Ysabel Gerrard, "The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life" (U California Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Isabel Gerrard about The Kids Are Online, Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. And thank you for the invitation as well. I'm really, really thrilled to be able to do this. This is a fantastic book. Like as...

basically like a best middle-aged old man now. It was both kind of like revelatory, slightly depressing. There's a wonderful quote about like, you know, fat computers, which are precisely the computers I grew up with that opens the book. And it's also, I think, incredible

incredibly sociologically important. It tells us, I think, quite a lot of important things about youth studies, digital life online. It's got a lot of important interventions into, I guess, public and policy discourses that we're living through right now. And the place to start with a book like this is kind of like what inspired it. How did you get kind of interested in working with

working uh about young people and their kind of digital social media lives yeah that's a great question but firstly i want to say thank you so much for such a lovely intro it's they're really wonderful things to hear honestly i'm very very grateful that you said that um in terms of how the book came to be i think listeners might be interested to know that it was actually never intended to be a book um

it was supposed to be a series of sort of separate research projects. So I joined the University of Sheffield in 2017, sort of with a project going on around mental health and content moderation. And then I got really interested in the anonymous app moderation space. And then I, I don't know, just a few different projects grew in this sort of 2017 to 2022 period. And,

And it was probably just before the pandemic, really, that I just started thinking, I wonder if this is a book. I wonder if there is an intervention, a contribution that is book worthy. Because I think to me, a book needs a really clear through line. If you're going to combine different projects and different ideas together,

It needs to have that thing that holds them all together. And then when I had that eureka moment and realized what that thing was, which was this concept of paradoxes and reframing how we think and talk about kids online. Once I had that, it just suddenly was a book and not distinct projects. So that's, so it's, you know, social media, people's uses of social media, conversations

controversies around social media and society they've always been what the things that have fueled the work that I've done um but yeah it was never supposed to be a book now I'm very happy it's a book now obviously but um but yeah it had quite an interesting little journey really I mean I think you mentioned that the glue that sticks the book together is this idea of a kind of platform paradox and I'm intrigued really to know

basically like what what that means i guess what that kind of theory of uh young people uh and online life is partially because it runs right the way through book through the book but i think also it's like a pretty important contribution to how we think about this space too yeah i the notion of paradoxes was something that came in

It sort of, yeah, probably midway through the projects that I was doing. And it grew out of, frankly, a slightly more personal frustration with deterministic framing of

of the relationship between young people and social media, particularly in the press, but also frankly in academic research. There's so much research on how does X affect Y? How does A impact B? How does C shape D? And I would often read them and I would, you know, because I like to, I'm a proper qual researcher. You know, I love going and talking to people and learning about them and figuring them out.

And so to me, that framing, it felt so disempowering. And so I sort of had this personal grievance with this idea that social media could only ever be good or bad and that it has this such dramatic power to affect, shape or influence you.

not really accounting for the agency of the people who were using it. But then actually, so that was sort of a personal gripe. But then as I was going into schools, chatting to more and more and more young people, this actual paradoxes in the way that they spoke about their relationship with social media, the paradoxes were coming through with such strength in the data that I was producing that it couldn't be ignored.

And they were describing moments where...

only by taking a risk or only by experiencing a harm could they unlock something good or pleasurable or helpful. And so it just bulldozed this idea that a whole platform or a space within a platform or an instance of experience of platform use could be straightforwardly either good or bad. I just felt that that

had gone for me conceptually and so and that's where the paradox notion was was born and then obviously you do the deep dive into all the paradox literature and but yeah it just it came through with such force it frankly could not be ignored

I guess the other thing around the sort of conceptual frame of the book is it brings out these sort of four, I suppose, kind of frameworks or ideas, stigma, secrecy, safety, and social comparison. And sort of each chapter kind of engages with them in different ways. And rather than get you to sort of theoretically understand

introduce them, I think we might kind of dive into some of the research directly. And the book starts with, I guess, one of those examples of, you know, kind of like X is happening, therefore Y, that you are sort of trying to unpack and overturn, which is young people and mental health on social media. And, you

The kind of the paradox is really clear there in the chapter you talk in quite a lot of detail around how this is a space that's like allowed young people to talk about mental health and it's really positive in some ways. But at the same time, you know, it's clear that we've got some significant kind of social problems that have flowed from young people's access to mental health content. So what's the story there? I guess kind of like.

