It's Complicated

notes

Preface

Most names used in this book are pseudonyms. Some pseudonyms are chosen by teens themselves; I chose other pseudonyms to be unique names that maintained cultural and temporal identifiers by using baby name websites that took into account birth year and ethnicity. When I'm quoting from public material, including blog posts and news media interviews, I use the name provided by the teen in that context. The names teens use online may not be their legal names, but I did not seek to verify either way.

The interviews and fieldwork conducted from 2010–2011 were done in collaboration with Alice Marwick. Most of these focused on privacy and bullying. I identify the interviews conducted by Alice both in the Appendix and within the text. To learn more about the teens that were interviewed for this book and the methodological approach that informs this book, see http:// www.danah.org/itscomplicated/.

Introduction

Lenhart, Ling, Campbell, and Purcell, "Teens and Mobile Phones."

This book draws on data collected in the United States and refers to cultural references that are particular to American culture. Although many of my arguments have resonance outside the United States, I make no attempt to speak to the cultural practices, norms, or attitudes rooted in other countries. Many scholars have examined young people's mediated practices in other cultural contexts, including Livingstone, Children and the Internet; Mesch and Talmud, Wired Youth; and Davies and Eynon, Teenagers and Technology. In addition, as the directors of the EU Kids Online Project, Sonia Livingstone and Leslie Haddon have created a large network of researchers in Europe to examine children's online practices. They have produced numerous reports, journal articles, and scholarly manuscripts. To learn more, see http://www HYPERLINK "http://www2.lse.ac.uk/"2 HYPERLINK "http://www2.lse.ac.uk/".lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/.

To read more about how social media is situated within Web2.0 in light of the rise of social network sites, see Ellison and boyd, "Sociality Through Social Network Sites." In this article, we argue that what makes "social media" significant as a category is not the various technologies labeled as social media but, rather, the sociotechnical dynamics that unfold as millions of people embrace a variety of technologies available at a particular time and use them to collaborate, share, and socialize.

In the introduction to Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out, Mimi Ito and colleagues (including myself) describe an important tension in online interactions between those that are "interest-driven" and those that are "friendship-driven." Although we use this construct to help describe different youth practices, the same dynamic is at play in terms of how broader media have been adopted. Services like Facebook are primarily friendship-driven while the boards on 4chan are primarily interest-driven. Of course, some major social media services — like LiveJournal and Tumblr — have been adopted for both in ways that often create unique tensions within those sites.

Mimi Ito initially used the term networked publics in 2008 to "reference a linked set of social, cultural, and technological developments that have accompanied the growing engagement with digitally networked media" (Ito, "Intro- duction," 2). Although I agree with her framing and believe that the broadness of what she offers has tremendous value, I am trying to add more precision in my usage. To do so, I draw on a broader notion of publics. In employing the concept of "publics," I am purposefully referring to a long strain of scholarly debate and analysis. Much of what I'm nodding toward is rooted in, conversational with, or challenging of Jürgen Habermas's historical analysis of a public sphere as a category of bourgeois society in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (see also Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere). In particu- lar, I subscribe to Nancy Fraser's argument in "Rethinking the Public Sphere" that publics are where identities are enacted, Michael Warner's argument in Publics and Counterpublics that counterpublics enable marginalized individuals to create powerful communities in resistance to hegemonic publics, and Sonia Livingstone's recognition in Audiences and Publics that publics emerge when audiences come together around shared understandings of the world. To better understand the academic roots of how I understand networked publics, see boyd, "Social Network Sites as Networked Publics."