Derek E. Baird, M.Ed.

Calm the Vote: New BeMe Studios 2024 Election Streaming Series Aims to Ease Gen Z Election Jitters

I am excited to unveil a project I spearheaded as Chief Youth Officer at BeMe Health: our collaboration with Rock the Vote. By fusing BeMe’s expertise in youth mental health with Rock the Vote’s legacy in youth voter mobilization, we have crafted a unique approach for engaging youth in democracy during the 2024 election.

Our initiative is designed with a threefold goal: to empower first-time Gen Z voters to take action, to promote mental wellbeing during what can be a stressful period, and to boost non-partisan civic engagement.

But our mission extends beyond just motivating young adults to participate in elections; we equip them with the tools they need to navigate the electoral process with confidence and security.

As the project lead on this initiative, I’m excited to announce:

👉🏼 Our new voter engagement platform at BeMe.com/RocktheVote is now live! Starting today, potential voters can easily register to vote, check their registration status, pledge to vote, and request absentee ballots — all in one place powered by the Rock the Vote civic tech.

👉🏼 Our ‘Calm the Vote: A Gen Z Guide to the 2024 Election,’ a new BeMe Original series hosted by Juan Bendaña, aims to demystify the election process and provide mental health support for first-time voters.

Produced by BeMe Studios, this streaming series will roll out across all our social channels and is now available exclusively in the BeMe app.

👉🏼Available exclusively in the BeMe app, our unique Spark Sesh empowers youth to navigate challenging political conversations. This single-session intervention (SSI) equips youth with essential communication skills: engaging in meaningful dialogue, respecting diverse viewpoints, and preserving relationships during intense election periods.

Join us in making democracy less stressful and more accessible for Gen Z. Together, we can ensure that young voices are heard and supported throughout the 2024 election season and beyond.

 

Connecting with the 'Missing Middle': For Gen Z, Diversity Matters

I'm pleased to share that I've written a new piece, Widen the Welcome: How Public Media Can Connect with the 'Missing Middle' for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

One of the primary lessons from the latest Cooney Center's landmark research report, The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media, is that public media can look to the content created by Gen Z, streaming networks, and commercial media as examples of how to connect with the missing middle.

In my Cooney Center piece, I share my thoughts on how public media can widen the welcome to the 'Missing Middle' next-generation public media viewers through cultural alignment, co-creation, and inclusion.

The key to earning the trust of Gen Z audiences is rooted in listening, acknowledging their life experiences, sharing stories that mirror their lived reality, and creating content that widens the welcome to public media through representation and inclusion to viewers of all races, abilities, genders, ethnicities, and orientations.

You can read my full article here. 

 

Introducing Tiny Habits for Kids

I've recently partnered with my colleague and friend, B.J. Fogg, author of the New York Times Bestseller, Tiny Habits, to build a community to help teach parents, teachers, and other trusted adults to use the Tiny Habits methods to improve the lives of children. 

If you're interested in joining Tiny Habits for Kids, please use this priority invitation. In order to keep our Tiny Habits for Kids community robust, useful, and free of trolls, we ask you to verify your identity when you complete your invitation.

"Tiny Habits is a blueprint for redefining our approach to self-improvement. The habits are tiny, but the results are big." -Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO at Thrive Global

We look forward to building our community and having you learn from our Certified Tiny Habits Coaches, how creating habits-- from getting kids to do their homework, reducing screentime and even eating carrots-- can be fun and easy.

So, come join us--we can't wait to meet you and show you how starting tiny can result in big changes.

Dear Transgender Kids: I Have Your Back

Dear LGBTQ+ Kids,

In the past few weeks, several states have introduced bills singling out LGBT and gender-diverse children. As a result of these bills, children and adolescents may be excluded from participation in school sports, banned from obtaining books and media that reflect their own lived experience, and restrict healthcare delivery for gender-diverse children and adolescents.

As a member of the education technology and children’s media communities, I have centered my professional life and career on children and teens' well-being. I have created media, lesson plans, and other kids' tween and teen content that encourages children to be inclusive, kind, and empathetic.

I Pledge To Fight For You.

• I recognize health care and your right to an education as basic human rights and I oppose any laws and regulations that discriminate against transgender and gender-diverse people, especially children and teens. I will fight for your right to health care.
  
  
• I feel that one of the best ways to show solidarity with transgender and gender-diverse children is to pledge to be an upstander ally and defender of your rights.
   
