Teenagers And Social Media Quotes

An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Checking in on what our kids are doing online isn't helicoptering, it's parenting.

The absolute best way to raise kind kids, is to be kind parents.

Side note: is anyone else grateful social media wasn’t a thing when they were a teenager? It’s like Draco Malfoy and all three Heathers smooshed into one invisible organism that thrives on Internet memes and passive aggression.

Teen "addiction" to social media is a new extension of typical human engagement. Their use of social media as their primary site of sociality is most often a byproduct of cultural dynamics that have nothing to do with technology, including parental restrictions and highly scheduled lives. Teens turn to, and are obsessed with whichever environment allows them to connect to friends. most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other.

It’s super-important to have a strong social media presence, and Jane’s always going, When interviewers ask you about your Twitter, say you love reaching out directly to your fans, and I’m like, I don’t even know how to use Twitter or what the password is because you disabled my laptop’s wireless and only let me go on the Internet to do homework research or email Nadine assignments, and she says, I’m doing you a big favor, it’s for nobodies who want to pretend like they’re famous and for self-promoting hacks without PR machines, and adults act like teenagers passing notes and everyone’s IQ drops thirty points on it.

But whether or not teenagers are using dating apps, they're coming of age in a culture that has already been affected by the attitudes the apps have introduced. 'It’s like ordering Seamless,' says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service. 'But you’re ordering a person.' The comparison to online shopping seems apt. dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex.

Some people were simply created with the right genes and the proper social skills, I figured. They ended up at a lunch table with a group of good-looking individuals, like them, who did what all good-looking individuals managed: making the rest of us feel both envious of them and sad for ourselves, intentional or not. They had activities outside of school and followers online—people of social necessity who sat at home on Friday nights and 'liked' popular posts in hopes that they, too, might one day be as attractive and personable.

Emily swiped right on every picture, indicating interest, and within minutes she was getting matches. Her picture, now centered in a little circle, came rolling toward a boy's picture in another circle, and collided with it, with a little ding. "See," she said, "it's like a game.

When your mental health becomes impacted by social media then it is time for a detox.

Checking in on what our kids are doing online isn't 'helicoptering,' it's 'parenting.

It all goes together,” Montana said. “Society wants to sell them things, so it makes them grow up faster. Sexism serves capitalism.

So, schools will say they have a ‘zero tolerance’ for bullying, but they really don’t want to deal with anything.

In today's youth, morals and manners are replaced by money and mischiefs.

Accountability is actually a conversations about what happened, why it happened, and how do we prevent it from happening again.

Scientists have found that the amount of time spent milkshake-multitasking among American young people has increased by 120 percent in the last ten years. According to a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry, simultaneous exposure to electronic media during the teenage years—such as playing a computer game while watching television—appears to be associated with increased depression and anxiety in young adulthood, especially among men.[1] Considering that teens are exposed to an average of eight and a half hours of multitasking electronic media per day, we need to change something quickly.[2] Social Media Enthusiast or Addict? Another concern this raises is whether you are or your teen is a social media enthusiast or simply a

Some people know what is right and what is wrong. They may justify their actions and reason beyond any doubt, but deep down inside. They know very well what they are doing and why they are doing it.

The mainstreaming of porn is tremendously affecting what’s expected of them. They’re learning sex through porn. What it means to have sex, a lot of the time, is to mimic what they see in pornography.” (Donna Freitas quote from book)

And yet, despite the high numbers of girls experiencing sexual harassment in schools, only 12 percent said they ever reported it to an adult. "Some researchers claim that sexual harassment is so common for girls that many fail to recognize it as sexual harassment when it happens," said the AAUW report. A 2014 study, published in Gender & Society, of students in a Midwestern city also found that girls failed to report incidents of sexual harassment in school because they regarded them as "normal." Their lack of reporting was found to stem from girls' fear of being labeled "bad girls" by teachers and administrators, who they felt would view them as provoking how they were treated. They also feared the condemnation of other girls, some of whom were shown to be unsupportive, accusing them of exaggerating or lying. Many girls saw everyday sexual harassment and abuse as "normal" male behavior male behavior and something they had to ignore, endure, or maneuver around.

