danah and I have a new piece in the Daily Beast. Summary: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In the last decade, we’ve studied how technology affects how teens socialize, how they present themselves, and how they think about issues like gender and privacy. While it’s true that teens incorporate social media into many facets of their lives, and that they face new pressures their parents didn’t—from cyber-bullying to fearmongering over “online predators”—the core elements of high-school life are fundamentally the same today as they were two decades ago: friends, relationships, grades, family, and the future.

Read the full piece here.

A lot of the research that we do involving teenagers seems obvious to teenagers themselves. “Duh.” “Why would anyone study that?” “Who cares?”

Unfortunately, teenagers aren’t the ones writing news stories about how Facebook is making us lonely, Facebook is full of creepers, or teens are pressured to reveal intimate details on Facebook (note: those last two studies sponsored by a company that creates parental blocking and monitoring software). They aren’t the ones passing anti-bullying legislation, appearing on television to tell parents that teens study less and are more narcissistic than a generation ago, or implementing 3-strikes laws in public schools.

Our public-facing work aims to explain teenage practice in clear language that isn’t sensationalistic or fear-mongering. Obviously, not all scholarship lends itself to this type of writing. But given that social media is often discussed in utopian or dystopian terms in the press, research can provide a rational, sensible perspective that’s badly needed. Like, duh.