New technologies always provoke generational panic, which
usually has more to do with adult fears than with the lives of teenagers. In
the 1930s, parents fretted that radio was gaining "an invincible hold of
their children". In the 80s, the great danger was the Sony Walkman –
producing the teenager who "throbs with orgasmic rhythms", as
philosopher Allan Bloom claimed. When you look at today's digital activity, the
facts are much more positive than you might expect.
Indeed, social scientists who study young people have found
that their digital use can be inventive and even beneficial. This is true not
just in terms of their social lives, but their education too. So if you use a
ton of social media, do you become unable, or unwilling, to engage in face-to-face
contact? The evidence suggests not. Research by Amanda Lenhart of
the Pew Research Centre, a US
thinktank, found that the most avid texters are also the kids most likely to
spend time with friends in person. One form of socialising doesn't replace the
other. It augments it.
"Kids still spend time face to face," Lenhart
says. Indeed, as they get older and are given more freedom, they often ease up
on social networking. Early on, the web is their "third space", but
by the late teens, it's replaced in reaction to greater autonomy.
They have to be on Facebook, to know what's going on among
friends and family, but they are ambivalent about it, says Rebecca Eynon, a
research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, who has interviewed about 200
British teenagers over three years. As they gain experience with living online,
they begin to adjust their behaviour, wrestling with new communication skills,
as they do in the real world.
Parents are wrong to worry that kids don't care about
privacy. In fact, they spend hours tweaking Facebook settings or using quick-delete
sharing tools, such as Snapchat, to minimise their traces. Or they post a
photograph on Instagram, have a pleasant conversation with friends and
then delete it so that no traces remain.
This is not to say that kids always use good judgment. Like
everyone else, they make mistakes – sometimes serious ones. But working out how
to behave online is a new social skill. While there's plenty of drama and
messiness online, it is not, for most teens, a cycle of non-stop abuse: a
Pew study found only 15% of teens said someone had been mean or cruel
to them online in the last 12 months. As wrenching as the worst-case
scenarios of bullying are, and as urgently as those need to be addressed, they
are not, thankfully, a daily occurrence for most kids. Even sexting may be
rarer than expected: Pew found only 4% of teenagers had sent a "sext"
and only 15% had received one – less of an epidemic than you would imagine.
But surely all this short-form writing is eroding
literacy? Certainly, teachers worry. Pew Centre surveys have found that
teachers say that kids use overly casual language and text speak in writing,
and don't have as much patience for long, immersive reading and complex
arguments. Yet studies of first-year college papers suggest these anxieties may
be partly based on misguided nostalgia. When Stanford University
scholar Andrea Lunsford gathered data on the rates of errors in "freshman
composition" papers going back to 1917, she found that they were virtually
identical to today.
But even as error rates stayed stable, student essays have
blossomed in size and complexity. They are now six times longer and, unlike
older "what I did this summer" essays, they offer arguments
buttressed by evidence. Why? Computers have vastly increased the ability of
students to gather information, sample different points of view and write more
fluidly.
When the linguist Naomi Baron studied students'
instant messaging even there she found surprisingly rare usage of short forms
such as "u" for "you", and as students got older, they
began to write in more grammatical sentences. That is because it confers
status: they want to seem more adult, and they know how adults are expected to
write. "If you want to look serious," as the teenage Sydney told me, "you don't use
'u'." Clearly, teaching teens formal writing is still crucial, but texting
probably isn't destroying their ability to learn it.
