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It's Complicated
The social lives of networked teens
Danah Boyd
(New Scientist)
If parenting is about learning how little influence we have over people and events, then pity also the youths interviewed by Boyd for It's Complicated. Patronised, legally marginalised and even subject to curfew, US teenagers - to hear Boyd tell it - have but one means to engage with the outside world: via the imperfect medium of the computer screen. "Obsessed" with social media, they are simply trying to recreate, for themselves and each other, a social space denied to them by anxious parents, hostile civic authorities and a mass media bent on exaggerating every conceivable outdoor danger.
Of course, a life online is not simply a life lived behind glass. There are serious problems with social media: chiefly, the obstacle they present to self-reinvention, and the ease with which bullies can weaponise them.
But Boyd has little time for technological determinism. Her fieldwork with worried-well parents and their kids reveals the fault is not in our computers but in ourselves, that we scare our kids into their bedrooms, then spy on them constantly once they're there. And she marshals a huge body of sociological evidence, anecdotal and statistical, to support this.
Parents, you've had your chance. Of course you blew it. Now leave the kids alone.
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