CHLOE COMBI: Thank you very much for having me.
Yes, my name is Chloe Combi, and I'm
here today to talk to you about my book,
"Generation Z, Their Voices, Their Lives."
And to reiterate, it was a strange kind
of genesis, this book, because I'm not originally a writer.
I was a school teacher.
And I was a schoolteacher straight out of university,
and I taught in quite challenging
inner London schools.
And there, I started my own education charity
called Write Club, which got quite a lot of media attention.
And because of that, i started writing for newspapers,
sort of darkly humorous pieces about the realities of teaching
life.
And then from there, I started writing features
about, I guess, the grittier aspects of teen life,
so on grooming, and busing, and gangland
culture, and dog fighting.
And yes, those did get quite a lot of attention.
I think they were well timed as well.
And what became very clear was that there
was this real need for this window into teenage life.
So Generation Z was born.
And the concept, I suppose, was simple enough.
it was gonna take about 3 years to research and write it,
and I'd already kind of started.
And the aim was to interview 2,000 teenagers, which I hit.
So it's a big sample of teenagers.
And this isn't a book just about gritty teenagers.
It's from the most kind of normal teenage experience
to the most extreme, because you have to get the whole range.
And so I think it's a good insight
into who teenagers in the UK in the 21st century are.
So who are Generation Z?
Well, we're already talked a bit about this.
And actually, originally, and I wanted
to call this book Generation I. I
didn't want to call it Generation Z,
but we'll go back into that later.
And the small i, because I thought
the I for the narcissistic I, which
is a quality that this generation are accused
of a lot, the i, which obviously is
a sort of sly nod to Apple, which most teenagers are
completely enthralled with, I'm sure you know.
And obviously, i for information,
which is a real quality of everyday life
that we're all into.
But there was a fear that people would
assume that it was a book about technology,
and it's not at all, because I'm not a tech expert.
So many things.
So it became Generation Z.
And actually Generation Z was more of
understood as a sociological label than I realized.
Because we've all heard of Generation X.
That was a real thing, and there was books on Generation X.
But Generation Y, which I'm guessing most people in here
fall into, kind of fell through the cracks?
And they were sometimes called the millennial generation,
and sometimes called the post-baby boomer generation.
So on a very simple level, Generation Z
are the children of Generations Y and Generation X.
And some of them probably actually
have grandparents now who are Generation X, which
is a bit terrifying.
And for me, for my purposes, they were teenagers.
Everyone who I interviewed in this book
and who is in this book is between the ages of 13 to 19.
But for some people writing about Generation Z,
they widen that cohort a little bit,
and they're probably more 12 to 22 year-olds.
And currently there's a lot of scare pieces about how
the oldest of Generation Z are about to enter the workplace,
and ill-equipped they are, and how they can't talk properly,
and don't write properly, and they write in text speak,
and speak in text speak.
But for my purposes, they were teenagers.
On a much more complex level, they were as complex
as any big group of people.
They're as complicated, and as strange, and as multifaceted,
and as normal, and as likable, and a unlikable,
and as difficult to define as any other large group.
But there were themes, and they were coming up again,
and again, and again.
They became quite predictable, and they
formed the natural chapters of the book.
And not in any order, and I can't never
remember all of these, but they are sex, of course,
and body, of course, school, family, friendships
and relationships, crime, gender, class, race,
the future, and technology.
And technology particularly I wanted to focus on a bit,
obviously, considering this audience.
But also because it is interesting
for this generation, because this is the first generation--
this is the thing that differentiates this generation.
This is the first generation that have grown up
with the internet.
They've grown up with social media.
They've grown up with mobile phones,
and they've never known a world without those things.
The rest of it's probably can remember a world when
we didn't have those things, but this generation has never
known world without them, and it's massively
influenced who they are, and how they've evolved,
and how they think.
And on the way, I actually met a few kids,
several who spring to mind, and I'm
gonna read you a very short piece, who
didn't realize that the internet used to not exist.
And they actually thought I was pulling their leg,
and they had to go and google this fact, which obviously
in ironic in and of itself.
And I'm going to read you a very short piece from the book.
Now this is a trigger warning.
There's swearing.
And if you do end up reading this book,
there's lots of swearing, and there's
lots of quite grim stuff in it.
There's lots of really funny and happy stuff as well,
but there is swearing.
And I'm not going to give you the whole description,
but these are three boys, and basically
them describing their relationship every day
with technology.
And these three boys have never read a book,
except "Holes" by Louis Sachar, because they were made to,
and "Romeo and Juliette," because they
were made to at school.
And they figured that they probably
accrued individually, probably about $250 a week
online in some way, like gaming and so on.
And these are three different boys.
One's called Raj, one's called Abdi, and one's called Jouad,
Do you know what I found out the other day?
That the internet used to not exist.
