RReport

Angie Green
English 213
Dr. Webster Newbold
Emerging Media Project

Teenager’s Social Life and Social Networking Sites

Danah Boyd shines new light on how teenagers live vicariously through social networks in her article, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.”
Boyd begins with talking about the different networking sites, how they’re used, and what their profiles contain. She sheds light on how Friendster was one of the main basis on social networking. It began with Friendster’s, “Testimony,” moving on to MySpace’s, “Comments,” and finally with Facebook’s famous, “Wall.” She also talked about how Friendster helped with the start of fan pages for musicians, which helped MySpace out with their roaring popularity. Boyd mostly focuses on MySpace and their large number of networks and members. She doesn’t leave out the fact that there are many social sites out there, such as the obvious Facebook, Friendster, Bebo, etc., but also including the many that were failed attempts from big names like Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL. She also explains that there are social networks outside of the U.S. that are largely popular and these sites reside in places like China, North and South Korea, and Brazil.
A main topic that Boyd covers is privacy. She goes on to tell how parents and teenagers have two different perspectives on what privacy is. Parents tend to think privacy should be what the public shouldn’t see, and teenagers tend to think of privacy is what parents shouldn’t be able to see. Teenagers tended to feel violated if their profile was viewed by their parents, thinking they just wanted to be apart of their social, gossip life. Parents just wanted to make sure their child wasn’t acting out. Boyd tells of an incident where a girl friended her father, but he discovered something not his daughter’s character and questioned her about it.
Digging deeper into the online lives of the teenager, Boyd says that people obviously use their physical bodies to tell information about them and their lives. Boyd tells the readers that teenagers love being online because they want their online audience to perceive them in more ways than just their physical appearance, thus creates profiles, more information about one person, and online drama. Boyd says that Jenny Sunden puts it in a great way saying, “…people must learn to write themselves into being.” With creating “yourself” online, one also creates a sort of online caste system. This places people in the same social statuses as if they were in real person. For example, if one person doesn’t “accept” a friend request, then they are considered awkward, but having too many friends makes them a “whore.” This also deals with conflict in the online world. MySpace offers a “Top 8” for friends on a person’s profile. As Nadine, age 16 so thoughtfully put it, “As a kid, you used your birthday party guest list as a leverage on the playground. ‘If you let me play, I’ll invite you to my birthday party.’ Then, as you grew up and got your own phone, it was all about someone being on your speed dial. Well today it’s the MySpace Top 8. It’s the new dangling carrot for gaining superficial acceptance. Taking someone off your Top 8 is your new passive aggressive power play when someone pisses you off.”
Boyd also presents the idea of teenagers putting too much information on their MySpace. For one instance, a young, black, poor, boy was going to be admitted into a college, but once admissions looked at his MySpace, they began to think differently. Some things on his profile insisted in him being related to gangs, when his admission letter disagreed with such activity. The college was put into a predicament because it puts up the question to whether he was lying in his letter, or if he was just trying to fit in on his social page.
The final idea that Boyd presents is teenagers love their social networks because, in fewer words than she so kindly said it, it sticks it to the man. She tells us that teenagers have to follow adult rules and regulation all day, whether it be in school, in activities, at work, or even at home. MySpace, or any social network gives them the freedom to create their own person. Her explanation of contractions rings true in my mind as she said, “…we sell sex to teens but prohibit them from having it; we tell teens to grow up but restrict them from the vices and freedoms of adult society” (Boyd, pg. 21).
What exactly does this have to do with emerging media? My views begin to completely merge with Boyd. Her view on how easy it is to begin the social network process is completely relatable. Anyone can get online, if it becomes available to them. Thus, anyone can create a social profile online and become a virtual someone. Then my “friends” can put things on my social page and I can put things on theirs. I can share information and tell the world “who I am.” As you can tell, the media is no longer a newspaper or a lady on television explaining recent events. Media now includes these social networking sites and it provides information that old technology or media could never give us. Using digital literacies, we see how teenagers, and mostly students communicate and build networks. We see them writing on each other’s pages, and creating blogs. They make their person using the Internet.
With the previous thought in mind, the next topic that I covered above was Boyd’s view of privacy. Combining privacy and teenagers putting up too much information and creating their own world, this is a bit more arguable. She tended to side more with parents when it comes to keeping social profiles “private.” What she failed to mention was how she defined “privacy” in the social world when it came to multiple views of networking sites. To me, privacy is the limiting information to the public. This is for anything. It goes from telling a secret, to updating my “About Me” on Facebook. She says that teenagers didn’t want their parents to see their profile and that was her definition of MySpace privacy. I don’t think that’s all of it. MySpace has become sort of a popular site to broadcast your popularity in your life, whether you have a lot of a little. The privacy has more to do with what people can and cannot see, opposed to what is actually put on the site. Things can be written and hidden on the site, but things also can be left blank and that is considered “privacy” because the person didn’t want that particular information broadcasted. This is very clear to see who is literate or illiterate when it comes to social media. If someone has explicit information about their lives on their page, then they can be someone who doesn’t know how to work the site, or hasn’t caught up on how posting that information can be detrimental to their lives. The young boy didn’t know that when he was “chattin’ it up with his homies” he was actually damaging his future and this is important to keep in mind when it comes to the information we post. Not only does foul language and the horrible grammar tend to hurt us, the information and virtual paper trail can mess up future plans.
This comes to Boyd’s last and most important idea in her article, teenagers love the power of being online and using this media to be what they want to be. Teenagers are more intelligent than adults tend to want them to be. They obviously can use this technology to their advantage and create their own worlds using the Internet. Some and more adults are still digitally illiterate, but here, teenagers are bridging gaps and creating new worlds that can be the future of the human population. Adults tend to think now that the Internet is damaging every teen’s life, when in reality, it’s going to construct how everyone lives in the future. Caste systems, social status, and societal appearance are now virtual thanks to teenagers. It’s adult’s hopes that by the time they are of “career” age, they can clear up their grammatical errors, fowl language, and their drama lives using the computer. Even if the teenagers are “sticking it to the man” by creating their own worlds, present adults need to help the teens instead of criticizing them for the worlds they are creating.
In conclusion, the social networks are the future of the digital world. They are becoming virtual reality in more than just one way. Teenagers, our future, are shaping their reality based on new pictures and status updates. No longer do telephones ring when he-said-she-said stories arrive. Now, messages are sent using MySpace, and comments are posted about who’s dating who. This digital device, has and will become the future because teenagers are making it their reality, and teenagers are our future leaders.