Contribution
An ethnography of American teenagers on MySpace and Facebook in 2004–2008, organised around three relations: identity (Chapter 4), peer sociality (Chapter 5) and power over teens (Chapter 6). Its general apparatus, introduced in Chapter 1 and used throughout, is a set of four properties of networked publics (persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability) and three dynamics they produce (invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, the blurring of public and private). It extends Meyrowitz’s account of broadcast media (1985) from public figures to everyday people.
Key insight
People locate a performance by knowing its audience. Networked media hide the audience and keep, copy and index the performance, so the context a person writes for and the context in which it is read come apart. What changes is not how teens present themselves but the boundaries that used to keep each presentation with its audience.
Assumptions
- A constructivist view of technology (§1.3): properties and dynamics “do not determine teen practices” (p. 3) but reshape the environment.
- Goffman’s impression management as the core frame for identity (p. 125), with profiles as “digital bodies”.
- A public is “both a space where people may gather, interact, and be viewed and also an imagined community” (p. 21).
- The fieldwork: 2.5 years of interviews and observation of teens across the United States (p. 2). Its sample and protocol are in Chapter 2, not read here.
Key results
- Networked publics (p. 15). Publics “restructured by networked technologies”, at once “the space constructed through networked technologies” and “the imagined community that emerges”.
- Four properties (p. 27). Persistence, replicability, scalability and searchability. None is new alone; in networked publics they are “a part of the environment by default”, “persistent-by-default, ephemeral-when-necessary” (p. 30). Scalability is “the possibility of tremendous visibility, not the guarantee of it” (p. 31).
- Three dynamics (p. 34). “Invisible audiences: not all audiences are visible when a person is contributing online, nor are they necessarily co-present. Collapsed contexts: the lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts. The blurring of public and private: without control over context, public and private become meaningless binaries”. They are “an amplification of those Meyrowitz astutely recognized resulting from broadcast media” (p. 34).
- The paradigm case (pp. 36–37). Carmichael, after Meyrowitz (1985: 43): “very different rhetorical styles when speaking to blacks and whites”; “There was no neutral speaking style”; he “was able to maintain distinct styles as long as he was able to segment social groups, he ran into trouble when electronic media collapsed those social groups”.
- Segmenting fails online (p. 37). People “try to segment contexts” by discouraging audiences, limiting searchable information and privacy settings, “Yet a motivated individual can often circumvent any of these approaches.”
- Context is not deception (p. 37). “What is lost in this approach is the ways in which context helps people properly locate their performances. Bilingual speakers choose different languages depending on context”.
- Collisions before and after (p. 38). “Events like weddings, in which context collisions are common, are frequently scripted to make everyone comfortable. Unexpected collisions, like running into one’s boss while out with friends, can create awkwardness, but since both parties are typically aware of the collision, it can often be easy to make quick adjustments”. “In networked publics, contexts often collide such that the performer is unaware of audiences from different contexts, magnifying the awkwardness and making adjustments impossible.”
- Facets, not fragments (p. 125). Against Turkle, teens are not “fragmenting their identities through online engagement”; “they present a facet of their identity based on the social context involved”, which does not create “identity crises”.
- Imagined audiences (pp. 143–146). Teens write for friends; “their potential audience might be global, their imagined audience is very local” (pp. 144–145). Strangers are assumed to “walk on by” (p. 146). “Negotiating multiple audiences creates context collisions and teens feel more pressure when they are forced to contend simultaneously with different audiences, such as peers and parents” (p. 146).
- Two tactics (p. 147). Structural (“security through obscurity”: false information, privacy settings) and social (Friends lists and “Keep Out” demands). “But it’s my space” against “But it’s public”: teens’ “sense of privacy has to do with context and control, not potential access”.
- Search collapses contexts (p. 159). “Online, boundaries are porous—search collapses contexts, replicability allows traces of social acts to be copied to other spaces”.
- Public by default, private when necessary (p. 163). Early MySpace users kept public profiles. “Being ‘public’ made sense when the relatively homogeneous potential audience did not create conflicts in how people presented themselves, but when teens started facing unwanted audiences, many chose to control access instead of limit self-presentation.”
