
The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens - samsolomon
https://newrepublic.com/article/129002/secret-lives-tumblr-teens
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ikeboy
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133663)

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kelukelugames
Yes, I remember this was posted recently. I thought the wait period for dupes
was a year?

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striking
It used to be something like that. It now appears to be based on the number of
votes as well as the amount of time.

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mcphage
> In early 2014, when she was 16, some Tumblr users dug up posts Miller had
> written when she was 13 in which she used the word “nigga.” Screenshots of
> the old posts went viral. At one point, according to Miller, she had 9,500
> concurrent visitors on her blog and she received over 2,000 angry messages,
> some of them telling her to kill herself.

If you're telling a child to go kill themselves, because of something they
said when they were 13 years old, and didn't understand a complicated issue
from halfway around the world...

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nmeofthestate
...you should kill yourself? Maybe most of the messages were from 13 year
olds.

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evilDagmar
What I just _don 't_ get is how these teens who were supposedly so internet
and media savvy and established huge followings based on "being honest" or
somesuch couldn't see that deliberately posting low-quality content which was
fundamentally dishonest (the opposite of what they'd been doing) was just as
certainly going to hurt them. ...and that thousands of teenagers are
apparently involved in this kind of thing, it's probably safe to call it
"widespread".

Clearly there's a lapse here, but I'm uncertain if it's an ethics problem or
simply an educational problem (we didn't teach them not to deliberately poop
into the internet).

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mhurron
> supposedly

This is the reason. Kids and teens are not anything savvy in reality, and
specifically are no more internet savvy than anyone else.

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lostgame
Umm...pardon me? I'm pretty sure kids under 20 are far, incomparably, even,
more internet-savvy than the previous generations.

Just because there's a small percentage of 20-50-somethings who actually
understand or use it, doesn't mean there's not a huge percentage of 7-year-
olds who understand technology infinitely better than their parents. This is
the norm, not an exception.

Proof? Let's take something super-recent - Microsoft's ludicrous failure with
'Tay.' The lack of 4chan/reddit-proofing indicates how wildly out of touch the
previous generation is with the internet of the current generation. It's sad.

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mhurron
First off it was a 16 year old. I have more experience using the internet than
they have experience living. Extend that out to 25 year olds and I have more
experience dealing with desktop computers in general than they have living.

No, people under 20 do not have the most experience online. That 7 year old
doesn't understand anything about what they're using, it has been made so that
they don't have to. People mistake no fear of using something as experience
and knowledge of that thing.

That 7 year old doesn't understand shit, they're just not scared of braking it
and having to pay for a replacement. The majority of teens fall in to this as
well.

We don't mistake the almost ubiquitous use of cars in the US as an indicator
that the US population is 'car savvy,' so why do we do it with computers, cell
phones and the internet when in reality you need to know just as much about
how they work as how your car does in order to use it?

Simple use is not understanding.

And Tay is a better example of the failure of American society to raise people
than anything else. Microsoft didn't have these problems in Japan or China.

And honestly, you want to talk about outliers and than use 4chan users as some
example of 'the current generation?' Hell 4chan users themselves are not some
coherent group.

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traek
> We don't mistake the almost ubiquitous use of cars in the US as an indicator
> that the US population is 'car savvy,' so why do we do it with computers,
> cell phones and the internet when in reality you need to know just as much
> about how they work as how your car does in order to use it?

That may be true from the perspective of understanding the technical workings
of the internet, but it's orthogonal to the discussion of understanding
internet culture.

"Internet savvy" in this context means savvy with media and savvy with modern
social networks, not with the OSI model of networking.

~~~
mhurron
> "Internet savvy" in this context means savvy with media and savvy with
> modern social networks

But they're not, they do not have 'shrewdness and practical knowledge' of
social networks or how the internet works they're just not scared of them.

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jabberjones
And those are just the secret lives someone would attach their name to:
[http://abdlstoryforum.info/forums/index.php/topic,6486.msg63...](http://abdlstoryforum.info/forums/index.php/topic,6486.msg63620.html#msg63620)
.

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amykhar
In Internet time, this article is ancient.

