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Heather Horst: Coming of Age in Networked Public Culture

Filed at 4:00 pm on August 9, 2007 in Identity • Leave a comment

In talking to families in Silicon Valley about their use of media and technology, I often hear stories about how fundamentally different the experience of being a teenager is today. While there is clear continuity between the ways in which my generation made ‘mixed tapes’ or ‘hung out’ on the telephone for hours at a time, one of the most fundamental shifts in American youth culture centers upon kids’ engagement in what has been termed “networked public culture”, or “those cultural artifacts associated with ‘personal’ culture (like home movies, snapshots, diaries, and scrapbooks) have now entered the arena of ‘public’ culture (like newspapers, cinema, and television)”(Russell, Ito, Richmond and Tuters 2006).

For young adults such as 18 year old Ann, the entree into networked public culture first came through MySpace, a site and space which dominated her high school social life and the attendant rites of passage associated with middle class American teenage life: prom, graduation and a post-graduation trip to Mexico. However, after graduation Ann felt compelled to leave the world of MySpace behind and turned to Facebook.

Ann’s formal introduction to Facebook came from her college RA who sent her an invite to be part of a wider network of 90 dorm residents attending Ann’s new college. By the middle of the summer, Ann was checking her Facebook for status updates an average of four to five times per day. Through these brief, but repetitive engagements, Ann started to “meet” the other students slated to live in her dorm, the most important and exciting of these new connections being her future roommate Sarah.  In preparation for their new life together, Ann and Sarah also decided to upload a few pictures of their bedrooms at home and the things they planned to bring to their new dorm room onto their Facebook. Alongside comparing their taste in music, Ann was thrilled when she looked at the photographs and saw Sarah’s signature colors, declaring “I’m brown and pink stuff and she’s brown and blue stuff!”  Ann imagined that this aesthetic harmony would also signify a harmonious relationship.

Middle class American youth like Ann harness the power of digital media to imagine and plan their future lives as college students. Reconfiguring their relationships with high school friends remains central to this process of becoming a college student, such as when Ann declares, “I’m not falling out with a lot of my friends, but just I wasn’t really into them as much anymore.” Or “This is the girl that I’m talking about, that I didn’t talk to in high school but when we’re in the same school, now we’re talking.  But she went to, she’s going to college with me.” Becoming a college student also hinges upon the ability to establish relationships with new individuals and spaces, the most central of which is their new domestic space: the dorm room. Through the medium of Facebook, Ann and her roommate designed a shared and intimate living space, filled with objects which will increasingly become part of their everyday lives at college. Much like homecoming, prom and graduation, Facebook and other spaces of networked public culture have now become part and parcel of the process of coming of age for teenagers in the United States.

References:
(1) Russell, Adrian, Mimi Ito, Todd Richmond and Marc Tuters. 2006. Networked Publics: Introduction. http://netpublics.annenberg.edu/about_netpublics/networked_public_culture, Accessed June 25, 2006.

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Tags: american-teenagers, identity-formation, networked-public-culture, rites-of-passage