I didn't know that, and my mind was all like, the fuck.
And this is the next one.
You're such a fool.
Of course it didn't used to exist.
Mobile phones used to not exist.
That's jokes, man.
Can you imagine no mobile phones?
How would you even talk to people?
With your mouth, you dickhead.
But no, man.
The world would be so shit without all the stuff we have.
The teachers are all negative about it
and say it's sucking our brains up, but that's bullshit.
I was gaming with this sick guy in Columbia the other day.
He told me the shit about Colombia
that I didn't know from geography lessons.
That's educational.
And he told me he gangbanged my mum and sisters as well.
But that's just gaming, isn't it?
You cuss each other to the max.
It's psychological banter, isn't it?
You want them to get all pissed off with you so that they lose.
And it goes on.
So that leads on to my next question, which
is do teenage boys and girls engage with and get treated
by the internet differently?
well, that piece obviously referenced gaming quite a lot.
And I'm not gonna go into gaming today, because I don't game,
and I don't really know enough about the logistics
and the politics of it to really go into in detail.
What I do know is that it's a real red button
topic at the moment, particularly
to do with gender, because there's
this whole thing about how it's a traditionally male thing,
and more and more girls want to game.
But thumbs up to teenage boys.
I will say that I met very few who seemed
to have a problem with that.
They were very inclusive about the idea.
And that seems to be more of an issue
that a few gray men seem to have a problem with,
and I'll let you make of that what you will.
Both genders are, as I'm sure you know,
hugely, hugely, hugely in social media.
But that relationship's evolving and changing really,
really quickly.
And I guess what you would describe
as the granddaddy of social media, which would be Facebook,
is in its death throes with teenagers.
They're completely out.
They leaving by the hundreds of thousands every day.
And for the reason, and I quote, it's
because there's too many old people on there.
Their parents and their grandparents are now on there,
and 16 year-olds don't want to hang out with their parents
and grandparents in real life, and they certainly
don't online.
I don't think teenagers ever really embraced
Twitter that much.
I think it's much more of a middle class adult thing.
I think that middle class adults love to go on Twitter
and either show off or get offended by things.
I think that kids like Twitter for stalking people,
but other than that, they don't really
talk about in any kind of passionate way.
The three things that they're really into,
the mainstream stuff, there's lots of underground stuff,
but the three big ones they're into at the moment
are Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube.
Now YouTube I'm not gonna talk about too
much, because it almost deserves a talk unto itself.
Because the YouTubers are the teen-appointed new rock
stars and royalty.
They are huge, and these are completely teen-led trends.
Like, beyond the ages of 19, probably PewDiePie
means absolutely nothing to you, but they
are like these little gods to millions and millions
of teenagers.
And what's interesting is this is not industry or adult-led.
This is entirely teen-led, which goes
to show that they have quite a lot of autonomy and power
on the internet.
But the one I wanted to talk about today
was actually Instagram, because there I
think there is a really interesting gender
political paradigm that comes up.
Male vanity is a thing, and it's a growing thing,
and there's lots of issues about boys and their body image.
But if you look at the Instagram page
of the average teenage boy, it revolves
around stuff or action.
Stuff being cool, if they're a bit older,
cool cars, cool headphones, cool shades, school threads.
And or it revolves around action,
so like, on holiday surfing with their mates,
or on the side of a mountain with their hands
in the air at sunset.
Or if they're a bit younger, maybe
like looning around a classroom with their friends,
and making those kinds of signs.
Girls Instagram page revolve around the self.
And by the self, I mean the selfie self-- very stylized,
very sexualized, the duck face.
Now it's the fish face, which duck face is very 2015
and we're nearly 2016.
Lots and lots of pouting, and lots of focus on body,
in a very kind of sexualized way.
And when I was writing the book, the girls, lots of girls,
told me about selfie parties.
And selfie parties, ostensibly, I guess,
are like slumber parties.
Butt the whole idea is you get together, sit
around each other's houses, and rather than watch
a movie or talk about boys, you doll each other up,
take hundreds or thousands of selfies,
manipulate them, face tune them, although you
don't admit to that, and then put them on Instagram.
And there's a competitive element
as to who gets the most likes or the most comments.
And obviously, the holy grail of those comments come from boys.
And I think that that's pushing both genders
into roles I think a lot of them are really uncomfortable with.
Girls become the exhibitionists on trial,
and boys become the voyeurs and the judges.
And lots of them have said to me, I don't like this.
And what a shame in 2015, where most adults, probably
with the exception of like Donald Trump,
have decided that beauty pageants are really naff,
that teenagers are in this endless online beauty pageant.
And you can say, yeah, yeah, yeah, they don't have to do it.
But I think the teenagers, social media, and Instagram,
is kind of like the tree falling in the woods.
If they're not on it, they feel like they don't exist.
