Month: February 2018

In her article “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”, Jean M. Twenge claims that the youngest generation is “accustomed to being wired at all times”. She believes that young people have simply formed their lives around technology and social media. Her evidence to this claim is that her toddler is comfortable swiping through an iPad, barely yet knowing how to walk. I disagree with this claim and evidence because the child was not born knowing how to use an iPad. The child was not even born owning an iPad. It was the parent who purchased the technology, provided the technology to the toddler, and taught the toddler how to use the technology. The youngest generation is so accustomed to being wired at all times because they are raised surrounding by technology at all times. Parents provide their children with technology from a young age and often buy them a smartphone by age 13. This type of technological childhood development inherently allows children to grow exceedingly comfortable using technology from a young age.

Twenge also claims that Athena, a 13-year-old girl from Houston Texas, is part of a generation which lives a life on social media. After describing the typical behavior of teenagers from her youth, Twenge briefly explains the teens of Athena’s generation. “She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said.” Twenge shows the difference between her generation and Athena’s generation to emphasize the technology dependency of Athena’s generation. What she does not discuss is the fact that Athena’s parents purchased her a smart phone at the age of 11, providing her with unlimited access to technology, and more importantly, social media. If Athena’s parents had not provided her with such exposure, she would not have grown so accustomed to this technology. Perhaps if they had encouraged her to spend time outdoors during the summer instead of spending it in her bedroom on her phone, she would not have developed a dependency for her smartphone. Children are not born with knowledge of technology. This knowledge must be learned from observing those around them. If a child grows up surrounded by a family who has a significant dependency on technology, then that child will learn from their family to depend on technology as well.

The following quotes reflect boyd’s arguments in her first chapter.

“…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” (32).

“The popularity of social media in recent years has produced a significant rise in

nonfiction or so-called real names identity production, but it is also important to

recognize that there continue to be environments where teens gather anonymously or don

crafted identities to create a separation between the kinds of social contexts that are

viable offline and those that can be imagined online” (41).

“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 affordances of Facebook. The were each affecting the other’s attempts at

self-representation, 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 necessarily share their sense of decorum

and norms. Resolving the networked nature of social contexts is complicated” (50).

Though I was already aware of many of the topics boyd discussed in the first chapter of It’s Complicated, I found the section about association most interesting. Even if you do not invite certain people to see your social media, they may see it due to one of your friends inviting them to see their pages.

One idea I did not agree with was that the officer who displayed a photo of a teen drinking had violated the teen’s privacy. If the photo was posted online for anyone in the world to see, then that picture was not private.