Parents These Days

Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting addition to the discussion of class and networking, offering a description of a talk by danah boyd (whose name I have been capitalizing, which apparently isn't right) about the history and usage of MySpace and Facebook. What's particularly striking is the opening:

danah began her discussion with two quotes, one from über-blogger Kathy Sierra's 16-year old daughter Skyler, who observed, "If you're not on MySpace, you don't exist." The other quote, from a 16-year old named Amy, explains the appeal of these spaces for some American teens: "My mom doesn't let me out of the house very often, so that's pretty much all I do..." The central point of danah's talk - or at least the one I took away - is that teens are using these online spaces very differently from the way my generation of online users did. They use them not to meet people from around the world who share a common interest, but to have interactions with people they know in real-life because they've got so few opportunities for interaction in the real world.

She elaborates on this later on, and it's really kind of sad:

danah reminds us that "teenagers" are a recent contept - three generations ago, kids above fourteen would move into work or farm environments and would be rapidly socialized into adult life. With the emergence of 1950s teenage culture, we've moved into a realm of age segregation where "it's considered freaky to know people two years older than you are." This age segregation has been compounded by pervasive fear of "stranger danger", which has unfortunately been reinforced by real-world events like the revelations about abuse in Catholic churches, which has removed yet another context in which adults and teens interact. (danah points to World of Warcraft as one of very few online spaces that encourages "real age diversity", with people of different ages cooperating on common goals.)

I'm not sufficiently plugged in to teen culture to be able to assess how accurate this is, but it does ring true. It fits well with the breathless scare stories about the Internet that have become a staple of evening news broadcasts, and with the oft-remarked lack of unsupervised play time for lots of kids these days. Even in our pleasant corner of affluent suburbia, there aren't as many kids roaming around as I would've expected from my own childhood-- you see kids outside, but they're mostly playing in their own yards, in relatively small groups. I could easily believe that a lot of online interaction is taking the place of what would've been face-to-face interaction some years ago.

It's sad, really. It's also sort of ironic that the Baby Boom generation have, through excessive concern, wound up creating a world that's every bit as confining as the 50's culture that they famously rebelled against...