Larry: I’m pleased to be speaking with Mya Whitaker, who’s the executive director of the Bay Area Urban Debate League. And you might wonder what debate has to do with, are we doing tech right? And the answer is simple debate teaches you critical thinking skills. I was a debater in high school, and one of the things that I learned whether you had to debate both sides of every issue, so you couldn’t just get into your bubble and repeat what you believed.
You had to talk rationally from both sides, and I learned a great deal about that, which has stood me well throughout life. So given the divisiveness that’s going on right now in the United States and much of the world and the. Polarization that happens on social media. I thought it was a great time to speak with Mya Whitaker to find out how debate has helped her and her students deal with some of the more complex issues and how to have an intelligent and rational and respectful conversation.
It’s a great pleasure to be here. Mya, I have to tell you. I don’t think the Urban Debate League was around when I was in high school back a gazillion years ago, but I was a national forensic league debater and it was the most important class I have ever taken. Starting in kindergarten and going all the way through to my doctoral degree.
I can’t think of a single class that was as important as my speech class in high school and my participation in debate. It just gave me so much confidence. And I gather that it’s true for you as well, that it really had a big impact. Your life.
Mya: Yes. I love the skills that I got from critical thinking, conflict resolution to overall how to rebuild from a loss.
There’s no other game that I’ve played ’cause I also was on the wrestling team before that, the skillset I can still use in the workplace and really help me diffuse in a critical way and be strategic when even choosing jobs for myself as a young adult.
Larry: One of the things I love about debate is you’re forced to debate both sides of the issue.
In today’s world it’s nice to at least have the skill to, to have to see things from both sides.
Mya: And I think it’s a forgotten skill people have, especially when it comes to politics or even round table discussions.
People take for granted that there is different sides. I love to use my brother and I as an example, same household, different perspectives of the coin, and we have both lived in Oakland our whole lives, so never take for granted that there’s two sides to each argument.
Larry: Absolutely. And I, my brother and I also love each other, but sometimes disagree on political issues, but we can have a conversation and I think that’s the most important thing.
Let’s talk about how the technology has played a role. As this is called are we doing tech Right? We’re specifically interested in the role of technology in helping or perhaps hindering young people’s development on their voice and their identity.
Mya: So what I’ve seen with tech from a personal and professional standpoint is it has its benefits, but also it is hurting our youth and understanding and critically engaging with techs. All of our students, especially after Covid, are learning at different paces, learning different methods, and there’s nothing like pieces of paper, a visual, and also giving them something to take back with them that we just can’t get from a computer.
Larry: I was at one of your sessions where you debated some of the issues around tech.
I think one of the debates that was about whether cell phones should be banned in schools. And again, it was really interesting to hear the young people arguing both sides of that case in a very intelligent way. How do you think debate helps young people better understand the world around us?
Mya: So I think that it allows them to fact check easier and make sure that other people are also in agreeance with their thoughts, which can sometimes be harmful and good. So the example I’ve been using in the last week is on one of my social media pages. I. At least four of my friends have shared that Dennis Rodman is dead.
Dennis Rodman is not dead. And you know it looking at my peers for me as somebody that understands how harmful, just sharing something like that could be. And what does that mean? That they’re exposed to on their pages if they feel like they need to share it? So that’s one thing that I’m looking at as far as when you have peer checked resources, it’s easier for you to just get on Google and check that like Dennis Rodman is doing whatever he’s doing.
He’s not what? No. And so how are people training their kids to do the same thing? When it comes to debate, I see that more research is now available to these students because there’s so many databases from educational institutes where they can check their ideas. Whether they be radical or conservative, there’s some type of literature that has been written, and we want them to engage with things like that, right?
We want them to go down the rabbit hole of understanding. Again, all of these writers do not agree on this topic and how it should be displayed. So I do see the beauty of that as far as being accessible to all of this database now, where they can find their identities and also be reaffirmed by, you’re not the first person, which we all wanna feel.
You’re not the first person.
Larry: The life or death of Dennis Rodman is fairly easy to verify. And I would hope not very controversial, but there’s a lot of data out there where there are people who will show you reams and reams of quote evidence. I’m doing air quotes right now for those of you can’t see which is just wrong.
I see it all the time. I have a debate. I’m, I have my Facebook followers includes Trump supporters and Trump People don’t like Trump, and the arguments going back and forth are sometimes based on how we interpret facts, but other times, they’re just false information. We, you can’t you can’t make a decision based on false information and make a good decision because.
I can tell if I tell you the world is flat and you honestly believe it, then you’re never gonna get on a ship across the ocean because you’d be worried about falling off the face of the earth. Luckily I’ve actually traveled around the world and I know it’s round, but even if I didn’t, I believe the scientists who tell me that.