And what really interested me was
one of the undisputed queens of Instagram, Kylie Jenner, who
millions of them follow, and unless you've
lived under a rock, a happy rock, for the last five years,
you know that Kylie Jenner is the half-sister
of Kim Kardashian, who originally became famous,
ostensibly, because her mum put her sex tape on the internet.
Her mum did that.
And I Kylie Jenner has sort of become the next generation.
And it was her 18th a few weeks ago.
And there was wall-to-wall, endless, global, breathless
coverage of this-- what she wore,
what her mouth looked like, what was
on her feet, what was around her neck, what her boyfriend looked
like.
I mean, every possible thing.
On the very same day, a very different 18-year-old,
Nobel Peace Prize winner, Taliban-botherer,
and pretty awesome person, Malala Yousafzai,
opened a school for girls who hadn't been receiving
an education, and that received minimal coverage,
particularly in comparisons to Kylie Jenner's 18th birthday.
So you can see why teenage girls and teenage boys
are assimilating this message that it's not
how brave you are, or how clever you are,
or how innovative you are, all those things.
It's basically if you've got hot tits and ass.
And that's what we're reducing girls to via Instagram.
Which leads me to my next question.
I hope.
Is technology and social media turning all teenage
into bullies and victims?
Well, that's really a question, and 2014,
35% of all 11 to 17 year-olds had
said that they'd been cyberbullied,
and I think that's growing.
That's doubled on last year, so I'd
be interested to see the figures for this year and next.
Now, I guess that's a question we could ask of all ourselves.
And I know you probably know better than anyone
that the big criticism of the internet
is how lawless and unregulated it is,
and how people do things that they
wouldn't do in ordinary life.
And this absolutely applies to teenagers.
The hot crucible that the internet already is,
when you add teenagers to that mix,
it becomes a nuclear reactor, because teenagers
are very vulnerable, but they're also
liable to do very stupid things.
If you go into any school in any part of the country,
no matter how good the school is,
and you say the word cyberbullying
to the head teacher or teacher, they
will make hair tearing motions.
Cyberbullying is an enormous problem.
In fact, it probably is the biggest past all our problem
currently in schools.
And the reason is very simple, that bullying has been
an age old problem in schools.
Hands up if you were ever bullied at school.
OK, what cyberbullying has done is taken bullying out
of the classroom, out of the playground,
out of the bus stop, and it has placed it in a 24 hour a day,
seven days a week, 365 days a year, potential.
Kids can be bullied at 2:00 in the morning
from their bedrooms.
Kids can be bullied whilst they're
on summer holiday with their parents.
And kids are really creative, and they're really mean.
I've seen fake Twitter pages being set up.
I've seen Facebook hate groups being set up.
I've seen them hack into each of these emails,
and put them online for other people to see.
And that's with my own eyes.
And if you wanted to ask what the wicked stepmother
of this kind of cyberbullying is, particularly
from the head teachers point of view, it would be and sexting.
Does anyone know what sexting is?
OK, just in case you don't, sexting
is a sexually explicit text with a nude or semi-nude photograph.
Now, as you can imagine, these are wildly popular with kids.
If you get a group of kids in a room,
probably from the age of 15 plus,
I'd say probably 75% of them have either sent a sext,
received a sext or been privy to a sext.
And this is a really, really, really huge problem,
because at any one time in a school,
you've potentially got live with the ability
to go viral pictures of underage kids floating around.
And I've seen and heard of actual-- if you think about it,
the ethics behind it, if a 14 year-old sends another 14
year-old a nude picture of themselves,
theoretically, they're in possession of child porn.
And the schools every week are having to bring police in,
and there's been arrests, and in all sorts, things
that won't make the press, because obviously
it's the kind of thing that they're not
going to be particularly transparent about.
I think this leads to the next thing.
This sexting thing is being fueled
hugely by another red button of the internet, which is,
is the internet turning all teenagers
into wannabe porn stars, pornographers, and sex mad?
Well, I would say to this, no, no, and no.
And the reason being is because teenagers, not
this generation, but all teenagers,
are already fairly sex mad.
A lot of porn watching, which is being done in huge amounts,
a lot of porn watching is because kids can.
It's because it's there.
And I don't believe that any teenager who found, say, a porn
mag in a bush in the '70s, '80s, or '90s was like, nah, dude.
I'm gonna wait till 2015 to look at this.
To be a teenager is to be curious
about sex and pornography.
But does that mean that I don't think that porn is a problem?
No, I don't.
And here's why.
If teenagers were watching the kind of porn films
that maybe they made in the '70s,
with big bushes and big moustaches,
like refrigerator operators, that would be one thing.
But they're not.
A huge commission study into pornography
that was made recently revealed that 80%,
and I'd say that's probably modest, 80% of pornography
now contains some extent of violence and sexual violence.
