Cathy的翻译

chapter 2: second factor

the cyberbubble

Excerpt from  Girls On The Edge 

…the way we live now, where we’re forever sending off e-mail and texts, fielding cell phone calls: where we’re no longer any one place but everywhere – and nowhere – at once.

JEFFERY EUGENIDES

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.

THICH NATH HANH

Describe yourself in two words.

 “Party animal” is how Caitlin answers that question. Fifteen years old, just starting tenth grade, Caitlin plans her life around parties. Getting invited to the cool parties. Then hopping from one party to the nest. And most important of all, uploading photos to her Facebook page, illustrating her exploits at the various parties.

I spoke with Caitlin and her Mom, Karen, together. Karen says she doesn’t mind her daughter’s passion for parties. “As long as she’s not drinking or doing drugs, and I know where she is, I really don’t have a problem with all the parties,” Karen says. “When I was in tenth grade, that was all I wanted to do. What bugs me is how obsessive she is about putting it all on her Facebook page. It’s like the whole point of the party for her is to uplode a photo. She spend at least an hour every day, and more on weekends, editing photos for her Facebook page.”

 “But you kept a diary too when you were my age,” Caitlin interupts. “You tod me you used to spend hours writing in your diary.”

 “But that was private,” Karen says. “I wasn’t putting it on display.”

 “So how does that make it better than what I do?” Caitlin answers.”If you’re going to spend so much time on yourself, why not share it with other people? It seems kind of weird to spend all that time writing about yourself, just for yourself.”

 “But you spend so much time on the pictures,” Karen replies. “You’re not even writing.”

Caitlin gives an ineffable shrug of her shoulder and shakes her head with her eyes almost closed. It’s a perfect I-don’t-expect-you-to-understand geasture. “They didn’t have Facebook when they were growing up, remember?They didn’t even have the Internet,” Caitlin says, with a mix of disdain and disbelief. “You didn’t share photos online because you couldn’t, not because you didn’t want to.”

When I refereed this conversation between mother and daughter, it seemed to me that Caitlin had a point. After all, isn’t sharing with one’s friends online a more social activity than scribbling in a diary in one’s bedroom?

It wasn’t until much later, after discussing this issue with many other parents and their daughters, that I saw the problem with Caitlin’s argument. When tweens and teenagers write and post photos online, they are seeking to please/entertain/amuse their friends. When you are writing in your bedroom in a diary no one else will ever see, you can wirte whatever you want, at whatever length you want. You can explore your own thoughts and feelings through your writing.

One danger of online blogs and social networking site is that your daughter may not be expressing what she really feels. She may instead be writing what she thinks will entertain or impress her peers who read it. She might not even be aware of the difference. She may not realize that what she says she is feeling isn’t what she actually is feeling. She subtly asjusts what she is writing to suit what she thinks her friends want to read. After a while, she may gradually become the girl she is pretending to be.

Xiyin Tang was a student at Columbia University when she was interviewed about her online blog, which she began posting online when she was in fifth grade. “When I first started out with my Livejournal, I was very honest,” she told reporter Emily Nussbaum. “I basically wrote as if there was no one reading it. And if people wanted to read it, then great.” But she soon changed her style to fit the prevailing style of Internet blogs and social networking. “I tried to make my posts highly stylized and short,” Xiyin said, instead of the long digressive essays she might have wanted to write.

 “Highly stylizzed and short” with lots of photos. Don’t forget the photos. A recent report from Harvard Business School found that the number-one reason why teens and young adults go to social networking sites is to look at photos. That’s especially true for boys and young men; they are looking for photos of girls and women, some whom they know, and some thy don’t.

Girls know this. Girls know that if they want their social netwoking site to be popular, then that site needs to include lots of photos. Funny photos are good; sexy photos are better, as long as the photos aren’t skanky. It’s all about projecting the right image: cool, hip, ironic.

I spoke recently with parents of a girl, let’s call her Julia, who was spending hours a day working on her MySpace page and/or instant messaging(“IM’ing”) or texting her friends.Some nights Julia was staying up well past midnight, tweaking photos for her MySpace page, texting and instant messaging her friends. I suggested to her parents that they should restrict her time online.

 “But kids need to be comfortable in the digital world,” her father said. “This is the 21^st century. This is the technology they will use at college and in the workplace. Why shouldn’t she develop her proficiency?”

For many parents, this Dad’s comment seems reasonable. But this Dad is mistaken. Posting blog entries and uploding photos is not the beat way to develop skills that will be useful in the workplace. Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein has reviews the available research on this point, and he concludes that “teen blog writing sticks to the lingo of teens – simple syntax, phonetic spelling, low diction – and actually grooves bad habits.”

The girl who spends hours in her bedroom on a social networking site may not do better at school, either now or subsequently, sompared with the girl next door who are never goes online at home. That’s what the reserch seems to show. It’s important to control for socioeconomic variables when you do these studies: that’s why some early reports, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, led parents to think that there might be some advantage to kids spending lots of free time online.If you simply compare the academic performance of kids who spend many hours online with kids who don’t, you might well find that the kids spending time online do better, on average, than kids who never spent any free time online.Maybe you read a report of such a study ten years ago. But kids who had access to the the Internet ten years ago often came from homes and communities that were significantly more affluent than kids who didn’t have access to the Internet. One of the most enduring facts about Western society is that kids who come from affluent neighborhoods do better in school than kids who come from low-income neighborhoods. So if investigators don’t control for socioeconomic status, the use of the Internet may just be a proxy for household income. As one team of investigators recently reported, “Once other features of student, family, and school background are held constant, computer availability at home shows a strong statistically negative relationship to math and reading performance.”

中文译文  (翻译：Cathy)