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.

Sarah R's report.

October 20, 2010

Emerging Media Research Report

The author of this current research paper is making the assumption that the reader knows and understands what Facebook is and does as a social networking site.  If the reader does not have this basis of knowledge the author would like to direct you to Neil Selwyn’s introduction in the article below.  Selwyn gives background information on the use, history, and development of the Facebook social networking site.  In the article entitled, “ ‘Screw Blackboard… do it on Facebook!’: and investigation of students’ educational use of Facebook,” Selwyn discusses the academic use of Facebook at the University of London in the United Kingdom. 

Facebook offers perhaps the most appropriate contemporary online setting within which to explore how social software applications ‘fit’ with higher educational settings and communities of educational users and, therefore, investigate the current assumptions surrounding social software and education. (Selwyn)

Facebook is the opportunity that Selwyn had been looking for to see how social networking sites are used in the educational system, more specifically the educational system within universities.  The debate among educators seems to boil down to whether or not these social networking sites actually help the students in their studies or if they really just impede the student’s pursuit for an education.  Selwyn proceeds to do a study to try and make some conclusions in either direction on the matter at hand. 

The group studied was undergraduate students attending Coalsville University in the school of Social Science. With 909 students in the Social Science School only 694 had active Facebook accounts, over the course of a four month period of data collection, and 68,169 wall postings over a five month period of analysis this study appears to have been supported with evidence. 

The evidence directed toward educational-related postings on the 694 profiles within the study brought forth five main themes including:  recounting and reflecting on the university experience, exchange of practical information, exchange of academic information, displays of supplication and/or disengagement, and exchanges of humor and nonsense.  As a college student the author of this paper certainly can agree that these are the most common themes in her own experience with Facebook and the educational posts she herself has made.  If a Facebook user were to log on right now they would very likely find all of these types of postings among their networks. 

Selwyn comes to the conclusion that, “…in terms of education-related interaction, Facebook was used primarily for maintaining strong links between people already in relatively tight-knit, emotionally close offline relationships, rather than creating new points of contact with a ‘glocalised’ community of students from other courses or even other institutions.”

In Marshall McLuhan’s book, “The Medium is the Massage,” he makes the following statement:

At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective. … Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.  As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. …We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of the experience coexist in a state of active interplay.

Technology, specifically social networking, has given us the ability to be a part of individual’s lives without necessarily investing in their lives.  The Facebook postings that Selwyn observed kept a few strong bonds between close friends.  Visual means of apprehending the world are just too slow; so instead of meeting face to face students are becoming more dependent upon social networking sites.  This transfer to technology based communication could be seen as a good or a bad thing depending upon the circle of critics involved.      

And yet Selwyn states that the data shows that students are doing the exact same thing they have always done only now it is instantly spread to more than just the small group in the back of the lecture hall. Students are still investing in their close friendships only in a new medium. In a sense the data listed shows,

How Facebook has become an important site for the informal, cultural learning of ‘being’ a student, with online interactions and experiences allowing roles to be learnt, values understood and identities shaped. … Facebook should therefore be seen as an increasingly important element of students’ meaning-making activities, especially where they reconstruct past events and thereby confer meaning onto the overarching university experience.

As an avid Facebook user the author of this piece would have to agree with much of what Selwyn states in his article, but cannot say that Facebook has not wasted hours of her time.  As one of the opening remarks to Selwyn’s article states, “We're all going to fail university. It's not because we're stupid, or because we don't do any work. It's because of an uncontrollable addiction to Facebook and msn. When we're not drinking, or being hungover, or thinking about drinking while being hungover, we're talking about drinking and debauchery on msn or Facebook. This has got to stop. It won't, we all know that, but it should,”

Introductory statement from the ‘Facebook is Sucking Out My Soul and MSN is Feeding on the

Remains’.  Although there may be benefits to Facebook such as networking, keeping in contact with classmates, and all the other reasons it is helpful, it seems that the average student is not using Facebook as a medium to pursue those benefits.  Rather Facebook is used as a distraction from the work at hand.  The author of this piece has in the time it has taken her to write this 1,000 word paper has gone on Facebook at least thirty times. 

