Tuesday, April 8, 2008
American Teens "writing themselves into being"
The popularity of social networking sites, particularly Myspace, which Dannah Boyd discusses in her article "Why Youth (Heart) Social Networking Sites" is particularly apparent amongst teens. Social forums such as Myspace allow teens an opportunity to socialize in a "public" forum, but with a greater degree of control than in normal social situations. Myspace allows teens to edit and sculpt the information and image they make available to the public before it actually becomes available to the public. This provides teens with a "safer" space for public interaction because, unlike face to face social interaction which is unpredictable and changes moment to moment, they have the opportunity to reflect on how their interactions will be percieved before interacting. I believe this is simultaneously helpful and harmful to teens. On one hand, teens having an opportunity to sculpt their public image can enable them to control how they are percieved and may reduce social anxiety that may occur in face to face interaction. On the other hand, this carefully edited image is influenced by numerous factors present in the normal teen socialization forum, teens still feel the pressure to look "cool". Facing this pressure, teens may "write themselves into being" by creating an online identity of what they strive to be, instead of the reality of their personality. This could create a whole host of problems.
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5 comments:
i agree generally with what you said, except for the fact that the net is a "safer" area. i think, in a sense, it's safer because it lets you edit yourself, but at the same time, why should you need to edit yourself? this is the way that a lot of people tend to get into trouble with lies and deceit because most of the time, they cant remember what lie they said on their site when they are in real life. it is interesting that people gain confidence when they are not face to face with someone. this is where you get people breaking up with their significant others via email. why? because people cant be themselves in person, and maybe that is the problem we need to fix. Teens (well, everyone really) need to write their TRUE selves into being, not some random mosaic, mish-mash of "cool" thoughts.
Online profiles are filled with identity claims, be they direct statements that you say about your self, or your Display name, even which pictures you choose to display. The Jenkins essay really stresses that these forms of identity expression oftentimes are not accurate portrayals of oneself. Rather it is the identity you wish to express. That being said, can we really argue that we're making connections with people, or are we being duped into 'connecting'with fictionalized, enhanced, cyber-personalities that have been carefully crafted? Further more, aren't these online sites opening the door to new ways of misrepresentation within the realm human interaction?
Participants definitely fine-tune their profiles trying to have others perceive them exactly the way they want to be perceived. But you can tell when a person is for real or not. You can tell when a person is posturing in the same way you can tell in person.
I don't think this aspect of online profiles could actually "create a whole host of problems" as you say it could. The "real" people are still gonna be generally known as "real," and the "phonies" are still gonna be seen as such. People can make small attempts to improve their image by putting up "cool" pictures and wording their comments with the most appropriate lingo, but their efforts are usually pretty transparent. No one can actually dupe their whole network of friends or the whole population of their high school into thinking they are somebody they're clearly not...
Note: This comment applies to people that use online networks to interact with people they know in person or are connected to by one other person. MySpace celebrities or Youtube icons like lonelygirl15 --whose viewers are mainly people across the country that they don't know--don't count in what I'm saying. Obviously, lonelygirl15 fooled millions, but that was like a corporate ploy. If you don't know what I'm talking about, click here and then here.
Plus...isn't what we strive to be more important than what we are at the moment? It's a question of how successfully a person becomes what/who they want to be. When people project an image of themselves but do not become that person as soon as writing it into being, that's when they are worthy of criticism.
People change constantly. I think that a person's image of who they want to become is really the core of that person's current identity. But that person must immediately fit into the identity they've put out there. And if that person finds they can't do so, or if they change their minds about who they want to be, they must then project a self-image that correlates to what they've discovered.
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