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it’s complicated

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it’s complicated

the social lives of networked teens

danah boyd

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory

of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the class of 1894, Yale College.

Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be

reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form

(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US

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danah.org/.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

boyd, danah (danah michele), 1977–

It’s complicated : the social lives of networked teens / danah boyd.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-16631-6 (clothbound : alk. paper)

1. Internet and teenagers. 2. Online social networks.

3. Teenagers—Social life and customs—21st century.

4. Information technology—Social aspects. I. Title.

HQ799.2.I5B68 2014

004.67'80835—dc23

2013031950

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992

(Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Peter Lyman (1940–2007), who took a chance on me and helped me find solid ground

preface ix

introduction 1

1 identity why do teens seem strange online? 29

2 privacy why do youth share so publicly? 54

3 addiction what makes teens obsessed with social media? 77

4 danger are sexual predators lurking everywhere? 100

5 bullying is social media amplifying meanness and cruelty? 128

6 inequality can social media resolve social divisions? 153

7 literacy are today’s youth digital natives? 176

8 searching for a public of their own 199

appendix: teen demographics 215

notes 221

bibliography 245

acknowledgments 267

index 273

contents

The year was 2006, and I was in northern California chatting with teenagers about their use of social media. There, I met Mike, a white fifteen- year- old who loved YouTube.1 He was passionately describing the “Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments” video that had recently gained widespread attention, as viewers went to YouTube in droves to witness the geysers that could be produced when the diet soda and mint candy were combined. Various teens had taken to mix- ing Mentos and Diet Coke just to see what would happen, and Mike was among them. He was ecstatic to show me the homemade video he and his friends had made while experimenting with common food items. As he walked me through his many other YouTube videos, Mike explained that his school allowed him to borrow a video camera for school assignments. Students were actively encouraged to make videos or other media as part of group projects to display their class- room knowledge. He and his friends had taken to borrowing the cam- era on Fridays, making sure to tape their homework assignment before spending the rest of the weekend making more entertaining videos. None of the videos they made were of especially high quality, and while they shared them publicly on YouTube, only their friends watched them. Still, whenever they got an additional view—even if only because they forced a friend to watch the video—they got excited.

As we were talking and laughing and exploring Mike’s online vid- eos, Mike paused and turned to me with a serious look on his face. “Can you do me a favor?” he asked, “Can you talk to my mom? Can you tell her that I’m not doing anything wrong on the internet?” I didn’t immediately respond, and so he jumped in to clarify. “I

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mean, she thinks that everything online is bad, and you seem to get it, and you’re an adult. Will you talk to her?” I smiled and promised him that I would.

This book is just that: my attempt to describe and explain the net- worked lives of teens to the people who worry about them—parents, teachers, policy makers, journalists, sometimes even other teens. It is the product of an eight- year effort to explore various aspects of teens’ engagement with social media and other networked technologies.

To get at teens’ practices, I crisscrossed the United States from 2005 to 2012, talking with and observing teens from eighteen states and a wide array of socioeconomic and ethnic communities. I spent countless hours observing teens through the traces they left online via social network sites, blogs, and other genres of social media. I hung out with teens in physical spaces like schools, public parks, malls, churches, and fast food restaurants.

To dive deeper into particular issues, I conducted 166 formal, semi- structured interviews with teens during the period 2007–2010.2 I interviewed teens in their homes, at school, and in various public set- tings. In addition, I talked with parents, teachers, librarians, youth ministers, and others who worked directly with youth. I became an expert on youth culture. In addition, my technical background and experience working with and for technology companies building social media tools gave me firsthand knowledge about how social media was designed, implemented, and introduced to the public. Together, these two strains of expertise allowed me to enter into broader policy conversations, serve on commissions focused on youth practices, and help influence public conversations about networked sociality.

As I began to get a feel for the passions and frustrations of teens and to speak to broader audiences, I recognized that teens’ voices rarely shaped the public discourse surrounding their networked lives. So many people talk about youth engagement with social media, but very few of them are willing to take the time to listen to teens, to hear them, or to pay attention to what they have to say about their lives,

preface xi

online and off. I wrote this book to address that gap. Throughout this book, I draw on the voices of teens I’ve interviewed as well as those I’ve observed or met more informally. At times, I also pull sto- ries from the media or introduce adults’ perspectives to help provide context or offer additional examples.

I wrote this book to reflect the experiences and perspectives of the teens that I encountered. Their voices shape this book just as their stories shaped my understanding of the role of social media in their lives. My hope is that this book will shed light on the complex and fascinating practices of contemporary American youth as they try to find themselves in a networked world.

As you read this book, my hope is that you will suspend your assumptions about youth in an effort to understand the social lives of networked teens. By and large, the kids are all right. But they want to be understood. This book is my attempt to do precisely that.

it’s complicated

One evening, in September 2010, I was in the stands at a high school football game in Nashville, Tennessee, experiencing a powerful sense of déjà vu. As a member of my high school’s marching band in the mid- 1990s, I had spent countless Friday nights in stands across cen- tral Pennsylvania, pretending to cheer on my school’s football team so that I could hang out with my friends. The scene at the school in Nashville in 2010 could easily have taken place when I was in high school almost two decades earlier. It was an archetypical American night, and immediately legible to me. I couldn’t help but smile at the irony, given that I was in Nashville to talk with teens about how technology had changed their lives. As I sat in the stands, I thought: the more things had changed, the more they seemed the same.

I recalled speaking to a teen named Stan whom I’d met in Iowa three years earlier. He had told me to stop looking for differences. “You’d actually be surprised how little things change. I’m guessing a lot of the drama is still the same, it’s just the format is a little differ- ent. It’s just changing the font and changing the background color really.” He made references to technology to remind me that technol- ogy wasn’t changing anything important.

Back in Nashville, the cheerleaders screamed, “Defense!” and waved their colorful pom- poms, while boys in tuxes and girls in for- mal gowns lined up on the track that circled the football field, signal- ing that halftime was approaching. This was a Homecoming game, and at halftime the Homecoming Court paraded onto the field in formal attire to be introduced to the audience before the announcer declared the King and Queen. The Court was made up of eight girls

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and eight boys, half of whom were white and half of whom were black. I reflected on the lack of Asian or Hispanic representation in a town whose demographics were changing. The announcer intro- duced each member to the audience, focusing on their extracurricu- lar activities, their participation in one of the local churches, and their dreams for the future.

Meanwhile, most of the student body was seated in the stands. They were decked out in the school colors, many even having painted their faces in support. But they were barely paying attention to what was happening on the field. Apart from a brief hush when the Homecom- ing Court was presented, they spent the bulk of the time facing one another, chatting, enjoying a rare chance to spend unstructured time together as friends and peers.

As in many schools I’ve visited over the years, friendships at this school in Nashville were largely defined by race, gender, sexuality, and grade level, and those networks were immediately visible based on whom students were talking to or sitting with. By and large, the students were cordoned off in their own section on the sides of the stands while parents and more “serious” fans occupied the seats in the center. Most of the students in the stands were white and divided by grade: the upperclassmen took the seats closest to the field, while the freshmen were pushed toward the back. Girls were rarely alone with boys, but when they were, they were holding hands. The teens who swarmed below and to the right of the stands repre- sented a different part of the school. Unlike their peers in the stands, most of the students milling about below were black. Aside from the Homecoming Court, only one group was racially mixed, and they were recognizable mainly for their “artistic” attire—unnaturally col- orful hair, piercings, and black clothing that I recognized from the racks of Hot Topic, a popular mall- based chain store that caters to goths, punks, and other subcultural groups.

Only two things confirmed that this was not 1994: the fashion and the cell phones. Gone were the 1980s- inspired bangs, perms, and excessive use of hair gel and hairspray that dominated my high school

introduction 3

well into the 1990s. And unlike 1994, cell phones were everywhere. As far as I could tell, every teen at the game that day in Nashville had one: iPhones, Blackberries, and other high- end smartphones seemed to be especially popular at this upper- middle- class school. Unsurprisingly, the phones in the hands of the white students were often more expensive or of more elite brands than those in the hands of the black students.

The pervasiveness of cell phones in the stands isn’t that startling; over 80 percent of high school students in the United States had a cell phone in 2010.1 What was surprising, at least to most adults, was how little the teens actually used them as phones. The teens I observed were not making calls. They whipped out their phones to take photos of the Homecoming Court, and many were texting fran- tically while trying to find one another in the crowd. Once they con- nected, the texting often stopped. On the few occasions when a phone did ring, the typical response was an exasperated “Mom!” or “Dad!” implying a parent calling to check in, which, given the teens’ response to such calls, was clearly an unwanted interruption. And even though many teens are frequent texters, the teens were not directing most of their attention to their devices. When they did look at their phones, they were often sharing the screen with the person sitting next to them, reading or viewing something together.

The parents in the stands were paying much more attention to their devices. They were even more universally equipped with smart- phones than their children, and those devices dominated their focus. I couldn’t tell whether they were checking email or simply supple- menting the football game with other content, being either bored or distracted. But many adults were staring into their devices intently, barely looking up when a touchdown was scored. And unlike the teens, they weren’t sharing their devices with others or taking photos of the event.

Although many parents I’ve met lament their children’s obsession with their phones, the teens in Nashville were treating their phones as no more than a glorified camera plus coordination device. The

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reason was clear: their friends were right there with them. They didn’t need anything else.

I had come to Nashville to better understand how social media and other technologies had changed teens’ lives. I was fascinated with the new communication and information technologies that had emerged since I was in high school. I had spent my own teen years online, and I was among the first generation of teens who did so. But that was a different era; few of my friends in the early 1990s were interested in computers at all. And my own interest in the internet was related to my dissatisfaction with my local community. The internet presented me with a bigger world, a world populated by people who shared my idiosyncratic interests and were ready to discuss them at any time, day or night. I grew up in an era where going online—or “jacking in”—was an escape mechanism, and I desperately wanted to escape.

The teens I met are attracted to popular social media like Face- book and Twitter or mobile technologies like apps and text messag- ing for entirely different reasons. Unlike me and the other early adopters who avoided our local community by hanging out in chat- rooms and bulletin boards, most teenagers now go online to connect to the people in their community. Their online participation is not eccentric; it is entirely normal, even expected.

The day after the football game in Nashville, I interviewed a girl who had attended the Homecoming game. We sat down and went through her Facebook page, where she showed me various photos from the night before. Facebook hadn’t been on her mind during the game, but as soon as she got home, she uploaded her photos, tagged her friends, and started commenting on others’ photos. The status updates I saw on her page were filled with references to conversations that took place at the game. She used Facebook to extend the plea- sure she had in connecting with her classmates during the game. Although she couldn’t physically hang out with her friends after the game ended, she used Facebook to stay connected after the stands had cleared.

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Social media plays a crucial role in the lives of networked teens. Although the specific technologies change, they collectively provide teens with a space to hang out and connect with friends. Teens’ mediated interactions sometimes complement or supplement their face- to- face encounters. In 2006, when MySpace was at the height of its popularity, eighteen- year- old Skyler told her mother that being on MySpace was utterly essential to her social life. She explained, “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.” What Skyler meant is simply that social acceptance depends on the ability to socialize with one’s peers at the “cool” place. Each cohort of teens has a differ- ent space that it decides is cool. It used to be the mall, but for the youth discussed in this book, social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the cool places. Inevitably, by the time this book is published, the next generation of teens will have inhab- ited a new set of apps and tools, making social network sites feel passé. The spaces may change, but the organizing principles aren’t different.

Although some teens still congregate at malls and football games, the introduction of social media does alter the landscape. It enables youth to create a cool space without physically transporting them- selves anywhere. And because of a variety of social and cultural fac- tors, social media has become an important public space where teens can gather and socialize broadly with peers in an informal way. Teens are looking for a place of their own to make sense of the world beyond their bedrooms. Social media has enabled them to participate in and help create what I call networked publics.

In this book, I document how and why social media has become central to the lives of so many American teens and how they navigate the networked publics that are created through those technologies.2 I also describe—and challenge—the anxieties that many American adults have about teens’ engagement with social media. By illustrat- ing teens’ practices, habits, and the tensions between teens and adults, I attempt to provide critical insight into the networked lives of con- temporary youth.

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What Is Social Media? Over the past decade, social media has evolved from being an eso-

teric jumble of technologies to a set of sites and services that are at the heart of contemporary culture. Teens turn to a plethora of popular services to socialize, gossip, share information, and hang out. Although this book addresses a variety of networked technologies—including the internet broadly and mobile services like texting specifically— much of it focuses on a collection of services known as social media. I use the term social media to refer to the sites and services that emerged during the early 2000s, including social network sites, video sharing sites, blogging and microblogging platforms, and related tools that allow participants to create and share their own content. In addition to referring to various communication tools and platforms, social media also hints at a cultural mindset that emerged in the mid- 2000s as part of the technical and business phenomenon referred to as “Web2.0.”3

The services known as social media are neither the first—nor the only—tools to support significant social interaction or enable teenagers to communicate and engage in meaningful online com- munities. Though less popular than they once were, tools like email, instant messaging, and online forums are still used by teens. But as a cultural phenomenon, social media has reshaped the information and communication ecosystem.

In the 1980s and 1990s, early internet adopters used services like email and instant messaging to chat with people they knew; they turned to public- facing services like chatrooms and bulletin boards when they wanted to connect with strangers. Although many who participated in early online communities became friends with people they met online, most early adopters entered these spaces without knowing the other people in the space. Online communities were organized by topic, with separate spaces for those interested in dis- cussing Middle East politics or getting health advice or finding out how various programming languages worked.

Beginning around 2003, the increased popularity of blogging and the rise of social network sites reconfigured this topically oriented land-

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scape. Although the most visible blogging services helped people con- nect based on shared interests, the vast majority of bloggers were blogging for, and reading blogs of, people they knew.4 When early social network sites like Friendster and MySpace launched, they were designed to enable users to meet new people—and, notably, friends of friends—who might share their interests, tastes, or passions. Friendster, in particular, was designed as a matchmaking service. In other words, social network sites were designed for social networking. Yet what made these services so unexpectedly popular was that they also provided a platform for people to connect with their friends. Rather than focusing on the friends of friends who could be met through the service, many early adopters simply focused on socializing with their friends. At the height of its popularity, MySpace’s tagline was “A Place for Friends,” and that’s precisely what the service was for many of its users.

Social network sites changed the essence of online communities. Whereas early online community tools like Usenet and bulletin boards were organized around interests, even if people used them to engage with friends, blogs, like homepages, were organized around individuals. Links allowed people to highlight both their friends and those who shared their interests. Social network sites downplayed the importance of interests and made friendship the organizing tenant of the genre.

Early adopters had long embraced internet technologies to social- ize with others, but in more mainstream culture, participating in online communities was often viewed as an esoteric practice for geeks and other social outcasts. By the mid- 2000s, with the mainstreaming of internet access and the rise of social media—and especially MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter—sharing information and con- necting to friends online became an integrated part of daily life for many people, and especially the teens who came of age during this period. Rather than being seen as a subcultural practice, participat- ing in social media became normative.

Although teens have embraced countless tools for communicating with one another, their widespread engagement with social media

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has been unprecedented. Teens who used Facebook or Instagram or Tumblr in 2013 weren’t seen as peculiar. Nor were those who used Xanga, LiveJournal, or MySpace in the early to mid- 2000s. At the height of their popularity, the best- known social media tools aren’t viewed with disdain, nor is participation seen to be indicative of aso- cial tendencies. In fact, as I describe throughout this book, engage- ment with social media is simply an everyday part of life, akin to watching television and using the phone. This is a significant shift from my experiences growing up using early digital technologies.

Even though many of the tools and services that I reference through- out this book are now passé, the core activities I discuss—chatting and socializing, engaging in self- expression, grappling with privacy, and sharing media and information—are here to stay. Although the specific sites and apps may be constantly changing, the practices that teens engage in as they participate in networked publics remain the same. New technologies and mobile apps change the landscape, but teens’ interactions with social media through their phones extend similar practices and activities into geographically unbounded settings. The technical shifts that have taken place since I began this project—and in the time between me writing this book and you reading it—are impor- tant, but many of the arguments made in the following pages transcend particular technical moments, even if the specific examples used to illustrate those issues are locked in time.

The Significance of Networked Publics Teens are passionate about finding their place in society. What

is different as a result of social media is that teens’ perennial desire for social connection and autonomy is now being expressed in net- worked publics. Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such, they are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imag- ined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice.5

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Although the term public has resonance in everyday language, the construct of a public—let alone publics—tends to be more academic in nature. What constitutes a public in this sense can vary. It can be an accessible space in which people can gather freely. Or, as political scientist Benedict Anderson describes, a public can be a collection of people who understand themselves to be part of an imagined com- munity.6 People are a part of multiple publics—bounded as audiences or by geography—and yet, publics often intersect and intertwine. Publics get tangled up in one another, challenging any effort to understand the boundaries and shape of any particular public. When US presidents give their State of the Union speeches, they may have written them with the American public in mind, but their speeches are now accessible around the globe. As a result, it’s never quite clear who fits into the public imagined by a president.

Publics serve different purposes. They can be political in nature, or they can be constructed around shared identities and social practices. The concept of a public often invokes the notion of a state- controlled entity, but publics can also involve private actors, such as companies, or commercial spaces like malls. Because of the involvement of media in contemporary publics, publics are also interconnected to the notion of audience. All of these constructs blur and are contested by scholars. By invoking the term publics, I’m not trying to take a posi- tion within the debates so much as to make use of the wide array of different interwoven issues signaled by that term. Publics provide a space and a community for people to gather, connect, and help con- struct society as we understand it.

Networked publics are publics both in the spatial sense and in the sense of an imagined community. They are built on and through social media and other emergent technologies. As spaces, the networked pub- lics that exist because of social media allow people to gather and connect, hang out, and joke around. Networked publics formed through technol- ogy serve much the same functions as publics like the mall or the park did for previous generations of teenagers. As social constructs, social media creates networked publics that allow people to see themselves as a

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part of a broader community. Just as shared TV consumption once allowed teens to see themselves as connected through mass media, social media allows contemporary teens to envision themselves as part of a collectively imagined community.

Teens engage with networked publics for the same reasons they have always relished publics; they want to be a part of the broader world by connecting with other people and having the freedom of mobility. Likewise, many adults fear networked technologies for the same reasons that adults have long been wary of teen participation in public life and teen socialization in parks, malls, and other sites where youth congregate. If I have learned one thing from my research, it’s this: social media services like Facebook and Twitter are providing teens with new opportunities to participate in public life, and this, more than anything else, is what concerns many anxious adults.

Although the underlying structure of physical spaces and the relationships that are enabled by them are broadly understood, both the architecture of networked spaces and the ways they allow people to connect are different. Even if teens are motivated to engage with networked publics to fulfill desires to socialize that predate the internet, networked technologies alter the social ecosystem and thus affect the social dynamics that unfold.

To understand what is new and what is not, it’s important to under- stand how technology introduces new social possibilities and how these challenge assumptions people have about everyday interactions. The design and architecture of environments enable certain types of interaction to occur. Round tables with chairs make chatting with someone easier than classroom- style seating. Even though students can twist around and talk to the person behind them, a typical classroom is designed to encourage everyone to face the teacher. The particular properties or characteristics of an environment can be understood as affordances because they make possible—and, in some cases, are used to encourage—certain types of practices, even if they do not deter- mine what practices will unfold.7 Understanding the affordances of a particular technology or space is important because it sheds light on

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what people can leverage or resist in achieving their goals. For exam- ple, the affordances of a thick window allow people to see each other without being able to hear each other. To communicate in spite of the window, they may pantomime, hold up signs with written messages, or break the glass. The window’s affordances don’t predict how people will communicate, but they do shape the situation nonetheless.