Points: 151- 300 13 to 25 years old (Young and daring) You are a risk-taker forever. A risk-taker who would always do what he/she want. Your mental age helps you live every moment as the best. You are outgoing and a big dreamer. Friends are everything for you. For you, life is to take chances and dares in every aspect of life. Like most teenagers, you are a little rebellious and don’t do well with rules. Social media is a big part of your life making you conscious of fashion and your image. You work more on your physical fitness.

Girls may be suffering more than boys [mental illnesses] because they are more adversely affected by social comparisons (especially based on digitally enhanced beauty), by signals that they are being left out, and by relational aggression, all of which became easier to enact and harder to escape when adolescents acquired smartphones and social media.

The APA surveyed multiple studies which found links between the sexualization of girls and a wide range of mental health issues, including low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, cutting, even cognitive-dysfunction. Apparently, thinking about being hot makes it hard to think: "Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities," said the APA report.

Young women's expectations of safety and entitlement to respect have perhaps risen faster than some young men's willingness to respect them," says Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College and has written about the history of dating. "Exploitative and disrespectful men have always existed. There are many evolved men, but there may be something going on in culture now that is making some more resistant to evolving.

The girl was surprised when Freitas referred to the experience as sexual assault. "She had no idea that that's what it was, Freitas said. "I'm not sure some young women know what consent is anymore." It's ironic that there has been such outrage in the media about young women crying rape, when in actuality there seems to be a lack of understanding among some young women and girls about whether their encounters are rape or not. "We've learned to be distant from our bodies, " Freitas said.

A landmark 2007 report by the American Psychological Association (APA) found girls being sexualized--or treated as "objects of sexual desire... as things rather than as people with legitimate sexual feelings of their own"--in virtually every form of media, including movies, television, music videos and lyrics, video games and the Internet, advertising, cartoons, clothing, and toys. Even Dora the Explorer, once a cute, square-bodied child, got a makeover to make her look more svelte and "hot.

Misogyny now has become so normalized,” says Paul Roberts, the Impulse Society author. “We can’t even see the absurdity and the inequity of it, it’s so pervasive. When the male gaze was digitized, it was almost as if it was internalized. With smartphones and social media, girls had the means of producing the male gaze themselves, and it was as if they turned it on themselves willingly in order to compete in a marketplace in which sex was the main selling point. And the social media companies aren't going to do anything about it, as long as it's driving traffic.

AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Communication is not just about words. It’s about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheromones, all of which can’t be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes.” And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there's something they can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anticapitalist revolution without gun-battles in the streets -- which most of us are hoping it is, since let's face it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose -- there's no possible way we could have an anticapitalist revolution while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights. Yes, that will probably mean the suburban middle class will be the last to come on board. But they would probably be the last to come on board anyway.

We are in uncharted territory" when it comes to sex and the internet, says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. "There have been two major transitions" in heterosexual mating, Garcia says, "in the last four million years. The first was around ten to fifteen thousand years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled," leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract. "And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet," Garcia says. Suddenly, instead of meeting through proximity, community connections, and family and friends, people could meet each other virtually and engage in amorous activity with the click of a button. Internet meeting is now surpassing every other form. “It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” Garcia says. “It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.” And yet this massive shift in our behavior has gone almost completely unexamined, especially given how the internet permeates modern life. While there have been studies about how men and women use social media differently- how they use language and present themselves differently, for example- there's not a lot of research about how they behave sexually online; and there is virtually nothing about how girls and boys do. While there has been concern about the online interaction of children and adults, it's striking that so little attention has been paid to the ways in which the Internet has changed the sexual behavior of girls and boys interacting together. This may be because the behavior has been largely hidden or unknown, or, again, due to the fear of not seeming "sex-positive," mistaking responsibility for judgement. And there are questions to ask, from the standpoint of girls' and boys' physical and emotional health and the ethics of their treatment of each other. Sex on a screen is different from sex that develops in person, this much seems seems self-evident, just as talking on a screen is different from face-to-face communication. And so if talking on a screen reduces one's ability to be empathic, for example, then how does sex on a screen change sexual behavior? Are people more likely to act aggressively or unethically, as in other types of online communication? How do gender roles and sexism play into cybersex? And how does the influence of porn, which became available online at about the same time as social networking, factor in?

