Teenagers
have always been attracted to public spaces where they can hang out
with friends, find new friends, and talk endlessly with peers about
matters that concern them, away from
parents
and other authority figures. Such gatherings are crucial to human
development; they are how teenagers expand their social horizons, share
views on issues that matter to them, experiment with different versions
of their
personality, and develop the sense of independence from parents and other adults that they must in order to become adults themselves.
Until
rather recently, the places where teens would find one another were
physical, geographical spaces, but today they are more often located in
cyberspace. Many adults are puzzled, and some are apppalled, by the
amount of time teens spend online and by what they seem to do there. A
terrific new book by danah boyd (who spells her name without capitals),
entitled It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, helps us make sense of it.
The book, published this month by Yale University Press, is the
product of an extensive program of research. From 2005 to 2012, boyd
traveled back and forth across the United States meeting with and
talking with teenagers, and also with parents, teachers, librarians,
youth ministers, and others who work with teens. She also spent
“countless hours” studying teens through the traces they left online, on
their
social network
sites, blogs, and other social media. In addition, she and her
collaborator Alice Marwick conducted formal, semi-structured interviews
of 166 teens about their social media habits.
As the title of her book (It’s Complicated)
suggests, the results of boyd’s study can’t be summarized with a few
simple statements. The book debunks some of the simplistic myths about
teens and technology that we often find in the popular media or hear in
conversations among adults. Here are five of those myths, and some of
what boyd has to tell us that is relevant to each:
A
teenager at a computer or smartphone may look socially isolated, but,
more often than not, the teen is using that device to overcome social
isolation—isolation that we adults have imposed. Boyd says that she
often heard parents complain that their teens preferred computers to
“real people,” but the teens’ perspective was quite different. Teens,
throughout the country, and across ethnic groups, told her repeatedly
that they would much rather get together with friends in person, but had
little opportunity to do so. They communicated with their friends
through social media, because that was often the only way they could
reach them.
In generations past, teenagers, and even preteens
and younger children, socialized with one another as they walked to
school and back every day. At school they could
socialize
during lunch hour and other breaks in the day. After school and on
weekends, they could walk, bicycle, take public transit, or (in the case
of older teens) drive to find one another at parks, fields, street
corners, vacant lots, secret clubhouses, diners, malls, or other regular
meeting places. Today’s teens don’t have such freedom. Many aren’t
allowed to walk to school. "Lunch hour" is no longer even close to an
hour, and other breaks in the school day have been largely removed. Many
parents restrict their teens from venturing out without an adult, and
even when parents do allow it, other forces work against it. As boyd
points out, policy makers have implemented curfews and anti-loitering
laws aimed at teens, in the mistaken belief that this curbs juvenile
crime (she
cites evidence that it does not); and many commercial venues that once
welcomed or at least tolerated teens now ban them, especially when they
appear in groups. Even when an individual teen is free to leave the
house and has a place to go, the chance that his or her friends will
also have that freedom is small.
Boyd found that the parents she
talked with often believed they were providing their teens with
opportunities to socialize when they enrolled them in and drove them to
adult-directed after-school activities, but the teens disagreed. They
told boyd that these activities provided little opportunity for the kind
of socializing they craved, precisely because of the adult structure
and continuous adult surveillance.
As boyd (p 106-107) puts it, “Authority
figures simultaneously view teens as nuisances who must be managed and
innocent children who must be protected. Teens are both public menaces
and vulnerable targets. Society is afraid of them and for them.”
Because of this, we have more or less banned teens from physical public
places; so, being humans and needing social networks, they have figured
out how to get together online.
Myth #2: Teens are addicted to technology and social media.
In a previous essay on this blog (
on video game “addiction”), I described our tendency to apply the term
addiction
to almost any kind of activity that people enjoy and engage in
frequently. Used more conservatively and usefully, the term refers to an
activity that (a) is compulsive in the sense that the person hasn’t
been able to stop doing it, even with great effort, and (b) is clearly
more harmful than helpful to the person engaged in that behavior.
Boyd
found that some teens indeed do spend more time with social media than
they say they would like. They acknowledged being drawn into it and
enjoying it so much that they lose track of time, and said it does cause
some harm by subtracting from the time they can spend on other
activities, including those that adults are encouraging them to do, such
as schoolwork. But it is not clear that the harm outweighs the gains.