Because technology is involved, networked publics have different characteristics than traditional physical public spaces. Four affor- dances, in particular, shape many of the mediated environments that are created by social media. Although these affordances are not in and of themselves new, their relation to one another because of networked publics creates new opportunities and challenges. They are:

• persistence: the durability of online expressions and content;

• visibility: the potential audience who can bear witness;

• spreadability: the ease with which content can be shared; and

• searchability: the ability to find content.

Content shared through social media often sticks around because technologies are designed to enable persistence. The fact that content often persists has significant implications. Such content enables inter- actions to take place over time in an asynchronous fashion. Alice may write to Bob at midnight while Bob is sound asleep; but when Bob wakes up in the morning or comes back from summer camp three weeks later, that message will still be there waiting for him, even if Alice had forgotten about it. Persistence means that conversa- tions conducted through social media are far from ephemeral; they endure. Persistence enables different kinds of interactions than the ephemerality of a park. Alice’s message doesn’t expire when Bob reads it, and Bob can keep that message for decades. What persis- tence also means, then, is that those using social media are often “on the record” to an unprecedented degree.

Through social media, people can easily share with broad audi- ences and access content from greater distances, which increases the

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potential visibility of any particular message. More often than not, what people put up online using social media is widely accessible because most systems are designed such that sharing with broader or more public audiences is the default. Many popular systems require users to take active steps to limit the visibility of any particular piece of shared content. This is quite different from physical spaces, where people must make a concerted effort to make content visible to siz- able audiences.8 In networked publics, interactions are often public by default, private through effort.

Social media is often designed to help people spread information, whether by explicitly or implicitly encouraging the sharing of links, providing reblogging or favoriting tools that repost images or texts, or by making it easy to copy and paste content from one place to another. Thus, much of what people post online is easily spreadable with the click of a few keystrokes.9 Some systems provide simple buttons to “forward,” “repost,” or “share” content to articulated or curated lists. Even when these tools aren’t built into the system, content can often be easily downloaded or duplicated and then forwarded along. The ease with which everyday people can share media online is unrivaled, which can be both powerful and problematic. Spreadability can be leveraged to rally people for a political cause or to spread rumors.

Last, since the rise of search engines, people’s communications are also often searchable. My mother would have loved to scream, “Find!” and see where my friends and I were hanging out and what we were talking about. Now, any inquisitive onlooker can query databases and uncover countless messages written by and about others. Even messages that were crafted to be publicly accessible were not neces- sarily posted with the thought that they would reappear through a search engine. Search engines make it easy to surface esoteric interac- tions. These tools are often designed to eliminate contextual cues, increasing the likelihood that searchers will take what they find out of context.

None of the capabilities enabled by social media are new. The let- ters my grandparents wrote during their courtship were persistent.

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Messages printed in the school newspaper or written on bathroom walls have long been visible. Gossip and rumors have historically spread like wildfire through word of mouth. And although search engines certainly make inquiries more efficient, the practice of ask- ing after others is not new, even if search engines mean that no one else knows. What is new is the way in which social media alters and amplifies social situations by offering technical features that people can use to engage in these well- established practices.

As people use these different tools, they help create new social dynam- ics. For example, teens “stalk” one another by searching for highly vis- ible, persistent data about people they find interesting. “Drama” starts when teens increase the visibility of gossip by spreading it as fast as pos- sible through networked publics. And teens seek attention by exploiting searchability, spreadability, and persistence to maximize the visibility of their garage band’s YouTube video. The particular practices that emerge as teens use the tools around them create the impression that teen soci- ality is radically different even though the underlying motivations and social processes have not changed that much.

Just because teens can and do manipulate social media to attract attention and increase visibility does not mean that they are equally experienced at doing so or that they automatically have the skills to navigate what unfolds. It simply means that teens are generally more comfortable with—and tend to be less skeptical of—social media than adults. They don’t try to analyze how things are different because of technology; they simply try to relate to a public world in which technology is a given. Because of their social position, what’s novel for teens is not the technology but the public life that it enables. Teens are desperate to have access to and make sense of public life; understanding the technologies that enable publics is just par for the course. Adults, in contrast, have more freedom to explore various public environments. They are more likely—and more equipped—to compare networked publics to other publics. As a result, they focus more on how networked publics seem radically different from other publics, such as those that unfold at the local bar or through church.

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Because of their experience and stage in life, teens and adults are typically focused on different issues. Whereas teens are focused on what it means to be in public, adults are more focused on what it means to be networked.

Throughout this book, I return to these four affordances to discuss how engagement with networked publics affects everyday social practices. It’s important to note, however, this is not how teenagers themselves would describe the shifts that are under way. More often than not, they are unaware of why the networked publics they inhabit are different than other publics or why adults find networked publics so peculiar. To teens, these technologies—and the properties that go with them—are just an obvious part of life in a networked era, whereas for many adults these affordances reveal changes that are deeply disconcerting. As I return to these issues throughout the book, I will juxtapose teens’ perspectives alongside adults’ anxieties to highlight what has changed and what has stayed the same.

New Technologies, Old Hopes and Fears Any new technology that captures widespread attention is likely to

provoke serious hand wringing, if not full- blown panic. When the sewing machine was introduced, there were people who feared the implications that women moving their legs up and down would affect female sexuality.10 The Walkman music player was viewed as an evil device that would encourage people to disappear into separate worlds, unable to communicate with one another.11 Technologies are not the only cultural artifacts to prompt these so- called moral pan- ics; new genres of media also cause fearful commentary. Those who created comic books, penny arcades, and rock- and- roll music have been seen as sinister figures bent on seducing children into becoming juvenile delinquents.12 Novels were believed to threaten women’s morals, a worry that Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary dramatizes brilliantly. Even Socrates is purported to have warned of the dangers of the alphabet and writing, citing implications for memory and the ability to convey truth.13 These fears are now laughable, but when

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these technologies or media genres first appeared, they were taken very seriously.

Even the most fleeting acquaintance with the history of informa- tion and communication technologies indicates that moral panics are episodic and should be taken with a grain of salt. So too with utopian visions, which prove just as unrealistic. A popular T- shirt designed by John Slabyk and sold on the website Threadless sums up the disillusionment with failed technological utopias:

they lied to us this was supposed to be the future where is my jetpack, where is my robotic companion, where is my dinner in pill form, where is my hydrogen fueled automobile, where is my nuclear- powered levitating house, where is my cure for this disease

Technologies are often heralded as the solution to major world problems. When those solutions fail to transpire, people are disillu- sioned. This can prompt a backlash, as people focus on the terrible things that may occur because of those same technologies.

A great deal of the fear and anxiety that surrounds young people’s use of social media stems from misunderstanding or dashed hopes.14 More often than not, what emerges out of people’s confusion takes the form of utopian and dystopian rhetoric. This issue will reappear throughout the book. Sometimes, as in the case of sexual predators and other online safety issues, misunderstanding results in a moral panic. In other cases, such as the dystopian notion that teens are addicted to social media or the utopian idea that technology will solve inequality, the focus on technology simply obscures other dynamics at play.

Both extremes depend on a form of magical thinking scholars call technological determinism.15 Utopian and dystopian views assume that technologies possess intrinsic powers that affect all people in all situ- ations the same way. Utopian rhetoric assumes that when a particular

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technology is broadly adopted it will transform society in magnifi- cent ways, while dystopian visions focus on all of the terrible things that will happen because of the widespread adoption of a particular technology that ruins everything. These extreme rhetorics are equally unhelpful in understanding what actually happens when new tech- nologies are broadly adopted. Reality is nuanced and messy, full of pros and cons. Living in a networked world is complicated.

Kids Will Be Kids If you listen to the voices of youth, the story you’ll piece together

reveals a hodgepodge of opportunities and challenges, changes and continuity. As with the football game in Nashville, many elements of American teen culture remain unchanged in the digital age. School looks remarkably familiar, and many of the same anxieties and hopes that shaped my experience are still recognizable today. Others are strikingly different, but what differs often has less to do with technol- ogy and more to do with increased consumerism, heightened compe- tition for access to limited opportunities, and an intense amount of parental pressure, especially in wealthier communities.16 All too often, it is easier to focus on the technology than on the broader systemic issues that are at play because technical changes are easier to see.

Nostalgia gets in the way of understanding the relation between teens and technology. Adults may idealize their childhoods and for- get the trials and tribulations they faced. Many adults I meet assume that their own childhoods were better and richer, simpler and safer, than the digitally mediated ones contemporary youth experience. They associate the rise of digital technology with decline—social, intellectual, and moral. The research I present here suggests that the opposite is often true.

Many of the much- hyped concerns discussed because of technology are not new (for example, bullying) but rather may be misleading (for example, a decline in attention) or serve as distractions for real risks (for example, predators). Most myths are connected to real incidents or rooted in data that are blown out of proportion or are deliberately

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exaggerated to spark fear. Media culture exaggerates this dynamic, magnifying anxieties and reinforcing fears. For adults to hear the voices of youth, they must let go of their nostalgia and suspend their fears. This is not easy.

Teens continue to occupy an awkward position between childhood and adulthood, dependence and independence. They are struggling to carve out an identity that is not defined solely by family ties. They want to be recognized as someone other than son, daughter, sister, or brother. These struggles play themselves out in familiar ways, as teens fight for freedoms while not always being willing or able to accept responsibilities. Teens simultaneously love and despise, need and reject their parents and other adults in their lives. Meanwhile, many adults are simultaneously afraid of teens and afraid for them.

Teens’ efforts to control their self- presentation—often by donning clothing or hairstyles their parents deem socially unacceptable or engaging in practices that their parents deem risky—are clearly related to their larger effort at self- fashioning and personal autonomy. By dressing like the twenty- somethings they see celebrated in popular culture, they signal their desire to be seen as independent young adults. Fashion choices are one of many ways of forging an identity that is cued less to family and more to friends.

Developing meaningful friendships is a key component of the com- ing of age process. Friends offer many things—advice, support, enter- tainment, and a connection that combats loneliness. And in doing so, they enable the transition to adulthood by providing a context beyond that of family and home. Though family is still important, many teens relish the opportunity to create relationships that are not simply given but chosen.

The importance of friends in social and moral development is well documented.17 But the fears that surround teens’ use of social media overlook this fundamental desire for social connection. All too often, parents project their values onto their children, failing to recognize that school is often not the most pressing concern for most teens. Many parents wonder: Why are my kids tethered to their cell phones

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or perpetually texting with friends even when they are in the same room? Why do they seem compelled to check Facebook hundreds of times a day? Are they addicted to technology or simply wasting time? How will they get into college if they are constantly distracted? I encounter these questions from concerned adults whenever I give public lectures, and these attitudes figure prominently in parenting guides and in journalistic accounts of teens’ engagement with social media.

Yet these questions seem far less urgent and difficult when we acknowledge teens’ underlying social motivations. Most teens are not compelled by gadgetry as such—they are compelled by friendship. The gadgets are interesting to them primarily as a means to a social end. Furthermore, social interactions may be a distraction from school, but they are often not a distraction from learning. Keeping this basic social dynamic firmly in view makes networked teens sud- denly much less worrisome and strange.

Consider, for example, the widespread concern over internet addic- tion. Are there teens who have an unhealthy relationship with technol- ogy? Certainly. But most of those who are “addicted” to their phones or computers are actually focused on staying connected to friends in a culture where getting together in person is highly constrained. Teens’ preoccupation with their friends dovetails with their desire to enter the public spaces that are freely accessible to adults. The ability to access public spaces for sociable purposes is a critical component of the com- ing of age process, and yet many of the public spaces where adults gather—bars, clubs, and restaurants—are inaccessible to teens.

As teens transition from childhood, they try to understand how they fit into the larger world. They want to inhabit public spaces, but they also look to adults, including public figures, to understand what it means to be grown- up. They watch their parents and other adults in their communities for models of adulthood. But they also track celebrities like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian to imagine the freedoms they would have if they were famous. For better or worse, media narratives also help construct broader narratives for

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how public life works. “Reality” TV shows like Jersey Shore signal the potential fun that can be had by young adults who don’t need to appease parents and teachers.

Some teens may reject the messages of adulthood that they hear or see, but they still learn from all of the signals around them. As they start to envision themselves as young adults, they begin experiment- ing with the boundaries of various freedoms, pushing for access to cars or later curfews. Teens’ determination to set their own agenda can be nerve- racking for some parents, particularly those who want to protect their children from every possible danger. Coming of age is rife with self- determination, risk taking, and tough decision- making.

Teens often want to be with friends on their own terms, without adult supervision, and in public. Paradoxically, the networked pub- lics they inhabit allow them a measure of privacy and autonomy that is not possible at home where parents and siblings are often listening in. Recognizing this is important to understanding teens’ relation- ship to social media. Although many adults think otherwise, teens’ engagement with public life through social media is not a rejection of privacy. Teens may wish to enjoy the benefits of participating in public, but they also relish intimacy and the ability to have control over their social situation. Their ability to achieve privacy is often undermined by nosy adults—notably their parents and teachers— but teens go to great lengths to develop innovative strategies for man- aging privacy in networked publics.

Social media enables a type of youth- centric public space that is often otherwise inaccessible. But because that space is highly visible, it can often provoke concerns among adults who are watching teens as they try to find their way.

A Place to Call Their Own Sitting in a cafeteria in a small town in Iowa in 2007, I was talking

with Heather, a white sixteen- year- old, when the topic of adult atti- tudes toward Facebook came up. Heather had recently heard that politicians were trying to prohibit teen access to social network sites,

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and she was incensed. “I’m really mad about it. It’s social networking. It really is a way to communicate, and if they ban that, it’s really hard to communicate with other people you don’t see that much.” I asked her why she didn’t just get together with her friends in person. The rant that followed made clear that I had touched a nerve.

I can’t really go see people in person. I can barely hang out with my friends on the weekend, let alone people I don’t talk to as often. I’m so busy. I’ve got lots of homework, I’m busy with track, I’ve got a job, and when I’m not working and doing homework I’m hanging out with the good friends that I have. But there’s some people I’ve kind of lost contact with and I like keeping connected to them because they’re still friends. I just haven’t talked to them in a while. I have no means of doing that. If they go to a different school it’s really hard and I don’t exactly know where everyone lives, and I don’t have everyone’s cell phone numbers, and I don’t have all of their AIM screen names either, so Facebook makes it a lot easier for me.

For Heather, social media is not only a tool; it is a social lifeline that enables her to stay connected to people she cares about but can- not otherwise interact with in person. Without the various sites and services she uses, Heather—like many of her peers—believes that her social life would significantly shrink. She doesn’t see Facebook as inherently useful, but it’s where everyone she knows is hanging out. And it’s the place to go when she doesn’t know how to contact some- one directly.

The social media tools that teens use are direct descendants of the hangouts and other public places in which teens have been congre- gating for decades. What the drive- in was to teens in the 1950s and the mall in the 1980s, Facebook, texting, Twitter, instant messaging, and other social media are to teens now. Teens flock to them know- ing they can socialize with friends and become better acquainted with classmates and peers they don’t know as well. They embrace social media for roughly the same reasons earlier generations of teens

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attended sock hops, congregated in parking lots, colonized people’s front stoops, or tied up the phone lines for hours on end. Teens want to gossip, flirt, complain, compare notes, share passions, emote, and joke around. They want to be able to talk among themselves—even if that means going online.

Heather’s reliance on Facebook and other tools registers an impor- tant change in teen experience. This change is not rooted in social media but instead helps explain the popularity of digital technolo- gies. Many American teens have limited geographic freedom, less free time, and more rules. In many communities across the United States, the era of being able to run around after school so long as you are home by dark is long over.18 Many teens are stuck at home until they are old enough to drive themselves. For younger teens, get- ting together with friends after school depends on cooperative par- ents with flexible schedules who are willing or able to chauffeur and chaperone.

Socializing is also more homebound. Often, teens meet in each other’s homes rather than public spaces. And no wonder: increasing regulation means that there aren’t as many public spaces for teens to gather. The mall, once one of the main hubs for suburban teens, is much less accessible now than it once was.19 Because malls are pri- vately owned spaces, proprietors can prohibit anyone they wish, and many of them have prohibited groups of teenagers from entering. In addition, parents are less willing to allow their children to hang out in malls, out of fear of the strangers teens may encounter. Teens sim- ply have far fewer places to be together in public than they once did.20 And the success of social media must be understood partly in relation to this shrinking social landscape. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are not only new public spaces: they are in many cases the only “public” spaces in which teens can easily congregate with large groups of their peers. More significantly, teens can gather in them while still physically stuck at home.

Teens told me time and again that they would far rather meet up in person, but the hectic and heavily scheduled nature of their

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day- to- day lives, their lack of physical mobility, and the fears of their parents have made such face- to- face interactions increasingly impos- sible. As Amy, a biracial sixteen- year- old in Seattle, succinctly put it: “My mom doesn’t let me out of the house very often, so that’s pretty much all I do, is sit on MySpace and talk to people and text and talk on the phone, cause my mom’s always got some crazy reason to keep me in the house.” Social media may seem like a peculiar place for teens to congregate, but for many teens, hanging out on Facebook or Twitter is their only opportunity to gather en masse with friends, acquaintances, classmates, and other teens. More often than not, their passion for social media stems from their desire to socialize.

Just because teens are comfortable using social media to hang out does not mean that they’re fluent in or with technology. Many teens are not nearly as digitally adept as the often- used assumption that they are “digital natives” would suggest. The teens I met knew how to get to Google but had little understanding about how to construct a query to get quality information from the popular search engine. They knew how to use Facebook, but their understanding of the site’s privacy settings did not mesh with the ways in which they configured their accounts. As sociologist Eszter Hargittai has quipped, many teens are more likely to be digital naives than digital natives.21

The term digital native is a lightning rod for the endless hopes and fears that many adults attach to this new generation. Media narratives often suggest that kids today—those who have grown up with digital technology—are equipped with marvelous new superpowers. Their multitasking skills supposedly astound adults almost as much as their three thousand text messages per month. Meanwhile, the same breath- less media reports also warn the public that these kids are vulnerable to unprecedented new dangers: sexual predators, cyberbullying, and myriad forms of intellectual and moral decline, including internet addiction, shrinking attentions spans, decreased literacy, reckless over- sharing, and so on. As with most fears, these anxieties are not without precedent even if they are often overblown and misconstrued. The key to understanding how youth navigate social media is to step away

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from the headlines—both good and bad—and dive into the more nuanced realities of young people.

My experience hanging out with teenagers convinced me that the greatest challenges facing networked teens are far from new. Some challenges are rooted in this country’s long history of racial and social inequality, but economic variability is increasingly notice- able. American teens continue to live and learn in radically uneven conditions. I visited schools with state- of- the- art facilities, highly credentialed and specialized faculty, and students hell- bent on going to Ivy League colleges. At the other extreme, I also visited run- down schools with metal detectors, a stream of “substitute” teachers standing in for full- time educators, and students who smoked mari- juana during class. The explanations for these variations are complex and challenging, and the disparity is unlikely to be addressed in the near future.

