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Designing the Social: Unpacking Social Media Design and Identity [1st ed.]
 9789811557156, 9789811557163

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
The Digital Metamorphosis (Harry T. Dyer)....Pages 1-13
Defining Social Media…It’s Complicated (Harry T. Dyer)....Pages 15-43
Devices and Technology: How the Way in Which We Access Social Media Affects Our Experiences, Uses, and Identities (Harry T. Dyer)....Pages 45-69
What’s ‘Social’ About Social Media? (Harry T. Dyer)....Pages 71-91
Enmeshing the User and Design: How Is Identity Managed Online? (Harry T. Dyer)....Pages 93-116
Comic Theory: A New, Critical, Adaptive Theoretical Framework for Identity Presentation (Harry T. Dyer)....Pages 117-153
Critical Digital Citizenship: A Call to Action for Educators and Educational Researchers (Harry T. Dyer)....Pages 155-172

Citation preview

Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 11 Series Editors: Aaron Koh · Victoria Carrington

Harry T. Dyer

Designing the Social

Unpacking Social Media Design and Identity

Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education Volume 11

Series Editors Aaron Koh, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong Victoria Carrington, School of Education, University of Tasmania, Launceston,  TAS, Australia

We live in a time where the complex nature and implications of social, political and cultural issues for individuals and groups is increasingly clear. While this may lead some to focus on smaller and smaller units of analysis in the hope that by understanding the parts we may begin to understand the whole, this book series is premised on the strongly held view that researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in education will increasingly need to integrate knowledge gained from a range of disciplinary and theoretical sources in order to frame and address these complex issues. A transdisciplinary approach takes account the uncertainty of knowledge and the complexity of social and cultural issues relevant to education. It acknowledges that there will be unresolved tensions and that these should be seen as productive. With this in mind, the reflexive and critical nature of cultural studies and its focus on the processes and currents that construct our daily lives has made it a central point of reference for many working in the contemporary social sciences and education. This book series seeks to foreground transdisciplinary and cultural studies influenced scholarship with a view to building conversations, ideas and sustainable networks of knowledge that may prove crucial to the ongoing development and relevance of the field of educational studies. The series will place a premium on manuscripts that critically engage with key educational issues from a position that draws from cultural studies or demonstrates a transdisciplinary approach. This can take the form of reports of new empirical research, critical discussions and/or theoretical pieces. In addition, the series editors are particularly keen to accept work that takes as its focus issues that draw from the wider Asia Pacific region but that may have relevance more globally, however all proposals that reflect the diversity of contemporary educational research will be considered. Series Editors: Aaron Koh (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Victoria Carrington (University of Tasmania) Editorial Board: Angel Lin (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Angelia Poon (National Institute of Education, Singapore), Anna Hickey-Moody (RMIT, Australia), Barbara Comber (University of South Australia, Australia), Catherine Beavis (Deakin University, Australia), Cameron McCarthy (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA), Chen Kuan-Hsing (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan), C.  J. W.-L.  Wee (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Daniel Goh (National University of Singapore, Singapore), Jackie Marsh (University of Sheffield, UK), Jane Kenway (Monash University, Australia), Jennifer A Sandlin (Arizona State University, Tempe, USA), Jennifer Rowsell (University of Bristol, UK), Jo-Anne Dillabough, (University of Cambridge, UK), Megan Watkins (University of Western Sydney, Australia), Mary Lou Rasmussen (Australia National University, Australia), Terence Chong (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore) Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Senior Editorial Assistant: Lay Peng Ang E-mail: [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11200

Harry T. Dyer

Designing the Social Unpacking Social Media Design and Identity

Harry T. Dyer University of East Anglia Norwich, UK

ISSN 2345-7708     ISSN 2345-7716 (electronic) Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education ISBN 978-981-15-5715-6    ISBN 978-981-15-5716-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5716-3 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

