building on the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to expand “parental notification” mandates. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently announced an expedited review of COPPA to see if it is keeping up with new developments. The FTC is also exploring child safety in virtual worlds. New concerns about “sexting,” or the sending of sexual explicit images over mobile devices, has also raised new concerns led some lawmakers to ponder penalties.

How serious are these concerns? Is legislation or regulation needed to address them? What free speech issues are at stake? Should Congress take the lead or leave it to the States to experiment with different models? These and other issues were discussed by a panel of leading experts in the field of online safety and privacy policy.

Transcript PFF Online Child Safety Privacy Hill Event (7-27-2009) http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=18756666&access_key=key-1blb7az1ag406howibuk&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.”

As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most importantly that websites obtain the “verifiable consent” of a child’s parent before collecting personal information about that child or giving that child access to interactive functionality that might allow the child to share their personal information with others. The law was intended primarily to “enhance parental involvement in a child’s online activities” as a means of protecting the online privacy and safety of children.

Yet advocates of expanding COPPA—or “COPPA 2.0″—see COPPA’s verifiable parental consent framework as a means for imposing broad regulatory mandates in the name of online child safety and concerns about social networking, cyber-harassment, etc. Two COPPA 2.0 bills are currently pending in New Jersey and Illinois. The accelerated review of COPPA to be conducted by the FTC next year (five years ahead of schedule) is likely to bring to Washington serious talk of expanding COPPA—even though Congress clearly rejected covering adolescents age 13-16 when COPPA was first proposed back in 1998.

We’ll discuss some of the key points of our paper in a series of blog posts, but here are the top nine reasons for rejecting COPPA 2.0, in that such an approach would:

• Burden the free speech rights of adults by imposing age verification mandates on many sites used by adults, thus restricting anonymous speech and essentially converging—in terms of practical consequences—with the unconstitutional Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), another 1998 law sometimes confused with COPPA;
• Burden the free speech rights of adolescents to speak freely on—or gather information from—legal and socially beneficial websites;
• Hamper routine and socially beneficial communication between adolescents and adults;
• Reduce, rather than enhance, the privacy of adolescents, parents and other adults because of the massive volume of personal information that would have to be collected about users for authentication purposes (likely including credit card data);

• Would likely be the subject of massive fraud or evasion since it is not always possible to definitively verify the parent-child relationship, or because the system could be “gamed” in other ways by determined adolescents;
• Do nothing to prevent offshore sites and services from operating outside these rules;
• Present major practical challenges for law enforcement officials in the face of such evasion by both domestic users and offshore sites;
• Could destroy opportunities for new or smaller website operators to break into the market and offer competing services and innovations, thus contributing to consolidation of online content and services by erecting barriers to entry; and
• Violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, since Internet activity clearly represents interstate commerce that states have no authority to regulate.

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), which was formed a year ago to study online safety concerns and technologies, today issued its final report to the U.S. Attorneys General who authorized its creation. It was a great honor for me to serve as a member of the ISTTF and I believe this Task Force and its report represent a major step forward in the discussion about online child safety in this country.

The ISTTF was very ably chaired by John Palfrey, co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and I just want to express my profound thanks here to John and his team at Harvard for doing a great job herding cats and overseeing a very challenging process. I encourage everyone to examine the full ISTTF report and all the submissions, presentations, and academic literature that we collected. [It’s all here.] It was a comprehensive undertaking that left no stone unturned.

Importantly, the ISTTF convened (1) a Research Advisory Board (RAB),which brought together some of the best and brightest academic researchers in the field of child safety and child development and (2) a Technical Advisory Board (TAB), which included some of America’s leading technologists, who reviewed child safety technologies submitted to the ISTTF. I strongly recommend you closely examine the RAB literature review and TAB assessment of technologies because those reports provide very detailed assessments of the issues. They both represent amazing achievements in their respective arenas.

There are a couple of key takeaways from the ISTTF’s research and final 278-page report that I want to highlight here. Most importantly, like past blue-ribbon commissions that have studied this issue, the ISTTF has generally concluded there is no silver-bullet technical solution to online child safety concerns. The better way forward is a “layered approach” to online child protection. Here’s how we put it on page 6 of the final report:

The Task Force remains optimistic about the development of technologies to enhance protections for minors online and to support institutions and individuals involved in protecting minors, but cautions against overreliance on technology in isolation or on a single technological approach. Technology can play a helpful role, but there is no one technological solution or specific combination of technological solutions to the problem of online safety for minors. Instead, a combination of technologies, in concert with parental oversight, education, social services, law enforcement, and sound policies by social network sites and service providers may assist in addressing specific problems that minors face online. All stakeholders must continue to work in a cooperative and collaborative manner, sharing information and ideas to achieve the common goal of making the Internet as safe as possible for minors.

In sum, education and empowerment are the real keys to keeping kids safer online. We all need to work harder to mentor our children and help them develop the skills and good old fashion common sense to make smart decisions online. Technical tools can supplement — but can never supplant — education, parental guidance, and better mentoring.

Still, this was a task force that primarily came about after state attorneys general (AGs) had been incessantly pressuring social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to adopt age verification technologies as a solution to online child safety concerns. Specifically, fears about online predators — driven largely by the moral panic whipped up by shows like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” — prompted calls for mandatory age verification for social networking sites.

So, what did the final ISTTF report have to say about mandatory age verification. Answer: Probably not as much as the AGs were hoping for, and what we did say they may not like to hear.