Although almost all teens have access to technology at this point, their access varies tremendously. Some have high- end mobile phones with unlimited data plans, their own laptop, and wireless access at home. Others are constrained to basic phones with pay- per- text plans and access the internet only through the filtered lens of school or library computers. Once again, economic inequality plays a central role. But access is not the sole divide. Technical skills, media literacy, and even basic English literacy all shape how teens experience new technologies. Some teens are learning about technology from their parents while other teens are teaching their parents how to construct a search query or fill out a job application.

One of the great hopes for the internet was that it would serve as the great equalizer. My research into youth culture and social media—alongside findings of other researchers—has made it obvi- ous that the color- blind and disembodied social world that the inter- net was supposed to make possible has not materialized. And this unfortunate reality—the reality of racial tensions and discrimination that long predates the rise of digital media—often seems to escape our public attention.

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Meanwhile, we hear a lot about how the online spaces that teens frequent are sinister worlds populated by sexual predators or bullies. But we rarely if ever hear that many teenagers are scarred by the same experiences offline. Bullying, racism, sexual predation, slut shaming, and other insidious practices that occur online are extraordinarily important to address even if they’re not new. Helping young people navigate public life safely should be of significant public concern. But it’s critical to recognize that technology does not create these problems, even if it makes them more visible and even if news media relishes using technology as a hook to tell salacious stories about youth. The very sight of at- risk youth should haunt all of us, but little is achieved if we focus only on making what we see invisible.

The internet mirrors, magnifies, and makes more visible the good, bad, and ugly of everyday life. As teens embrace these tools and incorporate them into their daily practices, they show us how our broader social and cultural systems are affecting their lives. When teens are hurting offline, they reveal their hurt online. When teens’ experiences are shaped by racism and misogyny, this becomes visible online. In making networked publics their own, teens bring with them the values and beliefs that shape their experiences. As a society, we need to use the visibility that we get from social media to under- stand how the social and cultural fault lines that organize American life affect young people. And we need to do so in order to intervene in ways that directly help youth who are suffering.

Ever since the internet entered everyday life—and particularly since the widespread adoption of social media—we have been bom- barded with stories about how new technologies are destroying our social fabric. Amid a stream of scare stories, techno- utopians are touting the amazing benefits of online life while cyber- dystopians are describing how our brains are disintegrating because of our connec- tion to machines. These polarizing views of technology push the dis- cussion of youth’s engagement with social media to an extreme binary: social media is good or social media is bad. These extremes— and the myths they perpetuate—obscure the reality of teen practices

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and threaten to turn the generation gap into a gaping chasm. These myths distort the reality of teen life, sometimes by idealizing it, but more frequently by demonizing it.

How to Read This Book The chapters that follow are dedicated to different issues that

underpin youth engagement with social media. Many are organized around concerns about youth practices that persist in American soci- ety. Each chapter offers a grounded way of looking at an issue. Although the chapters can be read independently, they are collec- tively organized to flow from individual and familial challenges to broader societal issues. A conclusion summarizes my arguments and offers a deeper analysis of what networked publics mean for contem- porary youth.

As a researcher passionate about the health and well- being of young people, I wrote this book in an effort to create a nuanced por- trait of everyday teen life in an era in which social media has become mainstream. The questions I ask are simple: What is and isn’t new about life inflected by social media? What does social media add to the quality of teens’ social lives, and what does it take away? And when we as a society don’t like the outcomes of technology, what can we do to change the equation constructively, making sure that we take advantage of the features of social media while limiting potential abuse?

It is much easier to understand myths retrospectively than it is to dismantle them as they are being perpetuated, but this book aims to do the latter. That said, some of the most pervasive anxieties about social media have begun to subside in recent years, as adults have started participating in social media and, especially, Facebook. I am cautiously hopeful that adult engagement will calm some of the most anxious panics. And yet the tropes and stories that I use throughout the book tend to be resurrected with each new technology, while oth- ers endure in the face of quite overwhelming evidence to the con- trary. As many adults have grown comfortable with Facebook, the

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media’s narratives switched to focusing on the scariness of mobile apps like Snapchat and Kik. The story remains the same, even if the site of panic has shifted.

Social media has affected the lives and practices of many people and will continue to play a significant role in shaping many aspects of American society. There are many who lament these developments or wax nostalgic about the pre- internet world. That said, I would be surprised to find anyone who still believes that the internet is going away. Along with planes, running water, electricity, and motorized transportation, the internet is now a fundamental fact of modern life. This does not mean that access to the internet is universal, and some people will always opt out.22 Even in a country as wealthy as the United States, many lack access to sanitation, and some choose to live without electricity. Just because the internet—and social media—is pervasive in American society does not mean that everyone will have access, will want access, or will experience access in the same way.

Contemporary youth are growing up in a cultural setting in which many aspects of their lives will be mediated by technology and many of their experiences and opportunities will be shaped by their engagement with technology. Fear mongering does little to help youth develop the ability to productively engage with this reality. As a society, we pay a price for fear mongering and utopian visions that ignore more complex realities. In writing this book, I hope to help the public better understand what young people are doing when they engage with social media and why their attempts to make sense of the world around them should be commended.

This book is written with a broad audience in mind—scholars and students, parents and educators, journalists and librarians. Although many sections draw on academic ideas, I do not expect the reader to be familiar with the scholarly literature invoked. When necessary for understanding the argument, I provide background in the text. More often than not, I’ve provided numerous touchstones and references in endnotes and an extensive bibliography that can enable those who wish to go deeper or to understand the relevant debates to do so.

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Throughout this book, I draw on qualitative and ethnographic material that I collected from 2003 to 2012—and interview data con- ducted from 2007 to 2010—to provide a descriptive portrait of the different issues that I discuss.23 Given the context in which I’m writ- ing and the data on which I’m drawing, most of the discussion is explicitly oriented around American teen culture, although some of my analysis may be relevant in other cultures and contexts.24 I also take for granted, and rarely seek to challenge, the capitalist logic that underpins American society and the development of social media. Although I believe that these assumptions should be critiqued, this is outside the scope of this project. By accepting the cultural context in which youth are living, I seek to explain their practices in light of the society in which they are situated.

The networked technologies that were dominant when I began researching this book are different than those that were popular when I was finishing the manuscript. Even MySpace—once the dominant social network site among youth and referred to through- out this book—is barely a shadow of its former self in 2013. Quite probably, what’s popular when you’re reading this book is different still. As I write this, Facebook is losing its allure as new apps and services like Instagram, Tumblr, and Snapchat gain hold. Social media is a moving landscape; many of the services that I reference throughout this book may or may not survive. But the ability to navigate one’s social relationships, communicate asynchronously, and search for information online is here to stay. Don’t let my refer- ence to outdated services distract you from the arguments in this book. The examples may feel antiquated, but the core principles and practices I’m trying to describe are likely to persist long after this book is published.

Not everyone has equal access to the internet, nor do we all experi- ence it in the same way. But social media is actively shaping and being shaped by contemporary society, so it behooves us to move beyond punditry and scare tactics to understand what social media is and how it fits into the social lives of youth.

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As a society, we often spend so much time worrying about young people that we fail to account for how our paternalism and protec- tionism hinders teens’ ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged adults. Regardless of the stories in the media, most young people often find ways to push through the restrictions and develop a sense of who they are and how they want to engage in the world. I want to celebrate their creativity and endurance while also highlight- ing that their practices and experiences are not universal or uniformly positive.

This book is not a love letter to youth culture, although my research has convinced me that young people are more resilient than I initially believed. Rather, this book is an attempt to convince the adults that have power over the lives of youth—including parents and teachers, journal- ists and law enforcement officers, employers and military personnel— that what teens are doing as they engage in networked publics makes sense. At the same time, coming to terms with life in a networked era is not necessarily easy or obvious. Rather, it’s complicated.

1 identity why do teens seem strange online?

In 2005, an Ivy League university was considering the application of a young black man from South Central Los Angeles. The applicant had written a phenomenal essay about how he wanted to walk away from the gangs in his community and attend the esteemed institu- tion. The admissions officers were impressed: a student who over- comes such hurdles is exactly what they like seeing. In an effort to learn more about him, the committee members Googled him. They found his MySpace profile. It was filled with gang symbolism, crass language, and references to gang activities. They recoiled.

I heard this story when a representative from the admissions office contacted me. The representative opened the conversation with a simple question: Why would a student lie to an admissions commit- tee when the committee could easily find the truth online? I asked for context and learned about the candidate. Stunned by the ques- tion, my initial response was filled with nervous laughter. I had hung out with and interviewed teens from South Central. I was always struck by the challenges they faced, given the gang dynamics in their neighborhood. Awkwardly, I offered an alternative interpretation: perhaps this young man is simply including gang signals on his MySpace profile as a survival technique.

Trying to step into that young man’s shoes, I shared with the col- lege admissions officer some of the dynamics that I had seen in Los

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Angeles. My hunch was that this teen was probably very conscious of the relationship between gangs and others in his hometown. Perhaps he felt as though he needed to position himself within the local context in a way that wouldn’t make him a target. If he was anything like other teens I had met, perhaps he imagined the audience of his MySpace profile to be his classmates, family, and community—not the college admissions committee. Without knowing the teen, my guess was that he was genuine in his college essay. At the same time, I also suspected that he would never dare talk about his desire to go to a prestigious institution in his neighborhood because doing so would cause him to be ostracized socially, if not physically attacked. As British sociologist Paul Willis argued in the 1980s, when youth attempt to change their socioeconomic standing, they often risk alienating their home community.1 This dynamic was often acutely present in the communities that I observed.

The admissions officer was startled by my analysis, and we had a long conversation about the challenges of self- representation in a net- worked era.2 I’ll never know if that teen was accepted into that pres- tigious school, but this encounter stayed with me as I watched other adults misinterpret teens’ online self- expressions. I came to realize that, taken out of context, what teens appear to do and say on social media seems peculiar if not outright problematic.3

The intended audience matters, regardless of the actual audience. Unfortunately, adults sometimes believe that they understand what they see online without considering how teens imagined the context when they originally posted a particular photograph or comment. The ability to understand how context, audience, and identity inter- sect is one of the central challenges people face in learning how to navigate social media. And, for all of the mistakes that they can and do make, teens are often leading the way at figuring out how to nav- igate a networked world in which collapsed contexts and imagined audiences are par for the course.

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Taken Out of Context In his 1985 book No Sense of Place, media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz

describes the story of Stokely Carmichael, an American civil rights activist. In the 1960s, Carmichael regularly gave different talks to different audiences. He used a different style of speaking when he addressed white political leaders than when he addressed southern black congregations. When Carmichael started presenting his ideas on television and radio, he faced a difficult decision: which audience should he address? No matter which style of speaking he chose, he knew he’d alienate some. He was right. By using a rolling pastoral voice in broadcast media, Carmichael ingratiated himself with black activists while alienating white elites.

Meyrowitz argues that electronic media like radio and television easily collapse seemingly disconnected contexts. Public figures, jour- nalists, and anyone in the limelight must regularly navigate discon- nected social contexts simultaneously, balancing what they say with how their diverse audiences might interpret their actions. A context collapse occurs when people are forced to grapple simultaneously with otherwise unrelated social contexts that are rooted in different norms and seemingly demand different social responses. For example, some people might find it quite awkward to run into their former high school teacher while drinking with their friends at a bar. These con- text collapses happen much more frequently in networked publics.

The dynamics that Meyrowitz describes are no longer simply the domain of high- profile people who have access to broadcast media. When teens interact with social media, they must regularly contend with collapsed contexts and invisible audiences as a part of everyday life.4 Their teachers might read what they post online for their friends, and when their friends from school start debating their friends from summer camp, they might be excited that their friend groups are combining—or they might find it discomforting. In order to sta- bilize the context in their own minds, teens do what others before them have done: just like journalists and politicians, teens imagine the audience they’re trying to reach.5 In speaking to an unknown or

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invisible audience, it is impossible and unproductive to account for the full range of plausible interpretations. Instead, public speakers consistently imagine a specific subset of potential readers or viewers and focus on how those intended viewers are likely to respond to a particular statement. As a result, the imagined audience defines the social context. In choosing how to present themselves before dis- connected and invisible audiences, people must attempt to resolve context collapses or actively define the context in which they’re operating.

Teens often imagine their audience to be those that they’ve chosen to “friend” or “follow,” regardless of who might actually see their profile. In theory, privacy settings allow teens to limit their expres- sions to the people they intend to reach by restricting who can see what. On MySpace and Twitter—where privacy settings are rela- tively simple—using settings to limit who can access what content can be quite doable. Yet, on Facebook, this has proven to be intrac- table and confusing, given the complex and constantly changing pri- vacy settings on that site.6 Moreover, many teens have good reasons for not limiting who can access their profile. Some teens want to be accessible to peers who share their interests. Others recognize that privacy settings do little to limit parents from snooping or stop friends from sharing juicy messages. Many teens complain about parents who look over their shoulders when they’re on the computer or friends who copy and paste updates and forward them along.

To complicate matters, just because someone is a part of a teen’s imagined audience doesn’t mean that this person is actually reading what’s posted. When social media sites offer streams of content—as is common on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram—people often imagine their audience to be the people they’re following. But these people may not be following them in return or see their posts amid the avalanche of shared content. As a result, regardless of how they use privacy settings, teens must grapple with who can see their profile, who actually does see it, and how those who do see it will interpret it.

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Teens’ mental model of their audience is often inaccurate, but not because teens are naive or stupid. When people are chatting and sharing photos with friends via social media, it’s often hard to remem- ber that viewers who aren’t commenting might also be watching. This is not an issue unique to teens, although teens are often chastised for not accounting for adult onlookers. But just as it’s easy to get caught up in a conversation at a dinner party and forget about the rest of the room, it’s easy to get lost in the back- and- forth on Twitter. Social media introduces additional challenges, particularly because of the persistent and searchable nature of most of these technical systems. Tweets and status updates aren’t just accessible to the audience who happens to be following the thread as it unfolds; they quickly become archived traces, accessible to viewers at a later time. These traces can be searched and are easily reposted and spread. Thus, the context col- lapses that teens face online rarely occur in the moment with conflict- ing onlookers responding simultaneously. They are much more likely to be experienced over time, as new audiences read the messages in a new light.

When teens face collapsing contexts in physical environments, their natural response is to become quiet. For example, if a group of teens are hanging out at the mall and a security guard or someone’s mother approaches them, they will stop whatever conversation they are having, even if it’s innocuous. While they may be comfortable having strangers overhear their exchange, the sudden appearance of someone with social authority changes the context entirely. Online, this becomes more difficult. As Summer, a white fifteen- year- old from Michigan, explains, switching contexts online is more challeng- ing than doing so in the park because, in the park, “you can see when there’s people around you and stuff like that. So you can like quickly change the subject.” Online, there’s no way to change the conversa- tion, both because it’s virtually impossible to know if someone is approaching and because the persistent nature of most social exchanges means that there’s a record of what was previously said. Thus, when Summer’s mother looks at her Facebook page, she gains

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access to a plethora of interactions that took place over a long period of time and outside the social and temporal context in which they were produced. Summer can’t simply switch topics with her friends at the sight of her mother approaching. The ability to easily switch con- texts assumes an ephemeral social situation; this cannot be taken for granted in digital environments.

Because social media often brings together multiple social con- texts, teens struggle to effectively manage social norms. Some expect their friends and family to understand and respect different social contexts and to know when something is not meant for them. And yet there are always people who fail to recognize when content isn’t meant for them, even though it’s publicly accessible. This is the prob- lem that Hunter faces when he posts to Facebook.

Hunter is a geeky, black fourteen- year- old living in inner- city Wash- ington, DC, who resembles a contemporary Steve Urkel, complete with ill- fitting clothes, taped- together glasses, and nerdy mannerisms. He lives in two discrete worlds. His cousins and sister are what he describes as “ghetto” while his friends at his magnet school are all academically minded “geeks.” On Facebook, these two worlds collide, and he regu- larly struggles to navigate them simultaneously. He gets especially frus- trated when his sister interrupts conversations with his friends.

When I’m talking to my friends on Facebook or I put up a sta- tus, something I hate is when people who I’m not addressing in my statuses comment on my statuses. In [my old school], people always used to call me nerdy and that I was the least black black person that they’ve ever met, some people say that, and I said on Facebook, “Should I take offense to the fact that somebody put the ringtone ‘White and Nerdy’ for me?” and it was a joke. I guess we were talking about it in school, and [my sister] comes out of nowhere, “Aw, baby bro,” and I’m like, “No, don’t say that, I wasn’t talking to you.”

When I asked Hunter how his sister or friends are supposed to know who is being talked to on specific Facebook updates, he replied,

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I guess that is a point. Sometimes it probably is hard, but I think it’s just the certain way that you talk. I will talk to my sister a different way than I’ll talk to my friends at school or from my friends from my old school, and I might say, “Oh, well, I fell asleep in Miss K’s class by accident,” and they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, Miss K is so boring,” and [my sister’s] like, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t fall asleep. You should pay attention.” I mean, I think you can figure out that I’m not talking to you if I’m talking about a certain teacher.

Hunter loves his sister, but he also finds her take on social etiquette infuriating. He wants to maintain a relationship with her and appre- ciates that she’s on Facebook, although he also notes that it’s hard because of her priorities, values, and decisions. He doesn’t want to ostracize her on Facebook, but he’s consistently annoyed by how often she tries to respond to messages from his friends without realizing that this violates an implicit code of conduct.

To make matters worse, Hunter’s sister is not the only one from his home life who he feels speaks up out of turn. Hunter and his friends are really into the card game Pokémon and what he calls “old skool” video games like the Legend of Zelda. His cousins, in contrast, enjoy first- person shooters like Halo and think his choice of retro video games is “lame.” Thus, whenever Hunter posts messages about play- ing with his friends, his cousins use this as an opportunity to mock him. Frustrated by his family members’ inability to “get the hint,” Hunter has resorted both to limiting what he says online and trying to use technical features provided by Facebook to create discrete lists and block certain people from certain posts. Having to take measures to prevent his family from seeing what he posts saddens him because he doesn’t want to hide; he only wants his family to stop “embarrass- ing” him. Context matters to Hunter, not because he’s ashamed of his tastes or wants to hide his passions, but because he wants to have control over a given social situation. He wants to post messages with- out having to articulate context; he wants his audience to understand

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where he’s coming from and respect what he sees as unspoken social conventions. Without a shared sense of context, hanging out online becomes burdensome.

The ability to understand and define social context is important. When teens are talking to their friends, they interact differently than when they’re talking to their family or to their teachers. Television show plotlines leverage the power of collapsed contexts for entertain- ment purposes, but managing them in everyday life is often exhaust- ing. It may be amusing to watch Kramer face embarrassment when he and George accidentally run into Kramer’s mother on Seinfeld, but such social collisions are not nearly as entertaining when they occur without a laugh track.7 Situations like this require significant monitoring and social negotiation, which, in turn, require both stra- tegic and tactical decisions that turn the most mundane social situa- tion into a high- maintenance affair. Most people are uncomfortable with the idea that their worlds might collide uncontrollably, and yet, social media makes this dynamic a regular occurrence. Much of what’s at stake has to do with the nuanced ways in which people read social situations and present themselves accordingly.

