Young People And Text Messaging. Again.

Odd story this one, can half see the point of it, but half think it’s going to go horribly wrong. Basically, Crimestoppers and Lancashire Police have just launched a service allowing young people to text a number to report someone at their school carrying a knife.  The text will be anonymous, and is meant to help the police deal with knives in schools. On a superficial level, it’s yet another of those bizarre ‘young people and text messaging’ projects, which imply that somehow using a new technology will make young people want to take part in it more. As if young people can’t bear to speak to people face to face. Or non young people don’t have mobile phones. A very odd premise.To be fair though, it does have more of a purpose than the massive disasters of young people and text message based consultation that have littered the world of e-democracy for too long, and will doubtless continue to do so for a while longer yet. In this project, the young person will at least see a result from sending a text.The main problem, at least on first reading, is that if the text’s sent in a genuinely anonymous manner, then the service is at best just asking for kids to send in false accusations against people for a joke, and at worst a way for gangs to play out battles with each other by setting each other up, potentially increasing the tension between them. Which may be resolved through more knife fights. Perhaps that’s too much of a leap of faith, and it’s always hard to gauge the exact details of how something like this will run from a brief news story, perhaps they have these points covered. At the same time though, the point always bears repeating, never confuse what a technology can do with what it actually does effectively and well. Technology is only ever a side issue to the planning of a process.