FEBRUARY 16, 2010
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Adults love to obsess about how the perils of modernity are ruining the younger generations. (They can’t help themselves. It’s how they keep their minds off all the gray hair, crows feet, and erectile dysfunction that stalk the land of the middle aged.) Nowadays, a favorite fixation is whether youth can be taught to responsibly navigate our wired world. Can immature minds grasp the privacy issues that become more complicated with each new networking tool? How can we make teens understand the foolishness of putting drunken, naked spring break pics on Facebook for the entire world (and future potential employers) to ogle? Is social networking creating a generation of scorching narcissists? Will sexting turn our youth into a pack of mindless, drooling sociopaths?
I’m sorry, but from where I sit, it ain’t the young’uns having notable trouble setting barriers and using technology with any level of discretion, reserve, or common sense. Rather, every time you turn around, an ostensible grown-up has done something monumentally stupid like sexting his mistress, sending filthy instant messages to strapping young House pages, or tweeting about his congressional delegation’s classified landing in Iraq. And how about that moron in North Carolina who googled the many and varied ways to kill a person in the days before killing his wife? Now there’s a guy in need of a lesson on the dangers of interconnectivity. This is not to say that younger users don’t do plenty of stupid stuff as well. But, as often as not, it’s the older generations that clearly can’t be trusted to navigate even basic media and networking tools.
Just last week, two unrelated news stories drove this point home for me. The first and more respectable involved a new Pew study showing that most American teens, usually early adapters of tech innovations, have no use for Twitter. And within the slim 8 percent of “online teens” who do use Twitter, most are tracking the goings-on of celebrities. (A related question found that 19 percent of online adults “use Twitter or similar services,” although the different wording of the question makes an apples-to-apples comparison impossible.)
The WaPo’s article on the Pew report cited similar findings from other researchers. In a survey of college freshmen last year, Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University found that 10 percent had used Twitter once and never gone back, while only 4 percent used it regularly. “They’re more interested in friends and not keeping in touch with the world more broadly,” she explained. And while adults often assume teens are desperate for the spotlight, privacy is a big concern, said Lynn Schofield Clark of the University of Denver. “Twitter seems to take away the control they want,” she observed. “There is a growing awareness of privacy levels.” Overwhelmingly, members of the younger generation prefer friend-focused tools like Facebook, where they have more control over their info and interactions.
How’s that for irony? It turns out that all those middle-aged goobers tweeting about their sock drawers in a scramble to prove they’re one of the cool kids are in fact proving how uncool they really are: Tech’s true early adapters are more discriminating and have little interest in blasting their every thought to a vast cloud of strangers. So explain to me again which demographic group is the more attention-starved and narcissistic?
I was still pondering teens’ underappreciated level of tech maturity when I was smacked in the face by the latest installment of the John-Edwards-Is-a-Pig-and-an-Idiot drama. As it turns out, not only does an Edwards-Rielle Hunter sex tape exist, it is the focus of a legal battle between Hunter and Edwards dogsbody turned sex-scribbler Andrew Young. On February 5, Young was scheduled to appear in a North Carolina court to contest an injunction filed by Hunter, who seeks to prevent dissemination and to regain possession of “a personal video recording that depicted matters of a very private and personal nature.” Depending on who tells it, the tape was either stolen by Young from a hatbox full of Hunter’s very important personal effects or discarded by Hunter when she fled the North Carolina home the Youngs had been renting for her in late 2007. Either way, Young somehow found himself in possession of a home movie of the sort that drives the tabloids to stuff filthy wads of cash into one’s trousers. He is willing to fight Hunter for it (perhaps even eager, seeing as how he has a book to promote), and, at this point, there’s not much Edwards can do but sit back and watch his once-golden image gather even more layers of slime.