Identity Work in Networked Publics In her 1995 book, Life on the Screen, psychologist Sherry Turkle

began to map out the creation of a mediated future that resembled both the utopian and dystopian immersive worlds constructed in sci- ence fiction novels. Watching early adopters—especially children— embrace virtual worlds, she argued that the distinction between computers and humans was becoming increasingly blurred and that a new society was emerging as people escaped the limitations of their offline identities. Turkle was particularly fascinated by the playful identity work that early adopters engaged in online, and with a psy- choanalyst’s eye, she extensively considered both the therapeutic and the deceptive potential of mediated identity work.8

Turkle was critical of some people’s attempts to use fictitious iden- tities to harm others, but she also highlighted that much could be

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gained from the process of self- reflection that was enabled when peo- ple had to act out or work through their identity in order to make themselves present in virtual worlds. Unlike face- to- face settings in which people took their bodies for granted, people who went online had to consciously create their digital presence. Media studies scholar Jenny Sundén describes this process as people typing themselves into being.9 Although Turkle recognized that a person’s identity was always tethered to his or her psyche, she left room for arguments that suggested that the internet could—and would—free people of the burdens of their “material”—or physically embodied—identities, enabling them to become a better version of themselves.

I wanted Turkle’s vision for the future to be right. When I embraced the internet as a teenager in the mid- 1990s, I was going online to escape the so- called real world. I felt ostracized and misunderstood at school, but online I could portray myself as the person that I wanted to be. I took on fictitious identities in an effort to figure out who I was. I wasn’t alone. Part of what made chatting fun in those days was that it was impossible to know if others were all that they por- trayed themselves to be. I knew that a self- declared wizard was prob- ably not actually a wizard and that the guy who said he had found the cure to cancer most likely hadn’t, but embodied characteristics like gender and race weren’t always so clear.10 At the time, this felt playful and freeing, and I bought into the fantasy that the internet could save us from tyranny and hypocrisy. Manifestos like John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyber- space” spoke to me. Barlow told the global leaders at the World Eco- nomic Forum that the new “home of the Mind” enabled “identities [that] have no bodies.” I was proud to be one of the children he spoke of who appeared “native” in the new civilization.

Twenty years later, the dynamics of identity portrayal online are quite different from how early internet proponents imagined them to be. Although gaming services and virtual worlds are popular among some groups of youth, there’s a significant cultural difference between fictional role- playing sites and the more widely embraced

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social media sites, which tend to encourage a more nonfiction- oriented atmosphere. Even though pseudonymity is quite common in these environments, the type of identity work taking place on social media sites like Facebook is very different from what Turkle initially imagined. Many teens today go online to socialize with friends they know from physical settings and to portray themselves in online contexts that are more tightly wedded to unmediated social communities. These practices, which encourage greater continuity between teens’ online and offline worlds, were much less common when I was growing up.

This doesn’t mean that identity work is uniform across all online activities. Most teens use a plethora of social media services as they navigate relationships and contexts. Their seemingly distinct prac- tices on each platform might suggest that they are trying to be differ- ent people, but this would be a naive reading of the kinds of identity work taking place on and through social media. For example, a teen might use her given name on a video service like Skype while choos- ing a descriptive screen name on a photo app like Instagram.11 And when choosing a login for a blogging site like Tumblr, she might choose a name that intentionally signals her involvement with a par- ticular interest- based community.

Quite often, teens respond to what they perceive to be the norms of a particular service. So when a teen chooses to identify as “Jessica Smith” on Facebook and “littlemonster” on Twitter, she’s not creat- ing multiple identities in the psychological sense. She’s choosing to represent herself in different ways on different sites with the expecta- tion of different audiences and different norms. Sometimes these choices are conscious attempts by individuals seeking to control their self- presentation; more often, they are whimsical responses to sites’ requirement to provide a login handle. Although some teens choose to use the same handle across multiple sites, other teens find that their favorite nickname is taken or feel as though they’ve out- grown their previous identity. Regardless of the reason, the outcome is a hodgepodge of online identities that leave plenty of room for

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interpretation. And in doing so, teens both interpret and produce the social contexts in which they are inhabiting.

Context matters. While teens move between different social con- texts—including mediated ones like those produced by networked publics and unmediated ones like those constructed at school—they manage social dynamics differently. How they interact and with whom they interact in the school lunchroom is different than at afterschool music lessons than via group text messaging services. For many of the teens I interviewed, Facebook was the primary place where friend groups collide. Other services—like Tumblr or Twitter—were more commonly used by teens who were carving out their place in interest- driven communities.12 For example, there are entire communities of teens on Tumblr who connect out of a shared interest in fashion; collectively, they produce a rich fashion blogging community that has stunned the fashion industry. On Twitter, it’s not uncommon to see teens gushing about the celebrities du jour with other fans. These examples illustrate how these particular plat- forms are used circa 2013; teens’ approaches to different sites may have changed by the time you’re reading this book, but managing context within a given site and through the use of multiple sites has been commonplace for well over a decade. What matters is not the particular social media site but the context in which it’s situated within a particular group of youth. The sites of engagement come and go, are repurposed, and evolve over time. Some people assume that these ebbs and flows mean radical changes in youth culture, but often the underlying practices stay the same even as the context shifts what is rendered visible and significant.

The context of a particular site is not determined by the technical features of that site but, rather, by the interplay between teens and the site. In sociological parlance, the context of social media sites is socially constructed.13 More practically, what this means is that teens turn to different sites because they hear that a particular site is good for a given practice. They connect to people they know, observe how those people are using the site, and then reinforce or challenge those

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norms through their own practices. As a result, the norms of social media are shaped by network effects; peers influence one another about how to use a particular site and then help collectively to create the norms of that site.

Because teens’ engagement with social media is tied to their broader peer groups, the norms that get reinforced online do not deviate much from the norms that exist in school. This does not mean that there aren’t distinctions. For example, I met a teen girl who was obsessed with a popular boy band called One Direction even though her friends at school were not. She didn’t bother talking about her crush on one of the band’s members in the lunchroom because she knew her friends wouldn’t find such a topic interesting. She didn’t hide her passion for One Direction from her friends, but she didn’t turn to them to discuss the band members’ haircuts or their latest music video. Instead, she turned to Twitter, where she was able to gush about the band with other fans. She first turned to Twitter because the members of One Direction were using that plat- form to engage with their fans, but as she engaged with the broader fan community, she spent more time talking with other fans than replying to the musicians’ tweets. Through this fan community, she began interacting on Tumblr and posting fan- oriented posts on Instagram. Her friends all knew about her obsession—and occasion- ally teased her for her celebrity crush—but they didn’t follow her on Twitter because they weren’t interested in that facet of her life. She wasn’t hiding her interests, but she had created a separate context— and thus a separate digital persona—for talking with fellow fans. When she wanted to talk with her school friends, she turned to Face- book or text messaging. At the same time, the contexts were not wholly distinct. When she found out that one of her classmates was also a fellow fan, they started engaging on both Facebook and Twitter, talking about school on Facebook and One Direction on Twitter. And she even ended up Facebook friending a few fans she met through Twitter, which created a space for them to talk about a different range of topics.

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This young fan is a typical savvy internet user, comfortable navi- gating her identity and interests in distinct social contexts based on her understanding of the norms and community practices. She moves between Facebook and Twitter seamlessly, understanding that they are different social contexts. She has a coherent understanding of who she is and is comfortable choosing how she presents herself in these different environments. She moves just as seamlessly between these mediated environments as she does between online and offline settings, not because she’s cycling through identities—or creating a segmentation between the virtual and the real—but because she’s switching social contexts and acting accordingly.

As teens move between different social environments—and inter- act with different groups of friends, interest groups, and classmates— they maneuver between different contexts that they have collectively built and socially constructed. Their sense of context is shaped—but not cleanly defined—by setting, time, and audience. Although navi- gating distinct social contexts is not new, technology makes it easy for young people to move quickly between different social settings, creating the impression that they are present in multiple places simul- taneously. What unfolds is a complex dance as teens quickly shift between—and often blur—different social contexts.

The popularity of social media in recent years has produced a sig- nificant rise in nonfiction or so- called real names identity produc- tion, but it is also important to recognize that there continue to be environments where teens gather anonymously or don crafted identi- ties to create a separation between the kinds of social contexts that are viable offline and those that can be imagined online. Most nota- bly, multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and StarCraft were quite popular among youth I encountered. It is within these spaces—along with virtual worlds like Second Life and Whyville— where teens can and do engage in much of the playful and productive identity work that early internet scholars initially mapped out.14 The process of creating an avatar and selecting virtual characteristics requires tremendous reflection, and teens often take this seriously.

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Although some teens do invest a great deal of time and thought into their avatars, other teens I met were no more invested in their gaming character than in their Twitter handle. Their choices had meaning and were valuable, but not something that they felt needed to be analyzed for significance. When I asked one teen boy why he had chosen to be a particular character in World of Warcraft, he looked at me with a scrunched face. I pressed on to ask if his choice had any particular meaning, and he responded with an eye roll, say- ing, “It’s just a game!” before continuing on to talk about how he had a collection of characters with different skill sets that could be used depending on what he was trying to achieve in the game.

Choosing and designing an avatar is a central part of participation in immersive games and virtual worlds, but youth approach this practice in extraordinarily varied ways. Some teens purposefully con- struct their avatars in ways that they feel reflect their physical bodies; other teens choose characters based on skills or aesthetics. For some teens, being “in world” is discrete from their school environment, whereas others game with classmates. It may seem that the role- playing elements of these environments imply a significant separation between the virtual and the real; however, these often get blurred in fantasy game worlds as well.15

Alongside the identity work done within common social media sites and wildly popular gaming services, a subculture has emerged in which participants outright eschew recognizable identity altogether by proclaiming the virtues of anonymity. Nowhere is this more visible than in the community of individuals who participate in and contrib- ute to the image- based bulletin board site 4chan. 4chan was initially created in 2003 by a fifteen- year- old named Chris Poole, known as “moot,” so that he could share pornography and anime with other teens.16 Often referred to as the underbelly of the internet, 4chan is an active source of internet cultural production as well as malicious prankster activity. It is the birthplace of popular memes such as lol- cats: often entertaining, widely distributed pictures of cats portrayed with text captions written in Impact font using an internet dialect

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referred to as lolspeak.17 4chan is also where Anonymous—the “hack- tivist” group mostly known for a series of well- publicized political actions—originated.18 Although it’s impossible to know much about the site’s contributors, the content typically shared on the site reflects tastes and humor usually associated with teenage boys.

The reason it’s hard to get a handle on who participates on 4chan is that most of the content produced on the site is shared anonymously. As I met teen boys who contributed to 4chan, I found that many of them relished the anonymous norms of the site. They felt that ano- nymity gave them a sense of freedom they didn’t feel they could have on sites for which constructing an identity—pseudonymous or “real”— was more typical. Some admitted to using this freedom in problematic or destructive ways—recounting acts of ganging up on girls whom they deemed annoying or using a combination of wits and trickery to manipulate Facebook administrators into providing data. But more often than not, teens talked about wanting to have a space where they weren’t constantly scrutinized by adults and peers. By becoming anon- ymous and being an invisible part of a crowd, these teens knew that they weren’t building a reputation within the site. Yet even when they weren’t being personally recognized, many relished seeing their posts get traction and attention within the site; this made them feel part of the community. Furthermore, extensive use of in- group language and shared references made it easy to identify other members of 4chan, thereby enabling another mechanism of status and community.19

As teens have embraced a plethora of social environments and helped co- create the norms that underpin them, a wide range of practices has emerged. Teens have grown sophisticated with how they manage con- texts and present themselves in order to be read by their intended audi- ence. They don’t always succeed, but their efforts are phenomenal.

Crafting a Profile, Creating an Identity Performance Chris was ecstatic when his sixteen- year- old daughter invited

him to be her friend on MySpace during the height of the MySpace craze. He had decided not to require that she befriend him on social

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network sites, so he saw her invitation as a signal of trust and love. He immediately accepted the friend request and logged in to look at her private profile. His heart sank. About halfway down the page, there was a panel with a question, “What Drug Are You?” followed by a picture of a white substance on a mirror with a rolled- up dollar bill; the text below said, “Cocaine.” Trying not to panic, he approached his daughter quizzically. She responded with laughter, followed by a drawn- out, “Daaaaad.” She explained that what he’d seen was a quiz. Quizzes were all the rage in her school, and this one was currently making its rounds. She explained that whenever there were quizzes, you could easily guess where the quiz was going and answer so that you could get the result you wanted. This did not give Chris any sense of relief, but he reserved judgment and hesitantly asked why she wanted to get cocaine as the result. She proceeded to explain that the kids who smoked marijuana at school were “lame,” while those who took mushrooms were “crazy.” And then she explained, “But your generation did a lot of cocaine and you came out OK!” Chris burst out laughing, humored by how she perceived him and his peers. He had grown up in a rural white Midwestern community where alcohol and teen pregnancy dominated. Indeed, Chris was only sixteen years older than his daughter. After high school, he had gotten involved in the music scene, but being a single father left little room for partying. Cocaine was not part of his youth at all. Chris then grew serious and asked if she was interested in cocaine; he felt relieved by her exasper- ated rejection of this idea, and they proceeded to have a long conver- sation about how an onlooker could easily take what seemed like a funny quiz out of context.

Many teens post information on social media that they think is funny or intended to give a particular impression to a narrow audi- ence without considering how this same content might be read out of context. Much of what seems like inaccurate identity information is simply a misinterpretation of a particular act of self- presentation. This issue was particularly noticeable in early social media genres in which explicit identity information was required for participation.

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Consider, for example, MySpace, which required a user to provide age, sex, location, and other fields to create a profile.

When I stumbled on Allie’s MySpace profile, I learned from the demographic section that she is ninety- five years old, from Christmas Island, and makes $250,000+ per year. While it is possible that she is nearly a centenarian and logging onto MySpace from a remote, sparsely populated island in the Indian Ocean while running her highly profit- able company, this seems unlikely. A quick glance at the rest of Allie’s profile reveals other information that suggests that she is more likely to be a teenage girl attending high school in New Jersey. Her photo album includes self- portraits, photographs of Allie with friends, and images of teens goofing around. The majority of her friends indicate that they’re from New Jersey, and the high school she lists on her profile is also located in that state. The comments on her profile included messages about homework and parents. I don’t know Allie, but I doubt that she is trying to deceive me with demographic outliers.

I met many teens who fabricated answers like name, location, age, and income to profile questions. They thought it was amusing to indicate their relationship status on Facebook as “It’s Complicated” whether they were in a relationship or not. A casual viewer scanning Facebook might conclude that an extraordinary number of teens are in same- sex relationships because so many have chosen to list their best friend as the person that they are “In a Relationship” with. In the same vein, Facebook profiles suggest that the US census data must be inaccurate because, at least on Facebook, teens often have dozens of siblings; of course, a little bit of prying makes it clear that these, too, are close friends. These are but a few of the playful ways in which teens responded to social media sites’ requests for information by providing inaccurate information that actually contains meaningful signals about friendship and sociality.

When I talked with teens, I learned that there were also numerous ways of repurposing social network site fields for entertainment and humor. Outside of wealthy communities, where talking about money is deemed gauche, I met countless teens who told MySpace that their

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income was “$250,000+.” Choosing a birth year that made the age field depict “69” was also a common, if unsurprising, trend among teenage boys.20 Searching for social media users in Afghanistan or Zimbabwe offers an additional window into teen life, as many teens select the top or bottom choice in the pull- down menu when they indicate their location. Facebook expected users to provide “real names,” but many teens I met offered up only their first name, prefer- ring to select a last name of a celebrity, fictional character, or friend. These were but a few of the ways that teens provided what appeared to be fictitious information on their profiles. These practices allowed them to feel control over their profiles, particularly given how often they told me that it was ridiculous for sites to demand this information.

One way of reading teens’ profiles is to assume that they are lying. But marking oneself as rich or from a foreign land is not about decep- tion; it’s a simple way to provide entertaining signals to friends while ignoring a site’s expectations.21 Most teens aren’t enacting an imag- ined identity in a virtual world. Instead, they’re simply refusing to play by the rules of self- presentation as defined by these sites.22 They see no reason to provide accurate information, in part because they know that most people who are reading what they post already know who they are. As Dominic, a white sixteen- year- old from Seattle, told me, he doesn’t have to provide accurate information “because all my [social media] friends are actually my friends; they’ll know if I’m jok- ing around or not.” Awareness of the social context helps shape what teens share and don’t share. Many teens treat social media requests for information as a recommendation, not a requirement, because they view these sites purely as platforms for interacting with class- mates and other people they know from other settings.

Why teens share what they do is neither arbitrary nor dictated by the social media sites where they hang out—nor by the norms that govern adults’ use of those same sites. The youth- oriented social con- text in which teens share matters. Teens don’t see social media as a virtual space in which they must choose to be themselves or create an alternate ego. They see social media as a place to gather with friends

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while balancing privacy and safety with humor and image. When Los Angeles–based Chicano fifteen- year- old Mickey says, “It’s not that I lie on [MySpace], but I don’t put my real information,” he’s highlight- ing that his choice to provide false data allows him to control the social situation. He doesn’t want to be easily searchable by his parents or teachers, nor does he want to be found by “creeps” who might be browsing the site looking for vulnerable teenagers. He wants to be in a space with friends, and so he provides just enough information that his friends can find him without increasing his visibility to adults.

Teens fabricate information because it’s funny, because they believe that the site has no reason to ask, or because they believe that doing so will limit their visibility to people they don’t want to find them. In doing so, they are seeking to control the networked social context.

When teens create profiles through social media, they are simulta- neously navigating extraordinarily public environments and more intimate friendship spaces. Media scholars Paul Hodkinson and Siân Lincoln argue that constructing these profiles can be understood through the lens of “bedroom culture.”23 Just as many middle- class teens use different media artifacts—including photographs, posters, and tchotchkes—to personalize their bedrooms, teens often decorate their online self- presentations using a variety of media. Likewise, teens use their bedrooms to create a space for hanging out with friends and they turn to social media to do the same online. Yet because of the properties of social media, creating boundaries around these online spaces is far more difficult. Although teens complain about the impossibility of keeping siblings and parents out of their rooms, achieving privacy in social media is even harder. This, in turn, challenges teens’ ability to meaningfully portray the nuances of who they are to different and conflicting audiences.

Impression Management in a Networked Setting In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, sociologist Erving

Goffman describes the social rituals involved in self- presentation as “impression management.” He argues that the impressions we make

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on others are a product of what is given and what is given off. In other words, what we convey to others is a matter of what we choose to share in order to make a good impression and also what we unintentionally reveal as a byproduct of who we are and how we react to others. The norms, cultural dynamics, and institutions where giving and giving off happen help define the broader context of how these performances are understood. When interpreting others’ self- presentations, we read the explicit content that is conveyed in light of the implicit information that is given off and the context in which everything takes place. The tension between the explicit and implicit signals allows us to obtain much richer information about individuals’ attempts to shape how they’re perceived. Of course, our reactions to their attempts to impress us enable them to adjust what they give in an attempt to convey what they think is best.

Based on their understanding of the social situation—including the context and the audience—people make decisions about what to share in order to act appropriately for the situation and to be per- ceived in the best light. When young people are trying to get a sense of the context in which they’re operating, they’re doing so in order to navigate the social situation in front of them. They may want to be seen as cool among their peers, even if adults would deem their behav- ior inappropriate.24 Teens may be trying to determine if someone they’re attracted to is interested in them without embarrassing them- selves. Or they may wish to be viewed as confident and happy, even when they’re facing serious depression or anxiety. Whatever they’re trying to convey, they must first get a grasp of the situation and the boundaries of the context. When contexts collapse or when informa- tion is taken out of context, teens can fail to make their intended impression.

