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Education and young people
There is considerable public anxiety that social media distracts from education and reduces the social skills of young people - despite an exemplary body of prior research that rejects any such simple conclusions.
In several of our field sites we show that low-income families often see social media activity as a useful skill, enhancing literacy and providing a route to alternative, informal channels of education. By contrast higher-income families find more as a threat to formal education. However, we have also researched in field sites where the opposite would be true.
The best way to appreciate the impact of social media is to focus on specific sets of relationships: those between schoolchildren, between teachers and schoolchildren and between both of these groups and parents.