[Air-l] teens and myspace

[Angela Thomas]

Dear Nancy and others,

Since I'm from Australia I've ended up late into this great discussion.  I
am working with groups of tweens and teens across a range of contexts and
have just written a paper about the seemlessness of children's social
practices across a range of spaces - both online and offline.  I've
pointed out that there is no dichotomy for them and that they blend into
each other.  The paper will appear in a journal called "E-Learning" at:
http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/ for anybody interested.  Since the paper
covers the 11 - 18 age group I've used the words children, adolescents and
young people accordingly.

Here's my asbtract:

Children’s virtual experiences as an interface to their identities and
their everyday lives

Angela Thomas

University of Sydney


Abstract

In this paper I will explore the seamlessness between children’s online and
offline worlds.  For children, there is no such dichotomy of online and
offline, or virtual and real – the digital is so much intertwined into
their lives and psyche that the one is entirely enmeshed with the other. 
Despite early research pointing to the differences that mark the virtual
as a space of “otherness”, I want to suggest that the fabric of children’s
everyday lives knows no such distinct demarcation, and that what they do in
their virtual worlds significantly affects how they connect to society. 
Moreover, through the virtual, children are simultaneously engaging in
acts of self-reflection, self-fashioning and identity formation.  Using
data from a longitudinal ethnographic study of children online, I
illuminate a number of case studies which support this argument.  I do so
by using narrative accounts based on extensive interviews with focus
children.

Here's a bit of the conclusion and my references:

Throughout the paper I have made six key points:

·	Children live in complex, heteroglossic, dynamically interactional
worlds, with the ability to multitask and exist successfully across a
variety of spaces, cultures and roles at any given time
·	Children’s lives in online communities connect to and blend into their
lives in offline communities: socially, emotionally, sometimes phyically,
and intellectually
·	What children do online is essentially similar to what they do offline:
make friends, talk about their interests, engage in hobbies and pursuits
that interest them, and have fun
·	Young people are engaged in struggles of identity formation: they
struggle for power, popularity, to define who they are, and to understand
their early sexual development.  This is reflected in their online worlds,
though sometimes expressed through alternative semiotic means.
·	Discursively produced themes of angst, power, romance and sex can be
drawn from these case studies, reflecting the parallels of everyday lived
experiences and fluidity of emotions between the online and offline worlds
inhabited by young people
·	Online communities are important socialisation agents for youth culture


REFERENCES

Agger, B. (2004). The Virtual Self. MA, USA: Blackwell.
Arnett, J. J. (1995). Adolescents’ uses of media for self-socialization.
Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 24, pp. 519 – 533.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. C.
Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Beavis, C., Nixon, H. & Atkinson, S. (2005) LAN cafes: cafes, places of
gathering, or sites of informal teaching and learning? Education,
Communication and Information (Routledge UK), 5(1), 41-60. Special issue:
New Media, Production Practices, Learning Spaces.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology
(M. Adamson, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original
work published 1982, 1987)
Buckingham, D. (2000). After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age
of Electronic Media. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender as Performance. A Critical Sense: Interviews with
Intellectuals. P. Obsborne.
Davis, I. (2005). Talis, Web 2.0 and All That.  [Blog post: July 4, 2005]. 
Internet Alchemy. Retrieved September 20, 2005, from
http://internetalchemy.org/2005/07/talis-web-20-and-all-that
Denzin, N.K. (1992). The Many Faces of Emotionality: Reading Persona.
Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience. C. Ellis &
Flaherty, M. G. London, SAGE Publications: 17-30.
Ellis, C. & Flaherty, M. (1992). An Agenda for the Interpretation of Lived
Experience. Investigating Subjectivity. C. Ellis & Flaherty, M. London,
Sage Publications.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other
writings 1972-1977. London, Harvester Wheatshaft.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other
writings 1972-1977. London, Harvester Wheatshaft.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Gee, J. P. (2001). Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education.
In W. G. Secada (Ed.) Review of Research in Education, 25, 99-126.
Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association.
Haraway, D. (1997).
Modest_Witness at Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and
technoscience.  London: Routledge.
James, A., Jenks, C. and Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing Childhood. Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press.
Kelly, K. (2005). We Are the Web. Wired. Issue 13.08, August 2005.
Retrieved October 22, 2005, from
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html.
Lemke, J. L. (1998). Metamedia Literacy: Transforming Meanings and Media.
Handbook of Literacy and Technology: Transformations in a Post-Typographic
World. D. Reinking, McKenna, M. C., Labbo, L. D. & Kieffer, R. D. London,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers: 283-301.
Malson, H. (1998). The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-Structuralism and the
Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa. London, Routledge.
Nanowrimo.org. (2005). What is Nanowrimo? Retrieved February 27th, 2006
From: http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/cjaycontent/index.php?id=2
Phillips, L. & Jörgensen, M. W. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and
Method. London, SAGE.
Stone, A. R. (1991). Will The Real Body Stand Up?: Boundaries Stories About
Virtual Cultures. Cyberspace. First Steps. M. Benedikt. Cambridge, MA, MIT
Press.
Street, B.V. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice.  Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge
Subrahmanyam, K., Greenfield, P. and Tynes, B. (2004). Constructing
sexuality and identity in an online teen chat room.  Applied Developmental
Psychology 25. pp. 651-666.
Suler, J. (2005). Adolescents in Cyberspace: The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly. Retrieved February 27th, 2006 From:
http://www.rider.edu/suler/psycyber/adoles.html
Thomas, A. (2004). Digital Literacies of the Cybergirl. E-Learning, (1), 3.
pp: 358-382.
Thomas, A. (2005). Fictional Blogging and the Narrative Identity of
Adolescent Girls.  Paper prepared for Blogtalk Downunder Conference, May,
2005, Sydney.
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the Screen. New York, Simon and
Schuster.University Press.
Valentine, G., & Holloway, S.L. (2002). Cyberkids? Exploring children’s
identities and social networks in online and off line worlds. Annals of
the Association of American Geographers, 92, pp. 302-319.


Kind Regards,
Angela

http://anya.blogsome.com
_______________________________________________________
Angela Thomas
Lecturer in English Education,
Faculty of Education and Social Work
University of Sydney
Phone: +61 2 9351 6229,  Fax: +61 2 9351 2606

"Ceci n'est pas une .signature"

----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.