Urs Gasser on two new books — and what’s ahead
The precariousness of the early days of the pandemic turned parents into educators and scholars scrambling to make sense of the historic challenges faced by our societies and the institutions governing them.
Urs Gasser, the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center (BKC) and Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School, has co-authored two timely books that inform both of those struggles.
Gasser co-authored The Connected Parent with John Palfrey, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which turns a decade of academic research into practical guidance for parents raising children in a “digitally connected” world. He also wrote an essay series published in German (Pandemie als Verbundkrise und digitales Phaenomen) that focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic, risk, digitization, and the law. This book is co-authored with Jens Drolshammer, professor emeritus at the University of St. Gallen and former BKC faculty associate.
We spoke with Gasser about the books, threads between them, and what he is working on next.
You’re the co-author of two new books to be published within a few weeks’ time. Let’s start with “The Connected Parent”. In a nutshell, what is this book about?
“The Connected Parent”, written with my friend and long-time collaborator John Palfrey, offers advice to parents and other caregivers on how to support their children as they grow up in an increasingly digitally connected environment. The book includes very practical advice and suggestions. John and I summarized the best available research, including 15 years of youth and media work at the Berkman Klein Center (BKC), to help parents figure out how to think about issues like screentime, social media usage, privacy and well-being, digital activism and citizenship skills, to name just a few — and what to do about them to minimize risk and embrace opportunities.
Your second book focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic, risk, digitization, and the law. Can you tell us more about it?
This book is published in German and in the form of an essay collection. It offers initial reflections on COVID-19 as a specific type of risk that Judge Posner a decade ago in a seminal book described as a “catastrophic risk” — something most recently also taken up in Tony Ord’s new book.
The texts were written during the “lockdown” and in collaboration with my former teacher and previous BKC associate Jens Drolshammer. Switzerland serves as a country case study to better understand what role the law plays during such a massive crisis. We have heard and learned a lot from public health experts during the crisis. Understandably, the legal system has been less front-and-center. Yet, it turns out that law is almost everywhere and hugely relevant especially during a crisis of this magnitude. Some of the essays also explore the historic role digital technologies play in dealing with COVID-19 — I call it metaphorically the first “digital pandemic.” We talk about the intersectionality of these things.
Both of these books are timely to the ongoing pandemic, in different ways. Are there any connecting points between these two books?
We submitted “The Connected Parent” manuscript before COVID-19 arrived in the US and were only able to add small references to it as our publisher was initially skeptical about how much of a “big deal” COVID-19 would be. Well, of course, now we know better. Parents and educators are trying to figure out how digital tech can be used to support kids around the world as their education is so deeply disrupted by COVID-19. The book will not give a full answer to the current crisis, but might be still helpful in the present based on the connected parent philosophy we sketch in the book. And we believe it offers sound longer-term guidance that helps parents to engage with their kids — and be connected with the digital world they live in. The book on the pandemic reflects on some of the educational experiences in real-time, albeit from a policy and not necessarily a parental perspective. There are also other connection points between the two books. Both are written with a broader audience in mind, and both are the fruit of collaboration.
What motivated you and John Palfrey to write “The Connected Parent”? Isn’t it unusual for scholars to write a parents’ guide?
Yes, it is! John and I have already written several books together, including our 2008 and 2016 book “Born Digital,” and in some ways, the new book is its cousin. Since our last book, we’ve been asked many times for more practical guidance than we were willing to offer in our previous work. And at some point, we decided to take on this challenge and translate what we can learn from research in ways that it translates into recommendations for parents. For me, it’s been a great learning experience to write this book. As academics, we are used to making all sorts of caveats — “can’t say, more research is needed” — where the data is shaky. But as a parent, you have to make decisions, whether you have scientific evidence or not. So we’ve tried to take this seriously and be helpful even where we don’t have all the answers. We did so by being very honest about what we know and what we don’t know — and then still give advice based on what we think makes sense based on our own experiences as researchers, educators, and parents. The Youth and Media team at BKC has been very helpful to keep us honest and grounded.
In the introduction to the essay series on the pandemic, risk, digitization, and the law, you and Jens Drolshammer state that the book is an experiment. What do you mean by that?
It’s been an experiment in multiple ways. It’s experimental in the sense that it was written during the early moments of the pandemic, with lots of uncertainty and even unknown unknowns. The texts offer real-time observations and reflections, without a rigorous methodology, which of course means that our observations are not scientific and offered more in the spirit of early hypotheses. We looked at it like writing initial observations and questions into a personal journal and making these entries publicly available because it might be of interest to others as well. We did so based on stories, reports, news coverage, etc. we’ve collected from the first day of the pandemic based on a set of 10 criteria.
So both the format and working style is experimental, at least for me. We hope that these early and only tentative entries into what we termed our “logbook” might invite more rigorous work over the years to come. It’s also an experiment to write and publish such a book across the Atlantic during such an extraordinary time.
Will you publish an English translation of the book?
I don’t think so. While I enjoy the challenge of writing and publishing in two different languages, I generally don’t feel excited about translating what I’ve written in one language to the other. To me, it’s about more than translating the text: When writing in German or English, I think differently about what I am going to say and how — it’s like flipping a switch.
That said, a brief summary with some of the key observations, as well as a transatlantic conversation with Professor Martha Minow and John Palfrey that is included in the essay collection, is also available on Medium.
Do you plan to continue writing books, and if so, what’s next?
I try to keep a balance as far as types of contributions are concerned. I’m working on a number of shorter articles right now, but have another book project lined up — this time a book on the turn to information and information law, which brings me back to the roots of my academic life.
On a personal level, I enjoy working on books because it forces me to learn and engage in different ways than what has become the dominant mode in today’s professional lives. I’m acutely aware that both reading and writing books are an enormous privilege, and I couldn’t be more grateful for it.
