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Summary
Summary
"boyd's new book is layered and smart . . . It's Complicated will update your mind."--Alissa Quart, New York Times Book Review
"A fascinating, well-researched and (mostly) reassuring look at how today's tech-savvy teenagers are using social media."-- People
"The briefest possible summary? The kids are all right, but society isn't."--Andrew Leonard, Salon
What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens' lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Yet despite an environment of rampant fear-mongering, boyd finds that teens often find ways to engage and to develop a sense of identity.
Boyd's conclusions are essential reading not only for parents, teachers, and others who work with teens but also for anyone interested in the impact of emerging technologies on society, culture, and commerce in years to come. Offering insights gleaned from more than a decade of original fieldwork interviewing teenagers across the United States, boyd concludes reassuringly that the kids are all right. At the same time, she acknowledges that coming to terms with life in a networked era is not easy or obvious. In a technologically mediated world, life is bound to be complicated.
Author Notes
danah boyd is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Research Assistant Professor at New York University, and Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She lives in New York City.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Boyd, an NYU professor and principal researcher at Microsoft Research, spent eight years exploring the relationship between teens and technology, meeting with teens nationwide, from gang-ridden schools in L.A. to schools in rural Pennsylvania. The text is backed by current research, though the author warns that social media is a "moving landscape" that is constantly evolving. Boyd set out to explain the networked lives of teens to "adults who worry" about the role of technology in kids' lives, but, as one teen posts online of her romantic status, "It's complicated." The author discovers this to be true of the role of technology in teenagers' lives as well. As she delves into this complex subject, Boyd finds that adults have often used technology as a "punching bag," blaming and fear-mongering in ways that aren't helpful to kids, families, or communities. While many adults complain teens are addicted to technology, she argues that kids are actually addicted to their friends and social connections. Today's teens, Boyd asserts, have less freedom than teens of yore; with structured environments and schedules, less free time, less geographic freedom, and not as many places to hang out face-to-face. As a result, they create their own online meeting places where they can gather and interact. Students, parents, and educators will find this a comprehensive study of how technology impacts teens' lives and how adults can help balance rather than vilify its inevitable use. Agent: Kristine Dahl, ICM. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
since the word "teenager" was coined 70 years ago, adults have defined adolescents by one extreme or another. They are rebels without causes or activist leaders, mindless consumers or cultural kingpins, digital natives or naïfs. Enter Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a research assistant professor at New York University. In life, Boyd retains the spirit of a youthful rebel, with her pierced tongue and name spelled in anti-Establishment lowercase. And perhaps in part thanks to its author's identification with youth, "It's Complicated" avoids many of the typical either-or clichés about adolescence. Boyd's new book is layered and smart. In each chapter, Boyd addresses various panics about teenagers. She describes how they live virtually today, meeting on Skype rather than in the den, mall or park; texting one another through classes, sharing relationship drama on Facebook. She understands why adults are concerned about teenagers becoming screenagers but also what teenagers get out of their screen lives. Boyd palpably cares for her subjects. "I often heard parents complain that their children preferred computers to 'real people,'" Boyd writes. In her research, however, she discovered that they would much rather hang out with their friends in person. But they can't. "Today's teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation." Many American teenagers attend schools outside their neighborhoods, live in gated communities and are advised (often by their parents) to fear strangers. Curfew and loitering laws further tack kids to their bedrooms. According to Boyd, the American bourgeoisie is more devoted to buying free-range meat than raising free-range children. In this anodyne, restricted America, social media is the only way teenagers can effectively get a life. To parents or educators who believe social media is dangerous, Boyd argues that there's no reason to believe "digital celibacy" will help teenagers become smarter, happier or healthier. If adults worry that their children are falling in love with their operating systems (as in Spike Jonze's film "Her"), she offers a more positive spin. Teenagers go online "to take control of their lives and their relationship to society," she writes. "Social media - far from being the seductive Trojan horse - is a release valve, allowing youth to reclaim meaningful sociality as a tool for managing the pressures and limitations around them." Boyd's lesson is this : If the concern is that kids are spending too much time online, the best response isn't merely to pull the plug. Parents, teachers and even urban planners might try to think about giving kids physical freedom, leisure time and more public spaces to gather to actually change their digital habits. The book also offers a thoughtful and useful chapter on privacy and technology, where Boyd writes with insightful pith, "Privacy doesn't just depend on agency; being able to achieve privacy is an expression of agency." This chapter and others are tethered to a central media studies tenet about teenagers (and fan boys and girls): Young people have more power and capacity than we might think. Youth and other networked communities are not simply passive consumers or pliant sex objects. Instead, they are cultural creators and arbiters who are, at least partially, controlling and scripting their own lives and experiences. Boyd writes brilliantly about teenagers' main weapon against privacy invasion, which she calls "social steganography." They practice a sort of interpersonal encryption when using social networks. For instance, parents might read but not fully understand teenagers' posts and messages because they're using in-jokes, nicknames, code words, subliminal tweeting or "sub-tweeting" so tweets become "meaningless to clueless outsiders." I might find it silly if a 16-year-old from New Jersey on Facebook says she is 95 years old and from Easter Island. However, Boyd sees young people dissembling about their age or geography as the technological equivalent of writing messages with invisible ink. According to her, these personae are often modes of self-protection (from adult sexual predators, for instance) and also self-expression. "Rather than finding privacy by controlling access to content," she writes, "many teens are instead controlling access to meaning." BOYD IS A passionate futurist. Indeed, "It's Complicated" can be too bullish about growing up networked. She tends not to be explicitly critical of the fact that these teenagers have to navigate advertisements 24/7 and often become advertisements for themselves on social networks. To my mind, this is one of the most pernicious elements of social media. In addition, as today's default setting for all of us is publicity, privacy is costly and time-consuming (think about the time it takes to change settings or encrypt, for example). The recent revelations of how deeply our privacy is violated online by the N.S.A. as well as by data-mining corporations (which include Google and Facebook) have horrified some Americans. But we haven't even begun to imagine what it means to grow up thinking that your every email and text message is very likely being recorded. To her credit, Boyd acknowledges that teenagers' power - especially the edge obtained by cyber-manipulating identity and privacy - has its limits. Young people are sometimes exploited and bullied virtually. In addition, their privacy can be invaded in unexpected ways, through what Boyd calls "collapsed contexts." Their hidden online identities can be revealed accidentally on social media, where otherwise unconnected people can overlap. These crosshatched worlds can be particularly challenging, Boyd writes, for teenagers who occupy radically different worlds. For instance, a teenager she interviewed was still "working through her sexuality" and was terrified of being outed inadvertently to her conservative parents by her online chat history. Other young people were worried that their use of social media might accidentally allow their hidebound religious parents to discover their buried identities. The idea of "collapsed contexts" is just one way that Boyd's book helps us understand our new environment. "It's Complicated" will update your mind. Teenagers live virtually today, meeting on Skype rather than in the mall or park. ALISSA QUART is the author of "Republic of Outsiders" and "Branded."