Why, how and what are the paradoxes when people are using social media to understand and discuss mental health? Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's a really it's such a timely and important topic that everyone wants to know about. Everyone wants you to say something about the relationship between social media and mental health.

And so there are so many ways of exploring this relationship. There are so many things you can consider. But one of the contributions that I wanted to make was more around how content circulates on platforms and how that ties into experience.

So I draw quite extensively on literature, on recommendation systems and how social media platforms effectively work to just show you more and more of the stuff that they think you want to see. There's been quite a few newsworthy examples of this. I, for example, I talk about the Molly Russell case in the book and what I...

One of the things I was really grappling with was the notion that social media can be a space where people who are struggling with their mental health and who feel stigmatized for that, who don't really necessarily have anywhere else to turn, can use social media to essentially help them, make them feel less alone and so on.

But then because of the way the platform works, which is by figuring out who you are through your various data points, which is your likes, your comments, your shares, your clicks, your lurking time, you know, your hover time over something. There's so many data points that it uses. It creates...

sort of an algorithmic identity for you and then shows you more and more of the things it thinks you want to see. What that means is when it's figured out that you are someone who wants to talk about your mental health, it will not allow you to escape that. It will not allow you to escape that space that you were in.

And then through that, you risk being exposed to things that could really upset you, things that could really trigger you, things that you don't necessarily want to see or that you wouldn't have independently sought out. And so that's the paradox for me is,

When we think about social media and the way that it works, technically, it's not, it can't ever be strictly good, but it also can't ever be strictly bad because it depends on the person's experience and what they're there for, but also the way that the platform then guides them and guides their behavior. It's so tricky. And that's the part of it that I really struggle with and that I kind of struggle with

myself, actually, in my own life, you know, we've all got things we're going through things we use social media for. And so, you know, I don't want listeners to think I'm just this sort of research is that on the sidelines, observing this phenomenon, this, this conflict between wanting to use social media, but for pleasures and enjoyment and happiness.

versus just being exposed to really awful stuff. And because that's a risk that you take, I'm within that too. You know, it's not just my participants. I think it's all of us. We all have to grapple with that in various ways. So that's how I'm coming up the kind of mental health social media relationship. But as I say, there's so much research in this space and so much work being done to answer other questions about it.

I mean, you flagged there, I guess, your positionality with regard to being a social media user. And it made me think, actually, one of the things that runs throughout the book is, I guess, a kind of, you mentioned being a qual researcher, you know, a distinctive feature.

maybe assembly of methods that are attentive to engaging with young people that in some cases are really creative. In some cases, you've kind of borrowed from particular projects that have come at the research, you know, through traditional methods like talking to young people, but also through some much more, I guess, kind of roundabout and engaging and interesting methods, getting them to think about

doing creative activities and stuff like this. And this might be a nice moment actually to hear a bit about some of the methods. And I guess partially it's a way that the book makes itself even more distinct along with its kind of theoretical and empirical contribution, but actually the methods and the kind of methodological activity become really important for some of the other case studies we're going to talk about.

Yeah, thank you so much for that question. I really enjoy talking about the methods I use to collect the data for the book because...

Because the journey itself was so fascinating. And I'm someone who, I really enjoy thinking and writing and reading about research ethics. And I really lived that through this book. So, you know, it's really tokenistic thing to say, but it is true. I really did.

have to and want to most crucially think about ethical considerations from the very very beginnings of research design right the way through to data representation including doing this podcast you know and I felt this the book took me a really long time to write frankly and one of the reasons I

was that it is predominantly sort of interview and conversational based. So I use kind of digital methods, I use interviews, I ran various workshops with various activities, some of the interviews were independent, some were paired. So it's a bit of a combo of core research, but it

One of the things that kind of, one of the things that drove it was this desire to just, to just get it right, you know, to just represent what people were saying accurately and ethically. And I think that's something that played into that experience. That's something I'm quite proud of in the book is,

is that I am not someone who, you know, we're talking about positionality. I'm not someone who went into this book thinking that social media is the devil. I'm not someone who went into this as a non-user or someone who rejects social media in any capacity. I have my questions, I have my worries, but I also love it. It's a huge part of my life.

