UOFT What Do Teens Do on Social Media Discussion

read required readings (attached) then writing paragraphs:

 Be specific on which social media apps or platforms you’re discussing. – Be specific on which teens (year, backgrounds, age groups, languages, location, socio-cultural identities, etc) you’re referring to – Provide at least 4 specific examples from this week’s required readings (boyd, Kabir). You do not need to provide APA references at the end for course materials, but you do need in-text citations. – NO OUTSIDE SOURCES. In-text citations are required. Reference entries at the end are not required. – Each example is one short paragraph. The first sentence of each paragraph must clearly state the activity (and platform if applicable). it’s
complicated
new haven + london
it’s
complicated
the social lives of
networked teens
danah boyd
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory
of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the class of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright © 2014 by danah boyd.
All rights reserved.
Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
An online version of the work is made available under a Creative
Commons license for use that is noncommercial. The terms of the license
are set forth at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-­nc-­sa/3.0/. For a
digital copy of the work, please see the author’s website at http://www.
danah.org/.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,
business, or promotional use. For information, please e-­mail sales.press@
yale.edu (US office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (UK office).
Designed by Lindsey Voskowsky.
Set in Avenir LT STD and Adobe Garmond type by IDS Infotech, Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
boyd, danah (danah michele), 1977–
It’s complicated : the social lives of networked teens / danah boyd.
   pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-16631-6 (clothbound : alk. paper)
1. Internet and teenagers. 2. Online social networks.
3. Teenagers—Social life and customs—21st century.
4. Information technology—Social aspects. I. Title.
HQ799.2.I5B68 2014
004.67’80835—dc23
2013031950
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992
(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Peter Lyman (1940–2007), who took a
chance on me and helped me find solid ground
contents
preface
ix
introduction
1
1 identity why do teens seem strange online?
29
2 privacy why do youth share so publicly?
54
3 addiction what makes teens obsessed with social media?
77
4 danger are sexual predators lurking everywhere?
100
5 bullying is social media amplifying meanness and cruelty?
128
6 inequality can social media resolve social divisions?
153
7 literacy are today’s youth digital natives?
176
8 searching for a public of their own
199
appendix: teen demographics
215
notes
221
bibliography
245
acknowledgments
267
index
273
preface
The year was 2006, and I was in northern California chatting with
teenagers about their use of social media. There, I met Mike, a white
fifteen-­year-­old who loved YouTube.1 He was passionately describing
the “Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments” video that had
recently gained widespread attention, as viewers went to YouTube in
droves to witness the geysers that could be produced when the diet
soda and mint candy were combined. Various teens had taken to mixing Mentos and Diet Coke just to see what would happen, and Mike
was among them. He was ecstatic to show me the homemade video he
and his friends had made while experimenting with common food
items. As he walked me through his many other YouTube videos,
Mike explained that his school allowed him to borrow a video camera
for school assignments. Students were actively encouraged to make
videos or other media as part of group projects to display their classroom knowledge. He and his friends had taken to borrowing the camera on Fridays, making sure to tape their homework assignment before
spending the rest of the weekend making more entertaining videos.
None of the videos they made were of especially high quality, and
while they shared them publicly on YouTube, only their friends
watched them. Still, whenever they got an additional view—even if
only because they forced a friend to watch the video—they got excited.
As we were talking and laughing and exploring Mike’s online videos, Mike paused and turned to me with a serious look on his face.
“Can you do me a favor?” he asked, “Can you talk to my mom?
Can you tell her that I’m not doing anything wrong on the internet?”
I didn’t immediately respond, and so he jumped in to clarify. “I
ix
mean, she thinks that everything online is bad, and you seem to get
it, and you’re an adult. Will you talk to her?” I smiled and promised
him that I would.
This book is just that: my attempt to describe and explain the networked lives of teens to the people who worry about them—parents,
teachers, policy makers, journalists, sometimes even other teens. It is
the product of an eight-­year effort to explore various aspects of teens’
engagement with social media and other networked technologies.
To get at teens’ practices, I crisscrossed the United States from
2005 to 2012, talking with and observing teens from eighteen states
and a wide array of socioeconomic and ethnic communities. I spent
countless hours observing teens through the traces they left online
via social network sites, blogs, and other genres of social media. I
hung out with teens in physical spaces like schools, public parks,
malls, churches, and fast food restaurants.
To dive deeper into particular issues, I conducted 166 formal, semi­
structured interviews with teens during the period 2007–2010.2 I
interviewed teens in their homes, at school, and in various public settings. In addition, I talked with parents, teachers, librarians, youth
ministers, and others who worked directly with youth. I became an
expert on youth culture. In addition, my technical background and
experience working with and for technology companies building
social media tools gave me firsthand knowledge about how social
media was designed, implemented, and introduced to the public.
Together, these two strains of expertise allowed me to enter into
broader policy conversations, serve on commissions focused on youth
practices, and help influence public conversations about networked
sociality.
As I began to get a feel for the passions and frustrations of teens
and to speak to broader audiences, I recognized that teens’ voices
rarely shaped the public discourse surrounding their networked lives.
So many people talk about youth engagement with social media, but
very few of them are willing to take the time to listen to teens, to hear
them, or to pay attention to what they have to say about their lives,
x
preface
online and off. I wrote this book to address that gap. Throughout
this book, I draw on the voices of teens I’ve interviewed as well as
those I’ve observed or met more informally. At times, I also pull stories from the media or introduce adults’ perspectives to help provide
context or offer additional examples.
I wrote this book to reflect the experiences and perspectives of the
teens that I encountered. Their voices shape this book just as their
stories shaped my understanding of the role of social media in their
lives. My hope is that this book will shed light on the complex and
fascinating practices of contemporary American youth as they try to
find themselves in a networked world.
As you read this book, my hope is that you will suspend your
assumptions about youth in an effort to understand the social lives of
networked teens. By and large, the kids are all right. But they want
to be understood. This book is my attempt to do precisely that.
preface
xi
it’s
complicated
introduction
One evening, in September 2010, I was in the stands at a high school
football game in Nashville, Tennessee, experiencing a powerful sense
of déjà vu. As a member of my high school’s marching band in the
mid-­1990s, I had spent countless Friday nights in stands across central Pennsylvania, pretending to cheer on my school’s football team
so that I could hang out with my friends. The scene at the school in
Nashville in 2010 could easily have taken place when I was in high
school almost two decades earlier. It was an archetypical American
night, and immediately legible to me. I couldn’t help but smile at the
irony, given that I was in Nashville to talk with teens about how
technology had changed their lives. As I sat in the stands, I thought:
the more things had changed, the more they seemed the same.
I recalled speaking to a teen named Stan whom I’d met in Iowa
three years earlier. He had told me to stop looking for differences.
“You’d actually be surprised how little things change. I’m guessing a
lot of the drama is still the same, it’s just the format is a little different. It’s just changing the font and changing the background color
really.” He made references to technology to remind me that technology wasn’t changing anything important.
Back in Nashville, the cheerleaders screamed, “Defense!” and
waved their colorful pom-­poms, while boys in tuxes and girls in formal gowns lined up on the track that circled the football field, signaling that halftime was approaching. This was a Homecoming game,
and at halftime the Homecoming Court paraded onto the field in
formal attire to be introduced to the audience before the announcer
declared the King and Queen. The Court was made up of eight girls
1
and eight boys, half of whom were white and half of whom were
black. I reflected on the lack of Asian or Hispanic representation in a
town whose demographics were changing. The announcer introduced each member to the audience, focusing on their extracurricular activities, their participation in one of the local churches, and
their dreams for the future.
Meanwhile, most of the student body was seated in the stands. They
were decked out in the school colors, many even having painted their
faces in support. But they were barely paying attention to what was
happening on the field. Apart from a brief hush when the Homecoming Court was presented, they spent the bulk of the time facing one
another, chatting, enjoying a rare chance to spend unstructured time
together as friends and peers.
As in many schools I’ve visited over the years, friendships at this
school in Nashville were largely defined by race, gender, sexuality,
and grade level, and those networks were immediately visible based
on whom students were talking to or sitting with. By and large, the
students were cordoned off in their own section on the sides of
the stands while parents and more “serious” fans occupied the seats
in the center. Most of the students in the stands were white and
divided by grade: the upperclassmen took the seats closest to the
field, while the freshmen were pushed toward the back. Girls were
rarely alone with boys, but when they were, they were holding hands.
The teens who swarmed below and to the right of the stands represented a different part of the school. Unlike their peers in the stands,
most of the students milling about below were black. Aside from the
Homecoming Court, only one group was racially mixed, and they
were recognizable mainly for their “artistic” attire—unnaturally colorful hair, piercings, and black clothing that I recognized from the
racks of Hot Topic, a popular mall-­based chain store that caters to
goths, punks, and other subcultural groups.
Only two things confirmed that this was not 1994: the fashion and
the cell phones. Gone were the 1980s-­inspired bangs, perms, and
excessive use of hair gel and hairspray that dominated my high school
2
introduction
well into the 1990s. And unlike 1994, cell phones were everywhere.
As far as I could tell, every teen at the game that day in Nashville
had one: iPhones, Blackberries, and other high-­end smartphones
seemed to be especially popular at this upper-­middle-­class school.
