Customer Reviews

Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online

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Anastasia Goodstein knows teenagers. She has studied them, marketed to them, and talked to them. Don't be turned off because the author is not a parent of a teen. Because Goodstein isn't a parent, she was able to get teens to open up about their online experiences. And she also talked to parents who share there struggles, concerns and perspectives. If you really want to know what your teen is doing online - or if your young child is just starting to go online - buy this book NOW.

What you will learn is that there are dangers on the Internet, and more often the dangers are your child's fellow students. Cyber-bullying from classmates is becoming more a danger to teens than strangers trolling for sex, and Goodstein covers the various methods of cyber-bullying. Considering that teenagers don't always make the right choices, parents do have a lot to worry about.

While Goodstein properly alerts parents to the real dangers of the Internet, she also balances it with realism. Although your teen may not always understand the consequences of what she does online, she probably already knows about the dangers of the Internet and how to protect herself. You'll read comments from real teens about their online experiences. The comments will alarm you and and comfort you all at the same time.

Helpful tips and "insider" information are peppered throughout the pages. Know what a "Code 9" is? Find the answer and more teen code in the book. (Code 9 = parent in the room). Are teens "hooking up" with other teens they meet online? Maybe not as much as you might have been told. Where is the balance between protecting your child and trusting your child? There's not an easy answer but you can find out what other parents are doing successfully.

You will be a better-informed parent after reading this book, even if you think you already know everything about teens' online life. I think of myself has a pretty online-aware parent, but I learned something from reading Totally Wired, and you will too.

If you have teens in your life, you need to read Totally Wired. Goodstein de-mystifies text messaging and social networking, offers common-sense advice on how to manage the security concerns about your teens online time, and provides a `cheat sheet' to help us interpret what's really going on in our teenagers' world.

The best part is that Goodstein really gets teens. Drawing analogies to things that were familiar to us from our youth, she helps us understand that MySpace is really just another place to hang out, that personalizing your own online page is a way for teens to express themselves just as I did by hanging posters in my room or pinning buttons to my denim jacket, and that many teens do need parents to help them understand the boundaries, both offline and online. Reading this book made me remember how much fun it was to be a teenager myself (in between all the drama). And I came away with a new sense of respect for the choices that today's far more empowered teens are making for themselves.

Now if someone would only write a book to help teens understand their parents ...

Anastasia know her stuff! With a thorough knowledge of the youth media landscape and an exhaustive and stellar group of people interviewed and profiled - this is a fantastic book! It's a nice and easy read with an amazing amount of information imparted. Anastasia does a great job of pairing what teens are doing online with their developmental traits and needs -- this is not a lost generation - they are simply being teens as teens have always been - in new ways. This book will calm fears, educate parents, educators, lawmakers etc. on the reality of this new wired world. The bottom line with this issue is that parents need to be educated on what their children are doing, and put their "worry" and concern in the right areas - once they learn what's really going on they won't respond to the hype and hysteria that the media at large seems intent on passing on. Every parent, every public and school library MUST get their hands on this - learn it, love it, live it!

This is a fabulous book. Anastasia Goodstein does a superb job at providing readers a "realistic" look at what teens are doing online. She does not hype it up for the "scare" factor, but gives parents the knowledge and tools they need to make their own parenting decisions. This book is well worth the money spent!

Anastasia really understands tweens and teens. In a very easy read... Totally Wired, Anastasia relays what today's kids are doing to what any generation did when they hit this critical age of child development. Things are not so different... we just have new ways to communicate. And like any generation that had their battles, this generation is learning to know what is and is not appropriate, who I should or should not talk to and how being connected online all the time can affect me and the world around me. As co-creator of Zoey's Room, an online community for tween girls -- I highly recommend all parents and educators to read this and remember what it was like to be that age...

An engaging and enlightening read for adults that live or work with teens. In spite of their total connectedness with friends and the world, teens today are still the same teens of times past. As they strive to figure out who they are, they need adult involvement and guidance in their lives. What intimidates many adults is the fact that they cannot stay ahead of these mind-boggling tech savvy teens. Yet between the great overview of the tech world teens live in and excellent suggestions on how adults can effectively connect and guide teens, much of the intimidation felt evaporates.

Author Goodstein carefully explains all the ways teens are connected, complete with side bar definitions, interviews, resource lists, etc. Ms. Goodstein has done her homework including documented statistics, expert observances and experiences, and summaries of numerous interviews she conducted with both teens and adults who have extensive contact with teens. Whether you know a little or a lot about the world teens live in today this book has much to offer.

This was a great read for me on two different levels. I'm both a parent and someone who sometimes works with companies that market products to teens. Goodstein has done her homework and provides a compelling look at what teens do when they are online and why they do it. The book is full of case studies and interviews, that provide real world context. I'm not sure how the book will age, but it is 'of the moment,' and definitely worth a read now.

Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online
Review by Richard L. Weaver II, PhD.

In Totally Wired, Goodstein has written a superb book. If you are a parent and you have a teenager, please read this book.

When totally wired teenagers today get out of bed in the morning, the first thing they do--before breakfast and before showering--is to fire-up their "at rest" computer to check for messages on their favorite community sites. They open iTunes to accompany them while getting dressed and listen to songs from CDs their friends burned for them. Before going downstairs for breakfast, they check their cell phone for both voice and text messages from their friends.

Totally wired teenagers will call or text their friends on the way to school so they know where they are and where to meet them when they arrive. To protect themselves from having their cell phones confiscated during classes, they turn them to vibrate, but they use them between classes to keep in touch with their friends and plan activities for immediately after school.

Schools have many computers, and students own their own laptops as well. Students use school computers to check their Web e-mail messages, do research for school projects, type projects and papers, and make PowerPoint presentations. Students, for the most part, are more comfortable with computers than most of their teachers, and often students end up answering their teachers' questions and helping them figure things out.

In English, the teacher created a special website just for his classes that includes the syllabus, course expectations, brief project outlines and papers that must be downloaded, and a FAQ (frequently asked questions) link as well. One feature of the website is an ongoing, up-to-date blog which students are required to respond to using their special class names that only they and their teacher know.

This English teacher has received high ratings on Ratemyteacher.com not just because of his use of the computer but how he integrates the computer into classroom activities, maintains a daily question-and-answer page on the website where students can keep up with any aspect of the course about which they have questions, and a "contact me" link where students can contact him directly regarding problems, suggestions, or personal insights.

The algebra teacher, unlike the English teacher described above, does not receive high ratings on Ratemyteacher.com. She assigns too much homework (according to the students), sometimes embarrasses them when they don't know answers, and calls on them when they aren't paying attention.

Totally wired teenagers often are incredibly busy after school hours. In addition to athletics, homework takes up time, but spending time on the computer dominates. They update their LiveJournal (LJ) entries, post comments on their friends' Ljs, instant message (IM) their friends and relatives, check their own website blog, add a new entry to it as well. They go to their MySpace profile to keep in touch with distant friends. They may even keep tabs on boyfriends' or girlfriends' online profiles, sometimes leaving flirtatious comments, posting recent pictures of themselves or cute photos of them together. Although they like having boyfriends and girlfriends, they realize such contacts take time.

Much time is spent, too, interspersed within all of this, sending and reading e-mail messages and text messages. If there is even a little time remaining, they may surf the Internet, enter a chat room, post a note on a message board, hang out on community sites, or just go back through all of their contacts to see answers to their questions or more recent posts. Sometimes they just relax and review what they have done.

When they are away from home, it is not uncommon to receive cell phone messages from parents who are just checking in. When they are somewhere they know their parents would not like, they lie and tell them they're somewhere else. As long as they answer their cell phones when their parents call, they get away with it. When at parties, it is not uncommon to receive text messages from someone across the room, telling them to check out someone else, or talking about someone else who is in the same room.

When they hang out with friends, they go see movies, rent DVDs, play video games or watch others play video games, just talk as they watch for text messages or communicate with someone else on their cell phones, or listen to their iTunes or MP3. They find such multitasking comfortable and easy, and most students perform multitasking when they do their homework, work at their computer, or watch DVDs.

Today's teenagers spend enormous amounts of time socializing with friends, love listening to music and playing games, actively use their computers for socializing, doing homework, and researching papers and projects, and find it easy getting information of all kinds from the Internet. Because of the Internet, gossip travels quickly just as negative information and mean pictures. Writing diaries, once considered a personal form of expression, has become public documentation and sharing diaries, emotional experiences, and likes and dislikes is common practice.

"There are more opportunities for teens to express themselves and distribute their work as writers, artists, videographers, or podcasters (Internet radio hosts who create audio recordings you can download from the Web)" (p. 13), writes Goodstein. There is no doubt that totally wired teens raise new issues of privacy and safety, but it may be, too, they are becoming more communicative and expressive at the same time. We live in a far more verbal world than ever before.

This book gives the reader an in depth view of what school children have access to via computer, cell phones, pagers, etc. A must for parents to read and understand.

Speaking as a Middle School Counselor dealing with cyber-bullying issues on an almost daily basis, this book is a wonderful resource to me. A major frustration to me in doing research on this has been the sheer volume of "resources" out there that completely miss the point. Treating cyberspace as if it isn't "real" and so forth - ask the average 8th grader how "real" their myspace is. This is an excellent book with a very realistic approach to a very serious issue, and I look forward to being far more proactive on this in the coming school year. If you work with teens, this book should be required reading.