Mya: It’s really concerning too, like we’re talking about are people aware when they’re being presented something that sometimes it’s gonna take an extra two seconds, two minutes, maybe five minutes to really sit and find that research. And I think that we also forget. We are Americans. Don’t nobody like being told what to do.
So if you understand that we’re starting from that attitude okay, so how do I get them to understand on their terms what it will take to motivate them to go get the research of if I make you feel inferior, you’re even more so not gonna lean into what I’m trying to explain. And even more so if you feel like.
I made you feel like I know everything. Again, everybody wants to be talked to, to be brought along is what I’m learning. Just going back to the basics, like you said, people talking to each other, checking stuff, we can sit at a coffee table and check this Dennis Robin stuff.
It’s not like a fight.
Larry: Yeah, that’s a relatively easy one. But look at, for example, the debate about vaccines. You’re gonna see people who are absolutely certain that vaccines cause autism and that they actually contributed to the covid epidemic. And then of course you have many people who would say what I would agree with, which the medical community seems to have some consensus on that.
They’re safe and effective. But there’s plenty of quote evidence out there, seemingly credible. People who are very intelligent, believe some people do believe it. How do you give people a sense of what’s credible and what isn’t in, in this very complex world we live in?
Mya: I think it’s the proof of showing that the results are the results like we’re seeing happening in Texas right now.
When sometimes, and I pray for those families that are impacted, but like we’re seeing the results of these disasters coming back and the real harm is on our babies. So like you said, what are the unintended consequences people are not thinking about, of okay, and in pursuit of this, should harm come your way?
How did you protect your baby? Like I said, I’m a mother. I live in California, so I understand my perception of this is totally different, but I do in the same breath, wanna just give the tools that when that person is ready to come around, that they can find the right evidence to support what is happening in the world, because the truth is the truth.
Yeah. And it, and we’ve always had people that believe in conspiracy theory. So I also wanna give grace to that. I do a lot of researching on civic rights. And my family is from Mississippi, so I do a lot of research about Mississippi and how information was shared with them about what was happening around them.
- Luckily, I still have my grandparents around so I can check with them about what was going on. Like they knew Meyers and Jackson they knew these families, these were real people. When Emmett Till happened, understanding that there was propaganda heavily pushed in their neighborhoods, that this was a lie.
This is a lie, and people believed it. So understanding that this is not new. People have been disagreeing on facts forever, but how do I bring it around for people to understand? Ultimately, when you’re ready to get that research and education that there are hard facts, check with people who are around.
Check with your family. Check with people you trust, outside of your yes bubble. And I think social media has made it seem you can build an echo chamber. I. That is what’s scary. You can block everybody that disagrees with you, but in the street or in your even workplace, when you have these ideas and they get checked, that pushback is how we build community, right?
Our community is what sets the norms. So I think of, again, going back to go outside, check with your people, like
Larry: Yeah. And check with other people as well. I remember, I think it was my sister, this is many years ago. She said, I don’t understand how Reagan won the election.
Everybody I know voted for McGovern. Because she lived in a blue bubble. She lived in, Southern California surrounded by Democrats, and she couldn’t understand how a Republican could have won the election because it just didn’t match her peer group.
Mya: But if you go outside and you check and you talk to other people that don’t agree with you, you would see.
That’s why I like to say if you start a Facebook that is different or even open up, one of your friends or me and you even open up our apps, they’re gonna show different things about what our groups are talking about. Even myself, who has several pages understands that the group on one page is talking politics about who’s running the mayoral election.
And then my other page is dennis Rodman is, so again, what are people even being shown to engage with? I’ve seen no mayoral conversation on that other social media page, what are the echo chambers that are being built around you? ’cause I’ve had pages for, what, 12 years now.
Think of how built in that is. You know how much of you, you’ve built that fortitude of who you listen to.
Larry: No, it’s true. I’m actually fortunate that for whatever reason, I seem to have Facebook followers from both political parties and all sides of the spectrum. So my Facebook page is a debate and I make sure it’s respectful.
I will not delete any comment. I. Unless it is disrespectful. So if you wanna tell me why I’m wrong about everything, I say, you’re absolutely welcome to. If you start making negative comments about my personality or anybody who else who follows me, I’m gonna delete you and block you. I. But that’s rare. That’s only because I have thousands of followers.
I’m a public figure. For the most part it’s an echo chamber. And still even my page is mostly people who are like me. But that’s a big concern of mine is the fact that many of us may be getting pushed back into bubbles that we were beginning to get out of.
Mya: And again I think that the more people are prepared to accept other ideas, the more we’ll be able to blend stuff. That there’s not really, these imaginary boundaries. It’s all imaginary.
Larry: But on the getting back to technology and getting back to social media, you can if you choose to, live literally in a global village. I have friends from all over the world who I interact with on a daily basis.
