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Interview by Andrew Leonard, February 22, 2014, with danah boyd on Salon on findings from her new book--It's Complicated: the social lives of networked teens. The "why" they hangout and their actual skill levels excerpts are below. "What exactly is it that teens are trying to do with social media? They're looking for a space to hang out. When we grew up it was the mall or cafes or a variety of other physically grounded spaces. Teens today don't have access to those kinds of spaces and what they've done is they've turned to social media to regain some kind of access to public life. These new "networked publics" - places like Twitter and Facebook - are spaces that are created by digital technologies but they are really about people - the broad network of people that teens have learned to negotiate and socialize around." Teens seem to embrace these new "networked publics" very rapidly, but one chapter of your book annihilates the notion that teens are somehow "digitally native" - that they somehow understand these new technologies more readily or more naturally than their forebears. Teenagers are much more willing to experiment with these technologies to service their end goals - their social goals. There is no doubt about that.. Teens are always much more willing to just try things out. But just because they are willing to try things out doesn't mean that they understand how it works. That doesn't mean that they are inherently technologically sophisticated or understand technology in the ways that are often implied by "digital native."