This book would not have been possible without the hard work, dedication, patience, guidance, and effort of a number of people whom I would like to thank here. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, I would like to thank the nine participants whose work is detailed in this book, and without whom the insights presented here would be impossible. You were so giving with your time, so thoughtful with your comments, and so patient with my many questions. Thank you all for your efforts and inputs. I would also sincerely like to thank Professor Victoria Carrington, my supervisor for this project, my academic role model, and my friend. Your guidance, encouragement, and patience made this project more than I ever hoped it could be. You made the researcher I am today, and gave me a template for how to be a thoughtful supervisor. I hope I live up to the example you set me. I also wish to thank the community of researchers that I am proud to call colleagues. Over the past decade I am lucky to have been exposed to a strong, engaged, and brilliant community of researchers. A lot

of this came through my ongoing engagements with Twitter, on which I have found many brilliant, kind, supportive, and considerate researchers (certainly too many to name here) who give me hope for the future of digital research. I have also been privileged enough to meet many of you offline for many cups of coffee. I hope to have many more. I have also been tremendously privileged to be part of a vibrant interdisciplinary research community at the University of East Anglia. I hope to continue to grow this community, and continue to be enamoured with everything UEA has to offer. Of course, thanks also goes to my supportive, kind, and loving family and friends. You have been so forgiving of my dogged engagement with this work over the last decade. I hope to repay you all by being a little more present and engaged… Finally, of course, none of this would have ever been possible without my partner, Vanessa. Words cannot adequately describe how supportive you have been. For all our late night discussions, for all the articles you send my way, for all the cups of coffee, for the mess of my work spaces, for the knowing cuddles, for the stress you carry along with me, for allowing me to chase this bizarre profession, for pushing me to be the best I can be, for being a constant inspiration. For everything you have done and continue to do. Thank you a million times over.

Contents

1 The Digital Metamorphosis...................................................................... 1 1.1 Introduction........................................................................................ 1 1.2 Selecting and Introducing the Participants......................................... 6 1.3 Dissecting Social Media..................................................................... 12 References................................................................................................... 13 2 Defining Social Media…It’s Complicated............................................... 15 2.1 Introduction........................................................................................ 15 2.2 Dispelling Some Myths and Moral Panics: What Young People Aren’t Doing Online.......................................... 18 2.3 Understanding ‘Social Media’........................................................... 23 2.4 More than a Feature............................................................................ 28 2.5 How Young People Define Social Media........................................... 31 2.6 Implications for Educational Researchers, Policy Makers, and Educators....................................................................... 36 References................................................................................................... 37 3 Devices and Technology: How the Way in Which We Access Social Media Affects Our Experiences, Uses, and Identities.................................................................................... 45 3.1 Introduction........................................................................................ 45 3.2 Technically Social.............................................................................. 46 3.3 Socio-Cultural Grounded Experiences of Technology: ‘Technology Is Neither Good, nor Bad, nor Is it Neutral’................. 52 3.4 The Medium Is (Part of) the Message: Technology Changing Uses and Experiences of Social Media.............................. 55 3.5 Platforms Are Not Universal Across Devices..................................... 58 3.6 The Difference Between ‘Having’ and ‘Having Access to’ Technology......................................................................................... 59 3.7 Implications for Educational Researchers, Policy Makers, and Educators..................................................................................... 62 References................................................................................................... 66 vii

