Teens and Social Media

Scott and Randy interview danah boyd about her book It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens, coming out February 25th and available for preorder now.

Topics covered include:

• The flawed California Eraser Button Bill
• Teens creating social norms: SnapChat
• Parents don’t get it: Tech replaces teens’ dwindling access to public spaces

Transcript

danah: We have to step back and think not about what is it about the technology that matters, but what is it about their lives, what are they trying to get out of their lives and how does technology help them or hinder them.

Randy: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. This episode is about the social lives of network teens. I’m Randy Farmer.

Scott: I’m Scott Moore.

danah: I’m danah boyd.

Randy: We’re ecstatic to have danah boyd with us today. In 2009, Fast Company named her one of the most influential women in technology, and in 2010, Fortune named her the smartest academic in tech, calling her the reigning expert on how young people use the internet. She has worked as a social media researcher for giants, such as Intel, Google and Yahoo. Currently, danah is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, a research assistant professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. danah is a prolific writer and is the author of a new book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives Of Network Teens, due out February 25 from Yale University Press. You can find her online at danah.org.

Thank you so much for joining us, danah.

danah: Thanks for having me.

Randy: This episode’s news item is from our guest danah.

danah: In California, a new bill passed. It’s colloquially referred to as the Eraser Button Bill. The idea is that young people should have the right to remove anything that they had written before they were 18. Now what’s really interesting about this bill is that on one hand most of the major sites that people think of when they think about this already give that option, right? Facebook allows you to remove anything that you possibly published, regardless of whether or not you are 18.

The thing that is also really conflicting about this is that it’s said in the public eye as though this notion of erasing it for reputation or for the idea of forgetting the past, but most of what young people are concerned about aren’t the things that they personally posted, but the things that were posted about them or in which they were depicted, right? So your best friend took a picture of you that is embarrassing or depicts you in a bad light, but that’s not actually included in the bill, and so it’s very weird to think about this bill in light of what would the efficacy bill of this bill actually be?

Meanwhile, in Congress, Markey and Barton have decided to try to put forward a similar bill with the hopes of protecting young people across the nation, but a part of what confounds me is I’m not convinced that this actually protects young people or even empowers them in a meaningful way. The majority of sites already provide them with the mechanisms to remove their content and the sites that don’t are often not in a jurisdiction in which an American law enforcement can go after. So I’m very confused by this bill.

Bills like this highlight this concern that people have about the persistence and permanence of everything that emerges online and this sense that we should have the ability to turn this into ephemera, and this is a really challenging issue in light of technologies that both enable persistence or try to undermine persistence, as well as cultural practices that are recognizing the importance of things that are real time versus the idea of things that, you know, end up having archived just as a process of interacting.

Randy: We ran into this problem when we worked at Yahoo. There was confusion about “how public is public?” The fundamental idea that any content I share on the internet is public forever from the moment I share it, and the Eraser Bill in a very real sense isn’t even possible, in terms of promoting the idea that you can erase an event from your history. Archive.org is a well-known place that will archive stuff and you have to go separately to ask them to remove things. But now we know the government archives things on our behalf. So it certainly creates its confusion about what it means to remove something from the internet.

danah: I think the fact that it creates confusion makes it some ways irresponsible to assume that there’s a fix that can just happen and you can just go and make things disappear. But I also think there’s a challenging issue to this which is that what we’re making persistent are traces of the interaction not the interaction itself, and taken out of context so many of these interactions make little to no sense.

And I think this where we run into troubles because – go back and look at a Usenet conversation that you participated in in the ‘90s that you were passionately involved in–your interpretation of that textual interaction now the position of 2013, 2014 is so different than how you interpreted that material when you were in the argument or discussion at the time, and I think this one of the reasons why we start to see people’s obsessions with understanding privacy and persistence, you know, in new ways because of the fact that the dynamics of privacy and persistence really don’t take into account temporal aspects of meaning and interpretation.

I think about this in light of one of the teenagers that I interviewed who–she would login to Facebook and every day she would go through and she would read the comments that people left for her and then she would delete them, and she would go and she would leave comments or write status updates or post photos and then a few days she would login and she would delete those.

And I was asking her why she was doing this and she was like, you know, she hated the fact that people would bring things from the past into the present to create drama, and in her sake the idea of the past was one month ago; so she was thinking about the idea of a very recent past as deep, dark past, and so what was fascinating to me was her process of constantly cleansing everything that she did on line is that she tried to really signal that it was really about what was at the moment.

And I said to her, “You know anybody could take any of that material and record it for the future,” and she said, “Yeah, you could, but that would be violating the social norms, the social constructs by which we are currently operating.” In other words, that would be creepy. And she was really thoughtful about the fact that by removing the technological mechanisms by which that became defaults, she could actually insert a social norm, which I thought was really interesting.