Unsurprisingly, the phones in the hands of the white students were
often more expensive or of more elite brands than those in the hands
of the black students.
The pervasiveness of cell phones in the stands isn’t that startling;
over 80 percent of high school students in the United States had a
cell phone in 2010.1 What was surprising, at least to most adults,
was how little the teens actually used them as phones. The teens I
observed were not making calls. They whipped out their phones to
take photos of the Homecoming Court, and many were texting frantically while trying to find one another in the crowd. Once they connected, the texting often stopped. On the few occasions when a
phone did ring, the typical response was an exasperated “Mom!” or
“Dad!” implying a parent calling to check in, which, given the teens’
response to such calls, was clearly an unwanted interruption. And
even though many teens are frequent texters, the teens were not
directing most of their attention to their devices. When they did look
at their phones, they were often sharing the screen with the person
sitting next to them, reading or viewing something together.
The parents in the stands were paying much more attention to
their devices. They were even more universally equipped with smartphones than their children, and those devices dominated their focus.
I couldn’t tell whether they were checking email or simply supplementing the football game with other content, being either bored or
distracted. But many adults were staring into their devices intently,
barely looking up when a touchdown was scored. And unlike the
teens, they weren’t sharing their devices with others or taking photos
of the event.
Although many parents I’ve met lament their children’s obsession
with their phones, the teens in Nashville were treating their phones
as no more than a glorified camera plus coordination device. The
introduction
3
reason was clear: their friends were right there with them. They
didn’t need anything else.
I had come to Nashville to better understand how social media
and other technologies had changed teens’ lives. I was fascinated
with the new communication and information technologies that
had emerged since I was in high school. I had spent my own teen
years online, and I was among the first generation of teens who
did so. But that was a different era; few of my friends in the early
1990s were interested in computers at all. And my own interest in the
internet was related to my dissatisfaction with my local community.
The internet presented me with a bigger world, a world populated
by people who shared my idiosyncratic interests and were ready to
discuss them at any time, day or night. I grew up in an era where
going online—or “jacking in”—was an escape mechanism, and I
desperately wanted to escape.
The teens I met are attracted to popular social media like Facebook and Twitter or mobile technologies like apps and text messaging for entirely different reasons. Unlike me and the other early
adopters who avoided our local community by hanging out in chatrooms and bulletin boards, most teenagers now go online to connect
to the people in their community. Their online participation is not
eccentric; it is entirely normal, even expected.
The day after the football game in Nashville, I interviewed a girl
who had attended the Homecoming game. We sat down and went
through her Facebook page, where she showed me various photos
from the night before. Facebook hadn’t been on her mind during the
game, but as soon as she got home, she uploaded her photos, tagged
her friends, and started commenting on others’ photos. The status
updates I saw on her page were filled with references to conversations
that took place at the game. She used Facebook to extend the pleasure she had in connecting with her classmates during the game.
Although she couldn’t physically hang out with her friends after the
game ended, she used Facebook to stay connected after the stands
had cleared.
4
introduction
Social media plays a crucial role in the lives of networked teens.
Although the specific technologies change, they collectively provide
teens with a space to hang out and connect with friends. Teens’
mediated interactions sometimes complement or supplement their
face-­to-­face encounters. In 2006, when MySpace was at the height
of its popularity, eighteen-­year-­old Skyler told her mother that being
on MySpace was utterly essential to her social life. She explained,
“If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.” What Skyler meant
is simply that social acceptance depends on the ability to socialize
with one’s peers at the “cool” place. Each cohort of teens has a different space that it decides is cool. It used to be the mall, but for the
youth discussed in this book, social network sites like Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram are the cool places. Inevitably, by the time
this book is published, the next generation of teens will have inhabited a new set of apps and tools, making social network sites feel
passé. The spaces may change, but the organizing principles aren’t
different.
Although some teens still congregate at malls and football games,
the introduction of social media does alter the landscape. It enables
youth to create a cool space without physically transporting themselves anywhere. And because of a variety of social and cultural factors, social media has become an important public space where teens
can gather and socialize broadly with peers in an informal way. Teens
are looking for a place of their own to make sense of the world beyond
their bedrooms. Social media has enabled them to participate in and
help create what I call networked publics.
In this book, I document how and why social media has become
central to the lives of so many American teens and how they navigate
the networked publics that are created through those technologies.2
I also describe—and challenge—the anxieties that many American
adults have about teens’ engagement with social media. By illustrating teens’ practices, habits, and the tensions between teens and adults,
I attempt to provide critical insight into the networked lives of contemporary youth.
introduction
5
What Is Social Media?
Over the past decade, social media has evolved from being an esoteric jumble of technologies to a set of sites and services that are at the
heart of contemporary culture. Teens turn to a plethora of popular
services to socialize, gossip, share information, and hang out. Although
this book addresses a variety of networked technologies—including
the internet broadly and mobile services like texting specifically—
much of it focuses on a collection of services known as social media. I
use the term social media to refer to the sites and services that emerged
during the early 2000s, including social network sites, video sharing
sites, blogging and microblogging platforms, and related tools that
allow participants to create and share their own content. In addition to
referring to various communication tools and platforms, social media
also hints at a cultural mindset that emerged in the mid-­2000s as part
of the technical and business phenomenon referred to as “Web2.0.”3
The services known as social media are neither the first—nor
the only—tools to support significant social interaction or enable
teenagers to communicate and engage in meaningful online communities. Though less popular than they once were, tools like email,
instant messaging, and online forums are still used by teens. But as a
cultural phenomenon, social media has reshaped the information
and communication ecosystem.
In the 1980s and 1990s, early internet adopters used services like
email and instant messaging to chat with people they knew; they
turned to public-­facing services like chatrooms and bulletin boards
when they wanted to connect with strangers. Although many who
participated in early online communities became friends with people
they met online, most early adopters entered these spaces without
knowing the other people in the space. Online communities were
organized by topic, with separate spaces for those interested in discussing Middle East politics or getting health advice or finding out
how various programming languages worked.
Beginning around 2003, the increased popularity of blogging and
the rise of social network sites reconfigured this topically oriented land6
introduction
scape. Although the most visible blogging services helped people connect based on shared interests, the vast majority of bloggers were
blogging for, and reading blogs of, people they knew.4 When early
social network sites like Friendster and MySpace launched, they were
designed to enable users to meet new people—and, notably, friends of
friends—who might share their interests, tastes, or passions. Friendster,
in particular, was designed as a matchmaking service. In other words,
social network sites were designed for social networking. Yet what made
these services so unexpectedly popular was that they also provided a
platform for people to connect with their friends. Rather than focusing
on the friends of friends who could be met through the service, many
early adopters simply focused on socializing with their friends. At the
height of its popularity, MySpace’s tagline was “A Place for Friends,”
and that’s precisely what the service was for many of its users.
Social network sites changed the essence of online communities.
Whereas early online community tools like Usenet and bulletin
boards were organized around interests, even if people used them to
engage with friends, blogs, like homepages, were organized around
individuals. Links allowed people to highlight both their friends and
those who shared their interests. Social network sites downplayed the
importance of interests and made friendship the organizing tenant
of the genre.
Early adopters had long embraced internet technologies to socialize with others, but in more mainstream culture, participating in
online communities was often viewed as an esoteric practice for geeks
and other social outcasts. By the mid-­2000s, with the mainstreaming
of internet access and the rise of social media—and especially
MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter—sharing information and connecting to friends online became an integrated part of daily life for
many people, and especially the teens who came of age during this
period. Rather than being seen as a subcultural practice, participating in social media became normative.
Although teens have embraced countless tools for communicating
with one another, their widespread engagement with social media
introduction
7
has been unprecedented. Teens who used Facebook or Instagram or
Tumblr in 2013 weren’t seen as peculiar. Nor were those who used
Xanga, LiveJournal, or MySpace in the early to mid-­2000s. At the
height of their popularity, the best-­k nown social media tools aren’t
viewed with disdain, nor is participation seen to be indicative of asocial tendencies. In fact, as I describe throughout this book, engagement with social media is simply an everyday part of life, akin to
watching television and using the phone. This is a significant shift
from my experiences growing up using early digital technologies.
Even though many of the tools and services that I reference throughout this book are now passé, the core activities I discuss—chatting and
socializing, engaging in self-­expression, grappling with privacy, and
sharing media and information—are here to stay. Although the specific
sites and apps may be constantly changing, the practices that teens
engage in as they participate in networked publics remain the same.
New technologies and mobile apps change the landscape, but teens’
interactions with social media through their phones extend similar
practices and activities into geographically unbounded settings. The
technical shifts that have taken place since I began this project—and in
the time between me writing this book and you reading it—are important, but many of the arguments made in the following pages transcend
particular technical moments, even if the specific examples used to
illustrate those issues are locked in time.
The Significance of Networked Publics
Teens are passionate about finding their place in society. What
is different as a result of social media is that teens’ perennial desire
for social connection and autonomy is now being expressed in networked publics. Networked publics are publics that are restructured
by networked technologies. As such, they are simultaneously (1) the
space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people,
technology, and practice.5
8
introduction
Although the term public has resonance in everyday language, the
construct of a public—let alone publics—tends to be more academic
in nature. What constitutes a public in this sense can vary. It can be
an accessible space in which people can gather freely. Or, as political
scientist Benedict Anderson describes, a public can be a collection of
people who understand themselves to be part of an imagined community.6 People are a part of multiple publics—bounded as audiences
or by geography—and yet, publics often intersect and intertwine.
