Networked teens are far from doomed, new book says

• Author Boyd says parents of teens should %27build a rapport%27 to explore the Internet together
• Tech just allows teens to do what they%27ve always done - %27socialize%2C gossip%2C flirt%27 - in an age of tightened parental oversight
• While cyber-bullying remains a hot topic%2C Boyd says mean behavior not worse because of Internet

Parents of today's teens share the same angst: By letting kids swim freely in an ocean-sized tech world do they risk leaving them to flail in a murky sea of faceless interactions?

There's good news: "The kids are alright," says Danah Boyd, Microsoft Research's longtime observer of cultural-tech trends.

To understand how social media was transforming the teen experience, Boyd conducted nearly 200 interviews for It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, out today (Yale University Press, $25). She answers USA TODAY's questions.

Your forward describes a YouTube-loving kid who wanted you to tell his mom that not everything on the Internet was bad. Your parental advice?

I totally understand adults' resistance to the Internet with regard to their children, but it's also clear that this is the contemporary site of peer sociality as well as the tool through which they get access to unbelievable amounts of information. Blocking teens from accessing social media is basically akin to saying that they're not allowed to have friends or go to the library. Parents shouldn't project their own understandings of the Internet onto their children but, instead, build enough of a rapport with them to be able to explore the Internet together.

Has technology – and specifically social media as shared through ubiquitous mobile devices – fundamentally altered the growing up process?

The Internet has not radically transformed our children. Instead, it's provided a platform through which young people enact all sorts of practices – good, bad, and ugly. What's really different today is that those practices are far more visible precisely because of the traces that people leave behind when they're interacting online. But when you look at what teens are doing online, they're doing what they've always done at this stage – socialize, gossip, flirt, joke around. It's just that those practices weren't always so visible to adults.

Can you share an example of how today's teens navigate tech?

Carmen, a Boston-based teen of Argentinean descent, did a phenomenal job of encoding content so that her friends would understand what she was talking about and her mother would not. My favorite story was when she broke up with her boyfriend and wanted to get sympathy from her peers without her mom thinking she was suicidal. She wanted to find the perfect song lyric without her mother overreacting. She and her geeky friends had just watched the Monty Python movie Life of Brian so she put up lyrics from (the theme song), Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. Her mother took the lyrics literally and commented that it was great she was having such a good day while her friends immediately texted her, knowing full well that that song was sung during a scene in which the key character was being crucified. Carmen's approach fabulously illustrates something that I saw all the time. Rather than trying to restrict access to content, many youth started finding innovative ways of limiting access to meaning.

So it's a myth that teens don't care about privacy?

Just because they share information does not mean that you can interpret what's being said. Parents forget that teens are extraordinarily accustomed to surveillance because parents, teachers, and other adults have always been hovering. What's astonishing is how teens find privacy in spite of surveillance.

What's the biggest preconception you had going into this project?

I really expected things to be much different because of social media. With some topics, I had to really check my own assumptions because the data that I collected made it very clear that my assumptions were naive. For example, I expected bullying to be much worse because of the Internet but I'm confident in the data that shows that it's not.

Does every virtuous tech development have the potential to become a vice?

Negotiating vices is a lifelong challenge, whether we're talking about chemical vices like alcohol, behavioral vices like gaming, or social vices like attention. The key is to understand what the root of the vice is. When teens engage in an unhealthy way with technology, the first thing that a parent should ask is: what is actually driving this? Then work to address the underlying issue rather than just regulating the symptom.

What are the most beneficial aspects of today's teens being networked?

Because of social media, teens have a much better sense of how their social world is structured; they see friends-of-friends as a network and they see how communities are architected. But above all, what I think matters about teens' engagement with social media is that they're getting access to public life. For a whole host of reasons, we've limited young people's mobility over the last 30 years. In spite of the restrictions we've placed on teens, they keep finding a way to make sense of public life. Today, that involves the Internet.

Do you foresee a backlash by future generations against our tech-driven life?

The issue is that parents have really limited the opportunities teens have to gather with their peer group as a whole outside of structured activities. Thus, the big question for me is what will it take for parents to calm down and actively enable their children to have physical and social freedom? The attitudes and expectations of adults are far more predictive of what will happen with the next cohort of teens than any technology that might appear.