The "generation" concept is interesting. We had a discussion last night in my New Com Techs and Society class about MySpace/Facebook. My students are grad students, but have gone straight to grad school from undergrad, so they're in their early/mid 20s. They admit being "addicted," but also considered it a juvenile pursuit; they were embarrassed to say they were members of that community. Is Facebooking just another thing that "kids" grow out of? JS On Feb 28, 2006, at 8:45 AM, Nancy Baym wrote:
My sense if that if it is dependent on all these things, then the notion that "kids today" view online interaction as completely nonstigmatic is a problematic notion.
I'm not suggesting that youth don't USE all this stuff -- it's evident that they do and that they are into it. My 9 year old son lives on Runescape whenever he can (playing, for the most part, with the playground crowd from his school).
What I am talking about is more like this -- when I interviewed college students a few years ago (before they were all "addicted" -- their own term -- to facebook), the people who rarely used the net socially were very happy to say that those who did things like IM with roomates were "pathetic." The ones who did IM roomates said they did it, but viewed themselves (or at least said they did) as "geeky," "pathetic," and other derogatory terms for doing so. Whether they were really stigmatizing their own internet use, or were responding to a sense that they *should* stigmatize it I don't know.
Were these college kids the last generation to think there was anything wrong with what they did (and enjoyed doing) online?
Don't want to play the killjoy here, but aren't our answers related to [and dependent on]:
- age [teen is broad] - technological proximity [demand] and design [offer] - gender [relatively self-explanatory] - size and nature of existing social networks [directly related to Andrea's point] - topic and nature of discussion [soap talk vs. sport talk vs. me talk] - class [oh, yes, kids form different classes use and think of the Internet, and other ICTs, in different ways]
La differance?
Cheers
Wainer
PS My bongo-bongo students seem pretty uncomfortable with online chats, but well into other electronic mediations [but hey, this is CH1 Britain]
-----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Andrea Kavanaugh Sent: 28 February 2006 15:24 To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] teens and myspace
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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--------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Jamie S. Switzer Assistant Professor Department of Journalism and Technical Communication Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523-1785 970.491.2239 fax 970.491.2908 jamie.switzer@colostate.edu