It's Complicated, by Danah BoydThis is a review, across multiple posts, of “It’s Complicated” by Danah Boyd.

I’m new to this book review thing, but it is one reason I set-up this blog. Beyond a diary to motivate me to keep running, I also wanted to begin to engage in issues that I can’t use the work blog for.

This is a book that came highly recommended by (@curiousc), about an issue that is something that is worrying many adults: the impact of social media and the internet on children, and specifically teenagers.

In summary

I’ve got two main points in summary. Given that I think this has turned into a long post (so long in fact I’ve had to turn it into a series of posts), you, the notional and currently fictional reader of this diary hiding in plain sight might well want to stop at the end of the summary.

So my two points:

  1. This is a fantastic book. The picture shows the number of times I folded down the page corner because of the insight, idea or startling fact or anecdote I found there. It’s so fantastic that you really should read it. Or failing that, ignore the previous paragraph and read past the summary to the full set of posts; and
  2. The media scare stories are just that, scare stories, the picture is much more interesting and nuanced. There are lots of things to be worried about, and the book provides lots of evidence to back them up, but they aren’t the things most parents are worrying about, on the whole.

Indeed, the worries I took away from the book are less about my own children’s safety, and much more related to the impact of social media on increasing and exacerbating social divisions.

So why is this a good book?

Boyd uses a mix of research techniques, but centres them on a large number of individual, in-depth interviews she carried out with teenagers across the US. It was published this year (2014), and the interviews were carried out over the previous couple of years. It has already dated, as a number of the social media networks (‘MySpace’ anyone?) are already passé.

The geographical and chronological boundaries should damn this book to being of limited interest, but what Boyd does well is pull out the more eternal truths and tie her findings into much wider societal changes that are going on in Western nations.

The second reason it’s a good book is that she is one of the few authors, Malcolm Gladwell being the most obvious other one, who is able to use anecdote  properly (in this case drawn from individual case studies from her interviews) to illuminate and draw the reader into a much larger discussion of an issue.

The posts that follow are not an in-depth review and summary of the book. Rather they are this particular magpie’s store of all the ideas I found useful and illuminating.

In order the posts are: