After looking through the articles regarding the youth and social media, I was able to gather some quotes that helped me try and elaborate my thinking regarding the rules of social media.
Firstly, I took the quote, “After all, my kids are digital natives: They’ve never known life without connectivity.”
This quote shares the idea of social media being a popular platform being relatively new. With it being new, it may mean that there are not even a concrete set of rules yet but several recommended attitudes people are expected to have on social media. Obviously, some people do not live up to such expectations because users technically do not have to follow it. So it may be that rules are not changing as we grow but more like being created as we grow. So a question we can also ask ourselves beside the title of this post is, “are rules for social media being made as the digital natives grow?”
The second quote I took away from the same article was, “I let him use Instagram because I wanted him to connect with other kids like him”
This quote shows that maybe certain views of social media by older generations have changed, which then results in a change of the “rules” parents set for their kids when they start using social media. Growing up, my parents had always told me not to talk to strangers online. Fearing that the person I could potentially be in contact with would be a whole different person from what they were online. However, this quote shows how parents become less and less worried about who their kids talk to on the internet. The author of the article is basically just allowing her son to be put out there on the internet and be able to connect with children who share similarities with him, fully knowing that there are chances of people lying about their relation to her child online. I feel that parents become less strict on this because they have started to trust their child’s judgment on whether they can trust someone on the internet. With their children being digital natives, if anything, their kids would know better about the ropes of social media and the internet than they would.
To conclude, I would just like to summarise-in a few words, my response to the question of whether rules are being changed as you age. Rules are not being changed, they are being made as you grow.
I agree with how they are being made instead of changing as some don’t even have any rules set yet. Social media is relatively a new thing, thus, a strict set of rules haven’t been made but is being made continually as we see the unsuitable things on social media. My own thinking on this topic has changed in the past year, I say this because social media rules are being made on a day to day basis. Whenever there is an issue formed on social media, somehow a rule is made out of that problem e.g. if inappropriate posts are being made, then a rule is made that you shouldn’t post these unsuitable posts.
Hi Kirsty,
Your post has me wondering whether or not the current trend of bias towards wanting constant connection will change. I wonder if by the time your generation reaches their 40’s and 50’s they will find the demands on their time (because of our constant state of being connected) no longer desirable.
Thanks for sharing,
Ms. Friedman