Alice Marwick and I co-authored this piece for The Guardian.

The Press Complaints Commission in the UK has now ruled that there is no “reasonable expectation” of privacy on Twitter. With this decision and the fact that teenagers are flocking to Twitter in a big way, frustrated adults are asking the same questions of teen Twitter feeds as they did of MySpace and Facebook: don’t young people know this stuff is public? Why do they put personal things online? Why don’t teens care about privacy?

First, let’s get something straight: not all teens use Twitter, and those who do don’t all use it in the same way. The sense of what’s appropriate on Twitter varies wildly by social group and locale – is it OK to break up with someone on Twitter? To tweet a hundred times a day? Similarly, young people use Twitter in different ways. Some primarily follow celebrities, enjoying the glimpses into their lives, sending @replies to their favourites in the hope of a response and chatting with other fans. Others like getting coupons and freebies from Twitter-savvy brands. Still other teens use Twitter to play hashtag games, like #lessambitiousmovies (think “The Devil Wears Payless” and “The Above Average Four”), where their bon mots can be retweeted or commented on by thousands they may not know. There are also countless teens who use Twitter primarily to engage with people they know from school, summer camp or after-school activities. Who teens imagine reading their tweets very much shapes their style of participation.

Twitter gives its users two settings: make tweets readable to all, or only to a selected group. A surprising number of teens choose the latter, culling a carefully chosen collection of real-life friends and family members. Even for teens who keep their tweets public – like the overwhelming majority of adult users – Twitter seems smaller and more intimate than Facebook. In an age where virtually every young person has a Facebook account, many teens are “friends” with hundreds of classmates, as there’s heavy social pressure to accept friend requests from people they know. Twitter’s more casual approach to “following” means teens can choose to follow only their friends without too much recrimination. In North Carolina, 17-year-old Manu summarises this sentiment: “I guess Facebook is like yelling it out to a crowd, and then Twitter is just like talking in a room.”

To teens, Twitter and Facebook have different purposes. Matthew, another 17-year-old from North Carolina, told us: “On Facebook, if someone writes their emotions every five minutes, it’s just obnoxious.” Since it’s normal to have 600 friends, if one of them posts constant status updates, it potentially drowns out more important or interesting messages. Matthew and his friends call this “blowing up your news feed” and it’s looked down upon. But on Twitter, it’s perfectly OK to talk about the meal you just ate, or the moment-to-moment sadness you feel, because the site encourages such minutia – and you can always unfollow someone if they tweet too much.

It’s also important to remember that just because a tweet can theoretically be accessed doesn’t mean it will be, nor does it mean the underlying sentiment will be understandable to an outside audience. Plenty of teens – and adults – use aliases and nicknames for their Twitter account, since unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t require a real name. Twitter also allows more playfulness; among the most popular Twitter accounts are a cat and several fictional characters.

But even when teens aren’t hiding behind monikers, what they post may not make sense to an outsider. Access to content is not the same as access to interpretation. Teens regularly post in-jokes and use song lyrics or cryptic references to speak to a narrower audience than might be accessing their tweets. Some tweets are clearly difficult to decode, making the reader aware that a message is being hidden; others can be understood as “social steganography” where the message is hidden in “plain sight”. While their classmates, parents or potential employers may be able to see these tweets, they don’t necessarily understand them. Although there’s nothing fundamentally new about these practices, their application to Twitter makes it clear that teens are aware of speaking in public and using strategies to manage it.

What all this means is that “public or private” is more complicated than it seems. Twitter and its ilk aren’t going away, and the answer to responsible use isn’t to shut teens out of public life. Many teens are indeed more visible today than ever before, but, through experience, they’re also developing skills to manage privacy in public. What matters is not whether or not teens are speaking in public, but how we support them as they try to learn how to responsibly navigate the networked public spaces that are central to contemporary life.

More comments can be found on the thread at The Guardian.