Psychologists who study peer influence ask what it is about teenage girls that makes them so susceptible to peer contagion and so good at spreading it. Many believe it has something to do with the way girls tend to socialize.35 “When we listen to girls versus boys talk to each other, girls are much more likely to reply with statements that are validating and supportive than questioning,” Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, told me. “They’re willing to suspend reality to get into their friends’ worlds more. For this reason, adolescent girls are more likely to take on, for instance, the depression their friends are going through and become depressed themselves.” This female tendency to meet our friends where they are and share in their pain can be a productive and valuable social skill. Co-rumination (excessive discussion of a hardship) “does make the relationship between girls stronger,” Professor Rose told me. But it also leads friends to take on each other’s ailments. Teenage girls spread psychic illness because of features natural to their modes of friendship: co-rumination; excessive reassurance seeking; and negative-feedback seeking, in which someone maintains a feeling of control by angling for confirmation of her low self-concept from others.36 It isn’t hard to see why the 24/7 forum of social media intensifies and increases the incidence of each.

EUROS SIDE WITH MEXICAN GANG RAPIST Mexico, President Bush’s dearest international ally, brought a lawsuit against the United States in the International Court of Justice on behalf of its native son, Jose Ernesto Medellin, arguing that Texas failed to inform him of his right to confer with the Mexican consulate. It probably didn’t occur to the police to ask Medellin if he was Mexican, with the media referring to the suspects exclusively as: “five Houston teens,” “five youths,” “the youths,” “young men,” “members of ‘a social club,’” “a bunch of guys,” “six young men,” “six teen-agers,” and “these guys”23 (and, oddly, “America’s hottest boy band”). The World Court agreed with Mexico, confirming my suspicion that any organization with “world” in its title—International World Court, the World Bank, World Cup Soccer, the World Trade Organization—is inherently evil. The court ordered that Mexican illegal aliens in American prisons must be retried unless they had been promptly advised of their consular rights—a ruling that would have emptied Texas’s prisons. It wasn’t as if America had shanghaied Medellin and dragged him into our country. He sneaked in illegally, demanded the full panoply of rights accorded American citizens, and when things didn’t go his way, suddenly announced he was an illegal alien entitled to rights as a Mexican citizen. Or as the New York Times hyperventilated: A failure to enforce the World Court’s ruling “could imperil American tourists or business travelers if they are ever arrested and need the help of a consular official.”24 If an American tourist or business traveler ever gang-rapes and murders two teenaged girls in a foreign country, I don’t care what they do to him.

First, accurately quantifying youth violence is difficult even for experts; therefore, citizens must become better educated about the different conclusions that can be drawn depending on which crime indicators are used. Second, the media focus on crimes youth commit against others, while often failing to report the thousands of stories of crimes committed against youth by adults. More inclusive information about all kinds of crimes involving youth can help put youth violence into proper perspective. Third, contextual factors, such as types of opportunities or neighborhood conditions in which youth live, must be more widely

Unfortunately, the impact of sexually explicit media content can also be damaging.

During the 2002–2003 season of Friends, Rachel, a 30-something, becomes a single mom. The challenges of raising an infant alone were rarely portrayed—or were portrayed unrealistically.

Still, many teens have inadequate or erroneous information about sex and its consequences.11

The hard truth was that the press didn’t trust the police to bring them the best stories any more; they’d turned their attention to social media, teenagers on Twitter and middle-aged whistle-blowers.

A 2010 study by the Internet security firm AVG Technologies found that 92 percent of American children have an online presence before the age of two. Parents post nearly 1,000 images of their children online before their fifth birthday, according to a 2015 poll conducted by the U.K.-based Parent Zone, an online safety site.

For a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation's multibillion-dollar line of so-called princess products, the five sisters of Keeping Up with the Kardashians were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle, unabashedly focused on the pursuit of beauty treatments, expensive fun, and luxury brands - the latter a national fixation spawned in the "luxury revolution" of the last thirtysomething years, in which most of the wealth of the country had traveled into the hands of a few, with the rest of the population looking on longingly as the beneficiaries of a new Gilded Age flaunted their high-end stuff. And entertainment media, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to Keeping Up with the Kardashians, provided them with ample opportunities to do just that.

13 to 25 years old (Young and daring) You are a risk-taker forever. A risk-taker who would always do what he/she want. Your mental age helps you live every moment as the best. You are outgoing and a big dreamer. Friends are everything for you. For you, life is to take chances and dares in every aspect of life. Like most teenagers, you are a little rebellious and don’t do well with rules. Social media is a big part of your life making you conscious of fashion and your image. You work more on your physical fitness.

