Danah Boyd grapples with the use of the word addiction in reference to teen’s online activity, and unrolls a few attitudes towards the dominantly adult anxiety of children’s overexposure to media. In her book, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens”, Boyd references dozens of interviews and examples of teens who share their story of online activity in an effort to catalogue healthy and unhealthy use of online communities. In the chapter about addiction, we learn that most clinical discussion surrounding addiction of any capacity is derived from an “overuse” or “misuse” of given behavior.

I discovered a video recently, revealing a institutionalized response to “Web Junkies”, or those who are addicted to the internet in China and it brought up several issues that Danah Boyd touched on, in psychological analysis of online addiction. The video is a bit disturbing at times and shows extreme institutionalized treatment facilities that wouldn’t be allowed in the United States for many reasons. Yet, even in my discomfort of viewing there are moments that I find myself agreeing with the intention of a treatment center.

Tao Ran, the addiction specialist at the treatment camp, works with kids who strategically wear diapers as a way to avoid using the restroom during binge gamming episodes. Every kid shown in the video shares a similar story of being brought by parents against their will, parents are still encouraged to stay and learn from Tao. Perhaps the only part in this video that Danah Boyd would remotely agree with, is when Tao explains the addiction as a manifestation of loneliness.

In our reading, Danah discusses the challenges of teens freely hanging out in person as a result of fearful parents and a dangerous society. This I understand firsthand as my parents were very protective and wouldn’t allow me to bike to my friends house “because something may happen”. So in an effort to appease my parents, I would stay in and satisfy my social desires online.

Teens are inherently social beings, and Danah Boyd makes a good point that, “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.” However I think the teens depicted in this video have a lot more than just an addiction to gaming that needs to be sorted out, attention on healing a personal sense of connectedness may be the most important step.

I found myself intrigued with this week’s reading of danah boyd’s It’s Complicated: the Social Lives of Networked Teens. I feel like she has taken the time to truly understand this community online and has brought to light real issues that I, being fresh out of my teenage years, can say really happen. One of these issues is the disagreement between adults and teens about personal privacy online. “Although many adults believe that they have the right to consume any teen content that is functionally accessible, many teens disagree” (58). As a teen, my mom had a rule that I couldn’t have a Facebook account unless she was my friend. She was open and honest with me, saying that she wanted to help me learn how to navigate having a social presence online. She did a great job at teaching me what was acceptable and unacceptable to post online, and I am definitely grateful for that. But I still never really got comfortable with the idea that she could read my posts. Like boyd was able to identify in many teens, it wasn’t that I had content I felt the need to hide from my mom. It was just that I wasn’t comfortable with her having full access to my posts directed towards my friends; it felt like she had a lens into my social life and therefore had the right to analyze it. I overheard her talking with my dad a few times about my online activity, whether she was speculating if I liked the boy who was in a picture I posted or if she was judging the online content posted by my friends that she was curious about. While I learned to shrug it off, knowing that this helicopter-parenting would end once I got older, I am starting to wonder if it is a permanently established norm now since I am an adult and she is still pouring over my social media accounts. When I got an Instagram last year, she made one just to follow my sisters and me (I accepted her follow request only after a few weeks of her complaining about how I hadn’t yet). Now I write for an online magazine for college women called Her Campus (http://www.hercampus.com), and I feel so uncomfortable every time my mom tells me that she read my latest work. It’s a website for college students, so a lot of the content has to do with dating, fashion, partying, etc. It’s meant for a specific audience, and that is the audience I have in mind when I write for it; not my mother. I feel like my freedom of expression is gone now that I have to filter what I write knowing my mother reads my work and shares it with her friends. I love my mom, and I agree that parents should be involved (to a certain degree of course) with their teenager’s social media presence, but when do we draw the line for online surveillance between parents and young adults?

We see the idea of moral panic heavily reviewed and criticized in the text by Boyd. This ‘moral panic’ that parents face, not only takes away from a child’s social understanding but also could curb them later on. While it is the natural instict of a parent to protect their child, often times this can be exaggerated.  We can see in today’s world since the prevalence of Apple, that the use of Apps in relation to social media can be restricted, hidden or even turned off.

