Kids on the Internet: Why parenting must keep up with the digital revolution

Should kids be on social media? The kneejerk reaction, for some parents, is to control what they do. But journalist Virginia Heffernan thinks that how children and teenagers use social media is how we all use social media — we're just too proud to admit it. Those of us that use social media inevitably are painting an avatar of personality online, testing what works and what doesn't, and through fine-tuning our own selves in the process. It is absolutely true that you can fall victim to narcissism if you follow the "like" economy to its fullest, but a healthy attitude towards social media can lead to some old-fashioned self-exploration that many older folks may have forgotten about. Because young people know... perhaps more than adults... that you have to try on a lot of metaphorical hats before you find the one that fits. Virginia Heffernan's latest book is Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.
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Transcript: Watching children in early adolescence and in adolescents is always internally heartbreaking for adults. There was a great article in The Times magazine about Christmas maybe 20 years ago that the power of the Christmas mystery is when you look at a child the same way in the story that the Virgin Mary looked at her new son the Christ child and thought simultaneously, “This child might save the world and he's going to die.” So this huge amount of hope we have for our children and this terror that they're going to die.
If my mother looked at me at 13, if she read my diaries about how eagerly I wanted to be popular it would sound very like someone courting likes on Instagram. I knew if my outfit didn't go over well and I knew the way that a 13-year-old might pull down a photograph of it on Instagram if it doesn't get enough likes not to wear that again. Or I decided not to wear that again because being liked was the most important thing in the world to me at that age and for a reason. You want to know how you're going to play in the world. You want to know how to be in the world, how to show up in the world and you're testing and learning what works for you. And by the way, it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking when people don't like you or invite you to a party. And similarly it's heartbreaking now when you don't get the response you crave online, or you get a response that's out of proportion to what you did. But taking the risk – let's just take the simple Instagram brings up fears of narcissism because we're in a heyday of self-portraiture, which we've been in before. There have been other times where people sat for portraits or painted themselves. Van Gogh's self-portrait is rarely regarded as a work of narcissism. But let's say that we have this popular form that is these self-portraits. Staging them; taking the photograph; taking many photographs; choosing the right photograph; cropping it; coloring it; and then distributing it immediately to this giant gallery space. And then, like every artist, trying to see who buys it, trying to see who's interested in it, trying to see if it sells and trying to see what kind of commentary they get on it.
A lot of people who post self-portraits, and this was true in the early days of YouTube with musicians, are actually looking in some cases for critical feedback. Remember the hot or not thing where photographs were posted and you could decide I like I don't like it? That, which also plays in the right and left swipe of Tinder, is something that we're courting like does this work? Does this work? I'm in beta right now. Do I talk loud enough? Do I talk too loud? That incredible self-consciousness of are my bangs a little too short? Are my eyes big enough? Or how can I inhabit this body that I'm in and fit the exigencies of social life, fit the exigencies of a party or a workspace or, by the way, opt out of it? There are plenty of kids who are dialing back and we see them in millennials a return to flip phones or to abstinence from computers from the Internet and I think that's very interesting.
The last thing I'll say when you talk about teaching my own kids, I feel very strongly that we can't adopt a "true love waits" abstinence program about screens. The idea is not to teach your kids never go to parties; never live in social space; avoid other people. Like learning to live in digital space is not unlike learning to live in social space. And it's what kids want help doing. I remember my mother teaching me this incredibly subtle social lesson, which is when you're describing a party that you went to but another friend didn't get invited to, don't say the party was terrible. Don't say they missed nothing.