Susan Boyd makes many assumptions and claims throughout the first chapter of her book. I am aligned with almost all of her points and some are up to interpretation. There was nothing in this chapter that I disagreed with. The first thing she introduces is the story of a student who was trying to escape the gang violence of his neighborhood and attend an ivy league school. This teen had many controversial posts on his my space page which liked him to gangs and corse language. the point she makes about this is that he did this as a “survival technique” (Boyd 29). I found this interesting and connected with it because I have witnessed this first hand as a teen on social media. If a teen is to break the social norms set by his peers he is ridiculed and thought of as weird or an outcast. The second point that she made that I agreed with was when she wrote that teens need to “understand how context, audience, and identity intersect (31). I agree that this is important because of how people can interpret your social media pages differently. Take the excerpt about the teen trying to get into an Ivy League school as a prime example of what not understanding these things can do. He did not think of who would see his my space page or if his posts would ever be taken out of context. This ultimately came back to haunt him when it came time to get accepted to college. The last point that I made a connection with was when she talked about the complexity and sophistication of social media. Boyd makes the point that social media is a “cultural labyrinth” (53) and that “they (teens) are grappling with battles that adults face, but they are doing so while under constant surveillance and without a firm grasp of who they are” (53). This his could not be any more true. Teens do not understand what they are getting themselves into when signing themselves up for social media. They do not know the complexities or the dangers of having your life online. On top of all this they can not possibly navigate these profiles without a firm grasp of who they are.
