4 February 2005
P-PG/Prev-PF (2005) 3 E
Prevention Platform
3rd Meeting
5-6 April 2005, Helsinki, Finland
Young People and the New Technologies:
Perspectives on Internet and Mobile Services in Drug and Alcohol Prevention
Head of Information Department, A-Clinic Foundation, Vice President, Prevnet Network; Helsinki, ( Finland)
(Transcript from tape. Updated 28 Nov 2004,
Head of Information Department, A-Clinic Foundation, Vice President, Prevnet Network; Helsinki, ( Finland)
Young People and the New Technologies:
Perspectives on Internet and Mobile Services in Drug and Alcohol Prevention
Stay in touch, 3rd European conference on youth work
Lucerne, Switzerland. March 13-15, 2003.
Published in:
Stay in Touch. Bundesamt für Gesundheit BAG. Bern
The scope of this paper telematics, what it is and to what use it can and should be used. Finally I’ll try to develop some ideas about the future.
Imagine first a summer scene at a park in Helsinki where young people are drinking, using their mobile phones, speaking and sending SMS. But what we see is not the complete picture, because there are young people just around the corner, also communicating through SMS with the visible group. This picture illustrates a new phenomenon. These kids still are part of a same group and a community, but of what I would call a virtual community, and they relate mainly by telematics.
There are here the aspects of telematics about which I want to speak today:
1. Utopian liberties – a revolution?
2. Face-to-face relation
1. Practical and biological factors
2. Psychological factors
3. Symbolic factors
4. Telematic drug prevention
5. Pro-drug activities and controlling Internet
6. Net addiction
7. Positioning by mobile phones
8. SMS and mobile services
9. Virtual reality (VR)
Why telematics?
The use of telematics, which by the way is an EU English term, the use of Internet, mobile phones etc. seems to many of us to broaden our possibilities in life, to simplify complicated world structure, to make it easier to be interactive, to keep anonymity and to lower the threshold for seeking help in certain situations. Telematics can also empower people to use their own resources. Our own services in Finland like AddictionLink and HelpInfo use telematics extensively. It has increased our possibilities to make prevention and treatment, to do things, which formerly we could not do.
There are many areas of life that can be changed by telematics, where the virtual reality and virtual worlds can be different from the real world we are living in. But in this presentation I will only be speaking of interactivity and social and psychological distance regulation. The virtual world seems to allow more freedom, not only technically, not only as freedom of action, but also as to contents. Already in the sixties, MacLuhan said that media is message, and here we can perhaps say that new media convey an even a stronger message. Cyberspace is a tool, the virtual world is a place and it is also a way of being.
What is not necessarily understood at first is that we still hang on to the idea that speaking and especially working face-to-face cannot be replaced by anything else. This argument is used also by our own treatment staff; they ask why we want to put time and money into telematics when the main and indispensable element in human interaction is the face-to-face relation. But I argue that this is not so and that we as human beings wish to be able to regulate the contact distance, as the incredible and rapid succes of ATM all over the world shows. What people want is cash and not a new human relation with the teller of a bank every time they need money. They want to regulate the psycho-social distances in a way that allows them to save social energy for other purposes, for human relationships they consider to be of importance.
In my young times and going to a boys-only-school I had limits in how getting to know girls. If not seeing her in a suitable social gathering I had to try to contact a girl by phone. Actually the call was often answered by the big brother who more often than not poked fun at me and made me very nervous from the start. When finally I was able to ask the girl whether she would like to go out with me next Saturday night, she would perhaps say, sorry, next Saturday I am not free and I will not be free next month nor the whole coming year. In such a situation both of us were embarrassed and lost face, she because she did not want to meet me and had to say so, and I for obvious reasons.
How easy has it become today for young people! They send a text-message and if they don’t get an answer, that’s it. If the fellow is very persistent, he may think that it was cyberspace who lost the message and try again. But if there still is no answer he will know what’s the matter and neither he nor or the girl will have lost face. Basically that is how one is able to keep and regulate the social and psychological distance in the relationships between people.
Telematics and the youth: a natural connection
Speaking of young people and telematics, what has changed? I have tried to list a few points. Some of them are quite natural and belong to the biological development of young people. They are not hampered by old traditions and are open to the new, ready to test things and eager to learn. When today’s young people were born telematics of course already existed. Young people are very talented physiologically and physically, they have good reactions and learn quickly.