Publics get tangled up in one another, challenging any effort to
understand the boundaries and shape of any particular public. When
US presidents give their State of the Union speeches, they may have
written them with the American public in mind, but their speeches
are now accessible around the globe. As a result, it’s never quite clear
who fits into the public imagined by a president.
Publics serve different purposes. They can be political in nature, or
they can be constructed around shared identities and social practices.
The concept of a public often invokes the notion of a state-­controlled
entity, but publics can also involve private actors, such as companies,
or commercial spaces like malls. Because of the involvement of media
in contemporary publics, publics are also interconnected to the
notion of audience. All of these constructs blur and are contested by
scholars. By invoking the term publics, I’m not trying to take a position within the debates so much as to make use of the wide array of
different interwoven issues signaled by that term. Publics provide a
space and a community for people to gather, connect, and help construct society as we understand it.
Networked publics are publics both in the spatial sense and in the
sense of an imagined community. They are built on and through social
media and other emergent technologies. As spaces, the networked publics that exist because of social media allow people to gather and connect,
hang out, and joke around. Networked publics formed through technology serve much the same functions as publics like the mall or the park
did for previous generations of teenagers. As social constructs, social
media creates networked publics that allow people to see themselves as a
introduction
9
part of a broader community. Just as shared TV consumption once
allowed teens to see themselves as connected through mass media, social
media allows contemporary teens to envision themselves as part of a
collectively imagined community.
Teens engage with networked publics for the same reasons they
have always relished publics; they want to be a part of the broader
world by connecting with other people and having the freedom of
mobility. Likewise, many adults fear networked technologies for the
same reasons that adults have long been wary of teen participation in
public life and teen socialization in parks, malls, and other sites where
youth congregate. If I have learned one thing from my research, it’s
this: social media services like Facebook and Twitter are providing
teens with new opportunities to participate in public life, and this,
more than anything else, is what concerns many anxious adults.
Although the underlying structure of physical spaces and the
relationships that are enabled by them are broadly understood,
both the architecture of networked spaces and the ways they allow
people to connect are different. Even if teens are motivated to engage
with networked publics to fulfill desires to socialize that predate the
internet, networked technologies alter the social ecosystem and thus
affect the social dynamics that unfold.
To understand what is new and what is not, it’s important to understand how technology introduces new social possibilities and how
these challenge assumptions people have about everyday interactions.
The design and architecture of environments enable certain types of
interaction to occur. Round tables with chairs make chatting with
someone easier than classroom-­style seating. Even though students can
twist around and talk to the person behind them, a typical classroom
is designed to encourage everyone to face the teacher. The particular
properties or characteristics of an environment can be understood as
affordances because they make possible—and, in some cases, are used
to encourage—certain types of practices, even if they do not determine what practices will unfold.7 Understanding the affordances of a
particular technology or space is important because it sheds light on
10
introduction
what people can leverage or resist in achieving their goals. For example, the affordances of a thick window allow people to see each other
without being able to hear each other. To communicate in spite of the
window, they may pantomime, hold up signs with written messages, or
break the glass. The window’s affordances don’t predict how people
will communicate, but they do shape the situation nonetheless.
Because technology is involved, networked publics have different
characteristics than traditional physical public spaces. Four affordances, in particular, shape many of the mediated environments
that are created by social media. Although these affordances are not
in and of themselves new, their relation to one another because
of networked publics creates new opportunities and challenges.
They are:
• persistence: the durability of online expressions and content;
• visibility: the potential audience who can bear witness;
• spreadability: the ease with which content can be shared; and
• searchability: the ability to find content.
Content shared through social media often sticks around because
technologies are designed to enable persistence. The fact that content
often persists has significant implications. Such content enables interactions to take place over time in an asynchronous fashion. Alice
may write to Bob at midnight while Bob is sound asleep; but when
Bob wakes up in the morning or comes back from summer camp
three weeks later, that message will still be there waiting for him,
even if Alice had forgotten about it. Persistence means that conversations conducted through social media are far from ephemeral; they
endure. Persistence enables different kinds of interactions than the
ephemerality of a park. Alice’s message doesn’t expire when Bob
reads it, and Bob can keep that message for decades. What persistence also means, then, is that those using social media are often “on
the record” to an unprecedented degree.
Through social media, people can easily share with broad audiences and access content from greater distances, which increases the
introduction
11
potential visibility of any particular message. More often than not,
what people put up online using social media is widely accessible
because most systems are designed such that sharing with broader or
more public audiences is the default. Many popular systems require
users to take active steps to limit the visibility of any particular piece
of shared content. This is quite different from physical spaces, where
people must make a concerted effort to make content visible to sizable audiences.8 In networked publics, interactions are often public
by default, private through effort.
Social media is often designed to help people spread information,
whether by explicitly or implicitly encouraging the sharing of links,
providing reblogging or favoriting tools that repost images or texts, or
by making it easy to copy and paste content from one place to another.
Thus, much of what people post online is easily spreadable with the
click of a few keystrokes.9 Some systems provide simple buttons to
“forward,” “repost,” or “share” content to articulated or curated lists.
Even when these tools aren’t built into the system, content can often
be easily downloaded or duplicated and then forwarded along. The
ease with which everyday people can share media online is unrivaled,
which can be both powerful and problematic. Spreadability can be
leveraged to rally people for a political cause or to spread rumors.
Last, since the rise of search engines, people’s communications are
also often searchable. My mother would have loved to scream, “Find!”
and see where my friends and I were hanging out and what we were
talking about. Now, any inquisitive onlooker can query databases
and uncover countless messages written by and about others. Even
messages that were crafted to be publicly accessible were not necessarily posted with the thought that they would reappear through a
search engine. Search engines make it easy to surface esoteric interactions. These tools are often designed to eliminate contextual cues,
increasing the likelihood that searchers will take what they find out
of context.
None of the capabilities enabled by social media are new. The letters my grandparents wrote during their courtship were persistent.
12
introduction
Messages printed in the school newspaper or written on bathroom
walls have long been visible. Gossip and rumors have historically
spread like wildfire through word of mouth. And although search
engines certainly make inquiries more efficient, the practice of asking after others is not new, even if search engines mean that no one
else knows. What is new is the way in which social media alters and
amplifies social situations by offering technical features that people
can use to engage in these well-­established practices.
As people use these different tools, they help create new social dynamics. For example, teens “stalk” one another by searching for highly visible, persistent data about people they find interesting. “Drama” starts
when teens increase the visibility of gossip by spreading it as fast as possible through networked publics. And teens seek attention by exploiting
searchability, spreadability, and persistence to maximize the visibility of
their garage band’s YouTube video. The particular practices that emerge
as teens use the tools around them create the impression that teen sociality is radically different even though the underlying motivations and
social processes have not changed that much.
Just because teens can and do manipulate social media to attract
attention and increase visibility does not mean that they are equally
experienced at doing so or that they automatically have the skills
to navigate what unfolds. It simply means that teens are generally
more comfortable with—and tend to be less skeptical of—social
media than adults. They don’t try to analyze how things are different
because of technology; they simply try to relate to a public world in
which technology is a given. Because of their social position, what’s
novel for teens is not the technology but the public life that it enables.
Teens are desperate to have access to and make sense of public life;
understanding the technologies that enable publics is just par for
the course. Adults, in contrast, have more freedom to explore various
public environments. They are more likely—and more equipped—to
compare networked publics to other publics. As a result, they focus
more on how networked publics seem radically different from other
publics, such as those that unfold at the local bar or through church.
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13
Because of their experience and stage in life, teens and adults are
typically focused on different issues. Whereas teens are focused on
what it means to be in public, adults are more focused on what it
means to be networked.
Throughout this book, I return to these four affordances to discuss
how engagement with networked publics affects everyday social
practices. It’s important to note, however, this is not how teenagers
themselves would describe the shifts that are under way. More often
than not, they are unaware of why the networked publics they inhabit
are different than other publics or why adults find networked publics
so peculiar. To teens, these technologies—and the properties that
go with them—are just an obvious part of life in a networked era,
whereas for many adults these affordances reveal changes that are
deeply disconcerting. As I return to these issues throughout the book,
I will juxtapose teens’ perspectives alongside adults’ anxieties to
highlight what has changed and what has stayed the same.
New Technologies, Old Hopes and Fears
Any new technology that captures widespread attention is likely to
provoke serious hand wringing, if not full-­blown panic. When the
sewing machine was introduced, there were people who feared the
implications that women moving their legs up and down would
affect female sexuality.10 The Walkman music player was viewed as
an evil device that would encourage people to disappear into separate
worlds, unable to communicate with one another.11 Technologies are
not the only cultural artifacts to prompt these so-­called moral panics; new genres of media also cause fearful commentary. Those who
created comic books, penny arcades, and rock-­and-­roll music have
been seen as sinister figures bent on seducing children into becoming
juvenile delinquents.12 Novels were believed to threaten women’s
morals, a worry that Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary dramatizes
brilliantly. Even Socrates is purported to have warned of the dangers
of the alphabet and writing, citing implications for memory and the
ability to convey truth.13 These fears are now laughable, but when
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these technologies or media genres first appeared, they were taken
very seriously.