When I grew up, it cost $3 a minute to call New York from Los Angeles and $10 a minute to call Europe. Now we can have video calls anywhere in the world for free. Now we can have social media and be interacting with people anywhere in the world. People of all different walks of life, all different ethnic groups, all different languages even.
Are you seeing any of that rubbing off on your kids or are they still living in isolated areas of, ecosystems?
Mya: I still see them in isolated areas. The ecosystems, even though you’re saying, okay, you have, I think that’s what we talked about when we did safer internet day, right?
They have this tool, but we’re not doing a good job of explaining how to use it. Right now they’re figuring out, oh, if I bang it like this, it gives me coins. But in reality, what I’ve seen in my, group that I grew up with when technology was introduced, it also introduced stalking. It also introduced crime, more crime, prolific crime on the media. It also introduced access to knowing where this person was that you really wouldn’t be able to track before. That was the scary part for me, remember when Facebook used to say, oh, this was posted here right now.
Think about if you’re in a different lifestyle, how dangerous that is. Not understanding that thing does that, and now you lose your life. So these are unintended consequences of not knowing how to use that tool.
Larry: I like it or not, and I actually mostly like it, but I absolutely agree with you. There are unintended consequences. It’s not gonna go away. The reality is that your students have phones in their pockets and their hips, as you say. And unless you plan to take ’em away from them, and if you do good luck they’re gonna be there.
So the question really is how do we. Given that, how do we educate young people? How do we educate parents? That’s what Connect Safely is all about. You have access to communities that are a little harder for us to reach. How do we get these messages into those communities so that everybody understands how to use these devices as safely as possible, where they’ll never be a hundred percent safe?
Bicycles will never be a hundred percent safe, but I always wear a helmet and try to avoid. Riding it recklessly. I would hope people would do the same with their digital technology.
Mya: I would say it starts with education. Even you using that bicycle example, it took years for people to understand, okay, put the helmet on.
And even still, they don’t put the helmet on. So again, it’s like. Understanding who you’re dealing with and giving them the tools to make decisions. I think for kids the exploration and trying to find community is normal.
Again, I go back to, but it’s like how are we creating s guardrails for that? And then also being aware of. Those kids who grew up online also lack social skills, right? So they have high anxiety. They don’t do really do well with understanding like how to read body language, how to interact with somebody else that has something different than you.
They’re more secluded. Is that really what we want to be the next generation? Is that happiness, is it to deal with high anxiety? Is it to deal with all these desires constantly being thrown at you? Like my social media page is telling me I’m supposed to be in the south with four kids and married.
I doubt that’s what Larry’s just showing him. I doubt that. And my YouTube page is telling me to go buy a RV and live off the land. Now, I don’t know what algorithm is this but think about if you weren’t conscious enough to be like. Who put this here? Why would I do that?
If you’re not critically engaging with stuff because that’s not how you were taught to, then it’s harder for you to understand of who put that in front of you. You get what I’m saying? You do, Larry, because tech.
Larry: No. What’s interesting it, it’s funny you say that because, maybe I would benefit from getting the same algorithmic suggestions that you get, but I don’t get them because all my algorithms, just like all of yours, are designed to reinforce my what they think I want, right?
And they’re pretty good at it. But on the other hand, maybe they’re limiting my horizons because I’m not being exposed. Maybe I’d benefit by getting an RV and living off the land. I don’t know. But how would I know if I didn’t get that information ahead of me?
Mya: It’s just interesting when I was in college,
I took a media class, I have a professor at SF State, professor American, who I love, because she was giving us the data that showed facebook had been doing studies on us and how consent is so important when you do studies and how Facebook was learning that every time they put something in front of us, they could see that it was impacting their audience, that people would then write negative stuff.
If I seen it was a couple years ago, like there was just really explicit things people would share and they could see that when the audience would see that, that they would also be impacted and write negative statuses even if you weren’t having a negative day.
So again, that’s what makes me as somebody consuming it, be like, who put this in front of me? Why? I barely comment on videos. The videos I comment on are mostly podcast videos, so why?
Larry: Again, as the algorithms try to predict what you’re interested in, and that’s partially based on what you look at.
So if you look at a bunch of, cat videos, they’re gonna show you more cat videos. Somehow Facebook figured out that I have an interest in aviation. I used to be a pilot years ago, and I just get a ton of airplane videos. And the more I watch, the more I get. And that’s. Could be healthy, but it could also be a rabbit hole of obsessive information.
Even if it’s not harmful, it’s limiting right there. There’s other things in life besides airplanes or whatever, or cats or anything. You name it. And in some cases the content could actually be encouraging negative thoughts. Facebook is aware of that, that we work with. As we work with these companies and have tried to.