• I will continue to educate others on the principles of diversity, inclusion, and belonging so that they can imagine an alternative to bigotry and exclusion.
  
  
• I will fight for you to be seen and represented in books, film, and media. 

To transgender, LGBTQ+, and gender-diverse kids: I have your back.

Dear Evan Hansen, Teen Broadway fandoms, and Mental Health on Tumblr and Instagram

Dear Evan Hansen (DEH) is a social media-centric musical that has been widely celebrated by a show-specific online fan community, known as ‘Fansens’, on Instagram and Tumblr, having won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2017. 

The growth of this fandom, on these platforms, is unique as Fansens have adopted plot points and thematic elements from the musical relating to how social media affects social anxiety, depression, and suicide to create fan art and fanfictions that, in turn, result in a community of care on social media where fans can discuss their own encounters with social anxiety, teen suicide and cyberbullying.

Though most Fansens would not have been able to see the musical performed on Broadway or live in-person, their fanfictions, personal posts, and fan art reflect and refract the difficulties that young people have with mental health, social anxiety, and suicide.

Using both digital methods and post-structuralist textual analysis, written by Derek E. Baird and Jarrod Walczer, analyses numerous fan cultural artifacts collected from DEH-specific hash-tagged posts on Tumblr and Instagram.

In doing so, this article provides a new perspective on the role that fan communities, their artifacts, their use of digital media, and their fan activist and upstanding techniques can play in providing avenues of self-care and modeling positive online support for those dealing with mental health issues.

By examining the emotional resonance between the characters, plot points, and music of DEH, and the fandom that spontaneously grew around it, we maintain that fandom studies scholars can gain a richer understanding of how visual media and fandom can be used to foster unity among young people and combat social issues both on social media and in the corporeal world.

You can read the full article here, or you can read a synopsis of our research over on Medium. You can access the full article on the Journal of Fandom website.

Humanizing User Experience Design Strategies with New Technologies: AR, VR, MR, and AI to Support Student Engagement and Retention in Higher Education

Today, I'm pleased to announce the book chapter I co-authored with Mercedes Fisher, Ph.D. for "International Perspectives on the Role of Technology in Humanizing Higher Education" is now available on both the Emerald Publishing website and Amazon!

Our chapter is focused on using new technologies like AR, VR, Zoom, and AI to support student engagement in higher education.

The Gen Z Frequency Translated into Chinese Language Edition

I'm so proud and excited to announce that my book, The Gen Z Frequency, has been translated into a Chinese language edition by Blue Lion Press and Zhejiang University Press.

Just like the original version of the book, the Chinese language edition offers a comprehensive guide for any youth brand or organization trying to reach Gen Z.

"Many books talk about Gen Z, but this is a definitive playbook for modern marketers and business people to authentically engage an emerging generation."

-Stefan Heinrich, Head of Global Marketing, ByteDance (TikTok)

The book covers content creation, connecting with youth culture, online community and content engagement strategies, and tactics such as social media, experiential, emerging technologies (like AR and VR), kids' privacy law, building online communities, embracing youth culture, and much more.

 

 

Case Study: How I Grew A GIPHY Channel from Scratch to 14 Million GIF Views

Like most successful recording artists, the COVID-19 outbreak in March brought everything — live concerts, recording, and fan events — to a screaming halt. After the initial shock of lockdown, Chris Mann got busy creating coronavirus parody videos that unintentionally went internationally mega-viral.

In addition to using Facebook and YouTube to distribute the videos, I also looked at ways to make the video content evergreen, grow his fanbase, allow fans to participate, show his lesser-known comedic personality, and tap into the cultural conversation around the COVID-19 outbreak.

While we had previously used GIPHY, the animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) hadn’t been, up to that point, a priority social platform for our digital content, culture, or community strategy.

Fast forward a pandemic and five months later, and we’ve seen the GIPHY channel grow from a couple of thousand GIF views to nearly 14 Million GIF views (as of this post) in just a few months.

Over on Medium, I wrote up a small case study sharing the content, culture, and fandom strategies I’ve learned from growing the GIPHY channel from nearly zero to 14 million GIF views.

Nickelodeon #KidsTogether Guide: Talking With Kids About Coronavirus

 Kristen Bell is hosting a Nickelodeon special with a “kid’s-eye view” of the coronavirus pandemic to address youngsters’ concerns and help families weather the crisis, the channel said Friday.

