Read danah boyd’s Dissertation. We will be focusing on chapters 4-6, but you might want to begin by reading the first chapter to get a sense of the project. Leave your comments below.
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Read danah boyd’s Dissertation. We will be focusing on chapters 4-6, but you might want to begin by reading the first chapter to get a sense of the project. Leave your comments below.
The two chapters by Danah Boyd were interesting; however I wish she had packed more statistics and information into the reading. I would like to know more details about the different points she was making. The author discusses how teens spend a great deal of time on internet connecting with friends on social networks. How much time do teens actually spend doing this? Doesn’t it appear teens today spend excessive amounts of time on the internet compared to other types of activities? Twenty or thirty years ago, teenagers spent much of their free time outdoors, playing, exercising or reading because they did not have access to the internet since it hadn’t been invented yet.
It seems the internet is the only way many teens can express themselves today. Decorating a Myspace or Facebook page is definitely a creative outlet for teens, however I also think a teen being visible on the internet is a problem. She points out that a huge percent of teens lie about their age anyway to gain more access to the web and avoid predators by updating their profile to make themselves appear older. Interestingly adults are doing the opposite and updating their profiles to appear younger. There is obviously a lot of deception on the internet. The author confirms what I have always assumed about teens, which is that teens are using social networking sites to connect mostly with friends and not strangers. I didn’t know that teens were connecting with people differently depending on whether they were reaching out to an adult, teachers or friends. The author touches on “impression management” “self presentation” and “identity”. I think it would be interesting to know more about the psychological, social, cultural and philosophical affects on one’s identity and how that shapes a teen’s presence on the web. Maybe teens do not feel like they have an identity until they can exist and be “seen on the web”.
I found the most interesting portion of danah boyd’s dissertation pertained to adult participation within youth space such as MySpace and Facebook. As someone who grew up engaged in new media such as social networks I never experienced my parents attempting to engage in those spaces, but I saw other parents who did. I thought of these parents as “cool” because they were willing to engage us (teenagers) at our level. Those interactions were some of the rare times when you could see an adult as an equal which was refreshing as a teenager. The lack of participation on my parents part did not weaken out relationship, but I do feel that I missed out on opportunities to bond with my parents because of their lack of participation.
It makes me wonder what our interactions with our children will be like. If we are versed in the spaces or technology that they will be using to socialize will those spaces be places where we will be equals or will we impose rules upon them as we would our homes?
Similarly, will we as parents be more or less accepting of these spaces since we ourselves have experienced them first hand? I see it going more towards acceptance, much in the way our society has with video games. With the new group of parents having grown up having played or been around video games I see more and more people becoming accepting of them.
I joined the social networking scene when Xanga was one of the hottest things out. But I always did wonder why people put themselves up online. I remember that these sites were usually used for diaries. Or I guess in Xanga’s case, many people wrote long and short diaries for everyone to see. I rejected the idea in the beginning, thinking why would I ever want to write my diaries online if I can do it privately on a notebook. Then I realized that it was not exactly about the content on my page, but it really was the existence of my page that mattered. Friends asking friends what their xanga id was etc etc, it was almost a sense of belonging? I am not even sure if it was called a social networking site ten or so years back.. These sites were extremely popular amongst younger crowd since teenage years are are when you are desperately trying to find your identity. Trying to distinguish yourself from everyone else, the stage of free thoughts and expression. It seems though this has spread through a higher age bracket. Very naturally though, since most of these people, such as myself have grew up with them. Hence the creation of networking sites such as linked-in. In any case, as far as the reading goes, I was almost expecting it to be a research paper of some sort.. Something very informative. It seems as if Danah was speaking from an outsider’s point of view. I don’t know why this is but, the whole reading seemed very distant?