Self- presentations are never constructed in a void. Goffman writes at length about the role individuals play in shaping their self- presentations, but he also highlights ways in which individuals are part of broader collectives that convey impressions about the whole group. In discuss- ing the importance of “teams” for impression management, he points

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out that people work together to shape impressions, often relying on shared familiarity to help define any given situation in a mutually agreeable manner. He also argues that, “any member of the team has the power to give the show away or to disrupt it by inappropriate con- duct.”25 When teens create profiles online, they’re both individuals and part of a collective. Their self- representation is constructed through what they explicitly provide, through what their friends share, and as a product of how other people respond to them. When Alice’s friend Bob comments on her profile, he’s affecting her self- presentation. Even the photo that Bob chooses as his primary photo affects Alice because it might be shown on Alice’s profile when he leaves a comment.26 Impression management online and off is not just an individual act; it’s a social process.

Part of what makes impression management in a networked set- ting so tricky is that the contexts in which teens are operating are also networked. Contexts don’t just collapse accidentally; they collapse because individuals have a different sense of where the boundaries exist and how their decisions affect others. In North Carolina, I briefly chatted with a black high school senior who was gunning for a soccer scholarship at a Division One school. When recruiters and coaches from different schools asked to be his friend on Facebook, he immediately said yes. He had always treated Facebook like a résumé, using the site to position himself as a thoughtful, compassionate, all- American young man. But he was often concerned about what his friends posted on Facebook, and for good reason.

A few days later, I was talking casually with Matthew, one of the soccer player’s classmates with whom he was friends on Facebook. Unlike the all- American athlete persona his classmate had crafted, Matthew’s profile was filled with crass comments and humor that could easily be misinterpreted. I asked Matthew, a white seventeen- year- old, about his decision to post these items on his profile with a particular eye to how they might get misinterpreted if read by a stranger. Matthew told me that he wasn’t friends with anyone who didn’t know him and wouldn’t understand that he was joking around.

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I pointed out that his privacy settings meant that his profile could be viewed by friends- of- friends. When he didn’t get my point, I showed him that his classmate had chosen to connect with many coaches and other representatives from schools to which he had applied for admis- sion. Matthew’s stunned response was simple: “But why would he do that?” Matthew and his classmate had very different ideas of how to use Facebook and who their imagined audiences might be, but their online presence was interconnected because of the technical affor- dances of Facebook. They were each affecting the other’s attempts at self- presentation, and their sharing and friending norms created unexpected conflicts.

Even when teens have a coherent sense of what they deem to be appropriate in a particular setting, their friends and peers do not nec- essarily share their sense of decorum and norms. Resolving the net- worked nature of social contexts is complicated. The “solution” that is most frequently offered is that people should not try to engage in context- dependent impression management. Indeed, Mark Zucker- berg, the founder of Facebook, is quoted as having said, “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”27 Teens who try to manage context collapses by segregating information often suf- fer when that information crosses boundaries. This is particularly true when teens, like the young man from Los Angeles at the beginning of this chapter, are forced to contend with radically different social con- texts that are not mutually resolvable. What makes this especially tricky for teens is that people who hold power over them often believe that they have the right to look, judge, and share, even when their interpretations may be constructed wholly out of context.

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union received a complaint from a student at a small, rural high school that sheds light on this issue. At a school assembly, in order to set an example, a campus police officer had shown a photo of one of the students holding a beer.28 The picture was not on that girl’s Facebook profile; it was posted by a friend of hers and tagged. The purpose of the assembly was to teach teenagers about privacy, but the students were outraged.

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Because of the police officer’s attempt to shame students into behaving by adult standards, the student exposed with a beer feared that she would not receive a local scholarship or might face other serious consequences. To complicate matters, she had not cho- sen to present herself in that light; her friend had done this for her. In choosing to upload and tag this photo, her friend undermined the self- image that the girl wished to present. Some may argue that this girl was at fault for being at a party holding a beer in the first place. She may indeed have been drinking the beer—72 percent of students in high school report having had alcohol at least once—but she may also just have been holding the beer for a friend or simply trying to fit in by appearing to drink.29 This girl certainly did not think that her decision to attend that party would result in such public shaming, nor is it clear that the punishment fits the crime. In situations like this, teens are blamed for not thinking while adults assert the right to define the context in which young people interact. They take con- tent out of context to interpret it through the lens of adults’ values and feel as though they have the right to shame youth because that content was available in the first place. In doing so, they ignore teens’ privacy while undermining their struggles to manage their identity.

One might reasonably argue that the girl holding the beer was lucky not to have been arrested, since alcohol consumption by minors is illegal. Yet it is important to note that the same shaming tactics that adults use to pressure teens to conform to adult standards are also used by both teens and adults to ostracize and punish youth whose identities, values, or experiences are not widely accepted. I met plenty of teens who wanted to keep secrets from their parents or teachers, but the teens who struggled the most with the challenges of collapsed contexts were those who were trying to make sense of their sexual identity or who otherwise saw themselves as outcasts in their community. Some, like Hunter—the boy from DC who was trying to navigate his “ghetto” family alongside his educationally minded friends—were simply frustrated and annoyed. Others, like teen girls

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who are the subject of “slut shaming” were significantly embarrassed and emotionally distraught after photos taken in the context of an intimate relationship were widely shared to shame them by using their sexuality as a weapon. Still others, like the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) teens I met from religious and conservative backgrounds, were outright scared of what would happen if the con- texts in which they were trying to operate collapsed.

In Iowa, I ended up casually chatting with a teen girl who was working through her sexuality. She had found a community of other queer girls in a chatroom, and even though she believed that some of them weren’t who they said they were, she found their anonymous advice to be helpful. They gave her pointers to useful websites about coming out, offered stories from their own experiences, and gave her the number of an LGBT- oriented hotline if she ran into any dif- ficulty coming out to her conservative parents. Although she relished the support and validation these strangers gave her, she wasn’t ready to come out yet, and she was petrified that her parents might come across her online chats. She was also concerned that some of her friends from school might find out and tell her parents. She had learned that her computer recorded her browser history in middle school when her parents had used her digital traces to punish her for visiting inappropriate sites. Thus, she carefully erased her history after each visit to the chatroom. She didn’t understand how Face- book seemed to follow her around the web, but she was afraid that somehow the company would find out and post the sites she visited to her Facebook page. In an attempt to deal with this, she used Inter- net Explorer to visit the chatroom or anything that was LGBT- related while turning to the Chrome browser for maintaining her straight, school- friendly persona. But still, she was afraid that she’d mess up and collapse her different social contexts, accidentally coming out before she was ready. She wanted to maintain discrete contexts but found it extraordinarily difficult to do so. This tension comes up over and over again, particularly with youth who are struggling to make sense of who they are and how they fit into the broader world.30

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As teens struggle to make sense of different social contexts and present themselves appropriately, one thing becomes clear: the inter- net has not evolved into an idyllic zone in which people are free from the limitations of the embodied world. Teens are struggling to make sense of who they are and how they fit into society in an environment in which contexts are networked and collapsed, audiences are invisi- ble, and anything they say or do can easily be taken out of context. They are grappling with battles that adults face, but they are doing so while under constant surveillance and without a firm grasp of who they are. In short, they’re navigating one heck of a cultural labyrinth.

2 privacy why do youth share so publicly?

Many teens feel as though they’re in a no- win situation when it comes to sharing information online: damned if they publish their personal thoughts to public spaces, and damned if they create private space that parents can’t see. Parent- teen battles about privacy have gone on for decades. Parents complain when teens demand privacy by asking their parents to stay out of their bedroom, to refrain from listening in on their phone conversations, and to let them socialize with their friends without being chaperoned. In the same breath, these same parents express frustration when teens wear ill- fitting clothes or skimpy outfits. They have long seen revealing clothing as an indica- tor of teens’ rejection of privacy. In other words, common and long- standing teen practices have historically been sure signs of teens’ unhealthy obsession with, or rejection of, privacy.

Social media has introduced a new dimension to the well- worn fights over private space and personal expression. Teens do not want their parents to view their online profiles or look over their shoulder when they’re chatting with friends. Parents are no longer simply wor- ried about what their children wear out of the house but what they photograph themselves wearing in their bedroom to post online. Interactions that were previously invisible to adults suddenly have traces, prompting parents to fret over conversations that adults deem inappropriate or when teens share “TMI” (too much information).

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While my childhood included “Keep Out” bedroom signs and bat- tles over leather miniskirts and visible bras, the rise of the internet has turned fights over privacy and exposure into headline news for an entire cohort of youth.

Teens often grow frustrated with adult assumptions that suggest that they are part of a generation that has eschewed privacy in order to participate in social media. In North Carolina, I asked “Waffles” about this issue, and he responded with exasperation. “Every teenager wants privacy. Every single last one of them, whether they tell you or not, wants privacy.” Waffles is a geeky white seventeen- year- old teen who spends hours each day interacting with people through video games and engaging deeply in a wide variety of online communities. He balked at the idea that his participation in these networked pub- lics signals that he doesn’t care about privacy. “Just because teenagers use internet sites to connect to other people doesn’t mean they don’t care about their privacy. We don’t tell everybody every single thing about our lives. . . . So to go ahead and say that teenagers don’t like privacy is pretty ignorant and inconsiderate honestly, I believe, on the adults’ part.” Waffles articulated a sentiment that I usually saw expressed through an eye roll: teenagers, acutely aware of how many adults dismiss their engagement in social media, have little patience for adults’ simplistic assumptions about teen privacy.1

Although teens grapple with managing their identity and navigat- ing youth- centric communities while simultaneously maintaining spaces for intimacy, they do so under the spotlight of a media ecosys- tem designed to publicize every teen fad, moral panic, and new hyped technology. Each week, news stories lament the death of privacy, con- sistently referring to teen engagement with public social media ser- vices as proof of privacy’s demise.2 In her New York Magazine article describing people’s willingness to express themselves publicly, Emily Nussbaum articulated a concern about youth that is widespread: “Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show- offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for

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God’s sake, their dirty photos! —online.”3 Throughout the United States, I heard this sentiment expressed in less eloquent terms by par- ents, teachers, and religious officials who were horrified by what teens were willing to share. They often approached me, genuinely worried about their children’s future and unable to understand why anyone who cared about themselves and their privacy would be willing to be actively engaged online.

The idea that teens share too much—and therefore don’t care about privacy—is now so entrenched in public discourse that research showing that teens do desire privacy and work to get it is often ignored by the media.4 Regardless of how many young people engage in pri- vacy practices, adults reference teens’ public expressions as decisive evidence of contemporary teen immodesty and indecency. Mean- while, technology executives like Facebook’s founder Mark Zucker- berg and Google chairman Eric Schmidt reinforce the notion that today’s teens are different, arguing that social norms around privacy have changed in order to justify their own business decisions regard- ing user privacy. They cite youth’s widespread engagement with social media as evidence that the era of privacy is over.5 Journalists, parents, and technologists seem to believe that a willingness to share in public spaces—and, most certainly, any act of exhibitionism and publicity— is incompatible with a desire for personal privacy.

The teens that I met genuinely care about their privacy, but how they understand and enact it may not immediately resonate or appear logical to adults. When teens—and, for that matter, most adults— seek privacy, they do so in relation to those who hold power over them. Unlike privacy advocates and more politically conscious adults, teens aren’t typically concerned with governments and corporations. Instead, they’re trying to avoid surveillance from parents, teachers, and other immediate authority figures in their lives. They want the right to be ignored by the people who they see as being “in their busi- ness.” Teens are not particularly concerned about organizational actors; rather, they wish to avoid paternalistic adults who use safety and protection as an excuse to monitor their everyday sociality.

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Teens’ desire for privacy does not undermine their eagerness to participate in public. There’s a big difference between being in public and being public. Teens want to gather in public environments to socialize, but they don’t necessarily want every vocalized expression to be publicized. Yet, because being in a networked public—unlike gathering with friends in a public park—often makes interactions more visible to adults, mere participation in social media can blur these two dynamics. At first blush, the desire to be in public and have privacy seems like a contradiction. But understanding how teens con- ceptualize privacy and navigate social media is key to understanding what privacy means in a networked world, a world in which negotiat- ing fuzzy boundaries is par for the course. Instead of signaling the end of privacy as we know it, teens’ engagement with social media highlights the complex interplay between privacy and publicity in the networked world we all live in now.6

Navigating Conflicting Norms In 2006, seventeen- year- old Bly Lauritano- Werner wrote a piece

for Youth Radio in which she explained what privacy meant to her.7 She recorded the segment with her mother in order to highlight the generational disconnect that was at the heart of her frustration. The radio piece that aired on National Public Radio reveals a tension between Bly and her mother over the boundaries that underpin pri- vacy. “My mom always uses the excuse about the Internet being ‘pub- lic’ when she defends herself. It’s not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. I do online journals so I can commu- nicate with my friends, not so my mother could catch up on the latest gossip of my life.” When Bly interviews her mother during the seg- ment, her mother claims that she has the right to look at what Bly posts. She argues that she should be able to look “because I have a connection with you. I’m your mom, but also I just feel like it would be more interesting to me than it would be to someone who didn’t know you. . . . You publish it and it’s for general viewing therefore I feel I’m part of the general public, so I can view it.” Much to Bly’s

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frustration, her mother believes that she has the right to look precisely because the content is accessible to a broad audience, even though she knows that Bly doesn’t want her mother among that audience.

Although many adults believe that they have the right to consume any teen content that is functionally accessible, many teens disagree. For example, when I opened up the issue of teachers looking at stu- dents’ Facebook profiles with African American fifteen- year- old Chantelle, she responded dismissively: “Why are they on my page? I wouldn’t go to my teacher’s page and look at their stuff, so why should they go on mine to look at my stuff?” She continued on to make it clear that she had nothing to hide while also reiterating the feeling that snooping teachers violated her sense of privacy. The issue for Chantelle—and many other teens—is more a matter of social norms and etiquette than technical access.

Erving Goffman—the sociologist described in the previous chap- ter for his analysis of self- presentation—also wrote about the impor- tance of “civil inattention” in enabling people to respectfully negotiate others in public spaces.8 For example, even when two people happen to be sitting across from each other on the subway, social norms dic- tate that they should not stare at each other or insert themselves into the other’s conversations. Of course, people still do these things, but they also feel a social responsibility to avert their eyes and pretend that they cannot hear the conversation taking place.9 What’s at stake is not whether someone can listen in but whether one should. Eti- quette and politeness operate as a social force that challenges what’s functionally possible.

Although Bly and her mother do not find resolution in the three- minute radio segment, Bly accepts that there is nothing she can do to stop her mother from snooping. She concludes instead that journal- ing sites “are becoming lame” because parents are starting to create their own profiles and use these services to meet strangers, failing to recognize the hypocrisy in their advice about talking to strangers. Made in 2006, Bly’s arguments are specific to the journaling site LiveJournal, but I heard these same sentiments repeated over the

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years in reference to numerous other social media sites, especially Facebook. In 2012, when I asked teens who were early adopters of Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram why they preferred these services to Facebook, I heard a near- uniform response: “Because my parents don’t know about it.” The sites of practice change, but many teens get frustrated when adults “invade” teen- centric spaces, and so, in an attempt to achieve privacy, some move on to newer sites and apps to avoid parents and other adults.

Although Bly’s desire to seek freedom from her mother’s gaze prompted her to leave a service she once enjoyed, the increasing popularity of social media—and the challenges brought on by multiple audiences—are forcing other teens to reconsider how they achieve privacy in networked publics more generally. Some are perennially searching for adult- free zones, but this cat- and- mouse game gets tiresome, especially when par- ents quickly catch on to the “new” site. Much to many adults’ surprise, teens aren’t looking to hide; they just want privacy.10 As a result, many teens are developing innovative solutions to achieve privacy in public. To get there, they must grapple with the tools that are available to them, the norms that shape social practices, and their own agency.

Achieving Privacy by Controlling the Social Situation Privacy is a complex concept without a clear definition.11 Supreme

Court Justice Louis Brandeis described privacy as “the right to be let alone,” while legal scholar Ruth Gavison describes privacy as a mea- sure of the access others have to you through information, attention, and physical proximity.12 Taking a structuralist tactic, legal scholar Alan Westin argues that privacy is “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.”13 These different—but related—definitions highlight control over access and visibility. Although the failure to reach consensus on a definition of privacy may be frustrating to some, legal scholar Daniel Solove argues that each approach to privacy reveals insight into how we manage privacy in everyday life.14

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Public discourse around privacy often centers on hiding or opting out of public environments, whereas scholars and engineers often focus more on controlling the flow of information. These can both be helpful ways of thinking about privacy, but as philosopher Helen Nis- senbaum astutely notes, privacy is always rooted in context.15 Much of the scholarly conversation around privacy focuses on whether or not someone has—or has lost—privacy. Yet, for the teens that I inter- viewed, privacy isn’t necessarily something that they have; rather it is something they are actively and continuously trying to achieve in spite of structural or social barriers that make it difficult to do so. Achieving privacy requires more than simply having the levers to control information, access, or visibility. Instead, achieving privacy requires the ability to control the social situation by navigating com- plex contextual cues, technical affordances, and social dynamics. Achieving privacy is an ongoing process because social situations are never static. Especially in networked publics, the persistent, search- able nature of interactions complicates any temporal boundaries. Comments written weeks ago can easily be fodder for current dra- mas, and it’s often difficult to discern when a conversation starts and ends in an asynchronous texting channel.

Controlling a social situation in an effort to achieve privacy is nei- ther easy nor obvious. Doing so requires power, knowledge, and skills. First, people must have a certain degree of agency or power within a social situation, which means that they must either have social status or take measures to effectively resist those who are more powerful within that situation. Second, people must have a reasonable under- standing of the social situation and context in which they are operat- ing. And third, people must have the skills to manage the social situation in order to both understand and affect how information flows and is interpreted. These prerequisites for achieving privacy can be overwhelming. Furthermore, they are often taken for granted by those questioning why youth don’t do more to manage their privacy.

When teens try to achieve privacy in networked publics, they often struggle with these foundational elements. In social settings

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where parents lurk over teens’ shoulders under the guise of making sure their children are safe, teens often lack the agency necessary to control the social situation.16 The dynamics of mediated social situ- ations—including invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and persis- tent content—further complicate things, making it incredibly difficult for teens to imagine the boundaries of these mediated social situations. Finally, it’s hard to develop the skills to manage how information will flow within a social situation when the underlying affordances change regularly. For example, when sites like Facebook repeatedly alter their privacy settings, developing the necessary skills to manage how visible content should be becomes, if not next to impossible, then incredibly labor- intensive. Given all of this, teens cannot easily control the flow of information on social media. Some teens understand this intuitively; others struggle with this because popular rhetoric focuses so heavily on access and control. The most creative teens often respond to the limitations they face by experi- menting with more innovative approaches to achieving privacy in order to control the social situation. This typically involves working around technical affordances, reclaiming agency, and using novel strategies to reconfigure the social situation.

Public by Default, Private Through Effort The default in most interpersonal conversations, even those that

take place in public settings, is that interactions are private by default, public through effort. For example, when two people are chatting in a café, they can assume a certain level of privacy. Parts of the conver- sation may get recounted later, but unless someone within hearing range was surreptitiously recording the conversation, the conversa- tion most likely remains somewhat private due to social norms around politeness and civil inattention. There are many examples of people violating this norm, including Linda Tripp’s decision to record Monica Lewinsky’s confession and paparazzi using long- range cam- eras to capture celebrities from afar.17 However, these are seen as vio- lations because most people do not assume that their conversation

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will be publicized if they understand the social situation to be intimate.

