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Memo To Parents and Society: Teen Social Media "Addiction" Is Your Fault
FuzzNugget writes "Wired presents this damning perspective on so-called social media addiction: 'If kids can't socialize, who should parents blame? Simple: They should blame themselves. This is the argument advanced in It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd. Boyd ... has spent a decade interviewing hundreds of teens about their online lives. What she has found, over and over, is that teenagers would love to socialize face-to-face with their friends. But adult society won't let them. "Teens aren't addicted to social media. They're addicted to each other," Boyd says. "They're not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they've moved it online." It's true. As a teenager in the early '80s I could roam pretty widely with my friends, as long as we were back by dark. Over the next three decades, the media began delivering a metronomic diet of horrifying but rare child-abduction stories, and parents shortened the leash on their kids. Politicians warned of incipient waves of youth wilding and superpredators (neither of which emerged). Municipalities crafted anti-loitering laws and curfews to keep young people from congregating alone. New neighborhoods had fewer public spaces. Crime rates plummeted, but moral panic soared. Meanwhile, increased competition to get into college meant well-off parents began heavily scheduling their kids' after-school lives.'"
If something like Facebook is available to teens, they will use it. And they do.
What is with this "blaming" nonsense? What is all this talk about public spaces - where? Are we supposed to accept that the lack of facilities for youths exists throughout the Facebook-using world, or is Danah Boyd unable to think outside of her own local area?
Well, since its mostly talking about teenagers, which the parents usually don't allow to fully make their own choices, especially if it may reduce their safety, then yes, in this case I think we can blame the parenting.
My parents claimed they encouraged me to be more social and go out more with my friends, just like yourself. Instead I spent time on IRC and MUDs.
The original article actually sort of reads like the story of my own childhood. I grew up in NYC under Broken Windows/Giuliani, when policing and keeping kids safe began to become at its peak.
My mom watched an awful lot of daytime TV and abduction dramas -- she was warning me about being abducted from stores when I was four years old, constantly, until I was around sixteen and it was ridiculous.
Of course, my mother being fed all these stories from the media, was very "overprotective." This meant she tried to listen in on my phone calls, would regularly search my room (not for drugs or anything ..this started before I even knew what drugs were...for notes I had passed out in class and things she could find to get more information about who my friends were and what were we doing). When I was 16 I found she had many of my friends' phone numbers in the back of her phone book -- many of those friends were from outside of school and she had to have gone through my things to find the numbers.
What happened here? Well, I became adept at cryptography and communicating privately -- and started working at an ISP around age 12. I also spent a lot of time at home because she would prevent me from going to any events with friends (concerts), sleeping over anyone's house, etc etc. Ostensibly, she said "get out of the house", but in reality her conditions were too restrictive to actually encourage it.
Once I got to college, I became a complete social butterfly. I threw big parties all the time and was extremely social, and I continue to be quite a social person today. I have little social media presence.
After college I used the computer skills I had gotten as a teenager to start my career, which I continue in.
It's not a sad story and it has a fine ending, but it totally matches the article. It's almost eerie reading it myself.
I think it boils down to an extreme risk-aversion caused by a spike in artificial risk imposed by society on large percentages of interaction. This is done by people who have vested interests in either corralling behavior, or by people with axes to grind.
1. Every time feminists get some new law passed that lowers the legal bar for girls to make accusations that stick, it increases the social and legal risks for boys and men who have little or no legal recourse for false accusations, both deliberate and those based on bad definitions. With those huge generalizations rattling inside their heads, girls are treating all boys as 'potential rapists.' This causes feral like behavior in both genders as their natural biological imperatives collide with these newspeak mantras. The smarter ones are abandoning the game altogether because they see the risks which leave the not so average ones to mate and reproduce. Playing video games is increasingly being seen as almost as fun and a lot safer, socially. Cheaper too.
2. Schools' social dynamics are becoming more and more like prisons, with ever more extreme punishments for the tiniest missteps in following increasingly chaotic and nonsensical rules. A wrong word, or out of context statement overheard by the wrong person used to get the student a dressing down or 'demerit' slip. Now it lands the student in front of the school psychologist, who then comes up with some 'disease' to label him with, ruining his future opportunities.. The fact that schools are now reaching outside their domains and into the home is quite scary.
3. Up through the 1990s, cruising around in cars was popular with teens until gas prices reached a point where few could afford to without parental gas allowance. There was a time in fact where a highschool teen could buy a shitbox car, fuel, and insure it, on the pittance earned at his part time job. This is not true anymore...or is becoming starkly less true as time goes on.
4. The usual zomg, terrorists, zomg, pedophiles, zomg rapists, zomg drugs stuff hasn't gone away either. The only thing that has changed is the increasing ubiquity and homogeneity of its message. This reenforces its 'truthiness' and relative importance in people's minds.
Obviously, this post overlaps what was said in the article. I agree with a lot of it. If anything, 'social' media is just the biggest convenient pothole for people to fall into when they see that taking IRL social risk has just become too risky.