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Contents

4 What’s ‘Social’ About Social Media?...................................................... 71 4.1 Introduction........................................................................................ 71 4.2 From Networking to Not Working: Accounting for the Array of Online Social Experiences....................................... 75 4.3 Uses of Social Media Beyond Content Production Alone................. 79 4.4 Content Collapse: Negotiating Overlaps in Audiences...................... 81 4.5 Moving Beyond Content Production.................................................. 83 4.6 Implications for Educational Researchers, Policy Makers, and Educators....................................................................... 86 References................................................................................................... 88 5 Enmeshing the User and Design: How Is Identity Managed Online?....................................................................................... 93 5.1 Introduction........................................................................................ 93 5.2 Different Platform, Different Design Features, and Different Social Performances of Identity................................... 97 5.3 The Use of Third-Party Apps to Augment Design and the Effects of This Upon Social Interaction................................ 102 5.4 Accounting for the Offline in Online Identity Performances............. 104 5.5 Identity Boundary Negotiation Between User and Design: Tactics, Trade-Off, and Compromises............................ 108 5.6 Implications for Educational Researchers, Policy Makers, and Educators..................................................................................... 114 References................................................................................................... 116 6 Comic Theory: A New, Critical, Adaptive Theoretical Framework for Identity Presentation...................................................... 117 6.1 Introduction........................................................................................ 117 6.2 Positioning Identity............................................................................ 119 6.3 Accounting for Socio-cultural Resources and Experiences in Identity Performances.................................................................... 123 6.4 Accounting for the Role of ‘Staging’ and ‘Props’ in Identity Performances.................................................................... 126 6.5 Agential Realism and Agential Cuts: Accounting for the Narratives Paths Not Chosen.................................................. 133 6.6 Narratives in Comic Book Studies: Closure, Intertextuality, and Extratextuality............................................................................. 136 6.7 Introducing Comic Theory: Understanding Identity Performances in Social Media Through the Lens of Comic Books.................................................................................. 140 6.8 Conclusion: Designing an Identity..................................................... 147 References................................................................................................... 148

Contents

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7 Critical Digital Citizenship: A Call to Action for Educators and Educational Researchers................................................................... 155 7.1 Introduction........................................................................................ 155 7.2 Technology as Panacea: The Need to Readdress One-­Size-Fits-All Educational Technology....................................... 156 7.3 Comic Theory: Considering Design in Online Identity Performances...................................................................................... 163 7.4 Offering Closure................................................................................. 165 References................................................................................................... 170

Chapter 1

The Digital Metamorphosis

Abstract  This introductory chapter begins to explore why education needs to carefully explore, understand, and engage with social media. Through a sustained comparison with Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, this chapter unpacks why there is a need for educators, educational research, and educational policy makers to more carefully examine social media rather than rely upon engrained assumptions. In particular, this chapter asks educational professionals to pay attention to critical sociological understandings of social media. The chapter then moves on to introduce the participants of the research detailed in this book, discussing why they were selected and why there is a compelling ethical responsibility and need to move beyond the focus on public data collection that is ever-present in digital research. Finally, this chapter concludes by introducing the remaining chapters of this book. Keywords  Metamorphosis · Digital education · Social Media · Public data · Participant selection · Digital sociology

1.1  Introduction One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes. ‘What’s happened to me,’ he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. (Kafka 1915, The Metamorphosis)

In 1915, Franz Kafka released his now famous novella, The Metamorphosis (or ‘Die Verwandlung’ in its original German) detailing the demise of Gregor Samsa, an office worker, who wakes up to find himself transformed into a grotesque ‘monstrous verminous bug’. Gregor is immediately faced with the challenge of negotiating the alien and yet familiar world of his bedroom, trying desperately to navigate and negotiate the world around him that suddenly is not made for the new reality he © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. T. Dyer, Designing the Social, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5716-3_1

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embodies. Curiously his concern here is not about his sudden transformation into a hideous bug, but instead about how he was going to get to his job. Gregor begins to attempt to navigate the world around him to the best of his ability, but has to think carefully and deliberately about how to move effectively around an environment that is familiar but now viewed through (literal) new eyes, presenting both a physical and profoundly ontological shift: It was very easy to throw aside the blanket. He needed only to push himself up a little, and it fell by itself. But to continue was difficult, particularly because he was so unusually wide. He needed arms and hands to push himself upright. Instead of these, however, he had only many small limbs which were incessantly moving with very different motions and which, in addition, he was unable to control. If he wanted to bend one of them, then it was the first to extend itself, and if he finally succeeded doing with this limb what he wanted, in the meantime all the others, as if left free, moved around in an excessively painful agitation. ‘But I must not stay in bed uselessly,’ said Gregor to himself. (Kafka 1915, The Metamorphosis)