Social Media Advertising - Different Options & Their Benefits How To Use Social Media Paid Ads Ideally? What is the most effective way to make use of social media ads? Choosing which social media platform to advertise on depends on your target audience. You need to understand which platforms are being used, the type of campaigns that can run on each platform, and what investment you’ll be required to make. Pew Research Center’s report helps give us an idea of the most preferred platform for various demographics. For example, if your product caters to the teenage group, consider advertising on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat. If you’re catering to a more B2B client, you can consider LinkedIn. Once you understand where your audience spends the most time, you can narrow down the platforms. However, we’d still advise on A/B testing various platforms. You’d be surprised by how many B2B clients you can find on TikTok! What Are The Most Popular Social Media Ads? Here is a brief rundown of the various social media ad options available. 1. Facebook Ads Facebook Ads are the most successful form of social media advertising. Statistics show that Facebook paid ads have an average conversion rate of 9.21%. They’re easy to set up and track, and allow you to measure campaign performance easily, giving insights into how well your ads are performing. They also offer a wide range of targeting options that help you reach people who might be interested in what you’re selling, which is why they’re so effective at generating sales leads. Facebook Ads are also highly targeted. You can target specific demographics or audiences based on gender, age range, location, and other details such as interests and behaviors or job titles. This helps ensure that only people who are interested in what you’re offering, see your ad on Facebook. 2. Twitter Ads Twitter ads are a great way to reach your target audience, especially if your company already has a presence on the platform. They’re easy to set up and manage so you can focus on other aspects of your business. As of 2022, they have an average conversion rate of 0.77%. Twitter ads also offer simple targeting options that let you get more followers, increase engagement with existing customers and gain new followers interested in what you have to offer. There are multiple ad options to choose from for accomplishing various advertising goals, including promoted ads, follower ads, amplify ads, and takeover ads. Promoted and follower ads have a much wider average cost range than their takeover counterparts. 3. LinkedIn Ads LinkedIn is a professional networking site, so it’s not as casual as other social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. As a result, users are more likely to be interested in what you are promoting on the platform because they’re looking for something related to their professional lives. LinkedIn has an average click-through rate of 0.65%. In addition, the conversion rate for LinkedIn ads is also fairly decent (2.35%). They can have high or low conversion rates depending on factors like interests and demographics. But if your ad is effectively targeted, it will have more chances of enjoying a higher conversion rate. 4. Instagram Ads As a younger demographic, Instagram users make up a great target audience for social media advertising. They are highly engaged in the platform and are more likely to respond to call-to-action than other demographics. 5. YouTube Ads YouTube ads are excellent for marketers with video content to promote their business. Furthermore, the advertising options offered by this platform ensure that you needn't bother with YouTuber fame or even a large number of subscribers on your channel to spread the word on this platform.

What is driving this surge in mental illness and suicide?... the rapid spread of smartphones and social media into the lives of teenagers, beginning around 2007, is the main cause of the mental health crisis that began around 2011.

As Outdoor Education Centre Director in Barrie, Ontario, Pete Thistlethwaite leverages over 20 years of experience and a decade of teaching Chemistry and Phys-Ed. His passion for sports, travel, and family life with three teenagers complements his expertise in business operations, leadership, procurement, safety, and social media marketing, enhancing his professional and personal life.

To teach our kids what they need to know online, we have to talk to them off line.

They were slim and slinky and wearing eyeliner wings and sheer sleeveless tops, short shorts, and ankle boots. It was a sort of hipster, fashionista version of provocative.

Girls need to put down their phones sometimes and pick up books.

The real world we inhabit together is the one that matters; we need to find a way of navigating ourselves and our children back there, to the world of true and lasting connection.

In 2009, the Urban Dictionary defined a “guys’ girl” as “a mix between tomboy and girly girl…The guys talk openly in front of her and she wouldn’t be out of place going to a strip club with them. A guy’s girl enjoys the freedom guys have in farting, eating disgusting food, and in how they discuss sex, but still likes to look and feel like a woman.

What we create online becomes part of our digital DNA, this in turns becomes part of our human DNA.

