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Over on Twitter about an hour ago, I came across a tweet that said a new study had found that “Social Ntwks make college students more narcissistic.” I’m always interested in the latest research on student culture, so I clicked.
The link took me to a USA Today article on the study. The article doesn’t quite make the claim in the tweet, but it does make some other arguments that are well worth unpacking. (The study itself doesn’t appear to be online anywhere. If anyone reading this finds it, or can get access to it, let me know in comments.)
The tweet I quoted above makes a cause-and-effect claim: that social networking makes students more narcissistic. The lead sentence of the USA Today piece makes a similar, but slightly weaker, claim: that students believe that social networking makes them more narcissistic. But neither of these claims are backed up by the data that follows.
The article is based on the answers to two questions. Students were asked whether their peers “used social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for self-promotion, narcissism and attention-seeking,” and they were asked whether they agreed that their generation was “more self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking than previous generations.” A bit more than half (57%) answered yes to the first question, and 66% agreed “strongly” or “somewhat” with the second statement.
The first thing to point here is that there’s no claim of causality in the students’ answers. Most of them think that their peers (some of them? all of them? a few of them? the article doesn’t say) engage in attention-seeking behavior online (occasionally? frequently? incessantly?). And most of them think their peers are more prone to attention-seeking behavior than previous generations. But the answers provided in the article don’t give any indication that they think social networks themselves are the cause of this behavior, much less any evidence that such a cause-and-effect relationship actually exists.
So the Twitter soundbite version of the study is bunk — the survey doesn’t show that social networking makes people more narcissistic. And the weaknesses of the study don’t end there.
A second big problem is that the survey questions are muddled. Every blogger I know uses social networks for “self-promotion,” and to the extent that seeking attention for your writing is “attention seeking,” I guess they all do that too. But I wouldn’t call that behavior narcissistic, and I don’t think it makes much sense at all to frame the question as if it was. Self-promotion and narcissism aren’t the same thing. They’re not even close to the same thing — nobody thinks USA Today’s own self-promoting Twitter feed is narcissistic.
And here’s a third problem: what basis do young people have for assessing how “self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking” their parents’ generation was in their youth, much less their grandparents or great-grandparents? They weren’t there. They don’t know.
What they do know is how previous generations, and their own peers, are perceived in popular culture, and the perception of youth as “self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking” is a pop culture cliche. So that second question really only measures the degree to which young people have embraced society’s negative image of them.
And this is where we really go down the rabbit hole.
Where does the perception of today’s young people as narcissistic come from? In large part it comes from the work of researchers like Jean Twenge, who’s written two books and dozens of articles making exactly that argument. Twenge’s most recent project? She’s the author of the study we’re talking about today.
So here’s how it works. Writers come up with the idea — valid or invalid — that today’s youth are narcissists. They write books and publish op-eds and go on talk shows and give quotes to journalists and do public speaking engagements pushing this idea. Then, with their perspective embedded in popular culture, one of them, Twenge, conducts a survey asking young people what they think of it. Most of those young people, having been fed that story for years, admit that it’s at least “somewhat” accurate. And then that survey is presented as evidence that the theory is true.
Jean Twenge graduated from high school in the 1980s, a time when the popular media were full of stories about the entitlement and self-absorption of the nation’s youth. Her parents came of age in the 1960s, an era whose young people were widely condemned as narcissistic by their parents. As strange as it may seem now, the youth of the early 1940s faced similar charges, and anyone who’s ever read an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel knows that the same stereotype was rampant in the 1920s.
Are today’s youth more narcissistic than their parents were at their age? Maybe. I’m not sure that the question is a particularly meaningful one, but it’s possible that I could be convinced that it is, and that Twenge’s answer to it is the right one.
But what I do know for sure is that every generation thinks their children are more frivolous and more selfish than they were as youths, and that every generation is eager to consume “research” that supports this self-perception. Every generation loves to read about how great they are, and how the kids of today just don’t measure up.
And if I had to sum up that attitude in a single word?
I’d be tempted to call it narcissism.
A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.
According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.
The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.
Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”
As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”
Facebook Ain’t Cool With The Kids No More.
That’s the headline on a post at CrunchGear this morning, claiming that “social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd.” That post was based on an article in this morning’s Guardian, a British newspaper, titled “It’s SO Over: Cool Cyberkids Abandon Social Networking Sites.”
So is it true? Are young people abandoning social networking sites in droves? Have the youth of today written off Facebook as uncool?
Well, no.
The CrunchGear and Guardian pieces were both based on a report from the UK media regulatory agency Ofcom. Specifically, they were based on a single piece of survey data from page 289 of that report.
According to Ofcom, social networking use by British youth aged 15 to 24 held steady at 50% from the third quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009, after dropping from a high of 55% in the first quarter of 2008.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. A five point drop in social networking use a year ago among British youth.
Note that there’s nothing here about which young people are dropping out of social networking, or why, or how sure the pollsters are that they actually are. Nothing about the poll’s margin of error, which I wasn’t able to find in the report. And nothing, of course, about “coolness.”
And here’s one other thing. The Guardian article says “part of the reason” that “the kids don’t like social networking anymore … appears” to be “that older users do.” The US trade magazine Billboard dropped the hedge, saying that “adults’ love of social networking sites is driving away teens.” But there’s nothing — literally nothing — in the original report to suggest this. The report said social networking use in Britain dropped a little among 15-to-24s, and that went up a little among older people, but that’s it. There’s no support in the data for any sort of cause-and-effect relationship.
Next up: Mashable’s post on “Why Teens Don’t Tweet.”
The Washington DC Council is considering a set of reforms to the district’s elections that would have the effect of encouraging youth voter turnout — and allowing some currently ineligible teens to vote in primary elections.
Among other things, the Omnibus Election Reform Act of 2009 would:
- Allow 16-year-olds to “pre-register” to vote.
- Grant the vote in primary elections to 17-year-olds who would turn 18 by the time of the general election.
- Establish same-day voter registration, eliminating a deadline that’s currently a month in advance of election day.
Each of these reforms is designed to get young people (and, in the case of the third, not-young people too) engaged with electoral politics. The evidence shows clearly that if you register, you’re likely to vote, and that if you vote once, you’re likely to vote again.
Eliminating barriers to voting is the biggest step we can take toward higher turnout, and all of these proposals are worthy of adoption in DC and throughout the nation.
“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.”
–Pearl S. Buck
studentactivism.net 
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