Influence them to create certain barriers to these obsessive activities. And they have to some extent. But look, let’s face it, the algorithms continue to. Give us what we want. The same, even Netflix, I tune into Netflix. I’m gonna get a very different set of recommendations than you will .
Mya: Oh no, my son has gotten into mine. So right now mine is a mix of girlfriends and Dragon Ball Z. So I know like I’m being recommended anime and soap operas Right now. I don’t think it’s understanding that two people are using this one. But,
Larry: and of course they would prefer your son have his own profile, so they could just promote whatever he wants to watch.
But you’re confusing the algorithm. Let’s just say.
Mya: So that’s the thing, right? Of like how we talk about protections. He’s 12. He understood probably like two years ago, that the anime on my account is different than the anime on my mama account.
I can’t access the ones I wanna watch. And again, as a parent, are you really watching when they switch that, are you really cognitive =of. Whose app they’re in and what they’re consuming in that app. Me and him having it again to have that conversation. Okay. If you’re in Mommy’s app, let’s talk about what you watching.
If you wanna watch Rick and Morty. ’cause I too like dark humor. We can watch it together. I usually watch episodes beforehand so I know which ones are sexual that are not really humorous. Then I’m ready to expose to him, same thing with Boondocks, just being a parent of let me, we could watch it together, but I’m also watching it beforehand to understand, okay, do I really wanna have this conversation with him yet?
Or expose him to that media and talking to them, again how are you explaining to them? And not just taking away, thinking about when you were a youth, when somebody just said hi and didn’t explain what that meant. It didn’t really deter you. I’m learning, how do I learn? What’s the danger she’s talking about?
Larry: You were saying exactly what we always say is, which is to ask your kids about the media they’re using. Share the media, get to know the media.
And the funny thing is that, and I gotta wrap up, but this is what I’ve been writing about the internet since the early eighties, believe it or not.
Long before you were born, I think. Yes. And I had this vision, this view the, certainly in the nineties of the internet bringing us together and creating the ability to have these dialogues. ’cause I can now talk to anybody anywhere in the world. And actually it’s gone in the opposite direction.
Which is weird. It, it’s counterintuitive to think that a global communication device that allows you to freely talk to essentially anybody in the world would cause polarity versus homogeneity. You would think it would go the other way. And I don’t know if you have any thoughts on to why that’s the case, but it just really shocked me looking back at it.
I think it’s just,
Mya: As a generation for myself who came up through sidekicks, so that’s how my age is oh 8, 0 9, high school, graduate. It, I don’t think people understood. I went to Skyline High School and one thing I always used to notice is the kids self segregate and we in California.
And like me and you are saying as we air our California dirty laundry of having different ideals, look, they’re self-segregating and nobody is making sure that these kids talk to each other. So what do you think their online look like? If they’re doing it at lunch, where this crew stay on the grass, this crew hang out at this building, this crew hang out over here.
They never mix. That is something that I loved about being on the debate team, is that I had somebody who was on my team, whose parents was a lawyer and a scientist. I had somebody on my team that was experiencing homelessness. I had somebody on my team that was being raised by their grandparents. You had myself who had my own turmoil, and we all were on the debate team.
So what we had in common was we like to critically engage with things, and that is what it’s really gonna take for people to start understanding. You want to be challenged, not in a personal, we don’t want personal attacks. I want you to challenge my ideals. I want you to make me go back and think a little harder or different.
Me and my brother are currently discussing Kanye West. That is big in our generation how he has gone off the Richter. And as somebody who has grown up with Kanye West as a fan to understand, how do you get to those ideals? Like you said, what has he been consuming? What is his ideal point?
Is it something that you want to also consume? How do we have conversations with people? I might not be able to talk to Kanye, but am I talking to my loved ones?
Larry: No, it’s a really good point. And another polarizing figure who’s also gone through a similar transition. Elon Musk. Many people liberals admired because of his climate change and the, creating a market for electric vehicles, and now many people are angry at him.
And Kanye is another example of a beloved rapper who gone off the deep end in ways that I never could have predicted. I, I hope people at Meta and TikTok and Snap and others are listening because if I can take anything away from this conversation. It’s what your comment about how you benefit in the debate world, where you get people, whether they’re black or white or Hispanic or rich or poor, or left or right.
You, you put ’em in the same room and you make them talk to each other. I wish the algorithms did the same thing. Frankly, I wish it brought us together as opposed to keeping us apart. And my friends at all these companies, if you’re listening and I think you are you can learn something from Mya Whitaker.
The and the Urban Debate League that maybe exposing our differences by bringing us together is a lot more valuable than putting us into little barrios or ghettos or whatever you wanna call them ecosystems where we’re in our own bubbles. So with that, my, I wanna thank you. That was a great, some great insights from this conversation.
Mya: Larry, we gotta grab coffee. I want this conversation to continue, so I’m sorry.
Larry: So we do that. Thanks.