And so I kind of went into this research with a series of really genuine, open questions to just gather experience. And there's a moment in the book where I reflect on the different relationships that I had with the educators at the schools I worked with.

So some of the, you know, you take, you've got to take a long time to get to know each other. They, you have an immense amount of power when you are allowed to sit and have a conversation for research purposes with someone under the age of 18 about their lives and about their experiences. And it was a power that I took incredibly seriously and that I did not in any way want to, you know, misuse. Yeah.

And so a lot of the research involved building trust with educators, building trust with the people I spoke to. And I think part of the reason I was able to do that was because they knew that

I used some of the platforms that they did. We could have a laugh and a joke. We had some of the same references in terms of pop culture and viral trends, obviously, you know, a couple of decades apart, but still, you know, I don't think that they felt, or I hope they didn't feel that I was this, you know, researcher who was just coming in to extract their thoughts. And then I would twist and turn them as I wish that it really wasn't like that. And yeah,

So, yeah, the methodological journey wasn't just a methodological one. It was an ethical one, too. And I wanted it to be honest and rigorous. And that's why it took me so long to write, basically. But yeah, thank you for that question, because it's a huge, huge part of this project.

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I mean, it puts me in mind of the kind of the middle sections of the book where this, I guess,

um, tricky subject of how to study anonymity comes up and it comes up both in terms of, um, some of your youngest participants, um, like kind of thinking about their anonymous selves, uh, online in, in, you know, quite a tricky kind of context about discussions about online anonymity, but also, uh, some of the older younger participants, um, using, um,

anonymous apps for their hiss. Kind of like, sort of like...

in some ways quite terrifying, but in other ways quite funny school kids or, you know, kind of school aged young people, but behavior. And I'm intrigued, I guess, by this connection really about how you were using methods and how you understand or how you kind of do research about anonymity. What were you finding was, I guess, the kind of the best way to engage young people to discuss their experiences of anonymity online?

I mean, anonymity is such a controversial topic. And I was quite lucky in the sense that the way we got into conversations about naming was because... So I designed this larger project. It was funded by the British Academy and it was around young people's experiences of anonymous apps. So for listeners who aren't aware, an anonymous app is an app where if two people have it...

And you want to send a message to a person you know who you're sending a message to, but they do not know who has sent it. And these apps very often attract harmful behaviors. And so they will often gain immense popularity. And I really mean immense. You know, their numbers can rival the big players sort of on the social media scene.

And then they die. They get taken down from app stores. They lose their popularity, whatever it may be. And so I went into several schools with this project in mind. But when I went to a secondary school and spoke to younger teens, so those who were sort of more 13, 14 years,

They weren't really using the apps as much as the sixth formers were. So the 16, 17, 18 year olds. And so they had opinions and views on them. But I got this feeling quite early on in the field work that they were parroting views that they had sort of overheard.

or that they felt they should have. And it's one of those things where I don't really have anything to back that up. It was just, when you've been doing research for this long, it was just a gut feeling because their answers were so similar to each other's. And anyway, I kind of had this moment where I thought, I'm not really getting data on anonymous apps here. What I am finding and what they want to talk about

was naming practices and how they can use social media in a way that feels safe to them. And a lot of, for the younger teens, a lot of their experiences and views around online safety were really distinctly tied up with naming, the names that they have.

and whether hiding your name makes you more or less safe and also how that can be contradicted by what sort of the adults in their lives were telling them and it was just a really profound set of conversations where it was so clear that they just wanted to use they called them nicknames

You know, they wanted to use nicknames. They were often happy for their face-to-face school friends to know their nickname. It was often their sort of gamer tag or their gamer handle.

And they felt like if they used the nickname, they would be safer. You know, no one would know the school that they went to. No one could, you know, quote, quote, quote, find them. It made them feel safer. But then what they were being told fairly and understandably, I think, by adults in their lives, it might be parents or carers, educators, and just the discourse that they were hearing was that if they're allowed to use nicknames, that means other people are.