In a mediated world, assumptions and norms about the visibility and spread of expressions must be questioned. Many of the most popular genres of social media are designed to encourage participants to spread information. On a site like Facebook, it is far easier to share with all friends than to manipulate the privacy settings to limit the visibility of a particular piece of content to a narrower audience. As a result, many participants make a different calculation than the one they would make in an unmediated situation. Rather than asking themselves if the information to be shared is significant enough to be broadly publicized, they question whether it is intimate enough to require special protection. In other words, when participating in net- worked publics, many participants embrace a widespread public- by- default, private- through- effort mentality.

Because of this public- by- default framework, most teens won’t bother to limit the audience who can see what they consider to be mundane conversations on Facebook. Teens will regularly share things widely on Facebook simply because they see no reason to make the effort to make those pieces of content private. For example, teens will share “Happy Birthday” messages or bored notes where they ask others what they’re doing openly because they don’t see these particular interactions as having much significance. The sum of interactions that they have online appear to be much more public because teens don’t go out of their way to make minutiae private.18 Adults complain that teens are wasting their time publicizing trivia, whereas teens feel as though their audience can filter out anything that appears to be irrelevant.

This does not mean that teens never restrict the visibility of con- tent. When they think something might be sensitive, they often switch to a different medium, turning to text messages or chat to communicate with smaller audiences directly. Of course, sometimes they also mess up, intentionally or unintentionally. They might post an inappropriate comment that they know will spark a fight because

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they’re trying to get attention or because they’re lashing out. They might post a photo that they don’t think will be particularly contro- versial given their imagined audience, only to have that photo cause drama or result in other unexpected trouble. Teens do think through the social cost to what they post, but they don’t always get it right.

Teens are aware that technology has shifted sharing norms, but they see this more in terms of what’s visible than as an underlying value change. In North Carolina, I met Alicia, a white seventeen- year- old who articulated how she felt technology had shaped infor- mation sharing.

I just think that [technology is] redefining what’s acceptable for people to put out about themselves. I’ve grown up with tech- nology so I don’t know how it was before this boom of social networking. But it just seems like instead of spending all of our time talking to other individual people and sharing things that would seem private we just spend all of our time putting it in one module of communication where people can go and access it if they want to. It’s just more convenient.

Alicia recognizes that the public- by- default dynamic creates a con- flict around privacy, but she thinks that it’s a red herring. “When [adults] see [our photo albums] or when they see conversations on Facebook wall to wall, they think that it’s this huge breach of privacy. I just think it’s different. . . . I think privacy is more just you choos- ing what you want to keep to yourself.” Alicia is not giving up on privacy just because she chooses to share broadly. Instead, she believes that she can achieve privacy by choosing what not to share.

By focusing on what to keep private rather than what to publicize, teens often inadvertently play into another common rhetorical crutch—the notion that privacy is necessary only for those who have something to hide. Indeed, many teens consciously seek out privacy when they’re trying to restrict access to a narrower audience either out of respect or out of fear. But as content becomes increasingly persis- tent, teens are also much more aware of the unintended consequences

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of having data available that could easily be taken out of context at a later time.

In DC, I met an African American seventeen- year- old named Shamika who found that her peers loved to use old status updates and point to them in a new context in order to “start drama.” She found this infuriating because the posts that she wrote a month ear- lier were never intended as fodder for current arguments. To deal with this, Shamika took radical measures to delete content from the past. Each day, when she logged into Facebook, she’d read comments she received and then delete them. She’d scan through the comments she’d left on friends’ updates and photos and delete those. She systematically cleansed her Facebook presence in a practice known as “whitewalling” in which she made certain that the front of her Facebook page—originally called the “wall”—was blank, revealing the background color of white. When I remarked to Shamika that anyone could copy and paste that content and bring it back at a later date, she nodded knowingly before telling me that doing so would be “creepy.” In other words, by using technology to signal what was expected, she shifted the burden from being a matter of technological access to being about a violation of social norms.

Although persistence has become de facto on most major social media, new apps have begun to emerge that call this normative affor- dance into question. For example, in 2013, teens starting using Snap- chat, a photo- sharing app in which images purportedly self- destruct after being viewed. Given the assumption that teens use such services only to share inappropriate content, journalists often referred to this application in the same breath as sexting or the sharing of inappro- priate sexual images. But in casually asking teens about Snapchat, I found most were using the app to signal that an image wasn’t meant for posterity. They shared inside jokes, silly pictures, and images that were funny only in the moment. Rather than viewing photographs as an archival production, they saw the creation and sharing of these digital images as akin to an ephemeral gesture. And they used Snap- chat to signal this expectation.

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As discussed in the introduction, technical affordances and design defaults do influence how teens understand and use particular social media, but they don’t dictate practice. As teens encounter particular technologies, they make decisions based on what they’re trying to achieve. More often than not, in a technical ecosystem in which making content private is more difficult than sharing broadly, teens choose to share, even if doing so creates the impression that they have given up on privacy. It’s not that every teen is desperate for wide- spread attention; plenty simply see no reason to take the effort to minimize the visibility of their photos and conversations. As a result, interactions that would be ephemeral in an unmediated space are suddenly persistent, creating the impression that norms have radi- cally changed even though they haven’t. Instead of going out of their way to achieve privacy by restricting the visibility of particular pieces of content, teens develop other strategies for achieving privacy in public.

Social Steganography Children love to experiment with encoding messages. From pig

latin to invisible ink pens, children explore hidden messages when they’re imagining themselves as spies and messengers. As children grow up, they look for more sophisticated means of passing messages that elude the watchful eyes of adults. In watching teens navigate networked publics, I became enamored of how they were regularly encoding hidden meaning in publicly available messages. They were engaged in a practice that Alice Marwick and I called “social steg- anography,” or hiding messages in plain sight by leveraging shared knowledge and cues embedded in particular social contexts.

The practice of hiding in plain sight is not new. When ancient Greeks wanted to send a message over great distances, they couldn’t rely on privacy. Messengers could easily be captured and even encoded messages deciphered. The most secure way to send a private message was to make sure that no one knew that the message existed in the first place. Historical sources describe the extraordinary lengths

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to which Greeks went, hiding messages within wax tablets or tattoo- ing them on a slave’s head and allowing the slave’s hair to grow out before sending him or her out to meet the message’s recipient.19 Although these messages could be easily read by anyone who both- ered to look, they became visible only if the viewer knew to look for them in the first place. Cryptographers describe this practice of hiding messages in plain sight as steganography.

Social steganography uses countless linguistic and cultural tools, including lyrics, in- jokes, and culturally specific references to encode messages that are functionally accessible but simultaneously mean- ingless. Some teens use pronouns while others refer to events, use nicknames, and employ predetermined code words to share gossip that lurking adults can’t interpret. Many teens write in ways that will blend in and be invisible to or misinterpreted by adults. Whole con- versations about school gossip, crushes, and annoying teachers go unnoticed as teens host conversations that are rendered meaningless to outside observers.

These practices are not new. Teens have long used whatever tools are around them to try to share information under the noses of their teachers and parents. At school, passing notes and putting notes in lockers are classic examples of how teens use paper, pen, and ingenu- ity to share information. Graffiti on bathroom walls may appear sim- ply to be an act of vandalism, but these scrawled markings also convey messages. As new technologies have entered into teen life, it’s not surprising that teens also use them in similarly cryptic ways to communicate with one another. Texting gossip during class serves much of the same purpose as passing a note, yet it doesn’t require having to move a physical object, which reduces the likelihood of getting caught. But encoding messages guarantees only that if all else fails, the meaning will not become accessible, even if control over the information itself is unsuccessful.

When Carmen, a Latina seventeen- year- old living in Boston, broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” She wanted her friends to know how she was feeling. Like many of her peers,

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Carmen shared her emotions by using song lyrics. Thus, her first instinct was to post song lyrics from an “emo” or depressing song, but she was worried that her mother might interpret the lyric in the wrong way. This had happened before. Unfortunately, Carmen’s mom regularly “overreacted” when Carmen posted something with significant emotional overtones. Thus, she wanted to find a song lyric that conveyed what she felt but didn’t trigger her mom to think she was suicidal.

She was also attentive to the way in which her mother’s presence on Facebook tended to disrupt the social dynamics among her friends. Carmen and her mom are close and, for the most part, Carmen loves having her mom as one of her friends on Facebook, but her mom’s incessant desire to comment on Facebook tends to discourage responses from her friends. As Carmen told me, when her mother comments, “it scares everyone away. Everyone kind of disappears after the mom post.” She wanted to make sure to post something that her friends would respond to, even if her mom jumped in to comment.

Carmen settled on posting lyrics from “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This song sounds happy but is sung during a scene in the Monty Python movie Life of Brian in which the main character is being crucified. Carmen knew that her immigrant Argentinean mother would not understand the British cultural reference, but she also knew her close friends would. Only a few weeks earlier, she and her geeky girlfriends had watched the film together at a sleepover and laughed at the peculiar juxtaposition of song lyric and scene. Her strategy was effective; her mother took the words at face value, imme- diately commenting on Facebook that it was great to see her so happy. Her friends didn’t attempt to correct her mother’s misinterpretation. Instead, they picked up their phones and texted Carmen to see if she was OK.

Part of what makes Carmen’s message especially effective is that she regularly posts song lyrics to express all sorts of feelings. As a result, this song lyric blended into a collection of other song lyrics, quotes, and comments. She did not try to draw attention to the message itself

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but knew that her close friends would know how to interpret what they saw. And they did. Her friends had the cultural knowledge about what references were being made to interpret and contextualize the message underneath the song lyric. Thus, she conveyed meaning to some while sharing only a song lyric with many more.

While many teens encode meaning as a strategy for navigating visibility, other teens leverage similar techniques to tease their class- mates with secrets. For example, some teens use pronouns and song lyrics in ways that make it very clear to the onlooker that they are not “in the know.” In North Carolina, I was browsing Facebook with a white seventeen- year- old named Serena when we stumbled across a status update written by her classmate Kristy. Kristy’s update said, “I’m sick and tired of all of this,” and was already “Liked” by more than thirty people. I asked Serena what this meant, and she went into a long explanation about the dramas between Kristy and Cathy. Sure enough, over on Cathy’s profile was a status update that read, “She’s such a bitch,” which was also liked by dozens of people. As an out- sider, I had no way of knowing that these two posts were related to each other, let alone what was referenced by the pronouns “this” and “she.” But Serena could fully interpret the drama that was unfolding; she knew the players, and she knew what the fight was about. She brought all of this knowledge to her interpretation of what she saw on Facebook, yet she also knew that many of her classmates and none of her teachers would know what was happening. Although outsiders were surely seeing these individual messages, few would dare ask.

When teenagers post encoded messages in a visible way, they are aware that people outside of their intended audience will be curious. Some will find the uninterpretable messages to be a frustrating marker of popularity, while others will see them as an enticing oppor- tunity to learn more. Some will investigate, while others will ignore what they can’t understand. When I asked Jenna, a white seventeen- year- old from a different North Carolina school, how she felt about seeing encoded messages, she told me that it depended on who was writing the message.

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If it’s someone that I want to know what they’re talking about, then I’ll try to investigate it. I’ll look at the wall, a conversation or something. But [sometimes] I don’t really care what so- and- so is doing. I have friends from when I went to Malaysia. They were all about Facebook. . . . And sometimes I hide them because whatever they’re talking about is confusing to me because I don’t know what they’re talking about or I get stuff from them that I don’t really want.

Many teens are happy to publicly perform their social dramas for their classmates and acquaintances, provided that only those in the know will actually understand what’s really going on and those who shouldn’t be involved are socially isolated from knowing what’s unfolding. These teens know that adults might be present, but they also feel that, if asked, they could create a convincing alternate inter- pretation of what was being discussed. Through such encoded lan- guage, teens can exclude people who are not part of the cycle of gossip at school, including parents, teachers, and peers outside their imme- diate social sphere.20

Over the decade that I observed teens’ social media practices, I watched encoding content become more common. In 2010–2011, teens started talking about subliminal tweeting, or “subtweeting,” to refer to the practice of encoding tweets to render them meaningless to clueless outsiders. More often than not, they employed this term when referencing various teen dramas that occurred between friends and classmates that required insider knowledge to decode. In other words, teens subtweet to talk behind someone else’s back. Although this is only one technique for encoding information, the rise of this term highlights how popular the practice has become.21

Encoding content, subtweeting, and otherwise engaging in social steganography offers one strategy for reclaiming agency in an effort to achieve privacy in networked publics. In doing so, teens recognize that limiting access to meaning can be a much more powerful tool for achieving privacy than trying to limit access to the content itself.

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Although not all teenagers are carefully crafting content to be under- stood by a limited audience, many are exploring techniques like this to express themselves privately in situations in which they assume that others are watching.

Living with Surveillance In 2008, the New York Times published an article called “Text Gen-

eration Gap: U R 2 Old (JK).” The piece begins with an anecdote about a father shuttling around his daughter and her friend. They are talking, and Dad interrupts to give his opinion; the girls roll their eyes. And then there is silence, while the girls start texting. When Dad com- ments to his daughter that she’s being rude for texting on her phone rather than talking to her friend, the daughter replies: “But, Dad, we’re texting each other. I don’t want you to hear what I’m saying.”22

Teens have many words for the kinds of everyday surveillance that they have grown accustomed to: lurking, listening in, hovering, and being “in my business.” Many of the privacy strategies that teens imple- ment are intended to counter the power dynamic that emerges when parents and other adults feel as though they have the right to watch and listen. They shift tools and encode content, use privacy settings, and demand privacy.23 Some teens even go to extremes to challenge adults’ surveillance.

In Washington, DC, my colleague Alice Marwick interviewed an eighteen- year- old black teen named Mikalah who had grown accus- tomed to ongoing surveillance by adults. Having been in and out of different foster care settings, she was used to having state agencies and her varying guardians regularly check in on her, online and offline. Frustrated by their attempts to access what she posted on Facebook, she decided to delete her account. When she went to do so, she was shown a message discouraging her from leaving Facebook. Pictures of her friends were portrayed, along with a note about how they would miss her on the site. Facebook also gave her a different option—she could simply deactivate her account. If she took this option, her pro- file would disappear, but she could login at any time and reactivate

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her account, making her profile reappear. Doing so would allow her to preserve her account, including her content, friends, comments, and settings.

Presented with this option, Mikalah had an idea. She deactivated her account. The next day, she logged in and reactivated her account, chatted with friends, and caught up on the day’s conversations. When she was done, she deactivated her account again. The next night, she repeated this same pattern. By repeatedly deactivating and reactivat- ing her account, she turned Facebook into a real- time tool. Anyone who checked in on her when she was logged in would find her account, but if they searched for her during off hours, she was miss- ing. From Mikalah’s perspective, this was a privacy- achieving prac- tice because she only logged in at night, whereas the adults she encountered seemed to log in only during the day. By repurposing the deactivation feature to meet her needs, Mikalah found a way to control the social situation to the best of her ability.

Mikalah’s approach is extreme, but it highlights the measures that some teens take to achieve privacy in light of ongoing surveillance. Teens’ experiences with surveillance vary tremendously. Those who are marginalized—typically because of their race or socioeconomic status—are much more likely to experience state surveillance than those who are privileged, but even privileged youth must contend with parental surveillance.24

Although not all parents and guardians are trying to control their children’s every move, many believe that being a “good” parent means being all- knowing. I regularly heard parents say that being a responsible parent required them to violate their children’s privacy, especially when the internet is involved. In an online forum, Chris- tina, a mother from New York, explained her reasoning. “I do not believe teenagers ‘need’ privacy—not when it comes to the Internet. I track everything my kids do online. I search their bedrooms too. I’m the parent—I’m not their friend.” When a teen responds to her post by arguing that parents should not look over their children’s shoulders, Christina responds critically.

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Annoying or not, I do it and will always do it. It’s MY computer. I also log in and check their history, and track where they go, who they talk to . . . everything. I’m a mom. It is my responsibil- ity to protect them. I wouldn’t let them talk to strangers “irl” so why would I let them do it online without supervising? That’s just foolish, imo. If my girls don’t like my spying, they’re free to not use the computer.

Christina’s attitude is not universal, but it does reflect a style of “intensive” parenting that is quite common in the United States.25 Legal scholars Gaia Bernstein and Zvi Triger have found that the norms around intensive parenting are increasingly part of public dis- course and inscribed into law, making parents liable if they don’t abide by the cultural logic of intensive parenting.26 Thus, even when parents don’t share Christina’s attitudes, there is significant pressure for them to engage in acts of surveillance to be “good” parents. And given the digital traces that teens leave behind as a byproduct of their mediated conversations, many parents feel the need to track, read, and consume every interaction their children have in networked pub- lics, even though doing so in an unmediated world is completely untenable.

Christina may feel that she has the right to track her children’s movements as long as they are in her house, but other parents make themselves all- knowing by being always present. In Michigan, Bianca, a white sixteen- year- old, told me that there is no such thing as privacy in her house because of her family dynamics. The problem isn’t just that her parents are always around, but they seem to feel as though they have the right to be a part of any interaction that occurs within earshot. Bianca told me that it’s impossible to have a conversa- tion with her best friend in her house because “my family butts in to everything.” Not only do Bianca’s parents listen in on her conversa- tions—whether they occur on the phone, via instant messaging, or in the living room—but they even interrupt to ask for clarifications. Rolling her eyes in agreement, Bianca’s best friend explained that it’s

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much better for them to hang out at her house because her mother gives the girls “space.”

Parental nosiness is not new. In an era before cell phones, teens prized cordless phones precisely because they could be taken to a pri- vate space.27 Even then, parents—and siblings—often used separate phones to listen in. Today, parental nosiness extends to kids’ online encounters. In many households, the computer occupies a shared space—in part because parents are told that kids’ safety depends on parental awareness of what their children are doing online.

Although most of the teens I interviewed did not mind the central location of the computer, quite a few complain about their parents’ ongoing tendency to hover. In Massachusetts, Kat, a white fifteen- year- old, told me that she found her mother’s behavior annoying. “When I’m talking to somebody online, I don’t like when they stand over my shoulder, and I’ll be like, ‘Mom, can you not read over my shoulder?’ Not that I’m saying something bad. It just feels weird. I don’t like it.” Kat isn’t ashamed of what she’s doing online—and she has even willingly given her mother her Facebook password—but she hates feeling watched. Some teens see privacy as a right, but many more see privacy as a matter of trust. Thus, when their parents choose to snoop or lurk or read their online posts, these teens see it as a signal of distrust. Teens like Kat get upset when their parents never leave them alone when they’re online because they read this as a lack of confidence in their actions.

This issue of trust also emerges in relationship to passwords. Many teens are comfortable sharing their passwords with their parents “in case of an emergency” but expect that their parents will not use them to snoop. Christopher, a white fifteen- year- old from Alabama, told me that his parents had all of his passwords but that he expected them not to log in to his accounts unless there was a serious issue. He respected his parents’ concern and desire to protect him, but in return, he expected them to trust him. Although he believed nothing in his accounts would upset his parents, he also said he would be angry if they logged in just to see what he was doing. Like many of his peers,

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Christopher believes that there is a significant difference between having the ability to violate privacy and making the choice to do so.

