Teenagers and social networking – it might actually be good for them
I ask a teenage girl, how often do you text? “250 times a day, or something,” she tells me. Shocking! The digital lives of teenagers have become the target of weekly attacks. In a recent essay for the Guardian, the novelist Jonathan Franzen bemoaned online socialising, arguing that it was creating a uniquely shallow and trivial culture, making children unable to socialise face to face. Then the American comedian Louis CK proclaimed on TV that he wouldn’t give his daughters cellphones for fear they wouldn’t develop empathy.
There’s also the scientist and writer Susan Greenfield’s famously apocalyptic warnings: “We could be raising a hedonistic generation who live only in the thrill of the computer-generated moment and are in distinct danger of detaching themselves from what the rest of us would consider the real world.”
As a parent of two boys at primary school, I’m not immune to worry about these issues. And you don’t need to be a parent to fret about the effect of all this technology on young people. Newspapers are constantly filled with frightening accounts of pornography addiction and aggression supposedly caused by violent video games – particularly now, as Grand Theft Auto V hits the shelves. But even when these titillating accounts touch on real concerns, they do not really reflect the great mass of everyday teenage social behaviour: the online chat, the texting, the surfing, and the emergence of a new teenage sphere that is conducted digitally.
That trend is real. Is it, as Franzen and the others fear, turning kids into emoticon-addled zombies, unable to connect, unable to think, form a coherent thought or even make eye contact? Could this be true?
I don’t think so. Let’s go back to that girl who texts 250 times a day. The truth is, she was an extreme case I cherry-picked to startle you – because when I interviewed her, she was in a group of friends with a much wider range of experiences. Two others said they text only 10 times a day.
A few were devotees of Snapchat, the app that lets you send a picture or text that, like a cold-war communiqué, is destroyed after one viewing. One had a phone filled with charmingly goofy emoticons, another disapproved: “I’m a skilled writer,” she told me. “People sometimes misunderstand tone, so you have to be precise.” As it turns out, the diversity of use in this group of friends is confirmed by research. Fewer than 20 percent of children send more than 200 texts a day; 31 percent send barely 20 or fewer.
New technologies always provoke generational panic, which usually has more to do with adult fears than with the lives of teenagers. In the 1930s, parents fretted that radio was gaining “an invincible hold of their children”. In the 80s, the great danger was the Sony Walkman – producing the teenager who “throbs with orgasmic rhythms”, as philosopher Allan Bloom claimed. When you look at today’s digital activity, the facts are much more positive than you might expect.
Indeed, social scientists who study young people have found that their digital use can be inventive and even beneficial. This is true not just in terms of their social lives, but their education too. So if you use a ton of social media, do you become unable, or unwilling, to engage in face-to-face contact? The evidence suggests not.
Research by Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Research Centre, a US think-tank, found that the most avid texters are also the kids most likely to spend time with friends in person. One form of socialising doesn’t replace the other. It augments it.
“Kids still spend time face to face,” Lenhart says. Indeed, as they get older and are given more freedom, they often ease up on social networking. Early on, the web is their “third space”, but by the late teens, it’s replaced in reaction to greater autonomy.
They have to be on Facebook, to know what’s going on among friends and family, but they are ambivalent about it, says Rebecca Eynon, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, who has interviewed about 200 British teenagers over three years. As they gain experience with living online, they begin to adjust their behaviour, wrestling with new communication skills, as they do in the real world.
Parents are wrong to worry that kids don’t care about privacy. In fact, they spend hours tweaking Facebook settings or using quick-delete sharing tools, such as Snapchat, to minimise their traces. Or they post a photograph on Instagram, have a pleasant conversation with friends and then delete it so that no traces remain.
This is not to say that kids always use good judgment. Like everyone else, they make mistakes – sometimes serious ones. But working out how to behave online is a new social skill. While there’s plenty of drama and messiness online, it is not, for most teens, a cycle of non-stop abuse: a Pew study found only 15 percent of teens said someone had been mean or cruel to them online in the last 12 months. As wrenching as the worst-case scenarios of bullying are, and as urgently as those need to be addressed, they are not, thankfully, a daily occurrence for most kids.
Culled from guardian.co.uk