I decided to simply ‘google’ devices for monitoring child Internet activity. I was astounded by the amount of apps that parents have readily available to them these days. This website caught my attention:

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/parental-control-apps-android/

It highlights 8 free apps for your smartphone to monitor your child’s activity within the Internet. The article highlights that we should not shut out technology together from a child’s life completely but we should be able to have the ability to control it. Control: however can be defined in many different ways. Throughout Boyd’s texts her accounts with many teens and the way their parents control or conform there Internet usage spreads along a wide range. For example we see the use of secondary devices like apps or websites that let parents check their child’s text messages, website streaming history, as well as their social media networks. One site, very popular among parents is the site Teensafe.com. The website locks the user in with keywords life: safe, and child. But what they are really doing is looking into the private conversations and lives of teens and children.

“What if we told you that modern technology has made it easier than ever for us to know what our kids are up to and keep them safe?  

This exclusive infographic illustrates that, while the threats of the digital world are real, they’re no match for an equipped parent.

TeenSafe brings protective parents and smartphone tech together to safeguard what we all value most, the great kids that depend on us.”

While there are dangers of the Internet the dialogue of children trying to survive in a virtual world may be curbed. We see the example Boyd gives of a nerd-like boy from the “ghetto” that changed his Myspace profile to represent gang signs, when his college application was set to end gang violence. While he may not support gangs, he did what he needed to survive within a social situation. This applies to life before the computer as well in different social circles. As parents are not there for every real life conversation their child/teen has, it should not mean that they should be tracked and their conversation should be analyzed. I am not saying that parents should not keep track of what their child is doing and not play an active role in their life, especially when it comes to the internet, but I do believe independence and forming your on social life is part of being a child and adolescence.

The concept of impression management stood out to me in this week’s readings. Described by sociologist Erving Goffman as “the social rituals involved in self-presentation”, the impressions we make on others are “a product of what is given and what is given off”. Throughout the article, references are also made to the way that teens can pick and choose their identities online, whether for privacy, humor or otherwise. These ideas are relevant for social networking sites like Facebook, but they seem to occupy a different meaning in the context of professional networking sites like LinkedIn.

As I go through recruiting for summer internships, there has been such a heavy emphasis on boosting my resume (and digital resume) to make myself appealing to prospective employers. Rather than taking steps to ensure privacy and avoid misrepresentation like I would on Facebook, I find myself seeking strategies to make myself more accessible to recruiters. This entails my regarding social media as an opportunity for personal branding and marketing, and constructing my identity in a way that appeals to employers- but even then, a good image might not be enough for employers.

For particularly saturated and highly competitive industries like investment banking and management consulting, I’ve been told that they search cover letters, resumes and LinkedIn profiles for a set of “key words” that point them toward applicants with the right skill set. Given that such a “controlled vocabulary” exists, it is discomforting to imagine ourselves as just another dataset or as a small portion of a vast, easily searchable database. It is even more uncomfortable to think that your profile and experiences might not be considered by employers, regardless of your qualifications, if you fail to include key words in your resume and your profile does not show up from their “controlled vocabulary” searches.

Impression management in this context therefore becomes an issue of distinguishing yourself and standing out, rather than preserving a positive image simply by virtue of omitting or concealing questionable information on your profile. We are now concerned with how others process and interpret the information on our profile, but in a way that encourages endless scrutiny of the way we present ourselves on networking sites.

As we ride a wave of increasing ease of integration of multiple social media platforms (you can use Facebook to sign in to almost everything), I am curious to see how our social and professional lives might converge, and if so, whether a consistency in identity across platforms is necessary. Failing which, I am curious to explore how discrepancies can be managed to avoid misrepresentation and misinterpretation. While it is a lot harder to navigate privacy in cyberspace, we are ultimately on the losing end of any such misinterpretation, making it necessary to hold ourselves accountable for our conduct on social media.

As I was reading It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, the experiences and words really reminded me of my younger sister. She is on every social media outlet, and is a big fan of twitter. She’s a huge fan of One Direction and has met fellow fans that have become really close friends because of twitter. She doesn’t like me going on her twitter. She even has 2 twitters: a safe family-friendly and school-friendly twitter and a nerdy, one direction, ranting-type twitter that she only shares with her closest friends.