Now, admittedly, allowing oneself to be videotaped banging one’s pregnant mistress (Hunter is reportedly heavy with child in the tape) while in the thick of a presidential campaign may not be as cutting edge as emailing a mistress photos of one’s penis. (Go Tiger!) But it is no less jaw-droppingly stupid, not to mention naïve about where even marginally interesting footage tends to wind up these days. (I’m now taking bets on how long before bits of this masterwork hit YouTube.) So unless Edwards expects us to believe his romp was recorded without his knowledge (one of the few claims of innocence he hasn’t yet attempted), we must assume he is a complete fool. At least when young hotties like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian make sex tapes, they manage a career boost from it.
My sense is that many grown-ups grab for media toys and new technologies to feel hip and to display how cutting-edge and non-obsolete they are. But adults clearly can’t handle their tech, be it tweets, texts, emails, or even relatively old-fashioned video. It’s not really their fault: They didn’t grow up in a wired world and so lack the basic feel for where limits should be drawn. The resulting awkwardness is a little like allowing a bunch of folks who’ve never seen a gun before to dash off into the woods with a Bushmaster semi-automatic. Without responsible, non-adult supervision, someone is going to get hurt.
Michelle Cottle is a senior editor of The New Republic.
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13 comments
I dunno - I'm middle age and I just like Twitter better than Facebook (I kinda liked myspace for the tunes, but the ads for videochats with hot coeds made me feel like a creepy old man). Most of my favorite tweets are just links to articles on the web or "instapunditry" (sorry Glenn) on something or someone in the news. I can scan and check out tweets pretty fast, while most people I know on facebook get lost in a time sinkhole checking out friends' pages, playing mafia war, taking quizzes, etc.
- Lymon1
February 16, 2010 at 6:14am
I hear ya, Lymon, but I found that after the first year, when I stopped playing games or taking quizes, Facebook suits my needs better than Twitter. Twitter feels like I'm standing at the water's edge on Omaha Beach trying to read the serial number on every passing bullet. It's just too much, too fast; to keep up with everyone I want to keep up with, I'd have to be reading Twitter all the time. I really only use it for hashtag searches anymore. Whereas Facebook can facilitate meaningful contact with my networks of actual friends and family in just a few minutes per day. But since Twitter-first or Twitter-only is becoming more common, I compromise and post all my non-media posts to Twitter, and then have my Twitter feed automatically sent to Facebook.
- rhubarbs
February 16, 2010 at 8:44am
I have never twiitted or tweeted or whatever it is called, and I don't have a facebook account, yet I still manage to embarrass myself daily at TNR. Generally, I find myself being more tech savvy than a lot of the less than half my age University students (including some of the IT students) since I have had more time to understand the inner working of Windows or a lot of programs like Acrobat, Photoshop, or Pagemaker. One of the advantages of my age is I learned when the learning curve was much steeper than today and it has only been a matter of keeping up, not learning new. Don't knock experience.
- blackton
February 16, 2010 at 10:27am
Blackton, I wrote almost the identical sentence as that with which you opened, then decided not to post. Must be an age thing. Most kids I know aren't very technology savvy, they are "gadget savvy" - they know how to do what they want with gadgets that are basically black boxes to enable social communication. Nothing wrong with that - a lot of people in my generation treated cars the same way. On the other hand, the ones I meet who are tech savvy in the "down in the innards, know how it works and fails" sense run circles around me (and my job is building and selling very sophisticated software systems) with the new stuff. Experience is great, but there is nothing like getting the workings of a system burned into your intuition as a young'un to make for deeply impressive skills. As for the folks about which Michelle is writing here - sex hormones make people stupid. Power and prestige make them arrogant. Stupid and arrogant is a toxic mix. Technology is just a stupidity and arrogance amplifier, just as it's frivolity amplifier for our texting-besotted youth.
