It's Complicated! The Social Lives of Teens

CC Liiu, Dev, Wisdom Quarterly; Dannah Boyd (sciencefriday.com); Elizabeth Blair (NPR)

Mmm, like, excuse me. This conversation is kinda like private. Like you wouldn't understand.

OMG, I can't believe you'd talk to that fart-chicken, she is such a biznatch, like, I don't want you to talk to her anymore, or I will totally go ape$hit, I mean it! - Inhale, girl, inhale.

    

Ahhh, I'm going all crazy! - Me, too!

The practice of hiding in plain sight is not new. When ancient Greeks wanted to send a message over great distances, they could not rely on privacy. Messengers could easily be captured and encoded messages deciphered.

 

The most secure way to send a "private" message was to make sure that no one knew that the message existed in the first place. Historical sources describe the extraordinary lengths to which Greeks went, hiding messages within wax tablets or tattoo­ing them on a slave’s head and allowing the slave’s hair to grow out before sending him or her out to meet the message’s recipient. 

 

When I hold my fingers like this, in one of my mudras, it means Pat likes me!!!

  

It was all snap googly and insta, man. - What?

Although these messages could be easily read by anyone who both­ered to look, they became visible only if the viewer knew to look for them in the first place. Cryptographers describe this practice of hiding messages in plain sight as steganography.

 

Children love to experiment with encoding messages. From pig latin to invisible ink pens, children explore hidden messages when they’re imagining themselves as spies and messengers. 

 

It's like totally complicated (amazon.com)

And as children grow up, they look for more sophisticated means of passing messages that elude the watchful eyes of adults.

 

In watching teens navigate public networks, I became enamored of how they were regularly encoding hidden meaning in publicly available messages. They were engaged in a practice that Alice Marwick and I called “social steg­anography,” or hiding messages in plain sight by leveraging shared knowledge and cues embedded in particular social contexts.

 

This uses countless linguistic and cultural tools -- including lyrics, in-jokes, and culturally specific references to encode messages that are functionally accessible but simultaneously mean­ingless. 

 

Obama and the NSA may spy, but we... XOXO

Some teens use pronouns while others refer to events, use nicknames, and employ predetermined code words to share gossip that lurking adults cannot interpret. Many teens write in ways that will blend in and be invisible to or misinterpreted by adults. Whole con­versations about school gossip, crushes... More + AUDIO

• The Internet's dark side exposed in three new films

Online, researcher says, teens do what they've ALWAYS done

Elizabeth Blair (Morning Edition, NPR.org, Feb. 25, 2014)

Don't call me, just text, 'kay? - O.K.

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.
 

With a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, a Masters from MIT, and as a senior researcher at Microsoft, Boyd is something of a star in the world of social media. For her new book, It's Complicated, she spent about eight years studying teenagers and how they interact online.

 

She says she wrote the book in part to help parents, educators, and journalists relax. "The kids are all right," she says.

 

Before Facebook, before Myspace, Boyd (who prefers to use lowercase for her first and last name like e.e. cummings) was an early adopter of the Internet. She got hooked when she was a teenager in the mid-1990s living with her family in a small town in Pennsylvania. It was "inspiring and exciting" to suddenly have access "to people who were more interesting than the people I went to school with," she says.

 

Yay, the kids are all right! (Danah Boyd/CDI)

Today, boyd is one of those people who seems to have memorized several maps of the World Wide Web. She roams like the rest of us, but she also seems to know exactly where to go and what to do when she gets there. She's got a variety of different Twitter accounts. 

"I have both my formal, professional @zephoria account, but then I also have a personal account -- which is me joking around with friends -- and then I have an even sillier account which is me pretending to be my 7-month-old son," says boyd.

"Flickr," she says, "has been a home for a long time to share photos with friends," and LinkedIn is where she spends professional time.

 

On the subject of Facebook, boyd rolls her eyes. Yes, she's there, but she finds it a very hard space to manage. More + LISTEN (5:30)

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MIC's cyber war; Teens tired of Facebook

Text: Jessica Guynn and Ryan Faughnder, LA Times, May 30, 2012; Wisdom Quarterly

For some youngsters the novelty has worn off. Adults are being burned by Facebook stock and lawsuits. And now it seems (pro-FBI) non-CIA-aligned media are interested in oppositional stories (brownsdesign.com).

SAN FRANCISCO - For teens, it has been an essential rite of passage: They turn 13 and join Facebook.

Since she signed up three years ago, friend requests and status updates are as much a part of Meera Kumar's life as homework and exams at Menlo School, the elite private institution in leafy Atherton, California, where she's a 16-year-old sophomore.

But when her kid sister Anika turned 13 last year, she gave Facebook a pass."

I guess I haven't been that interested in it," said Anika, who prefers sharing photos with friends on Instagram via her iPhone or video chatting with them on Google+. Could Facebook be losing its cool? More

"Flame" and homeland spying by US (MIC)

(NPR) ...The New York Times reported that former Pres. George W. Bush and B.S. Obama both authorized computer-virus attacks against Iran, culminating in the Stuxnet virus. They secretly and illegally targeted Iranian nuclear power plants. A United Nations agency raised alarms about another [spying] virus that escaped onto the W.W.W., dubbed "Flame," which may also have been designed for use against Iran. The Flame virus was highlighted in a cyber security alert issued by the International Telecommunication Union (I.T.U.), whose cyber security coordinator says his organization noticed some malicious software spreading around the Middle East... More

[US war machine] takes cyberwarfare to new level
(CNET) [The Military-Industrial Complex through its proxy and representative] President Barack [Soetoro] Obama has been fighting a clandestine cyberwar against foreign governments and [the make believe] al-Qaeda, and his efforts in that arena have far exceeded those of his predecessors [such as Cheney/Bush], according to a new report. The New York Times today published a wide-ranging report, adapted from an upcoming book, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by Times reporter David Sanger... More

• Old "flame" rekindled between Obama and Wall St.
  
  Weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, Obama invited two dozen Wall Street executives, many of them longtime donors, to the White House. Guests were asked for their opinions [tit for tat deals, mandates, terms] on the...
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• Facebook stock falls sharply in June 2012
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• Child killer Zimmerman back in custody
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• Conspiracies swirl as Vatican scandals engulf Rome

Fun with Texting!!!

Steven Hodson (Inquistr.com, Australia)

"OMG, hi!!! this is so fun!!!" "0.k., now u send me 1."

As a society we seem to love nothing better than creating psychological disorders around every new fad that comes our way. And it seems that texting is no different.

The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia has a post up in which Jennie Carroll, a Melbourne technology researcher with RMIT University, claims to have "discovered" four separate disorders when it comes to texting and children.

Yes, children are once again in danger of themselves and this wicked and evil texting thing. Why? Well, they just don’t know any better.

Carroll says teenagers who text too much could find themselves suffering from:

1. Textaphrenia: thinking we’ve heard or felt a new text message vibration when there is no message.
2. Textiety: a feeling of anxiety from not receiving or sending any text messages.
3. Post-Traumatic Text Disorder: injuries related to texting, such as walking into objects by not paying attention to surroundings.
4. Binge Texting: sending massive numbers of texts to build self-esteem among peers. More
   

Helping Haiti: Why?

"If living beings knew the fruit and final reward of generosity and the distribution of gifts, as I know them, then they would not eat their food without giving to others and sharing with others, even if it were their last morsel and mouthful. If they should meet a person who is worthy of receiving a gift, selfishness would not abide in their hearts."

-- The Buddha (Avadana Jataka)

Haiti, which is next to the richest nation in the world, is one of the poorest (arguably the poorest). Their juxtaposition and proximity is not coincidental. Haiti is kept in slave-like conditions. That's what we as a nation do around the world. The profit goes does not go only to us. A tiny fraction goes to a few well-educated and installed Haitian businessmen/politicians, a power elite. Their self-interest as they sell their people out is stoked by Americans, goaded by American firms, and enforced by the CIA and other economic gatekeepers. (That's how wealth and might are wielded by empires).

HOW TO HELP HAITI

For us to be rich, the vast majority of the world's people are kept dirt poor. Haiti is particularly bad in that it has a history of being left desolate -- from time to time, as covered by Wisdom Quarterly, subsisting by eating mud as food.

But why give? The Buddha is reputed to have said that a beggar or person need is potentially one's best friend. Why? That person provides the opportunity for the making of a great deal of merit (puñña). Merit, or profitable karma, is remarkably valuable in Samsara and exceedingly rare.

There are not many worlds given over to making merit. In some, such as Haiti and Hades, the suffering is such that people do not get the chance. In others, such as the US and Japan, the luxury is such that it does not frequently occur to beings to make merit for the future. The Buddha praised giving (dana), second only to meditation, as a wellspring of good karma.

The Motivation for Giving
The sutras record various motives for exercising generosity. The Numerical Discourses (AN.iv,236) lists the following eight motives:

1. One gives with annoyance, or as a way of offending the recipient, or with the idea of insulting the person.
2. Fear motivates a person to make an offering.
3. One gives in return for a favor done to oneself in the past.
4. One also may give with the hope of getting a similar favor for oneself in the future.
5. One gives because giving is considered good.
6. "I cook; they do not cook. It is improper for me who cooks not to give to those who do not cook." Some give urged by such altruistic motives.
7. Some give alms to gain a good reputation.
8. Still others give alms to adorn and beautify the mind.

Favoritism (chanda), ill-will (dosa), and delusion (moha) are also listed as motives for giving. Sometimes alms are given for the sake of maintaining a long-standing family tradition. Desire to be reborn in heaven after death is another strong motive. Giving pleases some, and they give with the idea of winning a happy frame of mind (A.iv, 236).

• with the expectation of getting
• to gain a good reputation
• to adorn the mind

One is inferior and will not produce excellent results. The other is middling. The third, giving with the thought of helping others (as one helps oneself) is an excellent motive! The misguided notion that only pure altruism is of value is incorrect and harmful, since it leads people not to give. Give because it feels good, and give again. Better than giving is encouraging others to give as one gives. Even with inferior motives, the result is good.

Merit grows for one who gives; no enmity builds up for one restrained; one skilled abandons unskillful deeds; with greed, anger, and delusion exhausted, one attains release, a final of suffering (Verses of Uplift, Udana 8.5).

• All About Giving (accesstoinsight.org)
• Reasons for Giving (urbandharma.org)
• The Perfection of Giving
• What is the giving of "alms"?
• Int'l Buddhist disaster relief: TzuChi.org

What parents don't know about MySpace

What parents don't know about kids use

Parents of teenagers know how important texting and social networking sites like MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook are to the over-13 set. But there's a lot they don't know (U.S. News & World Report) Related

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