Managing Identity in Networked Publics

As teens write themselves into being, couched in the context of their peers, they are forced to face the ways in which impression management in networked publics is unlike that which takes place in face-to-face encounters. The technical affordances for defining the situation and presenting oneself are quite different, forcing teens to explicitly articulate their identity, imagine the context in which they are operating, and negotiate the impressions they are conveying with few structures for feedback.

Much of what they face is an extension of what Meyrowitz (1985) described in his discussion of how electronic media alters the negotiation of situations. Yet

Meyrowitz, writing before the rise of the Internet, did not account for what would happen as the processes that celebrities and public people faced behind the screen

Unlike public people seeking to self-define to an unknown audience using electronic media, teens are constructing their presentations of self for people with whom they interact every day. What plays out online influences unmediated situations and what takes place in school shapes the social situations defined in networked publics. For teens, the two are constantly entangled and the context in which they are operating spans both mediated and unmediated encounters. And yet in each environment, teens must contend with other forces. In school, teens are faced with adults who seek to control the social situation. In networked publics, they must face invisible and unknown audiences, many of whom hold power over them.

Their efforts to define the situation and control the context are often thwarted by adults who seek to control peer worlds.

In all environments, teens’ identity is often framed in relation to those around them. The social categories that shape social relations in school (Eckert 1989) help define teens’ identity, both in the ways they themselves identify with those social categories and in the ways others mark them. Online, this is made more explicit.

Social relations are publicly articulated and teens’ profiles comprise not just what they themselves explicitly state, but also what others state about and to them.

Goffman (1959) speaks of how a person’s presentation of self comprises what they explicitly give and what they give off. While much of what teens explicitly include in their profiles gives off important signals, what their Friends say gives off signals at a whole new level.

More than anything, what makes impression management different in mediated and unmediated environments is the ways in which acts of self-presentation do and do not iterate. Often, it is impossible for the performers to assess the success of their presentations in conveying their sense of self to the audience. There are no feedback loops that allow teens to adjust based on real audience feedback and, often, there is no way of truly knowing who the actual audience is. Even a teen’s intended audience might not actually be consuming the content produced and the actual audience might be quite different from the perceived or imagined one. Given the multiple environments in which teens operate with the same people, feedback does occur, but changing one’s profile is not an ephemeral act and these adjustments might come long after damage is done.

While teens understand the context in which they are operating, they may not always understand the context in which their friends are operating. In unmediated environments, witnesses can look around and gauge the audience themselves, but online, this is not possible. Thus, when teens contribute to their friends’ self-presentations, they may put their friends in uncomfortable positions when their ideas of the context are not compatible. Teens’ lists of Friends help convey what the teens intend and imagine to be their audience, but they may not help resolve the conflicts that teens face. As core parts of profiles, these lists allow teens to express information about their identities, but they also feed directly into the ways teens negotiate status and maneuver in peer worlds.

Chapter 5: Friendship, Status, and Peer Worlds

When Skyler Sierra’s mother asked her to explain why MySpace was so

important, the 18-year-old from Colorado turned to her mother and said, “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.” For many of the teens whom I met, participating on social network sites is a necessary part of participation in peer culture. Social network sites are one of the many forms of social media that fill in social gaps by allowing teens to connect when getting together is not possible. While teens may see each other at school, in formal or structured activities, or at each other’s houses, social network sites support a much more unstructured environment for peers to gather more broadly. Teens use networked publics to support peer socialization. In doing so, many re-create many of the complex social dynamics that play out wherever teens gather. At the same time, technology introduces new structural forces that alter the social dynamics.

Teen practices involving social network sites mirror many of those that scholars have documented in other places where teens gather with peers (Eckert 1989; Milner 2004; Skelton and Valentine 1998). Just as they have done in parking lots and shopping malls, teens gather in networked publics to negotiate identity, gossip, support one another, jockey for status, collaborate, share information, flirt, joke, and goof around. In other words, they go to social network sites to “hang out.” Through mediated interactions, social network sites allow teens to extend their social worlds beyond physical boundaries. Conversations that begin in person do not end when

friends are separated. Teens complement private communication through messaging and mobile phones with social network sites that support broader peer engagement.

As with other forms of social media, most teens do not treat social network sites as alternative or “virtual” worlds (Osgerby 2004; Osgerby, Abbott 1998). Social network sites are simply another place for teens to connect with their friends and peers; participation fits seamlessly into their everyday lives and complements other practices. Just as they use more intimate channels of communication to maintain

“full-time intimate communities” (Matsuda 2005) with close friends, teens use social network sites to build “always-on” networked publics inhabited by their peers.

Teens will usually have a small circle of intimate friends with whom they

communicate in an always-on mode via mobile phones and IM, and a larger peer group that they are connected to via social network sites. Social network sites are one of many types of social media that teens use to engage with friends and peers, but they were the most dominant type of networked public that teens used during my fieldwork.

Social network sites are replacing physical gathering spaces for youth out of necessity. In the 1980s, the mall served as a key site for teen sociability in the United States (Ortiz 1994), because it was often the only accessible public space where teens could go to hang out (Lewis 1990). Teens are increasingly monitored and many have been pressured out of public spaces such as streets, parks, malls, and libraries (Buckingham 2000; Valentine 2004). Lacking other options, U.S. teens

have turned networked publics into their contemporary stomping ground. Just as teens flocked to the malls because of societal restrictions, many of today’s teens are choosing to gather with friends online because of a variety of social and cultural limitations (boyd 2007). While the site for gathering has changed through time, many of the core practices have stayed the same. What differences exist stem from the ways in which social network sites alter common social practices.

The relations and dynamics that play out in school extend into the spaces created through networked publics. What takes place online is reproduced and discussed offline (Leander and McKim 2003). When teens are socializing, online and offline are not separate worlds—they are simply different places to gather with friends and peers. Conversations may begin in one environment, but they move seamlessly across media so long as the people remain the same. Social network sites mirror, magnify, and extend everyday social worlds. At the same time, networked publics provide opportunities for always-on access to peer communication, new kinds of social pressures, public display of connectedness, and unprecedented access to information about others. As a result, technology inflects different aspects of teen sociality and peer social structures.

In this chapter, I examine how social media shapes peer worlds, focusing primarily on how social network sites are leveraged in and alter teen sociality. I center my analysis on practices that are salient in teens’ lives, like friendship development and maintenance, and core structural dynamics like social categories.

My goal is to investigate the role social network sites play in the lives of today’s teens by considering what has changed and what has not. I found that the majority of mediated teen practices replicate everyday interactions and dynamics, but that technology inflects these dynamics in critical ways, often by magnifying and formalizing interactions, conflicts, and social divisions.