- IowaBeauty
February 16, 2010 at 12:57pm
- So true, blankton. Nearly twenty years ago I was fortunate to play on the earliest of version of social networks, USENET. I saw people who believed they were anonymously posting and baiting, getting into serious feuds while some were stalked and a couple lost their jobs when they were hunted down. And as software became more complex I still found myself relying upon the fundamentals (maintenance, security) that I learned using DOS. That and hoping good luck prevailed. We're using machines, they are faster or have more efficient tools but easier doesn't mean safer. Most adults who have relied upon this technology for a couple of decades learned the hard way that they need to be more aware of privacy, confidentiality and caution is rarely bad. An innocuous post or e-mail is durable and can haunt in ways that only a bad experience can prove. Maybe kids are more suspect or it could be they are years from paying a price or discovering the cost of mischief. Face it, grown ups have more to lose but there's never been a guarantee that more age equaled more wisdom. Young or old, people who don't realize the need to be in control of their toys will discover the consequences of being seduced and it may not be pretty. All machines are equal opportunity destroyers and the quicker one learns that, the better.
- michael
February 16, 2010 at 1:01pm
michael, you obliquely raise a very serious issue: the longevity, even permanence, of the stupid things we all do as children and young adults. I think of the time I joined a few friends to stage an armed coup in a history class (European Civ; we were roleplaying the Estates General that week). Had I been my kid brother's age, a fun little stunt with the teacher's approval would have gotten us all expelled (zero tolerance means theatrical muskets and swords are treated as real weapons) and would no doubt have been filmed, posted to Youtube, and I'd have to explain that video and others like it at every job interview or credit review for the rest of my life. Thankfully, I'm just old enough that it's a fun anecdote about the stuff you can't get away with anymore, no mug shot, no film at eleven. And then there's all the drivel I wrote in college, which although that was in the early days of Usenet and Gopher, is mercifully accessible only as extremely obscure hard copies. I will never have to defend or apologize for the cartoons I drew or the editorials I wrote, whereas today's young people will. But I don't fault young folks for naivete about the perils. Of course they don't understand what it means to have the stupid things you did at 16 instantly searchable when you're 63. Nobody understands what that means, because none of us have actually lived in this new world yet. And maybe the youthful attitude of nonchalance will ultimately save us all. If the kids understand that embarrassing online stuff is no big deal, then when they're running the world, it will be no big deal.
- rhubarbs
February 16, 2010 at 1:24pm
rhubarbs, I think you are exaggerating the permanence of these things, a lot of it isn't cached, and with the plethora of new info coming out, isn't even backed up. All of it might be out there somewhere, but that somewhere could be in a server landfill, or in a musty old warehouse. And I simply don't think people are dumb enough to hold something against you that you did or wrote when you were 20 when you are 40. "oh yes, we were definitely going to hire you, but we came across this picture of you drunk at a frat party when you were in college so we decided not to" just doesn't strike me as likely. One of the reasons I do post with my own name is I don't think people remotely care whatsoever about what I say.