And, even if it does, boyd suggests, the language of addiction is not
helpful here. It sensationalizes the problem. It implies pathology
rather than a
time management problem of the sort that all of us have to varying degrees.
Boyd (p 92) points out that if we use the term addiction to refer to any activity that people enjoy and to which they devote great amounts of time, then “Being
‘addicted’ to information and to people is part of the human condition:
it arises from a healthy desire to be aware of surroundings and to
connect to society.” It’s not the technology itself that draws
young people in; it’s the chance to communicate with peers and learn
about their world. The computer is just a tool, like the telephone used
to be.
When adults see that children and teens are using computers
and smart phones rather than playing outdoors or socializing in
physical space, they find it easier to blame the computer and its
supposed “addictive” qualities than to blame themselves and the social
conditions that have deprived young people of the freedom to congregate
in physical places, away from interfering adults.
Myth #3: Teens these days have no appreciation of privacy.
Adults
are often appalled by the tendency of teens to put information into the
Internet that “should be private.” In contrast, teens regularly told
boyd that they used social media in order to achieve privacy. The
difference seems to be one of concern about privacy from whom. Parents
worry about the prying eyes of strangers, whereas teens are more
concerned about the prying eyes and ears of adults who know them well.
In boyd’s words: “When teens—and, for that matter, most adults—seek
privacy, they do so in relation to those who hold power over them.
Unlike privacy advocates and more politically conscious adults, teens
aren’t typically concerned with governments and corporations. Instead,
they’re trying to avoid surveillance from parents, teachers, and other
immediate authority figures in their lives. They want the right to be
ignored by the people they see as being ‘in their business.’ …They wish
to avoid paternalistic adults who use safety and protection as an
excuse to monitor their everyday sociality.”
Sometimes teens
who are physically near one another will text or use social media rather
than talk, precisely so parents or others who are physically present
won’t know what they’re saying. Teens quite rightly get annoyed when
their parents go online and read what was intended for peers, not
parents. It’s little different, to them, from reading private mail, or
bugging their bedroom, or reading their diary. Boyd (p 59) writes,
further, “In 2012, when I asked teens who were early adopters of
Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram why they prefer these services to
Facebook, I heard a near-uniform response: ‘Because my parents don’t
know about it.”
It is true, however, that many teens ignore
or are unaware of the long-lasting traces they may leave when they
communicate through social media and the harmful effects that can occur,
for example, if read by a potential future employer. Boyd found that
despite the common perception that all teens are Internet savvy, many of
them are not. They often don’t know how to use the privacy settings on
social media and are often unaware or forgetful of the extent to which
audiences other then the intended ones could access what they are
saying. Boyd suggests that we, as individual adults and as a society,
could do more than we currently do to help teens understand better the
social media they are using. Instead of warning them not to use it, or
forbidding them from using it, we might help them find ways to use it
more intelligently.
Myth #4: Social media put teens at great risk from sexual predators.
In
a nationwide survey, boyd and her colleagues found that 93 percent of
parents were concerned that their child might meet a stranger online who
would hurt them, while only one percent of them indicated that any of
their own children had ever had such an experience. By far the biggest
fear
expressed by parents was of “sexual predators,” “child molesters,”
“pedophiles,” and “sex offenders” who might contact their child through
their online participation. This mirrors the fears, revealed in other
national and international surveys, that underlie many parents’
decisions to restrict their children from venturing away from home,
outdoors, without adult protection. Surprisingly, the respondents to
boyd’s survey expressed as much fear for their sons as for their
daughters.
As I and others (e.g. Lenore Skenazy in her book
Free Range Kids)
have reported elsewhere, the “stranger danger” fears that afflict so
many parents are greatly overblown. In fact, harm of any kind to
children or teens from adult strangers is very rare, and there is little
or no evidence that technology or social media has increased such
danger. As boyd (p 110) puts it: “
Internet-initiated sexual assaults are rare—and the overall number of sex crimes against minors has been steadily declining since 1992—which suggests that the internet has not created a new plague.”
Of course, teens and children should all be cautioned about such
possibilities, and we should discuss common-sense ways of preventing it
with them, but the danger is so small that it is irrational to ban our
children from social media because of it.
The fact is, child
molestation is far more likely to be perpetrated by people who are well
known to the child, such as relatives, trusted family friends, priests,
and teachers, than by strangers. Again, in boyd’s (p 110) words: “
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.”
