Not Only Youth Heart Social Media
I loved the article, Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life by Danah Boyd. I, like many teenagers are obsessed with social media. I use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter daily. I blog, check out videos on YouTube and I find all these resources informative as well as entertaining. They keep me connected and entertained.
The article discusses the origin of social networking platforms such as MySpace and Friendster, Boyd says that most young people joined MySpace because they were, “Music junkies [that] loved the fact that they could listen to and download music for free while celebrity watchers enjoyed writing to musicians who were happy to respond.” (4) Instagram is similar to this, when one follows celebrities or musical artists one feels as if you are actually friends with them. As you glimpse through said celebrities pictures, you can comment and like their pictures and for a split second you are in that celebrities circle of friends, you are actually “friends” with someone that you have only seen on TV and in magazines, “teenagers are more focused on socializing with people they knew personally and celebrities that they adore” (5), who doesn’t want to message a celebrity and imagine them reading their comment and actually being a part of that person’s world.
Later in the article Boyd discusses the popularity of different social media networks based on cultural values, “few sites successfully support groups from different nation-states, although Orkut is popular in both India and Brazil, Cyworld has large audiences in China and South Korea, and MySpace is trying to grow globally” (5). In the United Arab Emirates, Snapchat is currently extremely popular especially among young women. Snapchat allows “snaps”, messages from the user to disappear after 1 to 10 seconds from the recipients’ device. Due to Islamic beliefs many young women don’t take pictures of themselves, but Snapchat allows them to participate in social media without violating their religious/cultural beliefs.
Blackplanet is also mentioned in the article, Blackplanet was a social networking site geared to African American individuals. I joined Blackplanet back in 1998, because I was looking for an outlet to met and network with more black people. Growing up in a predominantly white area, as well as going to a predominantly white school, I never thought that I had a group of friends that looked like me. When I found out about Blackplanet, this was my chance to meet other black people.
So many concerns when it comes to online networks and one of them is online predators going after teens pretending to be “friends”, I once asked my grade 7 class how many of them had an individual approach them online asking them for pictures or a friend request. I was shocked when most of them told me that strangers had contacted them asking for photos and conversation.
There are four properties that are fundamental to separate unmediated publics from networked publics , replicability is one of them. Replicability is defined as, “hearsay can be deflected as misinterpretation, but networked public expressions can be copied from one place to another verbatim such that there is no way to distinguish the “original” from the “copy.” (9). There have been cases of individuals stealing work of social media such as Facebook and there is no way to determine who is the originator of the material.
In conclusion, teens and young people love social media because they love to connect with others as well as sense a connection to celebrities and musicians that they love.
Boyd, D. (2009), “Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life”
Word count: 615
I enjoyed reading through your personal experiences with Social Media. Like yourself, I use social media daily,to stay connected with friends and to keep up to date with news. Just this morning, I woke up and had a reminder (through Facebook) of a mutual friends birthday being today. This particular person is someone I will be seeing at a party this weekend, and because of the reminder – I was able to text them directly and send them well wishes. Without social media, it is unlikely I would remember such a thing, and perhaps feel a little less connected to the person this weekend at our social gathering. There is no doubt, that social media provides us with multiple opportunities to stay connected. It’s value in society is unprecedented and as educators, I believe it provides us with a valuable platform to teach and educate the youth of today. My argument is not with the positives that Social Media provides, but instead with the “concerns” that you touched upon in your post. Boyd stated that people “often fabricate key identifying information like name, age, and location”, as well as create ghost profiles of people who do not necessarily exist (or do, and have been “stolen”). Such an act is easy to do, as most social media sites have little to no verification protocol in which they utilize to check authenticity of their users. This has led to a huge surge in what we now call “catfishing”. Catfishing is defined as being the “lure of someone into a relationship by means of a fictional online persona”. Catfishing has becoming so prevalent that it garnered the attention of the network MTV, which led to the creation of a very popular show “Catfish” (now in it’s 4th season). This show details the lure of innocent people who believe in phantom profiles and invest their time, money and feelings into them. But perhaps what it is most concerning is the individuals who feel the need to create these fake profiles in an attempt to escape their own reality. Most often, these individuals are not older people but youths of the same demographic who are utilizing fake sites to extort goods, bully, and perhaps most sadly, create relationships they don’t feel confident in creating in their own real life. Finally, I would agree with Boyd’s final comment that we “as a society, we need to figure out how to educate teens to navigate social structures that are quite unfamiliar to us because they will be faced with these publics as adults”.
Catfish (TV SHOW) Preview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMA4x7aXJT0
Boyd, D. (2009), “Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life”
I actually experienced a catfish like experience when I was 20. I was was dating a guy and I was also on a social networking group. I started to get messages from a guy stating that he knew the guy I was dating and started telling me all these negative things about him. When the truth came out the ‘guy’ online was actually a girl pretending to be a guy. She was interested I the guy I was dating and was trying to break us up.these are the type of things people have to deal with today, sigh.
As a casual observer of my social media accounts, I found this article fascinating (as with everything surrounding social media). I get why social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have millions of participants on a daily basis as the need to stay connected and to have a sense of belonging is very important. I also find it interesting how some people have gone beyond (Hearting…is that even a verb?) social media to being obsessed with it. I don’t believe this is just a young person’s issue as Boyd suggested in 2009. A Pew Internet research study from 2011 revealed that 66% of online adults use social media sites to stay in touch with family or friends. In 2014, Pew Internet research found that the largest user of social networking/media sites were 18-29 year olds with 89% usage this is closely followed by the 30-49 year old group with 82% usage.
I don’t necessarily find the numbers startling, but a study published late last year (2014) suggests that social media is the least trusted form of communication. Researchers found that only 2% of those surveyed believed social media sites were very secure. Could this be in response to the high levels of advertisements, Facebook’s privacy changes and/or issues with Snapchat’s security (to name a few). If this is the case why do so many people continue to use these sites as communication tools? Does our need to stay connected and have a sense of belonging trump the need for privacy and security? Thoughts?
Resources:
Eler, A. (2011). 67% of online adults use social media to say in touch with friends. ReadWrite. Retrieved from http://readwrite.com/2011/11/15/67_of_online_adults_use_social_media_to_stay_in_to
Pew Research Center. (2014). Social networking fact sheet. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/
Smith, J. (2014). Privacy is dead: People trust social media less than any other form of communication. Observer. Retrieved from http://observer.com/2014/11/people-trust-social-media-less-than-any-other-form-of-communication/
Honestly, I think people don’t care. I think that they are so obsessed with staying in touch and staying on top of everything that is going on through Social media that their privacy is the last thing that they are worried about.
Hi Haneefa,
I think you may be correct for some people, which really is sad in my very humble opinion.
-Ronaye