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October 28, 2007

Susannah Stern: "Producing sites, exploring identities: Youth online authorship"

Stern, Susannah. (in press). "Producing sites, exploring identities: Youth online authorship." In (David Buckingham, Ed.) MacArthur Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume.

Stern's article discusses how youth negotiate identity and audience as part of the process of blogging. Her article is completely in line with my findings on youth and SNS identity and audience negotiation. The article is extremely well-written with lots of good quotes.

For example, in her discussion of how blogs are announced, she points out that some teens promote while others feel that's arrogant or don't want people that they know to find them so that they have freedom. Yet, even those who promote often have people that they intentionally don't tell (p. 12). "Authors reconcile this apparent inconsistency by acknowledging their desire for their sites to be visited by others, but not at the risk of damaging their image or inviting trouble" (p. 12). Still, most see themselves as their primary audience, perhaps for self-reflection and perhaps for modesty.

Youth have strategic negotiations of audience, impression, self image, and content. (In other words, they're negotiating the same practices through their blogs that they do through embodied activity with friends and strangers.)

Quotes:

  • p. 1: A curious mix of intrigue, disdain and apprehension continues to characterize many adults' sentiments about the creations young people place into the public eye on the Internet. Indeed, it is common to see journalists, educators and parents oscillate between promoting youth Internet expression and denouncing it in practically the same breath.
  • p. 1: At least part of the general bewilderment about youth online expression stems from the fact that public attention is disproportionately paid to what teens disclose and produce online, such as the words, text, images and sounds that can be observed on the screen. Yet little consideration is typically given to understanding why young people express themselves in these ways or how their authorial experiences are meaningful to them.
  • p. 7: A trend consultant recently quoted in the New York Times proclaimed that young people these days are "fabulous self-marketers... They see celebrities expressing their self-worth and want to join the party." Indeed, mainstream media (e.g. Entertainment Tonight, Us, People) divulge ever more detail about the lives of pop stars, and some ordinary people are elevated to the status of celebrity simply by their apparent willingness to provide such details about themselves (as seen on, for example, The Real World and Laguna Beach). Virtually all "real" and "wanna-be" stars have web pages and blogs, not to mention that many have fan sites devoted to them as well. In this context, some young people view personal sites as avenues to participate in, or respond to, a culture that valorizes publicity as an end in itself. Indeed, they feel that personal sites can serve as symbols to others and themselves that they belong to and in the public culture. This does not mean that young authors uncritically buy into the dominant messages about celebrity and pop culture that persist in mainstream media, but rather that many have recognized the cultural value of self-promotion and are motivated to publish online in consequence.
  • p. 8: Despite the various reasons that motivate young people to create a personal site, it is only after having done so that many teens deliberate whether or not online expression is particularly valuable or potentially functional for them. This sequence of events appears to be different for adults, who generally reflect on the expected utility of online expression before commencing to author a personal site... In particular, nearly all of those who sustain these works for any length of time identify their utility for self-reflection, releasing pent-up feelings, and witnessing personal growth.
  • p. 8: These [formal operational] skills allow individuals to "construct more abstract self-portraits, to distinguish between their real and ideal selves, and to begin the process of resolving discrepancies between multiple aspects of themselves."
  • p. 10: Knowing -- and hoping -- that others will encounter their online expression is the fundamental appeal of publishing (literally "making public") personal sites for young authors... Adolescents have historically had few opportunities for public address, and, like other disenfranchised groups, they have received little encouragement toward this end. In fact, young people recognize from an early age that adults' voices are more culturally valued than their own. This uncomfortable reality is evidenced by the paucity of widely disseminated or published works authored by young people, by the adult designation of "appropriate" youth expression venues (e.g., diaries and bedrooms), and the stigmatization of many public youth expression practices (e.g., body art, graffiti).
  • p. 11: Of course, many young authors today have never known a time when it was not possible to address potentially vast numbers of people online. Consequently, they rarely view their personal home pages and blogs as rebellious attempts to claim space in the way that, for example, urban graffiti artists did in the 1970s... Youth authors are distinctly aware of the relative shortage of spaces for them to publicize their thoughts and lives amidst an increasingly mediated culture. Yet simultaneously, they feel entitled to engage in public address... Youth authors' desire to address the public is not simply about actually being heard (or read) by many people, but also about feeling empowered by the mere prospect of mass reception.
  • p. 11: Much has been made of the "blurring boundaries" between conceptions of public and private in the digital age. And young authors do, in fact, seem to have reconfigured these concepts in ways that pre-Internet folk find confusing. For example, people have traditionally considered their communication to be private when it is encountered exclusively by a limited and targeted individual or individuals. But some youth authors think of their communication as private when the people they know in real life do not see, hear, or read it, regardless of who else does.
  • p. 11: But knowing that their personal sites are publicly accessible does not lead most young people to envision a broad audience for their online works. And, despite their recognition that virtually anyone with Internet access can pore over their sites, most adolescents, by and large, cannot imagine why "some random stranger" would be interested in doing so (unless, of course, he is a "creeper" – a stalker or paedophile – about whom most young authors tend to demonstrate awareness and dismissal in equal measure).
  • p. 14: Adolescents of both sexes lament their inability to broach these kinds of issues [- homosexuality, violence, fear, and rejection -] in offline conversations with friends and family for fear of social or parental reprisals, and, given their age and relatively limited ability to travel freely, they can rarely locate many physical places where encounters with strangers regarding these topics would be possible or safe. Consequently, they are grateful that the Internet provides at least one non-private space to explore these personal issues.
  • p. 15: These types of self-presentational practices might be described as "identity experimentations" in the sense that young people use their personal sites to test out different versions of their current and possible identities. Youth authors are, in fact, the first to acknowledge how they use their personal sites to broadcast aspects of themselves in order to see what kind of reception they receive.
  • p. 16: One of the main reasons young people concern themselves so much with authenticity in their self-presentations on their personal sites is because, ultimately, they seek social validation from their audience.
  • p. 19: We view our bodies as private space in public, just as we view our blogs. And yet, the relationship between private and public is quite blurred, particularly considering that the public square of the blogosphere is not ephemeral, but across space and time.