Another thing is that the time perspective of the young people is very short. As we know, young people don’t die - that’s why scare technics in drug education does not really work. Death, sickness, worries, all that lies somewhere in the future. Young people also don’t really pay very much attention to the ethical and security issues in telematics. Many of them never think when surfing on Internet of the fact that one day later on, even after years, future employers can read all their texts and all their biographical data they leave behind.
Of course, young people have been the first to realize the great practical value of telematics; they are the first generation to use net business, electronic banking, info services, net education and distant working. For them that’s natural, for us it’s not. We older people have to learn it, we still compare these new techniques to the traditional ones.
Today young people want to have fun first and foremost. In telematics they see an instrument for more fun, with interactive possibilities. There are also financial reasons. Despite the fact that youngsters have a lot of money nowadays, they still have less than older people. The brand culture and newest fashions cost a lot of money. This is one of the reasons why young people have been and still are very inventive in terms of money saving devices. The use of SMS and “dead calls” - brief signal only calls - is definitely an invention of the young.
Psychological reasons to use telematics
Mobile phones, as well as telematics in general, are instruments of personal power, especially for the young. It gives them a feeling of control and command, it emphasizes their individuality and of course allows them to build up their identity and to play and even change roles. On the Internet especially but also on mobile phones you can impersonalize yourself to somebody else. It can be a good method for getting to know about another person in a general way, for dating, for sex or other relations and then of course for avoiding silence and inactivity. Not only television, radio and music but also telematics are filling the emptiness when one is alone. Text messages are often sent when one feels unwell or lonely.
It has been observed marked differences in behaviour between boys and girls in the use of telematics. Computer business has been from the start men’s business and still seems to be. But the girls, at least in Finland, are the main users of mobile phones and text-messages. They speak on the mobile phone and send SMSs more often than boys and write longer and more emotional messages, using every possible abbreviation in order to convey as much information as possible. When a young fellow sends a message, it will mostly be short and to the point, like “OK, I will be there at five”.
Many people think that a telematic and information society can like Communism, or like many religions, really change the world, that there will be a revolution, a new stage in the development of society, that it will lead to the kind of society that Thomas More was describing in his “Utopia”. That kind of talk was more common a couple of years ago but it is still possible for people to have more freedom and more possibilities for themselves. More prosaically, telematics have great symbolic value for the young because they are the ones that use them most.
Telematics are also an anti-adult thing, a means to underline the excellence of the youths and to demonstrate that older people don’t understand anything anyway. Even text-messages are demonstrative, young people send messages to their parents in a very different style and language than when they send messages to peers. One can understand that telematics also are instrumental in buildung up a culture, a peer-culture more precisely.
Telematics is an instrument and symbol for virtual social communities. I consider this the most significant influence telematics have on young people, as I was able to demonstrate when a started a small group in that park in Helsinki. Where earlier on there were small disparate groups there are now larger and more intensive groups, friendships have improved, companionships giving social support are now more solid and the mobile phone is a steady partner. As some Finnish researchers of SMS said, nowadays when young people are dating, this does not take place between two persons, it’s dating between three partners and one of them is the mobile phone.
In the questions around telematics and drugs the first and main topic of course is drug and alcohol prevention in the net. In Europe there are already hundreds such sites. In some countries telematics, Internet especially, are already very often and very well used for prevention or even for treatment. In the Netherlands for instance they make a lot of treatment. In Finland we do have in our AddictionLink a lively discussion area, anonymous counselling, many self-evaluation tests etc., a service that is used by more than 20’000 persons a month. It has become a normal part of the activities of the A-Clinic Foundation. My organization has nearly 700 staff, and there are now many more patients that we serve over the Internet than in traditional face-to-face situations. Of course this has much expanded our sphere of activity.
But there is also the other face of that coin. On Internet one can find more material advertising drugs as fancy, pleasant and beautiful than prevention texts or programmes saying why you shouldn’t use them. There are many texts advocating free drug policy, there is trade, especially of cannabis but also of synthetic drugs on the Internet, which possibly is not against the existing legislation of some countries. This trend is not decreasing, on the contrary. Internet reaches so very far, it has so many possibilities that there always will be a channel conveying a message that is quite different from the ones we want to give. This is why we should not leave the Internet to those who promote the use of drugs or offer them for sale.
