A friend recently relayed to me a story about a pastor he knew who decided to print the Facebook pages of some of the teens in his congregation, supersizing them on enormous posterboard, and putting them up around the sanctuary. When the kids walked in, they were outraged that the pastor would put up their private thoughts for the whole world to see. Which was exactly the point.
As adults we often wonder what adolescents (and even some other adults, ahem) are thinking when they post personal details of their lives on social networking websites. Don't they know that college admissions officers, potential bosses, and even a few tech-savvy parents can read all that information? The short answer, according to Danah Boyd, is yes. Kids realize that others can read it. It's just that they assume no one besides the intended audience will do so.
In It's Complicated:The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Boyd first explains how kids see social networking sites. "Unlike me and the other early adopters who avoided our local community by hanging out in chatrooms and bulletin boards, most teenagers now go online to connect to the people in their community." Most parents probably realize that their teens are not using Facebook or Twitter or Foursquare to escape social interaction. But Boyd takes it a step further and suggests that adults have left teens with few outlets for other kinds of social interaction.
Our helicopter parenting, compulsion to overschedule our children's lives, and deepest fears about "stranger danger" have meant that teens (at least middle- and upper-class ones) do a lot less hanging out than they used to. If they can't go to the mall, they go online. As Heather, one 16-year-old in Iowa, told Boyd, "I can't really see people in person. I can barely hang out with my friends on the weekend, let alone people I don't talk to as often. I'm so busy. I've got lots of homework. I'm busy with track, I've got a job." Boyd says, "For Heather, social media is not only a tool; it is a social lifeline that enables her to stay connected to people she cares about but cannot otherwise interact with in person."
So teens see social media as the online equivalent of the mall. It's a public space where you nonetheless expect some privacy. You're not sitting in your parents' kitchen. You're not having a conversation outside the teachers' lounge. When you're walking around a public space with your friends, it's unlikely that someone is eavesdropping on you. But just as you would probably end the conversation at the mall if you saw a group of your friends' parents sitting at the next table, so you should probably think about changing your expectations of privacy on Facebook.
Many of the parents that Boyd interviews see it as their responsibility to hover. And many of the teens, not surprisingly, complain. Boyd makes the age-old argument that if you don't let teens have some independence, they won't make the right choices when they are finally given some freedom. "Parents often engage in these acts out of love," she writes, "but fail to realize how surveillance is a form of oppression that limits teens' ability to make independent choices." Yep. That's parenthood for you.
Which reminds me, Danah Boyd is actually danah boyd. In the intergenerational battle, those lower-case letters give her away. She's on the side of the teenagers. And she's also, by the way, on the side of technology. In fact, she's a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. I imagine she would have a hard time keeping her job if she found that teens' use of technology is deeply harmful to them in some way.
Occasionally, boyd has the facts on her side. She explains to parents that the dangers for their children online do not come from some preponderance of predators. Just like there aren't a lot of pedophiles hanging around your local park or kidnappers lurking at the mall's foodcourt, there is not a high likelihood that your child will be victimized by a stranger online. "Internet-initiated sexual assaults," she writes, "are rare. The overall number of sex crimes against minors has been steadily declining since 1992, which also suggests that the internet is not creating a new plague."
In this area, as in other topics, boyd suggests that the internet has not fundamentally altered human nature. It is merely a new technology reflecting the same old realities. To some extent she is right. She notes that it was probably a little bit utopian to believe that the internet, through the anonymity it supposedly offered, would help to erase our social divisions.
In fact, just as kids congregate in different parts of the cafeteria, depending on their race, class, and what crowd they fit into, so kids online also gravitate toward certain sites. Their groups of friends are no more diverse online than they are in real life. She chronicles the way that whites migrated to Facebook even while blacks stayed on MySpace. The white kids found the MySpace profiles tacky, preferring the "clean" graphics of Facebook, while the black kids liked the "bling" that was available on MySpace.
But if boyd is helpful in calming excessive fears, her brisk reassurances are ultimately unpersuasive. She never addresses what really is different about the internet. It has brought material into our homes through the back door that we never would have allowed through the front. It is nothing less than shocking that boyd includes only one mention of the word "pornography" in her entire book. And that single mention is part of a long list of things that the public has "angst" about.
In a recent essay for the Daily Mail, the former editor of a magazine called Loaded described what he saw when he visited a class of 13- and 14-year-olds in the north of England. A researcher asked the kids questions about what they had viewed online. And without exception these middle-class white boys and girls were very familiar with the genre. I'll spare you most of the details (there was actually a term they all knew for sex with a woman who had no arms or legs), but they knew about things that even the researcher was unsure of. They reported that they were sent links to these pictures, videos, and such (whether they wanted them or not) via social networking sites.
So no, danah boyd, hanging out on Facebook is not exactly like hanging out at the mall. And the truth of the matter is that kids interact differently with each other when they are communicating online. Just like we all do. We misunderstand the tone of emails because we have no facial expressions (except emoticons) to help us understand. It is much easier to be nasty to someone when you don't have to see or even hear (over the phone) his or her reaction.
Aside from the fact that it brings our kids into contact with content we would rather they wait a few years (or a lifetime) to see, social networking also makes teens believe (even more so than they already do) that the world revolves around them. Their lives, their drama, the mean kids, the boys they like, the girls who don't like them—all of their friends and enemies could be communicating with them or about them at any hour of the day. Gossiping, bullying, whatever you want to call it, it seems like there is no break.
It is our job as mothers and fathers to remind them that there is a world outside the soap opera of middle school and high school. Boyd may call that "oppression," but I just call it parenting.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author most recently of Got Religion? How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back (Templeton Press).
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