Bell and her guests practiced social distancing, using video to connect for the hour long program airing 7 p.m. EDT Monday. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, California’s surgeon general, and Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, former U.S. surgeon general, offer advice on how to be healthy, while kids and parents around the country share how they’re coping with disruption.

“I feel like right now, kids’ questions and worries might be getting overlooked,” the “Frozen” star said in explaining why she participated. “I wanted kids to feel empowered to ask questions, and create a place where they are heard.”

Because of the impact of COVID-19, kids and grown-ups alike may find themselves feeling more anxious or stressed than usual. Nickelodeon offers this guide to give kids, parents, and caregivers advice on ways to support each other in these difficult times.

Check out this guide on how to support each other in these difficult times.

 

'The internet is all around us': How children come to understand the Internet

While children are living more of their lives online, little is known about what they understand about the implications of their online participation.

In this report, the Tiana Murray & Rachel Buchanan report on the Best Footprint Forward project conducted at the University of Newcastle (UON), which explored how children come to understand the internet.

Thirty-three children (ranging in age from 10 to 12 years old) from three primary schools in regional Australia participated in focus groups and created a work sample depicting the internet.

Analysis of the focus group transcripts and work samples revealed that while the children’s understanding of the internet was not technical, their knowledge was developed through the social activities that they engaged in online, and influenced by the interactions they have in their ‘real life’ with parents, teachers, and friends.

The children in the study demonstrated ambivalence about the internet; they regularly went online for a variety of purposes but these positive experiences were tempered by concerns and fears. This research presents a nuanced perspective of children’s knowledge of the internet; by rejecting the notion that children are naïve, passive consumers of digital culture, analysis of their understanding reveals it to be balanced and sophisticated.

You can read the full study below. 

Gen Z Culture Report: Mini Keanu, Finsta, Song for a Whale, Gen Z Social Impact [June 2019]

Gen Z Speak: "Finsta" 📷

Teens have always had their own language and Gen Z is no different. Keeping up can be difficult. I'm here to help you out.

A "Finsta" is a second (or third or sixth) "fake" Instagram account used for posting photos you don't want to post on your "real" Instagram or that you want to keep away from your parental units.

 

Meme Culture 🤣

The latest meme to hit the socials? Mini Keanu Reeves. Here's what you need to know.

 

Gen Z Social Impact 💖

At 11 years old Jahkil Jackson is the CEO of Trophies, a streetwear brand that champions positivity and education, and the Executive Director of 'Project IAM,' a philanthropic endeavor that raises awareness and support for the homeless.

Learn more about this amazing young social changemaker. 

 

Teaching Gen Z 🏫

While there’s much hype around the use of VR in education, how are teachers using this emerging technology in the classroom? What do students think? Those are just some of the questions Foundry 10 asked teachers and students in their VR in Education Pilot Program.

 

Gen Z Book Pick 📕

Full of heart and celebrating the things that make us different, ‘Song for a Whale’ by Lynne Kelly shows how, with a little determination, kids can make big waves and change the world.

How The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) Will Reshape Online Privacy for Kids’ Across America

Here's my latest piece for Virtual Reality Pop! magazine, this time focused on the new privacy law, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and how it will impact both publishers and creators of digital experiences for kids, including virtual reality.

The primary challenge for many companies is that to be CCPA compliant, they will now be required to acquire actual knowledge of a users age, and by doing so, it may potentially open them to COPPA liability.

The primary benefit for kids, teens, and families are that the CCPA will give parents and teens more control over what personal data companies can collect from minors.

Gen Z, Privacy & Photos on Social Media

MediaSmarts has been developing digital and media literacy programs and resources for Canadian homes, schools and communities since 1996.

Through their work, Media Smarts supports parents, educators and youth media professionals with information and tools so they can help children and teens develop the critical thinking skills they need for interacting with the media they love.

Building on the privacy findings from their Young Canadians in a Wired World research, this 2017 qualitative study, To Share or Not to Share, of Gen Z youth ages 13 to 16 examines the reasoning that teens apply when deciding to share photos of themselves or other people electronically.

These interviews explore the ways that reputational privacy and social norms impact teens’ decisions to post photos and investigate whether or not they actively consent to the collection and use of their personal information by the platforms they use for sharing photos. The findings of the Media Smarts study also dovetailed with my own research for my book, The Gen Z Frequency.

