Parents: Don’t Panic About Your Kids’ Social Media Habits

A Q&A with Danah Boyd, a Microsoft researcher who studies social media.

In a book coming out this winter, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Boyd argues that teenagers aren’t doing much online that’s very different from what kids did at the sock hop, the roller rink, or the mall. They do so much socializing online mostly because they have little choice, Boyd says: parents now generally consider it unsafe to let kids roam their neighborhoods unsupervised. Boyd revealed interesting points that she noticed about teenagers’ social media habits. One, she said that teenagers’ limited mobility leads them to seek escape from the house by going online. She also pointed out that bullying is actually on the decline, but that online bullying has gained more visibility. Finally, she pointed out that teenagers don’t like to be as public as people assume, diverting more personal content to chats and private channels.