Teens and Real People

One of Danah Boyd’s points in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens is that teens have much less freedom of movement than teens of the past, and so are nudged toward virtual rather than face-to-face relations.

As Alissa Quart sums it up in her NYTBR review: “In her research, however, she discovered that they would much rather hang out with their friends in person. But they can’t. ‘Today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation.’ . . . According to Boyd, the American bourgeoisie is more devoted to buying free-range meat than raising free-range children. In this anodyne, restricted America, social media is the only way teenagers can effectively get a life.”