I enjoyed this reading overall, but one aspect troubled me. In these three chapters, she (mostly) indirectly argues that parents and the American media are the reason teens have been forced onto social network sites — they want to escape the restrictive environments of school and home life. Although, I don’t think she ever develops that argument fully. According to boyd, because of the “culture of fear” and many parents’ blind acceptance of the associated cultural values, teens are victimized. Their social norms are shaped by the outside world — not by the technology itself. In other words, the technology is literally an add-on to their offline social lives, and it is an add-on teens are driven to adopt. Unfortunately, problems arise, since “as teens move online, their desire for privacy extends there, as does their parents’ desire to know what they are doing” (248).
boyd is fiercely protective of teens while the portraits of reasonable parents are few. Even for the teens who have serious behavioral problems, like Wolf, boyd passes no judgment. To justify teens lying about their profile ages, boyd explains that parents set a precedent of lying. In some contexts, “adults are intentionally engaged in deceiving other people” (150) and “adults regularly encourage teens to lie to avoid potential predators” (153). Also, teens lie about profile information to get around advertisers and avoid restrictive laws like COPPA. boyd frames profile deception as the normal and harmless teen practice of “leveraging technology to meet their needs” (151). Elsewhere, I noticed the pattern of shifting blame off of teens and onto parents and the society at large. The use of proxies to get around school restrictions on MySpace and Facebook is framed as a clever trick and a model of digital literacy. I don’t think the authoritarian restrictions boyd describes are healthy, but I also don’t think it is right to glorify misbehavior.
Perhaps “helicopter parenting” has made youth less independent, and maybe the pervasive stranger-danger rhetoric has intimidated teens into submission. However, certainly there are some things that teens do to exacerbate situations. Wolf might ultimately need the type of disciplined environment Anindita has. On the surface, this is an ethnographic study of teenagers, but in fact it is a study of parent-teen relationships. Considering this, it is obvious that the accounts of parents are absent, except for a few extreme testimonies in Chapter 5, which are online posts and not even neutral interview scenarios. I believe boyd’s chapters would be stronger if they were framed as: how is social media affecting the relationship between teens and authority figures, or affecting the relationships teens have with each other? Right now, it seems more like a one-sided account of how outside factors are trying to thwart the natural inclination teens have to socialize in private, in an unstructured, unmonitored space. Social network sites are portrayed as a natural and needed prosthesis teens use to escape the whacked-out society and parenting to which they are subjected. I feel like I have only heard one side of the story.
Dana Boyd’s article was very informative filled with examples to support her arguments. In Chapter 4, she gives a brief history of the social network sites. This reminded me of my home page created during the nineties. It was not organized as well as Myspace.com and Facebook.com but, you could search and make friends based on the home page tag. The HTML home pages were very similar to the Myspace.com and Facebook.com home pages.
From the article, teen’s home pages are much easier to create than HTML home pages. Teens have to create a home page that represents themselves or an idealized version of themselves. She describes how the teens separates themselves from there friends with there home page decoration. Her example reminded me of De Saussure’s example of a how the brains tell difference between chairs by how it is not like other chairs? She did not explain the process teens go through to make choices about there decorations. She did capture the spirit of why the teens participate and select decorations.
Her example of the teens decorating there home page was very interesting. Can teen’s home page decoration be considered as art? Would teens decorated home page be considered art in order to move the social structure in a Marxist world? She uses Marxist vocabulary to describe the effect of the teens participating in Myspace.com and Facebook.com. The social capital created by the home page is very interesting. How can a teen trend move the social structure?
As teenager are more adept to early-adopt something like Facebook, I assume that is the reason why the focus was not on a broader audience. As time passes, social networking will become something normally used by the vast majority of society. What is interesting in both this larger scale as well as the limited, teen-focused scale is how the real world relates to this network. Is it just a separate world to exist in? While this does happen, as people pretend to be celebrities or fictional characters, that is the exception. There is some overlap between the real world of social interaction and the virtual social network.
The use of the word “real” may unintentionally reveal my inclination for which of the two kinds of social interactions matters the most. While face-to-face social interactions are still quite normal, this has the potential to drastically decline in the future. Even so, unless we are plugged-in to something like the Matrix, real world social interaction will always take precedence over what occurs on Facebook (or its equivalent). Therefore, what is most interesting to me is how these interactions contribute to and detract from interactions in the real world. For example, friends are different things on Facebook than they are in the real world. Things are much more commoditized. This has the potential to blend back in with how people view their interactions with people face-to-face. On the other hand, it is much easier to see common interests and make connections online, bringing that information back into real-life interactions.
