Boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated : the social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.
Out of the various stages of life from childhood to adulthood, young adult and teenage years are commonly known as years of trouble, where feelings grow muddled and relationships with oneself and the world become more than just familial ties. Furthermore, the digital age and newly emerging social media platforms have complicated and magnified these troubles into something far bigger than what it used to be. The book, it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens by Danah Boyd, offers insight into this complex digital evolution and how it has changed the life of a teeanger and how it is lived. While the landscape for realizing and expressing feelings has been shifted by the emergence of social media and other digital platforms, much of the foundational mental and emotional motions have stayed the same, with some minor additions. Through finding mutual ties between past and present teenhood and discovering what has changed, librarians are able to apply this knowledge, in order to better serve the teen population and act off knowledge and strategy, rather than implicit biases.
At its core, teenhood has largely remained the same; however, there are definitely new challenges for teens to navigate, with the addition of social media. In the introduction of the book, Boyd (2014) mentions that school was still familiar and that the anxieties and hopes were still much like the ones she had experienced. However, one cannot deny that social media has enabled teens with new ways to integrate in public life through social media. The author goes on to mention how other feelings are “strikingly different, but what differs often has less to do with technology and more to do with increased consumerism, heightened competition for access to limited opportunities, and an intense amount of parental pressure, especially in wealthier communities.” (Boyd, 2014, p. 16) Cultural evolution of heightened performance subscribing to capitalism has arguably changed teenhood more so than technology itself; however, according to Boyd (2014), social media as a cultural phenomenon has greatly shifted teens’ approaches towards information and communication.
One aspect of information that Boyd (2014) mentions has changed is spreadability, or the ability to easily and rapidly share information (e.g. making information or content viral), and visibility, or the easy accessibility to content. Teenagers are able to share and exchange information at a much faster pace than before. While this concept is not new, when applied to social media, spreadability, for example, has made heightened headway for gossip to spread and for information to reach far and wide at a quick pace (Boyd, 2014). These concepts of spreadability and visibility can be aligned with Radical Change theory (Dresang & Koh, 2009), expanding upon Dresang’s work in 1999. Helping information scholars to understand youth information-seeking, this theory is characterized by three aspects, interactivity, connectivity, and access. Furthermore, soon came a typology that helped categorize the types of radical change present in youth. One key type, Type Two: Changing Perspectives, mentions youth having to express their opinions and create new information, in order to help build their identities (Dresang & Koh, 2009). This aligns with Boyd’s (2014) analysis on teenhood and identity, where she points out that teens must regularly interact with numerous invisible contexts as a part of their everyday life and open themselves up to the world. Through creating new information in digital space, they are exposing themselves to the uncontrollable nature of spreadability and visibility that social media now brings to them (Boyd, 2014). Inevitably, they will run into issues with social media that may be beyond their control.
Despite these new digital spaces that this coming generation must now navigate for and by themselves, that does not mean there is nothing for information professionals to do; rather, it is their duty to best utilize their knowledge and experiences to best help these young adults. The most important thing to develop when working with a diverse community is cultural competence, which is characterized by Overall (2009), as cited by Cooke (2009) as “the ability to recognize the significance of culture in one’s own life and in the lives of others, and to come to know and respect diverse cultural backgrounds.” Boyd (2014) mentions in her book that the older generation oftentimes believe that technology has separated their youth from the current generation’s and that this is, in fact, far from being. While the mediums have changed, social dynamics such as gossiping and drama still live on (Boyd, 2014). Through recognizing and respecting similarities and differences between generations, we begin the first step towards gathering knowledge and then strategizing approaches to best serve our patrons of all ages, including the youth wrestling with newfound technology and challenges.
Between generations, some things never change.
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References
Boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated : the social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.
Cooke, N. (2016). Developing Cultural Competence. In Information Services to Diverse Populations. ABC-CLIO, LLC.
Dresang, E. T., & Koh, K. (2009). Radical Change Theory, Youth Information Behavior, and School Libraries. Library Trends, 58(1), 26–50. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.0.0070