Even the most fleeting acquaintance with the history of information and communication technologies indicates that moral panics are
episodic and should be taken with a grain of salt. So too with utopian
visions, which prove just as unrealistic. A popular T-­shirt designed
by John Slabyk and sold on the website Threadless sums up the
disillusionment with failed technological utopias:
they lied to us
this was supposed to be the future
where is my jetpack,
where is my robotic companion,
where is my dinner in pill form,
where is my hydrogen fueled automobile,
where is my nuclear-­powered levitating house,
where is my cure for this disease
Technologies are often heralded as the solution to major world
problems. When those solutions fail to transpire, people are disillusioned. This can prompt a backlash, as people focus on the terrible
things that may occur because of those same technologies.
A great deal of the fear and anxiety that surrounds young people’s
use of social media stems from misunderstanding or dashed hopes.14
More often than not, what emerges out of people’s confusion takes the
form of utopian and dystopian rhetoric. This issue will reappear
throughout the book. Sometimes, as in the case of sexual predators and
other online safety issues, misunderstanding results in a moral panic.
In other cases, such as the dystopian notion that teens are addicted to
social media or the utopian idea that technology will solve inequality,
the focus on technology simply obscures other dynamics at play.
Both extremes depend on a form of magical thinking scholars call
technological determinism.15 Utopian and dystopian views assume that
technologies possess intrinsic powers that affect all people in all situations the same way. Utopian rhetoric assumes that when a particular
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15
technology is broadly adopted it will transform society in magnificent ways, while dystopian visions focus on all of the terrible things
that will happen because of the widespread adoption of a particular
technology that ruins everything. These extreme rhetorics are equally
unhelpful in understanding what actually happens when new technologies are broadly adopted. Reality is nuanced and messy, full of
pros and cons. Living in a networked world is complicated.
Kids Will Be Kids
If you listen to the voices of youth, the story you’ll piece together
reveals a hodgepodge of opportunities and challenges, changes and
continuity. As with the football game in Nashville, many elements of
American teen culture remain unchanged in the digital age. School
looks remarkably familiar, and many of the same anxieties and hopes
that shaped my experience are still recognizable today. Others are
strikingly different, but what differs often has less to do with technology and more to do with increased consumerism, heightened competition for access to limited opportunities, and an intense amount of
parental pressure, especially in wealthier communities.16 All too often,
it is easier to focus on the technology than on the broader systemic
issues that are at play because technical changes are easier to see.
Nostalgia gets in the way of understanding the relation between
teens and technology. Adults may idealize their childhoods and forget the trials and tribulations they faced. Many adults I meet assume
that their own childhoods were better and richer, simpler and safer,
than the digitally mediated ones contemporary youth experience.
They associate the rise of digital technology with decline—social,
intellectual, and moral. The research I present here suggests that the
opposite is often true.
Many of the much-­hyped concerns discussed because of technology
are not new (for example, bullying) but rather may be misleading (for
example, a decline in attention) or serve as distractions for real risks
(for example, predators). Most myths are connected to real incidents
or rooted in data that are blown out of proportion or are deliberately
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introduction
exaggerated to spark fear. Media culture exaggerates this dynamic,
magnifying anxieties and reinforcing fears. For adults to hear the
voices of youth, they must let go of their nostalgia and suspend their
fears. This is not easy.
Teens continue to occupy an awkward position between childhood
and adulthood, dependence and independence. They are struggling
to carve out an identity that is not defined solely by family ties. They
want to be recognized as someone other than son, daughter, sister,
or brother. These struggles play themselves out in familiar ways, as
teens fight for freedoms while not always being willing or able to
accept responsibilities. Teens simultaneously love and despise, need
and reject their parents and other adults in their lives. Meanwhile,
many adults are simultaneously afraid of teens and afraid for them.
Teens’ efforts to control their self-­presentation—often by donning
clothing or hairstyles their parents deem socially unacceptable or
engaging in practices that their parents deem risky—are clearly related
to their larger effort at self-­fashioning and personal autonomy. By
dressing like the twenty-­somethings they see celebrated in popular
culture, they signal their desire to be seen as independent young
adults. Fashion choices are one of many ways of forging an identity
that is cued less to family and more to friends.
Developing meaningful friendships is a key component of the coming of age process. Friends offer many things—advice, support, entertainment, and a connection that combats loneliness. And in doing so,
they enable the transition to adulthood by providing a context beyond
that of family and home. Though family is still important, many teens
relish the opportunity to create relationships that are not simply given
but chosen.
The importance of friends in social and moral development is well
documented.17 But the fears that surround teens’ use of social media
overlook this fundamental desire for social connection. All too often,
parents project their values onto their children, failing to recognize
that school is often not the most pressing concern for most teens.
Many parents wonder: Why are my kids tethered to their cell phones
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17
or perpetually texting with friends even when they are in the same
room? Why do they seem compelled to check Facebook hundreds of
times a day? Are they addicted to technology or simply wasting time?
How will they get into college if they are constantly distracted? I
encounter these questions from concerned adults whenever I give
public lectures, and these attitudes figure prominently in parenting
guides and in journalistic accounts of teens’ engagement with social
media.
Yet these questions seem far less urgent and difficult when we
acknowledge teens’ underlying social motivations. Most teens are not
compelled by gadgetry as such—they are compelled by friendship.
The gadgets are interesting to them primarily as a means to a social
end. Furthermore, social interactions may be a distraction from
school, but they are often not a distraction from learning. Keeping
this basic social dynamic firmly in view makes networked teens suddenly much less worrisome and strange.
Consider, for example, the widespread concern over internet addiction. Are there teens who have an unhealthy relationship with technology? Certainly. But most of those who are “addicted” to their phones
or computers are actually focused on staying connected to friends in a
culture where getting together in person is highly constrained. Teens’
preoccupation with their friends dovetails with their desire to enter
the public spaces that are freely accessible to adults. The ability to access
public spaces for sociable purposes is a critical component of the coming of age process, and yet many of the public spaces where adults
gather—bars, clubs, and restaurants—are inaccessible to teens.
As teens transition from childhood, they try to understand
how they fit into the larger world. They want to inhabit public spaces,
but they also look to adults, including public figures, to understand
what it means to be grown-­up. They watch their parents and other
adults in their communities for models of adulthood. But they also
track celebrities like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian to imagine
the freedoms they would have if they were famous. For better or
worse, media narratives also help construct broader narratives for
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how public life works. “Reality” TV shows like Jersey Shore signal the
potential fun that can be had by young adults who don’t need to
appease parents and teachers.
Some teens may reject the messages of adulthood that they hear or
see, but they still learn from all of the signals around them. As they
start to envision themselves as young adults, they begin experimenting with the boundaries of various freedoms, pushing for access to
cars or later curfews. Teens’ determination to set their own agenda
can be nerve-­racking for some parents, particularly those who want to
protect their children from every possible danger. Coming of age is
rife with self-­determination, risk taking, and tough decision-­making.
Teens often want to be with friends on their own terms, without
adult supervision, and in public. Paradoxically, the networked publics they inhabit allow them a measure of privacy and autonomy that
is not possible at home where parents and siblings are often listening
in. Recognizing this is important to understanding teens’ relationship to social media. Although many adults think otherwise, teens’
engagement with public life through social media is not a rejection
of privacy. Teens may wish to enjoy the benefits of participating in
public, but they also relish intimacy and the ability to have control
over their social situation. Their ability to achieve privacy is often
undermined by nosy adults—notably their parents and teachers—
but teens go to great lengths to develop innovative strategies for managing privacy in networked publics.
Social media enables a type of youth-­centric public space that is
often otherwise inaccessible. But because that space is highly visible,
it can often provoke concerns among adults who are watching teens
as they try to find their way.
A Place to Call Their Own
Sitting in a cafeteria in a small town in Iowa in 2007, I was talking
with Heather, a white sixteen-­year-­old, when the topic of adult attitudes toward Facebook came up. Heather had recently heard that
politicians were trying to prohibit teen access to social network sites,
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and she was incensed. “I’m really mad about it. It’s social networking.
It really is a way to communicate, and if they ban that, it’s really hard
to communicate with other people you don’t see that much.” I asked
her why she didn’t just get together with her friends in person. The
rant that followed made clear that I had touched a nerve.
I can’t really go see people in person. I can barely hang out
with my friends on the weekend, let alone people I don’t talk
to as often. I’m so busy. I’ve got lots of homework, I’m busy
with track, I’ve got a job, and when I’m not working and doing
homework I’m hanging out with the good friends that I have.
But there’s some people I’ve kind of lost contact with and I like
keeping connected to them because they’re still friends. I just
haven’t talked to them in a while. I have no means of doing
that. If they go to a different school it’s really hard and I don’t
exactly know where everyone lives, and I don’t have everyone’s
cell phone numbers, and I don’t have all of their AIM screen
names either, so Facebook makes it a lot easier for me.
