‘Writing themselves into being’: youth, identity, and social media

Digital technologies have had a significant impact on the ways young people perceive themselves and interact with others. Before the rise of social media, it was the use of mobile phones that drew researchers’ attention to the way technological developments were playing a bigger part in youngsters’ identities and relationships. During the mid-1990s, ownership of mobile phones proliferated in economically developed countries, and they became an integral part of youngsters’ lives. In particular, use of mobile phones seemed to increase the importance of peer groups. Australian-based research by Patricia Gillard and her colleagues, for example, showed how possession of mobile phones made it possible for young people to ‘carry’ their friends around with them — not only into public spaces like the school but also into the private spaces of the home, so that for teenagers ‘the combination of a private space at home and intimate talk with friends may mean that friends become more influential in their emotional development and well-being’ (Gillard, Wale and Bow, 1998: 150).

SMS (Short Message Service) or ‘texting’ also developed into an important medium of communication. Originally conceived as a new paging system for busy professionals, SMS was rapidly laid claim to by young people and became a prevalent medium for establishing and maintaining peer group relations. In Britain, for example, fieldwork conducted by Alexander Taylor and Richard Harper (2001) found that mobile phones had become de rigeur among teenagers — and use of SMS was universal, with the exchange of text messages representing a ritualised form of ‘gift-giving’ that worked to express and cement young people’s friendships. In the new millennium, however, digital communication became even more central to young people’s lives as a consequence of interrelated developments in the technologies of the Internet and mobile phones.

Most obviously, the beginning of the twenty-first century saw changes in the structure of Internet sites that laid the way for the growth of ‘Web 2.0’. The term ‘Web 2.0’ was originally coined in 2005 by Tim O’Reilly (founder of the publishing house O’Reilly Media) to describe what he saw as a new generation of platforms on the World Wide Web. When the Web first emerged during the 1990s, it had enabled essentially a one-way flow of information. That is to say, its pages were generally static and, while they could be read by viewers, elements of interaction were limited. In contrast, O’Reilly highlighted what he saw as the rise of a radically new kind of Web. This was characterised by websites with a much higher degree of dynamism and interactivity. In Web 2.0 the two-way flow of information was more pronounced, and users’ experience was enhanced through a greater ability to collaborate and share information. Web 2.0, therefore, was marked by the rise of digital platforms that relied on material contributed by their users (known as ‘user-generated content’) and/or allowed users to create, share, collaborate, and communicate information with others — features embodied in platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok (see Chapter 3).

Alongside the rise of a more interactive Internet, important changes also occurred in mobile phone technology. Originally, the functionality of mobile phones - known as cellular or ‘cell’ phones - was limited to audio calls and texting. But this changed in 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone, the first smartphone. Performing many of the functions of a computer, smartphones allow the storage of data and, compared to cell phones, have much stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems. This facilitates the use of a wide range of software and Internet applications (including access to music, video, cameras, and gaming). The technologies of Web 2.0 and the smartphone, therefore, were complementary, and the convergence of the two laid the way for a boom in mobile digital media and communications.

As has been the case with many new forms of communication (see Chapter 3), youth was in the forefront of these developments, and smartphone ownership became virtually ubiquitous among young people across the economically developed world. In the US, for example, 96 per cent of young people aged between 18 and 29 owned a smartphone by 2018 (Statistica, 2019ix). Elsewhere, the picture was similar. In China, for instance, 94 per cent of people aged between 18 and 34 owned a smartphone in 2016 (Statistica, 2018Ü). And, by 2018, 99 per cent of German youngsters aged between 18 and 19 had a smartphone (Statistica, 2018iii), and in the UK they were owned by 93 per cent of 15-year-olds (Statistica, 2019x). At the same time, however, global inequalities were still pronounced in access to the new technologies. In India, for example, only 24 per cent of the entire population possessed a smartphone in 2018, and 35 per cent had no phone at all (Statistica, 201 Oxi).³ Moreover, economic inequalities ensured that even many youngsters with access to a smartphone were still excluded from using its more sophisticated functions (see Chapter 3).

