Susannah Stern’s article Producing Sites, Exploring Identities: Youth Online Authorship explores the phenomenon of young people creating web-content. She examines not what they create, but why they create it. She points to the “curious mix of intrigue, disdain and apprehension” (p. 95) that many adults express about youth online authorship and attempts to bypass the question of whether these online expressions are ultimately positive or negative. Stern, rather, attempts to ascertain the purpose that young authors themselves feel that their work serves.
I was stuck by how her informants viewed their web-pages; as both fluid documents and as projects to be proud of. The web page functions as diary, as scrapbook, as soapbox and as sounding board. I found Stern’s admonition not to “exoticize” (p.114) teen web-expression helpful. Teens are doing what they have always done; seeking to explore, reinvent and refine their identities. The internet is merely another, constantly-changing, place for them to do that.
I was left wondering, however, if the number of youth web pages and blogs has dropped as the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter has risen. The danger of any research on teens and technology is that both technology and the informants change so fast, that by the time something is published, its relevance may be suspect. Data ages quickly when it concerns the intersection of adolescence and technology!
I found an interesting article published this month in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy about an immigrant teen informant and her use of digital spaces (Myspace, Facebook etc.) to both maintain ties to her home culture and to navigate her new American identity. The author, Cheryl A. McLean, draws on Anthony Giddens’s idea that new media contributes to “disembedding” us from physical space and that “social locations are carried out across long distances” (McLean, 2010, p.15). McLean ends her article with the admonition that “Ultimately, literacy educators must respond to youth literacies as multiple, fluid and overlapping if we are to create “homes” for the diverse learners who make up contemporary classrooms. (McLean, 2010, p.20). It seems to me that digital spaces are, increasingly, where teens construct identities and we, as educators would do well to embrace that reality.
The link to McLean’s article is below:
McLean, C. (2010). A Space Called Home: An Immigrant Adolescent's Digital Literacy Practices. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(1), 13-22. doi:10.1598/JAAL.54.1.2. https://catalog2.nmsu.edu:2104/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=107&sid=3ebd4754-d88b-4545-a029-d3ed23a58dd6%40sessionmgr110
