Scott Allenby recently drew my attention to a N.Y. Times article entitled Cracking Teenagers' Online Codes which introduces us to Dr. Dana Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, assistant professor at N.Y.U. and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. A main thesis espoused by Boyd: when we bemoan the evils of teenagers' online behavior, we're barking up the wrong tree. 

 

This certainly qualifies as novel thinking; even here, at a relatively progressive/iconoclastic school, the potential evils of online activity are the source of much angst. Boyd's counter is to recognize that engaging in unsupervised conversations, flirtations, immature humor, etc., are the normal stuff of "hanging out," in a society that no longer tolerates teenagers physically roaming around.

 

“We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them,” she observes. “What scares me is that we don’t want to look at the things that make us uncomfortable. So rather than see what teenagers are showing us online about bullying and suicide and the problems they’re dealing with and using that information to help them, we’re making ourselves blind to it.”







Described as a "...rockstar emissary from the online and offline world of teenagers," the 34-year-old doctor is--in the words of tech guru Clay Shirky, "...the first anthropologist we’ve got who comes from the tribe she’s studying." Our fear of worst outcomes motivates us to ignore potential benefits. “There are lots of places where it’s extraordinarily helpful for kids to talk to adults.” she opines.



 



Below, students here in Andover communicate via Skype with Mountain Classroom students who are in the Southwest.

 

In the article, Alice Marwick, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft observes, "She was the first to say that teenagers at risk off line are the same ones who are at risk online. It's not that the Internet is doing something bad to these kids. it's just that these bad things are in kids' lives and the Internet is just a component of that." 

 

Winter Bonus Weekend began Thursday at 11:45 AM, and classes recommence Tuesday morning. This means that the next blog post on this site will appear Tuesday evening, January 31.