First, the ISTTF’s Research Advisory Board conclusively proved the primary online safety issue today is peer-on-peer cyber-harassment, not adult predation. Mandatory age verification would do nothing to stop cyberbullying. Indeed, the lack of adult supervision may even exacerbate the problem.

Second, after reviewing various age verification solutions, the ISTTF’s Technical Advisory Board concluded:

Age verification and identity authentication technologies are appealing in concept but challenged in terms of effectiveness. Any system that relies on remote verification of information has potential for inaccuracies. For example, on the user side, it is never certain that the person attempting to verify an identity is using their own actual identity or someone else’s. Any system that relies on public records has a better likelihood of accurately verifying an adult than a minor due to extant records. Any system that focuses on third-party in-person verification would require significant political backing and social acceptance. Additionally, any central repository of this type of personal information would raise significant privacy concerns and security issues.

As a result, our final report concluded that:

The Task Force does not believe that the Attorneys General should endorse any one technology or set of technologies to protect minors online. Instead, the Attorneys General should continue to work collaboratively with all stakeholders in pursuing a multifaceted approach to enhance safety for minors online.

Then, on pages 28-31, we go into more detail about age verification, finding that:

[Age verification] approaches are less effective in the child safety context — in other words, at creating safe environments for minors — than in the context of completing financial transactions or regulating purchases, especially to the extent that identity authentication and age verification focus solely upon adults. The reasons for this include the fact that in the commercial and financial contexts, an adult typically wants to verify his or her identity correctly in order to purchase a product or get access to records. Moreover, when adults purchase regulated items (such as alcohol or tobacco) online, in some cases a second form of age verification occurs when the item is delivered.

The identity authentication and age verification solutions that authenticate or verify only adults could be and are already sometimes used to reduce minors’ access to adult-only sites. Because they do not authenticate or verify minors, however, they cannot be used to create environments for minors that require authentication or verification prior to access. To the extent that an adult nonetheless uses his or her own verifiable information when accessing an environment intended only for minors, these technologies could enhance the ability of Internet service providers and social network sites to exclude that adult. Of course, it seems unlikely that an adult with nefarious purposes would proceed in this manner. Thus, while these types of identity authentication and age verification technologies may be helpful for other purposes, they do not appear to offer substantial help in protecting minors from sexual solicitation.

And there’s far more detail following this passage from the final report, so please read that section for additional discussion.

Again, some AGs may not like to hear all this but these were near-consensus findings of the Task Force. And, if anything, the Task Force probably did not far enough to show why mandatory age verification will not work and how age verification will actually make kids less safe online. In my final statement to the Task Force, this is what I spent my time focusing on. I outlined the dangers of age verification as well as 10 questions about age verification that the AGs must answer if they persist in this pursuit of a technological Holy Grail. I have embedded my entire expanded final statement down below as a Scribd document, but here are the key reasons I believe mandatory age verification represents a dangerous solution to online child safety concerns:

Again, although the Task Force didn’t go quite as far as I would have liked in terms of making clear the dangers associated with mandatory age verification, I think our final report reflects the general skepticism among Task Force members about taking that path or relying too heavily on any single, silver-bullet technical approach to online child safety concerns. Again, this is real progress; a sensible step forward in the discussion about keeping our kids safe online.

I hope policymakers will take a close look at our conclusions and recommendations and take them seriously. We need to stop wasting so much time searching for silver bullets and start getting more serious about how to better mentor our kids so that they can be good — and safe — digital citizens. Education, not regulation, is the key.

Below I have linked to some background essays about the Internet Safety Technical Task Force as well as additional thoughts by fellow task force members or reporters. I’ll add to it as I see new things in coming days.

Additional thoughts / articles about the ISTTF:

• ISTTF director John Palfrey discusses the report on this short podcast with Larry Magid as well as this longer one from the Berkman Center
• ISTTF co-director danah boyd comments on the report on her blog
• ISTTF member Larry Magid of ConnectSafely.org: “Net Threat to Minors Less Than Feared,” CNet News.com
• ISTTF member Anne Collier of Net Family News: “Key Crossroads for Net Safety“
• ISTTF member Stephen Balkam of FOSI featured on an NPR podcast about our work
• ISTTF member John Morris of CDT: “Deconstructing Reaction to Net Safety Task Force Report“
• ISTTF member Marsali Hancock, President of iKeepSafe blog essay about the task force
• AGs respond to report in interview with Emily Steel of the Wall Street Journal: “The Case for Age Verification“
• New York Times article by Brad Stone: “Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown“
• Wall Street Journal article by Emily Steel: “No Easy Answer for Protecting Kids Online“
• Associated Press story by Anick Jesdanun: “Panel: Technology Alone Can’t Protect Kids Online“
• Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog entry by Tracy Mitrano, “Report Weighs the Benefits and Risks of Social Networks,”
• PC World article by Jaikumar Vijayan: “Study Accused of Exaggerating Kids Online Safety“
• PC World blog post by Jaikumar Vijayan: “Are Internet Child Safety Concerns Overblown or Understated?”

Background info:

• an old blog entry of mine about the formation of the task force
• an old paper of mine about the agreement between MySpace and AGs that led to the formation of the ISTTF
• an essay of mine from the ISTTF’s mid-point: “Age Verification Debate Continues; Schools Now at Center of Discussion“
• my big white paper on the dangers of mandatory age verification
• my book: “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods”
• my final ISTTF statement, which is also embedded below as a Scribd document…