When I was a teenager in the late ‘70s I battled my parents
in a cold war over privacy. My campaigns
were punctuated by giving my mom the silent treatment and by moving my room to the relative privacy of the basement. Those years were angst
ridden and I’m a little ashamed of them, so I don’t dwell on them much. But danah boyd’s It’s Complicated brought those memories back in full flood. That’s because It’s Complicated is about the challenges which American teens face
as they move from socializing in the home or other forums that have been
structured by their parents into social spaces that they define for
themselves. These new spaces are
primarily digital and they didn’t exist in the ‘70s. But take away the digital and the teens of
today seem a lot like the teens of yesterday.
They’re looking for privacy.
If, like me, you are 50 and teach, your first inclination
might be to think that kids these days are different; that they are tethered to
their phones, that they don’t know when to put them away at the dinner table or
in the classroom, and that their fixation on screens is corroding their ability
or inclination to read anything approaching the length of a novel. While I’m not ready to let go of these
anxieties altogether, It’s Complicated allays some of them by
showing a semblance of my own largely forgotten high school self in the youth
of today. That’s because teens now, as then, are trying
to create social spaces that aren’t surveiled by their parents. For the youth of my own day this involved hiding
our partying, gravitating to a house where parents were absent from the scene,
or hanging out at the mall. It was hard
enough to create privacy in the ‘70s but according to Boyd things have not
improved greatly in the 21st century. That’s because teenagers still aren’t as free
as adults. And the constraints that
adults place on them limit the ways in which they can socialize. Teenagers don’t have as much access to cars
as their parents. They don’t have as
many venues for gathering as adults do. And
the obligations of family life often require that they stay at home even though
they would rather be with friends. To transcend
these constraints, youth naturally turn to social media since if they can’t
meet as much as they would like in person, then at least the affordances of
digital mediums allow them to still interact.
On the surface it might seem that teens lives have improved,
since the options for connection today are much larger than they were 30 years
ago. After all, modern teens don’t just
have access to a phone on the kitchen wall, they also have access to Snapchat,
and Twitter, and texting, and the avalanche of other social media that
capitalism is plying them with. But while
these technologies offer more opportunities for connection, they also present new challenges. One of the more daunting of these challenges
Boyd calls “context collapse.” While
attempting to communicate with one set of friends, messages and images often
get disseminated out to people (and especially parents) that teens aren’t intending
to communicate with. In the ‘70s context
collapse was easily avoidable -- we’d simply start whispering on the phone, or
arrange to meet at the mall or somewhere else that was outside the oversight of
adults. But these venues, according to
Boyd, are increasingly inaccessible to young people as malls have imposed more
restrictions on teens gathering, and as adults, in an attempt to protect their
children from perceived dangers of the modern world, increasingly limit where
teens can go. In the face of these predicaments,
teens naturally (or at least very understandably) migrate online, even if there
they face context collapse and surveillance by parents and others who hold
power over them.
Because young people seem to purposefully share more of
themselves online then they should, and because they move online even in the
presence of context collapse, it would seem on the surface that they aren’t all
that interested in maintaining their privacy.
But Boyd makes clear this is a myth.
Youth today, as in my own day, are very interested in maintaining
private spaces that aren’t subject to adult surveillance. Unfortunately, 21st century teens
are cursed by the fact that this privacy is much more complicated to maintain
online. Youth in all eras face
extraordinary challenges in coming of age.
Only now, the hardships seem amplified, more complicated, and more
deserving of sympathy and empathy.
The fact that It’s
Complicated elicits empathy suggests how good an ethnographer Boyd is: through 166 interviews with different teens (that
she conducted with the help of Alice Marwick), she’s rendered her subjects so
intelligible that we start to think that we feel the way they do. But while Boyd wields her ethnographic tools
skillfully, at times it seems to prevent her from giving credence to more
critical perspectives on teen life in a digital age. For example, Boyd seems unwilling to take
seriously Nicholas Carr’s worries about
the shallowness of post-print culture or his concern that modern social
media presents ever more opportunities for youthful attention to be
interrupted. (Boyd, instead seems wedded
to the very questionable apologia that Kathy Davidson makes for
multitasking).
