This book provides an interesting counterpoint to [b:Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other|8694125|Alone Together Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other|Sherry Turkle|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328841533s/8694125.jpg|13566692], which emphasises the problematic aspects of technology. 'It’s Complicated', by contrast, seeks to reassure the reader that today’s American teenagers are not being ruined by the internet and smartphones. I found myself agreeing with both books to some extent, as they are really pursuing different points. Turkle focuses more on the elderly than youth and doesn’t engage with the ‘digital natives’ concept. Boyd (sorry, I’m a stickler for capitalisation) is seeking to counter media scare stories about teenage life, which she rightly insists say more about the media’s use of fear than about teenagers themselves. Both books use ethnographic methods, which explore nuances of experience appealingly. Boyd seems more will to back this up with data on overall trends, which I appreciated.

The two books, but this one especially, really emphasise to me how American society has major problems and use of technology is a symptom rather than a cause. A major theme of ‘It’s Complicated’ is the fact that teenagers use social media to communicate with their friends because it is much easier than meeting with them face-to-face. A mixture of fearful & stiflingly protective parents, bad transport, a hostile built environment, and lack of free time appear responsible for this. Reading this chapter, I felt very glad not to be an American teenager, as it sounds incredibly depressing. Likewise, in Turkle’s book there was much about robots being used as companions for the elderly - this is symptomatic of society dismissing the elderly, rather than being a cause of it. Technology is not some neutral force, even as it shapes society it was created and marketed in a particular context.

Given the focus on teenagers, do not expect this book to reflect on the adoption of social media by other demographics. Moreover, it doesn’t consider the impact of smartphones and their ethic of constant connectivity. On the other hand, it does make some very striking points on how social media spaces reproduce existing inequalities and prejudices, especially racism. Likewise notable was the concept of ‘civil inattention’ and privacy-in-public within the context of facebook; the idea that relatives should skim past updates intended to be read by friends. Given that social mores and norms of behaviour are uncertain and evolving in social media, the extent of civil inattention is hard to gauge. A post that seems to invite sympathy and comfort leads you wonder if it is inviting such from you, or from closer friends, perhaps someone specific? On facebook, there is the perennial question of whether to weigh into a discussion between people you barely know, on a topic you feel strongly about. As arguing on the internet seems astoundingly futile, I'd always answer no. (As an aside, I don't use facebook, which I dislike for its clutter and general stressfulness. The same situation can occur on twitter, though.)

‘It’s Complicated’ is not a long book. It covers the topics most commonly raised in scaremongering about teenagers and technology, such as addiction to social media, bullying, and privacy. I was left with other questions, though. How is technology changing teenagers attitudes and practises in relation to consumerism, to socialising (surely more than the book implies), and to their future priorities? Are smartphones seen as tools for a purpose, or as part of their identity? I’m sure plenty of other books cover these issues. Perhaps it says something about my own attitude to technology that I get books out of the library about it! During my own teenage years I didn’t have a mobile phone but had access to the internet at school and the library. That wasn’t necessarily a better or worse way to grow up than with a smartphone and internet connection, yet this book definitely makes it clear that such technologies aren’t going to magically fix all the problems that teenagers face. They might make some worse and some better, in certain circumstances. What they most definitely do, however, is make incredible amounts of money for the companies that produce the hardware, run the websites, and sell the services. ( )

danah boyd spent 10 years researching teen use of social media and has written a great book diving into themes and patterns. Similar to Sherry Turkle, boyd looked past the specifics of what teens were doing and focused on generalities and patterns of use across all social media.

As a teacher and parent, it was helpful to think through what developmental hurdles teenagers are tackling with social media as the outlet. I reflected on my teaching habits and how I model appropriate, safe, and purposeful use to my students. boyd also gave great insight on how, as a parent, I can engage in healthy ways with my kids as they form identity in a connected world. ( )

Must read for anyone who educates or works with teens.

This book really resonated with my memories of using technology as a teenager, but at the same time revealed so much I hadn't considered about how race, class, and agency shape technology use.