The reading this week was easy to engage but somehow eye-opening at the same time. Growing up in Taiwan, computers were treated as some kind of sacred equipment that only the adults were allowed to touch because of their prices. Well, until I got into high school at least. Then all of the sudden schools were starting to require our applications and assignments to be typed. I never went through the period of using the typewriters. It just went from hand writing to computer directly. My friends and I were self-taught as well considering our parents never had to use computers. But back then, learning how to use the computers was the social activity for us.
It was interesting to see how the everyday social activities are moved to the virtual world among the teens, although it is not surprising once you start to think about it. And it was extra interesting for me to see that the social groups got carried to the virtual world. While the big picture of those groups remains, there is more interaction among different group members, which I think is a plus. It is kind of sad to see that race is still a problem among the teens though.
I kind of feel bad for parents nowadays for having to deal with all these teenage children problems not only in real life, but also online too. For my parents’ generation, it was too much of a trouble to learn about the technologies and they just opted out. But with the advent of social networking sites, opting out seems be out of the question. Parents are constantly updating themselves about what’s “cool.” And they have to beat their kids to learning about new software that would help the teens to get on inappropriate websites. The technology is somehow becoming an impact on how the parents educate their teens. It brought tension into the parents and the teens’ lives. I think the convenience of the technology might have made this parent-children relationship a little too complicated than it really should be.
I’m curious to know how Myspace would be different if the tools in it were originally purposed for self-expression toward a friend base, instead of information transfer to those the user doesn’t know. I also wonder why it is the “About Me” portion of Myspace that seems to be less utilized for individualistic expression of the user, and the “Favorites” portions were more likely to have strategic choices made to express individuality in the user. It seems to me that teens are always trying to be incredibly similar to one another, but just different enough to create an internal sense of individualism. Boyd says, “it is quite likely that the act of public articulation motivates people to list tastes that differentiate themselves from those around them.” (235) It just seems odd to me that the decision is that of the “taste” portion of the profile, and not the (inherently and theoretically) more individualistic “About Me” portion.
I also felt that the whole article spoke to the underlying silent agreement that we spoke about in the last class (I think, I hope I’m not just making this up…) in which the parents turn a blind eye to certain activities. I believe someone said “In the 50’s parents knew kids were sneaking out, but they allowed it to happen as long as they believed that no one was going to get hurt.” This type of arrangement seems to be an underlying theme throughout Boyd’s writing. Boyd seems to be trying to explain why teens are secretive while utilizing this public space, however she neglects to get to the source of these needs. Maybe that wasn’t her goal, but I’d like to hear more about the demographics from which these teens come from and why they have these reactions. There was a lack of examples of active and engaged parental figures and their roles in this discussion.
I’m curious to know more about the “participation gap” (188). Will this ultimately lead to a group of people technically stifled to the point that they will never quite catch up to those that have been utilizing this technology their entire lives? Will we see the speed of this adoption become such a force powerful that it will create a new form of literacy? Will those who are not allowed access or allowed “less access” be so behind that, again with the speed of emerging technologies, they will never be able to catch up? Will blocking social networking site become a kin to banning books? Obviously that’s a bit extreme, but the possibilities could eventually be there. If this becomes one of the key elements in communication between teens, and drastically alters the way they connect to one another on a human level, will blocking these site be considered inhumane?
I remember when I first signed up for AOL and it was time to create a screen name. I wound up picking WooHaFooi, which was a combination of a Busta Rhymes song I was listening to at the time and a different spelling of the last word in the title of a Hanna Barbara cartoon, Hong Kong Phooey. Why in the world this turned into my screen name, I could never tell you . . . teens are fascinating creatures . . .
