YES

By: David Kleeman

With a hat tip to The Who: “The kids are alright.” Today’s young people create games, videos, TikToks, fan art and fiction. Confronted with a pandemic that isolated them from friends, they adopted and adapted digital platforms to sustain their social lives. They control more discretionary money than any previous cohort, and they want to spend it on brands and experiences that engage with and listen to them. In short, Gen Z and Gen Alpha not only want agency in their media, technology and entertainment—they expect it.

WHAT IS AGENCY?

We’re still primarily in a web2, centralized world, where platform companies own the tools of production, avenues of distribution and users’ data. Web3 will someday have amazing potential to return agency to users, but it’s too early for kids to be safe in decentralized worlds.

Agency is not absolute. Kids need support to build a foundation for exploration and responsible risk-taking in digital spaces. Beyond tech and regulatory solutions, teaching critical literacy is needed across all media industries, and from parents and educators.

FANDOM, CONNECTED

Youth have a long history of exerting agency over their favorite things, making stories and characters, toys and games their own through their play, dress and creativity. But there was a time when sharing that fandom was limited to a child’s physical community. As a kid, if I wore a Davy Crockett cap and my friend donned a Superman cape, the roleplay hit a wall.

If you brought Star Wars action figures to a playdate and I brought Masters of the Universe, we needed to compromise (not a bad thing). But when the internet arrived, fans could share their fiction and art with a more global community. Today’s youth sit on the cusp between web2’s massive social reach and web3’s fan-centric, user-generated communities. Older kids and teens immerse themselves in the spaces they need to support their self-expression—often around IPs or brands. But more importantly, they find communities where they can express their authentic selves, in ways not always possible in real life.

BUILDERS, NOT JUST USERS

Empowering creation with powerful tools also builds agency. Young people are no longer just consumers or users; they’re builders. YouTube videos, TikToks, Roblox games, Fortnite Creative islands, Minecraft constructions, fan art and fiction—there have never been more ways to bring one’s dreams to life. The rapid rise of generative AI engines enables pretty much anyone to produce high-quality game art and, soon, animation.

For some young people, just the act of creation is powerful. Others build to only share with friends and family.

A small percentage seek to tap into the massive global audi- ence, and a lucky few find fame and fortune. They have a willing audience—under-18s now watch as many minutes on YouTube, TikTok and Twitch as they do on Netflix, Prime, Hulu and Disney+. Current estimates are that within the next decade, one million people will earn their living from the metaverse, and another 100 million will build for fun.

This projection levels up the importance of early agency from “nice to have” for expressive play or hobbies, to “must have” for developing the builders and creators of the future. At Dubit, we are hiring older teens and young 20-somethings to build metaverse experiences. These native users of Roblox, Core, Fortnite, Discord and other powerful platforms learned coding out of an intrinsic interest in making what they and their friends wanted to play. Pairing them with experienced builders who understand team-building, client service and working to deadlines results in symbiotic mentoring.

INDUSTRY’S RESPONSIBILITY

Young people have more agency than ever before, but that doesn’t relieve us of our professional obligation to make high-quality, thoughtful, age-appropriate, innovative content for linear and inter- active media. Our work provides seeds for their creativity, along with an invitation to bring an expansive, “what if” vision to the table.

NO

By: Peter Robinson

Young people are incredibly invested, both in their own development and in the world around them. But so much of this is out of their hands—and that’s something I’d like to change.

I would argue that despite the potential access to more information than ever before, they actually have less agency than previous young generations. (The word “potential” is intentional and important.)

First, let’s talk about what agency means. The dictionary definition is, “the ability to take action, or choose what action to take.” But in order to do this, you need:

1. Awareness (because you can’t act on something you know nothing about);

2. Comprehension (because understanding something’s relevance to you provides the motivation and rationale for action); and

3. The ability and/or desire to act.

Many movements have been inspired by young generations challenging norms and taking action, including Black rights, women’s suffrage, anti-war movements and even punk. But today’s young people face barriers to agency that are not as clear-cut.

AWARENESS

Young people have access to so much information, but it is largely fed to them by powerful forces—algorithm-powered mega-plaforms, brands with hungry bottom lines, and influencers seeking “engagement.” (Thankfully, educators still play a role in this, too.)

These forces put agency in peril: How can you reasonably filter when there is so much noise?

Recently, a child spoke with us about the influx of branded content onto platforms like Roblox, stating, “adults have messed up the real world, and have now come to Roblox to do the same.”

Social gaming platforms have been natural havens for niche communities, rule-breakers and boundary-pushers for years, with keen young people rapidly adopting and deploying new game-based tools. But inevitably, those same havens attract adult attention, and the brands are never far behind.

RELEVANCE

This stage is critical to comprehension. We can all act, but having an understanding of why it’s important (to you or others) is crucial to achieving full agency. With so much misinformation and brand noise, it can be hard to distinguish fact from fiction. To find and retain agency, it helps if it has meaning.

Media literacy in schools helps, but we are facing another major evolution in online media—web3—and once again, our approach will need to adapt. If web3 develops in a decentralized manner, it will provide spaces for expression without filters and brand noise.

If it doesn’t—which I suspect will be the case—then tools for filtering relevance and information will be key.

ABILITY TO ACT

You need to know what to do and how to do it. But even wanting to act is hard without “scaffolding.” This is shorthand for support—providing kids with a framework that fosters agency instead of restricting it.

For example, KidsKnowBest did a study on sustainability two years ago, and found that the difference between action and comprehension was a system that supported a child to go from awareness (repeated prompts), to comprehension (multiple con- versations and practical education), to action (lowered barriers to sustainable behaviors), culminating in rewards for positive behavior.

Agency and sustainable behaviors are most clearly demonstrated by circular communities, which the European Week for Waste Reduction defines as when “individual citizens and the wider community are engaged, invested and see local value and benefit in pursuing zero waste and circular activities.” In such a system, the reward is part of the action.

Children can have degrees of agency, if they can find what matters and how to act. It is our duty to design the scaffolding now to ensure that future generations have the agency that young activists in the 1960s, for example, had and used for the benefit of society.

The kids of this generation will be building the platforms of the next one, and we have a unique opportunity to help them.

Strategist, analyst, author and speaker David Kleeman has worked in children’s media for more than 35 years. He is SVP of global trends at metaverse studio and research consultancy Dubit.

A researcher and commentator on kids and family trends, Peter Robinson is Chief Strategy Officer at KidsKnowBest, a kids and family research and marketing agency.

This debate was originally published in Kidscreen’s February/March 2023 issue.