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

An absolutely key idea in Boyd’s book, and one that I was alluding to in my first post, is that the social space for teenagers is shrinking. It’s shrinking offline and the affordances of online spaces often mean that it’s hard for teens to find their own private spaces where adults have no access.

This social space, the one they need to learn to be who they are, might be and will become, is one that in earlier times would have had limited adult presence in it. Adult presence may have been around it, but it wouldn’t be in it, or at least had easy access to it.

All this means that the conversations that teens are having now are much more visible and adults around them are, understandably, concerned that teenagers are sharing too much information. And it is this that is at the heart of many media scare stories.

It leads many to conclude that teenagers don’t care about privacy, so much so that Boyd feels this is now just an accepted fact of the public debate about social media.

Boyd’s research says something different, however. She notes that teenagers (and adults for that matter) seek privacy in relation to those who hold power over them. And young people aren’t worried about governments and corporations, on the whole. The concerns of young people are different to the concerns of those commenting in the media, who are most definitely concerned government and corporation power. The people young people are trying to hide from are parents, teachers and other authority figures.

Her research suggests that their main concern is to “avoid paternalistic adults who use safety and protection as an excuse to monitor their everyday sociality.”

It is this insight that makes me think that us parents must try to understand where our desire to ‘protect’ our children comes from. If we are using safety because we don’t like what they are doing, that is a very different thing to being genuinely concerned about protecting them.

And adults and teenagers view the notion of privacy very differently. Boyd tells the story of a teen who keeps an online journal in order to communicate with her friends. She’s not writing for her mother, and doesn’t expect her to read it. Her mother on the other hand can’t understand this and thinks that because it is in public she has every right, and indeed is probably the one person in the world who is likely to be interested in it.

In the end Boyd concludes that teens often feel that adults are snooping on them, even though their private conversations are in public. For teens it is “less a matter of technical access than social norms and etiquette.”

I’m left thinking there’s not much new. This is exactly the same as a parent knowing where a child keeps their diary. Knowing it is there is very different to sneaking a peek when they are out. This would violate their privacy in an obvious way (for most people). Teens appear to see a direct link between the diary in the draw and their online journal (which is odd for most adults).

What this mismatch between adults and teenagers is doing is pushing teenagers away from spaces that their parents are joining and to other venues.

And sharing may be hiding other things. She tells the tale of a shy teen who shares bits of her life in order to stop friends asking her for lots of information. She talks of LBQT teens sharing lots in order to appear straight. And so on. Sharing as privacy, and as a way of stopping people with power exerting it will be a strange concept for many. It’s not one I’d really considered, but it will certainly make me slightly more circumspect about making assumptions about why people are acting the way they are online.

And understanding this is critically important, because part of the media debate is that teenagers and young people don’t care about privacy in the way that older adults do. In this book Boyd scotches this argument and describes something much more subtle and interesting that is going on.

In a latter chapter Boyd highlights just how wrong assumptions about how young people are using social media, and therefore how wrong their assumptions about teens desire for privacy can be.

She tells the story of a young man with both Facebook and Twitter profiles. For him, Facebook had become so prevalent that he felt he had to friend everyone, Twitter on the other hand had much lower penetration into his social network.

As a consequence, Facebook (despite many adult assumptions) felt to him like he was “forcing everyone” to listen to him. So he had more intimate conversations on Twitter. To a watching adult this would make little sense, but this young man was trying to exert control over his network.

The wider point Boyd draws out is that a site is more or less in public partly because of the way it is designed, but also partly because of where it sits in the broader social ecosystem. To put it another way, just because everyone can read anyone’s tweets doesn’t mean that it is inherently public. It depends on how the people around you are using the technology too.

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