So kids are watching porn films with depicted rape,
depicted gang-rape, S&M, beatings, slapping around,
and all manner of sex acts.
And I've done a lot of writing on this,
so I've had to do my research.
And of course that is impacting on how they see each other
and how they see sex.
And I'm gonna go out on a limb here
and say yes, there are some teenage girls who
watch pornography, but the vast, vast majority
of teenage consumption of pornography
has been done by boys.
And I promise you they are somewhere between watching it
quite regularly to mainlining the stuff.
And it's having an impact.
It's manifesting behaviorally, certainly.
In this country, we have a problem with consent,
and not just with teenagers, but particularly with teenagers.
There is confusion over what no means,
when people can say no, what date rape means,
what rape means.
And I do believe that is being slightly led
by porn, because in porn, there is no such thing as no,
and there's very, very few boundaries.
And another very quick reading that I wanted to do for you
today, which was from a boy who I spoke to, I spoke to a lot
over the last couple of years, who's
actually being treated for I guess
you could say a porn addiction.
I remember the first time I saw porn.
I was probably about six.
I went to a primary school that was attached to a high school,
and there was always old kids most giving us shit.
But some were OK.
This bunch of lads were like, look at this.
Look at this.
And it was a porn film.
I don't know what it was exactly,
by I remember being really interested in it,
and knowing it was probably bad, but in a good way.
I'd say I was about nine, and a lot of the boys at school
were either interested in seeing porn,
or had been watching it a bit.
You'd have to be pretty clueless not to be aware of it.
I didn't get a mobile phone until I
was 11, when the obsession really started, because it
was so easy to access.
But I'd definitely seen a lot before then.
A lot of my mates have mobile phones,
and after football, we'd sometimes
watch a bit on John's phone, who had
this wicked phone with a really good screen even then.
We'd all cuss each other, saying you've got an erection,
you pervert.
And we would deny it, but it's porn.
What else is gonna happen?
So he was kind of exposed to porn at the age of nine.
And I don't think that's unusual at all.
In fact, I know it's not, because I've done a lot of work
in primary schools.
So a bit bleak, but before I move
on to the last couple of things, sex talk is rather 1997.
I think in education we need to perhaps bring
in a porn talk, and porn education,
and about how it doesn't replicate real life.
But with things like cyberbullying, and sexting,
and what happens, potentially, if you put a picture up online,
I think that maybe companies like this, and educators,
and politicians, perhaps need to get together and really
clarify the dangers and the pitfalls of the internet,
and put them there for everyone to see every time you
go online, because I think lots of kids
are really, really running into trouble.
I know lots of kids are really running into trouble,
because they do things on the internet without thinking,
without realizing.
So not a completely different topic,
but a slightly different topic, because I know Rob
was really curious about this one.
This is a country with a class obsession,
and it's a country with a class problem.
There are far too many kids who are falling through the cracks,
and neglected.
And I think with this particular government, that's increasing.
But that can almost have a technological slant
which I think almost pertains to you guys.
If you think about a middle class kid, or a middle class
and upwards, a kid who's reasonably privileged and well
looked after, they're gonna have lots of access to technology.
They almost always have a smartphone.
They might well have a laptop or a personal computer
in their bedroom.
They might have a tablet that was
given to them by the school, or given to them by their parents.
And they'll do things, all the things that we just discussed.
They'll watch films.
They'll watch movies.
They'll upload photographs, or chat to their friends,
and they'll do schoolwork.
Kids who come from much less privileged backgrounds,
I'd say if anything that their access to technology
and how they use it is more important to them.
Kids who don't have families and don't
have parents who keep tabs and look after them,
they form alternative family structures that
revolve around their peers.
And technology, and particularly mobile phone technology
is an absolutely essential and intrinsic part of that.
It's how, basically, they look after each other.
There is an endless where are you?
What you doing?
Are you safe?
Are the feds about?
Are there enemy foe around?
And so on.
And doing this book, writing this book,
I spent a lot of time with kids, what's called on road.
And I never used street parlance because I sound idiotic,
but on road, basically, is street parlance
for on the road.
And people assume that that means a child or a teenager
is in a gang that's affiliated to criminal activity.
And actually, it can mean that, but it doesn't necessarily.
It often just means that a kid is on the road,
because the road is more safe than the home
that they come from.
And that can be mostly for really upsetting reasons.
Bad step-parents, bad parents, drug abuse, prostitution,
getting knocked around, or just getting kicked out.
So there's countless kids on road,
whether they're full time or part time.
But to go back to the more organized gangs,
there's much, much, much scaremongering
about whether they're utilizing technology to organize crime,
and utilizing technology to threaten each other,
and using technology to recruit.
And the answer to that is, hell yes.
Absolutely they are.
They're using technology very, very, very cleverly,
and very smartly.
And it's very, very simple as to why.