For Heather, social media is not only a tool; it is a social lifeline
that enables her to stay connected to people she cares about but cannot otherwise interact with in person. Without the various sites and
services she uses, Heather—like many of her peers—believes that her
social life would significantly shrink. She doesn’t see Facebook as
inherently useful, but it’s where everyone she knows is hanging out.
And it’s the place to go when she doesn’t know how to contact someone directly.
The social media tools that teens use are direct descendants of the
hangouts and other public places in which teens have been congregating for decades. What the drive-­in was to teens in the 1950s and
the mall in the 1980s, Facebook, texting, Twitter, instant messaging,
and other social media are to teens now. Teens flock to them knowing they can socialize with friends and become better acquainted
with classmates and peers they don’t know as well. They embrace
social media for roughly the same reasons earlier generations of teens
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introduction
attended sock hops, congregated in parking lots, colonized people’s
front stoops, or tied up the phone lines for hours on end. Teens want
to gossip, flirt, complain, compare notes, share passions, emote, and
joke around. They want to be able to talk among themselves—even
if that means going online.
Heather’s reliance on Facebook and other tools registers an important change in teen experience. This change is not rooted in social
media but instead helps explain the popularity of digital technologies. Many American teens have limited geographic freedom, less
free time, and more rules. In many communities across the United
States, the era of being able to run around after school so long as
you are home by dark is long over.18 Many teens are stuck at home
until they are old enough to drive themselves. For younger teens, getting together with friends after school depends on cooperative parents with flexible schedules who are willing or able to chauffeur and
chaperone.
Socializing is also more homebound. Often, teens meet in each
other’s homes rather than public spaces. And no wonder: increasing
regulation means that there aren’t as many public spaces for teens to
gather. The mall, once one of the main hubs for suburban teens,
is much less accessible now than it once was.19 Because malls are privately owned spaces, proprietors can prohibit anyone they wish, and
many of them have prohibited groups of teenagers from entering. In
addition, parents are less willing to allow their children to hang out
in malls, out of fear of the strangers teens may encounter. Teens simply have far fewer places to be together in public than they once
did.20 And the success of social media must be understood partly in
relation to this shrinking social landscape. Facebook, Twitter, and
MySpace are not only new public spaces: they are in many cases the
only “public” spaces in which teens can easily congregate with large
groups of their peers. More significantly, teens can gather in them
while still physically stuck at home.
Teens told me time and again that they would far rather meet
up in person, but the hectic and heavily scheduled nature of their
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21
day-­to-­day lives, their lack of physical mobility, and the fears of their
parents have made such face-­to-­face interactions increasingly impossible. As Amy, a biracial sixteen-­year-­old in Seattle, succinctly put it:
“My mom doesn’t let me out of the house very often, so that’s pretty
much all I do, is sit on MySpace and talk to people and text and talk
on the phone, cause my mom’s always got some crazy reason to keep
me in the house.” Social media may seem like a peculiar place for
teens to congregate, but for many teens, hanging out on Facebook or
Twitter is their only opportunity to gather en masse with friends,
acquaintances, classmates, and other teens. More often than not,
their passion for social media stems from their desire to socialize.
Just because teens are comfortable using social media to hang out
does not mean that they’re fluent in or with technology. Many teens
are not nearly as digitally adept as the often-­used assumption that
they are “digital natives” would suggest. The teens I met knew how
to get to Google but had little understanding about how to construct
a query to get quality information from the popular search engine.
They knew how to use Facebook, but their understanding of the site’s
privacy settings did not mesh with the ways in which they configured
their accounts. As sociologist Eszter Hargittai has quipped, many
teens are more likely to be digital naives than digital natives.21
The term digital native is a lightning rod for the endless hopes and
fears that many adults attach to this new generation. Media narratives
often suggest that kids today—those who have grown up with digital
technology—are equipped with marvelous new superpowers. Their
multitasking skills supposedly astound adults almost as much as their
three thousand text messages per month. Meanwhile, the same breathless media reports also warn the public that these kids are vulnerable
to unprecedented new dangers: sexual predators, cyberbullying, and
myriad forms of intellectual and moral decline, including internet
addiction, shrinking attentions spans, decreased literacy, reckless over-­
sharing, and so on. As with most fears, these anxieties are not without
precedent even if they are often overblown and misconstrued. The key
to understanding how youth navigate social media is to step away
22
introduction
from the headlines—both good and bad—and dive into the more
nuanced realities of young people.
My experience hanging out with teenagers convinced me that
the greatest challenges facing networked teens are far from new.
Some challenges are rooted in this country’s long history of racial
and social inequality, but economic variability is increasingly noticeable. American teens continue to live and learn in radically uneven
conditions. I visited schools with state-­of-­the-­art facilities, highly
credentialed and specialized faculty, and students hell-­bent on
going to Ivy League colleges. At the other extreme, I also visited run-­
down schools with metal detectors, a stream of “substitute” teachers
standing in for full-­time educators, and students who smoked marijuana during class. The explanations for these variations are complex
and challenging, and the disparity is unlikely to be addressed in the
near future.
Although almost all teens have access to technology at this point,
their access varies tremendously. Some have high-­end mobile phones
with unlimited data plans, their own laptop, and wireless access at
home. Others are constrained to basic phones with pay-­per-­text plans
and access the internet only through the filtered lens of school or
library computers. Once again, economic inequality plays a central
role. But access is not the sole divide. Technical skills, media literacy,
and even basic English literacy all shape how teens experience new
technologies. Some teens are learning about technology from their
parents while other teens are teaching their parents how to construct
a search query or fill out a job application.
One of the great hopes for the internet was that it would serve
as the great equalizer. My research into youth culture and social
media—alongside findings of other researchers—has made it obvious that the color-­blind and disembodied social world that the internet was supposed to make possible has not materialized. And this
unfortunate reality—the reality of racial tensions and discrimination
that long predates the rise of digital media—often seems to escape
our public attention.
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23
Meanwhile, we hear a lot about how the online spaces that teens
frequent are sinister worlds populated by sexual predators or bullies.
But we rarely if ever hear that many teenagers are scarred by the same
experiences offline. Bullying, racism, sexual predation, slut shaming,
and other insidious practices that occur online are extraordinarily
important to address even if they’re not new. Helping young people
navigate public life safely should be of significant public concern.
But it’s critical to recognize that technology does not create these
problems, even if it makes them more visible and even if news media
relishes using technology as a hook to tell salacious stories about
youth. The very sight of at-­risk youth should haunt all of us, but little
is achieved if we focus only on making what we see invisible.
The internet mirrors, magnifies, and makes more visible the
good, bad, and ugly of everyday life. As teens embrace these tools and
incorporate them into their daily practices, they show us how our
broader social and cultural systems are affecting their lives. When
teens are hurting offline, they reveal their hurt online. When teens’
experiences are shaped by racism and misogyny, this becomes visible
online. In making networked publics their own, teens bring with
them the values and beliefs that shape their experiences. As a society,
we need to use the visibility that we get from social media to understand how the social and cultural fault lines that organize American
life affect young people. And we need to do so in order to intervene
in ways that directly help youth who are suffering.
Ever since the internet entered everyday life—and particularly
since the widespread adoption of social media—we have been bombarded with stories about how new technologies are destroying our
social fabric. Amid a stream of scare stories, techno-­utopians are
touting the amazing benefits of online life while cyber-­dystopians are
describing how our brains are disintegrating because of our connection to machines. These polarizing views of technology push the discussion of youth’s engagement with social media to an extreme
binary: social media is good or social media is bad. These extremes—
and the myths they perpetuate—obscure the reality of teen practices
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introduction
and threaten to turn the generation gap into a gaping chasm. These
myths distort the reality of teen life, sometimes by idealizing it, but
more frequently by demonizing it.
How to Read This Book
The chapters that follow are dedicated to different issues that
underpin youth engagement with social media. Many are organized
around concerns about youth practices that persist in American society. Each chapter offers a grounded way of looking at an issue.
Although the chapters can be read independently, they are collectively organized to flow from individual and familial challenges to
broader societal issues. A conclusion summarizes my arguments and
offers a deeper analysis of what networked publics mean for contemporary youth.
As a researcher passionate about the health and well-­being of
young people, I wrote this book in an effort to create a nuanced portrait of everyday teen life in an era in which social media has become
mainstream. The questions I ask are simple: What is and isn’t new
about life inflected by social media? What does social media add to
the quality of teens’ social lives, and what does it take away? And
when we as a society don’t like the outcomes of technology,
what can we do to change the equation constructively, making sure
that we take advantage of the features of social media while limiting
potential abuse?
It is much easier to understand myths retrospectively than it is to
dismantle them as they are being perpetuated, but this book aims to
do the latter. That said, some of the most pervasive anxieties about
social media have begun to subside in recent years, as adults have
started participating in social media and, especially, Facebook. I am
cautiously hopeful that adult engagement will calm some of the most
anxious panics. And yet the tropes and stories that I use throughout
the book tend to be resurrected with each new technology, while others endure in the face of quite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As many adults have grown comfortable with Facebook, the
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25
media’s narratives switched to focusing on the scariness of mobile
apps like Snapchat and Kik. The story remains the same, even if the
site of panic has shifted.
