I'm in the middle of a Facebook study myself right now and one of the things I find fascinating is the ways that students integrate these new channels into an "ecology" of communication technologies. For example, apparently there are things you can say on Facebook in a message that you can't say in email or IM, and that you wouldn't write on someone's Facebook wall. The ways that young people (these are generally late teens) appropriate communication channels is quite nuanced. It occurs to me that "online" or "the Internet" may not be the appropriate level of granularity here. -Andrea Forte (aforte@cc.gatech.edu) On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Andrea Kavanaugh wrote:
I think kids are comfortable because they are generally more likely to be writing to people they know from face-to-face relationships than are adults.
At 10:10 AM 2/28/2006, you wrote:
I have a question for those of you working with youth culture, particularly but not just around MySpace.
I have been interested recently by what I perceive as a gap between the ways in which most of us *use* the internet socially (ie, often without big issues about it) and the way we *think* about using the internet socially (ie, a poor substitute for more meaningful face-to-face interaction). Recently a number of adults have said to me that this gap between action and perception, which they acknowledge in themselves, is completely gone with teens, what with myspace and all.
My question is whether youth really perceive their online communication to be completely non-problematic compared to face-to-face communication, or if even amongst teens there is a sense that it might be a little pathetic or embarrassing to use the internet socially (even amongst those who do). Is the stigma around online socializing really completely gone for youth? Of course, adults always perceive kids as way better and more comfortable with the net than they are, which makes me wonder if this sense that kids have no sense of stigma is adult perception vs youth reality.
Thanks for your thoughts, Nancy _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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