"Everything is complicated": What do teenagers do on the Internet
Writer and Sociologist Boyd was given (just like that, in the lower register) in 2005 she began to talk with American teenagers about their life on social networks - to find out how they build it there and what they want to achieve. In addition, Boyd wanted to explain to anxious adults that "not everything on the Internet is bad," as a friend of mine asked her at one time, who was keen on shooting a video about the explosive effect of throwing Mentos into a bottle of Coke. This is how the book “It's Complicated” (“Everything is Complicated”) turned out - an experience of popular sociology that inspires all kinds of trust.
Boyd worked on the book in parallel with her doctoral thesis on the same topic that she defended in 2008 at the University of California at Berkeley. She used her scientific apparatus at full capacity. First, she had an impressive sample: several hundred respondents, 18 states, different races, social strata and subcultures - freaks, athletes, queens of beehives and geeks; no one left uninvited. Secondly, Boyd strictly structured each interview, as it should be in a sociological survey. Thirdly, she has been working in the Microsoft research division for several years and spent a lot of time talking with the creators of the once popular Friendster dating site, so she is well aware of the principles of developing social networks and applications, as well as how they are sold to the public. In addition, Boyd has a bachelor's degree in computer science.
Boyd highlights several major issues she sees in how modern society treats adolescents and their social escapades. It is difficult to avoid technological determinism: children with iPhones are either very good and make everyone happy, or very bad and make everyone unhappy. It is important to remember that humanity has always been inclined to place too high hopes on new technologies, and they, of course, did not meet these expectations. The concern of adults about children with devices is growing, including from this tradition. In addition, the fear of ordinary people is constantly used by journalists who know that many parents associate social networks with all sorts of decline (intellectual, moral, yes with whatever), and prefer to write about the problems of adolescents instigating, ignoring reliable scientific studies that say that is not so bad. “In general, children are fine,” Boyd says in the first preface of the book. “But they want to be understood.”
To do this, the writing is given, you must first understand what the difference is between the "adult" and the "childish" attitude to the question. She uses the term "networked public environments" (networked publics), denoting social networks in which adolescents participate, and highlights the important thing: the attention of adults is more attracted by the "network" component of the phenomenon, and adolescents by the "public" one. This is natural - they are constantly looking for opportunities to somehow manifest themselves in a society without parental control, and for this they do not have many opportunities: at least in the USA over the past twenty years children have significantly less free time and more different restrictions for real communication. When parents observe how teens interact in social networks, they have something to compare this situation with, because they have access to those social media that their children do not yet have.
"At school, those who blow a lot, behave like morons, and your generation, dad, smelled mountains of cocaine, but you grew up a normal person!"
The most important thing in adolescent networking is the social context and intended audience, Boyd writes. Adults dealing with teenagers often do not think about it. In 2006, the admissions office of one of the Ivy League universities received documents from a guy who lived in South Central Los Angeles. He wrote a wonderful letter of motivation in which he told how much he wanted to break out of his midst, to get away from gang fights and problems. University staff were delighted (such a success story would have been an excellent advertisement), they decided to find it on MySpace, and they were amazed that everything in his profile indicated, if not affiliation, then full sympathy for one of the gangs. The guy decided not to take. A little later, Boyd called from the selection committee as an expert and asked her: why did he decide to lie if he knew that the truth was easy to find on the Internet? She suggested the obvious - the guy just has to hide his ambitions, disguise himself as his peers. In South Central, the influence of gangs is enormous, and those who want to get rid of him should not show it. University acceptors were amazed - they did not think at all about such an explanation. Boyd writes that he does not know how the story ended. Perhaps the boy did take to study - and if not? The price of someone's inattention to the context is sometimes very high.
Boyd, fortunately, has examples of more penetrating adults. Someone Chris received on the same MySpace (dana does not get tired of repeating: the sites where teenagers hang out can be a thing of the past, social overtones are not!) A request for friendship from their own daughter. He was very touched by such trust, but he saw on her page a post with the question: "What drug are you?" - and the answer: - "Cocaine". Chris was horrified, but before he grabbed the belt (the help line for drug addicts), he decided to still talk to his daughter. It turned out that it was (of course) a test that all her friends from Mayspase were obsessed with, and in it, if you give answers carefully, you could get exactly the result you want. This pleased Chris a little, but he restrained himself again and asked: "Why did you want to be cocaine?" She replied: at school, those who blow a lot behave like morons; those who eat mushrooms are crazy in general, and "your generation, dad, smelled mountains of cocaine, and you grew up a normal person!" This made Chris laugh - he grew up in a typical "Rednek" town in the Midwest, where he was never heard of cocaine, but there were plenty of alcoholics and early flying girls. He himself was only 16 years older than his daughter. When she told him that cocaine didn’t really interest her, they both talked for a long time about how easy it would be to make a mistake by taking jokes on the Internet out of context.