Reading has always been like breathing for me, necessary for existing and thinking. But recently, I find, as I try to make it through the pages, my mind keeps wandering to my phone. What's happening there? What am I missing?

For many girls, the pressure to be considered "hot" is felt on a nearly continual basis online. The sites with which they most commonly interact encourage them to post images of themselves, and employ the "liking" feature, with which users can judge their appearance and, in effect, rate them. When girls post their pictures on Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook, they know they will be judged for their "hotness," and in a quantifiable way, with numbers of likes. Social media, which gave us selfies, seems to encourage an undue focus on appearance for everyone, but for girls, this focus is combined with a pervasive sexualization of girls in the wider culture, an overarching trend which is already having serious consequences.

With each tweet, post, share and comment, we are building and adding to our digital iceberg.

Kids started having their own cameras, en masse, in the 1960s. Kodak Instamatics, which came out in 1963, were inexpensive ($16) and easy to use, durable and small, the perfect size to fit in a child’s pocket or the upper tray of a footlocker on its way to summer camp. The Instagram logo, in a conscious nod, echoes the look of the early Instamatics—a dark stripe on top, metallic on the bottom, with a round flat lens and viewfinder in the middle. The

She posted a picture of herself in a T-shirt which said “FLAWLESS.

There’s a reason why researchers and organizations like Pew Research are doing the work that they do — they do so to make sure that we don’t forget about the populations that aren’t already in our networks [danah boyd, "An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media," Medium, January 12, 2015].

Teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background [boyd, danah , "An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media," Medium, January 12, 2015].

You work hard, you excel at sports," Matt said, "you get into an Ivy League school, or even like an NYU or a Boston College, you make your parents look good, and they, like, pay you for your time. They see everything in terms of money so that's how they show their love - through money." "But a lot of kids who are fuck-ups get whatever they want, too," his friend Roxanne, sixteen, observed.

The Twenty-Year Rule Let’s stop blaming each other for things that happened more than twenty years ago. Humans change a lot in two decades. If we are lucky enough to mature and learn over time, we become better versions of our younger selves—wiser, less selfish, and more useful. In olden times—let’s say, before the Internet—your mistakes of youth would go unrecorded. The Twenty-Year Rule applied by default in most cases, because no one had an efficient way to check up on your behavior that far back. Now we have social media that creates a total slideshow of every dumbass thing you ever thought or did in your entire life. It turns out that most of us were worse people when we were younger. You wouldn’t want to know the teenage me. But I’d like to think I’ve improved since then. I’ll agree to judge you by your most recent twenty years on this planet if you will extend me the same courtesy.

In recent decades, aspiration has been heavily wrapped up not in what we aim to do, achieve or create but in what we can afford to buy. Young adults and teenagers have been under more and more pressure to be successful with fewer means to do so. Brands have aggressively told us that the road to contentment is through consumption.

The following chapters will explore some of the more formalized “content cartels” in further detail, but in seeking to illustrate how backdoor agreements further increase the existing repression, one example stands out: the close relationship between Facebook and the Israeli government. For Palestinians, many of whom are physically cut off from the world by occupation and border controls, the internet is—in the words of author Miriyam Aouragh—“a mediating space through which the Palestinian nation is globally ‘imagined’ and shaped,” bringing together a dispersed diaspora along with a geographically fragmented nation.24 Social media has not only enabled long-lost relatives and friends to come together virtually, but has also provided space for organizing and the development of an alternate narrative to that provided by the mainstream media, which has long privileged the Israeli political position over that of the Palestinian one. But just as Palestinian activist voices have been historically devalued and silenced by mainstream media, so too have they been censored by social media platforms—while Israeli hate speech on the same platforms often goes ignored. In the summer of 2014, a few months after US-brokered peace talks faltered, three Israeli youth were kidnapped and murdered in the occupied West Bank. In retaliation, three Israeli men abducted and murdered a Palestinian teenager, leading to increased tensions, violent clashes, and an increase in rockets fired by Hamas into Israeli territory. Israel responded with airstrikes, raining rockets into Gaza and killing more than two thousand Palestinians and injuring more than ten thousand more—a majority of whom were civilians. As the violence played out on the ground, social media became a secondary battlefield for both sides, as well as their supporters and detractors.

