The Kids Might Be Learning Faster About How to Use Social Media

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

As I mentioned yesterday, the article about how college admission folks do, in fact, check online profiles of potential students, there was another thought that occurred to me.

Us older folks like to read something like that, and think that yes, these kids today with their selfies and risque photos, should really pay more attention to what college admissions offices, and potential employers are going to see.

I would like to posit that many already know that.

What are the fastest growing social media apps for teens and young adults? They may have profiles on Twitter and Facebook, but those are mostly just to connect to various things that they like. That’s not where they spend their time and interact with each other, though. That happens on SnapChat, Instragram Stories, WhatsApp, etc.

What’s different about those networks? I can put something up, share it with my friends, and then it goes away. No one is going to find it a year from now and hold it against me or take it out of context. Now, I’m not going to claim that they are doing this with the long term view, they are still kids after all. They are probably just using those to keep stuff from teachers, parents, and non-friends, but it’s serving the same purpose. They seem to have comprehended, much quicker than the adults online, that maybe it makes more sense to have a variety of smaller social networks as opposed to one large one.

They’re not wrong. I’ve found myself using Instagram and SnapChat Stories as a way to put up silly things and then have them go away. I’ve been using Facebook Messenger more to have group conversations. I’d probably use Signal or WhatsApp or even Slack if I happened to know anyone who wanted to communicate that way. It makes sense. It’s part of our nature as human beings to communicate in different ways with different groups of people, and it makes sense to want to have some of those communications be less than permanent.

Of course, just because they seem to get this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still be teaching them some basic online safety. Sure, that photo might not be public, but any of your friends who receives it could screenshot it, and make it public! But as I have said before, this does seem to be a more natural way for people to interact, and that’s not a bad thing.

Now if we can just get all of the adults to quit sharing things that aren’t true, we might get somewhere. Trust me, when you share things without checking the authenticity of it, we judge you. 😉

Similar Posts

  • |

    Watch Out For Phone Calls Claiming Your Computer is Infected

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

      Since I’ve recently seen a couple of Facebook friends mentioning the fact that they’ve gotten unsolicited phone calls claiming that their computer was at risk, and infected with malware, I thought I’d go ahead and make a public service announcement about it. Do not give out any personal information, or download software that allows…

  • Google+ Communities

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Thiss seems like an interesting idea Just saw the Google announcement about communities and it has sparked a few ideas for ways to use them rolling around in my head. Especially for the Child Abuse Survivor site, but also for this site and some other things. How about you guys, are you excited about the…

  • |

    Over-Simplistic Scientific Intelligence

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 5 minutes

    And this really brings me back to my point, that we do a poor job of truly understanding science, statistics and cause and effect. We believe that algorithms have all been well-thought out, and produce a “true” result, even when they are trying to predict something as unpredictable as what traffic will look like 20 years from now. We assume social science studies are giving us the “right” answer for how to educate people, or train them for the best outcomes, without considering what we are teaching them about the larger world. We assume that we can tweak one belief, or one thing, without human beings reacting to those changes in unpredictable ways, all the while thinking our one change will cause the reaction we DO predict.

    We assume a lot that should never be assumed. We over-simplify a world that actually has more influences than we can possibly account for, and assume that what is really a small statistical difference represents a universal truth.

    It doesn’t. There are no simple answers. It takes hard work, hard discussions, and lots of listening to figure out the best way forward. Don’t wait for AI to tell you what to do, it may be missing quite a bit.

  • |

    Linked: Data From Fake Legal Requests Used to Sexually Extort Minors

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    In this case, we have an emergency process. There are good reasons to have that process, if someone is threatening violence to themselves on social media, it’s useful for the tech company to share some information with law enforcement so they can be reached. But, having the ability to get that kind of response from tech companies is also an invitation to hackers. If they can create a fake emergency request they can collect personal information about any user. They can then use that information to target that individual.

    When you create that kind of system, the request needs to be coming from a safe, verified, source. When the source is compromised, and the receiver doesn’t have an excellent validation process, bad things are going to happen.

    Because when you have that kind of data, people will try and do bad things with it.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)