In the chapter “Privacy”, she gives examples of how an adult’s view of public content on social networks differs from that of a teenager. If from the point of view of a mature person, the attitude to private life is characterized by what you have already posted on Facebook, then teenagers will rather judge him by what is left behind the brackets. Here, Boyd talks about a girl whose chances of getting a prestigious scholarship at the university were drastically reduced because of a photo from the party that appeared on Facebook, where she was holding a glass of beer. It was not she who posted the photo, but the teachers still allowed the campus police to show the picture to all students at the school meeting. The funny thing is that the meeting was dedicated to the importance of protecting privacy on the Internet. The case ended with a complaint to the Union for the Protection of Civil Liberties (ACLU). That is, adults in this case did not take into account either the social context or the girl’s obvious desire to have control over her personal affairs - since she did not post this photo herself, it means she didn’t want anyone to see it.
The prejudice that a sense of privacy is atrophied among today's adolescents has taken root very deeply, and many adults refuse to admit the opposite. Or do not guess to ask the adolescents themselves, who, in turn, hope that adults will "filter out" information from their pages. Any technology creates certain conditions for communication or work with it, and modern social networks are no exception. In most of them it is much easier to keep the content public than to mess with the settings, and teenagers, of course, choose the easiest option. Hence the false idea that "the children have lost all shame." They often try to encrypt their messages in social networks without resorting to the standard tools of hiding meanings.
Boyd called this phenomenon “social steganography”, that is, the art of creating messages that everyone can read, but only those who read the necessary social context can understand. Art itself is not new (judging by the fact that there is an article about it in Wikipedia), but it finds its original expression on the Internet. Add to this the eternal and laudable desire of teenagers to hide something from adults, and get social steganography. Teenagers, Boyd writes, know well that hiding the meaning of a message is much more important than closing access to it altogether. So they are also protected from the observation of parents and adults in general, who believe that they have the right to always know what children are doing. Moreover, the society, setting the stereotype of the "responsible parent", often pushes them to it.
Teenagers are interested in each other just as their parents were interested in each other. Technology just helps
Next, Boyd deals with "dependence on social networks" - an incredibly mythologized concept. She recalls that the passion with which adolescents (and not only them) spend hours studying each other’s Facebook pages, losing time and sleep, is not asocial (as assumed by stereotype), but, on the contrary, socially emphasized. Teenagers are interested in each other just as their parents were interested in each other. Technology just helps them in this.
Boyd treats social networks not through the addiction characteristics, but through the notion of “flow”, that is, the state of total immersion in what you do; active concentration, ideal, for example, for creativity (the author of these lines often experienced this state while working on another text for Wonderzine). Adolescents are often tied to their accounts also because their life outside of school is arranged by caring parents literally by the hour. Hanging on Facebook and Twitter for them just compensation for the lack of free time.
“I have no doubt that socialization on the Internet affects the minds of adolescents,” Boyd remarks. “As they socialize, they learn to comprehend a deeply interconnected and tangled world. But unlike [Nicholas] Carr, I don’t think this will end everything. "
In the last chapter, Boyd compares the situation of contemporary adolescents and women of previous centuries - and both of them tried to exclude society from active public life, constantly justifying their isolation: it’s the same for their own good; they are not skillful enough, not mature enough in this. If “It's Complicated” came out at least a year ago, it would be difficult to find parallels between the regulated life of American teenagers and our “freemen” (everything is relative, of course), but now that the Russian state is re-learning (learning in many ways and from experience from the United States) control over the private life of every citizen, whether child or adult, and arranges for the demonization of the Internet for the gullible and illiterate, you can read this book as a guide to action: leave the kids alone. Although she was given, Boyd would say that such a summary is sensationalist. It's Complicated.