Ever had one of dem days you wish woulda stayed home / Run into a
group of niggas who getting they hate on / You walk by they get wrong you reply
then shit get blown / Way outta proportion way past discussion / Just you
against them, pick one then rush em / Figure you get jumped here thats next /
They don’t wanna stop there now they bustin / Now you gushin, ambulance rushin
you to the hospital / with a bad concussion / Plus ya hit 4 times bullet hit ya
spine paralyzed waist down / now ya wheel chair bound / Never mind that now you lucky to be alive. – T.I. “Dead and Gone”

[Originally posted on DML]

Sometimes, I feel like I’m living in parallel universes. I attend conferences and hear from parents and journalists who are talking about the bullying pandemic. And then I talk with teenagers about their social dramas, producing the interactions that adults identify as bullying. I hear from well-meaning adults about how they want to create interventions to help teenagers with bullying. And then I hear teens complain about the assemblies and messaging that they’re forced to listen to that don’t even begin to resonate with them. Whenever I talk to folks about bullying, I’m forced to confront the fact that adults and teens are talking past one another. And then I hear songs like T.I.’s “Dead and Gone” that capture the escalation at the most extreme sense and hope that teens are taking home the core message of the song, which T.I. captures simply as “I won that fight, I lost that war.” The cultural logic underpinning bullying is far more complex than most adults realize. And technology is not radically changing what’s happening; it’s simply making what’s happening far more visible. If we want to combat bullying, we need to start by understanding the underlying dynamics. And we need to approach interventions with an evaluation-based mindset. We won’t know how to stop bullying and no amount of legislation requiring education is going to do squat until we actually find intervention mechanisms that work. And that starts with understanding what’s happening.
The Way Teens See It

When I first started interviewing teenagers about bullying, they would dismiss my questions. “Bullying is so middle/elementary school,” they’d say. “There’s no bullying problem at my school,” they’d say. And then, as our interview would continue, I’d hear about all sorts of interactions that sounded like bullying. I quickly realized that we were speaking different languages. They’d be talking about “starting drama” or “getting into fights” or “getting into my business” or “being mean.” They didn’t see rumors or gossip as bullying, regardless of whether or not it happened online. And girls didn’t see fighting over boys or ostracizing one another because of boys as bullying. They didn’t even see producing fight videos as bullying.

So then I started asking them what bullying was. What I learned was that bullying was when someone picked on someone or physically hurt someone who didn’t deserve it. I’d ask how they knew if someone deserved it and the response was incredulous, “oh, you know.” So I pushed harder… “what if you don’t know?” I asked. I got blank stares so I took a different tactic. “What if someone’s messing with someone and that other person thinks they’re being mean?” This got their attention, but not in the way that I expected. Most told me that you know when someone is messing with you and that if you don’t, you’re stupid. Besides, when someone’s messing with you, you can’t take it seriously.

Of course, teens do take it seriously. And they do misinterpret when people are messing with them. And they do take minor social infractions personally. And then things escalate. And here’s what makes bullying so difficult to address. So often, one person thinks that they’re not at fault and that they’re simply a victim of bullying. But those who are engaged in the bullying see it entirely differently. They blame the person and see what they’re doing as retaliation. None of this is communicated, of course, so things can quickly spiral out of control without anyone really knowing where it all began.

A Story: Janiya and Precious

I was talking with Janiya about who she was friends with on Facebook and she told me “everyone.” I asked her if there was anyone from school that she was not friends with on Facebook and she rolled her eyes and said, “Yeah, Precious.” When I asked her why, she said “I just don’t like her.” Slowly, the story unfolded that she and Precious were currently entangled in a “situation” that had recently blown up pretty badly such that parents were involved. After hearing about the current squabbles, I asked Janiya to think back to a time when she and Precious were friends. I asked her what went wrong. Eventually, she told me about a birthday party in the 4th grade where Janiya played a joke on Precious and Precious took it really badly. It became clear that, ever since then, they were up and down. They didn’t trust one another and it sounded like they regularly misinterpreted what the other had said or done. Everything became personal and, when things got bad, it escalated into a physical fight. From Janiya’s point of view, she’d done nothing wrong; it was all Precious’ fault. But, reading between the lines, it was clear that Precious had a very different POV. I asked Janiya if this was bullying and she told me that Precious and her mom were bullies. I doubt that Precious would see it that way.