And that means that not everyone you meet online is who they say they are. And that's risky and that's unsafe. And so this practice that made them feel safer at once also made them feel a bit unsafe. So, yeah, that was that's the story of how.

how we kind of arrived at these discussions about anonymity. And I was grateful we were able to arrive at them quite organically, precisely because anonymity and naming practices are quite controversial and big topics at the minute. I guess another quite sort of controversial and big topic is how...

images are kind of created and presented and this isn't just an online thing is it you know you talk actually in the book about how when people are talking about things like editing photos online I mean this is going on has been going on you know kind of magazines you know advertising popular culture way before anything and kind of digital really got going online and I

As with anonymity, I guess it'd be interesting to hear about both how...

editing these sort of photos is on the one hand, you know, it's this paradox again, isn't it? On the one hand, there are sort of like loads of problems that come with the sense of there being particular kind of standards that are enforced, but also young people's kind of like reflexivity and knowledge about this and how they, you know, on the one hand, they're kind of using filters to represent themselves, but on the other hand, they're kind of pushing back against in some cases, some quite narrow body image standards. Yeah.

Absolutely. So the chapter that you're talking about is sort of the final empirical chapter in the book.

and it's my newest work it's my newest project and going back to that question of how the book came to be a book um I actually didn't imagine that this would be a chapter because it was supposed to be a pilot study and actually this came up in the reviews of the book um which was that

There was just quantifiably less data informing that chapter than the others. And all I could do is just tell the reviewer that they were right, because there was, because it was never supposed to be a chapter. It was a smaller scale exploratory study on which I hoped and still will be developing something larger out of it. That being said...

I just, I'm not particular, I'm not someone who is massively weathered to the notion that you need more and more and more of something to make it better in terms of research. And the conversations that I had with the teens who were so kind enough to give me their time and what they were saying was so fascinating and so socially important that I couldn't not include it.

And so I'll take the criticism, I'll take the hit, but I stand by it being there because precisely because of what you've just said that these digital photo editing is a newer iteration of an issue that we have had for decades and decades. You know, when I was my participant's age, for me, it was the kind of, you know, I grew up in England. So I grew up with kind of the tabloid, tabloidy style gossip magazines, you know,

along with, sorry, the tabloid style gossip magazines and the more glossy sort of high-end magazines and billboards and TV shows like America's Next Top Model.

And I grew up with a really particular, thinking a really particular body type was, you know, aspirational and normal. And then you grow up and you change and you develop, don't you? But I didn't grow up with digital photo editing in the sense that you can do it yourself to images of yourself. And a question I really love grappling with in my work and I enjoy being asked is about what is new.

what is new about aspects and elements of social media? What do we already have the tools at our disposal to tackle and solve and address? And what actually is quite distinct and new? And I do feel that digital photo editing, specifically the ability to edit images of your own face and your own body,

is something distinct from what we have had in the past. But what is not new or what is not distinct is the perpetuation via media, whether it's social media or legacy media, of specific ideals and norms around what bodies, quote unquote, should look like. And I loved those conversations and I learned so much about, for example, the techniques that

that teams were using to kind of do that investigative work there's a paper that explores the concept called the digital forensic gaze and it's brilliant and it explores how people use certain techniques to figure out whether an image has been edited or not and

And my participants were so good at it. And when they were thinking about images of their peers, they knew when something had been edited because they would see them the next day at school and they'd think, well, you look, you don't look like that. And so they sort of didn't really care about that. And they also bigged up their friends and admitted themselves that they will often do it, which I was quite surprised about.

