The violent and agressive teens in America ruin it for everyone else.

Unlese we reign in gangs, drugs, alcohol, and agression, no one will be in favor of unsupervised teens.

Everyone loses.

I am presenting a paper next week on social networking sites at AMCIS, “Trust and Privacy Concern Within Social Networking Sites: A Comparison of Facebook and MySpace,
by Catherine Dwyer,Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Katia Passerini, Proceedings of AMCIS 2007, Keystone, CO.

The paper is here: http://csis.pace.edu/~dwyer/research/DwyerAMCIS2007.pdf

I conducted a study comparing members of Facebook and MySpace. Facebook members expressed greater trust in the site and other members, and were more willing to share information in their profile. However, MySpace members reported more use of the site to meet new people. This was true even for members of MySpace that expressed low trust in the site. This seems to suggest members have some intuitive sense they apply as they evaluate people they meet on these sites, and this process is independent of privacy settings. My plan for my next study is to explore in more detail how members negotiate their privacy settings in order to both protect themselves, but also keep open channels of communication to new people they may want to meet.

I’m American, but have lived in Germany and spent a lot of time in other European countries. I’ve noticed that Europeans don’t think it’s “cheap” or “lame” to go for walks, hang out in parks, take a date hiking, etc.

Here, in the States, the perceived value of free time seems to be highly correlated with the cost of that “free” time. With the exception of an enlightened / hippy / easy-going few, I can’t imagine taking dates to something that doesn’t cost money (e.g., drinks, a restaurant, etc.). Friends don’t hang out and play board games here or just chat or have potlucks or bbqs with the frequency I saw in Europe. It’s always about going to a club, or grabbing dinner at a restaurant, etc.

And with friendship-things always revolving around things that require money, what are not-well-off teens to do? Hang out with other not-well-off-teens, I suppose. Or stay home.

Another issue: American cities, especially most larger ones, tend to be horribly unwalkable and bike un-friendly. Most areas have few if any pedestrian streets downtown, where you can just walk along, unbothered by cars. It’s all about drive, park, get inside. Lingering is not encouraged. And it’s not “safe.”

Not so in much of Europe. Or Montreal.

Can you tell I’m fed up with America? For better or worse, I really like my current job. Or I’d be on the next plane to somewhere else where people live for more than the next exciting bauble or reservation at the newest trendy restaurant.

I find this outlook intriguing. While I spent my teenage years crashing college parties, working, and breaking curfew, one of my closest friends was living in Israeli. He had come to visit while we were both 16, and I don’t believe he was used to American teenage life. His plans once he returned to Israel made me jealous…camping on the beach for a week with his peers, unsupervised. I couldn’t even imagine an outing like such. My first vacation without my family didn’t happen until I was already in college.

I feel as if American teenagers turn to drinking to push the boundaries. Since drinking is so set here for the age of 21, doing so before had is a type of rebellion. American teenagers are known to rebel. No one cares for limitations.

If given the opportunity to get trashed at my friend’s house at 4AM or camp on the beach with all my friends, alcohol free, I’d chose the latter. It’s unfortunate that American teenagers lack the freedom of youth.

Michael Clarke, I think you’ll find the willingness to accept risk is largely a function of age, not culture or subculture. American parents don’t lock down their kids because they’re more protective of them than Israeli parents, but rather because American parents, unlike Israel, Japan, France, and most other cultures, have chosen to withdraw from public space. It’s more a function of Americans’ rabid independence than their fear.

As to a monoculture, there is an old, ugly, and seldom openly discussed claim, especially in the American South, that sharing resources like the ones mentioned above depends on some system to keep out people you don’t want to share with– Palestinians in Israel, poor blacks here. Its adherents even seem sometimes to glorify it more because it is an unpleasant idea, seldom openly discussed and sure to provoke outrage, as if it were secret knowledge of government corruption in Stalinist Russia. First, I think that like most elephants in the room, this needs to be discussed, not politely ignored, even though it will start fights. Second, I simply don’t believe it. The crucial difference between the idea that Stalin’s government was corrupt, and the idea that all communities are equally and inevitably guilty of segregation, is that the former is true and the latter is false. Look at Vancouver, Berlin, or London, all of which are quite diverse, yet more welcoming, more tolerant, and share more public resources than any city in America. No city is without racial and cultural tension, but that doesn’t mean that every city is as bad as Johannesburg in the 1980s or LA today. Americans have been sharing water fountains for forty years, we’ve been increasing how much we share government power and public spaces as well, we can certainly continue those improvements, we should, and I believe we will.

On to the question of Israel and Palestine. Henry Kissinger once said, in reference to this issue, “You Americans, you’re all engineers. You think that all the world’s problems are puzzles that can be solved with money and materiel. You are wrong. All of the world’s great problems are not problems at all. They are dilemmas, and dilemmas cannot be solved. They can only be survived.” Perhaps it’s only because I am, in fact, an engineer, but I disagree. I continue to believe that the war between Israel and Palestine, just like the American Civil War or Apartheid in South Africa, can and will be changed to peace.

Finally, a quick note on binge drinking. I can’t pin that on any particular public policy. Alcohol has been legal for many decades, so I’d say a failure to teach kids how to drink moderately is a purely cultural and social failure. I’m guessing it’s a matter of whether kids learn about alcohol and its effects secondhand before adolescence, and whether they ever see adults around them drinking responsibly and moderately. The problem’s hardly unique to the US, either– anecdotally, there’s more excessive drinking each step from France to England to Scotland to Australia. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about the subject with much neutrality. Anything I say drips smugness over the fact that I went to college at the University of Texas and barely drank at all, and never vomited or blacked out, even though I know many of my most smart, capable friends did so every few weeks.