So how do we intervene with Janiya and Precious? A lecture on bullying is going to be completely ignored by both of them, either as irrelevant or meaningless to them personally. They don’t see what they’re doing as bullying. What Janiya and Precious need is to understand the situation from each other’s perspective
and to have empathy for how the other experiences what’s unfolding. That’s not an easy thing to do. Heck, that’s extremely hard. Just ask any marital

therapist who’s trying to help a couple work through their relationship. Janiya has a different solution in mind: make Precious change schools. She’s not interested in solving the relationship drama; she just wants Precious out of her life. And the only way that she can imagine this happening is by making it hard for Precious to stick around. So she’s taken a pretty strict stance: she never looks Precious in the eye or speaks to her so as to pretend that she’s invisible. And she encourages her friends to do the same. Online and off.

Empathy, Not Technology, Is Core of the Problem and the Solution

Janiya and Precious are trapped in a full-blown battle, but these dynamics are not unique. Girls ostracize one another either because of personal collisions or in support of their friends’ dramas. They make each other miserable by spreading rumors or gossiping behind their back. Technology is employed in efforts to humiliate, deprecate, or isolate. The end result for girls tends to be verbal and emotional torment. Boys, on the other hand, tend to front in order to move towards a physical altercation. Or to intimidate or humiliate. But in all cases, the point is to show who has social power. It’s all about creating and reinforcing hierarchies. In schools where status-driven hierarchies aren’t acutely maintained by teens, bullying isn’t so dominant. But when there’s something to be gained by putting someone down, bullying rears its ugly head.

When I look at how teens hurt each other, I can’t help but also see how they’re developing training wheels for future relationships and reflecting normative behaviors that they see around them. I hear teens’ dramas reflected in their stories about how their parents fight – with each other, with their friends and family and colleagues, and with them. What teens are doing is more coarse, more direct, and more explicit. But they’re witnessing adult dramas all around them and what they tend to see isn’t pretty. Parents talking smack about work colleagues or bosses. Parents fighting with each other or ostracizing their family members over disagreements. And it’s not just parents…Teens are seeing fights and dramas all over the media. Celebrity fights and dramas aren’t just in their face; they’re glorified! And even if MTV comments on domestic abuse after airing Jersey Shore, the way that the housemates treat each other sets a standard for what’s societally acceptable. Teens are seeing drama everywhere – they’re seeing it as a legitimate part of adult society that can often lead to notoriety.

Let’s Understand, Then Act

And here’s where we run into another major component of bullying… attention. In a world of brands and marketing, there’s a sentiment that there is no such thing as bad attention. Countless teens are desperately seeking attention. And there’s nothing like “starting drama” to guarantee both attention and entertainment. So teens jump in, adding fuel to the flame because it’s fun. They know that it hurts, but it also feels good sometimes too. And this is what makes music videos like Eminem & Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie” resonate with both adults and teens. The drama is half the fun, even when it hurts like hell.

Combating bullying is not going to be easy, but it’s definitely not going to happen if we don’t dive deep in the mess that underpins it and surrounds it. Lectures by uncool old people like me aren’t going to make teens who are engaged in dramas think twice about what they’re doing. And, for that matter, using the term “bullying” is also not going to help at all either. We need interventions that focus on building empathy, identifying escalation, and techniques for stopping the cycles of abuse. We need to create environments where young people don’t get validated for negative attention and where they don’t see relationship drama as part of normal adult life. The issues here are systemic. And it’s great that the Internet is forcing us to think about them, but the Internet is not the problem here. It’s just one tool in an ongoing battle for attention, validation, and status. And unless we find effective ways of getting to the root of the problem, the Internet will just continue to be used to reinforce what is pervasive.

Banner image credit: lenifuzhead

Second image credit: *nimil*