Education

Social Media and the Youth ‘Culture of Fear’

By Jason Tomassini — March 10, 2012 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

The new Marketplace K-12 blog is covering education-related goings-on at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas, this week. A post today touched on subjects covered in this space: cyber-bullying and how youth use technology.

Danah Boyd, a leading researcher on youths and social media, with Microsoft, spoke about the “culture of fear” surrounding teenagers use of the internet, how that culture has developed and why it’s affecting how teens use social media. An excerpt from the post:

First, data show that students are still bullied the most in school, and the Internet hasn't increased bullying, Boyd said. But parents can't see what happens at school the way they can see what happens online. Because it's more visible to them, parents teach their kids to fear online culture as a way to control them, the same way media and marketers do, Boyd said.

Read the full post here.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Digital Education blog.