ETA: The natural read after this book is http://www.freerangekids.com/. Just sayin'. ( )

Really liked this book. She really knows her stuff - everything she says about technology rings true, and everything she says about teenagers does also. I totally recommend this to parents who worry about social networking and would like to better understand what's going on with their kids on the internet. ( )

On point and worth the time. Just not the right time to read it. If you want the teen and scientific breakdown of how they view it having grown up in technology, five it a go. I think the author is very even-handed with examples vs studies, and hits all the fears and problems we as parents straddling both a life before the Internet and after. ( )

A reasonably quick and interesting read. Good insights into privacy and addiction in particular. A multi year research effort (2006-2013) so some content is dated but it still feels fresh and valuable. For those familiar with her work or who work in this field of study and teens or young adults, the content can easily be skimmed for understanding. Definitely works to give the teen a voice. That's a big plus. ( )

C'est compliqué statu sentimal favori des adolescents sur Facebook, sert ici de métaphore espiègle pour nous inciter à prendre en compte tous les aspects de leurs vies numériques.L

"Through social media, teens reveal their hopes and dreams, struggles and challenges
[…] Technology makes the struggles youth face visible but it neither creates nor
prevents harmful things from happening even if it can be a tool for both. It simply
mirrors and magnifies many aspects of everyday life, good and bad.” (p. 212)"
LSE Research Online. Retrieved from:http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/59815/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Helsper,%20E_Helsper_Book_review_Danah_2014_Helsper_Book_%20review_Danah_2014.pdf

Such an insightful book. Full review (rave) at Inside Higher Ed.

Boyd's research is extensive but I find nothing revelatory or especially enlightening in it. The quotes she includes from interviews with teens are interesting and insightful. She does a good job addressing misperceptions and misunderstandings about social networking but seems overly dismissive about the problems of online bullying. In her lengthy discussions of digital inequality and digital literacy, I find it an astonishing oversight that Boyd never once mentions the important roles libraries and librarians in these areas. ( )

Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, this book provides a rich picture of US teenagers' social media use. It is well-written and well-researched, combining deep and incisive analysis with an accessible style. Key topics include identity, privacy, addiction, danger, bullying, inequality and literacy. I would consider the book required reading for interaction designers moving into mediated communication -- which constitutes a growing proportion of interaction design practice in the near future, in my estimation.

This is a book for any librarians, teachers, parents, and scholars looking at media use by teenagers. Boyd presents the complicated, and sometimes strange appearing lives of teenagers online. She looks at youth culture, technology and how the two are affecting each other. It is a refreshing look debunking common myths about teenagers and their use of social media. Boyd’s argument that paternalism and protectionism imposed on teenagers from adults is a hinderance to teens in learning how to become informed digital citizens. Her arguments, as well as examples are solid in demonstrating her side. Whether you agree with boyd or not, it is a thought provoking book. It also includes contents, index, and in-depth bibliography. ( )

A must read... ( )

This should be a must read for any teacher and administrator's working with tween and teens. It's not just for the computer teacher! It is critical to understand the social, emotional, and psychological implications of the use of technology for our students. It also underscores the importance of teaching digital literacies. ( )

Being a blogger means I use social media quite a bit, something which often highlights for me how technologically behind I’d be if I didn’t blog. This has made me curious about how more technologically savvy people use social media, so I was excited to see how teens who grew up with social media use these sites. In It’s Complicated, the author takes a look at teen use of the latest social media sites over the past decade, from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter. The author systematically questions the stereotypes about social media-using teens. These include the assumption that all teens are good at and potentially addicted to technology to the idea that technology has fundamentally changed the way teens interact. She supports her conclusion with facts and figures, as well as hundreds of interviews with teens and parents.

Despite leaning a little academic, this book did a great job balancing all the components I look for in good nonfiction. The interviews with teens and parents provided interesting anecdotes, but the conclusions the author made were all clearly supported by rigorous research. Many of the issues the author addressed (the possibilities of unexpected audiences, the permanency and publicity of social media communication, and the ever-changing Facebook privacy settings, for example), are relevant to adults as well as teens. While reading, I loved comparing how I use technology to how teens use technology to how people think teens use technology. I was frequently surprised by both the ways in which teen use of social media is similar to and different from my own. The whole book was surprisingly insightful and thought-provoking.

Another impressive thing Boyd did (something I think is a challenge in nonfiction) was to write a book appropriate for many audiences. The teen interviews and Boyd’s empathy for the teens make this a book every parent with a teenager should read. The teen perspectives she presented were generally reasonable once the author showed where they were coming from. I think parents would benefit from that perspective. The book was also academically rigorous, well documented with many sources for learning more. I think even someone with prior knowledge of this field of study would likely learn something from this book. However, the academic bits which were included in-text, instead of in the notes and bibliography, were so clearly explained that this is also perfect for a general audience. I would highly recommend this to parents of teens; to anyone interested in social media; and to anyone who uses social media.

