Archive for the ‘Youth’ Category
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
Adolescence is popularly considered a biological inevitability largely due to the prevalence of misleading claims about the adolescent brain, such as the following which appeared recently in the New York Times:
While we used to think the brain was relatively mature by 16 or 18, in fact it is still developing ...
Posted in Youth | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
Earlier this month I spent a week at the National Data Archive for Child Abuse and Neglect investigating the correlation between guardian behaviors (rules, filters, surveillance, etc.) and youth online safety.
I’ve recently become interested in how technology use among youths is regulated within the family. Parents tend to learn about ...
Posted in Technology, Youth | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010
My paper, "Teens, Tribunes, and Tribulations: Representations of Youth and Technology in Mass Media," is now available for download.
Written last fall for a public sociology class, it examines how essentialist and determinist constructions of youth and technology (of the sort espoused by Bauerlein in my most recent post) act as ...
Posted in Deviance, Technology, Youth | No Comments »
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
Mark Bauerlein is an English professor, moral panic practitioner, technological determinist, and G. Stanley Hall kool aid drinker, as evidenced by his book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
These credentials are evidently sufficient for an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where ...
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Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
FiveThirtyEight, a paragon of insightful statistical commentary, critiques a series of Hyundai commercials featuring Jeff Bridges in which adult fears of reckless teen drivers are exploited to sell cars:
My point here is not to justify teen driving behavior. It's a serious problem, but one that receives ample attention, ...
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Thursday, April 15th, 2010
I was strolling through the old Google Reader this morning and found an article on CNN about "hooking up." How's this for a first sentence?
When Jennifer Nicholas sees television shows or movies where characters "hook up" or have sex with "friends with benefits," she cringes, because that's how ...
Posted in Deviance, Youth | No Comments »
Friday, March 5th, 2010
I like the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Their surveys are reliable and well-constructed, and they've collected tons of publicly available data over the past 10 years.
Their public relations, though, doesn't approach the quality of their methods. Exhibit A: thorough takedowns of last month's "just-this-side-of-moral-crusading...soft ball pitch to those ...
Posted in Technology, Youth | No Comments »
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
Susan Engel, psychologist and educational administrator, has her take on the cesspool of American education in yesterday's NYT:
If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them ...
Posted in Education, Youth | No Comments »
Friday, October 16th, 2009
CNN takes a look at the MySpace/Facebook class divide:
A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.
More specifically, almost ...
Posted in Technology, Youth | No Comments »
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
The Harvard Business Review recently published the above map in an article attempting to locate MySpace's centers of activity. The colors represent relative rates of use: red states have 20% or more MySpace logins than we'd expect from their populations of Internet users, and orange states have 10-20% more. Dark ...
Posted in Technology, Youth | No Comments »