Leroux, who switched national team allegiance from Canada to the U.S. in 2008 as a teenager, became a focal point of the growing rivalry. She was booed by Canadian fans every time she touched the ball. Some Canadian fans called her “Judas” in chants and sent racially charged messages at her on social media. Leroux, who was a dual-national, was also mixed race—she had a white Canadian mother and a black American father. The USA-Canada rivalry hadn’t been much of a soccer rivalry—the U.S. hadn’t lost to Canada in 11 years by that point—but it was fast growing into a rivalry of raw emotion.

A definition of accountability is an understanding that a harm took place and that you are responsible for a piece of that harm.

When you are targeted for who you are, it doesn't just hurt your feelings. It hurts every cell in your body.

Powerless people bully because they want to have power over other people.

Love, you see, is the most important emotion.

Not surprisingly, the exchange of wives from couples who are often polar opposites has led to the show’s fair share of scandals. An Oklahoma man sued the show for misrepresentation and distress when his “wife” turned out to be a gay man. A man on the UK version of the show committed suicide after being humiliated when his sexual practices were made public. A participant who lost his job and received death threats after being labeled “the worst husband in America” accused the producers of manufacturing a character for him to play. He claimed that, under duress of constant cameras and the threat that he was not being entertaining enough, they persuaded him to amp up his hostility toward his swapped wife. Another participant, who was a teenager when her show aired, sued the show, claiming that she was represented in such a false light on air that she suffered bullying at school that ruined

Not surprisingly, the exchange of wives from couples who are often polar opposites has led to the show’s fair share of scandals. An Oklahoma man sued the show for misrepresentation and distress when his “wife” turned out to be a gay man. A man on the UK version of the show committed suicide after being humiliated when his sexual practices were made public. A participant who lost his job and received death threats after being labeled “the worst husband in America” accused the producers of manufacturing a character for him to play. He claimed that, under duress of constant cameras and the threat that he was not being entertaining enough, they persuaded him to amp up his hostility toward his swapped wife. Another participant, who was a teenager when her show aired, sued the show, claiming that she was represented in such a false light on air that she suffered bullying at school that ruined her confidence. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum.

(The term constant is not hyperbole: a 2015 study by Common Sense Media found that teenagers were consuming media—including text messaging and social networks—nine hours per day on average.)

When you let cellphones, TV, Internet and social media raise your child . Your child will love and live for drama . Everything good or bad will be entertainment to them. They won’t know where to draw the line. They won't take things seriously. They would be Inspired by lies and end up living a lie themselves.

Nonetheless, we have reason to think that, for most teenagers, time spent online can be both good and bad. Teens use texting and social media platforms to make meaningful connections, cultivate friendships, and enjoy harmless entertainment. It is also true that many of the same adolescents find that digital technology invites time wasting, unkind behavior, social comparison, and exposure to disquieting content. In my experience, teenagers will freely admit that they feel mixed about the place of digital technology in their lives.

You are a risk-taker forever. A risk-taker who would always do what he/she want. Your mental age helps you live every moment as the best. You are outgoing and a big dreamer. Friends are everything for you. For you, life is to take chances and dares in every aspect of life. Like most teenagers, you are a little rebellious and don’t do well with rules. Social media is a big part of your life making you conscious of fashion and your image. You work more on your physical fitness.

Being seventeen in a modern world was tough enough without the introduction of so many different social media platforms. I often wished I had been born in a time before technology was such a devastatingly huge part of our everyday lives. I didn’t totally hate it—what teenager really wanted to live without their phone, after all—but every time I opened an app, I was reminded of just how much I didn’t fit in with the rest of the world. The false hair; faces caked in makeup; photos edited with ten different filters — everyone looked the same, and I didn’t look anything like them. I didn’t like drinking, partying or social gatherings; I was boring in their eyes and, if I was honest, in my own eyes too. It was cruel, really, for people to be subjected to such falseness.

Diana Fox, a striking young beauty of only twenty-two. She had gotten into trouble when she was a teenager, when another student at her high school had been arrested for plotting a shooting at the school. He had been infatuated with her, and all of his social media ramblings indicated that she was part of the plan, but she had denied it. Unfortunately, she had once engaged him on instant messenger when he was ranting about how the privileged students were causing so much havoc for everyone else, and she thought he was only joking when he talked about killing them all. She had gone along with it during the chat, thinking it was only some sort of cathartic role-play, but that series of messages was enough to convict her of being a co-conspirator. Because of the severity of the threat, the sixteen-year-old girl was tried as an adult and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison.