This review first published on Doing Dewey. ( )

A solid ethnographic study of teens and their use of social media, designed for the adults who have power over those teens' lives, to give them a means of understanding what the heck is going on here. In short: teens use social media in order to connect with their friends and be a part of society, which is something they find difficult to do given society's overprotectiveness of them in general. ( )

When there’s no malt shop

It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by Danah Boyd (Yale University Press, $25).

One of the most intriguing points that Danah Boyd makes in her book about teens and social media is that, for youth, the Internet is where groups find public space.

Like the malt shop and the mall before it, social sites online form a place where teens and young adults can gather and create their own culture. It’s the natural progression of coming-of-age, particularly in an era where very real concerns about physical safety of kids keeps so many parents from letting them go somewhere “just to hang out.”

Boyd (who uses lower case letters for her name: “danah boyd”) is in the first cohort of people to grow up with the Internet. And in her very real and thorough research, which included plenty of interviews, she discovered that between helicopter parents and “no loitering” policies at malls and restaurants, teens don’t have anywhere to go and “hang out.”

Once readers begin to see the Internet as a public space like a food court, much of teen behavior online begins to make a great deal of sense.

At the A&W back in the day—for me, the ’70s—groups of kids could hang out (both in cars and outside them) as long as we bought a root beer. One 40-cent root beer could give two hours of group socialization without adult interference; in fact, adults never even noticed us unless we got too loud or some idiot started a fight.

And that’s exactly what kids are doing on the Internet. And, like any self-respecting teenagers, the kids move on as soon as their parents show up. If my mother and her friends had started taking their coffee breaks at the A&W, we’d have headed right on over to Dairy Queen. Hence, the exodus from Facebook now that so many of us oldsters are on it.

There’s also a great deal of mythbusting here, and it’s useful. Just because kids have grown up with the Internet doesn’t mean they understand how it works; Boyd shows that teens are just as clueless as grown-ups about Google’s algorithms and metadata.

They may know how to use it, but they don’t know any more about how it works than most adults. Truly tech-savvy datanauts are a minority in any age group.

But—and this is surely the most important thing about this very useful book—Boyd’s main point is that the Internet isn’t a game-changer in quite the way we think. It’s just technology. Kids use it to create a space to “hang out,” but it hasn’t changed the nature of adolescences. One of her main points is that the Internet hasn’t increased bullying, but has made it more visible.

In general, that matches up with other serious studies on violence in general; as Stephen Pinker has pointed out in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and as any reader of crime statistics knows, we live in a less violent and criminal place that our grandparents did. The disconnect is that, even though there is less violence and crime, we hear more about it and we hear about it sooner because of media technology.

What Boyd is making clear is that the same is true of the Internet: We’re using it for the same things we’ve always done. The Internet simply makes those things faster and more visible. ( )

Boyd’s book, available for free on her website, recounts her ethnographic research on the internet lives of American teens of different races and classes. She challenges many of the simple conclusions popular in the media. Teens do value privacy—but they don’t often struggle through the difficulty of making their ordinary posts/tweets private, difficulty that’s been deliberately created by the corporations interested in having people expose themselves. The result: their ephemeral interactions are “suddenly persistent, creating the impression that norms have radically changed even though they haven’t.” Instead, teens are trying new ways to get privacy, for example by controlling access to meaning/using code words, as disempowered people have long done.

Boyd constantly emphasizes teens’ relative (pun intended) lack of power in their lives. Teens use social media to hang out with their friends, when their parents often cut off other ways of socializing because of fear of public spaces. Teens, she says, mostly aren’t addicted to social media; “if anything, they’re addicted to each other,” and it’s this desire for connection that’s misdiagnosed as antisocial texting. Teens are excluded from many physical spaces/parts of public life, but they struggle against this, using social media and other networked technologies both socially and politically.