Whether privacy is a “right” that children can or cannot have, or a privilege that teens must earn, adult surveillance shapes teens’ under- standing of—and experience with—privacy. In his book Discipline and Punish, philosopher Michel Foucault describes how surveillance operates as a mechanism of control. When inmates believe they are being watched, they conform to what they believe to be the norms of the prison and the expectations of their jailors. Surveillance is a mechanism by which powerful entities assert their power over less powerful individuals. When parents choose to hover, lurk, and track, they implicitly try to regulate teens’ practices. Parents often engage in these acts out of love but fail to realize how surveillance is a form of oppression that limits teens’ ability to make independent choices. Regardless of how they explicitly choose to respond to it, teens are configured by the surveillance that they experience. It shapes their understanding of the social context and undermines their agency, challenging their ability to control the social situation meaningfully. As a result, what teens’ do to achieve privacy often looks quite differ- ent than what most adults would expect as appropriate tactics. Teens assume that they are being watched, and so they try to find privacy within public settings rather than in opposition to public- ness.

Privacy as Process Taylor is not one to share, and if she had her druthers, she wouldn’t

tell her friends much about what’s happening in her life. She under- stands that her friends mean well, but the Boston- based white fifteen- year- old is a reserved person, and she doesn’t like it when people are “in [her] business.” To combat nagging questions from friends and classmates, she has started creating a “light version” of her life that she’ll regularly share on Facebook just so that her friends don’t pester her about what’s actually happening. Much to her frustration, she finds that sharing at least a little bit affords her more privacy than sharing nothing at all.

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She’s not alone. Many public figures find that the appearance of unlimited sharing allows them to achieve privacy meaningfully. Heather Armstrong, a well- known blogger referred to by her nick- name “Dooce,” once remarked: “People I meet tell me, ‘It’s so weird I know everything about you.’ No you don’t! Ninety- five percent of my life is not blogged about.”28 Through the act of sharing what appears to be everything, bloggers like Armstrong appear to be vul- nerable and open while still carving off a portion of their lives to keep truly private.

In a world in which posting updates is common, purposeful, and performative, sharing often allows teens to control a social situation more than simply opting out. It also guarantees that others can’t define the social situation. Sitting in an afterschool program in Los Angeles, I casually asked a teen participant why she shared so many embarrassing photos of herself on her profile. She laughed and told me that it was a lot safer if she shared her photos and put them in context by what she wrote than if she did not because she knew that her friends also had embarrassing photos. They’d be happy to embar- rass her if she let them. But by taking preemptive action and mock- ing herself by writing dismissive messages on photos that could be interpreted problematically, she undermined her friends’ ability to define the situation differently. After explaining her logic, she contin- ued on to explain how her apparent exhibitionism left plenty of room for people to not focus in on the things that were deeply intimate in her life.

In most cases where people share to maintain privacy, they do because they do not want someone to have power over them. Perfor- mative sharing may or may not be healthy. For example, I’ve met les- bian, gay, and transgendered teens who extensively share to appear straight so that people don’t ask about their sexuality, and I’ve met abused teens who tell extravagant stories about their lives so that no one asks what’s really happening at home. Issues emerge when teens start to deceive in order to keep the truth private. But by and large, when teens share to create a sense of privacy, they are simply asserting

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agency in a social context in which their power is regularly under- mined. The most common way that this unfolds is when teens system- atically exclude certain information from what is otherwise a rich story. For example, plenty of teens tell their parents about what hap- pened at school without telling them information that would reveal that they have a crush. On one hand, these teens are hiding, but on the other hand, they’re sharing in order to hold onto a space for privacy.

Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context. Cynics often suggest that only people who have something to hide need privacy. But this argument is a dis- traction.29 Privacy is valuable because it is critical for personal develop- ment. As teenagers are coming of age, they want to feel as though they matter. Privacy is especially important for those who are marginalized or lack privilege within society. Teenagers have not given up on pri- vacy, even if their attempts to achieve it are often undermined by peo- ple who hold power over them. On the contrary, teens are consistently trying out new ways of achieving privacy by drawing on and modern- izing strategies that disempowered people have long used.30 Rather than finding privacy by controlling access to content, many teens are instead controlling access to meaning.

It’s easy to think of privacy and publicity as opposing concepts, and a lot of technology is built on the assumption that you have to choose to be private or public. Yet in practice, both privacy and pub- licity are blurred. Rather than eschewing privacy when they encoun- ter public spaces, many teens are looking for new ways to achieve privacy within networked publics. As such, when teens develop inno- vative strategies to achieve privacy, they often reclaim power by doing so. Privacy doesn’t just depend on agency; being able to achieve privacy is an expression of agency.

3 addiction what makes teens obsessed with social media?

In a 2009 New York Times article, “To Deal with Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook,” psychologist Kimberly Young, director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery, describes dozens of teenagers she’s met who tried to quit Facebook. “It’s just like any other addic- tion,” Young says. “It’s hard to wean yourself.”1

I also came across several teens who, because of limited time, challenging social dynamics, or a need to disengage, decided to quit different social media sites.2 Andrew, a white high school senior in Nashville, made a pact with a friend to leave Facebook, or to commit “Facebook suicide,” because he felt “addicted” to it. He found that he’d login at night, stay on the site until two o’clock in the morning, and then be frustrated with himself for not getting any sleep. He recounted telling himself, “This is stupid and it’s having control of my life and I don’t want that with anything.” Andrew and his friend deactivated their profiles within minutes of each other, using the same computer.

Andrew’s decision had consequences. He said that not having an account cramped his social life. He had more trouble finding out about social activities, and he found negotiating interpersonal rela- tionships more challenging. He explained not being able to look up

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or “stalk” new friends as one example. To justify his decision, he thought about how older generations managed to get by without Facebook and decided that he was both willing to make and capable of making the sacrifice. “I just kind of remind myself that it’s a social networking site,” he said, “which is kind of a smart and dumb idea at the same time to me.” Then he added, “Not really. It’s a smart idea, but . . . I should be more mature and get off Facebook.” Thinking of his relationship to Facebook as an addiction allowed him to question what had become normative. By dismissing Facebook as insignificant and his frequent participation as immature, Andrew felt that he gained control over his relationship to the site and all that the rela- tionship signaled.

Although teens often use the word addiction in passing reference to their online activities, media coverage of teens’ use of social media amplifies the notion that the current generation of youth is uncon- trollably hooked on these new technologies and unable to control their lives. Fear mongering stories often point to accounts of internet addiction boot camps in China and South Korea, where the compul- sion allegedly rivals alcoholism, drug addiction, and gambling.3 In the United States, media coverage frequently portrays American youth in dark bedrooms with only the glow of the screen illuminat- ing their faces, implying that there’s a generation of zombified social media addicts who are unable to tear themselves away from the streams of content from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This media- driven image of social media addiction looks nothing like the dynamic that Andrew was describing when he used the same term.

There is no doubt that some youth develop an unhealthy relation- ship with technology. For some, an obsession with gaming or social media can wreak havoc on their lives, affecting school performance and stunting emotional development. However, the language of addiction sensationalizes teens’ engagement with technology and suggests that mere participation leads to pathology. This language also suggests that technologies alone will determine social outcomes. The overarching media narrative is that teens lack the capacity to

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maintain a healthy relationship with social media. It depicts passion- ate engagement with technology as an illness that society must address. It is easier for adults to blame technology for undesirable outcomes than to consider other social, cultural, and personal factors that may be at play.

When talking about teens’ engagement with social media, many adults use the concept of addiction to suggest that teens lack control. Some even cite their own obsession with social media as evidence to support this perspective. Anxieties about teens’ engagement with technology aren’t new, but few ask why teens embrace each new social technology with such fervor. The pictures of teens’ faces illu- minated by computer screens mirror earlier images of televisions’ entertaining glow luring in teenagers.4 Parents in previous genera- tions fretted about the hours teens whiled away hanging out or chatting on the phone. Today’s teens aren’t spending hours on landlines, but they are still conversing—updating others on social network sites, posting pictures and videos, and sending text messages to friends. Both entertainment and sociality are key reasons why teens invest so much energy in their online activities.

Although teens complain about how time drags when they must do things that they do not find enjoyable, time seems to slip away when in mediated environments with their peers. This can be disori- enting and a source of guilt. It is also the root of anxiety about social media addiction. Consider the following conversation that took place when I was interviewing a pair of white sophomores and best friends in Kansas at the height of MySpace’s popularity:

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?”

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Lilly: Yeah. You just get sucked in. I don’t know who the genius was that thought it up because it really sucks you in.

Addiction is one way to understand the dynamic that Lilly and Melanie are describing, but another is what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.”5 For Csikszentmihalyi, flow is the state of complete and utter absorption. It’s the same sense that’s colloqui- ally described it as being “in the zone.” Time disappears, attention focuses, and people feel euphorically engaged. This is the ideal state for creativity and artistry; athletes, musicians, and actors try to har- ness this mindset before they perform. It is critical to leadership, writing, software development, and education. Yet people also expe- rience this state when they gamble and play video games, two activi- ties that society often associates with compulsion or addiction.6 Deep engagement does not seem to be a problem in and of itself, unless coupled with a practice that is socially unacceptable, physically dam- aging, or financially costly.

Unlike most compulsions, teens are not less social when they engage deeply with social media. On the contrary, their participation in social media is typically highly social. Listening to teens talk about social media addiction reveals an interest not in features of their com- puters, smartphones, or even particular social media sites but in each other.7 Teen “addiction” to social media is a new extension of typical human engagement. Their use of social media as their primary site of sociality is most often a byproduct of cultural dynamics that have nothing to do with technology, including parental restrictions and highly scheduled lives. Teens turn to, and are obsessed with, which- ever environment allows them to connect to friends. Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.

The Addiction Narrative Addiction is a relatively modern concept. Although references to

people being “addicted to the bottle” date back centuries, it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that both medical professionals and

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the public consistently used the term addiction to refer to substance abuse.8 Before that, the term referred to a strong interest in or devo- tion to a particular pursuit such as gardening or reading.9 As con- cerns about addiction took hold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, addiction became a medical concern. Medical practitioners consistently blamed the substance, even while having conflicted feelings about how responsible an individual was for the problem. As the Journal of the American Medical Association opined in 1906, “It matters little whether one speaks of the opium habit, the opium disease, or the opium addiction.”10

As the twentieth century progressed, the public joined medical practitioners in taking addiction seriously, and the term addiction gained traction in popular discourse. Alcoholics Anonymous coalesced from a community of compulsive drinkers in 1935 to a national orga- nization, structured to help those struggling to get sober. In 1949, the World Health Organization convened a committee to consider “drugs liable to produce addiction.”11

Addiction initially referred only to drug and alcohol abuse, but as it entered popular parlance, the term came to mean behavioral com- pulsions as well, including gambling, overeating, self- injury, and sex. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of mental disorders, differentiates chemical dependence as substance disorders and behav- ioral compulsions as impulse- control disorders. Over the past twenty years, excessive use of information and communication technologies has become part of the addiction narrative, often under the umbrella of an impulse- control disorder.

In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addic- tion disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about “people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet.” Intending to parody society’s obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began dis- cussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: “I don’t think

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Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error.”12

Although Goldberg rejects the notion of internet addiction, other practitioners and researchers have called for labeling compulsive inter- net usage a disorder.13 Most of the clinical discussion around internet addiction focuses on whether “overuse” or “misuse” of the internet con- stitutes a disorder—as opposed to an obsession or compulsion. Experts also debate whether problematic engagement is simply a manifestation of depression, anxiety, or other disorders. Although some individuals’ unhealthy relationships with the internet seem to impede their ability to lead active lives, it is not clear that the internet is the source of the problem. But addiction is an easy and familiar trope.

Addiction is often represented in the media as a problem with youth culture. In 1938, the film Reefer Madness started a mass frenzy, depicting marijuana as a “killer weed” turning vulnerable young people into addicts. Rising heroin use in the late 1950s and 1960s heightened popular concern, amplified by the drug- related deaths of rock idols Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison at the start of the 1970s. Then, in 1971, an anonymously authored book brought the issue of addiction into direct contact with childhood, magnifying already widespread anxiety among parents. Go Ask Alice, purportedly the diary of a teenage girl, documents descent into addiction, ending with what the prologue indicates as an eventual overdose. Although some parents and educators want the book banned for describing drug use, others tout the book’s stark portrayal of substance abuse as proof of the dangers of drugs.14 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, popular media simultaneously valorized and demonized substance abuse, with young addicts taking center stage in movies like Trainspot- ting, Drugstore Cowboy, and The Basketball Diaries. This practice continues into the twenty- first century with TV shows like Skins and Celebrity Rehab.

Public discussions of addiction introduce conflicting sentiments. On one hand, American society takes medical and mental health

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concerns more seriously. On the other, celebrities often celebrate— and are still celebrated for—their out- of- control substance use. When Amy Winehouse, a beloved blues singer with a bad girl reputation, died in 2011, the media broadly discussed her death in terms of addic- tion. News reports detailed her struggles with alcohol and drugs, often referencing the lyrics of her signature song “Rehab,” which focus on her refusal to go to a drug rehabilitation clinic. Meanwhile, upon hearing of her death, many young people used a Twitter hashtag to celebrate her membership in #27club, a collection of famous musi- cians, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, whose drug and alcohol abuse contributed to early deaths at the age of twenty- seven.

The problem with popular discussions about addiction is that it doesn’t matter whether people are chemically or psychologically dependent on a substance or behavior. Anyone who engages in a practice in ways that society sees as putting more socially acceptable aspects of their lives in jeopardy are seen as addicted. When teenagers choose to use the internet for social or entertainment purposes instead of doing homework, parents are suspicious. When socializing or play results in less sleep or poorer grades, parents blame the technology. Of course, it is easy to imagine that teens may prefer to socialize with friends or relax instead of doing homework, even if these activities are not societally sanctioned. Instead of acknowledging this, many adults project their priorities onto teens and pathologize their children’s interactions with technology.

There are teens who do struggle significantly with impulse control, and we should not ignore the difficulties they face in managing their priorities. But instead of prompting a productive conversation, addic- tion rhetoric positions new technologies as devilish and teenagers as constitutionally incapable of having agency in response to the temp- tations that surround them.

Many adults believe that they have a sense of what’s “good” for teens—school, homework, focus, attention, and early bedtime— and many teens are acutely aware of how much society values such

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adult- oriented pursuits. But many adults are unaware of how social their everyday experiences are and how desperate teens are to have access to a social world like that which adults take for granted.

Although a century’s worth of research on chemical addiction, compulsion, and flow has offered tremendous insights into human psychology, not everyone is powerless in relation to the world around them. Teenagers may seem like a uniquely vulnerable population, but nothing is gained from framing their social media interactions in terms of a disease. Teens, like adults, are deeply social. But unlike adults, teens often have little freedom to connect with others on their own terms, and they clamor for sociality in ways that may look foreign to adults.

Growing Up with Limited Freedom Reflecting on her love for Facebook, Tara, a Vietnamese American

sixteen- year- old from Michigan, explains that her use of the site “is kinda like an addiction.” She laughs as she says this, noting, “It’s like everyone says all these bad things about it. It does take up your time. It does, but you can’t help it.” Tara likes Facebook because it allows her to connect with her friends. Like many of her peers, Tara spends hours each week viewing her friends’ photos and updates, writing comments, and reading comments left by others. For Tara, participat- ing on Facebook is a social necessity, a crucial component of her social life. This is not to say that it is the only part of that life, or even her preferred way of being with friends. When I tried to ask Tara why she spent so much time on Facebook instead of connecting offline, she cut me off, explaining that she would much prefer to hang out with her friends face to face but finds it impossible. At that point, her eighteen- year- old sister Lila jumped in to explain, “If you don’t have the option [of getting together in person], then you can just go online.”

Both girls made very clear that what mattered to them was hang- ing out with friends, and they were happy to use any means necessary to do so. In using the term addiction to describe their extensive use of Facebook, both Tara and Lila acknowledged that their parents didn’t

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approve of the amount of time they spent on the site. But their par- ents also forbade them from socializing out of the home as often as they would like. They struggled to find a term to express the gap between their perspective towards Facebook and their parents’ atti- tudes, particularly because they felt that it was easier to sneak in time on Facebook than to sneak out of the house. They nonchalantly referred to their extensive time online through the lens of addiction to highlight that they felt as though participation was central to their lives because their friends and peers really mattered to them. For them, Facebook was the only way to stay connected.

To many parents, the amount of time that teens spend on social media is evidence of addiction in a negative sense. These parents often believe that the technologies are in and of themselves the draw for their children. Such parents often go to great lengths to get their children off of social media, particularly when they’re concerned about how often or in what ways their children are using these sites. In Boston, a father paid his fourteen- year- old daughter two hundred dollars to deactivate her Facebook account for five months.15 After a teen girl in North Carolina used Facebook to complain about her father, her father responded by posting an irate video on YouTube in which he reads a letter he wrote to his daughter and then fires a gun at his daughter’s laptop.16 These are admittedly extreme responses— and there is a lot more to question in these cases than teens’ supposed addiction to social media—but these parents’ drastic measures reveal the frustration parents have with the technological artifacts them- selves.

I often heard parents complain that their children preferred com- puters to “real” people. Meanwhile, the teens I met repeatedly indi- cated that they would much rather get together with friends in person. A gap in perspective exists because teens and parents have different ideas of what sociality should look like. Whereas parents often high- lighted the classroom, after- school activities, and prearranged in- home visits as opportunities for teens to gather with friends, teens were more interested in informal gatherings with broader groups of

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peers, free from adult surveillance. Many parents felt as though teens had plenty of social opportunities whereas the teens I met felt the opposite.

Today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation.17 Many middle- class teenagers once grew up with the option to “do whatever you please, but be home by dark.” While race, socioeconomic class, and urban and suburban localities shaped particular dynamics of childhood, walking or bicycling to school was ordinary, and gathering with friends in public or commercial places— parks, malls, diners, parking lots, and so on—was commonplace. Until fears about “latchkey kids” emerged in the 1980s, it was normal for children, tweens, and teenagers to be alone. It was also common for youth in their preteen and early teenage years to take care of younger siblings and to earn their own money through paper routes, babysitting, and odd jobs before they could find work in more formal settings. Sneaking out of the house at night was not sanctioned, but it wasn’t rare either.

Childhood has changed. As a result of attending schools outside their neighborhoods, many teens know few youth their age who live in walking distance. Fear often dictates the edges of mobility. Even in suburban enclaves where crimes are rare, teens are warned of the riskiness of wandering outside. In countless communities I visited, families saw biking around the neighborhood as inherently unsafe. Many of the teens I met believed that danger lurked everywhere. They often echoed concerns presented by their parents. For example, Jordan, a fifteen- year- old living in a suburb in Austin, told me that she is not allowed to be outside without adult supervision. Although her father was born into a white middle- class family in the United States, her foreign mother’s fear shaped her childhood. “My mom’s from Mexico . . . and she thinks I’ll get kidnapped,” she said. Jordan felt as though getting kidnapped was unlikely, but she wasn’t inter- ested in tempting fate to find out. She too was scared of going to the neighborhood park because strangers lurked there, but she wished her mom would let her rollerblade on the street in front of the house.

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In many communities, parenting norms focus on limiting chil- dren’s access to public places, keeping an eye on their activities, and providing extensive structure. Many parents—especially those from wealthier and less crime- ridden communities—know that they have restricted their children’s mobility more than their parents restricted theirs. They argue that these restrictions are necessary in an increas- ingly dangerous society, even though the data suggest that contem- porary youth face fewer dangers than they did twenty years ago.18

Parents aren’t the only ones limiting teens’ mobility. Teens often self- restrict either to appease parents or because they believe that there are significant risks. Teens regularly echoed parental fears, also arguing that today’s world is much more unsafe than it previously was. Natalie, a white fifteen- year- old in Seattle, told me that she understands why her parents do not allow her to walk anywhere, but she wishes that the world were not so dangerous. She genuinely believes that the risks that her peers face are unprecedented.

