"Drama" - teens' fear of adults' intervention,

In her writing The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics, Danah Boyd argues that teens tend to beautify bullying by using the word “drama” because in doing so, “it lets them save face when confronted with adult-defined dynamics, which their peers see as childish and irrelevant”. In another word, it is a self-defense mechanism for teens to not feel inferior to the groups that bully them. Boyd also claims that such drama is “often performed for, in, and magnified by networked publics”.

While it is true that many teens try to save face by not admitting they are being bullied, Boyd misses the point that teens always attempt to free themselves from parents’ instructions, and such conflict is internal, not external. Boyd bases her argument on the assumption that teens defend themselves because the word bullying, which is defined by adults, is seen as childish among their peers. However, Boyd does not address the fact that teens are in a stage of internal conflict between their wish for personal freedom and their authoritative parents’ orders. Unlike what Boyd claims, teens are rebellious because they want to, not because other peers are. They may save face partially because they do not want to be labeled as a coward by their peers, but, more importantly, they save face because they do not want their parents to intervene their fight to obtain freedom.

Teens do not tell adults that they are being bullied because they know exactly how the network technology can escalate the incident. My junior high school was a newly founded international school that had less than twenty students in its first year of class. The school was trying its best to advertise its features mainly through the Internet. While the school slowly became more acknowledged by the public, it also meant that its small student bodies were under surveillance, especially of the parents. When I realized that there was a bullying happening inside our small class, I did not take any action. People may argue that I did not want everyone to think I was an instigator. That fear may have prevented me from doing anything, but my thinking was simpler: I knew that confessing this bullying would result in a total chaos. I knew that there were many anonymous BBS talking about how the school is run and it was not difficult to figure out that students’ parents were chatting on those BBS. Under such strict surveillance I did not want adults to exacerbate our problems by start posting our names on the BBS.

As Boyd points out herself in another paper, youth care much more about their online privacy than people used to assume. In the age of technology probably no one wants their parents to talk about them using their initials on a clearly non-anonymous BBS. The fact that their names are being mentioned by adults seems intruding. Frankly, teens do not want adults to be involved in their own world of adventure.

While peer pressure is a major problem in bullying, teens’ general distrust of adults is also an important element in considering why they do not ask for adults’ help. Boyd focused on how teens fear to lose their positions in the community they belong, but, more notably, they fear the intervention of adults. Thus, teens romanticize bullying or any complicated relationships as “drama” in order to minimize the conflict between them and adults.