The Social Life of Teens

In class this week, we started reading Danah Boyd’s book “It’s Complicated”. In the first couple of chapters she mentions how teens these days are doing the same thing that teens twenty years ago were doing. They just go about it in a different way. Years ago, teens would be hanging out at malls, restaurants, parking lots, and many other public places. Now due to policing and laws these places aren’t as available for teens to group together and hang out. Don’t get me wrong, these places are still around for teens to hang out, but it is frowned upon by many business owners for them to loiter outside their buildings. Instead they use social media websites and other forms of online communication in order to interact with their friends. There is nothing unusual about teens using these websites, they just want to be able to connect with their friends without the constant surveillance by adults. 

In the introduction of the book, Boyd mentioned how when she was at a high school football game in Nashville, the students were still doing what they did at football games when she attended high school in Pennsylvania. The student section of the bleachers was filled with teens dressed in school colors. The upperclassmen were in the lower seats closer to the field while the freshmen were up at the top of the bleachers. The teens weren’t sucked in to their smartphones even though they each had one on them. The teens that were alone would be texting until they found the friends they were looking for, but after they were together the smartphones were put away, unless the unwanted phone call from their parents came in or they were showing a friend something on it. This goes to show that teens are not using social media and other forms of technology to separate themselves from a social life. They are using it to connect with their friends and peers when they are unable to go out of the house and hang out with them in person. Social media also allows them to interact with more people than they would if they were to go to a friend’s house or hang out at the mall.