The public and commercial spaces that I grew up with are now often seen as off- limits by both parents and teens.19 Policymakers have implemented countless curfew and loitering laws to address gangs, delinquency, and teen violence, thereby limiting teens’ access to public places.20 Even when parents don’t object and there are no legal restrictions involved, many food, shopping, and entertainment venues limit teens explicitly or implicitly, banning all teens or groups of teens. Some venues have even installed a new sound technology to ward off teens through a high- pitched sound that only children and adolescents can hear.21 If teens have the freedom and a place to go, they encounter new struggles when they try to get there. Limited access to cars was a regular refrain among teens I interviewed. In towns where public transit is an option, independent travel is often forbidden by parents. Even in cities, many teens never ride public transit alone except to take a school bus to and from school.

A study of how children get to school reveals the stark changes in mobility that have taken place over four decades. In 1969, 48 percent of children in grades kindergarten through eighth grade walked or

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biked to school compared to 12 percent who were driven by a family member. By 2009, those numbers had reversed; 13 percent walked or bicycled while 45 percent were driven.22 In a safety- obsessed society, parents continue to drop off and pick up students well into high school. Although studies that focus on the decline of biking and walking usually address the implications for childhood obesity, this shift also has significant social implications. For many youth, walk- ing or biking to school historically provided unstructured time with friends and peers. Even when teens commuted alone, they often arrived early enough to hang out near their lockers before school or stayed late enough to get some time with friends before heading home. This is no longer the case in many of the schools I observed.

On top of fear, restrictions, and limited mobility, the issue of time often arises as a key factor in limiting teens’ opportunities to social- ize. Many teens have limited free time, due to afterschool activities, jobs, religious services, and family expectations. Nicholas, a white sixteen- year- old from Kansas, told me that he lacked free time because sports took up time after school and on weekends. On the rare occasions when he had downtime, his options for socializing were limited. His parents expected him to attend sports events if he was participating in the sport, but his parents would not take him to other school sports events just to hang out. If he had free time outside of his activities, they told him to focus on schoolwork, community service, or other approved activities. Hanging out with friends was viewed as a waste of time. His parents felt that he had plenty of opportunities to socialize during the group activities he was involved in. Nicholas disagreed.

Many parents believe that keeping their children busy can keep them out of trouble. After I blogged about the restrictions on teenag- ers’ mobility, I received an email from Enrique, a parent in Austin. In it, he explained:

Bottom line is that we live in a society of fear; it is unfortunate but true. As a parent, I will admit that I protect my daughter

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immensely, and I don’t let my daughter go out to areas I can’t see her. Much different when I was a kid. Am I being over pro- tective? Maybe. But it is the way it is. Is it depressing? No it is not as we keep her busy very busy w/o making it depressing :- ) .

Rather than enacting physical restrictions, Enrique focused on struc- turing his daughter’s time to limit the likelihood that she would get into trouble, without making her feel overly constrained.

The decision to introduce programmed activities and limit unstructured time is not unwarranted; research has shown a correla- tion between boredom and deviance.23 In response to reports of such studies, many parents have gone into overdrive so that their children are never bored. As a result, many teens from middle- and upper- class backgrounds spend most of their days and nights in highly structured activities—sports, clubs, music lessons, and so on. This leaves little downtime for teens to reflect, play, socialize, or relax.

My interview with Myra, a middle- class white fifteen- year- old from Iowa, turned funny and sad when “lack of time” became a ver- bal tick in response to every question I asked her about connecting with friends. From learning Czech to track, from orchestra to work in a nursery, she told me that her mother organized “98%” of her daily routine. Myra did not like all of these activities, but her mother thought they were important. She was resigned to them. Lack of free- dom and control over her schedule was a sore topic for Myra. At one point, she noted with an exasperated tone that weekends were no freer than weekdays: “Usually my mom will have things scheduled for me to do. So I really don’t have much choice in what I’m doing Friday nights. . . . I haven’t had a free weekend in so long. I cannot even remember the last time I got to choose what I wanted to do over the weekend.” Myra noted that her mother meant well, but she was exhausted and felt socially disconnected because she did not have time to connect with friends outside of classes. The activities she participated in were quite formal, leaving little room for casual inter- actions as she raced from one pursuit to the next. In between, Myra

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would jump on the computer in the hopes of chatting with a friend. Friendship and sociality—always mediated but still important— filled the interstices of her life.

From wealthy suburbs to small towns, teenagers reported that parental fear, lack of transportation options, and heavily structured lives restricted their ability to meet and hang out with their friends face to face. Even in urban environments, where public transporta- tion presumably affords more freedom, teens talked about how their parents often forbade them from riding subways and buses out of fear. At home, teens grappled with lurking parents. The formal activ- ities teens described were often so highly structured that they allowed little room for casual sociality. And even when parents gave teens some freedom, they found that their friends’ mobility was stifled by their parents. While parental restrictions and pressures are often well intended, they obliterate unstructured time and unintentionally posi- tion teen sociality as abnormal. This prompts teens to desperately— and, in some cases, sneakily—seek it out. As a result, many teens turn to what they see as the least common denominator: asynchro- nous social media, texting, and other mediated interactions.

Reclaiming Sociality Amy, a biracial sixteen- year- old from Seattle, used MySpace to

socialize because her mobility was curtailed. Every day, after school she immediately goes home, where she feeds her younger sister, helps her with her homework, and does household chores. Occasionally, her parents allow her to go out on weekends, but when I asked her how often, her friend James responded by saying, “Slim to none.” Amy just shrugged in agreement. I asked her what she needed to do for her parents to allow her to go out. She spoke of the need to make sure the house was clean, while James rolled his eyes and said, “Your mom being in a good mood.” I asked her how she got permission to come to the interview with me, and she told me that her mom saw it as equivalent to a job because I was offering money for teens’ time. Amy told me that she was excited for the opportunity to hang out

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with her friends at the interview. After we finished, I got the sense that they were intending to tell her parents that the interview ran long just to buy more time.

Amy made it very clear that she didn’t prefer hanging out with friends online but felt that technology provided a rare opportunity to connect even when she couldn’t leave the house. When I asked her what she’d rather do, she explained, “Just go anywhere. I don’t care where, just not home. Somewhere with my friends, just out hanging out.” Resigned that this was not feasible, she spent as much time online as possible. As she explained, “My mom doesn’t let me out of the house very often, so that’s pretty much all I do, is I sit on MySpace and talk to people and text and talk on the phone, ’cause my mom’s always got some crazy reason to keep me in the house.”

Looking just at her participation on MySpace, an outsider might argue that Amy appears to be addicted to social media. Talking with her, it’s clear that she craves time with friends and uses any excuse to go online to do so. She is responding to the structural restrictions that make it difficult for her to achieve an age- old teen goal: get together with friends and hang out. Social media has become a place where teens can hold court. Their desire to connect, gossip, and hang out online makes sense in response to the highly organized and restricted lives that many teens lead.

Social media introduces new opportunities for housebound teens to socialize and people- watch, but it also provides an opportunity to relax. Serious and diligent students like friends Sasha and Bianca, white sixteen- year- olds from Michigan, often emphasized the need for social downtime. Sasha described her daily schedule this way: “I’ll study for a couple of hours and then I’ll talk to my friends for a cou- ple of hours or whatever, and that just helps refocus my mind and helps me absorb the information more than just constantly studying.” Then Bianca chimed in. “My brain has to stop taking in all the infor- mation.” She needed time to just “relax for a while.” Both of these teens were diligent students, and they saw socializing as an important complement to their hard work, a mechanism of rejuvenation.

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When I asked what they gained from these online interactions, Bianca defended socializing using adult- oriented language. She high- lighted the opportunity to learn “social skills” and clarified by stating, “You learn how to deal with different situations and different people, and just to work with people that you don’t like so much. So it just helps you.” This language is not how most teens explain their practice, but it is a spot- on assessment. When teens interact with others, they engage in tremendous informal learning, developing a sense of who they are in relation to others while building a holistic understanding of the social world. Teens may clamor to get access to social media simply to hang out, but there they gain access to a rich learning environment.

Being “addicted” to information and people is part of the human condition: it arises from a healthy desire to be aware of surroundings and to connect to society. The more opportunities there are to access information and connect to people, the more people embrace those situations. Whereas the colloquial term news junkie refers to people who rabidly consume journalistic coverage, I’ve never met a parent who worried that their child read the newspaper too often. Parents sometimes tease their children for being “bookworms,” but they don’t fret about their mental health. But when teens spend hours surfing the web, jumping from website to website, this often prompts concern. Parents lament their own busy schedules and lack of free time but dismiss similar sentiments from their children.

Unfortunately, when teens turn to social media for sociality and information, adults often see something wrong, and they blame the technology for the outcomes. For example, in The Shallows, technol- ogy critic Nicholas Carr denounces the internet as insidious. He argues that the internet radically reworks our brains, destroying our ability to focus by distracting us with irrelevant information. There is little doubt that teens’ brains are being rewired through their medi- ated interactions. As cognitive scientist Steven Pinker points out, stimuli have always reworked, and are continuously reworking, our brains. Challenging Carr, Pinker argues that, “far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us

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smart.”24 Popular science writer Steven Johnson makes a similar point in Everything Bad Is Good for You, pointing out that engaging with the increasingly sophisticated world of media sharpens our brains. The limitation of Carr’s argument stems from his assumption that technology alone does cultural work and that resultant outcomes lead to change that is inevitably bad. This logic, rooted in techno- logical determinism, fails to recognize the sociocultural context in which technology is situated.

I have little doubt that socializing online is rewiring teens’ brains. Through their engagement with social media, teens are learning to understand a deeply networked and intertwined world. Yet unlike Carr, I do not think that the sky is falling. My views are closer to those of scholar Cathy Davidson, who, in Now You See It, argues that children embrace new technologies to learn. This results in changes to learning that often confound adults who relish the environments with which they are familiar and in which they had opportunities to learn. When teens engage with networked media, they’re trying to take control of their lives and their relationship to society. In doing so, they begin to understand how people relate to one another and how information flows between people. They learn about the social world, and as Bianca points out, they develop social skills.

What’s at stake is not whether teens’ brains are changing—they are always changing—but what growing up with mediated sociality means for teens and for society generally. Teenagers may not yet be experts on navigating a world drowning in information and flush with opportunities for social interaction, but there is no reason to believe that they won’t develop those skills as they continue to engage with social media. There’s also no reason to think that digital celi- bacy will help them be healthier, happier, and more capable adults.

Coming of Age Without Agency Around the turn of the twentieth century, at the same time that

the conception of addiction was emerging, psychologist G. Stanley Hall embarked on a mission to define adolescence in order to give

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youth space to come of age without having to take on the full respon- sibilities of adulthood.25 He used data about behavioral differences to make an argument about maturation and cognition. Hall argued that children were savages incapable of reasoning and that adoles- cence marked a developmental stage in which young people began to recognize morality. He believed that it was important to protect youth during this stage and worked with moral reformers to put lim- itations on child labor, to mandate compulsory education, and to introduce a notion of juvenile justice. His work set in motion a shift that resulted in American society understanding adolescents simulta- neously as a vulnerable population that needed protection and as a potentially delinquent population that had not yet matured.

Hall was part of the significant social transformation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries known as the Progressive Era.26 This period in American history was a source of social activism and political reform affecting a wide array of issues. Alongside emerg- ing concerns about addiction was a rise in interest about the well- being of children that led to the curtailment of child labor and the creation of compulsory high school education.27 Hall played a central role in helping define what childhood and adolescence should look like, using protectionist rhetoric to insulate children as vulnerable populations that resembled the language being used by political reformers seeking to outlaw alcohol. Although the attitudes and beliefs professed by these moral reformers were not widespread dur- ing the Progressive Era, they are now nearly universal in contempo- rary discourse about childhood.

A century later, the frame of vulnerable children that Hall and his cohort popularized is still pervasive, and child protection has gone far beyond Hall’s initial prescriptions. Protecting children from forced labor, providing opportunities for education, and treating youth differently in criminal justice are all beneficial mainstays from Hall’s endeavors, but contemporary youth also face state- imposed curfews, experience limitations on where they can gather, and must get parental approval before they engage in a host of activities. By

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imagining teens as balls of uncontrollable hormones, society has sys- tematically taken agency away from youth over the past century.28 This hampers their maturation, while the resultant restrictions prompt youth to either submit to or resist adult authority.

Although child protective services is another productive output of this movement, the current state of foster care and mental health infrastructure is so fractured that it often results in children being doubly oppressed. Most adults are well meaning and supportive, but the same system that empowers parents also forces some youth to face abuse. Meanwhile, many teenagers see education no longer as an opportunity but as a requirement; rather than having the space to mature, teens must inhabit a highly structured environment that is supposedly for their own good. For many teens, learning is not rel- ished but despised, even as they engage in accidental learning when- ever they interact with others.

As the outcome of Hall’s movement unfolded over the twentieth century, the period between childhood and adulthood widened, and twenty- first-century American youth spend an extended period in a liminal stage with restricted opportunities and rights. In buying into adolescence, what we’ve created is a pressure cooker. Teens are desper- ate to achieve the full rights of adulthood, even if they don’t under- stand the responsibilities that this may entail. They are stuck in a system in which adults restrict, protect, and pressure them to achieve adult- defined measures of success. It’s a testament to the strength of teens that so many have developed strong coping mechanisms to manage the awkwardness of this liminal stage. Social media—far from being the seductive Trojan horse—is a release valve, allowing youth to reclaim meaningful sociality as a tool for managing the pressures and limitations around them.

As they make their way toward adulthood, teens need to learn how to engage in crucial aspects of maturation: self- presentation, manag- ing social relationships, and developing an understanding of the world around them. The structured and restrictive conditions that comprise the lives of many teens provides little room for them to

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explore these issues, but social media gives them a platform and a space where they can make up for what’s lost.

Grappling with Restrictions As teens seek out new spaces where they have agency, adults invent

new blockades to restrict youth power. The rhetoric of addiction is one example, a cultural device used to undermine teens’ efforts to reclaim a space. Restrictive adults act on their anxieties as well as their desire to protect youth, but in doing so, they perpetuate myths that produce the fears that prompt adults to place restrictions on teens in the first place. But this cycle doesn’t just undermine teens’ freedoms; it also pulls at the fabric of society more generally.

After reading a news article about my work, Mike, a father in Illinois, emailed me to explain that he is strict with his children because of what he perceives to be a decline in societal values.

The reason my children do not hang out as I used to as a teen is not due to predators necessarily, but due to other teens who have been raised on MTV, lack of parental guidance, and are treated as adults by their parents. . . . I believe MySpace further sends the entire dynamic down the rabbit hole. If parents took more responsibility for instilling values, morals and standards in their children (versus relying on the educational system, television, and the media), I feel that we could reclaim some of this lost teen freedom for our children.

Mike’s email highlights a wide array of intertwined issues. He blames technology, institutions, and individuals. Rather than focus- ing on how he can help his children navigate this ecosystem, he blames other families and implies that the best solution for his children is social isolation.

The concern that we’ve become disconnected as a society has become a common trope over the past two decades, and both schol- ars and the media have blamed everything from changes in food acquisition to neighborly isolation.29 Whatever the cause, fear and

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distrust of others is palpable and pervasive. Driving around the United States, I was shocked by the skepticism many parents held for other parents. For example, Anindita—a seventeen- year- old of Indian and Pakistani descent living in Los Angeles—told me that she wasn’t allowed to spend the night at friends’ places because her dad was concerned that other fathers or brothers might get drunk and take advantage of her. Although I initially thought that her experi- ence was unique, I was surprised to find other parents who forbade their children from participating in sleepovers, too.

When parents distrust others or the values of families around them, they often respond by trying to isolate their children. In a different community in Los Angeles, I met a fifteen- year- old boy named Mic whose Egyptian parents didn’t want him to socialize with American teens, whom they perceived as upholding unhealthy values learned from American parents. As a result, he was forbidden from making friends at school, talking on the phone, and using social media; he was allowed to socialize only with cousins and trusted friends of the family when his family went to the mosque. To manage this, his father dropped him off at school and made him wait in the car until the bell rang; he picked him up again for lunch and then immediately after school. These restrictions weighed on Mic, and he was regularly seeking out opportunities to connect with others in interstitial times at school, often trying to sneak access to the internet between classes to have some form of social outlet.

Mic’s father sent him to school because he believed that this was the only way for Mic to get an education. Unfortunately, Mic’s father failed to recognize that his restrictions hindered his son’s ability to succeed owing to the heavy emphasis that American educational sys- tems place on collaboration, both in and out of the classroom. As the school began demanding extracurricular coordination through information technologies, Mic floundered, which only resulted in more restrictions at home. Mic’s father failed to realize that Ameri- can educational systems take sociality for granted. Rather than see- ing socializing as a distraction from learning, schools are increasingly

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integrating learning with social experiences to prepare youth for collaborative, social work environments.

Although many parents have historically worked to minimize their children’s exposure to diverse cultural mores, teens’ use of social media often subverts the goals sought by moving to gated communi- ties or limiting exposure to broadcast media. By exploring broad net- works of people and diverse types of content, teens can easily get access to values and ideas that differ from what their parents try to instill. This is alluring to curious teens and terrifying to protective parents. As with earlier media genres that parents distrusted, many parents have chosen to demonize technologies that allow youth to escape their control. The rhetoric of addiction positions children as vulnerable to the seductiveness of technology, which in turn provides a concrete justification for restricting access and isolating children.

Most youth aren’t turning to social media because they can’t resist the lure of technology. They’re responding to a social world in which adults watch and curtail their practices and activities, justifying their protectionism as being necessary for safety. Social media has become an outlet for many youth, an opportunity to reclaim some sense of agency and have some semblance of social power. It has provided a window into society and an outlet for hanging out that these teens didn’t even know they had lost. But teen sociality is fraught and many adults are uncomfortable with teens having access to unstruc- tured time and unmanaged relationships.

The activities at the core of teens’ engagement with social media look quite similar to those that took place in shared settings in previ- ous generations—at sock hops, discos, and football game stands. Teens hang out, gossip, flirt, people watch, joke around, and jockey for status. These dynamics are at the heart of teen life, and because they play out in a mediated world, teens relish any opportunity to log in and engage with their peers and the teen- oriented social world that unfolds through networked publics. But this is not comforting to those adults who want their children to spend less time socializing with peers and more time engaging in adult- approved activities.

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Teens’ engagement with social media—and the hanging out it often entails—can take up a great deal of time. To many adults, these activities can look obsessive and worthless. Media narratives often propagate the notion that engagement with social media is destruc- tive, even as educational environments increasingly assume that teens are networked. Many adults put pressure on teens to devote more time toward adult- prioritized practices and less time socializing, fail- ing to recognize the important types of learning that take place when teens do connect. When teens orient themselves away from adults and toward their peers, parents often grow anxious and worried about their children’s future. The answer to the disconnect between parent goals and teen desires is not rhetoric that pathologizes teen practices, nor is it panicked restrictions on teen sociality. Rather, adults must recognize what teens are trying to achieve and work with them to find balance and to help them think about what they are encountering.