There is much discussion on blogs about the way young adults use the internet, but I thought it might be interesting to question a few teenagers about their favorite internet sites, and how they use the virtual cultures available to them.
Amongst a group of fourteen year olds, (four boys, and two girls) it was not surprising that news and current affairs definitely did not feature. Neither did any of the group place a high value on the use of the internet as a research tool, citing boredom with the whole process of individually researching when they see school as their social arena.
The most enthusiastic response came when asked about their social networking habits. Each group member belonged to, or accessed a minimum of three social networking sites with MSN, You Tube, Be-Bo and MySpace being the most mentioned.
The group commonly agreed they spent up to five hours a night or more on-line chatting mostly to ‘friends’ on-line, who were in fact complete strangers.
One student recounted a story, where he had met a ‘friend-on-line’, who turned out to be a 40 year old man who had requested he strip on webcam. The student found it funny but certainly this type of use of virtual cultures raises issues that would be a parent’s worst nightmare.
Just hearing about this young boys experience has me questioning this underlying subject basis on the way in which people pretend to be someone they are not on the web and how a handful of users seem to develop some other persona when using this particular medium for social networking.
Whether it is in a bad way (such as pedophiles praying on 14-year-olds) or (allowing shy personality to become more assertive) the internet can be miss used as a venue for miss information and mischief.
This issue along with week 6 KCB lecture by Axel Burns and the reading by Froth Facilitating Social Networking, had me thinking about one of the flaws both these men brought up in relation to social networks.
“Social Networking systems.. proximate users focus on local interaction, which presents interesting challenges and opportunities with regard to location awareness, privacy, security, surveillance and social control” (Froth 2006)
This same topic has been discussed in lectures and throughout my workplace; one of the issues with online social networking is that you only meet and get to know the person so far as they allow you to see them. The public persona is often not the whole of an individual.
In the last week, social networking site ‘Facebook’ have committed to introducing extreme safety measures to minimize this type of internet usage (Gladstone Observer 2008). But is that really possible when a computer savvy generation have become confident in their ability to manage and control their internet relationships.
A second issues raised was the amount of bullying and harassment that is undertaken on sites such as You Tube and BeBo. The boys in the group openly admitted to using social net working sites as a means of bullying.
So is there a need for some ‘Gate-Keeping’ on this type of anti-social behavior occurring on popular social networking sites?
Unfortunately antics of new media technologies will find this type of behavior illustrative of the down side of the developing world of virtual Cultures.
Reference:
Gladstone Observer. 2008. Facebook sets new safety standard. ed(10/05/2008).
Froth, M. 2006. Social Networking in Inner-City Neighborhoods. p.44-50. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00004750/ (accessed May 12, 2008).
Burns, A. 2008. Online Communities. KCB201 Virtual Cultures, Week 6 lecture. http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_29175_1. (accessed April 23,2008).
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