The Kids are alright (its the parents you have to worry about....)

There is an article in the NYT on the angst about the kids use of Social Networking sites, and whether it ruins their social skills:

Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins.

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Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis.

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The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.

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....the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.

In true journalistic fashion the article leads with the negative and the mitigation is on Page 2 - for example, it makes it possible to organise one's existing social life much more effectively and reduce downtime:

To some children, technology is merely a facilitator for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet some friends later at a party. The next day she played in two softball games, texting between innings and games about plans to go to a concert the next weekend.

And it can a godsend for the shy kids (never mind grouos like the deaf):

Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others. Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general “goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s Facebook interactions.)

But what they usually don't ask is WHY the kids use this technology so heavily. As Dr Norman Lewis pointed out at our recent TEDxTuttle2 event, a large reason the kids use the technology so heavily is that the parents are frantic about Risk (see photo above). This generation of kids is the most carefully chaperoned in history, with nearly every waking moment structured into activities, and they spend far more time with Adults than any generation before. Not only that, but the Adults ate scared of the yout when they gather together and have sought to obstruct (and even criminalise) the places young people meet.

Social Media represents the last unmediated space the kids' have to themselves (and even better, as you can see from this article, the Adults disapprove of it - bonus!)

And what is so odd is why parents are so risk averse - as Norman showed, most risks to the kids have dropped off dramatically in the last 30 years or so, even as hysteria about the risk rises in the media (I read an interesting study that showed the amount of panic words used by the media rocketed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the argument there being that once the Commies were no longer a threat, there is a conspiracy to cow the population with a new "risk" bogeyman - and justify removing a lot of civic freedoms to boot.)

Be the reasons as they may, it has worked and the result is the kids are on social media - and, observing my kids, doing what kids always do. They use Social media the way we used telephones. Do they hang out less? Possibly physically, but overall I'd say they are more in contact than my generation was - thse commentators seem to forget that these online friendship groups see each other every day at school and in those structured after school activities.

Its just one more risk parents are being scared with...... its all a Conspiracy, I tell you