“It is not accidental that teens live in a culture infatuated with celebrity – the “reality” presented by reality TV and the highly publicized dramas (such as that between socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie) portray a magnified (and idealized) version of the networked publics that teens are experiencing, complete with surveillance and misinterpretation. The experiences that teens are facing in the publics that they encounter appear more similar to the celebrity idea of public life than to the ones their parents face.”[1]
So reads one of danah boyd’s conclusions about teenage experiences in networked publics toward the end of her excellent (albeit dated) article “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites.” I have been talking about frictionless experiences ever since I heard about Mark Zuckerberg talk at the F8 conference, and there were several times in this article where this idea of friction struck me. The above quote, for example, refers primarily to the wide publicity that anyone and everyone receives now because of the internet generally and social media specifically. But I’m inclined to say that there is more similarity between teenagers’ public experiences and The Simple Life than publicity. The point of the show was to watch two second-rate celebrities, who had never experienced the kind of friction that regular folk do, perform menial, dirty, friction-filled jobs. They worked on farms, cooked meals, styled their own hair – seriously terrifying work. Their lives had been so cushioned and limited that watching them attempt these tasks or even talk to others who performed these tasks became painful. Introducing friction in the lives of two celebrities who had not previously encountered that level of resistance made for three seasons of snigger-worthy television.
Back to boyd. Her article basically explores a selected history of social networks and, specifically, the rise and fall of MySpace. Basically teenagers fled to online communities because they had nowhere else to go in the off-line world. Previously popular places like roller-skating rinks and malls started to over-regulate and increase authority presence. While kids could still be kids at Chuck-E-Cheese’s, teens couldn’t be teens at Skateland. So they took to the internet and found functionally similar spaces where they could be themselves. It didn’t take long, however, before parents started policing those spaces as well which led to multiple online identities (one for parents and one for friends) and a steady exodus of teenagers from MySpace. boyd's conclusion is that “teens need access to these publics – both mediated and unmediated – to mature, but their access is regularly restricted.”[2] She makes related points throughout her piece:
We are doing our youth a disservice if we believe that we can protect them from the world by limiting their access to public life. They must enter that arena, make mistakes, and learn from them. Our role as adults is not to be their policemen…[3]
While social interaction can and does take place in private environments, the challenges of doing so in public life are part of what help youth grow. Making mistakes and testing limits are fundamental parts of this. Yet, there is a pervading attitude that teens must be protected from their mistakes.[4]
While I agree with this philosophy generally, it seems to me that mediated public spaces aren’t designed for this kind of maturation. That is to say, if the interfaces with which teenagers (and other age groups) interact are meant to provide frictionless experiences, then are these mediated publics equal to unmediated publics in the role they play in socialization? Do people prefer mediated publics? If so, is fuller access to that social space priming future The Simple Life stars? I’m being purposely hyperbolic and exaggerating boyd’s metaphor – but there do seem to be some inconsistencies within this kind of argument. I’m interested in these questions as well as exploring the various arenas from which friction is being removed, to what extent, and to what end.
Many of my concerns and conclusions are highly speculative and reactionary, but if it makes for good fiction then it makes for a few good blog posts.
[1]. danah boyd, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life,” in MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning: Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume, ed. David Buckingham (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 22.
[2]. Ibid., 22-23.
[3]. Ibid., 22.
[4]. Ibid., 19.
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