Growing Up Female & Social - Part II: What Teens Wish We Understood

Our parents had it so easy…a letter was theirs to be sneakily read, a phone call, to be eavesdropped.  But we live in a world of pinging secret text messages. Codes, acronyms and apps never to be translated – or even known.  It’s another shift.  A new vocabulary with apps that are missing vowels (tumblr), and acronyms that are meant to leave us out of the story (PIR: Parent in Room).

Where is Benedict Cumberbatch (a.k.a. Sherlock, Alan Turing) when you need him?

Welcome to the new reality.  But what feels like a tidal shift to us, is just a new software update for our teens.

When I bring up teens and social media with my friends, we share the eye roll; the heavy sign; the shaking of the head.  And, inevitably, one of us gives voice to the old lament – the refrain of generations past, “What’s to become of kids today?”

In this, “Growing Up Female and Social - Part II,” I reveal my Digital Daughter Ambassadors answers to what they think we don’t get about social media and what they would like us to know.  

Growing Up Female and Social – Survey Says…

Digital Daughters

It’s 2015, and our kids are 'gramming, texting, Snapchatting, tweeting and streaming.  

The distracting noise level on social channels is amplifying while the length of thoughtful prose is diminishing. 

Don’t despair…

Social media and its octopus-like tentacles that reach out and poke our kids – cajoling them to “like,” “follow” and “post” – are intimidating, and worrying, especially when new apps crop up like weeds.  But when I looked to my Digital Daughter Ambassadors (DDAs) – tweens, teens and young women from around the country – to get insight into how they were managing with the proliferation of ways to communicate (text, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Google+, Tumblr – and face-to-face), I found a lot of wisdom.

My very unscientific questionnaire of  “Growing Up Female and Social” is just an ear to the ground.  But I am already hearing echoes, and they offer important insights on what a diverse group of girls, my DDAs who hail from New York to Pennsylvania, Maryland to Minnesota, California to London, England - really think about social media, how they use it, and why they love it so much.

Here are some initial insights from the questionnaire, showing our girls to be wise to both the downfalls and upshots of social media.

Staying Relevant - The Best American Hashtags 2014

It was a frigid November evening, but my digital daughter, Amanda, and I were wrapped in a blanket of storytelling at New York City’s Symphony Space. 

Hosted by Matthew Love of Selected Shorts, it was a night to celebrate “The Best American Short Stories 2014,” with selections by Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Jennifer Egan.  Egan offered insights into this edition’s common themes – despair, hope through the support of others, wild animals – along with her own list of prerequisites for inclusion, most notably an ability to engage the reader in surprise and current truths. I closed my eyes and escaped into worlds created by Lauren Groff and T.C. Boyle – and performed by actors Amy Ryan and Dylan Baker, respectively.  

(Golden rule: You are never too old to be read a story.)

Matthew Love was all wit.  As part of his commentary, he riffed off of what other, more modern-day writing collections, might look like.  He postulated that in our short-take society we might want to see, “The Best American Paragraphs,”  “The Best American Sentences,” or even “The Best American Tweets” – adding that maybe they would be pamphlets instead of tomes.   I thought I could contribute another trilogy, “The Best American Hashtags,” “The Best American Emoji Sentences,” “The Best American Selfies.”  I bet they would sell (attention any agents out there wanting to get it on this, l’m #allears).