| I enjoyed this reindag overall, but one aspect troubled me. In these three chapters, she (mostly) indirectly argues that parents and the American media are the reason teens have been forced onto social network sites — they want to escape the restrictive environments of school and home life. Although, I don’t think she ever develops that argument fully. According to boyd, because of the “culture of fear” and many parents’ blind acceptance of the associated cultural values, teens are victimized. Their social norms are shaped by the outside world — not by the technology itself. In other words, the technology is literally an add-on to their offline social lives, and it is an add-on teens are driven to adopt. Unfortunately, problems arise, since “as teens move online, their desire for privacy extends there, as does their parents’ desire to know what they are doing” (248).boyd is fiercely protective of teens while the portraits of reasonable parents are few. Even for the teens who have serious behavioral problems, like Wolf, boyd passes no judgment. To justify teens lying about their profile ages, boyd explains that parents set a precedent of lying. In some contexts, “adults are intentionally engaged in deceiving other people” (150) and “adults regularly encourage teens to lie to avoid potential predators” (153). Also, teens lie about profile information to get around advertisers and avoid restrictive laws like COPPA. boyd frames profile deception as the normal and harmless teen practice of “leveraging technology to meet their needs” (151). Elsewhere, I noticed the pattern of shifting blame off of teens and onto parents and the society at large. The use of proxies to get around school restrictions on MySpace and Facebook is framed as a clever trick and a model of digital literacy. I don’t think the authoritarian restrictions boyd describes are healthy, but I also don’t think it is right to glorify misbehavior.Perhaps “helicopter parenting” has made youth less independent, and maybe the pervasive stranger-danger rhetoric has intimidated teens into submission. However, certainly there are some things that teens do to exacerbate situations. Wolf might ultimately need the type of disciplined environment Anindita has. On the surface, this is an ethnographic study of teenagers, but in fact it is a study of parent-teen relationships. Considering this, it is obvious that the accounts of parents are absent, except for a few extreme testimonies in Chapter 5, which are online posts and not even neutral interview scenarios. I believe boyd's chapters would be stronger if they were framed as: how is social media affecting the relationship between teens and authority figures, or affecting the relationships teens have with each other? Right now, it seems more like a one-sided account of how outside factors are trying to thwart the natural inclination teens have to socialize in private, in an unstructured, unmonitored space. Social network sites are portrayed as a natural and needed prosthesis teens use to escape the whacked-out society and parenting to which they are subjected. I feel like I have only heard one side of the story.
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