It's Complicated, by Danah BoydThis is the sixth in a series of posts reviewing “It’s Complicated” by Danah Boyd.

In the last post I explored a little about how social media’s dangers are not as most of the mass media would have us believe. I fixed on Boyd’s insight that they are related as much to what is happening in the ‘real world’ as they are to what is happening online. If this is true, is the reverse true? Could social media have any role in reducing social divisions?

This question is not a new one, as Boyd explores. Back in 1858, when the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid, commentators expressed hopes that it could bind humanity together and heal divisions. Of course, just as social media isn’t creating problems for young people all by itself, it can’t magically solve deep issues within our society. Indeed their design (either by accident or design) normally shore up existing social structures and divisions.

The networks teens belong to, whether MySpace (a significant platform when Boyd was doing her research), Facebook, Twitter or something further outside the sight of the mainstream are heavily influenced by their existing offline social networks. And often these divide along the divided lines of society. This is racial in the US where Boyd’s research was carried out, but I’d imagine is similar in the UK.

The fact that online networks mirror offline networks shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it rather puts a lie to the theory that the Internet will dissolve social boundaries. Further more, because both social and technical networks are “neither evenly distributed nor meritocratic”, not everyone will benefit equally. To put it another way, “Social media does not radically rework teen’s social networks. As a result, technology does not radically reconfigure inequality.”

The perceived dangers have the effect of heightening this problem as young people are discouraged from building new connections. Just because networks promise a low cost way to build new, wider networks, doesn’t mean that this will be the outcome.

This effect has particular implications for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Those from more privileged backgrounds are already in the right networks, they benefit much less from heterogeneous networks than their less well off peers (though they do still benefit).

Boyd clearly and simply describes the dangers for social equality. For example, information flows round networks. At the time she was researching, young people were segmenting between MySpace and Facebook. College admissions officers targeted Facebook, and yet this was precisely the network that Latino and Black youth were less likely to use. Boyd found that they were totally unaware that they were making cultural choices with real world implications. Moreover, these were real work negative implications for precisely the people who needed more information and support.

Just who is a digital native?

One of the persistent myths in popular culture is that young people are digital natives. They are, within this mythology, able to navigate the new online world without a care in the world.

My own theory, before reading Boyd, had been that this is just because young people have more time to experiment, while at the same time the costs of failure are far lower for them. I still bought into the myth that they are digital natives, though didn’t believe that this was just because they are young.

It’s important to understand this, as Boyd highlights, because we need to understand the capacities of young people to navigate the online world if we are to help them deal with its challenges, and make the best of its opportunities.

The picture, as you will have gathered from this series of posts, is much more nuanced that the popular myth; some teens are highly adept, others barely understand the online world at all. Painting a picture of digital natives risks reinforcing very real offline social inequalities, because of course, it is more likely to be social disadvantaged young people who are less adept.

Boyd feels the term native is dangerous because it reduces the responsibility adults feel for helping all young people make the most of the networked world.

This is a good place for this magpie reviewer to stop. It illustrates perfectly why “It’s Complicated” is such a good book. It turns many assumptions on their head and leads to profoundly important conclusions. The Internet, or at least its implications, is dangerous, but at least as much because of its effect on real world equality as for our individual children.

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