My Sister as a Case Study- Vallarie Perez

So I really enjoyed reading Boyd's book and I appreciated the views she decided to share about her perception of the effects of social media on young adults. I found her claims to be very plausible as is by simply comparing them to my own feelings and also to my experiences as a younger teen who regularly interacted on social media. Reading Boyd's book was refreshing, because it proved that my feelings about social media were not fundamentally based on the fact that I am a part of my own age group and that teens simply do not have the ability to think in terms of adults. Boyd entirely eliminates the validity of any such argument throughout her book and explains the prevalence of social media in the lives of teens and also assesses the reasoning behind the concerns of parents while explaining why they aren't necessarily accurate. I have a sixteen year old sister, freshly sixteen, I might add. I'm close to her and I decided to talk to her about social media and why she's so heavily engaged with it. She's very open with me so I knew the conversation would flow freely and that she wouldn't feel the need to adjust her claims, which is part of the reason I decided to talk to her about this at all. As expected, she told me exactly how she felt about the claims I relayed to her that people had made in regard to their fears about adolescent "dependency" on social media (as explained by Boyd). My sister's answers did nothing but affirm the premises upon which Boyd presented her claim. It was cool to me, to see evidence of Boyd's claims supported by someone who was so close to me, because it proves that her research was strikingly accurate. Teens just want to hang out, away from their parents, and take advantage of the option to be connected to people they feel they can relate the most to at this point in their lives- their friends.