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Intelligence
Understanding the Psychology of Teen Online Networking

Intelligence

Understanding the Psychology of Teen Online Networking

Jan 24, 2007By Michael Stoner

I’ve read few analyses of social networking that are more cogent than those by danah boyd [she eschews capital letters for her name], who wrote a thesis at MIT on online networking and is now a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley. Her blog Apophenia is full of interesting observations, but this article on Alternet, “What Adults Should Know About Kids’ Online Networking,” is a good introduction to her and her work.

She’s not really too concerned about sexual predators preying on kids they’ve stalked through MySpace-despite what you might believe from various press accounts, there isn’t a single case of someone being abducted based on information from MySpace. These are the kinds of insights I find really fascinating, though, as we begin to understand how teensand, indeed, the rest of us-relate to each other through the use of various media:

KS: What are some the differences between online and offline networks?

db: There are sort of four properties and one key practice that are fundamentally different online. The key practice is that you have to write yourself into being. To a certain degree we do this offline as well, whereby you have a body that you’re working with that you then accessorize to hell. Online you don’t have a body, you don’t have a presence, you don’t have anything that sort of marks your existence.

There are four functions that are sort of the key architecture of online publics and key structures of mediated environments that are generally not part of the offline world. And those are persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Persistence-what you say sticks around. Searchabilitymy mother would have loved the ability to sort of magically scream into the ether to figure out where I was when I’d gone off to hang out with my friends. She couldn’t, thank God. But today when kids are hanging out online because they’ve written [themselves] into being online, they become very searchable. Replicability- ‑you have a conversation with your friends, and this can be copied and pasted into your Live Journal and you get into a tiff. That creates an amazing amount of “uh ohs” when you add it to persistence. And finally, invisible audiences. In unmediated environment, you can look around and have an understanding of who can possibly overhear you. You adjust what you’re saying to the reactions of those people. You figure out what is appropriate to say, you understand the social context. But when we’re dealing with mediated environments, we have no way of gauging who might hear or see us, not only because we can’t tell whose presence is lurking at the moment, but because of persistence and searchability.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?