- blackton
February 16, 2010 at 2:18pm
- OK, I'm hardly paranoid or I'd not have admitted to a lot of my experiences that are easily mined using various search tools. But that's just it, I assume an e-mail is no less secure or private than a post to a public group. Most people may be smart enough to not lose track of a sex tape but I have loads of notes where people clearly didn't consider the lack of confidentiality before they hit SEND. Has anyone received a note that was not meant for them? How many people in and out of government leave behind data trails even though they shred everything scrap of paper? No, we can't control snooping or gotcha photos but most people are done in by a combination of hubris-vanity-ignorance where they didn't stop and ask, "What if ____ ?". I think there is a statue of limitations so Spitzer or Edwards wouldn't be held accountable for their behavior if it had been kept quiet for thirty year. But Michelle knows guns better than most people and she has a point, before one points a firearm they should know whether they intend for the safety to be off or on. It isn't that people aren't stupid with an ax or a saw, errors with a gun tend to be deadlier. -
- michael
February 16, 2010 at 3:28pm
I think the proliferation of embarassing media floating out in the ether is probably creating problems for folks in my generation NOW, but by the time we're in the position of hiring and admitting students, we won't be bothering with such searches. Why? Because the power-holders will have just as much dirt out there, and just as much to lose. Collectively we'll all make an unspoken decision to pretend it all doesn't exist and prevent Mutually Assured Humiliation. As for Twitter, I frigging love it. I use it more to keep up on interesting writers and comedians and so on. Facebook I can't stand - frankly I don't give a damn what every single person I've ever met is doing at any given moment. Dana Stevens summed it up perfectly for me - Facebook is about catching up (which I loathe) and Twitter is about BSing (which I love). (Cue shameless plug: twitter.com/andydaglas )
- adaglas
February 16, 2010 at 4:12pm
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I Dare You
I'm more cynical than adaglas. It won't matter that "power-holders will have just as much dirt out there", because it doesn't prevent those who currently have power to bully as they ignore their own skeletons. Hypocrisy favors those who make the rules. Wag your finger at your own risk... If there's any doubt, just ask any prospective employer if his boss can meet the standard he's asking of you. You could ask if he passes that test but it better be a job you don't want. I may be wrong but during a police interrogation it probably doesn't matter if you know the detective is cheating on his wife. No, I'd not hint of mutual anything. -- michael
February 16, 2010 at 4:49pm
LMAO and almost dropped my iPhone. Bloggig here in my underpants I had to IM my Posse and let them know how hip this post is. OOOXXX OOOXXX
- CRS9TNR
February 16, 2010 at 9:22pm
Adding to the sad trumpeting of how 'tech savvy am I' posts... I remember when the GUI of the internet didn't exist and you had to FTP to find anything and USENET was truly useless, searching for a graphic that someone had spent hours typing out using keyboard strokes then printing it out on my dot-matrix printer, writing script in FORTRAN, learning Autocad R10 on an Intel 286 and the baud rate on my modem was 56K and I liked it. I used twitter for about 3 days and found it completely useless pour moi. I don't Facebook with any level of obsession but I keep my profile trimmed to the basics with no true personal information that my friends don't already know. I do use it primarily to keep in touch with family and friends from out of state primarily because those same people can't seem to remember my email address. I also have a LinkedIn profile which has, surprisingly, been useful in networking professionally and as one of many conduits I use to keep abreast of the vast amounts of information that swamp my profession. But the real value of these software interfaces is to stay connected to colleagues across vast geographic areas that don't necessarily make phone calls relevant. The sad state of the middle-aged boomers who feel the need to stay connected truly is a reflection of narcissistic behavior. It's one thing to text or even sext between husband and wife but tweeting about your meet up? It's as if the mere act of participating in the technology and social networks validates what they're posting about regardless of relevance. So at the end of the day after working on the blackbox some call a laptop, the last thing I want to do is be plugged in 24 hours a day. Thankfully I've still got my reading library filled with printed texts and treatise to peruse while wearing my velvet smoking jacket, puffing on the pipe, scotch in hand, with Miles' Sketches of Spain playing on the phonograph. Sometimes the approach to middle age can make one appreciate the simple things in life.
- singlspeed
February 17, 2010 at 10:39am
While it is impressive to note how many teens lose interest in "twittering" or "tweeping" or whatever the kids call it these days, that doesn't necessarily indicate greater maturity or savvy so much as perhaps a misplaced trust. What of the girl who sends uncovered pics of herself, naughty bits and all, to her BF only to have those splashed all over the Internets when the relationship breaks up (didn't that happen to one of the High School Musical starlets or someone like that? OMG!)? Decidedly un-savvy. About the only social media in which I indulge is Facebook (from which I faithfully follow TNR.com, you're welcome), and the biggest hassle there is getting rid of the "friends" from backintheday who have devolved into knuckle-dragging Tea Partiers or worse.
- cspencef
February 17, 2010 at 11:28am