Adult fears and mis-fears are a big part of the book. “American society despises any situation that requires addressing teen sexuality, let alone platforms that provide a conduit for teens to explore their desires.” But adult attempts to isolate teens from risks are damaging, undermining teens’ trust and eroding social ties: “When parents create cocoons to protect their children from potential harms, their decision to separate themselves and their children from what’s happening outside their household can have serious consequences for other youth, especially those who lack strong support systems. Communities aren’t safe when everyone turns inward; they are only safe when people work collectively to help one another.”

Boyd also critiques the rhetoric of teens as “digital natives” who are more savvy than their elders. First, she unpacks the term “native”: “throughout history, powerful immigrants have betrayed native populations while destroying their spiritual spaces and asserting power over them.” Also, she points out that teens aren’t necessarily knowledgeable about digital spaces (many have the same difficulty controlling their Facebook settings that their elders do) or about digital sources (they’ve been taught to distrust Wikipedia, but that just means they go to the next search result down, which is often worse; “[m]any teens I met assumed that someone verifies every link that Google shares,” and many people regardless of age treated Google as neutral, unlike the NYT or Fox). ( )

Over ten years ago I was a college student majoring in Sociology and if the subject matter were relevant at the time, this would definitely be an assigned book. I say this only because it did at times read as a textbook and I do think that is its intended purpose. That said, from a parent’s perspective (of younger children) I did find some extremely useful information and found it fairly easy to read. Danah Boyd spent around six years studying teenagers and their habits concerning social networking. Obviously much changed over that time but the general approach to social networking is still relevant. One of the most interesting aspects of her research concerned the common notion that kids using Facebook and other sites too frequently impede real life socialization. She found that as kids are more restricted in the face to face socialization (through safety concerns, over-scheduling and lack of public venues) than in the past, more kids use online resources in order to have any sort of private contact with their friends. She also offers very common sense information regarding internet addiction, online predators and embarrassing online information. I found the actual excerpts from her conversations with teenagers fascinating and the most useful for parents while some of explanatory research was somewhat repetitive. Overall, I think that this information could be enlightening to parents and educators as it addresses the truths of social networking as seen by teenagers. I received this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )

From the introduction:

Four affordances...shape many of the mediated environments that are created by social media....They are:
persistence - the durability of online expressions and content;
visibility - the potential audience who can bear witness;
spreadability: the ease with which content can be shared; and
searchability: the ability to find content. (11)

In networked publics, interactions are often public by default, private through effort. (12)

What's novel for teens is not technology but the public life that it enables. (13)

Whereas teens are focused on what it means to be in public, adults are more focused on what it means to be networked. (14)

As a society, we often spend so much time worrying about young people that we fail to account for how our paternalism and protectionism hinders teens' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged adults. (28)

From Chapter One: Identity

The ability to understand and define social context is important....Most people are uncomfortable with the idea that their worlds might collide uncontrollably, and yet, social media makes this dynamic a regular occurrence. (36)

[Teens represent themselves] in different ways on different sites with the expectation of different audiences and different norms. (38)

Context matters. (39)

Many teens post information on social media that they think is funny or intended to give a particular impression to a narrow audience without considering how this same content might be read out of context. (44)

Teens fabricate information because it's funny, because they believe that the site has no reason to ask, or because they believe that doing so will limit their visibility to people they don't want to find them. In doing so, they are seeking to control the networked social context. (47)

From Chapter Two: Privacy

The idea that teens share too much - and therefore don't care about privacy - is now so entrenched in public discourse that research showing that teens do desire privacy and work to get it is often ignored by the media....Meanwhile, technology executives like Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google chairman Eric Schmidt reinforce the notion that today's teens are different, arguing that social norms around privacy have changed in order to justify their own business decisions regarding user privacy. (56)

There's a big difference between being in public and being public. (57)

The issue for...many teens...is more a matter of social norms and etiquette than technical access....What's at stake is not whether someone can listen in, but whether one should. (58)

Much to many adults' surprise, teens aren't looking to hide; they just want privacy. As a result, many teens are developing innovative solutions to achieve privacy in public. (59)

Much of the scholarly conversation around privacy focuses on whether or not someone has - or has lost - privacy. Yet, for the teens that I interviewed, privacy isn't necessarily something that they have; rather it is something they are actively and continuously trying to achieve in spite of structural or social barriers that make it difficult to do so. (60)

The default in most interpersonal conversations, even those that take place in public settings, is that interactions are private by default, public through effort. (61)

