In your preface you say "the kids are alright." What do you mean by that?

My frustration about how we approach young people is that we think that everything must be so much worse because of technology. The funny thing is that we’ve had these moral panics for every generation. Comics were ruining everybody, rock and roll was ruining everybody, MTV was ruining everybody — we’ve had this in many different iterations. Part of the story of the book is that by and large, the kids are alright. The reason I say "by and large" is because the kids who have been fine are still fine. Privileged kids are relatively fine. The thing that I struggle with is that because we get so obsessed with focusing on relatively healthy, relatively fine middle- and upper-class youth, we distract ourselves in ways that don’t allow us to address the problems when people actually are in trouble.

"We use this visibility to panic rather than using it to figure out new ways of helping young people."

Those young people make themselves visible online as well. I think about this woman whose case I got involved with. Her name was Tess, and she lived in Colorado. She and her boyfriend at the time killed her mother. The media coverage of this was at the height of MySpace, so the media coverage was "Girl With MySpace Kills Mother" which is always really like, "What the hell? What does this have to do with MySpace?" So I went and looked at it. People said she was a troubled kid, and that’s why she was on MySpace, and that’s why she killed her mother, blah blah blah. So I found her MySpace. For a year and a half she had documented abuse she faced at home, her attempts to run away, her attempts to get help, her confusion and frustration, her own mental health issues. She was a mess, and she was putting it all out there.

I was talking to a bunch of her friends and I said, "You guys saw this, why didn’t you say something?" One of her best friends said, "We did, regularly. The school told us it wasn’t their problem. They told us that they blocked MySpace, and they couldn’t look at it. They didn’t know what we were talking about."

Meanwhile, as the case unfolded, what we learned was that the school had seen her come to school with black-and-blue marks, which they reported to Social Services, but by the time Social Services would investigate they’d say there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed. All this evidence was clearly documented on social media, which is really frustrating to me, because here’s this young woman who’s crying out for help all over social media, using this new tool, really trying to find somebody to pay attention. And nobody’s around.

And this is why I struggle with these tools; they mirror and magnify the good, bad, and ugly. We use this visibility to panic rather than using it to figure out new ways of helping young people.

Is it just human nature to be skeptical of these scary new technologies?

Nothing is more nerve-racking than capitalizing on the fear of adults about their kids. That’s one of the problems; we need to be resisting that culture of fear if we want to actually get anywhere. We need to step back and think about what we’re doing and the consequences of our decisions. It’s not like our conversations about security in this country. We can go hog wild and spend all of our resources trying to make it marginally more secure, but we will never make the world entirely secure. We will never make anything entirely safe. The question is, what is the level of resources, time, energy, money that we want to spend. There are diminishing returns on this.

We do this thing with kids where we try to keep them safe from every form of danger. Not only do we have diminishing returns in terms of time and energy, but we have unintended consequences just like we do with security, which is that we’ve eroded [kids'] opportunities to learn, to participate, to make sense of this world. They need this to come of age. We make it very difficult for them to be public. We make it very difficult for them to be a part of our political life. And we justify it through everything from brain science to mistakes that they’ve made and stupidity.

There’s an increasing gap between the teenage years and the first point in which a middle- or upper-class adult has a child. It used to be that people were having children at the age of 23 or 24. By and large middle- and upper-class parents are having their first child in their 30s. You remember certain parts of your teen years, but you don’t really remember.

Why have teens taken to such a great variety of apps and services to communicate with each other? Is fragmentation okay?

"The era of Facebook is an anomaly."

The era of Facebook is an anomaly. The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there’s this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you’re going because it’s where your pals from school are hanging out? That first [question] is a driving function.

There was this one teen girl I talked to, a total One Direction fan. Twitter was her One Direction space. What that meant was that her friends all knew about her Twitter account, but they weren’t into One Direction, so they weren’t on Twitter with her. But they all were on Instagram together because that was a fun place where they were sharing photos. And what she was sharing on Instagram was not about One Direction because that just wasn’t the place for it. Meanwhile, they were also doing crazy things on Tumblr, where they were part of a little maker community.

Whereas in the Facebook era, you have to balance all these audiences simultaneously. You’re saying, "Are you going to get angry with me because I posted about One Direction? Are you going to think I’m lame because I’m posting this maker stuff?" Where does this fit? And I think that’s a lot of the reason why when you start to fragment your audience, you start to think about what you’re looking for, you’ll go to different spaces, and it parallels what we do as adults. You go to different bars when you’re in the mood for different things. You see different people when you want to go listen to music or when you just want to have a quiet drink with a couple of friends.