Key Highlights

• Participants engaged in a number of different strategies to manage their privacy. Though a small number of photos were kept entirely private, most of the participants’ efforts were aimed at controlling who saw particular photos and preventing them from being spread to unintended audiences.
  
  
• A small number of topics were seen as not appropriate to share because they were seen as “private” (as opposed to not being shared out of fear of a negative.
  
  
• Photos containing family members were the most commonly cited as not appropriate to share because they were seen as “private”, though some participants included close friends as well.
  
  
• Snapchat, where photos are temporary by default, creates an expectation of being casual and “fun”, while Instagram’s persistent feed promotes the careful maintenance of a public-facing profile.
  
  
• When participants actively sought consent before posting photos of friends, the question was generally not “Should I share it?” but “Which one should I share?”, with the emphasis on selecting a photo in which everyone looks good according to the standards of the platform.

 

Blocking Bad: Protecting Teens on Instagram

Yesterday, during the annual Facebook F8 Developer Conference, Instagram announced that they had launched new anti-bullying & comment filtering AI technology that will automatically filter out comments that “harass or upset people in our community.

As the number one social network for Gen Z teens, Instagram has been increasingly proactive in developing both technology and wellbeing programs that improve the lives of the teens. In addition, the new comment filter is focusing on protecting teen celebrities and influencers who are often the recipients of brutal attacks in the comment section on their social feeds.

We first got a sneak peek at this new filtering technology last summer when Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom sat down with CBS News to talk about how the social network is betting that limiting hate speech will encourage more expression on the platform.

"Is it free speech just to be mean to someone?" - Kevin Systrom, CEO Instagram

According to Instagram, "This new filter hides comments containing attacks on a person's appearance or character, as well as threats to a person's well-being or health. The bullying filter is on for our global community and can be disabled in the Comment Controls center in the app.”

As teens  increasingly turning to social media platforms, like Instagram, to talk about their mental health and find resources to help them through their personal struggles, it's more important than ever that social media companies realize that they play an increasingly vital role and responsibility in promoting kindness and supporting the mental health of teens in their online communities. 

 

Related: Instagram #KindnessProm

It's Time to #EraseHate: For Blaze Berenstein. For Matthew Shepard. For Everyone

I was deeply touched by the death of Blaze Bernstein. Because it happened in my community, it seems so personal. It's shocking and still, honestly, very raw.

Nineteen years ago I stood in a park in remembrance of Matthew Shepard. Today I did it in memory of Blaze Bernstein. And while I hope I never have to do it again, if necessary, I will. I'll gather with strangers, hold a candle, place a stone to remember a life lost.

In many ways, it's felt like deja vu. So many years ago, it was Matthew. Now it's Blaze. How many more LGBTQ youth have to be murdered before it stops? I don't have the answer to that question. But in both cases, the mothers of these young men gave us a path forward: Do good. Be kind. Love each other. 

“As this began to unfold, we realized that we had an opportunity to set an example for people everywhere. To show them how even in the face of tragedy and loss, there is something better to concentrate on rather than bitterness, revenge, self-pity, and regret. We wanted people to embrace love, tolerance, and kindness, to do good. Our goal was to repair our broken world one child at a time, one kind act at a time, one day at the time.” — Jeanne Pepper-Bernstein, The Forward 

So, until the world isn't broken, go spread good and #DoGoodForBlaze!

Trend Watch: How Gen Z Use GIFs to Convey Emotion and Celebrate Shared Cultural Moments

In the last few years, there’s been an explosion in the use of GIFS – those little-looped videos that seem to be everywhere. The GIF is often misunderstood as a component of modern communication. 

Gen Z navigates their anxieties by relying on visual-centric social media platforms, like GIFs, emoji, and memes, wherein they can both create and share visual content to express their emotions. 

On social platforms, they embrace memes, visual narratives, GIFs and emoji to create fan art and provide their visual interpretations of shared cultural experiences and project their own emotions into their social media feeds. The visual narrative content posted on these platforms can largely be employed, remixed, and re-appropriated across one another and be reused for multiple purposes across multiple moments in time.

This creates a form of unity in social narratives, situating visual materials as both conversational and archival, across the platforms while also positing disunity and the breakdown of platform exclusive vernaculars.

This episode of the Australian podcast, Future Tense, host Antony Funnell talks to digital researchers and linguists about the ways that people are using GIFs, emoji, selfies and other visual communication tools as narratives to express their ideas, emotions or as visual expressions and celebrations of shared cultural moments.

 

 

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