It’s complicated
By danah boyd
Principal researcher at Microsoft that traveled across US from 2005 to 2012 talking with and observing teens from 18 states and varying socioeconomic and ethnic communities.
Conducted 166 formal, semi-structured interviews with teenagers over a 3 year span.
“By and large the kids are all right. But they want to be understood.”
By 2010 over 80% of high school students had phones but very few actually used them as phones.
(observation at football game)
Even though many teens are frequent texters, the teens were not directing most of their attention to their devices. When they did look at their phones, they were often sharing the screen with the person sitting next to them, reading or viewing something together.
The parents in the stands were paying much more attention to their devices.
...she used Facebook to extend the pleasure she had in connecting with her classmates during the game. Although she couldn’t physically hang out with her friends after the game ended, she used Facebook to stay connected after the stands had cleared.
Social media has become an important public space where teens can gather and socialize broadly with peers in an informal way. Teens are looking for a place of their own to make sense of the world beyond their bedrooms. Social media has enabled them to participate in and help create what [author] calls ‘networked publics.’
“Networked publics” formed through technology serve much the same functions as publics like the mall or the park did for previous generations of teenagers.
Social media allows people to see themselves as part of a broader community.
Social media has reshaped the information and communication ecosystem. Rather than being seen as a subcultural practice, participating in social media became normative. Engaging with social media is simply an everyday part of life, akin to watching television and using the phone.
Most teens are not compelled by gadgetry as such- they are compelled by friendship. The gadgets are interesting to them primarily as a means to a social end.
What the drive-in was to teens in the 1950s and the malls in 1980s, Facebook, texting, Twitter, instant messaging, and other social media are to teens now. Teens flock to them knowing they can socialize with friends and become better acquainted with classmates and peers they don’t know as well.
It’s critical to recognize that technology doesn’t create these problems, even if it makes them more visible and even if news media relishes using technology as a hook to tell salacious stories about youth. The internet mirrors, magnifies, and makes more visible the good, bad, and ugly of everyday life.
Along with planes, running water, electricity, and motorized transportation, the internet is now a fundamental fact of modern life.
Today’s youth are public by default, and private through effort.
The sum of interactions that they have online appear to be much more public because teens don’t go out of their way to make minutiae private. It’s not that every teen is desperate for widespread attention; plenty simply see no reason to take the effort to minimize the visibility of their photos and conversations.
I regularly heard parents say that being a responsible parent required them to violate their children’s privacy, especially when the internet is involved. Thus, when their parents choose to snoop or lurk or read their online posts, these teens see it as a signal of distrust.
In a world in which posting updates is common, purposeful, and performative, sharing often allows teens to control a social situation more than simply opting out. It also guarantees that others can’t define the social situation. In most cases where people share to maintain privacy, they do because they do not want someone to have power over them.
It is easier for adults to blame technology for undesirable outcomes than to consider other social, cultural, and personal factors that may be at play.
Parents in previous generations fretted about the hours teens whiled away hanging out or chatting on the phone. Today’s teens aren’t spending hours on landlines, but they are still conversing- updating others on social network sites, posting pictures and videos, and sending text messages to friends. Both entertainment and sociality are key reasons why teens invest so much energy in their online activities.
Today’s teens have less freedom to wander than any previous generation. Many middle-class teenagers once grew up with the option to ‘do whatever you please, but be home by dark.’
In a safety-obsessed society more students are being driven to school than walking or riding a bike. This shift also has significant social implications. For many youth, walking or biking to school historically provided unstructured time with friends or peers.
Although lawmakers are happy to propose interventions that limit youth’s rights to access online spaces, they have not proposed laws to outlaw children’s access to religious institutions, schools, or homes, even though these are statistically more common sites of victimization. Most acts of sexual violence against children occur in their own homes by people those children trust. Sexual predation did not begin with the internet, nor does it appear as though the internet has created a predatory epidemic. Internet-related sexual assaults are rare. Abduction by strangers is rare.
In school teens observe how students broker attention with respect to classmates and teachers and start drama to negotiate power and status. Meanwhile, at home, teens often hear their parents gossip about work, neighbors, and family. While society derides attention, gossip, and drama, teens also receive clear cultural signals that these behaviors are normal.
“By and large the kids are all right. But they want to be understood.”
It’s complicated
By danah boyd