Je vois ce que vous avez fait là.
I thought this was the most important point made in the entire book:
Most youth aren’t turning to social media because they can’t resist the lure of technology. They’re responding to a social world in which adults watch and curtail their practices and activities, justifying their protectionism as being necessary for safety. Social media has become an outlet for many youth, an opportunity to reclaim some sense of agency and have some semblance of social power.
From p. 98.
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I figured the response - if I got one (thanks BTW) - would be something like that. My feeling, though, is that it is incredibly tough to predict the future and that the signal-to-noise ratio means that while this book might predict the future it almost definitely won’t. On the upside, I don’t need to know about the future in order to take action tomorrow. I can just read BB (or the Verge, Wired, etc) and know what’s up at any given time and then check out whatever is the new thing.
The above being said, since I already don’t bother with instagram, twitter, tumblr, and most of that other, similar stuff I doubt I’m going to be doing anything different anyhow. New is fine but it has to be a LOT better than whatever it’s superseding in order for me to get the motivation to bother with it.
It’s less about the technology involved, then it is about the people. The book is about teenagers, who will soon be adults; it may be useful to know something about them.
I also believe It’s Complicated is a must read, but not for the same reasons you think it is, Cory. boyd’s work is absolutely central in the conversation about teens and social media. The problem, however, is that she’s wrong about some crucial points and her overall trope that teens are doing what they’ve always done (except now doing it online) and parents should “take a chill pill” and relax around digital media use is both dangerous and facile. It’s a message that parents long to hear, but it doesn’t mean its accurate or helpful for parents struggling to understand just how digital media use impacts their particular teen. I’ve read the entire work and have a long essay-length reply to her book. Let’s just say its not as glowing as every other review I’ve read.
I thought this was the most important quote of the book:
“Given the context in which I’m writing and the data on which I’m drawing, most of the discussion is explicitly oriented around American teen culture, although some of my analysis may be relevant in other cultures and contexts. I also take for granted, and rarely seek to challenge, the capitalist logic that underpins American society and the development of social media. [italics mine] Although I believe that these assumptions should be critiqued, this is outside the scope of this project.”
WTF? The idea of the public sphere that boyd borrows from Jurgen Habermas is focused centrally on the exact point that boyd says is “beyond the scope of the project,” namely, that the forces of state and market fundamentally define and distort communication in the networked publics in which teens participate daily. To say that a consideration of the “capitalist logic” is outside the scope of her project strains the credibility of the project.
That’s a pretty serious criticism, so I would like to know how that plays out.
All too often, I see some social critique of a broad, complex problem that finds the roots of the problem in capitalism and class, then throws its hands up, regarding this as an insoluble problem; the critique ends up arguing for more conservative solutions than more naive approaches that completely ignore capitalism entirely. E.g., “Well, the main reason for unequal outcomes in education is class inequality, but there’s nothing we can do about that, so we’ll just settle for more standardized testing and for attacking teachers’ unions, which will actually make everything worse, but at least we’ll be doing something.”
One of the things that makes me uncomfortable about social media is that not only are they increasingly commercialized, but that there’s a heavily propagandistic aspect to it – not propaganda for nationalism, but for capitalism itself. My impression is that teens are aware of this to a significant extent, are cynical about it and joke about it often, but also underestimate how much they’re being exploited and manipulated (as does nearly everyone). My stepson takes the attitude that whatever they’re getting out of him is a fair exchange for what he gets for free. Yet it should be obvious that most social media outlets depend entirely upon network effects and the creativity of the users, especially the younger users.
My job involves doing support work for some important communication tools owned by a giant corporation (with many lawyers), and I keep urging friends and family to use open source, free alternatives – but, I’m bashing my head against network effects and the endless flood of marketing.
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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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