Harvard Law professor John Palfrey says his book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives was born out of a friendly disagreement with his wife. A specialist in early childhood education, she had concerns about the couple's two young children spending a lot of time staring at screens. Palfrey, 37, who says he has always been an "early adopter" of technology ("My mom got us a TRS-80 in about 1981"), wanted to introduce his kids to it in healthy ways. Writing the book, he says, was "my homework."

As teachers, Palfrey and his co-author, Urs Gasser, also wanted to better understand the students sitting in their classrooms, wired to their smartphones: "digital natives," born after 1980, who are already reshaping the world in dramatic ways. For those outside the tribe—mere digital "settlers"—it pays to get to know them.

Q Born Digital is a sort of guidebook for older generations. Does it strike you as at all odd that we need a book written by a Harvard professor to decode our kids for us?

A [Laughs] The idea of the book was to gear it toward parents and teachers. It's for those who are puzzled by the phenomena that we see around us every day: The young people walking around with the ear buds in all the time, who at all times seem to be doing more than one thing; the students that appear to be distracted in the classroom; the kids who do homework differently; the kids who, despite being teenagers, never pick up the phone and call each other, and instead depend on text messages.

We wanted to explain it in a context that says that there's good and bad here. It's important for parents and teachers to find ways, on a micro level, to amplify the good parts and fight against the bad parts. And it's important that we do so on a macro level, a policy level, as well—find ways to bring out the great parts of this in kids, in terms of creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, activism, and also address concerns about privacy and safety and information quality and so forth.

Q Judging from the articles and videos I've found online, you spend a fair amount of time soothing parents' fears about the Dangers of the Digital Age.

A That's very true. The first thing we hear consistently is concerns about safety—the fear that kids will get online and meet somebody in the online environment who will lure them into the real world and try to do them harm. There is a kernel of truth to these fears. But if you look over a twenty-year period, from 1990 to 2010, there hasn't been an increase in the chances that this will happen to your child. There has likely been a decrease. So the fear that someone might get from watching a show like To Catch a Predator—that's not what the facts tell us.

Q As a father, I worry that a lot of these technologies—video games in particular—take kids away from reality when we really need kids to be engaged with the world.

A Virtually all kids engage in gaming, regardless of social class and gender, so it's a crucial thing to understand. The notion of pulling them away from reality doesn't bother me enormously. Literature is a creative escape. Film is a creative escape. Television is a creative escape. And I think that some of it is very good. Some of the gaming that involves identity play and new types of socializing can be positive.

The part of gaming that I worry about is the impact of, for example, a first-person shooter game on a young and malleable mind. There's not a lot of data on this, but I do not want my 8-year-old playing a game where he tries to kill as many people as he can with a knife or a gun. That doesn't seem to me to be healthy. There's real power of these games in education if we learn how to harness it. On the other hand, it's a machine that can backfire if we don't watch it.

Q The Christian Science Monitor just ran a quote from Nora Volkow, the director of National Institute on Drug Abuse. She said, "The technology is rewiring our brains."

A This is a wildly transformative change. There are fundamental differences in the way that human beings relate to information, to one another, and to institutions that are being wrought through this lens. But it's a neutral set of technologies. We can control it. And we should simply be more explicit about the choices that we are making.

One of the choices clearly is around privacy. Do we want to live lives that are so transparent to each other that we know vastly more about the person sitting across from us simply by opening a browser on our mobile phone and looking them up? Do we want to live this way over a ninety- or hundred-year lifespan, where every act that we don't protect is essentially shared with the rest of the world? Those are the fundamental questions that I think we need to be answering relatively soon, or I do think we will find unintended consequences.

Q You write that a person's "digital dossier" starts before birth and that there is now this incredibly intimate, detailed, digital record of our lives. It's the stuff we don't think about that is potentially scary.

A Right. There are lots of decisions that we make as individuals and as a society that we can get in front of, but I'm not convinced that the knowledge level is where it needs to be in order to do that. I do think that the awareness of information privacy has grown, especially among young people who have been online for a longer period of time. The backlash against Facebook with its changes in its privacy policy and the new Google product, Buzz—I think these are signs that there is some heightened awareness. I don't think it's where it needs to be for the public interest yet, but there are green shoots of awareness.

Q In the business world, technology has tremendous disruptive power: BitTorrent [a file-sharing site that has enabled a massive illegal trade in pirated music and video], YouTube, and Google are making old business models obsolete. But you write that eventually this "creative destruction will ... look more constructive than it does today."

A The innovative and entrepreneurial quality that we see in young people starting businesses today is a very good sign for American competitiveness. I know from working in venture capital that a young founder is a very attractive founder. There's a company here in Boston, started by a young man named Seth Priebatsch, called Scvngr—"scavenger" with no vowels. He has a very interesting mobile platform for scavenger hunts, for making your way around, for example, the Smithsonian Institution. Priebatsch is an early-20-something CEO who is one of the hotter business leaders in the area. He has a powerful ability to attract people and create businesses and create jobs.

From Facebook and YouTube down to Scvngr on the bleeding edge, these are companies that are not just serving young people online, but they are started by young people. There's a powerful feedback loop between the young people who are using it and the innovators, and it's creating a very powerful business ecosystem. And it's a very open business ecosystem. These young people are interested in creating a broad environment in which people can create and innovate.

Q Given how quickly technology is changing, how do we, as parents of "digital natives," prepare our kids for the future?

A There is a limit to what we will be able to do for them in this and every other realm. But I think we can help them get skills that they need to navigate these environments. You have to get engaged in the world that they're living in to some extent to be able to give them good guidance. That doesn't mean that you have to be their friend on Facebook and track their every move. But if they know that you are there for them, and they know you have good advice when they need it, the benefits will be greater than most parents expect.

I think it's very possible that our kids will find new ways of creativity that we haven't even thought of. We need to create environments in which the wonder and excitement of this world can emerge for and through young people. It's important that schools encourage kids to create things in a digital environment. Maybe it's videos, maybe it's computer codes, maybe it's a new digital application.

If you're wondering about kids' ability to pay attention for a long period of time, just look at kids who are involved in gaming or when they are engaged in one of these creative projects. This is not a panacea for education, but there's an enormous amount of promise in it. There are growing pockets of interest in how to engage kids in this kind of creativity, but it's not going to happen on its own.

Q This brings up an issue. What about the kids—and I'm thinking of a lot of the kids who grow up in inner-city Baltimore—who haven't grown up with this technology?

A I'm very worried about the growing divide between the digital haves and the digital have-nots. You're more likely to have good digital skills if your parents have a high degree of education, which is a proxy for income. I worry about a student in a poor area of a city where they have access to the technology through a mobile device or a library or a school, but they don't have a constructive environment in which to highlight the great parts and mitigate the bad parts. We as a rich society have this to fear as a growing gap between the rich and poor.

Q Do you have any examples of places that are working to close this gap?

A I wish I could say I did. There are precious few success stories. It's still a case you have to make to educators. I think there's still a view that every kid with a smartphone is smart about it. That's just not the case. Ensuring access alone is not sufficient. We have to ensure that kids have all the skills to do the positive stuff.