Choice Review
Based on 166 interviews with teens and discussions with parents, teachers, and other adults conducted between 2007 and 2010, this book examines the networked public life of youth. Boyd asks important questions, such as what is and is not new about social media, what social media add to the youths' lives, and how society can utilize technology positively. She argues that despite widely shared moral panics about youth and technology, the young generation is creating and living in public space mediated by technology, oftentimes because traditional public space is no longer available. Historically, adults have been suspicious of youth participation and socialization in public life. However, young people have found ways to create their own social life. Boyd reveals that this new environment is persistent, visible, spreadable, and searchable. It is also a space where the public and the private paradoxically merge. These youth, although often referred to as "digital natives," are often "digital naives" who would benefit from more digital literacy education. Accessibly written, boyd's work unearths the reality of young peoples' social lives both online and offline. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. Y. Kiuchi Michigan State University
Kirkus Review
An analysis of the role social media plays in the lives of teens. "Social media has evolved from being an esoteric jumble of technologies to a set of sites and services that are at the heart of contemporary culture," writes Microsoft principal researcher Boyd (Media, Culture, and Communications/New York Univ.). "Teens turn to a plethora of popular services to socialize, gossip, share information, and hang out." They use them to enhance and expand their social interactions with their peers. Cellphones, texting and online sites like Facebook allow teens to share more than the minutiae of their daily lives; they are relatively safe and vital places where they can express their opinions and receive almost instant feedback from a vast network of friends. With street corners, city parks and even shopping malls becoming off limits to teens as places to congregate, the Internet gives adolescents access to their friends, who might live across town or even across the country. Through hundreds of interviews with teens, parents, teachers, librarians and others who work with the young, Boyd's extensive research illuminates the oft-misunderstood world of teens today, where social media is an extension of life, not a place to hide from parents or other authority figures. She examines the unwritten etiquette rules of social networking sites, the safety concerns of parents and teens who worry about cyberbullying and cyberstalking, the fear of an online presence leading to sexual predation and the racial segregation filtering through the Internet. Thorough information interwoven with common-sense advice from teens and the author enable readers, particularly parents, to relax a bit regarding this new media age. Boyd also provides a list of demographic information about the teens she interviewed, including age, ethnicity, home state and which sites they use. Comprehensive new research that illuminates why and how social media is important to teens.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This groundbreaking survey of the online social habits and realities of American teens, based on extensive fieldwork, also serves as an important corrective to numerous persistent, widely held notions about young people, public life, and the Internet. Boyd (principal researcher, Microsoft Research) offers provocative, cogent, and compassionate assessments of teen participation in what she calls "networked publics." She illuminates the conflict between teens' desire to connect to peers and adult-created impediments to this socialization and roundly critiques both the idealism and the anxiety informing adult reactions to teen online behaviors. Among other topics in her packed but efficient and accessible book, Boyd discusses bullying, media literacy, and social inequality; debunks the pervasiveness of online predation; addresses problematic assumptions behind the term digital native; defends -Wikipedia as a great educational tool that makes transparent the evolution of knowledge; and astutely points out that the technology may be new, but teens, as always, simply want to socialize, be known, spend time with friends, and participate in public life. VERDICT Exciting, challenging, and liberating; this title is essential reading for adults with any interest in or control over teens.-Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Identity why do teens seem strange online? | p. 29 |
| 2 Privacy why do youth share so publicly? | p. 54 |
| 3 Addiction what makes teens obsessed with social media? | p. 77 |
| 4 Danger are sexual predators lurking everywhere? | p. 100 |
| 5 Bullying is social media amplifying meanness and cruelty? | p. 128 |
| 6 Inequality can social media resolve social divisions? | p. 153 |
| 7 Literacy are today's youth digital natives? | p. 176 |
| 8 Searching for a public of their own | p. 199 |
| Appendix: teen demographics | p. 215 |
| Notes | p. 221 |
| Bibliography | p. 245 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 267 |
| Index | p. 273 |