It's Complicated

It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens [Hardcover]

Author: danah boyd | Language: English | ISBN: 0300166311 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
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What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens’ lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers’ ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Yet despite an environment of rampant fear-mongering, boyd finds that teens often find ways to engage and to develop a sense of identity.

Boyd’s conclusions are essential reading not only for parents, teachers, and others who work with teens but also for anyone interested in the impact of emerging technologies on society, culture, and commerce in years to come. Offering insights gleaned from more than a decade of original fieldwork interviewing teenagers across the United States, boyd concludes reassuringly that the kids are all right. At the same time, she acknowledges that coming to terms with life in a networked era is not easy or obvious. In a technologically mediated world, life is bound to be complicated.

Direct download links available for It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens [Hardcover]

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (February 25, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300166311
• ISBN-13: 978-0300166316
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Textbooks > Communication & Journalism > Media Studies
  • #3 in Books > Textbooks > Social Sciences > Psychology > Developmental Psychology
  • #5 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development & Design > Web 2.0

It sure is complicated.

Spoiler Alert: As a psychotherapist, school counselor and educator, having spent much of my adult life working with teens and families, I have some serious problems with "It's Complicated." The main problems: This book was written by a researcher who neither takes a political stand on an inherently political issue nor does she make clear her biases in analysis of the "data" under consideration. In the end, the book suffers from a kind of blindness about what's right in front of her--that the impact and bi-directional effects of social media in the lives of our teens may not (and cannot) be seen for decades. The jury is and should be still out, and boyd's work may function to close the case on an incredibly complex set of issues that will require decades of study. What's the big deal, and why write such a long review? Because boyd is highly influential, because this book will be a best-seller and make her a bunch of money and because while she may be an expert in media studies and a preeminent researcher, she is NOT an expert in adolescent development. While this book clearly demonstrates a mastery of what teens are doing with social media, it demonstrates glaring errors and highly problematic interpretations of WHY they are doing what they do and say they are doing.

boyd has been called the "high priestess of the Internet" by the Financial Times, an internationally-recognized authority on how people (mostly teens) navigate the online world. Thought of as a brilliant ethnographer of adolescent digital natives, danah (that's not a typo, with the lower-case "d" and "b") boyd's rise to the top of the top of the world of experts about what teens are doing online has been meteoric.

For anyone who has been following research around youth and social networks over the past decade, this book has long been awaited. boyd has been and remains one of the most important cultural scholars of her generation, someone who is deeply grounded in the everyday practices around new media, someone who herself speaks as a member of the first wave of the so-called "digital natives" (a concept she deftly critiques and dissects throughout this book), someone who has been actively involved in public policy debates, who has developed a deep and intimate understanding of the lives that young people are living in the digital age, and someone who, through her vantage point at Microsoft Research, is on top of the cutting edge developments coming out of the digital industries. In short, she's the best possible person to write a book like this, and the book she has produced does not disappoint me in any way.

The book is a consolidation of danah's greatest hits through the years -- building upon her early work that sought to explain what distinguishes online social interactions from earlier venues where teens hung out and cut the crap with their classmates, taking us through her startling discoveries about various forms of segregation within online communities, and into her more recent work on bullying and harassment in cyberspace or her growing interest in understanding how youth manage their privacy while dealing with the range of unintended eyes that often are reading everything they post online. Each of these contributions to the field were significant on their own, but they gain greater clarity and resonance when read against each other across the flow of this book.

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