I especially enjoyed reading “chapter 6: power and control” where boyd describes the intergeneration gap and ways parents use their authority to limit and monitor teen’s activities online. ‘Moral Panic’ forces adults to focus on the dangers of the social networks and to blame technology for these dangers. According to boyd, parents fail to recognize the value of participation in these spaces because they fail to understand the technology itself. Their supposed ‘right way’ parenting is generally based on their own teen years and does not take cyber social spaces into account. This lack of understanding is the major reason that parents spy on their teens online, although, increasingly, parents are beginning to participate in social networks. This new level of engagement will help parents to better understand the technology and to reconnect with teenagers.
From their affiliations to their profile appearance, to the pictures they upload, teenagers are very careful about constructing their identities online. As more and more people (teens or adults) actively participate in cyberspace and broadcast their every step, I can’t help but wonder about the next generation kids and teens whose lives will become unwillingly disclosed, shared, and commented on by their tech savvy and cyber-addicted parents. No matter how meticulous these kids are in presenting themselves in cyberspace, future teenagers will have a difficult time maintaining and controlling their social personas because parents will have disclosed their every single move even prior to them being born!
Teenagers generally use social networks to connect with their peers. They use profiles, pictures, notes, comments, etc. to present themselves in cyberspace, and tend to share many little details about their lives with their peers. I wonder what will happen when these teens become parents themselves? What will happen to teen/parent dynamics when future parents have all their activities, photos, and personal details recorded and published on the web? Part of the traditional teen/parent relationship was based on parental authority when kids were kept unaware of their parents’ past. What will happen to parental authority when parents are easily disclosed?
boyd explains that social networks provide greater opportunities for teens to build their identity and figure out the world around them. Yet, it seems to me that majority of these identities are sculpted and performed. How can it be otherwise when, under the notion of fear or safety, teens’ cyber presence can be held against them by parents, teachers, or future employers?
One of the most interesting topics boyd brings up involves the influence that Facebook and Myspace users’ Friends have on shaping the user’s digital identity. The user’s choice of friends, the comments left on their page, and the photos they are tagged in play a huge role in shaping their identity; as boyd points out, “what teens explicitly state on their profiles is only one part of their self-presentation online” (136). This idea is complicated by considering that Facebook/Myspace users cannot initially control what is written on their pages (although they can ultimately delete comments), and furthermore, their “Friends” on social networking sites are generally not close friends with whom they interact with on a daily basis in “real life”. To what extent can one’s “Friends” shape their online identity when they are not in control of what is displayed on their page, or when what is displayed is from a source who has no intimate connection with the user?
Digital Media blogger Julia Roy illustrates this problem in a recent blog entitled “The Facebook ‘Friend’ Predicament’ (http://www.juliaroy.com/juliapatriciaroy/2009/04/my-myspace-facebook-wall.html ). Roy describes that lately her Facebook wall has been bombarded with random spam messages and nonsense from people she does not know – comments that do not reflect her circle of friends or her identity (she suggests that these types of comments belong on Myspace, which is a different discussion). Her solution is to merely delete all of these messages so that the comments from her real friends are not diluted by comments which do not accurately portray who she is.
I also found boyd’s discussion of how drama plays a role in social media (Section 5.5) interesting, particularly in regards to spreading rumors and relationships. I think that Facebook and Myspace have revolutionized the way that teens approach relationships and dating. These days, a relationship is not considered “official” until it is documented on Facebook – the “boyfriend/girlfriend” status does not come into existence until it is displayed on the couple’s social network. Never before have relationships been so public and subject to rumors and scrutiny than with the emergence of Facebook and Myspace. I feel like social networking sites are the most interesting innovation of my generation… I could spend hours talking about Facebook, but I will reserve that for my final project.
Out of Context-Boyd
Comments by David Hrisco
Boyd explores the argument of today’s youth and how they interact with society. Boyd approaches her argument from a “socialist constructivist” point or view”. She also avoids “technological determinism”. In her ethnography studies she states that she tries to avoid the SCOT theory. Her major thesis states the examination of teenagers and how they interact in “Networked Places”.