20 years ago, anyone on the street affiliated to crime
had to rely on what was going on and to understand
what was going on through word of mouth,
through face-to-face confrontation,
through graffiti, through the colors that they wore.
But now particularly with mobile phones and social media,
this internalized endless newspaper
as to street news, beefs.
But also any organized crime that you've heard of, probably
in the last 8 to 10 years, so if you think about the 2011 riots,
if you heard about that big thing
that kicked off in Walthamstow between two rival girl gangs
last week, organized gang-rapes, organized robberies, organized
movements against the police, or what they call the feds,
they absolutely will have had some element of technology
driving it, and probably quite a lot.
So it's definitely not just a middle class
concern, the internet.
So on a slightly more uplifting note,
will technology save the future for young people?
Loads of scaremongery articles, as I'm sure
you know from adults about how technology,
in particular the internet, is gonna
signal the end of civilization.
All newspapers will become Buzzfeed.
All television shows will be fronted
by AI versions of Davina McCall and Stephen Fry.
And all shops will be manned by robots.
Teenagers don't see technology like that at all.
They don't see it as the destruction of the future.
They see it as the creation of their future.
And they're very, very, very innovative,
and very creative on the internet.
They vie, and they vlog, they blog, they YouTube,
they create websites.
I do a Sunday show with a lad who's 17.
He started an internet radio show in his bedroom age 12.
Now age 17, he's sometimes pushing seven figures
of listeners, and he's courted by all these CEOs
and brands of the world.
And so that's just a good example.
But I think what the problem is there's
too much interface with institutions
that children, that teenagers, are caught up in that are too
wrapped up with the path.
And the best I can think of, to finish this off today,
is education.
And when I was teaching I lost count of the number of times
that I asked a kid to go read something from the book,
or read a book, and they would whinge and complain or not
do it.
And then as soon as you gave them a screen, and said
go and read this on a screen, whether it
was a laptop, or a computer, whatever,
they go away and happily do it.
And they wouldn't complain, and it would be
a completely different thing.
Hard, hard fact is we have a big reading
problem in this country, huge reading problem,
and it's gonna affect the future of our country.
There's too many kids and teenagers who are illiterate.
there are far too many who are below the level of literacy
that they should be, and I'd say probably 85%
if not more kids don't read enough, particularly
when you compare them to other countries and the kind
of reading levels that they're doing.
And I think if we don't do something about this,
we are heading for a problem, because there's
no way to sugarcoat it.
Reading is essential for academic and intellectual
development, both as an individual and as a country.
I think the remedy might be technology.
I think schools might be too beholden to this idea
that reading has to happen in an armchair in a corner
in a big tome of Dickens.
And they have to embrace that this is how kids want to read.
I did a lot of work for Wellington College
under Sir Anthony Seldon, who's a real educational progressive.
Six years ago, he got rid of 75% of the books in their library,
and replaced them with screens and instructive forms
of reading, and they went on to have unparalleled
academic success year-on-year.
Now, Wellington College is an incredibly wealthy institution,
and state schools don't have that kind
of equipment or money.
I'm a huge fan of the state system, but it is buckling.
It is buckling under a weight, and it's
heading for serious problems.
This is a government that is tearing apart the state
education system piece by piece, and it's
in desperate need of help.
Year-on-year, classroom sizes increase.
So you'll have in one classroom sometimes 35 kids.
And within that class size, you can have kids
with an ability range from serious learning difficulties
to genius.
So not every child in there is gonna
have the learning that they need.
Some kids really work well with one-on-one.
Some kids work really well in groups.
Some kids love rote learning.
Some kids love doing project learning.
So all the kids in the state system I spoke to pretty much
told me that the internet has become their primary source
of top-up learning, because they simply cannot facilitate this,
the kind of learning that every child needs.
And I think this needs to be embraced.
I think there needs to be a collaboration between perhaps
companies like this and all the many like them,
even though they're not as good, in education,
because I think the state system is in dire need of help.
So more online learning resources.
We're not reading enough.
Kids don't have access to books, so
what about a heavily promoted teen marketed
online library service?
A talk like this probably will primarily be watched by adults.
What about a teen channel, where you have something like,
how to write the perfect essay, what
the hell Hamlet's all about, the night before a GCSE maths exam?
What about an online live cramming session
with mathematician?
The night before an English one, an online cramming session
with a writer?
So many, many possibilities.
No pressure here, and this is the point I'm gonna finish on.
For teenagers in particular, the internet
is so much more than time and space.
It's where they learn, where they're entertained,
where they're looking for a guide to the future,
and maybe it needs to be filled with more spaces
to innovate, and to learn, and to inspire,
because companies like this have become
some of the most powerful in the world,
and all I would say is, with great power comes
great responsibility.
