Kids These Days Will Never Get Away from Their Social Media Past

Kate Eichhorn, associate professor of Culture and Media at The New School and the author of The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media (Harvard University Press, 2019), argues the danger to children and teens from social media might not be what they see while young but the inability to distance themselves as adults from their younger thoughts and actions.

"Part of your social identity management… forgetting plays an important role of that. With social media, with the excessive documentation of our childhood and adolescence, our ability to decide what we should carry forward diminishes that ability," says Kate Eichhorn.

— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) July 8, 2019

"The reason why young people finally have access to the technologies needed to document their lives and to circulate those images widely… is because private companies are invested in young people generating data," says Kate Eichhorn. "It's about Capitalism."

— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) July 8, 2019