Myth #5: Bullying through social media is a huge national problem.
Bullying,
real bullying, is, of course, a serious problem wherever it occurs;
and, indeed, there are some well-documented cases of cyberbullying
(online bullying) that have ended in tragedy. But how often do such
cases occur? Is such bullying common enough and serious enough that we
should ban teens from social media?
As is the case for addiction, part of the problem with the term bullying
lies in how people define or identify it. Boyd notes that she met
parents who saw every act of teasing as bullying, even when their
children, including those who were targets, did not. I have met such
parents, too, and some are unshakeable in their convictions.
Overextension also occurs when the term bullying is applied to
serious, two-way disputes between people of equal power. Boyd found that
teens themselves generally had a more conservative—and more
meaningful—way of identifying bullying: Bullying exists when there is an
imbalance of power between two individuals or groups and the more
powerful one repeatedly attacks the less powerful one in ways that hurt
the latter.
By this definition, according to boyd and the teens
she interviewed, cyberbullying is much less common than parents believe
it is. There is lots of teasing on line, lots of crude language, and
lots of what teens call drama and pranking, but not a
great deal of noxious bullying. Indeed, boyd (p 133) found that teens
consistently reported greater distress from bullying at school, in
person, than from bullying online.
Boyd spends a number of
paragraphs helping us adults understand the rather common online
phenomenon that teens, mostly girls, refer to as
drama, which she defines as “
performative, interpersonal conflict that takes place in front of an active, engaged audience, often on social media.”
Drama, according to boyd, is a two-way activity with no clear power
differential. It is also not necessarily hurtful. Indeed, many of the
teens boyd interviewed seemed to enjoy taking part in drama; it was,
among other things, a way of drawing attention to themselves and
rallying the support of their friends. About 9 percent of the teens boyd
interviewed even admitted that they would sometimes generate false
drama by posting anonymous, mean comments about themselves and
responding to those comments as if they had come from another person.
Boys engage in similar activities, but are more likely to call it
pranking (or, more coarsely,
punking), a term that refers explicitly to the teasing
nature
of the activity. For many teens, it is a matter of pride to respond
cleverly to such jabs without breaking down or losing their temper. This
may, in part, be how young people develop a thick skin. Such exchanges
have always been part of teenage experiences, more so among some groups
than others, and their appearance online does not change their nature.
Concluding thoughts
I like the main title of boyd’s book, It’s Complicated.
I can well imagine these words prefacing many of the responses that
teens gave to the questions she asked in interviews. An overriding
message of the book is that the assumptions about teens and technology
expressed by the media, politicians, parents, educators, and even by
child psychiatrists and other such “experts” are often overly simplistic
if not dead wrong. Whenever we see behavior among teens that seems
strange to us, or hear of case examples of real atrocities, we tend to
rush to judgment, and altogether too often the direction in which we
rush is to add yet another restriction to the already highly restricted
lives of today’s young people.
Aside from the very serious
problems of poverty and inequality, our nation’s biggest offense against
teenagers, and against younger children. too, is lack of trust. Every
time we snoop on them, every time we ban another activity “for their own
good,” every time we pass another law limiting their access to public
places, we send the message, “we don’t trust you.”
Trust promotes
trustworthiness, and lack of trust can promote the opposite. Teens are
neither angels nor devils—they never were and never will be—any more
than you and I are. Teens are not completely mature; they make mistakes.
They may even be less mature and more prone to mistakes than you and I
are. But they must be allowed to make mistakes, for that is how they
grow up. They can’t learn to take control of their own lives if we don’t
allow them to take that control. They can’t learn to trust themselves
if we don’t allow them to practice such trust. Boyd’s research and book
are great achievements, because she took teens seriously and listened to
them.
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What do you think? What have been your
experiences and observations concerning teenagers, technology, and
social media? Do you agree or disagree with the analyses presented here?
This blog is a forum for discussion, and your stories, comments, and
questions are valued and treated with respect by me and other readers.
As always, I prefer if you post your thoughts and questions here rather
than send them to me by private email. By putting them here, you share
with other readers, not just with me. I read all comments and try to
respond to all serious questions, if I feel I have something useful to
say. Of course, if you have something to say that truly applies only to you and me, then send me an email.
