Stop freaking out, parents: Social media isnt the problem
Ten years ago, if you were a technology reporter striving to make sense of the rise of Friendster and Orkut and Tribe.net this whole newfangled social networking thingamabob you were well-advised to visit the campus of University of California, Berkeley, where Danah Boyd was a graduate student working towards a Ph.D. from the School of Information. Nobody was thinking harder or more presciently about the implications of social media back then than Boyd.
She hasnt stopped since, through tours of duty at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, New York University and Harvards Berkman Center. As social media has become an essential part of all of our lives, Boyd has been participating in it, analyzing it and asking questions about it. Her primary focus has been studying how young people engage with social media, and February marks the release of her new book, Its Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. One of its most refreshing aspects is how grounded it is in conversations with actual teens. Its Complicated is both a report from the front lines and a larger social analysis.
The book can be fairly described as a distillation of everything Boyd has been figuring out for the past decade, and it probes much deeper than just the latest fads in Twitter gossip or Snapchat goofiness. Its Complicated is as much about parenting as it is about teens, as much about how society is evolving as it is about Facebook. On one level it is designed to counter the paranoia and anxiety that many parents still feel about their childrens engagement in social media. (No, all those hours spent looking into a screen are not making our kids more vulnerable to online predators, or socially maladjusted, or liable to be bullied.) But on another level it is a poignant critique of contemporary civilization. Social media is a place that lets teens be teens something that society, increasingly, does not. The briefest possible summary? The kids are all right, but society isnt.
Boyd took some time out of a busy week to talk to Salon by phone.
Its Complicated seems, in part, designed to reassure parents that its OK for their teenagers to be heavily involved with social media. What explains all the anxiety that parents have?
Every parent wants to make sure their kids are going to be OK. The challenge for parents is how to help your children engage with the world around them and figure out their lives on their own. I think the challenge with technology, is that it is the thing itself that people dont understand, so they focus on it and they miss seeing what their kids are trying to do how are they trying to live, what are the very real social and emotional challenges that they are facing. There is no clear silver bullet to all this, but I think the basic answer really is for parents to calm down. Stress does not help the situation at all; it is all about approaching technology with curiosity rather than with fear and anxiety.
What exactly is it that teens are trying to do with social media?
Theyre looking for a space to hang out. When we grew up it was the mall or cafes or a variety of other physically grounded spaces. Teens today dont have access to those kinds of spaces and what theyve done is theyve turned to social media to regain some kind of access to public life. These new networked publics places like Twitter and Facebook are spaces that are created by digital technologies but they are really about people the broad network of people that teens have learned to negotiate and socialize around.
The networked publics dont have the same fundamental boundaries and structures that we think of with public spaces. And that gets a little quirky, because of course what happens online is that anything you can share can spread, and it also has persistence, it can stick around, it can be copied and pasted in all kinds of weird ways.
I think it is important to realize the underlying reasons why young people are engaging with social media are the same reasons that have always encouraged them to gather in physically grounded public spaces. They want to gossip, they want to flirt, they want to hang out, they want to joke around, they want to see and be seen. And all of that is really important because it is how identity is manufactured and understood. Its how teens figure out who they are.
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Stop freaking out, parents: Social media isnt the problem