The first issue this year of the MIT Technology Review reached me by mail only a few days ago. As soon as I opened it, I came across an interview with Danah Boyd, a Microsoft researcher who studies social media. Her book, which just got published by the Yale University Press, is entitled It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. She argues that teenagers are not doing much online that is very different from what they used to do offline. In other words, they do so much socializing online because they have little choice. That is, their parents now generally consider it unsafe to let them roam their neighborhoods unsupervised. The interview thus turns to the nitty-gritty of the social media, where teenagers now find a new form of freedom to explore their sexuality and the like. To my surprise, unsafe neighborhoods are left out of the interview. That is how things are, and this is how they will remain. So, why bother talking about it? And all this in America, where freedom is on everyone’s lips! What I would urge parents to do is to make their neighborhoods safe for their children. That accomplished, let them decide themselves whether to socialize online or offline.