Parents, Stop Panicking About Sexual Predators Online

In a recent New York Times profile, Danah Boyd was described by one of her colleagues at NYU as our first anthropologist “who comes from the tribe she’s studying,” meaning that the 36-year-old researcher is a digital native who grew up immersed in the same online culture as the teenagers she now studies. “Danah Boyd often dresses like her youthful subjects,” reads the caption on a photo of her wearing a fuzzy animal beanie and striped knee-highs, suggesting that Boyd is an emissary from a new and unexplored terrain. But what’s most surprising about this lucid excerpt from Boyd’s new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, is how little the dynamics between teenagers and their parents seem to have changed, and also how much online life resembles dynamics in the real world. Full Article