An Imperfect Field Site

The value of building a field site as a set of networks is the opportunity for continuity, one of the advantages Burrell (Forthcoming) documents for choosing to approach fieldwork this way. Creating continuity requires being able to move

seamlessly between different mediated and unmediated environments. The fluidity with which teens move between different contexts highlights the continuity that they experience. When I began my project, I believed that it would be possible to follow them across these spaces. Yet social, cultural, and ethical limitations thwarted my intention to move along the different axes I laid out. In essence, I struggled to handle the complexities of a collapse in contexts as a member of the invisible audience, issues that I laid out in Chapter 1.

As minors, teens are vulnerable subjects. Part of their vulnerability stems from general concerns about the power relations between adults and minors. Cultural fears about sexual predators, stalkers, and abductors influence what is socially appropriate and ethical. Furthermore, parental consent is necessary for direct engagement with teenagers, which means that parents must preapprove any

situation in which I can interact with teens. With parental permission, I was able to interview teens in predefined settings, but I could not simply follow teens about their daily lives or to school, even if teens gave me permission to do so. This

restriction obliterates any chance of natural fluidity. In theory, following teens when they gathered with their friends in public settings was possible but felt stalkerish, as would following them beyond those settings. In short, my position as an adult meant that there was no comfortable way to move seamlessly across unmediated contexts without triggering ethical alarms.

Moving between mediated and unmediated environments introduced different challenges. While teens who I interviewed frequently showed me their online profiles, I was not able to sit with them on an average night when they were socializing with their friends through the sites. I accepted all Friend requests from teens, but I thought asking teens to be my Friend was an abuse of authority. As such, I could not really participate in collective “hanging out digitally” either. I could observe teens whom I interviewed, but this was not the same as creating a

continuous space for interaction. I knew that what I was seeing included in-jokes, references to offline activities, and conversations that had begun elsewhere, yet I

could not follow the referents. While my access was in some ways limited in these spaces, I was also privileged to have access to more everyday teen banter than I would normally encounter given my adult status.

Approaching teens online for offline interviews or interactions felt inappropriate given the cultural context concerning teens and online strangers. While scholars studying other communities felt comfortable contacting people online and interviewing them there or meeting with them in person (Baym 1993; Rettberg 2008; Taylor 2006), they were primarily dealing with adults. Mass media, safety organizations, police officers, and parents regularly tell kids that they should not talk to strangers online because they are potential child predators. Although, as I will discuss in Chapter 6, these fears are overblown, they are nonetheless real. As a result, I thought trying to move from online to offline would be inappropriate.

In unmediated contexts, observing typically makes a researcher visible to those being observed. Online, this is not the case. While I was an active participant-observer in networked publics, I was practically invisible to teens. I had a blog and profiles on both MySpace and Facebook long before any of the teens I met did,² but there was no reason why teens should read my blog or stumble on my profile.

Simply having a profile and being an active participant among my own friends did not make me visible to the teens I was observing. When I visited teens’ profiles,

2 I began blogging in 1997. I created my MySpace account in September 2003 and my Facebook account in mid-2004. Additionally, I began studying social network sites in the form of Friendster in early 2003 and created a profile on most major social network sites before I began studying them.

they had no way of knowing that there were visitors, let alone who I was. Most teens I observed were (and still are) completely unaware of my existence.

As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, there is no implicit visibility online.

Without my making my presence explicit, there is no way for someone to know that I am there. Yet there are few acceptable ways to make my presence known.

Ethnographers in other networked publics often make a point of “de-lurking” in online communities to make their presence known. In communities where chatting with strangers or leaving comments is socially acceptable, de-lurking is often valued.

Researchers entering such spaces can make their presence known and become trusted participant-observers. Such interactions allow them to develop social rapport with those they are observing and even contact participants directly for further conversation (e.g., Baym 1993; Rettberg 2008; Taylor 2006). This is not the dynamic of teens and social network sites. By and large, teens talk to people they know and have little interest in developing connections with strangers. To make my presence known, I would have had to initiate explicit contact with teens. I could have sent teens private messages, added them as Friends, or poked them on Facebook. Such direct contact removed from any social context in which it is

socially appropriate feels unethical, not to mention the challenges associated with an adult’s contacting a minor. I was not innately visible nor could I make my visibility known without direct contact.

While unsolicited messages to teens felt inappropriate, I initially thought that I could leverage connections I had to contact other teens. I decided against this approach because of the potential it had to put teens in an awkward situation, particularly when they were forced to weigh their friends’ support against their parents’ warnings. Such a dynamic is best exemplified by an encounter I experienced in late 2006.

I met Dan, a 15-year-old from Northern California, at a conference for geeks.

We talked about a variety of things and, at the end of the conference, our conversation spilled into an email dialogue. He invited me to be his Friend on MySpace and we kept in touch. At one point, we started talking about copying and pasting code into MySpace and he told me about Cory, a friend of his from school whom he thought to be the expert on the matter. He told me which of his Friends on MySpace was Cory and encouraged me to contact him. I sent Cory a MySpace message, indicating that Dan had encouraged me to contact him and explaining that I was a researcher. I then asked him a question about his technical practice. Cory responded with a curt note that included a brief explanation and a message about how his parents did not want him talking to strange adults online and while I seemed to be who I said I was, I would need to call his parents for permission to continue the conversation. I felt dreadful and apologized profusely for putting him an awkward situation. When I recounted this story to Dan months later, he sighed and acknowledged that concern about online strangers was rampant. My encounter

with Cory made me realize that I risked making teens very uncomfortable by contacting them online for online-only conversations, let alone offline encounters.

Creating continuous spaces across different media requires a certain degree of permeability between those spaces. The potential permeability of different contexts terrifies parents. I erred on the safe side and chose to interact with teens one context at a time. As a result, I experienced teens’ lives in a staccato fashion. I observed teens in discrete, bounded spatial contexts, but I was unable to follow them across spatial dimensions as they moved. That said, in casting my net widely, I was able to get tremendous information from multiple discrete contexts. Each interaction provided valuable perspectives into the lives of teens and the spaces that they inhabit.