Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I understand it’s a serious criticism and wouldn’t have made it if I didn’t feel strongly about the issues involved. I’m a psychotherapist, specializing in working with adolescents and have written pretty extensively on the subject of adolescent development and digital media. I’ve been following danah’s work for a long time and had both high hopes and trepidation about the book. It’s a very smart and well-meaning book but the problems with it are, in my view, significant. The other major criticism I have is that while she may understand and have thoroughly researched what teens are doing online, there are weaknesses in her analysis of why teens do what they do. It’s clear to me that she is not an expert in adolescent development and her ‘explanations’ are often surmises, based upon her own experience or based upon interview data. Teens think about problems and risk-taking in fundamentally different ways than adults do; this isn’t a matter of putting down teens…it’s a matter of brain development being asynchronous and complex. Teens don’t “get” things the way adults do, but boyd is so keen to side with teens against meddling, anxious parents, she really gets a lot of the developmental motivations wrong simply because she often takes what teens say at face value. She does this because she has enormous respect for adolescents, and had a difficult adolescence herself…but she’s no developmental expert so her analyses are often wish-fulfillment, not reflections of adolescent’s cognitive processes.
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