Social media has affected the lives and practices of many people
and will continue to play a significant role in shaping many aspects
of American society. There are many who lament these developments
or wax nostalgic about the pre-­internet world. That said, I would be
surprised to find anyone who still believes that the internet is going
away. Along with planes, running water, electricity, and motorized
transportation, the internet is now a fundamental fact of modern life.
This does not mean that access to the internet is universal, and some
people will always opt out.22 Even in a country as wealthy as the
United States, many lack access to sanitation, and some choose to live
without electricity. Just because the internet—and social media—is
pervasive in American society does not mean that everyone will have
access, will want access, or will experience access in the same way.
Contemporary youth are growing up in a cultural setting in
which many aspects of their lives will be mediated by technology and
many of their experiences and opportunities will be shaped by their
engagement with technology. Fear mongering does little to help
youth develop the ability to productively engage with this reality. As
a society, we pay a price for fear mongering and utopian visions that
ignore more complex realities. In writing this book, I hope to help
the public better understand what young people are doing when they
engage with social media and why their attempts to make sense of the
world around them should be commended.
This book is written with a broad audience in mind—scholars and
students, parents and educators, journalists and librarians. Although
many sections draw on academic ideas, I do not expect the reader to
be familiar with the scholarly literature invoked. When necessary for
understanding the argument, I provide background in the text. More
often than not, I’ve provided numerous touchstones and references in
endnotes and an extensive bibliography that can enable those who
wish to go deeper or to understand the relevant debates to do so.
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introduction
Throughout this book, I draw on qualitative and ethnographic
material that I collected from 2003 to 2012—and interview data conducted from 2007 to 2010—to provide a descriptive portrait of the
different issues that I discuss.23 Given the context in which I’m writing and the data on which I’m drawing, most of the discussion is
explicitly oriented around American teen culture, although some of
my analysis may be relevant in other cultures and contexts.24 I also
take for granted, and rarely seek to challenge, the capitalist logic that
underpins American society and the development of social media.
Although I believe that these assumptions should be critiqued, this is
outside the scope of this project. By accepting the cultural context in
which youth are living, I seek to explain their practices in light of the
society in which they are situated.
The networked technologies that were dominant when I began
researching this book are different than those that were popular
when I was finishing the manuscript. Even MySpace—once the
dominant social network site among youth and referred to throughout this book—is barely a shadow of its former self in 2013. Quite
probably, what’s popular when you’re reading this book is different
still. As I write this, Facebook is losing its allure as new apps and
services like Instagram, Tumblr, and Snapchat gain hold. Social
media is a moving landscape; many of the services that I reference
throughout this book may or may not survive. But the ability to
navigate one’s social relationships, communicate asynchronously,
and search for information online is here to stay. Don’t let my reference to outdated services distract you from the arguments in this
book. The examples may feel antiquated, but the core principles and
practices I’m trying to describe are likely to persist long after this
book is published.
Not everyone has equal access to the internet, nor do we all experience it in the same way. But social media is actively shaping and
being shaped by contemporary society, so it behooves us to move
beyond punditry and scare tactics to understand what social media is
and how it fits into the social lives of youth.
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27
As a society, we often spend so much time worrying about young
people that we fail to account for how our paternalism and protectionism hinders teens’ ability to become informed, thoughtful, and
engaged adults. Regardless of the stories in the media, most young
people often find ways to push through the restrictions and develop
a sense of who they are and how they want to engage in the world. I
want to celebrate their creativity and endurance while also highlighting that their practices and experiences are not universal or uniformly
positive.
This book is not a love letter to youth culture, although my research
has convinced me that young people are more resilient than I initially
believed. Rather, this book is an attempt to convince the adults that have
power over the lives of youth—including parents and teachers, journalists and law enforcement officers, employers and military personnel—
that what teens are doing as they engage in networked publics makes
sense. At the same time, coming to terms with life in a networked era is
not necessarily easy or obvious. Rather, it’s complicated.
28
introduction
1 identity
why do teens seem
strange online?
In 2005, an Ivy League university was considering the application of
a young black man from South Central Los Angeles. The applicant
had written a phenomenal essay about how he wanted to walk away
from the gangs in his community and attend the esteemed institution. The admissions officers were impressed: a student who overcomes such hurdles is exactly what they like seeing. In an effort to
learn more about him, the committee members Googled him. They
found his MySpace profile. It was filled with gang symbolism, crass
language, and references to gang activities. They recoiled.
I heard this story when a representative from the admissions office
contacted me. The representative opened the conversation with a
simple question: Why would a student lie to an admissions committee when the committee could easily find the truth online? I asked
for context and learned about the candidate. Stunned by the question, my initial response was filled with nervous laughter. I had hung
out with and interviewed teens from South Central. I was always
struck by the challenges they faced, given the gang dynamics in their
neighborhood. Awkwardly, I offered an alternative interpretation:
perhaps this young man is simply including gang signals on his
MySpace profile as a survival technique.
Trying to step into that young man’s shoes, I shared with the college admissions officer some of the dynamics that I had seen in Los
29
Angeles. My hunch was that this teen was probably very conscious of
the relationship between gangs and others in his hometown. Perhaps
he felt as though he needed to position himself within the local
context in a way that wouldn’t make him a target. If he was anything
like other teens I had met, perhaps he imagined the audience of his
MySpace profile to be his classmates, family, and community—not
the college admissions committee. Without knowing the teen, my
guess was that he was genuine in his college essay. At the same time,
I also suspected that he would never dare talk about his desire to go
to a prestigious institution in his neighborhood because doing so
would cause him to be ostracized socially, if not physically attacked.
As British sociologist Paul Willis argued in the 1980s, when youth
attempt to change their socioeconomic standing, they often risk
alienating their home community.1 This dynamic was often acutely
present in the communities that I observed.
The admissions officer was startled by my analysis, and we had a
long conversation about the challenges of self-­representation in a networked era.2 I’ll never know if that teen was accepted into that prestigious school, but this encounter stayed with me as I watched other
adults misinterpret teens’ online self-­expressions. I came to realize
that, taken out of context, what teens appear to do and say on social
media seems peculiar if not outright problematic.3
The intended audience matters, regardless of the actual audience.
Unfortunately, adults sometimes believe that they understand what
they see online without considering how teens imagined the context
when they originally posted a particular photograph or comment.
The ability to understand how context, audience, and identity intersect is one of the central challenges people face in learning how to
navigate social media. And, for all of the mistakes that they can and
do make, teens are often leading the way at figuring out how to navigate a networked world in which collapsed contexts and imagined
audiences are par for the course.
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identity
Taken Out of Context
In his 1985 book No Sense of Place, media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz
describes the story of Stokely Carmichael, an American civil rights
activist. In the 1960s, Carmichael regularly gave different talks to
different audiences. He used a different style of speaking when he
addressed white political leaders than when he addressed southern
black congregations. When Carmichael started presenting his ideas
on television and radio, he faced a difficult decision: which audience
should he address? No matter which style of speaking he chose, he
knew he’d alienate some. He was right. By using a rolling pastoral
voice in broadcast media, Carmichael ingratiated himself with black
activists while alienating white elites.
Meyrowitz argues that electronic media like radio and television
easily collapse seemingly disconnected contexts. Public figures, journalists, and anyone in the limelight must regularly navigate disconnected social contexts simultaneously, balancing what they say with
how their diverse audiences might interpret their actions. A context
collapse occurs when people are forced to grapple simultaneously with
otherwise unrelated social contexts that are rooted in different norms
and seemingly demand different social responses. For example, some
people might find it quite awkward to run into their former high
school teacher while drinking with their friends at a bar. These context collapses happen much more frequently in networked publics.
The dynamics that Meyrowitz describes are no longer simply the
domain of high-­profile people who have access to broadcast media.
When teens interact with social media, they must regularly contend
with collapsed contexts and invisible audiences as a part of everyday
life.4 Their teachers might read what they post online for their friends,
and when their friends from school start debating their friends
from summer camp, they might be excited that their friend groups
are combining—or they might find it discomforting. In order to stabilize the context in their own minds, teens do what others before
them have done: just like journalists and politicians, teens imagine
the audience they’re trying to reach.5 In speaking to an unknown or
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31
invisible audience, it is impossible and unproductive to account for
the full range of plausible interpretations. Instead, public speakers
consistently imagine a specific subset of potential readers or viewers
and focus on how those intended viewers are likely to respond to
a particular statement. As a result, the imagined audience defines
the social context. In choosing how to present themselves before disconnected and invisible audiences, people must attempt to resolve
context collapses or actively define the context in which they’re
operating.
Teens often imagine their audience to be those that they’ve chosen
to “friend” or “follow,” regardless of who might actually see their
profile. In theory, privacy settings allow teens to limit their expressions to the people they intend to reach by restricting who can see
what. On MySpace and Twitter—where privacy settings are relatively simple—using settings to limit who can access what content
can be quite doable. Yet, on Facebook, this has proven to be intractable and confusing, given the complex and constantly changing privacy settings on that site.6 Moreover, many teens have good reasons
for not limiting who can access their profile. Some teens want to be
accessible to peers who share their interests. Others recognize that
privacy settings do little to limit parents from snooping or stop
friends from sharing juicy messages. Many teens complain about
parents who look over their shoulders when they’re on the computer
or friends who copy and paste updates and forward them along.
