One thing that came up in my doctoral fieldwork with young people who used sites like MySpace and Facebook in the course of everyday life, was that the negative discourses circulating about these sites were being written back into how they understood their own practice. They often reproduced these discourses themselves, embarrassed about engaging in a social practice on a daily basis. Some of them even described themselves as 'addicted' or lamented the time they spent online.
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Photo by mandiberg on flickr |
I understand why some people get jumpy around having these technologies enter into the everyday: "The kids will forget how to have REAL conversations and will forget how to make REAL friends." For the vast majority of young people, that is simply not true. As I am arguing in my thesis, social network sites are often used to organise, facilitate and document offline social interactions and to strengthen relationships forged offline. Then, they are used to de-brief from and archive social experiences. This is a new form of mediation that will take some time to get used to, but we must push back against those knee-jerk reactions and fears that frame these practices as necessarily negative, inconsequential or even damaging. To witness how these discourses have been written back into young people's own conceptualisation of these sites is much more troubling, I think.
I recently came across an interview by Henry Jenkins with Sherry Turkle on her new book, Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. I haven't read the book yet, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this obviously critical edge plays out, but here is a nice extract on 'addiction', from that interview:
No matter how much the metaphor of addiction may seem to fit our circumstance, we can ill afford the luxury of using it. It does not serve us well. To end addiction, you have to discard the substance. And we know that we are not going to "get rid" of the Internet. We are not going to "get rid" of social networking. We will not go "cold turkey" or forbid cell phones to our children. Addiction--with its one solution that we know we won't use--makes us feel hopeless, passive.
We will find new paths, but a first step will surely be to not consider ourselves passive victims of a bad substance, but to acknowledge that in our use of networked technology, we have incurred some costs that we don't want to pay. We are not in trouble because of invention but because we think it will solve everything. As we consider all this, we will not find a "solution" or a simple answer. But we cannot assume that the life technology makes easy is how we want to live. There is time to make the corrections.
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