There has been developed many parental control programs, especially in the United States trying to censor unwanted material from kids' reach. China and Saudi-Arabia are trying to restrict certain sites from their whole population. The ethical questions around telematics are many in addition to child pornography, narcotics sales, gambling and political issues, most of them very debated. There will be tough and difficult ethical developments in telematics to come and legislation is very much needed. That is also a big task for the EU, the USA and other responsible nations when considering appropriate legislation. For lack of proper legislation and without international pressure measures shadow companies and small offshore countries can undermine the benefits of Internet as we have seen in the increasing flood of spam.
The new telematic tools also raise privacy issues. Does someone in this audience have a phone with a camera? When you take pictures in a pub, how do you handle that? Should you ask everyone who also happens to be on the picture whether they agree that you take and send it? We have to think carefully about those many new issues, they will come up all the time.
Another interesting aspect of concerns for us in the prevention and treatment field is computer addiction, especially the uncontrollable and compulsive use of the net. Internet and telephone services can be quite addictive and computer addiction can take many forms.
There is chat addiction, SMS addiction and net games addiction. Have you ever tried Solitaire, the little game that comes with Windows? Then you have probably noticed how easily one can get hooked. There is also net gambling addiction, addiction to net dating sites, on-line or phone sex addiction, surfing and information addiction and general addiction on computers and ICT. All these and many other computer addictions forms may need treatment.
In Switzerland there has been a study on this issue a few years ago and in the US net-therapists have been operating for quite some time. Their services are much in demand, as are also our net addiction tests and info texts in our AddictionLink site (www.paihdelinkki.fi).
Technical and social issues of telematics in the future
The European Union is encouraging and promoting the use of telematics. They have put up programmes called eEurope and eHealth. We should certainly look at what they are doing and at the elements of this centralized promotion that could be of use to us.
In the future surely issues like quality proof systems and regulations, standardization of platforms and interfaces are being developed as well as new technologies, especially high speed and broadband services. For the mobile phones there are the camera versions, which have already been mentioned.
Location and positioning services already exist. They use Internet, cellular networks and satellites to determine physical locations of mobile phones and people. In Tokyo they have been used for years. In that huge city, due to the complicated address system, even a taxi driver really needs that kind of help. But also in Europe and the US the use of locations services is expanding. The USA has even decided that all mobile phones must have that feature for rescue purposes. Even I do have an additional Genimap GPS accessory in my Nokia Communicator to help me get around in cities of Europe.
The locating services are good instruments, but they also raise ethical questions. They can be used and abused as tools for control, for instance to see where your children or your husband/wife are at a precise moment. The discussion about these important ethical questions has to be taken up very soon and very thoroughly.
Telematics have returned the written word
The use of mobile phones has been growing steadily in Europe, much more rapidly than the use of home computers and Internet. Without going into the details of the statistics, one can state that there are now about one billion mobile phone users and that the global penetration is 16 %. Mobile phones are reaching saturation point in many Western countries. The telephone is actually the oldest telematic instrument, it was already available long ago to nearly all the population and many people seem to feel that it is easier to use than Internet on many occasions.
SMS, this text-message scroll, has been the most notable new feature that has come up these last few years, originally designed by engineers as just a little tool to announce that a voice message has come in. It was the users, especially the young people, who discovered its potential in other messaging. The increase in the use of SMS in Europe can be said to have been astronomical. In Finland it comes to nearly two messages a day per capita, that means that the actual users, in particular the young people, are sending 5 to 6 messages a day.
That brings us to a very interesting point, which is that with email and SMS expansion, the written word has returned. It appears that people love written telematics, like emails, SMS, chat and television-SMS-chats. A text message or email has accuracy and resembles spoken language. It is possible later on to return to the message and to the given answer. It grants anonymity when this is wished for and it helps regulating the social distance.
The treatment people may argue that face-to-face communication still is best, but in many situations it seems to be of help to have at least part of the verbal communication also in writing. When seeing a doctor it happens that I don’t remember everything I had planned to tell him and neither do I remember everything he said to me. So it might be sensible to put down the essentials of this consultation in writing. Now that is exactly what is taking place in emails and SMS. On the other hand, written messages require basic writing skills and habits, and there is a certain slowness of interaction and lack of immediate feedback that can be viewed as negative.
Finnish researchers Kasesniemi and Rautiainen in 2001 state that “the communication jungle of teenagers is too dense for adults to understand”. We should be aware that not just an instrumental, technical development that is taking place, but also a revolutionary change in the life of the young people when compared to ours the older generation. One of the main causes of this difference is the use of text messages. We should take this fact into consideration when planning our prevention strategies. Here are some examples and suggestions based on the Finnish experiences.
