Teenage angst in a digital world
It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, by Danah Boyd, Yale, RRP£17.99/RRP$25, 296 pages
The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World, by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, Yale, RRP£16.99/$25, 256 pages
The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?, by Patrick Tucker, Current, RRP$27.95, 288 pages
Before social media platforms became the most public chronicles of teenage angst, that honour belonged to The Catcher in the Rye.
In among all the angsting, the narrator of JD Salinger’s classic coming-of-age novel frets over a once-common dilemma involving telephones and parents: “I couldn’t take a chance on giving [my sister] a buzz, because she was only a little kid and she wouldn’t have been up, let alone anywhere near the phone. I thought of maybe hanging up if my parents answered, but that wouldn’t’ve worked, either. They’d know it was me. My mother always knows it’s me. She’s psychic.”
