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Monday 1st December 2008 8:00 am
C.J. Pascoe: Flirting, Going Out and Breaking Up in Networked Publics
This post continues our series from the authors of a forthcoming book on youth new media practice. In the chapter on intimacy, a researcher discusses how teenagers are using new media in relationships. Findings from a three-year ethnographic study of young people’s use of new media were released last month.
“I get out of the shower, get dressed, go to my PC, log on to MSN, and talk to Alice,” says 17-year-old Jesse about his typical morning routine. After logging off IM, the couple might talk on their mobile phones as they commute to school. During the school day they trade text messages such as “Im in da band room” about their whereabouts and plans. After school Alice might join Jesse at his house, completing her homework while he plays his favorite video game, Final Fantasy, or they might continue to communicate by sending messages such as “I’ll be here for a while, go to sleep, I love you.” The day frequently ends late, with Alice falling asleep talking on the phone to Jesse in the bedroom she shares with her two younger siblings.
Alice and Jesse’s use of new media exemplifies much of what we have heard from our respondents about how teens put new-media tools (primarily mobile phones, instant messaging, and social network sites) to use in their courtship practices of meeting, flirting, going out, and breaking up. Mobile phones provide youth a way to open private channels of communication, maintain continual contact, and also serve as a “leash” through which teens in a relationship keep “tabs on” one another. Instant-messaging technologies allow teens to sustain frequent casual contacts with their intimates. Social network site profiles are key venues for representations of intimacy, providing a variety of ways to signal the intensity of a given relationship. While most of teens’ online relationships map closely to their offline ones, these digital spaces also give teens the ability to reach beyond institutional and geographic constraints to forge romantic relationships. This is especially important for sexual or racial/ethnic minority teens for whom the dating pool in their immediate geographic area may be limited. In their networked publics youth carry on and rework some of the emotional work of adolescence - meeting, flirting, dating and breaking up.
Category: Civic-Engagement, Credibility, Ecology-of-Games, Identity, Race-Ethnicity, Unexpected
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