Nevertheless, the social lives of young people with access to the full functionality of smartphones were profoundly transformed. The convergence of Web 2.0 interactivity and the technologies of mobile devices ensured that online social networks became the warp and weft of social relations for many young people. In 2018, for example, a study undertaken by the Pew Research Center, suggested the growth of mobile connections was fuelling more persistent online activity by young people. Of US youngsters aged between 13 and 17, the Pew researchers found that 44 per cent reported they went online several times a day, while some 45 per cent stated they were online ‘almost constantly’ — meaning that around nine in ten US teenagers were online multiple times daily (Anderson and Jiang, 2018: 8). Moreover, the youngsters’ online activity was revolving less around a single platform. Most significantly, while 71 per cent of teenagers said they used Facebook in 2014—15, this had declined to 51 per cent in 2018, and only 15 per cent said it was the site they used most often. Instead, platforms such as YouTube and social media sites like Instagram and Snapchat had leapt in popularity. Of their sample of youngsters, the Pew researchers reported that 85 per cent used YouTube, 72 per cent used Instagram and 69 per cent used Snapchat (Anderson and Jiang, 2018: 2). The popularity of Facebook among young people, then, was ebbing. Instead, youngsters’ online activity was increasingly taking place across multiple Internet sites and platforms.

Social media networks have become integral to young people’s lives because they represent a valuable arena in which to elaborate identity and build social relationships. As the US theorist danah boyd explains, the popularity of social networks lies in the way they allow youngsters to ‘write themselves and their community into being’ (boyd, 2008: 120). However, whereas earlier Internet researchers such as Rheingold and Turkle had celebrated the new possibilities for multiple, fluid online identities (see above), for most young people the reality of everyday use of the Internet is more prosaic. Most research suggests, for example, that young people’s online lives are deeply embedded in their offline experience. During the late 1990s, for instance, Chris Abbott argued that the Internet promoted ‘complementarity rather than alterity’ (1998: 97). That is to say, for most young users, the Web did not represent an ‘alternative world’ but a setting where they connected with their peers, swapping opinions and comparing experiences. Undoubtedly, some young people engage playfully and creatively with different identities in contexts such as online games and virtual worlds. But, for the most part, empirical research suggests that young people’s online and offline lives are mutually constituted rather than separate and distinct.

In her study of young people in Bermuda, for example, Katie Davis shows how youngsters strive for consistency and coherence (rather than multiplicity) in their online and offline identities. Pre-existing, offline friendships, she argues, underpin the way young people make use of the Internet and ‘adolescents tend to present themselves online in a manner that is consistent with their offline identities’ (Davis, 2014: 17). As boyd points out, social media networks are akin to 1950s drive-in cinemas or 1980s shopping malls in the way they provide young people with a public space to socialise and build relationships. ‘Collectively’, boyd argues, the significance of social media lies in the way they ‘provide teens with a space to hang out and connect with friends’ (boyd, 2014: 5).

The importance of social networks in the lives of young people was underscored by a large, US-based study undertaken by Mizuko Ito and her associates in the first decade of the new millennium (Ito et al., 2009). Drawing together 23 case-studies, the three-year ethnographic investigation revealed how youngsters used social media for a wide variety of reasons - for socialising with friends, swapping information, gossiping, or just having fun. In some senses, then, social networks are very much akin to traditional ‘teen hangouts’ in the way they provide spaces for socialising and building friendships. At the same time, however, many theorists have also pointed to the way social media networks have complicated traditional boundaries dividing the ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms. Sonia Livingstone (2009), for example, has highlighted how young people’s increased use of social media networks like Facebook has meant that many ‘private’ interactions now take place in public domains, so that youngsters’ social lives have become a blurred intersection of private and public realms — new forms of online space that danah boyd terms ‘networked publics’ (boyd, 2011).

In her analysis of the way young people navigate their way through these blurry public/private online spaces, Erika Pearson offers the metaphor of ‘a bedroom with walls made of glass’. Inside this ‘glass bedroom’, Pearson argues,

... private conversations and intimate exchanges occur, each with varying awareness of distant friends and strangers moving past transparent walls that separate groups from more deliberate and constructed ‘outside’ displays. The glass bedroom itself is not an entirely private space ... it is a bridge that is partially private and public, constructed online through signs and language.

(Pearson, 2009)

In these terms, then, communication through social media networks is a fuzzy mixture of the private and the public. On one level, young people have a sense that their online dialogues take place separate from — or ‘walled oft' from - the outside world. At the same time, however, the ‘walls’ are made from glass, so they afford a level of visibility that may be beyond the control of the occupant (unless, that is, they consciously decide to adjust the platform’s privacy settings — i.e. draw the ‘curtains’). In this way, then, Pearson suggests young people’s use of social media can be seen as a performance of identity that takes place in a blurred amalgamation of public and private realms. Drawing on such ideas, theorists such as Sian Lincoln (2014) argue that, rather than being lost and confused in hazy distinctions between public and private spheres, young people are often adept at organising their use of social networks — so that the virtual spaces of social media become almost an extension of the physical spaces of youngsters’ bedrooms. From this perspective, while social networks like Facebook or Instagram are a way for young people to reach out and make social relationships in a variety of public contexts, they also serve as a way of demarcating personal identities, individual tastes and private spaces.