Center for Children's Books Gryphon Brown Bag

Marianne Martens will present the Gryphon Brown Bag: "Protecting Youth in Online Environments: Whose Job Is It Anyway?" 

Studying youth in online environments presents new opportunities—and potential risks. As social media rapidly evolves, scholars, site owners, and young people operate in a climate of constant change. Researchers studying youth on new social media platforms and digital environments, often find themselves ahead of the Institutional Review Board. Responsibility for privacy protection and ethical considerations—particularly when the subject is youth—becomes more important than ever. Young people engaging with new platforms are often unaware of the amount of detail that can be extracted about them—or they are willing to sacrifice their privacy in exchange for the fun of using a new digital tool. And site owners, who offer participatory opportunity in exchange for information that provides commercial gain, must balance their desire for using new tools for mining (and exploiting) their digital data, with the responsibility of somehow guaranteeing safety for young participants in online environments. 

In this brown bag chat, we'll discuss issues related to young people in online environments—look at how they engagement, the laws that are supposed to protect them (like COPPA), and discuss ethical issues around privacy, moderation, and responsibility.

Martens is an iSchool research fellow and assistant professor of library and information science at Kent State University. Her research covers the interconnected fields of youth services librarianship and publishing, and the impact of interactive reading technologies. Previously, she was vice president of North-South Books in New York. Martens is the author of Publishers, Readers, and Digital Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Questions? Contact CCB