Teen Identity Online

This week’s reading was from danah boyd’s dissertation “Taken Out of Context.” She writes about how MySpace and Facebook have played a part in the identities and social lives of American teens. She puts much emphasis on the presentation of self through a media that is very complex. One of her essential points is that a person cannot control how they are perceived through these sites. She opens up the fourth chapter with a bio on a seventeen-year-old girl named Allie. Boyd states that Allie’s MySpace profile is “a social oddity, in the sense that hers is the first generation to have to publicly articulate itself, to have to write itself into being as a precondition of social participation.” I would argue, however, that this is not the case. I am six years older than Allie and I also used an Internet portal to describe myself in a short paragraph. It was my profile for AOL Instant Messenger and I spent countless hours coming up with the perfect combination of quotes, jokes, and personal information to present the “best” version of myself. This was my personal precursor for how to relate over Facebook. I already had a sense for what was appropriate to put in a public forum about myself and what would make me look unfavorable. And I would argue that we have had to write ourselves into being long before the Internet. For example, when writing a resume, one puts as much effort into the wording or the editing of what should be left in and what should be taken out. Also, newspaper biographies are another example. In order to participate in the society of those who are published, one must create a text that describes them without the benefit of a face-to-face meeting.

One key difference is the number of people who participate in this practice. I would agree with boyd that “while creating a tangible digital identity is relatively simple, negotiating the technology to engage in acts of self-presentation and impression management is complex and different from how these acts play out in unmediated environments.” There was no way for me to know that even though I was painstakingly thorough in producing my online image, I had no way to know if I was being taken out of context. And maybe that contributes to why I have always been so motivated to continually update my profile, whether it be Facebook, AOL Instant Messanger, or Twitter. Boyd states that “teens often do not want to let their profiles get stale because they think that this leaves a bad impression” and think this is true of adults as well.

The other part of boyd’s dissertation I wanted to touch on was the section about deception online. Boyd states: “Some teens seek to create rich profiles, while others maintain profiles that provide little information. Yet among both groups, uncountable teens respond to requests for name, age, location, income, and other demographic information with responses that do not accurately reflect the teen’s “true” identity.” Part of her reasoning as to why some are intentionally deceptive related to a sense of safety. For example, I may say I’m 18 even though I am only 13 in order to appear more mature and less able to be taken advantage of. But I would like to note that, at times, in my generation, lying about age was done for an opposite reason. I’d say a lot of teens lie about their age in order to qualify themselves for more “adult” behavior online. Such as the pre-teen that claims to be twenty-something in order to engage in a mature chat room conversation.

While boyd’s dissertation is interesting, she struggles with the same sort of accountability and documentary issues we all are grappling with today. Her work amounts to online ethnography, and it is hard (for me at least) to accept any online cultural artifact without full documentation. Admittedly we read only a small portion of her work, but several of her claims could have been more fully developed.

This is a movie poster for a Lifetime original movie concerning children chatting online, which I think is funny.