Hi Nancy and others I think the answer to this has to be more nuanced. For an example, my interviews with both families and young people between between 12 and 18 suggest that it depends on the application. For instance, use of chat rooms is thought to be 'sad' due to the suggestion that you have no offline friends of your own to talk to, whilst IM is 'cool' particularly having a large contact list. Also, there's a useful chapter which touches on this in Cyberkids - Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine, specifically about how young girls may perform gender by positioning themselves as being for/against internet use (if my memory serves). I've seen this in my own research too. Sue -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Lauren M. Squires Sent: 28 February 2006 18:18 To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] teens and myspace Sorry for this long response, but there's already been quite a lot to respond to! To Nancy's main point - it seems there IS still some stigma to online interaction that views it as not being entirely "real," even amongst heavy users, but I'm not sure how far down in age this goes. On sites like Friendster or Myspace, people use them emphatically but then often make explicitly negative commentary in their profiles, in testimonials/comments/wall posts, or more subtle commentary through use of ironic emoticons or sarcasm - to show that they *know* that what's online is not their *whole* world, or at least not their whole "REAL" world. I'm thinking of Alice Marlow's paper from AoIR in Chicago and what she called "authentic-ironic" as a kind of Friendster profile: these are people who use the system but for self-presentational purposes, also remain detached from it. Whether this applies to people younger than and equal to teens though, in addition to people in their 20s (my demographic), I'm not sure of. I have a hunch that it does apply to some extent - but if it doesn't, or if it applies less to younger age groups, it can have something to do simply with saturation and integration, as Nancy alluded to somewhere up in this discussion. People in their 20s have experienced life (however long ago it may have seemed, and however distant a way of life it now feels) without the internet, without email, IM, or Myspace. People in their teens and younger, for the most part, have not. I would expect that to have grown up immersed in a technology, rather than constantly working to integrate it, has a great effect on how one then views that technology's relationship to one's daily life and how one compares social interaction with/through it to other forms of interaction. Seems it also has to do with whether there's a sense of how connected online practices are to offline practices. Facebook, for instance, seems to be very connected (rooted, even) to the offline. LJ, probably usually less so. Nancy, you wrote: "Whether they were really stigmatizing their own internet use, or were responding to a sense that they *should* stigmatize it I don't know." I'm not sure there's a difference. If you think you *should* stigmatize it, then it seems it's stigmatized. The point about different applications is critical - for some groups, LJ may not be a "cool" place to hang out online whereas AIM is. Like Starbucks is not, but the mall is. And what you value (as Kevin said) or what your ideologies are (as Joshua said) also depend on your social networks - a particular group of users could think Myspace is cool but (as Demetri Martin so eloquently put it on the Daily Show) Friendster "got kinda gay." So many variables. Also, FWIW, there's much to look at with how Media's representation of new media affects/reflects users' perceptions of it. What other media are young people consuming, and what does that media tell them about internet spaces? (Demetri Martin piece on Myspace, example case in point.) Lauren -- lauren m. squires lx: http://polyglotconspiracy.net cmc: http://sociocmc.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ 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 Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/