It's people running around looking for anything to generate volume: Oh, teenage girls are taking their clothes off? And that's getting a lot of hits? Then let's turn a blind eye to the consequences. Oh, your daughter's on Tinder? Well, she's just meeting friends. It's all about high-volume usage. I don't think it's necessarily a cynical, let's destroy women thing - it's how can I get my next quarter's bonus? And I think to the extent that the digital social media society normalizes impulses- think it, post it," Roberts says, "we've also created a context for more and more provocative propositions, whatever they are: Look at my boobs. Do you want to hook up? It's moved the bar for what's normal and normalized extreme behavior; everything outrageous becomes normalized so rapidly. You realize how insane things are today when you think about the relative rate of change. When I was in high school, if I had gone around saying, Here's a picture of me, like me, I would have gotten punched. If a girl went around passing out naked pictures of herself, people would have thought she needed therapy. Now that's just Selfie Sunday." (--- Paul Roberts quoted from the book)

In an interview om WNYC in 2015, Willliam Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, national security expert, and the author of Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Prefect Warfare, compared the military's compulsive data-collecting with unmanned drones to our collective addiction to our smartphones. "You can't just stop yourself from checking your e-mail or texting," Arkin said. "And that's the world of drones in a nutshell." Are we using our phones like drones? Compulsively checking on one another? And when we don't like what someone has to say, or perhaps how they look, dropping destructive speech bombs whose after-effects we never have to see in person?

The more I talk to students," Freitas says, "the more the culture of hooking up seems really problematic for them. Both young women and young men are seriously unhappy with the way things are; they're really ambivalent about the sex they're having. According to everything they see in pop culture, they're supposed to be having a great time; but it's rare that I find a young man or a young woman who says hooking up is the best thing ever. In reality it seems to empty them out.

But another important question is, what is making some boys think sexual harassment is normal?

A 2013 review of studies on cyber-bullying in the Universal Journal of Educational Research reported that "perceived anonymity online and the safety and security of being behind a computer screen aid in freeing individuals from traditionally constraining pressures of society, conscience, morality, and ethics to behave in a normative manner." In other words, digital communication seems to relieve people of their conscience, enabling them to feel more comfortable behaving unethically.

In one notable incident, the feminism and pop culture blog Jezebel publicly called out a dozen teenagers who tweeted racist remarks after Barack Obama’s reelection. The site went beyond posting the tweets by researching the students, writing short bios for each, and contacting their schools. While the students’ conduct was abhorrent, they were minors, and the manner in which Jezebel went about publicizing their own behavior offered the impression that the act was more about allowing Jezebel to grandstand as a moral authority and to rack up page views based on the resulting controversy. Jezebel could as easily have contacted the students’ schools—the kind of institution of authority that might be able to positively influence the children’s behavior, or, perhaps, enact some punishment in concert with the children’s families—and written a story about the experience while also keeping the students anonymous. Instead, the site ensured that, for many of these students, they would spend years trying to scrub the Internet of their bad behavior, while likely nursing a (perhaps understandable) grievance toward Jezebel, rather than reforming their own racist attitudes. It’s easy to forgo self-examination when you, too, feel like a victim.

the angriest and most passionate voices, start to be rewarded by public opinion. This phenomenon is clearly observed in mainstream and social media. Consider the following comparison, for instance. After sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg made her landmark UN speech in 2019, media attention soared. While her efforts and sense of initiative were undeniably impressive, especially for a teenager, the fact remains that her credentials on the subject were nonexistent, and her scowling message offered no practical solutions whatsoever. Compare her accomplishments to another young environmentalist named Boyan Slat, who doesn’t make passionate speeches or hurl angry slogans, but did design a revolutionary ocean cleanup system that captures debris ranging from one-ton ghost nets to tiny microplastics. At the time of this writing, a quick Google search shows 69 million search results for Greta, and just over 500,000 for Boyan. Greta was named ‘Person of the Year’ by Time magazine. Boyan was not.

So while other teenagers were stuck in classrooms studying textbooks and taking notes during lectures, I was already out in the world, having dived head first into working for social change. I was learning complicated adult lessons in activism, campaign strategy, public relations, mass media, and corporate relations. And I was able to travel around the country, even if that sometimes meant seeing it through the eyeholes of an animal costume.

