Negotiating Multiple Communication Channels

In asking teens about which channels they use and how they decide among them, I found that teens recognize that each genre has its strengths and weaknesses.

As other scholars have noted (Bryant et al. 2006; Grinter and Eldridge 2001; Grinter et al. 2006), teens use different communication channels in different interactions.

In choosing which channel to use, teens account for the social situation, the

technical affordances, the people they are trying to reach, and their own preferences.

For most of them, multiple genres of social media are embedded into their lives and they leverage whichever one they think makes the most sense given a particular encounter.

For example, Kat, a white 15-year-old from Massachusetts, mapped out the ways in which the channel was dependent on the purpose of the interaction and her expectations of how her peers consumed these different media. As she explains,

“It depends on why I want to contact them. If I’m calling Jessica to see if she can give me a ride to dance, it’s always phone. If I have a question about homework, I’ll do it on IM, because Facebook is really riskier, because you don’t know when they'll answer you, or you don’t know if they’re signed on, but they’re not at their computer at all. So I usually use IM if they’re online and I have a question. I don’t use email for my friends. I use it for usually like adults.”

Kat does not universally prefer one channel to another but sees each as valuable

Timing is a key issue that many teens bring up. Teens account for the

affordances of the technology with respect to timing and take into consideration the usage and lifestyle patterns of their friends in choosing how to best contact them. As Laura, the 17-year-old from Washington, explains, “In urgency, I use texting. If it can wait, I use MySpace.” She takes into consideration the priority of a message, but she also accounts for the weight of it in relation to the cost of the contact. For many short messages, she prefers texting or MySpace “because sometimes you only need to say one little thing that doesn’t require a whole phone call.” Laura, like many of her peers, reserves phone calls for conversations and prefers to avoid them when the goal is to communicate something simple. Another timing-related issue that teens account for is the disruption factor. While instant messaging and texting are often framed as interruption technologies, the teens I interviewed often saw them as less invasive than voice-based channels.

With text messaging and mobile phone calls, economic issues are also at stake.

Text messaging is often a desirable medium for one-to-one communication, but the cost can limit use. For example, white 15-year-old Catalina from Austin, Texas, chooses to send texts only when she is out because at home, “you’re not gonna waste the text.” The teens I interviewed are often familiar with the costs of phone plans and they often know which friends have what carriers, what phone and texting plans, and which limitations. Teens are conscious of how their acts affect their friends. Some check to see if a friend is on IM before sending him or her a text message. Many ask their friends about their phone plans, determining whether or

not they share the same carrier and how many texts they can receive. In Michigan, white 16-year-old Bianca is required by her father to ask her friends about their plans before she can communicate with them. Others avoid text messaging because of the potential economic impact of communication. Those I interviewed who switched from limited to “all you can eat” text-messaging plans started texting much, much more. Because most teens do not have control over their phone plans, parents often limit their phone options.

While there is generally a sense that high bandwidth channels are “better,” teens believe that the technical affordances of social media can provide a valuable safety net in some situations. In Nebraska, white 15-year-old Brooke prefers to use AIM to talk with friends when she is hurt or angry. She explains that she is shy and that AIM allows her to compose her thoughts and communicate her feelings without being silenced. At the same time, she notes that she has come to believe that talking is

“better” and she is trying to learn to vocalize her feelings. For Ty, a black 17-year-old in Los Angeles, flirting through social media is far less intimidating than doing so offline. Furthermore, there is less cost. As Ty puts it, “If they don't respond or they don't say the things I want to hear, then I'll just go on to somebody else. It's as simple as that.” For other teens, social media lets them be more cautious. Some teens spend a long time crafting a message to send to a crush, providing relief from the

awkwardness of approaching someone in person and risking stumbling over words.

Melanie, a white 15-year-old in Kansas, points out that the “computer mask” is extremely valuable for learning how to negotiate relationships, especially in middle

school. As she explains, “It’s so much easier to say what you’re thinking when you’re not looking at someone.” Thus, while higher bandwidth channels are still generally preferred, social media and low bandwidth channels can be especially valuable when learning how to navigate awkward or new situations.

The rise of social network sites did not introduce just one new communication channel, but a plethora of them. The affordances of the three most popular—private messages, comments, and bulletins—are each significant. As teens adopted social network sites, they treated each channel differently. Private messages are structurally similar to email, but teens can count on their friends’ checking these more often and they do not have to remember their friends’ current email addresses. Comments are more personal than bulletins and yet more public. Comments are often valued for lightweight conversations when it is acceptable for the interaction to be

“overheard.” Furthermore, because of the public nature of comments, comments are often used as a tool for marking and negotiating status, forcing teens to carefully craft their posts at times. In choosing between private messages and comments, teens often consider the intensity of the connection. For example, Jill, an El

Salvadoran 14-year-old from Los Angeles, explains that she thinks “a message is like if you want to like to a person like talk and talk and the comment is just like to just drop by and say ‘how are you’ and stuff.” MySpace bulletins provide a one-to-many channel where teens can broadcast their thoughts for everyone they know to read.

This is effective when people send messages infrequently, but collective abuse can kill this channel and many of the teens I interviewed complained about getting too

many updates to bother reading their bulletins. Bands often use this channel to mass market and it became a preferred channel for spammers who phish accounts to send mass marketing messages to potential customers. Yet continual chain mail, quizzes, and requests for comments can also start to look like spam, even when they come from friends. Other lightweight channels of communication—like Facebook’s

“poke” feature—are nothing more than a tool to acknowledge someone’s presence.

In choosing which channel to use for a particular interaction, teens balance many different factors. Mentally, they associate different channels with different types of content, for use in different situations, and for specific people. This results in a segmentation of people and content into different buckets based on tool. For example, a teen might view email in relation to teachers and homework, MySpace as the tool for joking with classmates and flirting, and IM as the channel for intimate conversations with friends. Not all channels are created equal and negotiating social interactions requires choosing which channels are best for which social situation.

Teens have many choices, but this process cannot set by an individual; it must be negotiated collectively.