Some years ago, we started a SMS program comprehending an anonymous BAC (Blood Alcohol Contents) distant calculator. The user sends information about his gender, his weight, the number of drink units he has consumed, the starting time of the drinking session. The distant Promille calculator will return an estimate of the BAC. Why are people using this service so often? They could use a small calculator or look into a booklet to get the same estimate. But when somebody is drinking in a bar and takes a calculator or a booklet out of his pocket, people around him may start asking him what he is doing. Whereas when he is sending a text-message, nobody will pay any attention because everybody is doing that anyway. So Promille SMS is a socially invisible way of controlling your drinking and to know whether you are able to drive a car.
Virtual chat bus HUBU is one of the popular virtual services on drugs in Finland. It is a part of the popular Finnish general Internet chat Hotel Kultakala, where over 400’000 different characters are created by youths aged 10-16. Virtual HUBU bus has a constant line-up as young people are eager to get into it and speak about drugs with themselves and with a mediator who monitors talks and answers questions on drugs.
In a small city of Lahti in Finland in 2001 about one hundred students and teachers were answering the text messages young people sent them. The main topics were dating and sexuality, but other subjects like alcohol, abortion, army, communication problems, mental health etc. also came up. The Textari-Helppi experiment of the Lahti Parish gives us a good insight into the problems and preoccupations young people are experiencing.
Finally, I would like to make a few remarks about the future of telematic treatment and care services. Up to now we have had instrumental and informative, even interactive services, but what we are missing are services using experiences, feelings, sensations and virtual reality.
Sensations and feelings are conveyed by two successful and popular groups of on-line sites: gambling and cybersex. Those are the Internet site types, which make money and for which people seem gladly to pay by credit cards. These sites are so successful and popular that we should learn from their success of features in their services.
Virtual reality - VR - means that a computer is connected to all of the people’s senses. You may remember Tamagochi that was the first kind of mass market product of VR. Even if Tamagochi is a funny primitive key chain computer, many people get so attached to the small virtual bird, me included, that it really felt like a live pet.
After virtual reality will get out of its infancy for a real mass product it will have a great entertainment value. It will also be a good tool for training, prevention and treatment on alcohol and drugs. But it may also bring new problems. People may now reach “virtual reality” in a partial way both by telematics and also by more traditional mind-affecting ways as literature, film, alcohol, drugs, but there is always real life and virtual life with only some overlapping areas.
In the advanced VR these two worlds can overlap completely. Then a young fellow can be in Hawai with Claudia Schiffer, drink and eat the best, and forget all about the unpleasant normal real life. If one is not doing very well in the real life, why should one come back from the complete virtual life he has just built up for himself? Remember that in the future complete VR there is no sense of the human being that would give a contradictory message. Virtual reality then is really real. Therefore VR can become very addictive, and that is something we will have to deal with in the future.
That concludes the story about telematics in drug and alcohol prevention and treatment. As you can see, I’m really a believer despite the fact that I can see the many dangers and difficulties there are and will be. Telematics can approach many a new youth group more easily than by traditional methods. Let me conclude by saying: “Try it! The future is already here, though a little delayed, and we should start using it”, because most of what we call the future telematic tools actually already exists.
Tammi, Tuukka & Peltoniemi, Teuvo (eds.): Telematic drug & alcohol prevention: Guidelines and experiences from Prevnet Euro. A-Clinic Foundation & European Community. Helsinki 1999. Download
Peltoniemi, Teuvo: Experiences and perspectives in using telematic prevention on sensitive health issues. Pp. 99-105 in: Latifi, Rifat (ed.): Establishing Telemedicine in Developing Countries: From Inception to Implementation. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics. IOS Press, Amsterdam 2004. Download
Peltoniemi, Teuvo: Why AddictionLink and telematics in general are such good tools for substance abuse prevention and treatment? 2004 eHealth Conference and Exhibition, Cork, Ireland 5-6 May 2004. Download
Peltoniemi, Teuvo: Young People and the New Technologies: Perspectives on Internet and Mobile Services in Drug and Alcohol Prevention youth care, and drug prevention. Stay in touch, 3rd European conference on youth work, 2003. Lucerne, Switzerland. March 13-15, 2003. (= The power-point presentation slides of this presentation in pdf format) Download