I, as an annoying older sister, sometimes go on her not-allowed-for-everyone twitter and I see her cussing sometimes. I used to cuss at her age, and I was very like her in a lot of ways. But I still get mad and sometimes scorn her for it! And I know that’s bad. But I want her to be better than me (even though I know cussing is NOT a big deal!).

I am twenty-three now and do not relate to her teenage self anymore. We relate in so many other ways but I know I should just let her act as her teenage self. I sometimes tell her not too binge watch TV, even though I used to do that, too. It’s a weird thing to change mindsets with years. Teenagers cuss, teenagers binge watch TV, and they should be left alone.

I know she wants to be herself, and talk about shows with her friends, and cuss when she’s really mad – therefore I am all for teenagers being teenagers.

On a different note, with teenagers having such a huge presence online, they’re definitely influenced by the media. My sister constantly sees people talk about different issues on twitter and comes to me to have a conversation about it and I think that’s awesome. While I hope teenagers don’t easily buy into everything said online and approach it with a critical lens, I know that teenagers are more informed than ever! So even though I still don’t like the cussing and binge TV watching, I’m glad there is an outlet for discussion!

The first chapter in It’s Complicated, “why do kids seem strange online?”, took an interesting perspective on what content teens post online. It seems that all you hear is that teens should be more careful about what they post online, but Boyd looks at the situation differently. Boyd presents that although it is important for teens to be aware of what they are posting, the problem is not just the teens themselves, but also the way the platform is set up. Teens often have no way of knowing which of their social circles will be seeing a post, but they have to pick a group to target with the post. By giving the analogy of the speaker targeting different groups he spoke to, compared to TV, it became clear this is not only a problem for people online. Posting content via social media is just the newest way this problem has been encountered.
Although this book was published just last year, this chapter made me think of ways that social platforms have already improved this. Google plus was created with the purpose of creating a social network that can be directed at certain groups. On Google Plus, connections are sorted into circles like family, friends, work, etc. When something is posted on your page it is very easy to select which circle or circles the post is directed to. Other popular social platforms have since adopted this idea, so certain posts can have a limited audience, but it is not as clear cut as the circles on Google plus.
On Facebook, there is now the option to hide certain posts from certain friends. Although this tries to recreate the idea of targeting an audience, I don’t think it achieves that goal as well as Google plus. By excluding specific people from a post, it seems more like the poster is trying to hide something from specific people instead of just directing a post to a certain group. The key to understanding teens online the way that Boyd does is to understand that teens post items online targeted to a specific group, not everybody except a couple people.

Boyd says that today our online identities more closely reflect who we are in real life, the personas are tied together unlike the way users would “type themselves into being” in the beginning days of the Internet. It’s true to an extent, but Boyd has failed to consider the use of social media to legitimize yourself to yourself and to your real life peers.

“The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves make us who we are” (Kurt Vonnegut maybe). As a 15-17 year old girl on social media, my entire identity revolved around making myself seem as beautiful, mysterious, and desirable as possible. This was especially palpable through my Instagram and Twitter. I never bought followers, but I did my thirsty best to gain them through skanky hashtags and red-lipsticked photos. Once I hashtagged “like4bjs”. It’s laughable now but I’m not ashamed to admit it. During the time in adolescence where popularity and beauty seem like the two most important things in life, the crushing, Lolita-esque desire to feel love is manifested online. The affection you feel is artificial and fleeting, your heart pumping adrenaline as you refresh your photo again and again to see how many likes you have. The amount of followers, likes, reblogs and retweets you get makes you feel like some sort of goddess. Best of all, you know your school friends are jealous of your thousands of Instagram followers. Instagram and Tumblr “fame” have replaced playground popularity. Even if you’re the biggest outcast in your high school, getting love on social media creates an allure around you that fools your IRL peers into thinking you are actually cooler than them.

Then, last month Instagram deleted spam accounts, including fake profiles who have never posted a photo but follow hundreds of thousands. The penny-a-follow people. It was a glorious day. The people who had previously seemed like Instagram forces to be reckoned with were reduced to naked bundles of shame. The carefully manufactured online existence was shattered as people were forced to admit they were not as cool as pretended to be. It was the online equivalent of a queen bee takedown, akin to the stabbing of Ceasar or the fall of Regina George.