Category: cultural studies

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October 26, 2007

Misa Matsuda: "Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality"

Matsuda, Misa. (2005). "Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality." In M. Ito, D. Okabe, & M. Matsuda (Eds.), Personal, portable, pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life (123-142). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

In this essay, Matsuda draws on survey and interview data concerning how Japanese youth and others use keitai (mobile phones). Of particular note, she points out that youth use this technology to help support a "full-time intimate community" of friends. She situates her findings in a discussion of home life, parent-child relations, and the fears vs. realities of how keitai are shifting social relations. She examines how keitai are used for maintaining connections, how address book size does not match calling practices, how people use screening, and how this form of connectivity affects social network structure (drawing on the likes of Fischer and work on homophily). She points out that the tool is used differently depending on social position. For example, the keitai is a "personal phone" for single people, a "mobile phone" for married men, and a "private phone" for married women. While pagers initially supported friend maintenance over long distances, allowing for ongoing relationships with "former friends" after a move, keitai are much more about supporting pre-existing ties: scheduling rendezvous, calling the family, and making appointments are common uses of keitai.

Quotes:

  • p. 123: As Leopolinda Fortunati (2002:51) points out, using the keitai "is to be reachable not by everyone, but only by those with whom we want to communicate—intimate friends or selected others whom we want contact." In theory, the keitai can be used anytime anywhere, but people are actually fostering relationships with those who they choose to contact.
  • p. 126: Even though the Internet can be accessed with the keitai, most users are merely exchanging messages as they did with text pagers. Hence we can say that the keitai Internet is substantially different from that accessed by personal computers; it is an extension of individual ownership and personal uses of a youth mobile communication medium which has transitioned from pagers to keitai.
  • p. 133-134: Most of the utterances were "yeah" or "uh huh" and other such responses or acknowledgements (Kato 1958). Kato concludes that "small groups of people bound together in the intimacy of family or village didn't require those interactions that we now glorify as 'conversations'" (2002: 176).
  • p. 138: On its own, this data would give the impression that there are extremely large numbers of people with whom youths contact through keitai, but many say they do so regularly with approximately 10 people. The number of registered keitai numbers decreases with age, but there is little variation in the numbers of people contacted on a regular basis (Matsuda 2001a). This suggests that youths have large amounts of "superfluous numbers" in their keitai. Though there is the appearance that youth have expanded their circle of acquaintances with the keitai, judged by their communication patterns, they are mostly making frequent contact with a select few. Upon returning home, they make calls and exchange emails with the same friends that they just saw at school. This round-the-clock set of relationships with an exclusive group of friends is what Ichiro Nakajima, Keiichi Himeno and Hiroaki Yoshii (1999) characterize as a "full-time intimate community."
  • p. 139: As soon as class ends, students pull out their keitai and begin to make calls, contacting those friends who are part of their everyday friendship network.
  • p. 147: Beginning with work on Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft (Association/Community), the contrast between flexible interpersonal relationships, which people can enter and leave as they please, and binding relationships, which are often systemized and organized, has been studied by many researchers. For example, Chizuko Ueno (1994) characterizes ketsu-en (kinship), chi-en (community), and sha-en (sodality) as "obligatory relationships" and the flexible and pluralistic interpersonal relationships in which people choose their friends as "sentaku-en (selective relationships)." What is important here is her characterization of sentaku-en as "relationships born from urbanization."
  • p. 148: In this vein, youths' keitai-supported selective interpersonal relationships illustrate an intersection of the theories of Fischer and Matsumoto. It is not so much that the growth of youths' selective interpersonal relationships are a result of keitai ownership or their identity as youth, but rather that growth is the result more generally of an expanded social network, or growth in the number of people with whom contact can be made.

Category: mobile

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