"Living and Learning with Social Media" - 0 views
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Today's teens are still more interested in their friends than their lessons. They're still resistant to power and authority at variable levels. They still gossip, bully, flirt, joke around, and hang out. The underlying dynamics are fairly consistent. That said, technology is inflecting these practices in unique ways. And my goal here today is to talk about these inflection points.
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They use these sites to connect to people that they already know from school, church, activities, summer camp, etc.
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One of the most problematic mistakes adults make when trying to make sense of social network sites is to presume that kids interact on these sites just like they do
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we are having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience
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Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood.
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Teens who use MySpace can't communicate with those on Facebook and vice-versa. So if you don't participate, you're written out of the story. This means that divisions are re-inforced. Forget all of the rhetoric about how the Internet is the great equalizer - it's the great reproducer of inequality.
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For all of the attention paid to "digital natives" it's important to realize that most teens are engaging with social media without any deep understanding of the underlying dynamics or structure. Just because they understand how to use the technology doesn't mean that they understand the information ecology that surrounds it. Most teens don't have the scaffolding for thinking about their information practices.