This is the fifth in a series of posts reviewing “It’s Complicated” by Danah Boyd.

The addiction of social media

It's Complicated, by Danah BoydOne of the big strands of the debate about the impact of social media on young people is its addiction. I can certainly attest to the draw that looking to see if anyone has responded to a recent post or witty comment can have.

It’s here that I was really brought up short by one of Boyd’s central insights.  She notes that the physical social space for young people is increasingly restricted (as they are banned from shopping centres (malls) or classical music is played to chase them away). As a result, they are entering social networking spaces online to fulfil their need to learn to become a fully social adult.

This notion of restricted physical space and its interaction with and influence over the behaviour of teenagers online hadn’t occurred to me before. Is the addiction we see around us not caused by a fault in our young people, but a fault in the way we are bringing them up?

Sexual predation

Boyd’s chapter on sexual predators and the internet is of course good. This isn’t a comprehensive summary of her book, but just stuff that I found interesting and new to me. You need to read the book, as I said in the first post, because it is in this section I’m particularly aware of what I’ve left out.

One key point that struck me was that the teens who are most at risk are the same teens who are at risk in other parts of their lives too. It’s teens living in poverty with limited support networks around them who are more likely to stray into trouble.

This mirrors what I’ve been learning in my day job about digital exclusion. People who are digitally excluded are very often the very same people who are excluded in other ways too. Digital exclusion is a much more complex problem than just providing a bit of training, or doing everything offline in order not to exclude people.

In the same way, the challenge of predation is not going to be solved by banning young people from social media, or imposing restrictions on content via internet providers. We need to support young people on how to be safe while focusing most of our protection efforts on those most at risk.

Boyd says this is important because messages about restrictions on internet usage worries parents who find it hard to impose boundaries. It means that fewer adults feel able to support young people who are struggling, and young people with limited social networks don’t know who to turn to.

Bullying

I think this is probably my biggest fear about social media and my own children; the danger that bullies can creep right into the home through the computer screen. More over my fear is enhanced by the fact that bullying can be very public, persistent and therefore humiliating. It’s the one thing I feel most ill equip to deal with.

One important thing that Boyd does is try to define bullying (a term I’d not thought about much but appears to be difficult to reach agreement on). The definition Boyd settles on makes intuitive sense to me and has some implications that begin to settle my nerves a little, a very little.

Drawing on the literature, she settles on a definition of bullying as having three components: aggression, repetition and imbalance of power. This means that individual acts of harassment or one-off fights are not bulling, nor are “reciprocal acts of relational aggression.”

The trouble lies in the fact that parents and the media often use the term bullying much more loosely. At one end they label isolated acts of peer-to-peer fighting as bullying, while at the other the media can label serious criminal acts as bullying rather than using terms like stalking, harassment or abuse to describe what is happening. In this latter case, describing actions as bullying when they are worse can circumscribe the actions that are taken against them.

Boyd found that young people are much more likely to be clearer in their use of the term.

There are six posts in all in this series of posts reviewing It’s Complicated. In order the posts are: