To examine the interplay between American teenagers and this new
technological form, I embarked on a 2.5-year study of teen participation in social network sites and other emergent forms of social media. Moving between online and offline environments, I interviewed and observed teens throughout the United States in order to understand how they adopted social network sites into their lives and how their lives were shaped by their engagement with these sites. Like scholars before me (Ito 2002; Thorne 1993), I approached my fieldwork with the belief that the practices of teenagers must be understood on their own terms, divorced from the desires or expectations of adults. I believe that teens’ activities and logic can be understood as a rational response to the structural conditions in which they are embedded. Thus, I focused on understanding those structural conditions.
As my project unfolded, I focused on three sets of relations that play a dominant
how teens’ sociotechnical practices supported and complicated all three sets of relations. I analyzed how teenagers used social media to reproduce traditionally unmediated practices, how teens altered their practices to accommodate technical features, how teens repurposed technology to meet their needs, and how teens managed complications that arose as a result of their sociotechnical participation. In doing so, I began to recognize a set of technical properties (persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability) that destabilized core teen relations and a set of
dynamics (invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private) with which teens were forced to contend when participating in these environments. While these properties and dynamics certainly do not determine teen practices, they reshape the environment that teens inhabit and, thus, play a role in how teens negotiate identity, peer sociality, and interactions with adults.
I found that teen participation in social network sites is driven by their desire to socialize with peers. Their participation online is rarely divorced from offline peer culture; teens craft digital self-expressions for known audiences and they socialize almost exclusively with people they know. Their underlying behaviors remain relatively stable, but the networked, public nature of social network sites like MySpace and Facebook is particularly disruptive to more traditional forms of interaction. In crafting a profile, teens must manage a level of explicit self-presentation before invisible audiences that is unheard of in unmediated social situations. The publicly articulated nature of marking social relations can prompt new struggles over status and result in heightened social drama, but as teens learn to
manage these processes, they develop strategies for maintaining face in a social situation driven by different rules. The same structural forces that allow teens to interact with broad peer groups in a new type of public space also make their behaviors much more visible to those who hold power over them, prompting new struggles over agency and access to public life. Technical properties can often complicate teens’ relations to peers and adults, but my findings illustrate that teenagers often develop powerful strategies to adapt to the logic of new genres of social media. As teens learn to navigate social media, individual practices and collective social norms evolve to account for the infrastructure.
To explore and theorize teens’ sociotechnical practices, I integrate social science theories concerning everyday practices with a theory of technology that accounts for instabilities in the structural conditions of the environment in which those practices occur. The result is an ethnographic account of how social media has taken social situations out of traditional contexts and how American teens develop
strategies for making sense of these environments in order to engage in everyday practices that are important to them.
1.1.1. Dissertation Organization
The core of this dissertation is organized around the three sets of relations central to teen life—identity, peer sociality, and power relations. Chapter 4 examines the intersection of social network site profiles and identity, Chapter 5 describes how
for how adults’ restrictions and fears configure adult-teen interactions in the context of teens’ sociotechnical practices. In each of these chapters, I begin by laying out a relevant theoretical framework before turning to analyze how teens are managing each set of relations in conjunction with their participation in networked publics.
Chapter 4 builds on Goffman’s analyses of impression management, presentation of self, and behavior in social situations (Goffman 1959, 1963, 1966, 1967). Chapter 5 considers how Eckert’s social categories (Eckert 1989) and Milner’s status rituals (Milner 2004) fare in digitally mediated environments. Chapter 6 extends
Valentine’s analysis of how children lost access to physical public spaces (Valentine 2004). In each chapter, my aim is to use ethnographic fieldwork to describe teens’
everyday lives in relation to the theoretical backdrop and technology to account for what has and has not changed.
While each analytic chapter in my dissertation addresses a different body of theoretical concerns, three core theoretical frameworks are woven throughout my dissertation: teenagers, technology and change, and networked publics. The
remainder of this Introduction maps out these central theoretical frameworks.
To support my core ethnographic chapters, Chapter 2 outlines the ethnographic approach that I took in this project and Chapter 3 provides a historical overview of social network sites and teen engagement with social media. For those seeking more detail on my subjects or on the technology, Appendix 1 provides brief biographical information on all teens quoted in this dissertation and Appendix 2 details some of
the core features in MySpace and Facebook. A third Appendix includes the Creative Commons license that modifies the copyright claims I make to this dissertation.
Finally, my concluding chapter addresses the implications of my findings and analysis with respect to conceptions of networked publics. Unlike other chapters in this dissertation, I step out of analytic mode in Chapter 7 to consider what my work means for broader theoretical and social conversations. The tone of this chapter is intentionally more reflective and less grounded and I offer my views on how I believe my work can be applied.