And I wanted to leave it with a final note
from Annabel, who's 15, who said that if I woke up one
day and found the internet and Google wasn't there,
I'd probably just straight up die.
So Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
FEMALE SPEAKER: So we have 20 minutes for questions
and one microphone here.
Chloe, please repeat the question.
CHLOE COMBI: Yes.
Hello.
AUDIENCE: I know you said that you'd rather
have a whole session on YouTube, but it
would be really great to also understand, just
highlight what you think teens relationship is to YouTube.
CHLOE COMBI: To YouTube?
God, I mean, it would be better to get a teenager in here.
It's unbelievably passionate.
I mean, YouTube as I'm sure you know, YouTubers, they
have a particular slant, like they do wacky songs,
or advice on life, or makeup tutorials.
And that's what is it is, and kids just eat this up.
They [INAUDIBLE] and follow them in their millions.
And all I think it is, and again,
it reiterates the point I was making,
they see these people as like the cool brother and sister
they never had.
And I think that's just the relationship
they've developed with them.
But if you look at their subscribers on YouTube
and the amount of followers they have on Twitter and things
like that, it ranges between like, from 500,000
to 20 million.
It's extraordinary.
And actually, you probably will get them,
because the publishing industry has really caught on to this,
and everything in the Amazon top 100 at the moment
pretty much is books by YouTubers.
So it's this real cash cow.
But I'm not a teenager, and I have
talked to so many girls and boys about this,
and inevitably girls are [SHRIEKS] about these things,
perhaps more than boys are.
I think they are the next One Direction.
I think they're the new boy bands and boy [INAUDIBLE].
But also, I think it's because it is a big thing for males
and females.
So I think it is very much a sibling relationship,
and they have that very intimate feeling
like they were in a gang or a family if that makes sense.
FEMALE SPEAKER: We have a question in the back.
Sorry, we only have one microphone.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks so much for that.
I'm a mum with a one-year-old, and frankly, I
find it terrifying.
CHLOE COMBI: Sorry!
AUDIENCE: Really terrifying, but I
imagine you spoke to a broad selection of Generation Zers,
and their relationships with technology.
Were there any indicators of differentiators between those
who had healthy relationships with technology, where
it didn't impact on their ability
to socially effective person.
Could you share that?
CHLOE COMBI: Healthy relationships, I
think it's like anything.
I think I'm gonna sound really old here, but I'm not a parent.
I don't have children yet, but if and when I do,
I think what you really need to make clear are perhaps
two or three things.
The number one, I think that you need
to make absolutely clear that the internet is not
the real world, that everything on the internet to some extent
is airbrushed and commodified, and sold and packaged
in a particular way.
And I think a lot teenagers forget that,
and they buy into this Instagram fantasy.
So that communication to your kids
that the internet and whatever they're looking at isn't real.
And also that insistence.
And I know the kids, the teenagers who
I did speak to you who I know and felt
like they had really healthy relationships,
the ones that still exist outside the screen
still go out with their friends, go to the cinema, do stuff,
have this actually life outside of technology.
And I think the ones where I looked at them,
and I thought, this is a little bit toxic, unhealthy
where they're just completely living
in this internalized screen world
and they spend all their time online
and socialize online, and just have
no separation between technology and the real world.
And I think that's possibly what we're heading
for more, and more, and more.
People don't meat in bars anymore.
They meet on Tinder, and that's a really good example.
But I think that's gonna to be more and more extreme
as this generation goes on.
But just try and get them reading, and socializing,
and talking, and interacting in this time and space.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] it's a follow-up question, how
do you think we can do that?
How can we improve the situation [INAUDIBLE] life 10 years on,
not just the social aspect, but also the cyberbullying?
How do you think we can make a possible impact
and change their lives?
CHLOE COMBI: So do you mean their lives,
or the internet itself, or a bit of both?
AUDIENCE: A bit of both.
CHLOE COMBI: It's really hard, isn't it?
Because for lots of kids, how does go to the Scouts,
or be a girl guide, or go and be a champion swimmer,
or go and volunteer, or mow an old lady's lawn?f and I think
that it can be quite hard to sell reality when virtual
reality, to some kids, is so much more appealing.
But I think, again, we have to reiterate and reiterate
that there's no substitute for actual human contact,
and human emotion, and that say chatting to your mates online
is not the same, I think, as sitting by them,
and having them there, and so on.
To make things better, all I can say
is I just think it's information, information,
information.
And I think part of the big problem is,
and I briefly touched on that, I hope,
I think that there's just not enough
clarity about the laws and the rules,
and basically the ethics of the internet.
Not like this is what you have to do,
but this is what you should want to do.
And I think, really, if we've got any hope at all,
I think there needs to be much more collaboration
between the internet providers, and politicians,
and educators to actually come up
with internet happy packages, or something that sounds
a bit happy clappy, but something that is a bit more
universally understood about how you should behave online,
and probably maybe built into.