I thought it would be a lot more negative. But where they did have problems was with

sort of influencers and content creators editing pictures of themselves because they don't have that face-to-face reference point. They don't see these people in sort of non-social media face-to-face settings. They can't know whether their pictures are edited or not. So it was just a really fascinating project to run and it gave me so many insights that I'm now going to carry forward into new work on

on the old and the new when it comes to editing and body image. I mean, there's a couple of things that come to mind from that. One is, it's quite a nice example of how there's kind of always new

research questions coming up even where um you know you're kind of working through theoretical frameworks that can be applied in in lots of different circumstances but but the other i guess is this question that the book ends with which is about how we kind of live with the paradox and throughout the book you're you know you're kind of pointing out that you've got um i guess almost the kind of like policy position you know you're um kind of trying to work uh to kind of shape

how I suppose like regulators and regulation happens in this space as well as you know having or at least trying to shape some of the platforms approach to dealing with this paradox and I guess you know if not how do we solve this stuff because the book is really clear like these are not things to be solved but really like I guess how do we kind of like live with

the paradox and kind of live better with it as well. The PC gave us computing power at home, the internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language, using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift,

a new podcast from Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Etlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I've become quite conscious. And it's actually been more through sort of publicizing the book and doing interviews about the book that I've realized that I've actually done something that's quite profoundly unhelpful in the sense that

You, you know, if you're an individual who is working at a social media platform and you know that there's this issue and you, you want to shape it, you want to tackle it, you want to solve it and make the platform better for everyone. Someone's sitting there saying, ooh, but it's both good and bad. You know, it's not helpful. It's not pragmatic. And the irony is I am actually a deeply quite a pragmatic person. I can quite enjoy thinking in that way.

And so what I wanted to do was conclude the book with some genuine recommendations for things that had come out of the research that are not necessarily linked

to this notion of there being paradoxes. Because I'd be lying if I said I didn't finish this research and learn that there were things that are just harmful, that they are just bad and that shouldn't happen and shouldn't work in that way. And so I make recommendations to that effect. So as not to just be slightly too top level and utterly useless, but...

Then we move on to this notion of paradoxes. And I think the more and more and more I've reflected on it, the more I wonder if it is actually something that is helpful, if frustrating. Because if you're a parent or a carer or an educator or just someone who, you know, spends time with children and young people in their lives, I think it's quite...

nice and maybe a bit freeing to be able to say to yourself,

you know, we can't solve this and we need to have conversations and work through it together and think about which of these things might be more positive, which of these things might be more negative. At what point one is outweighing the other? Where the power lies? Does the power lie with the young person? Does the power lie with more with the platform in that instance?

And, and working through it in that way and not trying to box things away as good or bad and desperately trying to solve this massive issue in your mind. I wonder if accepting that that isn't really possible might actually be quite freeing on a day to day conversational level. But yeah, I mean, I guess we'll wait and see what the feedback is. But yeah, that's just something I've been

thinking about a lot since the book was published in some ways i mean i often say this um at the end of podcasts it's kind of slightly mean to be like great you've done this book so what's next but it sort of strikes me um from both actually you know on sort of moments where we touched on the idea of like new research projects new research questions but also actually that um balance of pragmatism uh that you you were you were outlining there there's you know

for an even more applied bit of work here. There's obviously, you know, new papers and new books flowing from the new projects. There's also, I think, and this is particularly kind of interesting when people do this theoretical innovation, there's the chance to, I guess, kind of, you know, go back in a couple of years and think about how the past

or paradox you've outlined applies or, you know, has maybe kind of shifted. So are you thinking about kind of more stuff in this space or are you going to be doing something completely different next? That's a lovely question. I'm grateful for it actually because, you know,

I have been thinking a lot about what's next. And for me, and it kind of always was, and I'm glad it hasn't changed. For me, it's extending the digital photo editing research, just expanding that, growing that, getting into, you know, working with more schools,

um and just I I think there's a book to be written about the relationship between digital photo editing you know just the ease of access of these apps and contemporary beauty norms and standards I think there's a I think there's a book there um I'd like to be the one to write it so I hope no one pips me to the post but that's

That's the next project. I'm also applying for a grant to research meme accounts in schools. So that's distinct from the use of anonymous apps that I talk about in the book. And it's something I've just learned more and more over the last few years is that

a lot of schools way more than you would think a student somewhere will create an account usually on instagram where they create and share memes that are specific to the school and that mock or make light of elements of it whether that be the teachers the way that it works pupils things like that and

And there's just no research on it. And there's a couple of news articles that I found where these accounts have been banned or where it's gotten really serious or it's made, you know, the fact that it's even made the news. But I think there's a really interesting project in that. So, yeah, so that's what I'm going to be turning my eye to next.