To complicate matters, just because someone is a part of a teen’s
imagined audience doesn’t mean that this person is actually reading
what’s posted. When social media sites offer streams of content—as
is common on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram—people often
imagine their audience to be the people they’re following. But these
people may not be following them in return or see their posts
amid the avalanche of shared content. As a result, regardless of how
they use privacy settings, teens must grapple with who can see their
profile, who actually does see it, and how those who do see it will
interpret it.
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identity
Teens’ mental model of their audience is often inaccurate, but
not because teens are naive or stupid. When people are chatting and
sharing photos with friends via social media, it’s often hard to remember that viewers who aren’t commenting might also be watching. This
is not an issue unique to teens, although teens are often chastised for
not accounting for adult onlookers. But just as it’s easy to get caught up
in a conversation at a dinner party and forget about the rest of the
room, it’s easy to get lost in the back-­and-­forth on Twitter. Social
media introduces additional challenges, particularly because of the
persistent and searchable nature of most of these technical systems.
Tweets and status updates aren’t just accessible to the audience who
happens to be following the thread as it unfolds; they quickly become
archived traces, accessible to viewers at a later time. These traces can be
searched and are easily reposted and spread. Thus, the context collapses that teens face online rarely occur in the moment with conflicting onlookers responding simultaneously. They are much more likely
to be experienced over time, as new audiences read the messages in a
new light.
When teens face collapsing contexts in physical environments,
their natural response is to become quiet. For example, if a group of
teens are hanging out at the mall and a security guard or someone’s
mother approaches them, they will stop whatever conversation they
are having, even if it’s innocuous. While they may be comfortable
having strangers overhear their exchange, the sudden appearance of
someone with social authority changes the context entirely. Online,
this becomes more difficult. As Summer, a white fifteen-­year-­old
from Michigan, explains, switching contexts online is more challenging than doing so in the park because, in the park, “you can see when
there’s people around you and stuff like that. So you can like quickly
change the subject.” Online, there’s no way to change the conversation, both because it’s virtually impossible to know if someone is
approaching and because the persistent nature of most social
exchanges means that there’s a record of what was previously said.
Thus, when Summer’s mother looks at her Facebook page, she gains
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33
access to a plethora of interactions that took place over a long period
of time and outside the social and temporal context in which they
were produced. Summer can’t simply switch topics with her friends at
the sight of her mother approaching. The ability to easily switch contexts assumes an ephemeral social situation; this cannot be taken for
granted in digital environments.
Because social media often brings together multiple social contexts, teens struggle to effectively manage social norms. Some expect
their friends and family to understand and respect different social
contexts and to know when something is not meant for them. And
yet there are always people who fail to recognize when content isn’t
meant for them, even though it’s publicly accessible. This is the problem that Hunter faces when he posts to Facebook.
Hunter is a geeky, black fourteen-­year-­old living in inner-­city Washington, DC, who resembles a contemporary Steve Urkel, complete with
ill-­fitting clothes, taped-­together glasses, and nerdy mannerisms. He
lives in two discrete worlds. His cousins and sister are what he describes
as “ghetto” while his friends at his magnet school are all academically
minded “geeks.” On Facebook, these two worlds collide, and he regularly struggles to navigate them simultaneously. He gets especially frustrated when his sister interrupts conversations with his friends.
When I’m talking to my friends on Facebook or I put up a status, something I hate is when people who I’m not addressing in
my statuses comment on my statuses. In [my old school], people
always used to call me nerdy and that I was the least black black
person that they’ve ever met, some people say that, and I said
on Facebook, “Should I take offense to the fact that somebody
put the ringtone ‘White and Nerdy’ for me?” and it was a joke.
I guess we were talking about it in school, and [my sister] comes
out of nowhere, “Aw, baby bro,” and I’m like, “No, don’t say
that, I wasn’t talking to you.”
When I asked Hunter how his sister or friends are supposed to know
who is being talked to on specific Facebook updates, he replied,
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identity
I guess that is a point. Sometimes it probably is hard, but I think
it’s just the certain way that you talk. I will talk to my sister
a different way than I’ll talk to my friends at school or from
my friends from my old school, and I might say, “Oh, well, I
fell asleep in Miss K’s class by accident,” and they’ll say, “Oh,
yeah, Miss K is so boring,” and [my sister’s] like, “Oh, well, you
shouldn’t fall asleep. You should pay attention.” I mean, I think
you can figure out that I’m not talking to you if I’m talking about
a certain teacher.
Hunter loves his sister, but he also finds her take on social etiquette
infuriating. He wants to maintain a relationship with her and appreciates that she’s on Facebook, although he also notes that it’s
hard because of her priorities, values, and decisions. He doesn’t want
to ostracize her on Facebook, but he’s consistently annoyed by
how often she tries to respond to messages from his friends without
realizing that this violates an implicit code of conduct.
To make matters worse, Hunter’s sister is not the only one from his
home life who he feels speaks up out of turn. Hunter and his friends
are really into the card game Pokémon and what he calls “old skool”
video games like the Legend of Zelda. His cousins, in contrast, enjoy
first-­person shooters like Halo and think his choice of retro video
games is “lame.” Thus, whenever Hunter posts messages about playing with his friends, his cousins use this as an opportunity to mock
him. Frustrated by his family members’ inability to “get the hint,”
Hunter has resorted both to limiting what he says online and trying
to use technical features provided by Facebook to create discrete lists
and block certain people from certain posts. Having to take measures
to prevent his family from seeing what he posts saddens him because
he doesn’t want to hide; he only wants his family to stop “embarrassing” him. Context matters to Hunter, not because he’s ashamed of
his tastes or wants to hide his passions, but because he wants to have
control over a given social situation. He wants to post messages without having to articulate context; he wants his audience to understand
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35
where he’s coming from and respect what he sees as unspoken social
conventions. Without a shared sense of context, hanging out online
becomes burdensome.
The ability to understand and define social context is important.
When teens are talking to their friends, they interact differently than
when they’re talking to their family or to their teachers. Television
show plotlines leverage the power of collapsed contexts for entertainment purposes, but managing them in everyday life is often exhausting. It may be amusing to watch Kramer face embarrassment when
he and George accidentally run into Kramer’s mother on Seinfeld,
but such social collisions are not nearly as entertaining when they
occur without a laugh track.7 Situations like this require significant
monitoring and social negotiation, which, in turn, require both strategic and tactical decisions that turn the most mundane social situation into a high-­maintenance affair. Most people are uncomfortable
with the idea that their worlds might collide uncontrollably, and yet,
social media makes this dynamic a regular occurrence. Much of
what’s at stake has to do with the nuanced ways in which people read
social situations and present themselves accordingly.
Identity Work in Networked Publics
In her 1995 book, Life on the Screen, psychologist Sherry Turkle
began to map out the creation of a mediated future that resembled
both the utopian and dystopian immersive worlds constructed in science fiction novels. Watching early adopters—especially children—
embrace virtual worlds, she argued that the distinction between
computers and humans was becoming increasingly blurred and that a
new society was emerging as people escaped the limitations of their
offline identities. Turkle was particularly fascinated by the playful
identity work that early adopters engaged in online, and with a psychoanalyst’s eye, she extensively considered both the therapeutic and
the deceptive potential of mediated identity work.8
Turkle was critical of some people’s attempts to use fictitious identities to harm others, but she also highlighted that much could be
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identity
gained from the process of self-­reflection that was enabled when people had to act out or work through their identity in order to make
themselves present in virtual worlds. Unlike face-­to-­face settings in
which people took their bodies for granted, people who went online
had to consciously create their digital presence. Media studies scholar
Jenny Sundén describes this process as people typing themselves
into being.9 Although Turkle recognized that a person’s identity
was always tethered to his or her psyche, she left room for arguments
that suggested that the internet could—and would—free people of
the burdens of their “material”—or physically embodied—identities,
enabling them to become a better version of themselves.
I wanted Turkle’s vision for the future to be right. When I embraced
the internet as a teenager in the mid-­1990s, I was going online to
escape the so-­called real world. I felt ostracized and misunderstood at
school, but online I could portray myself as the person that I wanted
to be. I took on fictitious identities in an effort to figure out who
I was. I wasn’t alone. Part of what made chatting fun in those days
was that it was impossible to know if others were all that they portrayed themselves to be. I knew that a self-­declared wizard was probably not actually a wizard and that the guy who said he had found
the cure to cancer most likely hadn’t, but embodied characteristics
like gender and race weren’t always so clear.10 At the time, this felt
playful and freeing, and I bought into the fantasy that the internet
could save us from tyranny and hypocrisy. Manifestos like John
Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” spoke to me. Barlow told the global leaders at the World Economic Forum that the new “home of the Mind” enabled “identities
[that] have no bodies.” I was proud to be one of the children he spoke
of who appeared “native” in the new civilization.
Twenty years later, the dynamics of identity portrayal online
are quite different from how early internet proponents imagined
them to be. Although gaming services and virtual worlds are popular
among some groups of youth, there’s a significant cultural difference
between fictional role-­playing sites and the more widely embraced
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37
social media sites, which tend to encourage a more nonfiction-­
oriented atmosphere. Even though pseudonymity is quite common
in these environments, the type of identity work taking place on
social media sites like Facebook is very different from what Turkle
initially imagined. Many teens today go online to socialize with
friends they know from physical settings and to portray themselves
in online contexts that are more tightly wedded to unmediated social
communities. These practices, which encourage greater continuity
between teens’ online and offline worlds, were much less common
when I was growing up.
