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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.'"
I've pushed and encouraged my son, now 19, to get out and socialize. I've encouraged him to go hang out with friends and to invite friends over. I've encouraged him to have and to attend parties, join groups, travel... I've provided a relatively fancy/sporty car and more than enough money to do almost whatever he likes.
Instead he plays League of Legends and DOTA2 for 18-20 hours per day. He'd rather be kicked in the head than leave you computer and go outside or socialize...
Well maybe it's my son that's got a problem. I do see lots of teens out in public. But, all of those teens, ALL OF THEM, have their heads buried in their smartphones. They go out of their way to NOT interact, let alone socialize, with anyone.
I think this "researcher" is full of shit. I think that we are still to blame for providing an easy and pervasive technological environment that allows them to bury their heads in their comfortable world of cyberspace and "social media", never having to come up for air. It's addictive as shit and they are all addicted to it. But, they're not at all interested in socializing IRL.
There are fewer places to hang out. Record stores and video rental stores are gone. Indoor malls are on the way out. Fast food places discourage hanging out. Starbucks are popular places to hang out, but just can't handle many people. Few nightclubs allow teens. Where to go?
I'm in Silicon Valley, and I get to see a few views of this. Downtown Redwood City (a mostly lower middle class town), sort of by accident, ended up being a teen hangout zone. Years of attempts to "revitalize downtown" actually worked. A 20-screen theater, a lot of cheap restaurants (pizza, yogurt, burgers, etc.) and a refurbished live theater, often used by cover bands, finally brought people downtown. There's also a big plaza in front of the former courthouse, where free movies or bands are shown on warm nights. It took years to get going, there were empty storefronts for years, and it seemed to be a boondoggle project, but now it's happening. But it was never intended to enrich the lives of teenagers. It was intended to enrich retailers and property owners.
There's another side to this. Being a teenager in a high-achieving area like Silicon Valley means being run ragged with school, homework, and semi-mandatory activities needed to build up the resume to get into a good college. As a horse owner, I see a lot of kids like that, and many are just overworked. I once asked a group of girls at the Stanford barn who were discussing grades what they considered an acceptable GPA. One answered, in a bleak voice, "4.5." These are kids who will be considered a failure if they don't get into a school at the Stanford/Harvard/Yale level. Those kids are on a treadmill from their first day of preschool.
As an amusing note, one thing horse kids have going for them is good situational awareness. They're used to being aware of what's going on around them, because that's required on or around horses. (Riding in a busy ring with different people and horses doing different things without getting in each others way is a basic skill.) They all have smartphones, but aren't glued to them.