Delimiting Moral and Ethical Behavior in a Limitless Age: A review of Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap by Carrie James

James, Carrie. Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.

“Remember who you are, where you’re from, and what you represent.” Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck wrote a version of this directive into the lyrics of their musical production The Real Ambassadors. Fans of the Arsenal Football Club attribute the quote to legendary midfielder David Rocastle. Alumnae of Camp Crestridge for Girls remember founding director Miss Arvine Bell offering this reminder every time they passed through the camp gates.

However, for those who study, teach, and practice digital and media literacy, this trio of imperatives offers a shorthand mandate for avoiding deficits in moral and ethical thinking during online activities and behaviors, particularly deficits that manifest among today’s young people. The reasons behind and importance of this mandate—in more elegant and comprehensive form—are found in Carrie James’s Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap.¹

James, a sociologist and Principal Investigator at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, collected the data that informs Disconnected during her work with the Good Play Project, which she codirected with Howard Gardner. From 2008–2012, James, Gardner, and their research team interviewed more than one hundred youth between the ages of ten and twenty-five, “youth who spend a significant amount of time online and who engage in different kinds of activities, including blogging, content creation, gaming, and use of social network sites” (17). These interviews, and the narratives they evoked, were then evaluated to understand the young people’s “experiences and choices in online contexts,” particularly as they worked through three hypothetical dilemmas that represent the themes of privacy, property, and participation:

1. A teen attends a party after being told by a coach to stay home the night before a big game, and another attendee posts an incriminating pictures on Facebook;
2. A college student contributes to a Wikipedia page but then reuses that same material in a paper.
3. Players in a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) conspire to take advantage of new participants by selling them worthless virtual trinkets for an inflated price.

James then digs into the conversations her team had with young people in response to these dilemmas and what those conversations revealed. She looks for evidence of three types of thinking among the youth who participated in her study: consequence thinking (or self-focused thinking), moral thinking, and ethical thinking. With their subjects, researchers emphasized that there were no right or wrong answers, for no responses to these situations are clear-cut, especially in the hypothetical. Instead, writes James, the team was most interested in discovering “where and when young people’s thinking includes or lacks moral or ethical sensitivity and an inclination to grapple with the dilemmas” (9).

Once analyzed, the data revealed two types of moral and ethical gaps in online activities among today’s youth. James calls these blindspots and disconnects, and she distinguishes between the two in this way: “Whereas blind spots are unconscious, naïve, and unintentional, disconnects are quite conscious, even mindful” (10).

For example, in her chapter on privacy, in which she uses the hypothetical party pictures as a springboard for discussion, James writes that many youth see threats to privacy only as a personal risk—a threat to “safety and reputations” (28). Accordingly, their reactions to the unwanted pictures appearing on a social network were, more often that not, centered around attempts to control their spreading and the potential audience. Where the blind spot occurred was in many young people’s failure to see how the pictures might reach unintended audiences and, in turn, affect community members both known (e.g., teammates, a coach) and unknown (e.g., the reputation of the school, conference, or sport as a whole). Not a surprising result, notes James, and “characteristically American” (44).

The ethical disconnect most often observed was an attitude that used to be reserved for celebrities but today can manifest toward classmates or even strangers—the feeling that online privacy violations, such as an unwanted picture tagged on a social network, are “expected among peers and therefore unstoppable” (39).

Though an admitted digital pessimist by nature, James opens herself to a brighter future by identifying this possible solution: “the need for a new discourse about online privacy, one that balances personal risk with sensitivity to the social, moral, and ethical dimensions of privacy in a digital age.” (45) She tasks adults in these young peoples’ lives with initiating the conversations required to build this balance. It is not just offline citizenship that must be taught, she reminds her readers. Moral accountability must be given equal weight online as personal accountability.

In the chapters on property and participation, James repeats this pattern of laying out the dilemma, analyzing responses, recognizing blind spots and disconnects, and identifying opportunities for improvement. Questions of property provide a particularly interesting read on youth attitudes (and ambivalence) toward ownership of online content.

By taking into account considerations both developmental—teens have the capacity for ethical thinking but do not always exercise it—and technological—the mediation of social networks creates distance between users and therefore may foster disinhibition— James offers a deeper and better understanding of the connected mindset among pre-teens, teens, and young adults. “I believe,” she writes, “that their ways of thinking reveal fundamental and lasting insights about the opportunities and challenges of being digital for our moral and ethical sensibilities.” (19) Indeed, they do.

Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap is an enlightening read, not only for its analysis of online decision making but also for its revelation of what youth have (and haven’t) learned from the adults in their lives prior to making those decisions. James’s work is relevant for any parent, teacher, graduate student, and professor who has ever wondered, in response to a young person’s ethically questionable decision online, What were they thinking?² Upon reading Disconnected, however, well-meaning adults will realize that the question they should ask instead is this: What are we teaching? After all, the so-called digital natives were born into a participatory culture. Their predecessors should be willing to inform them of and guide them with principles of ethical participation.