Go outside occasionally, see the world.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
I wonder what you thought [INAUDIBLE] as these guys grow
up, like when they're in their 30s and 40s,
do you think that their actual values will be [INAUDIBLE].
How worried should we be about that?
CHLOE COMBI: The way we're heading, bearing in mind
that I think that a lot of this is easy to forget,
that a lot of this is in its real infancy.
And in terms of the internet, we're
all pretty much in nappies still.
There's a real newness to this world,
and I think we're making up the rules as we go along,
and realizing there's some things that need
to be improved or modified.
I think Twitter's a really good example of this.
It started as this social experiment that is just
going horribly, horribly wrong.
And I think it's turning people into assholes.
And people are very quickly saying this isn't good enough.
And I think if we ascribe those values and that particular kind
of model to kids, I think we are going
to learn how to manage the internet better, and manage
our relationship with it better, But it is a collaborative
If it continued on its current trajectory,
I think we are in trouble.
I think we need to make some really, really quick changes,
and very, very quickly.
So I think that's a brilliant question.
FEMALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: You talked a lot about schools, institutions,
and businesses.
The parents haven't been [INAUDIBLE]
and I wonder is that because parents just
don't have a clue what their children are doing [INAUDIBLE].
CHLOE COMBI: Parents and technology,
that's a brilliant question, because I have written
a lot about this, about how kids are basically running circles
around their parents technologically.
And you get these really angry emails going, how dare you!
I'm a wiz on owned technology, and I know everything.
And I'm sure-- if any, how many of you guys have kids?
I'm sure not many of your kids would
be able to pull the wool over your eyes, and say no, Dad.
It's a school project on naked ladies!
But yes, yes, yes, yes.
I've got a four year-old and a six year-old nephew,
and they do seem to have this chip in their brain
that has this innate understanding.
Before he could even walk he was on the iPad.
And I just think there seems to be
something they're evolved with.
But yes, I think teenagers exist in a very,
very-- which is why Facebook has become so diminished
in its popularity-- they exist in this very private world
that they want to keep separate from their parents.
They have this very, very, very strong online identity
that, I think, is very, very confidential to them.
And yes, I do.
I think for the most part, if you read the book,
I mean, there's so may anecdotes of parents them getting
into all kinds of trouble There's
a girl who got groomed online, a horrible few horrible examples.
And the parents have absolutely no idea.
And I do think it's like all of us.
We're all quite secretive on the internet.
I mean, I don't think any of us would
be that happy if your mate was like let me look
at your history of browsing.
You'd be like, uh, must you?
And so if you think about kids, they're really, really
secretive online.
So I think there is a problem of this generational gap.
And I think it's probably narrowing.
So kids who are in their late teens and early 20s probably
have fairly clueless parents, and then obviously
as the parents get younger, that probably will narrow,
but right now, I think is a big thing.
Good question.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
Some of what you talked about sounds really depressing.
CHLOE COMBI: I know.
I'm sorry.
AUDIENCE: Did the teenagers feel optimistic about life?
[INAUDIBLE]?
CHLOE COMBI: For these talks, I sometimes do
go for the jugular.
And there are loads of brilliant, and wonderful,
and amazing kids, and they're doing brilliant, and amazing,
wonderful things.
And I promise you, it isn't a bleak book.
But yes, the teenagers are cautiously
optimistic about the future.
I think that they see that there's many things in decline,
things like where 10 years ago, there was a tangible dream,
I'm gonna go and work for the Times,
or I'm gonna go and work for The Daily Mirror
and become a journalist.
I think that's a vanishing prospect,
and there's lots of career vanishing prospects,
and they're very, very well aware of this.
The other thing is, I do think they've
become much more realistic.
Five years ago, when I first started
writing about kids, when I very first started teaching,
and they all were like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'm gonna be famous.
What are you gonna famous for?
I'm just gonna be famous.
I'm either gonna be a famous singer, or a famous footballer,
or what have you.
And I think they've also realized
that that's a fairly unrealistic dream,
and they need to have a plan B.
It's very much down to the individual.
There's some kids who just see the world,
and just see things that they're gonna add to it, and create.
And there's some kids who see the world,
and just see what they wanna take.
And let's say fr the most part, they
more fall into the former category.
They're much more optimistic, and giving,
and want to do stuff for the world,
and contribute to the world.
But trouble is you hear-- and I'm sometimes
a bit guilty of that-- the kids who take too much stuff away.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for an interesting talk.
I totally get the point about how they view technology.
I volunteer at this school in north London, and some of them
ask me, how the hell can you work for Google, sir?
Because it's just a website.