- Documented collisions (pp. 165–166). Kira’s grandfather read a quiz result on her public profile (song lyrics about smoking joints) as drug use, and her family “flip[ped] out”; after she went private, her grandparents used her stepmother’s account and read a photo caption as evidence that she was “sleeping around”; she then de-Friended all adults. Clyde keeps his profile private lest friends’ joking insults make him look like “a jerk”. James went private after a friend was grounded over party comments others left on the friend’s page.
- Privacy settings do not restore a context (p. 167). “Their ability to constrain the audience does not necessarily resolve their desire to have a coherent context in which to act”, since Friending pressures pull people from different contexts into one list.
- No feedback loop (p. 169). “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.”
- Conclusion (pp. 294, 300). “At the core, for most teens, not much has changed”; the properties and dynamics “are not wholly new” but an extension of Meyrowitz’s, newly interrelated and widespread.
Claims
Only a Read note may fill this in; this reading is Skimmed. The grading in prose: the properties and dynamics are an analytic framework, argued and illustrated, not tested; the collisions are documented by interview accounts; nothing is counted except that “roughly a quarter” of interviewees listed a false age (p. 149) and Pew’s 66 percent who limit access (p. 160).
Concepts
- Networked publics — publics restructured by networked technologies, as space and as imagined community (p. 15).
- Collapsed contexts — “the lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts” (p. 34).
- Context collision — the meeting of audiences from different contexts; scripted (a wedding), noticed (meeting the boss), or unseen by the performer online (p. 38).
- Invisible audiences — audiences not visible or not co-present when one contributes (p. 34).
- Imagined audience — the audience a teen writes for, local and peer-based, as against the potential audience (pp. 143–145).
Connections
Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place (1985) is the source of the collapsed contexts dynamic and of the Carmichael case; Goffman (1959, 1963, 1966, 1967) is the frame for self-presentation; Livingstone (2008) for privacy as control over a situation; Nissenbaum (2004) on contextual integrity is mentioned for privacy (p. 40). None of these is held in the record. NOTE-710 read §1.5, §4.4 and the Top Friends passage of §5.4; this reading adds the rest of Chapters 1 and 4 and Chapter 7.
Bearing on the record
- THEORY-406: not at all, for its promote_when. The promote_when asks for a study that observes the same people presenting differently to two audiences, records when the audiences are kept apart and when a channel brings them together, and measures conflict in both conditions, with the comparison fixed before the data are collected. boyd supplies no such study and makes no such comparison. The closest she comes is the remark that public profiles “made sense when the relatively homogeneous potential audience did not create conflicts” and that teens went private when adults arrived (p. 163), a recollected before-and-after with no measure of conflict. Her evidence is the kind the promote_when says cannot settle the question: vivid cases and interviews in which collisions are reported as awkward.
- THEORY-406, as a reading of boyd. The full chapters confirm what
THEORY-406 quotes (pp. 34, 36–38, 146) and the “unseen” clause (p. 38,
p. 169). They add two refinements a status review may want:
- What collides. In the cases boyd documents (pp. 165–166), the conflict usually comes from a single presentation, often content others co-wrote, read by an unintended audience that lacks the context to interpret it: a quiz result taken for drug use, joking insults taken for meanness. THEORY-406’s title speaks of presentations that differ by audience. Carmichael is that case; the teens’ cases are mostly misreading out of context.
- The remedy. Teens restore separation by controlling the audience rather than by changing what they present (p. 163), and boyd says this does not fully restore a coherent context (p. 167). This is consistent with THEORY-406’s conditional (trouble when boundaries go), not a test of it.
- CLAIM-317 and CLAIM-196. The reading gives them no measured evidence beyond NOTE-710’s. CLAIM-196’s thesis that role conflict needs an overlap of contexts gets illustration from pp. 146 and 163–166, not a comparison.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- Ethnographic and unmeasured. No count of conflicts, no comparison of segmented with collapsed audiences.
- US teenagers, 2004–2008, on two sites, with Carmichael as the only case outside them, and that one at second hand through Meyrowitz.
- Not read in full. The methods chapter and the chapters on peers and adults were not read beyond the passages named, so the sample and its limits are not stated here.
Open questions
- Does conflict concentrate where audiences meet, when it is counted against cases where they stay apart? boyd’s framework predicts it; no study in the record measures it.
- Is the trouble in collapse the meeting of differing presentations, or the reading of one presentation without its context? The two predict different remedies: consistent presentation for the first, context markers or audience control for the second.