Bang the Table

It’s not unusual when I am out presenting for Bang the Table to encounter great enthusiasm from people who see this as the ideal way to engage ‘youth’. There seems to be a rather naive belief with some that young people are on the web, its the sort of stuff they like to do so if we put it on the web they will join in (or something like that). I only wish it was that easy.

The truth is that the internet is such a broad and deep resource that simply being there will not attract anyone. Being there helps. It makes you available. But the real issue with engaging young people has always been that they are not even vaguely interested in most of the issues us adults want them to talk about. Or perhaps it is the way we frame those issues.

I thought it might be good to write here about what I think might work and invite others to contribute. Who knows we may be able to grow a youth engagement tool out of all this and that really would be a great outcome.

To start this process I had a long discussion with my kids, two hours to be precise while I had them captive in the car on the long drive home from Sydney. The following points are what I learned:

1. Probably most important of all is that adults do not get kids. We might think we do, we might remember being young ourselves and we may understand where they are at psychologically and developmentally but we don’t get them. There is nothing more tragic than an adult (over 25) who thinks that they can commune as an equal with teenagers. Forget it. Of course there are exceptions. We can all relate to young farmers whose average age is about 42 and young Liberals seem to have an average mental age of 68 but apart from that its best to drop the ‘awesome’ ‘rad’ ‘wicked’ ‘sick’ and ‘squee’ from our vocabulary because you are probably some years out of date anyway and at risk of looking like a try hard.
2. Young people are similar to the rest of us in that they hate pop ups and intrusive advertising. If you were thinking of getting to them by ads on myspace then forget it.
3. Young people want to design the environment in which they are online. They like to be able to make their own backgrounds. Avatars are essential. I guess this control of styles and layouts might be why myspace has been more popular with younger people than Facebook.
4. There seems to have been a genuine move towards creativity. Video sharing, fan fiction, role playing and other creative pursuits all seem popular so it might be that your kids aren’t just wasting their time on the web.
5. Young people love micro blogging – particularly when there might be a member of their favourite band reading their comments.
6. There is a wariness of giving out personal details (I should hope so too).
7. Incentives to participate don’t have to rely on cash or goodies. Kudos on certain websites is equally treasured. However, an itunes voucher is hard to beat.
8. If their school promotes the site they won’t go there unless the teacher is standing over them (I guess this fits, some of my favourite books I refused to read when they were served up at school and only discovered again some years later).
9. Moderation needs to have a personal element. They get quite upset and insulted by unexplained moderation and sites that empower some users over others using them as moderators are despised for the arbitrary and inconsistent moderation that results.
10. Anything tagged for under 18s ‘really sucks’. Under 25s might be ok though.

Perhaps these points which are true for my kids and their friends aren’t universal but if there is some truth to them it begins to crystalise the challenge of using the web to engage young people.

I think it may be possible to target certain online tools for younger people but the perrenial issue is how do we get them to come to the site in the first place. The web is littered with failed attempts to set up social networks. Perhaps we have to build on existing tools and networks? I think that, despite what I said above about reaction to school promotion, schools might have a role to play – perhaps during personal development classes (surely they get bored of talking about sex, drink and drugs?)

My personal view is that young people, just like the rest of us, will engage if they are interested and will not bother if they aren’t. To make it interesting they have to feel empowered – that this is not just tokenism; and the issue has to relate directly to their lives. On the plus side the active social networks that young people typically move in mean that the changes of the word spreading when you do frame an issue in an interesting way are high.

The most activity I’ve seen on Bang the Table from young people was during the review we hosted for Newcastle Buses when school bus routes were being changed. That got young people’s attention and we heard a fair bit from both school kids and students.

Meanwhile I intend to do some more thinking about using micro blogs like Plurk and Twitter as an engagement tool because in my tiny focus group there seemed to be less resistance to this method of engagement than to any other.

This work by Bang the Table Pty Ltd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License.

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