CHLOE COMBI: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
AUDIENCE: So the question I want to ask
is, if a couple of the issues are, as you mentioned,
this idea that [INAUDIBLE] kind of curated online
and there's a lack of core social contexts,
there's texting, there's obviously
cyberbullying, et cetera, it's far less inhibitive,
because you can't empathize with a text message.
Do you think that the rise of services like Snapchat which
are more unfiltered and have the [INAUDIBLE] aspect
are a force for good when it comes to cultural [INAUDIBLE].
CHLOE COMBI: It's a really complicated one,
because I know completely what you're saying,
that the in the moment can give it more of that immediacy
that email completely lost, and I think even texting does,
particularly as it's backed up with pictures
and emoticons and stuff like that
which underline your point.
I do know what you mean, but at the same time,
I think that Snapchat is also another barrier, because it's
like when you watch-- we're all guilty of this--
but when you watch kids doing stuff, like, say having lunch,
they're all too busy Snapchatting
their lunch to chat.
I know what you mean.
I think it's evolving the way we do talk in that particular way,
and I think it is bringing it into that real time,
and giving that kind of immediacy and emotion.
But I think at the same time it's another step back
from that human interaction.
And I don't whether in 30 years time
whether we're just gonna have screens for faces
with emoticons coming up.
AUDIENCE: Facebook's working on it.
It's called Oculus.
CHLOE COMBI: There you go.
That's terrifying.
FEMALE SPEAKER: We have time for two more questions, one here
and one in the first row [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much.
I was looking up [INAUDIBLE] changing nature of crime
and real decline in what we might call [INAUDIBLE]
crimes or burglaries.
CHLOE COMBI: Absolutely, yeah.
AUDIENCE: And a massive rise in terms of cyber crime and child
sex abuse.
If you were with the Home Secretary right now,
what three things would you ask him
to do that would make a difference in terms
of that growth on child sex abuse and cyber crime?
CHLOE COMBI: Well, this is really interesting.
I actually just wrote an article about this specifically,
this whole thing about child sex crime.
And it's a big question, and this is terrifying.
But one of the things, when you go
into the serious criminal world-- no,
not even the serious criminal world, when
you go into the streets of London,
you talk to kids involved in criminal activity, one
of the things that's fast emerging
is that drug dealing, and gun running, and things like that
are high risk, but pimping and the skin trade
is not high risk for the pimps.
It's high risk for the girls.
So kids, younger boys, younger and younger men,
are getting more, and more, and more
into pimping younger, and younger, and younger.
And I think that that is massively
being fueled and encouraged by the internet,
and by this child trafficking and things
like that on the internet.
So I think that because you've got these police
units that are well in there with the drug awareness stuff.
They're well in there with the burglary stuff.
They're well in there with the riot stuff.
They need to get sex units on the streets,
and really, really quickly.
I was talking to 13 year-olds the other day,
and they all know girls who were being pulled into the sex
industry, and girls who aren't that much older, and so school
age girls.
And I know for a fact, I was talking the grooming of girls,
particularly in what would be considered high risk schools,
is very, very common.
I've written several about this, 17 year-old boys,
they might look at a 30 or 40 year-old man, and think weird.
So what they're doing is recruiting 17 year-old boys
to lure them in.
So it's become this hierarchy.
So that would be my number one thing-- so
education and bringing in these sex units.
And again, I wouldn't teach my grandmother to suck eggs,
and come in here and say I'm a cyber expert.
I'm not, but I'm guessing they really
need to get more into these cyber aspects of it.
Because it seems to be like fungus.
It just pops up everywhere on the internet,
and it's really awful.
Great question.
Though.
It's one to think about.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
FEMALE SPEAKER: One more in the front [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: So teenagers are quite famously [INAUDIBLE]
and these are quite complicated issues,
and they might not be predisposed
to listen to their parents, the police, the government,
or teachers.
How do you think we should try and communicate
to teenagers on these issues?
How are you gonna get the message [INAUDIBLE]?
CHLOE COMBI: How are you gonna communicate?
I think that's a really good question,
and I think that I do know the answer to this one,
even though it's maybe not the complete one.
I think it's collaboration.
I think, again, this book is in their voices.
It's them talking.
I didn't say to them this is what I think you think.
I said to them, just tell me what you think.
And teenagers are so used to be being talked at and about
that no one ever sits and says, well, tell me.
Tell me, well, how did you feel when your mum died?
How did you feel when you got kicked out of school?
How did you feel when you got into Oxford?
And all these stories are in there,
and I think that's the thing.
It's communication and collaboration.
Rather than say, these are the teen problems,
you say, you tell me what teen problems are,
and let's sort this problem out togetherness, and let's try
and come up with some answers.
And I think that that's pertinent for what we're
doing on the internet, how we deal
with quite a lot of the internet problems,
and just generally how we're going to improve as a species.
That's a profound note to end on, wasn't it?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Please join me in thanking
Chloe for coming on.
CHLOE COMBI: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]