It’s easy to blame Facebook. If you’re a parent in this crazy new age when kids seem hopelessly locked into a round-the-clock stare session with some weakly glowing screen, it’s easy to glare in the direction of social media, point an accusatory finger and yell, “YOU did this!” I mean, because of social networks like Facebook, teens don’t hang out face-to-face like they used to do when we were kids. They aren’t mastering those real-world social skills that don’t require a cell phone and a pair of lightning-fast text-typing thumbs. They’re missing out on the …
But rein up there, Mom and Poposabe. Before you ride that horse into the sunset, you ought to know that some experts don’t pin the changes in youthful social attitudes on Facebook or the Internet. They kinda fault … you.
That’s right. I recently saw a Wired article that ruminated on this topic and some words of insight from a new book called It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, written by Microsoft researcher and ethnographer Danah Boyd. The book’s author spent a decade interviewing scores of teens about their online lives and landed on some interesting conclusions.
She found that Facebook and other social media waypoints are not really the social soul-suckers they appear to be. They are, in fact, a waypoint. A place where kids go to connect because their parents have essentially locked them away from each other. “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other,” Boyd noted. “They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they moved it online.”
Essentially, Boyd believes that because of more violent and graphic media, and the advent of a 24/7 news cycle that pumps a steady stream of “superpredator” horror stories into the family living room, parents have said, “not my kids,” and become much more restrictive with their teen’s freedoms. In other words, it’s not that the world has become a much more dangerous and deadly place than it used to be—statistics would actually suggest quite the opposite—but it feels that way. And that natural desire to protect our children has become a justification for some of us to, well, lock things up tight and throw away the key.
Teens being teens, however, still want to be with each other—just like we did when we were young, and our parents did when they were young, and our parents’ parents did before them. So nowadays they simply turn to the Internet and things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like to keep that connection going.
In fact, Boyd reports that more and more kids are flocking to high school football games. And it’s not because football is all the rage now, but because that’s one of the few places that parents still feel comfortable with. And what do you know, when teens hit those gathering spots, the cell phones and constant texting needs tend to be set aside. Or as Wired put it, “You don’t need Snapchat when your friends are right beside you.”
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