Teen Troubles with Twitter #3

In my last two installments of this three-part series, I've made a case for why teens don't use Twitter correctly and why that's a problem. In this installment, I intend to address how teens’ use of Twitter has evolved... for the worst.

In my classroom, teenagers use the expression "subtweet me" during discussions if one member of the class has indirectly disagreed with another student. A "subtweet" is when a user writes something about another user without mentioning them by name (or handle). Inherent in every "subtweet" is an insult or disagreement. The word is invoked in class only when one student feels victimized or attacked by another. Their invocation of this word is evidence that teenagers frequently use their Twitter pages for social quips, esoteric discussions, and to enhance their social images often at another student’s expense.

More recently, I have heard students mention "PT" or Private Twitter, where teenagers create a new account and keep their security settings structured so only a close group of friends see their posts. Note: "close" is all relative for teens. Teens intentionally create these accounts and enter this space to speak their minds. Frankly, it's indicative of a wider trend in this country where citizens feel constrained by--and thus seek to avoid--political correctness. The way a teenager acts in school is often very different than how that teen acts on PT. Posting to a Private Twitter isn't like telling a close friend how you really feel; it's telling dozens of friends how you really feel on a platform that stores data permanently. Needless to say, "PT" has perpetuated the denigration of a space that, has tremendous power to people together to share information, which is s shame. PT has also perpetuated the denigration of the discourse between our teenagers online and in-person.

As I've written throughout this series, Twitter is powerful. Teens can use it to learn, create, discuss and inform--whether that’s a school project or a personal learning project. If you told a teacher that an application encourages teens to do just that, she'd jump for joy. But our teenagers are not deriving the educational and developmental benefit that Twitter has to offer. They're "subtweeting" one another or posting secretive confessions and insults to their Private Twitter.

Obviously we're never going to be able to do all we can for our teenagers when it comes to guiding them in their digital and social spaces. But we also can't make progress if we keep turning a blind eye to what teens do on the internet. Schools should be teaching students how to get the most out of social media, and parents should be actively involved in what their children see and post online. We shouldn't simply scold our students about the pitfalls of social media when something bad happens; we need to be proactive. Let's empower our students to use Twitter in ways that benefit rather than harm them.

Teen Troubles with Twitter #2

For whatever reason, writing about teenagers and Twitter has inspired me to post on my blog (which has been largely defunct this year as I've been writing a longform essay on--you guessed it--social media and teens). This is the second part in a three-part series on how we're letting our teens down by not teaching them how to use Twitter.

With 24-7 access to a cellphone, teens check their social media pages all the time. All. The. Time. For that reason, a teen loses social standing if he or she cannot stay up-to-date with the developments in the social (media) world. On Instagram, for example, the vast majority of teens never miss a post. Snapchat has made sharing multimedia content to dozens of friends remarkably simple and completely normal. Call it FOMO, call it narcissism, call it societal pressure, our teens strive to be up-to-date on their social world, all the time.

However, teenagers struggle to keep up with Twitter. Therefore, it has become a secondary or tertiary (or worse) social media site for teens; they're not interested because they feel like they can’t keep up, and it's a shame.

As I've written about previously, Twitter is an awesome forum for learning. We can help our teens learn, create, discuss and inform on Twitter or we can allow them to bully, flirt or troll. If we choose to do the former, we need to teach teens how to use Twitter.

Let's start by dispelling the notion that you have to keep up with your entire Twitter feed. Truthfully, you don't even need to keep up with a majority of your feed. The great thing about Twitter is its free-flowing, fast-moving nature. As long as a user’s following list conveys interesting information, he should feel perfectly content consuming a small number of a tweets at a time. 

We must empower our teenagers to create diverse feeds harnessing the power of passion-based learning. But teens won't consume informational content in a space where they're concerned they can't keep up with every update. It’s too hard to manage.

This problem is compounded by the fact that--as I wrote about in my last post--teens are too worried about their "ratio" to really click follow on things that could deliver quality information.

Finally, teens discourage one another from posting informative content on Twitter. For whatever reason, it's social suicide for most. Twitter is a place for teens to have fun, to laugh, to flirt, and to forget about whatever is happening in their physical lives. Unfortunately, this use results in little learning. Sure, teens tweet and retweet, but little of that use is original content and rarely does it link to anything worthwhile. We must encourage our teens to build a robust digital profile to encourage teens to learn about their passions, create projects and original information, and to inform one another about not just social, but informational content. But in order to do so, we need to shift teen culture on Twitter. In this series called "Teen Troubles with Twitter" I’m hoping to spread the knowledge needed to help mentor our teens on Twitter.