[Social Networking Sites] Danah Boyd Is A Genius, Part 65,345

I want to steal her brain away and ask it questions forever, Futurama-and-Dead-Presidents-style.

I mean, how can you top this?

I'm not saying that social network sites have no value. Quite the contrary. But their value is about the kinds of informal social learning that is required for maturation - understanding your community, learning the communicate with others, working through status games, building and maintaining friendships, working through personal values, etc. All too often we underestimate these processes because, traditionally, they have happened so naturally. [They have also been understood to happen outside of school, in church or at home or in the pool hall; the fact that they are more prevalent in school now than ever before - and better understood as being within the purview of educators - is causing all sorts of tension and conflict. - Dennis] Yet, what's odd about today's youth culture is that we've systematically taken away the opportunities for socialization. And yet we wonder why our kids are so immature compared to kids from other cultures. Social network sites are popular because youth are trying to take back the right to be social, even if it has to happen in interstitial ways. We need to recognize that not all learning is about book learning - brains mature through experience, including social experiences.

Yes! Yes! A million times yes!

How cool could it be if someone nudged those interstitial spaces ever so slightly as to promote positive growth rather than the further following of mass media and commercial trends (which happen to promote a whole bunch of nasty stuff)?

Sigh. This is one of the reasons I felt like a space alien among teachers when subbing. I never saw this kind of thing articulated or even understood in regards to modern technologies like cell phones or social networking sites - or even chat programs.

Still Amazed at How the Awesomeness of Apophenia; Or, the "Get Into College or Die" Crowd Strikes Again

This was great.

Specifically, this passage:

What Pew's data shows is that online participation correlates with offline participation. They are not able to show causality (and they do not try to claim that they can), but such a correlation still contradicts the ever-present myth that online activities cause a decline in offline activities. Of course, don't misread this correlation in the opposite direction either. In other words, you cannot say that if you get a group of teens involved online, they will also get involved offline. Meshing these findings with my own qualitative observations, I have a sneaking suspicion that what Pew's data is pointing to is that the hyper-motivated and/or overly scheduled teens from middle/upper class communities are extremely engaged offline and use online technologies to socialize with their friends in the interstitial times and that this cohort's content creation is primarily to support friendships rather than create for creation sake. This also makes sense because teens who have more free time tend to have less restrictions and tend to prefer offline encounters with friends to online ones. [emphasis added]