Teen Social Life 2.0

After the class discussion about everyone’s experiences and feeling about the vast number of social networking sites I was interested to know how actual real life teenagers viewed them. Having spoken to them I found that the most popular was Facebook which the students check constantly throughout the day. Most of the students had a MySpace page but tended to view theirs or others rarely. Twitter was something that they had absolutely no desire to use since most felt that it was basically a whole website that lets you do what Facebook’s status updates do. They seem to be very aware of the kinds of information and photos they post saying in many cases that close family members also had accounts and could see what they posted which made them think about what they chose to post. It was interesting to see how frequently they communicated with each other and how important their interactions on Facebook were to them on many occasions being the hot topic of conversation for the day.
One book that I could have seen myself really liking when I was a teenager would be Living Dead Girl. It has a plot that really makes you think about a number of things and that can be appealing to a lot of teens who want to challenge themselves and explore things that may be interesting to them while still making them uncomfortable. It can serve as an alternative for teens who don’t want a sappy feel good story but instead a more mature read that treats them like they are actually capable of thinking instead of empty vessels that can’t do their own thinking. There is also a large group of teens who would be put off by this story especially if they have any type of experience remotely similar to Alice’s. This is a great book to look at because it is really difficult to pinpoint a specific group that would like it and could potentially be extremely alienating to some, while being a strong emotional experience for others.