This theme of the rise of populism around the West is crucial. Are you concerned that we’re seeing the rise of the kind of demagogues the Founders feared? RBG: Yes. JR: Social media is part of that? RBG: Yes, and an important part is the discontent seen among people who feel that our institutions of government pay no attention to them, as illustrated by J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. JR: Fixing democracy is a task bigger than any of us. But what are some things that could be done? RBG: One key thing is to teach children about democracy. They don’t learn about it in school as they did in civics classes when I was young. By the way, did you see the show What the Constitution Means to Me? JR: Not yet, but I know you did see it. What did you think? RBG: I loved it. At the end of the second act, a teenager comes on stage to take part in the conversation about the Constitution. Two young women alternate in that role. The older one, age eighteen, played the role the night I attended. She just graduated from high school, and I will stay in touch with her. I was uplifted by those young women. JR: What is uplifting about them? What’s the message of the play? RBG: The play begins with a young woman who wins American Legion competitions, by spouting rosy things about the Constitution. Then, she questions whether the Constitution is as protective as she portrayed it in her youth. At the end, she puts the question to the audience: Should we keep it or should we do it over? Our audience voted overwhelmingly to keep it, and it’s been overwhelmingly that way for most audiences. JR: Why are people moved to keep it? And why should we keep it? RBG: What reason is there to think we would do better if we started over from scratch?

Entz Media went after children as well. The sexualized and gender confused teen ranked highly on the demographics ladder. So did the impressionable tween. Television shows used exaggerated character types to encourage children and teenagers to label one another. Shows featured skaters, goths, gays, jocks, nerds, etc. Children and teenagers were encouraged to identify with one of the labels. Once an identity was embraced, corporations would then define the group's attributes and charge for compliance. Kid's programming was calculated to make them consume. Entertainment was no longer about story telling; it was story selling -- social engineering.

noose is just a rope with a knot that can be tightened. But in America it’s a rope that tells a story. The story is about lynching—the practice of mob murder, usually by hanging but also by burning, shooting, drowning, beating, or being

dragged behind a car. Between 1887 and 1950, at least 4,384 Black people were lynched in the United States—the true number is probably higher—in public displays of brutality and terror. The vast majority of lynchings took place in the South, where white people used the noose as a means of intimidation and control. While lynching victims were usually accused of committing a crime like rape or murder, there was no need for anyone to produce evidence or witnesses. The accusation was enough.

Black people could be lynched for being too successful or too outspoken, for owning property that white people wanted, for attempting to collect their wages or other debts from white people who didn’t want to pay, for asking for food, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. While lynchings sometimes happened under cover of darkness, they were often public occasions in which the person who was lynched was tortured and dismembered before a mob of enthusiastic onlookers. Sometimes they were advertised in advance so that photographers would have time to set up their equipment. Later, photos of the corpses would be sold as souvenirs.

On the average, a black man, woman or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob,” sociologists Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck write in A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930.

(The U.S. Congress didn’t pass a federal anti-lynching law until 2022, despite more than two hundred attempts over more than a hundred years.)

A noose is just a rope with a knot that can be tightened, but in America, it’s a rope that delivers a message. A noose says: Be afraid. It says: I could kill you. It says: You are powerless and your life doesn’t matter.

I think, before the digital age,” says Michael Harris, the author of The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, “girls had more opportunities to develop a rich interior life. At some point they were experiencing solitude. They had time to daydream or write in diaries or just think. Now, they’re online most of the time and a lot of what they’re doing there is comparing themselves or being compared. Online life is a toxic enabler of the desire to compare.

The constant seeking of likes and attention on social media seems for many girls to feel like being a contestant in a never-ending beauty pageant in which they’re forever performing to please the judges—judges who have become more and more exacting. For it’s no longer enough for girls and women to be just pretty—even beautiful is not enough; now the goal is to be “perfect,” “flawless.

People who are adults know what they are doing. People are fully aware of their actions. They might offer explanations, excuses, or reasoning, and they can justify their behavior in any way they choose. They may be able to deceive others, but they know exactly what they are doing. May they face the consequences of their actions. Whatever they do to others, may it be done unto them as well.