 But is method of distraction really any different than what students did in the past?  Is this generation ignoring the professor and causing distractions for themselves any different than the students in the ‘90s that didn’t have laptops in their classrooms.  Those students surely made diversions for themselves, procrastinated, doodled, or spaced out in a classroom or lecture hall. The conclusion to the Facebook dilemma is this:  there is no conclusion.  As McLuhan put it on his opening pages,

The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Facebook is by no means an exception to this statement.  Academic conversations that happened in the back of the classroom before now happen online and to a much wider audience.  Society will continue to be wrecked by social networking and technology.  Technology will increase, and there will be a time when Facebook will be accepted just like the printing press was accepted. 

Facetime by Natalie Friday

As the economy has suffered within the past few years and school are slowely limiting the amount of time students can spend outside of the classroom on fieldtrips and out of class experiences, teachers are being forced to improvise and come up with more creative ways to keep students interacting with the outside world. Some teachers connect their students with pen pals in different schools, and even different states. But what if we could connect the students in a more physical way, or at least connect a face with a name, or a classroom with an idea. The article Face Time by John K. Waters opens the doors to the idea of Videoconferencing in the K-12 classroom.

            The use of videoconferencing and connecting simultaneously with another person or class is what is called face-to-face. This is a way of connecting a face or voice with an email, text, blog, etc. The article introduces the concept my examining a fun and creative activity that has connected over 86 kindergarten through either grade classrooms which is a connection of 1800+ students between two states. Each classroom designs a Halloween monster using classroom materials and creates a list of instructions to go with their particular design. Included in the design the students have to include formulas that relate to math to help align particular angles, shapes, etc.  These details are posted in a wiki or blog that connects the classroom with another class located in another area. The second classroom then designs a monster using the specifications given. To finalize the activity the students use a video conference to display and share their monsters to see if they match up.

            There are several helpful organizations and websites to help teachers who are currently active with the videoconferencing programs as well as teachers who are newly interested. The groups, Polycom Collaborations Around the Planet (PCATP) and Two Way Interactive Connections in Education (TWICE), provide a website that allows educators to connect and present information about curriculum and program ideas as well as unite to collaborate with other schools and classrooms. PCATP and TWICE  are connected alongside a program called Read Around the Planet which occurs every year in March. This connection is another way that the use of video conferencing is connected to education.

            The article also talks about the concept of mashups. The idea of mashing up is the use of combining two web applications to join and work as one. The most common example used in the article is combining Good Maps with another application such as Ebay real estate to create a new and exciting use of technology. This is relavent when the Read Around the Planet connected with videoconferencing  This new technology is beginning to connect K-12 classrooms with a large social network. The connection here is the creation of a social network using videoconferencing.

            The article addresses what may come in the future as far as face-to-face activity goes online. According to the FaceTime article, “Video interactions have grown significantly in the past three years, from a single project with 20 classrooms participating in the 2003-2004 school year to more than 500 connections among numerous projects serving 15,000 students during the 2006-2007 schools year.” It is discussed that teachers in technology ready and enhanced districts are having the highest amount of project collaboration overall. This then presents the idea that videoconferencing may come to be more popular outside of the classroom. It is presented the online videoconferencing is the next form of social networking and is a personal alternative to the faceless online chat. The company Paltalk is one of the first companies to use this videoconferencing technology which at the time of the article had over 4 million users worldwide.

            Lastly the article briefly mentions some perks and downfalls that might arise with the use of face-to-face technology in the school setting. The upside to students and classrooms connecting with blogs and wikis is that they can be accessed during any time of the day and do not need collaboration or synchronization with another time zone. Real-time, however,  is the one downfall to this idea of connecting with other schools through video conferencing. This keeps students and teachers from being able to “time-shift” as they do when using blogs, emails, etc.