Boyd’s definition of networked places includes the online realms of
”My Space” and “FaceBook”. Boyd avoids “technological determinism”, which defines that people are subjected to technology and society which affect the human’s social development (question about this topic). Also, Boyd defines a methodology of SCOT’s theory but she states that she uses it as a framework of thinking about networked places.
As Boyd defines her arguments, she gives vivid definitions which are discussed further in her thesis and these include: the invisible audience, the replicable, and scalability within network publics. Before she discusses the network publics Boyd gives an account of a journal article regarding the “physical atom” and “bits of space” that are the “bits” virtual. These metaphors were used by a scientist to describe how “bits” of information would flow fluidly and transform the way information is delivered. Also, this discussion of atoms and bit’s sets up Boyd definition’s of scalability, replicability, and the invisible audience. These are “dynamics which must be recognized in the study of network publics.”
I found the majority of the reading to be a little redundant and what seemed to me to be fairly common knowledge. I may be a bit biased; I feel like I am somewhat a part of the “teen” generation she was researching. I have grown up using social media tools, so her observations of profiles, how/why/with whom teens engage with, and household dynamics of adults interacting with social networking tools (with the exception of some well thought-out observations) seemed like mostly common sense.
Boyd’s observation that teens repurpose tools on Myspace that were designed to help people meet new people is insightful (131). Also, her observations of teens’ sense of control (real or imagined) as a central factor in determining their comfort level online, along with the fact that they seem to realize that their profiles can be viewed by “the public”, but they still do not see their “participation in networked publics as being universally public” (139); yet to adults, “technology makes access appear public” (147).
I found Boyd’s analysis of age as it relates to sense of control is interesting and rings true. After my parents got a divorce, I made my mom a profile on myspace, then facebook, so that she could connect with old friends or find new people of interest to socialize with. I recall recognizing her isolation and tying that to how I felt being too young to get into anywhere of interest in our small town. We became closer, though I told her everything and showed her all the pictures I put up anyway. It’s really an interesting dynamic.
I would like to read more about the aesthetic differences between facebook and myspace, and what that meant for the social divide that occurred (5.3.4). She briefly mentioned that facebook is more aesthetically restrained (which pandered to the retrained aesthetic of the pretentious/elite) and myspaces ‘bling bling’ factor. I was thinking about what the cultural implications the aesthetic of each website held throughout the reading; I got excited when I saw the section, and then saddened when it was about a page long.
I feel like there is considerably more to say about this. Although the social-network effects ‘make’ people choose which site to use, the base of all these effects seem to be born out of aesthetic decisions. The feeling of ‘facebook being safer’ could be attributed to facebooks clinical/structured feel. Your aesthetic decisions on facebook are all structured and ordered by a power that’s ‘above you’. If myspace were a poster-board, facebook would be a form you fill out with designated boxes for ‘name/age’ etc. The do-anything-you-like aesthetic creates a feeling of danger, even though short contemplation makes one realize that facebook probably has more of your real data. There are many other aspects of these chapters that I think could be somewhat derived from the aesthetics of each site. The highschool poster-board feel of myspace could create the labeling of oneself as ‘too mature’ in relation to why someone wouldn’t want to join.
In relation to the transparency of interface, giving the user control over layout is a terrible idea. The entire point of a website is to create a seamless interaction with the content (old-facebook did this really well; some aspects of the new design are a bit overwhelming and complex). From a functional standpoint, allowing the users to have aesthetic control is a terrible idea. Facebook offers a ‘box’ for everything you may want (pictures in this box, music application in this other box, this here, that there) and myspace allows you to slap everything you desire on one giant page. These approaches are completely opposite aesthetically/functionally.
Studying aesthetics does seem a lot more assumption-based than studying blatant evidence derived from observing network effects. This means it probably isn’t the best incision point for study, but an incredibly interesting one nonetheless. I’d like to read someone’s interpretation of why this social divide exists based purely on aesthetic decisions made by the social-site creators.
MySpace vs. Facebook Cartoon
http://current.com/items/88913552/social_networking_wars.htm