I am delighted that Free Press has invited me to write about my new book, Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet (MIT Press, 2007), and to encourage discussion of some of the issues I have raised in it. One reason I wrote the book was to alert readers to the critical need for intervention in some of the important policy issues that will influence the future of our media system, as well as our democracy. Generation Digital comes out of my experience as a media policy advocate in Washington, D.C. From 1991 until 2003 -- when I returned to full-time teaching at American University -- I ran the Center for Media Education, a public interest group I co-founded with Jeff Chester. It is both a personal history of my own media reform policy efforts in Washington and an in-depth investigation of the major trends that are shaping the digital media culture.

The explosive growth of the Internet has triggered enormous technological, economic, and cultural changes that are profoundly altering the U.S. media. Young people are at the very heart of these changes. They are, in many ways, defining users of the new digital media, growing up in an immersive culture that has become a constant and pervasive presence in their lives. My book explains how the new tools of the Digital Age – from instant messaging, to blogs, to mobile devices, to social networking software – are particularly appealing to children and adolescents because they tap into the key developmental needs of identity exploration, personal expression, and autonomy.

Digital media are also creating unprecedented opportunities for youth to participate in democracy. This very website is a testament to that power, and the book documents a variety of efforts by young people who have launched campaigns to promote youth voting, to challenge corporate authority, and to rally support for policy battles over the future of the Internet. (See also our report, Youth as E-Citizens.) New Web 2.0 platforms have extended the political potential of the Internet even further, offering a powerful new set of participatory, multi-media tools that can be harnessed to serve the common good, and to empower young people as citizens.

But marketplace forces are threatening to undermine the democratic potential of the media system. Generation Digital provides a detailed account of the powerful interactive youth marketing machine that is fueling the growth of the new media culture. Digital marketers are ushering in an entirely new set of relationships, breaking down the traditional barriers between content and commerce, and creating intimate “one-to-one” relationships between young people and corporations. Marketers are continually developing new interactive techniques for reaching and engaging children and teens, tracking their every move online, and compiling elaborate behavioral profiles. (The recent study of interactive food marketing that I co-authored with Jeff Chester documents some of the latest practices.) Using sophisticated data mining, research, and targeting tools, companies are now strategically penetrating MySpace, YouTube, and other social networking platforms in order to exploit them for commercial purposes. Marketers speak of “recruiting evangelists,” by seeking out the “influencing members of each social network” and turning them into “brand breeders” or “brand advocates” for products. This kind of direct involvement by marketers into the daily communication and community-building activities of young people is unprecedented.

Because digital technologies are still in their early fluid stages, it is critical that we have a public debate about what kind of media culture we want for our children, and for the public at large. One of my longstanding concerns is that media debates about children tend to focus only on protecting them from harmful content, rather than creating a media system that will help them become thoughtful and engaged citizens. Generation Digital shows how the controversial Congressional debates during 90s – over cyberporn, online safety, and television violence -- deflected public attention away from the rapidly developing online marketplace and from a series of legislative actions (including the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) that profoundly influenced the power structure of the electronic media.

As we consider the policy issues for the Digital Age, the goal of fostering a healthy, democratic media culture for young people must be a top priority. We cannot and should not assume that marketplace forces will automatically foster the marketplace of ideas that is fundamental to a democracy. We need to translate the values that have fueled the public interest media reform movement into a proactive agenda for the future. I have outlined some of the building blocks for such an agenda in the last chapter of my book, and offer the following questions as a starting point for further discussion:

• Can we create participatory platforms in the new media landscape that are not dominated by commercialism and that are in the foreground of the digital experiences of young people?

• What rules are needed to prevent unfair targeting of children and teens by digital marketers?

• How can we achieve equitable access to broadband and other participatory technologies for all children -- across existing lines of class, race, ethnicity and gender – enabling them to be not only consumers of content but also contributors to the public discourse?