I used to ask the internet everything. I started young. In the late 1980s, my family got its first modem. My father was a computer scientist, and he used it to access his computer at work. It was a silver box the size of a book; I liked its little red lights that told you when it was on and communicating with the world. Before long, I was logging onto message boards to ask questions about telescopes and fossils and plots of science fiction TV shows.
I kept at it for years, buying new hardware, switching browsers and search engines as needed. And then, around 2004, I stopped. Social media swallowed my friends whole, and I wanted no part of it. Friendster and Myspace and Facebook—the first great wave of social networking sites—all felt too invasive and too personal. I didn’t want to share, and I didn’t want to be seen.So now, 10 years on, Facebook, iMessaging, and Twitter have passed me by. It’s become hard to keep up with people. I get all my news—weddings, moves, births, deaths—second-hand, from people who saw something on someone else’s feed. I never know what’s going on. In return, I have the vain satisfaction of feeling like the last real human being in a world of pods. But I am left wondering: what am I missing out on? And is everyone else missing out on something I still have?
Virginia Woolf famously said that on or about December 1910 human character changed. We don’t yet know if the same thing happened with the release of the iPhone 5—but, as the digital and “real” worlds become harder to distinguish from each other, it seems clear that something is shifting. The ways we interact with each other and with the world have altered. Yet the writing on this subject—whether it’s by social scientists, novelists or self-styled “internet intellectuals”—still doesn’t seem to have registered the full import of this transformation. (...)
The behaviour of teens online can be baffling. But are they really more “risk-averse,” “dependent,” “superficial” and “narcissistic” than kids in the past? And are they in danger in some new, hard-to-track way? Danah Boyd, a researcher at New York University and Microsoft, isn’t so sure. In It’s Complicated, her detailed new anthropological inquiry into the internet habits of American teenagers, she does much to dispel many of the alarmist myths that surround young people and social media.
Boyd has spent over a decade interviewing teens about their use of social media, and in the process has developed a nuanced feel for how they live their online lives. Throughout It’s Complicated, she shows teens to be gifted at alternating between different languages and modes of self-presentation, assuming different personas for different audiences and switching platforms (say, between Facebook and Twitter and Ask.fm) based on their individual interests and levels of privacy. She also suggests that many of the fears associated with teens and the internet—from bullying to addiction—are overblown. She argues convincingly, for instance, that “Social media has not radically altered the dynamics of bullying, but it has made these dynamics more visible to more people.”
Social media may not lead to more bullying or addiction, but it does create lots of drama. Boyd and her sometime-collaborator Alice Marwick define drama as “performative, interpersonal conflict that takes place in front of an active, engaged audience, often on social media.” Essentially, “drama” is what keeps school from being boring, and what makes it such hell. It’s also the reason teenagers spend so much time online. The lure isn’t technology itself, or the utopian dream of a space in which anyone could become anything, which drew many young people to the internet in its early bulletin-board and newsgroup days; it’s socialising. Teens go online to “be with friends on their own terms, without adult supervision, and in public”—and Boyd argues that this is now much more difficult than it used to be. She portrays the US as a place in which teens are barred from public spaces such as parks and malls, and face constant monitoring from parents, teachers and the state. This is a paranoid country, in which parents try to channel all their children’s free time into structured activities and are so afraid of predators that they don’t allow their children outside alone. In this “culture of fear” social media affords teens one of their few avenues for autonomous expression.
Parents never understand; but Boyd makes the case that adult cluelessness about the multiple uses teens find for social media—everything from sharing jokes to showing off for university recruiters—can be especially harmful now. She tells the story of a teenager from south central Los Angeles who writes an inspiring college entrance essay about his desire to escape his gang-ridden neighbourhood. But when admissions officers at the Ivy League university to which he’s applying Google him, they are shocked to discover that his MySpace profile is filled with gang symbolism and references to gang activities. They do not consider that this might be a survival strategy instead of a case of outright deception.
by Jacob Mikanowski, Prospect | Read more:
Image: uncredited