This doesn’t mean that identity work is uniform across all online
activities. Most teens use a plethora of social media services as they
navigate relationships and contexts. Their seemingly distinct practices on each platform might suggest that they are trying to be different people, but this would be a naive reading of the kinds of identity
work taking place on and through social media. For example, a teen
might use her given name on a video service like Skype while choosing a descriptive screen name on a photo app like Instagram.11 And
when choosing a login for a blogging site like Tumblr, she might
choose a name that intentionally signals her involvement with a particular interest-­based community.
Quite often, teens respond to what they perceive to be the norms
of a particular service. So when a teen chooses to identify as “Jessica
Smith” on Facebook and “littlemonster” on Twitter, she’s not creating multiple identities in the psychological sense. She’s choosing to
represent herself in different ways on different sites with the expectation of different audiences and different norms. Sometimes these
choices are conscious attempts by individuals seeking to control
their self-­presentation; more often, they are whimsical responses to
sites’ requirement to provide a login handle. Although some teens
choose to use the same handle across multiple sites, other teens find
that their favorite nickname is taken or feel as though they’ve outgrown their previous identity. Regardless of the reason, the outcome
is a hodgepodge of online identities that leave plenty of room for
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identity
interpretation. And in doing so, teens both interpret and produce the
social contexts in which they are inhabiting.
Context matters. While teens move between different social contexts—including mediated ones like those produced by networked
publics and unmediated ones like those constructed at school—they
manage social dynamics differently. How they interact and with
whom they interact in the school lunchroom is different than
at afterschool music lessons than via group text messaging services.
For many of the teens I interviewed, Facebook was the primary
place where friend groups collide. Other services—like Tumblr or
Twitter—were more commonly used by teens who were carving out
their place in interest-­driven communities.12 For example, there are
entire communities of teens on Tumblr who connect out of a shared
interest in fashion; collectively, they produce a rich fashion blogging
community that has stunned the fashion industry. On Twitter, it’s
not uncommon to see teens gushing about the celebrities du jour
with other fans. These examples illustrate how these particular platforms are used circa 2013; teens’ approaches to different sites may
have changed by the time you’re reading this book, but managing
context within a given site and through the use of multiple sites has
been commonplace for well over a decade. What matters is not the
particular social media site but the context in which it’s situated
within a particular group of youth. The sites of engagement come
and go, are repurposed, and evolve over time. Some people assume
that these ebbs and flows mean radical changes in youth culture, but
often the underlying practices stay the same even as the context shifts
what is rendered visible and significant.
The context of a particular site is not determined by the technical
features of that site but, rather, by the interplay between teens and
the site. In sociological parlance, the context of social media sites is
socially constructed.13 More practically, what this means is that teens
turn to different sites because they hear that a particular site is good
for a given practice. They connect to people they know, observe how
those people are using the site, and then reinforce or challenge those
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39
norms through their own practices. As a result, the norms of social
media are shaped by network effects; peers influence one another
about how to use a particular site and then help collectively to create
the norms of that site.
Because teens’ engagement with social media is tied to their broader
peer groups, the norms that get reinforced online do not deviate
much from the norms that exist in school. This does not mean that
there aren’t distinctions. For example, I met a teen girl who was
obsessed with a popular boy band called One Direction even though
her friends at school were not. She didn’t bother talking about
her crush on one of the band’s members in the lunchroom because
she knew her friends wouldn’t find such a topic interesting. She
didn’t hide her passion for One Direction from her friends, but
she didn’t turn to them to discuss the band members’ haircuts or
their latest music video. Instead, she turned to Twitter, where she
was able to gush about the band with other fans. She first turned to
Twitter because the members of One Direction were using that platform to engage with their fans, but as she engaged with the broader
fan community, she spent more time talking with other fans than
replying to the musicians’ tweets. Through this fan community,
she began interacting on Tumblr and posting fan-­oriented posts on
Instagram. Her friends all knew about her obsession—and occasionally teased her for her celebrity crush—but they didn’t follow her on
Twitter because they weren’t interested in that facet of her life. She
wasn’t hiding her interests, but she had created a separate context—
and thus a separate digital persona—for talking with fellow fans.
When she wanted to talk with her school friends, she turned to Facebook or text messaging. At the same time, the contexts were not
wholly distinct. When she found out that one of her classmates
was also a fellow fan, they started engaging on both Facebook and
Twitter, talking about school on Facebook and One Direction on
Twitter. And she even ended up Facebook friending a few fans she
met through Twitter, which created a space for them to talk about a
different range of topics.
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identity
This young fan is a typical savvy internet user, comfortable navigating her identity and interests in distinct social contexts based on
her understanding of the norms and community practices. She moves
between Facebook and Twitter seamlessly, understanding that they
are different social contexts. She has a coherent understanding of
who she is and is comfortable choosing how she presents herself in
these different environments. She moves just as seamlessly between
these mediated environments as she does between online and offline
settings, not because she’s cycling through identities—or creating a
segmentation between the virtual and the real—but because she’s
switching social contexts and acting accordingly.
As teens move between different social environments—and interact with different groups of friends, interest groups, and classmates—
they maneuver between different contexts that they have collectively
built and socially constructed. Their sense of context is shaped—but
not cleanly defined—by setting, time, and audience. Although navigating distinct social contexts is not new, technology makes it easy
for young people to move quickly between different social settings,
creating the impression that they are present in multiple places simultaneously. What unfolds is a complex dance as teens quickly shift
between—and often blur—different social contexts.
The popularity of social media in recent years has produced a significant rise in nonfiction or so-­called real names identity production, but it is also important to recognize that there continue to be
environments where teens gather anonymously or don crafted identities to create a separation between the kinds of social contexts that
are viable offline and those that can be imagined online. Most notably, multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and StarCraft
were quite popular among youth I encountered. It is within these
spaces—along with virtual worlds like Second Life and Whyville—
where teens can and do engage in much of the playful and productive
identity work that early internet scholars initially mapped out.14 The
process of creating an avatar and selecting virtual characteristics
requires tremendous reflection, and teens often take this seriously.
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41
Although some teens do invest a great deal of time and thought
into their avatars, other teens I met were no more invested in their
gaming character than in their Twitter handle. Their choices had
meaning and were valuable, but not something that they felt needed
to be analyzed for significance. When I asked one teen boy why he
had chosen to be a particular character in World of Warcraft, he
looked at me with a scrunched face. I pressed on to ask if his choice
had any particular meaning, and he responded with an eye roll, saying, “It’s just a game!” before continuing on to talk about how he had
a collection of characters with different skill sets that could be used
depending on what he was trying to achieve in the game.
Choosing and designing an avatar is a central part of participation
in immersive games and virtual worlds, but youth approach this
practice in extraordinarily varied ways. Some teens purposefully construct their avatars in ways that they feel reflect their physical bodies;
other teens choose characters based on skills or aesthetics. For some
teens, being “in world” is discrete from their school environment,
whereas others game with classmates. It may seem that the role-­
playing elements of these environments imply a significant separation
between the virtual and the real; however, these often get blurred in
fantasy game worlds as well.15
Alongside the identity work done within common social media
sites and wildly popular gaming services, a subculture has emerged in
which participants outright eschew recognizable identity altogether
by proclaiming the virtues of anonymity. Nowhere is this more visible
than in the community of individuals who participate in and contribute to the image-­based bulletin board site 4chan. 4chan was initially
created in 2003 by a fifteen-­year-­old named Chris Poole, known as
“moot,” so that he could share pornography and anime with other
teens.16 Often referred to as the underbelly of the internet, 4chan is an
active source of internet cultural production as well as malicious
prankster activity. It is the birthplace of popular memes such as lolcats: often entertaining, widely distributed pictures of cats portrayed
with text captions written in Impact font using an internet dialect
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identity
referred to as lolspeak.17 4chan is also where Anonymous—the “hacktivist” group mostly known for a series of well-­publicized political
actions—originated.18 Although it’s impossible to know much about
the site’s contributors, the content typically shared on the site reflects
tastes and humor usually associated with teenage boys.
The reason it’s hard to get a handle on who participates on 4chan is
that most of the content produced on the site is shared anonymously.
As I met teen boys who contributed to 4chan, I found that many of
them relished the anonymous norms of the site. They felt that anonymity gave them a sense of freedom they didn’t feel they could have
on sites for which constructing an identity—pseudonymous or “real”—
was more typical. Some admitted to using this freedom in problematic
or destructive ways—recounting acts of ganging up on girls whom
they deemed annoying or using a combination of wits and trickery to
manipulate Facebook administrators into providing data. But more
often than not, teens talked about wanting to have a space where they
weren’t constantly scrutinized by adults and peers. By becoming anonymous and being an invisible part of a crowd, these teens knew that
they weren’t building a reputation within the site. Yet even when they
weren’t being personally recognized, many relished seeing their posts
get traction and attention within the site; this made them feel part of
the community. Furthermore, extensive use of in-­group language and
shared references made it easy to identify other members of 4chan,
thereby enabling another mechanism of status and community.19
…