Authors, of course, are entitled to their own intellectual
predilections. But these predilections make Boyd indisposed to dwell on some of the costs
that accrue to teens when they choose to connect through social media. Boyd never pauses to consider that social
media might be inhibiting youth’s ability to tolerate being alone. Nor does she consider that aloneness when
it’s experienced as solitude rather than loneliness can actually set the
foundations for a more rewarding social life.
As a result, in It’s Complicated,
the virtues of connection, sociability, and collaboration eclipse the virtues
of solitude and disconnection.
This partiality becomes especially manifest in Boyd’s
discussion of privacy. In It’s Complicated, the privacy that is emphasized
isn’t the privacy that leads to time alone, instead it’s a type of privacy that
allow teens to socialize more extensively with other teens. That type of privacy is important because
without it we’re unlikely to become truly socialized beings. But it elides the other important benefit of
privacy which is learning how to spend time alone and to use that time in
rewarding ways. Ironically, Boyd must
know this since she has written a good book.
So she knows (or at least tacitly knows) how important it is to find places
to write that aren’t interrupted by phone calls and texts and all the other
social minutia that get in the way of a coherent and focused thinking. But while she’s carved out this sort of
privacy for herself, she doesn’t feel obliged to remind teens (or their
parents) that they might want to hack some of this privacy for themselves as
well. And therein lies the central lapse
in It’s Complicated. The book draws an incredibly sympathetic
portrait of how hard it is to be a teen.
And it makes a persuasive case for why we should cut teens a little
slack about their digital habits. But in
making their sociability intelligible it fails to ask young people to develop
their selves or their individuality by spending time alone, away from social
media.
This lapse is best illustrated in Boyd’s defense of two tenth
graders who are recounting how time flies by when they use social media:
Lilly: It’s really awful with
MySpace that I’ll click on somebody who’s sent a comment to me and I’ll look at
somebody else, ’cause they have a “Top 10 Friends” and I’ll click on one of
them, and then I’ll end up looking at people’s MySpaces in Tennessee and I
started back with my neighbor.
Melanie: And it’s five hours later
and you’re like, “Oh my God. Where have I been?”
While five hours might seem excessive and actually seems to
border on addiction, Boyd tries to explain it away as an experience that is
comparable to Csikszentmihalyi ‘s definition of the state of flow:
Addiction is one way to understand
the dynamic that Lilly and Melanie are describing, but another is what
pscychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls
"flow." For Csikszentmihalyi,
flow is the state of complete and utter absorption. It's the same sense that's colloquially
described as being "in the zone."
Time disappears, attention focuses, and people feel euphorically
engaged.
I get Boyd’s point here but the comparison isn’t really a
fair one. Flow is something rock climbers
or surgeons experiences while they climb or operate. It constitutes complete, uninterrupted and
utter immersion in an activity. And it requires being presented with challenges
that tests one’s skills. Social media
rarely if ever induces this sort of immersion or immersion. Instead, it’s all about interruption and
flitting from one social interaction to another.
Some might counter that flow, just like beauty, is in the
eye of the beholder. So if surgeons and
rock climbers can experience flow maybe somebody can experience it while surfing
social media or for that matter while watching television or washing
dishes. Still, I don’t really buy that
line of argument. When we fail to make
distinctions about the relative merit of activities we stray into banality. And conflating social media surfing with rock
climbing or surgery only compounds this problem. Which is why in the end I reject the
comparison – as well as its tacit invitation to accept teen’s digital sociability
more or less wholesale.
Boyd has written an anthem to teen privacy. And it’s an anthem well worth rallying behind
because teens should be accorded the privacy that allows them to associate
freely with other teens. Still, this anthem isn't setting the threshold high enough. Teens also need to learn how to channel
privacy not only toward licentious ends but toward more redeeming ones as well. They need to learn how to spend time alone. At least if they want to learn how to write
books that are as good as dana boyd’s.
