If kids canât socialize, who should parents blame? Simple: They should blame themselves. This is the argument advanced in Itâs Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd. Boydâfull disclosure, a friend of mineâhas 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 wonât let them. âTeens arenât addicted to social media. Theyâre addicted to each other,â Boyd says. âTheyâre not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so theyâve moved it online.â
Itâs true. As a teenager in the early â80s I could roam pretty widely with my friends, as long as we were back by dark. But 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 kidsâ after-school lives.
The result, Boyd discovered, is that todayâs teens have neither the time nor the freedom to hang out. So their avid migration to social media is a rational response to a crazy situation. Theyâd rather socialize F2F, so long as itâs unstructured and away from grown-ups. âI donât care where,â one told Boyd wistfully, âjust not home.
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