“Controlling a social situation in an effort to achieve privacy is neither easy nor obvious. Doing so requires power, knowledge, and skills… Second, people must have a reasonable understanding of the social situation and context in which they are operating.”

In this part of the chapter, boyd discusses how privacy can be achieved by taking control of a situation. She says that the three things that are needed are power, knowledge, and skills, and then she describes how teens aren’t great at this because it isn’t easy. Even though her reasoning makes sense, I still think that saying teens “struggle with this” is incorrect. Not only that, but I also think this applies not only to privacy, but social media usage in general. The specific part of this that caught my attention was that she said that people need an understanding of the social situation and context. If anything, I”m pretty sure that teens are extremely knowledgable when it comes to the context of social media. Teens are usually the first people to try all the new types of social media, so they are usually the ones who set up the context. And this makes sense; since we have grown up in a technological society, we are the best audience for all this new stuff. Social media is literally made for teens, so we are generally good at navigating through all the intricacies, including achieving privacy. I think it’s hard to completely agree with boyd on a lot of things that she says, because she is still one of the adults. She’s trying to see privacy from the point of view of a teen, but just the fact that the has to do research and conduct interviews shows the disconnect. I understand that she was doing it for the book, but I’m pretty sure that a lot of the things the teens talked about were unfamiliar to her, but common knowledge for the average social media usage. I think this is why adults are so bad at using social media, and why parents are always invading privacy. They don’t understand normal social media cues, similar to regular social cues like boyd described (not staring, not eavesdropping). Honestly, I don’t think this will change anytime soon either, because teens are just so much different than adults. The best that can happen is for adults to just try and learn how to be normal.