Just Blame it on the Parents

My group gave me the two “girly” sections, “Friends” and “Family”, in the book we’re reading, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. I honestly wasn’t too excited about reading these sections and figured, if anything, the “Family” section would be the more interesting one. Turns out, both the sections were kind of lame and I think it’s because the media practices that they describe are practices that have been extended to adults in the last few years. It also may be because I lived the practices they are talking about in the book and it’s annoying hearing what you did in highschool be described in quotes, for instance “teens use social media to ‘hang-out’”. It sounded a little textbooky and pretentious to me, but there were some ideas in the “Friends” section that I hadn’t thought of before. I’ve always been kind of on the fence about social media and whether or not it’s good for students (whatever that means). I guess it just seems a little impersonal to me and makes it easier for students to pick on their peers while remaining distant or even anonymous to their victims. In the “Friends” section of the text, it talked about how social media sites are no longer a ‘virtual’ or ‘alternate’ world for most teens but an extension of reality. The authors talk about the ways in which everyday conversations move from one environment to the next and across medias, seamlessly. This section also talked about the ways in which participation on these sites helps teens to navigate through issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality. It also helps teens to understand and practice acceptable social norms. I  think, by far, the biggest benefit of participating on these sites though is the identity work that it forces teens to engage in. There can definitely backlash to what you write about yourself in the “About Me” section and the pages you “like” that show up on your newsfeed, but according to this section of the book the majority of bullying and gossip begins outside of the popular social media sites. These sites obviously extend the issues that teens deal with in their daily lives, but the authors of seemed to agree that it was the teens that were to blame for these issues and not the sites themselves. A lot of the blame for teens’ uses of social media were blamed on the parents throughout my section though, which was weird. The authors argued that the parents lack of knowledge regarding these sites was the main reason for teens getting into mischief, but also the reason why teens couldn’t progress in their knowledge of various media. I don’t know, this book was weirdly positive the whole time and made me not really buy it.