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The Rhetoric of MySpace vs. Facebook
From Eszter Hargittai's scholarship to more recent work by marketing analytics firms, we know that race and socio-economic status shape MySpace and Facebook usage. Yet, it is the rhetoric used by participants that highlights how these distinctions play out. In an upcoming paper entitled "White Flight in Networked Publics?" (to be published in Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White's upcoming anthology on Race and Digital Technology), I map out the language used by teenagers - and, to a lesser degree, adults - to explain the divisions between MySpace and Facebook.
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Social Media in South America: Orkut & Brazil
To start my participation here in DMLcentral, I want to write about social media outside the U.S., specifically in South America. Let's take the case of Orkut in Brazil, an interesting and relatively-unknown subject that I've researched and followed closely for years. Orkut is very much a cultural phenomenon in Brazil.… more
Emergent Networks: Fotologs as Performances of the Self
Raquel Recuero, a Brazilian professor, is an Internet culture researcher in South America.
Fotolog, a photo-sharing site, grew quickly in South America, becoming one of the most popular social networking services in Chile, Brazil and other countries. Fotologs became interesting narratives of everyday life, carefully constructed by users to share the impressions they wanted to display for their audience. They became identity performances. A Gothic user I interviewed, for example, would only publish pictures in black and white, always accompanied by Gothic band lyrics. He said it was a way to “make a statement about himself.”… more
Students: Panic Over Online Privacy, Identity is Overblown
Blogger Chris Sinclair attends the University of California, Irvine, and brings a youth perspective to DMLcentral.
Going on the Internet and reading blogs these days I feel like all I see are warnings about the evils of online networking, fleshing out a plethora of controversies involving social media sites. I find many of these articles boring and somewhat repetitive in their chastisement of Facebook and other sites and the Internet in general for suddenly making all of our “private” information “available.” How is this information “private” if a person has willingly made it public to a huge audience?… more
Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight
Carmen and her mother are close. As far as Carmen's concerned, she has nothing to hide from her mother so she's happy to have her mom as her 'friend' on Facebook. Of course, Carmen's mom doesn't always understand the social protocols on Facebook and Carmen sometimes gets frustrated. She hates that her mom comments on nearly every post, because it "scares everyone away...Everyone kind of disappears after the mom post...It's just uncool having your mom all over your wall. That's just lame." Still, she knows that her mom means well and she sometimes uses this pattern to her advantage. While Carmen welcomes her mother's presence, she also knows her mother overreacts. In order to avoid a freak out, Carmen will avoid posting things that have a high likelihood of mother misinterpretation. This can make communication tricky at times and Carmen must work to write in ways that are interpreted differently by different people.… more
Teens, Social Media, and Celebrity: Anatomy of an Incident
Recently, two Brazilian teenagers practicing sexting on Twitcam, became international news. More than 25,000 Twitter users watched the live transmission of the couple’s intimate moments. Copies of the video and screen shots quickly flooded other social networking sites. Several Twitter users who saw the images denounced the incident and it was reported to a local police chief. The police chief launched an investigation (all links in Portuguese) and contacted the boy, the girl, and their parents. The two teenagers (a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl) said the broadcast was the result of a wager. The boy subsequently posted a video on YouTube explaining that the act was consensual: “We exposed ourselves this way because we made a bet and she lost it.” The live broadcast has dramatically raised the profile of the issues of privacy, teens, and Internet culture in the national conversation in Brazil. The case has prompted considerable debate among youth development specialists, parents, and authorities, who increasingly find themselves looking for more effective ways to educate teens about online privacy issues.… more