Encoding content, subtweeting [subliminal tweeting], and otherwise engaging in social steganography offers one strategy for reclaiming agency in an effort to achieve privacy in networked publics. In doing so, teens recognize that limiting access to meaning can be a much more powerful tool for achieving privacy than trying to limit access to the content itself. (69)

Some teens see privacy as a right, but many more see privacy as a matter of trust. (73)

From Chapter Three: Addiction

Parents lament their own busy schedules and lack of free time but dismiss similar sentiments from their children. (92)

[References to The Shallows (Carr), Everything Bad is Good for You (Johnson), Steven Pinker, and Now You See It (Davidson)] (92-93)

By imagining teens as balls of uncontrollable hormones, society has systematically taken agency away from youth over the past century. This hampers their maturation, while the resultant restrictions prompt youth to either submit to or resist adult authority. (95)

From Chapter Four: Danger

Those who portray the internet as a dangerous place for teenagers to inhabit seem motivated by several anxieties, but chief among them is a long-standing fear about teens' access to public places. (103)

Legal scholar Larry Lessig argues that four forces regulate social systems: market, law, social norms, and technology or architecture....Policymakers respond to fear by regulating children's access to public spaces, even when doing so accomplishes little. (106)

Moral panics surrounding youth tend to reveal teens' conflicted position within American society....Society is afraid of [teens] and for them. (106-107)

...it is not uncommon for people to try to make sense of teens' violent acts by turning to the media that they embrace. (121)

When adults jump to fear and isolationism as their solution to managing risk, they often undermine their credibility and erode teens' trust in the information that adults offer. (126)

Fear is not the solution; empathy is. (127)

From Chapter Five: Bullying

Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus...narrowed in on three components that he saw as central to bullying in particular: aggression, repetition, and imbalance of power. (131)

The visibility and persistence of networked publics may enable larger audiences to witness acts of bullying. These same affordances create novel opportunities for people to intervene. (133)

If young people believe that adults will overreact or won't understand the complexities of the interpersonal dynamics, they aren't particularly interested in conveying the challenges they're facing....The language of bullying often presumes that there's a perpetrator and a victim. By focusing on blaming the perpetrator and protecting the victim, well-intended adults often fail to recognize the complexity of most conflicts. (136)

Social media has not radically altered the dynamics of bullying, bit it has made these dynamics more visible to more people. We must use this visibility, not to justify increased punishment, but to help youth who are actually crying out for attention....Recognizing where teens are at and why they engage in particular acts...is important to creating interventions that work. (152)

From Chapter Six: Inequality

New communication media often inspire the hope that they can and will be used to bridge cultural divides. This hope gets projected onto new technologies in ways that suggest that the technology itself does the work of addressing cultural divisions...[but] the mere existence of new technology neither creates nor magically solves cultural problems. In fact, their construction typically reinforces existing social divisions. (156)

The same biases that configure unmediated aspects of everyday life also shape the mediated experiences people have on the internet....Cultural prejudice permeates social media....How American teens use social media reflects existing problems in society and reinforces deep-seated beliefs. (158-159)

As teens turn to social media to connect with their friends, they consistently reproduce networks that reflect both the segregated realities of everyday life and the social and economic inequalities that exist within their broader peer networks. (171)

Information literacy is not simply about the structural means of access but also about the experience to know where to look, the skills to interpret what's available, and the knowledge to put new pieces of information into context. (172)

Not only are today's teens reproducing social dynamics online, but they are also heavily discouraged from building new connections that would diversify their worldviews. ["Stranger danger"] (173)

From Chapter Seven: Literacy

Teens may make their own media or share content online, but this does not mean that they inherently have the knowledge or perspective to critically examine what they consume. (177)

Censorship of inaccurate or problematic content does not provide youth the skills they will one day need to evaluate information independently. (181)

From Chapter Eight: Searching for a public of their own

What teens do online cannot be separated from their broader desires and interests, attitudes and values. Their relation to networked publics signals their interest in being a part of public life. It does not suggest that they're trying to go virtual or that they're using technology to escape reality. (202)

When teens turn to networked publics, they do so to hang out with friends and be recognized by peers. They share in order to see and be seen. (203)

What makes a particular site or service more or less public is not necessarily about the design of the system but rather how it is situated within the broader social ecosystem....the technical architecture of the system matters less than how users understand their relationship to it and how the public perceives any particular site. (204-205)

"The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see. If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society." -Vint Cerf (212)