Social media won’t vanish. We must teach teenagers to question it, writes Natasha Devon |
By Natasha Devon MBE
If you’re reading this and were born before the year 2000, you are literally a dying breed.
We Millennials, Gen Xs and Boomers lived through the technological revolution. After we die, there will be no one left who can remember what life was like before it.
I mention this because it’s key to understanding how young people think about social media. To them, it has always been there, in the same way as we have always lived alongside cars. Whilst many of the teenagers I do focus groups with in schools and colleges throughout the country do acknowledge the harm social media inflicts on their lives, they also don’t perceive it as optional.
There is no distinction in their worldview between the online and offline worlds. It is all one, continuous thing, inextricably enmeshed. That’s why if you ask them how they think what they’re seeing online affects their ‘real world’ attitudes and........