Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Teens Care About Online Privacy—Just Not the Same Way You Do

teen-facebook-privacy

The latest round of research on teenagers and digital privacy is out, this time in the form of a joint study by the Pew Research Center and the Berkman Center for Internet Society. The results of the study are similar to the results of past studies on youth and the Internet: teens are sharing more information about themselves. Interestingly, however, the report indicates that teens are also taking “a variety of technical and non-technical steps to manage the privacy of that information.” Here’s how the research breaks down. The joint paper found that teenagers are sharing more and ... Read More

What Are the Teens Up to Nowadays?

teens

Teens! We never know what they're doing, do we? (Oh, jeez. Do you #FollowATeen?) Teens are just so mysterious—like those weird deep-sea fish that have flashlights growing from their faces. We know they're fish, but are they really even fish? One day they're watching cartoons and the next day they're playing paddleball behind a school, except the rubber ball they're playing with is filled with drugs and the paddle is actually a stale pancake stolen from a local Denny's. Oh, and they're not actually behind a school; it's a "cyber cafe," probably. The point is: teens are crazy. Teens are ... Read More

Pitfalls of the Teen Dating Scene

(PHOTO: JULIA ZAKHAROVA/SHUTTERSTOCK)

As someone who didn’t have, ahem, a wealth of opportunity to explore the high school dating scene, my interactions with female classmates came primarily in the form of AOL instant messages and orchestra bus trips. By senior year, I’d received the “let’s just be friends” talk so often that I knew it by heart. Was it any coincidence that I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol till my freshman year of college, and underlined my English texts with colored pencils and a ruler? According to a six-year longitudinal study that looks at teenagers’ dating patterns, partying habits, and study ... Read More

Arts Involvement Narrows Student Achievement Gap

Students from the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder tend to do less well in school than those from more upscale families. But newly published research identifies one sub-group of these youngsters who tend to exceed expectations: those who participate heavily in the arts. “At-risk teenagers or young adults with a history of intensive arts experiences show achievement levels closer to, and in some cases exceeding, the levels shown by the general population studied,” a team of scholars writes in a new National Endowment for the Arts Research Report. “These findings suggest that ... Read More