Scott: Like right now, today, what are things that we should be paying attention to with teens and how they operate on line?

danah: I think the most important thing to understand about teens and their relationship to technology is that teenagers are just trying to live their lives. They’re trying to make sense of the world around them; they’re trying to navigate what contemporary sociology looks like; they’re trying to negotiate their peer relationships and status issues; they’re seeking out attention. All of these things are part of what their lives look like, and then they get mediated by technology in particular ways. And so when we see teens interacting with technology we have to step back and think not about what is it about the technology that matters but what is it about their lives? What are they trying to get out of their lives and how does technology help them or hinder them?

For example, over the last four generations teenagers have had increasingly limited access to mobility in terms of their ability to just really run around and be with their friends. Four generations it was really common for people to just go out and be out as long as they’d like, do whatever they wanted. I certainly grew up with the idea that you’re welcome to go out on the street with your bike, just be home by dark.

The teenagers that I’ve been interacting with have so limited ability to get together with their friends without being surveilled by parents. They just want to hang out in the space that is their own without the surveillance, without the interpretation from adults of what’s going on. And so they turn to technology in order to have those opportunities, the ability to just joke around with their peer groups, and I think it’s really interesting to see the rise of social media in light of the disappearance of access to public place and to realize that these sites have become the modern-day mall or parking lot or dance hall, right? The place where people really gather, socialize, joke around, hang out, etc.

Randy: One of the imbalances that has led to the development of applications in mobile messaging is definitely the cost of text messages. It’s amazing how many smart phone mobile plans come with data but don’t come with text messaging, and so you see the emergence of tools like Snapchat. But Snapchat has other features. Would you like to talk a little bit about how teens are using Snapchat?

danah: Snapchat is a mobile app that allows you to share photos with other people, but what makes it unique compared to other photo sharing apps is that you can put a time limit on how long somebody can look at the image that they receive. So say that you want to send a friend a picture. When they open it up, it self-destructs in five seconds, and it becomes an attempt to make it to a real time activity; we have to be attentive to it. And what’s phenomenal about Snapchat is that in many ways those two different very important things: first off, it makes things in truly real time where the idea is that the stuff is not meant to be persistent. Now that’s if you can capture the image and it notifies somebody that the image has been captured, but by and large people open it up and look at it at that moment.

The other thing because there’s such a limited amount of time in which that thing is open it becomes something where you put all of your focus to it for that limited period of time. So instead of seeing things sort of as they fly by you decide that you’re really going to look at this image and you’re going to look at this image for about five seconds or however long before it self-destructs, which is pretty beautiful to think about it.

Now when this first hit the landscape the media narrative was like “Oh my gosh, a new technology for young people to share inappropriate photos,” right? They must be sharing things that they want to hide, and sure there are some young people for whom that is true. But the vast majority of young people have turned to Snapchat to make things more ephemeral, to really appreciate being in the now, and it becomes a light and playful way of interacting. In the process it also means that these images are directed at peers instead of also adults, right? Because they don’t stick around.

Another funny thing about Snapchat is what people share on there often only has meaning to their own existing peer groups. So, for example, when I was sitting down with a teenager who was showing me the kinds of things that he would send through Snapchat. One of the things he talked about was the importance of doughnuts, and I was like “Why are you taking pictures of doughnuts?” and he was telling me that this was total joke amongst his friend group; it was really funny, you know, it had all of these different references. And so whenever he saw a doughnut he would take a picture and send it via Snapchat to his peers. And I said, “Well, why Snapchat instead of something else?” And he was like “You know, this isn’t interesting enough to stick around for a long time. This is only interesting in the moment, right now, and it’s only funny then, and the idea of having all of this as an archive seems ridiculous.”

But what is also important to realize is just because things can be persistent, doesn’t mean it’s worth it. Think of all of the crud that get recorded.

Randy: The sense that it’s always valuable for things to be archived forever doesn’t gibe with reality. But we’re interacting in a safe environment amongst ourselves and we can rest assured that it won’t be held against us.

danah: Absolutely.

Randy: That’s really awesome. I’ve never heard it put that well.

Marc: This week’s tip is to buy and read danah boyd’s latest book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. It’s based on a decade of fieldwork and research. boyd documents the many ways kids, teens, and young adults make use of social media. She reveals that the stereotypes about kids having no concept of privacy are inaccurate. In fact, kids display sophisticated methods for shaping and selectively sharing their content with many different social groups. If your business or product needs to connect with young people through social media boyd’s book is an essential guide. The book releases on the 25th of February and. is available for pre-order now. You can find the link on the show website.

Randy: The hosts of this podcast are available for consulting, specializing in social network analysis, online community management, and social media product design.

Marc: I’m Marc Smith, and you can find me at marc@connectedaction.net.

Scott: You can reach me, Scott Moore, at communl.com and on Twitter @scottmoore.

Randy: And my email address is randy.farmer@pobox.com. You can see a list of my consulting services at rosenfeldmedia.com.