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"Being a teenager in 2015 is very different than it was in 1995. While most teenagers spent their free time watching a little TV in the 90s, there were far fewer screens to put in front of their faces. A social network was the group of friends you hung out with at school. Now, things have changed. Technology has opened all kinds of new things to teens, some good and some bad. So just how as being a teenager changed from the 90s? Are things better or worse? Take a look at the infographic below from TeenSafe that presents true facts about teens and media and decide for yourself."

Having surveyed teenagers in 30 countries, they revealed that the number of teenagers claiming to be active on Facebook (ie. doing more than just "liking" a separate page on the web) had dropped to 56% in the third quarter of 2013, from 76% in the first. The biggest decline in active usage (by 52%) was in the Netherlands; there was a 16% fall for American teens. Where are they going instead? Not surprisingly, it's mobile chat services like WeChat, and photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Snapchat. What's truly startling though, is how quickly global teenagers are taking up the services instead:

"Facebook made a startling admission in its earnings announcement this month: it was seeing a "decrease in daily users, specifically among teens". In other words, teenagers are still on Facebook; they're just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic who often point the rest of us towards the next big thing."

Found in Communication Research and Practice: Vol 6, No 1 Abstract: Around the world policymakers are exploring the kinds of skills and competencies that teenagers need to have to contribute to society as digital citizens. Based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child framework, and informed by critical analysis of discourses around digital citizenship, this paper explores the competencies already demonstrated by many adolescents and addresses the priorities identified by policymakers. It compares the top-down adult policymakers' blueprints for digital citizenship with the performances of citizenship by many young people, who mobilise digital resources to communicate with powerful others as a means of progressing their aims. Drawing upon examples of small-scale teenage activism, and linking these to some of the big questions of the age: climate change, gender equity and social justice, the paper moves beyond discussions of tech-addiction and online passivity to investigate adolescents' strategic engagement in digital spaces to achieve a more equitable future.

"The Australian Human Rights Commission says in the world of the web, cyber bullying is an abuse of human rights. Cyber bullying is when a child or teenager is threatened, harassed or humiliated by another child or teenager using the internet, interactive and digital technologies or mobile phones."

"Researcher danah boyd is obsessed with how teenagers use the Internet. For the legions of adults who are worried about them, that's a good thing."

"Google openly collects user data from its online services but not via apps for education, but there is concern that the online activity of teenagers is being analysed for targeted advertising."

"I took an informal poll of my 150 students at the beginning of the year, and 60-80% of my students don't even have a facebook. They connect with each other on Kik, an app that allows users to text each other without exchanging phone numbers. They use Snapchat, an app that allows users to send pictures that supposedly disappear forever after ten seconds. They use Whisper, an app that a user can "anonymously" tell their deepest secrets to a vast community of other secret sharers. They use Yik Yak, Vine, Tumblr, Twitter (do you know about subtweeting? you should.), Instagram, Oovoo, WhatsApp, Meerkat, and sometimes even dating apps, like Tinder."

'Teenagers, legal risks and social networking sites' [PDF], a 109 page report by Melissa de Zwart, David Lindsay, Michael Henderson & Michael Phillips, investigates the legal risks of social networking as experienced by Victorian secondary school students, teachers and parents.

Recently, two teenage girls in Gainesville, Florida made a video (note: NSFW) in which they spewed a truckload of racist comments. They posted the video on YouTube and subsequently ruined their lives. It took all of fourteen minutes. (Actually, probably twenty, if you account for the time it took to upload the video.) When the video went viral, these girls' lives changed radically -- and not for the better. They have received numerous death threats, have been forced to drop out of the high school they'd been attending, and have become the latest poster children for social media stupidity. (As of this writing, at least one of the girls has publicly apologized for her remarks.) These are just the immediate repercussions. What consequences they will face in the future remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: it will be a long time before these girls can escape the shadow cast by this regrettable and truly disastrous #socialmediafail.

This article deals with the the range and impact of social networking sites on teenagers and children.

"People complain that they want privacy, and then they put all their information up on Facebook. Thus, hacking is ultra-easy. I have seen teenagers post pictures of their first credit card, then a month later their new college student I.D. These kids are so excited to have signs of growing up, but as we grow up our lives need to be more private to guard from hackers. Now I am a culprit of being very relaxed about my online privacy, meaning, I have the same password for multiple sites, I use my high school name as my clue, and the name of my high school is on Facebook somewhere. So hack away, I look forward to meeting the person who decides to take up my identity!"

"Cyber-bullying, update-addiction, sexting - from the perspective of a parent raising a ''digital native'' child, social media seems fraught with dangers. But new research suggests the risks inherent in social media use by younger generations might be overblown. danah boyd, assistant research professor at Harvard and principal researcher for Microsoft Research - like k.d.lang, she prefers the lower case - has completed a large-scale study on how US teenagers use the internet in general, and social media in particular. Her book is called It's Complicated, and is the result of in-depth interviews with scores of teens over an eight-year period."

" A Dutch teenager was arrested in Rotterdam on Monday afternoon after she tweeted a terrorist threat at American Airlines that quickly went viral online, police officials said. It was not immediately known what charges she could face."

HERE'S a staggering fact: almost half the Australian population are users of Facebook, a virtual den for nearly two million teenagers.

"A coroner investigating the death of teenager Jai Morcom after a schoolyard brawl has asked people to stop making unfounded accusations about Jai's death on social networking sites."

The ugly side of social networking.

"You may think the only people capable of snooping on your Internet activity are government intelligence agents or possibly a talented teenage hacker holed up in his parents' basement. But some simple software lets just about anyone sitting next to you at your local coffee shop watch you browse the Web and even assume your identity online. "

University of NSW researcher Nina Funnell has spoken to hundreds of young people aged between 15 and 18 about their sexting habits for a book she is writing and found sexting is an accepted part of adolescent dating culture."The common idea is that young people are doing this as a response to pressure or they're brainwashed by popular culture," Ms Funnell said.

This NY Times article is an entertaining way of thinking about how social media is viewed by teenagers.

Cyber bullying is a term used to describe covert, psychological bullying behaviours among mainly teenagers through email, chat rooms, mobile phones, text messages, mobile phone cameras and websites (Campbell 2005; Brown, Jackson & Cassidy�y2006). As a relatively new phenomenon, there is limited research on cyber bullying. The rise of cyber bullying is attributed primarily to increased adolescent access to the internet and mobile phones, facilitated by the anonymity provided by the internet.