Imagine the Molly Ringwald Teen Queen Trilogy (Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Pretty In Pink). Now imagine the same thing with the internet. In Pretty In Pink, Molly would own a successful Etsy shop, selling her own wares, defining the “it” aesthetic and rocketing herself out of wrong-side of the tracks poverty. In Breakfast Club, she would be a secret Tumblr bulimic, an active member of the Emo/ Thinspo community where she would vent the feelings she couldn’t express in life (everyone in the Breakfast Club would be hardcore Tumblr addicts). The luddite rejects new technology, but if we had had this tool 20 years ago you can bet teens would use it for the same thing. Online personas are simply another story we tell ourselves about the people we think we are and the people we want to be.

In “Personal Connections of the Digital Age” Nancy Baym comments on a variety of views and opinions that try to distinguish and label the role technology plays in the social sphere of human existence. Nancy groups the differing sentiments into two categories: Technological determinism, and Social Construction of Technology. Technological determinism claims that technology determines the extent to which humans can use it, thus altering human traits and characteristics. On the other hand, Social construction of technology argues the opposite, in that it views technology as merely serving an inherent human need, something that would persist with or without the emergence of socially geared technological devices.

However, siding with either category of thought does not sufficiently address the issue of properly weighing and understanding the nature of our social uses for technology. A perfect sub-topic of technology that parallels this discussion is the image, and its prevalent usage in the digital world for the purpose of human interaction. In using the two extremes Nancy Baym discusses, technological determinism and social construction of technology, one can easily see the ways in which the digital image can be argued for either side. But the simple grouping or labeling of the image as being one or the other ignores the subtleties and nuances that are necessary to understanding this relationship between the human and the digital image. Though I would like to argue that technology and its relationship to the image does assume a role in which both tend to the social needs and impulses of humans, something it definitely does, I think the way humans categorize their interactions with it is troublesome and ultimately problematic. The greatest qualm I have with digital technology is its love of the image. I find the relationship between digital technology and the image as worrisome solely because people lack the ability to correctly interpret or read images/photographs. Like language, the photograph is a linguistic instrument who’s doubly articulated existence is subtle. To read the subtleties of the image is to make an extra effort to interpret an entity that one can appear to have been adequately read almost instantaneously. However, the emphasis and dominance placed on our visual receptors is deceiving humanity. As images become more and more easily accessible, a result of their scalability, and if we continue to lack the skills to critically examine images, what will become of our more critical thinking processes or nuanced understandings and relationships to things and ideas. Has technology honed in on a human weakness? Lacking the skills to critically examine the digital image, humans would continue to perpetuate stereotypes and misinterpretations that could eventually harm social and cultural groups and possibly even further divide and segregate people as being similar or dissimilar. How would this affect our societal understandings of global cultures?

Growing up in the age of technology, I believe we really need to take a step back to take a look at how things are. Most people our age constantly forget that other generations simply did not have the resources that we have today. Technology defined many key events in the coming of age for our generation whether we acknowledged or participated in them or not. Although my mom was pretty adamant about not letting my brother and I play video games very often, and did not allow us to have Game Boys when we were young, so both of us never really developed a taste for it (yet I do speak only for myself), I still remember  the nights where my friends would stay out all night waiting in line for the new Xbox, PlayStation, or Call of Duty game just so they could play it through the night and skip school the next day. Despite that I was never one for video game consoles, I spent my equal share of time on the Internet while growing up. I was a huge fan of Neopets and also created a MySpace when I was eleven (although you had to be thirteen–which resulted in the deletion of the page when my mom found out, and then later the creation of a new page on my thirteenth birthday). Although since I have gotten older, I definitely have lost that “passion” I had for the social media. I think I have kinda realized why I liked it exactly. The human connection through the websites is really what drew me in, and I guess I found that the human connection made IRL (in real life–Baym, chapter 2) is much more satisfying and real, at least in my opinion. Although this apparent distance that is apparent with human connection via the Internet is not necessarily a problem with it, but rather a problem with how people use it, like Baym mentions in book. The Internet doesn’t distance people from people, people distance people from people.

This reminded me of Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood which speaks of the advancement and prominence  of technology, especially in my generation. The main character argues that Facebook, social media, and technology are turning humans into anti social robots, although I would place the blame on humans after reading Baym’s argument.

“Y’all need to get off your phones and in a book!”