Over the holidays, the technologist Sriram Krishnan was named as Trump’s AI advisor. Off of that, a battle over H-1B visas bubbled up, triggering a civil war in MAGA Land—where many say immigrants like Krishnan should not be prioritized over native-born citizens. That led to future DOGE co-chief Vivek Ramaswamy, whose parents were born in India, to take a swipe at American culture:
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote on X. He went on to recommend a different upbringing for America’s kids: “More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers.”
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To which I say: Hold the corded kitchen phone. Okay, now put your mom on so she can talk to my mom about whose house we’re sleeping at.
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At sleepovers, you came face to face with many versions of the American dream, or at least many versions of American snacks. You learned that different families had different cultures, and different rules, and you learned how to be a guest, and how to exist outside the sphere of your own family. It’s like a laboratory to see if your parents’ rearing, at least with regard to manners and to self-soothing, worked.
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Kids show up to college today never having fostered intimacy with another person. When friendships are mediated by screen there is no opportunity to get into the nitty-gritty. Learning how to shave your legs, how to do your hair, how to use a tampon, or in my case learning that your eyebrows need an overhaul are all things that happen at sleepovers. But it wasn’t just about going to war with our own body hair; it was the crucible where girls grow up.
Think of the children!
In Defense of the Great American Sleepover
in The Free PressRisks vs. Harms: Youth & Social Media
Sorely tempted to just copy and paste the whole thing. As is usual with danah, every other sentence deserves to be on a t-shirt.
In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”
The language of “harm” in this question is causal in nature. It is also legalistic. Lawyers look for “harms” to place blame on or otherwise regulate actants. […]
Risk is a different matter. Getting out of bed introduces risks into your life. Risk is something to identify and manage. Some environments introduce more potential risks and some actions reduce the risks. Risk management is a skill to develop. And while regulation can be used to reduce certain risks, it cannot eliminate them. And it can also backfire and create more risks.
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In the United States, we have a bad habit of thinking that risks can be designed out of every system. I will never forget when I lived in Amsterdam in the 90s, and I remarked to a local about how odd I found it that there were no guardrails to prevent cars from falling into the canals when they were parking. His response was “you’re so American” which of course prompted me to say, “what does THAT mean?” He explained that, in the Netherlands, locals just learned not to drive their cars into the canals, but Americans expected there to be guardrails for everything so that they didn’t have to learn not to be stupid. He then noted out that every time he hears about a car ending up in the canal, it is always an American who put it there. Stupid Americans. (I took umbrage at this until, a few weeks later, I read a news story about a drunk American driving a rental into the canal.)
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People certainly face risks when encountering any social environment, including social media. This then triggers the next question: Do some people experience harms through social media? Absolutely. But it’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen.
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I will admit that one thing that intrigues me is that many of those who propagate hate are especially interested in blocking children from technology for fear that allowing their children to be exposed to difference might make them more tolerant. (No, gender is not contagious, but developing a recognition that gender is socially and politically constructed — and fighting for a more just world — sure is.)