Gregor engages in an arduous process of navigating the environment in his new form, suddenly acutely aware of the new functions of familiar objects around him seen in a new light. Whilst navigating this ontological shift, Gregor is all the while overhearing the concerns and criticisms of his family and his boss, waiting for him on the other side of his locked bedroom door. His family and his boss, however, are not overly concerned with his well-being, but instead concerned with his productivity, attempting to work out how to get Gregor to work. Gregor too attempts to get ready for work, worried still not about his current bug-like condition and more about his ability to work: ‘But Mr. Manager,’ called Gregor, beside himself and in his agitation forgetting everything else, ‘I’m opening the door immediately, this very moment. A slight indisposition, a dizzy spell, has prevented me from getting up. I’m still lying in bed right now. But now I’m quite refreshed once again. I’m in the midst of getting out of bed. Just have patience for a short moment! Things are not going so well as I thought. But things are all right. (Kafka 1915, The Metamorphosis)

Eventually, Gregor manages to open the door of his bedroom, hurting himself physically in the process as he focuses intently on maintaining the status quo and getting to work: Unfortunately it seemed that he had no real teeth. How then was he to grab hold of the key? But to make up for that his jaws were naturally very strong; with their help he managed to get the key really moving, and he did not notice that he was obviously inflicting some damage on himself, for a brown fluid came out of his mouth, flowed over the key, and dripped onto the floor. (Kafka 1915, The Metamorphosis)

Gregor eventually opens his bedroom door, but, upon discovering his bug-like form, his family and boss panic, locking him in another room. Over a series of months they lock Gregor up, attempting to ignore him and wondering why he doesn’t understand them, all the while making no attempt to understand Gregor in his new form. This continues until Gregor (who eventually becomes referred to as ‘it’ rather than Gregor) finally dies.

1.1 Introduction

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I wanted to begin this book with a ‘cliffnotes’ summary of Kafka’s short work here not only because I think it’s a compelling indictment of modern capitalism and neoliberalism but because this book details the stories of nine modern Gregors. This may seem somewhat of a glib and grim comparison at first, but when we look at the state of modern social media, and education’s response to the challenges social media raises, I believe it is hard to not see the parallels between Gregor’s story and the stories of the nine participants detailed throughout this book. Through 45 interviews conducted over the course of a year (between the summer of 2014 and the summer of 2015 – exactly 100 years after Kafka published The Metamorphosis), this book details the stories of nine young adults (between the ages of 17 and 26) as they attempt to navigate and understand the world of social media. I would like to highlight here that I am not taking the cruel and unusual step of calling my nine participants ‘monstrous verminous bugs’ (!), but it is evident that the young people in this research are continuously attempting to navigate the world of social media that they increasingly find themselves in a world which is at once strange and familiar. They do so whilst bosses, parents, and teachers talk in worried tones through locked doors at them whilst ignoring the new reality these young people face. Though not as severe as Gregor’s transformation, the participants did undergo a number of changes over the course of the 12  months they were interviewed, starting new jobs for the first time, finishing school, starting/finishing university, moving away from home, and getting their first smartphone. Through following and interviewing the participants regularly over the course of 12 months, the research documented in this book is able to explore how they dealt with these changes in their lives, unpacking in detail the ways in which they navigated and negotiated social media’s unique challenges. This book then is my attempt to give voice to their perception of the ontological, social, and physical challenges they face and to understand how their experiences, and in particular their identities, morphed to meet the demands of the environments they were in and their changing social situations. The focus in this book is overtly upon the social experiences of young people online, with a particular focus upon how we can theorise and understand identity online. This is a deliberate choice and one that I feel is increasingly needed in the field of education, in which I conduct my research. This book, like my teaching to date, is bound up in education in the broadest sense. By education here I don’t necessarily mean classroom education, though this is explicitly the topic of Chap. 7 of this book in which we discuss critical digital literacies in education. Education, as any good teacher will tell you, should not be confined to the classroom. There is an increasing imperative for educators and educational researchers to deal with social media in an in-depth manner that doesn’t just throw technology at children in the assumption that some simple equation can be done here: Kids + Tech = ‘modern education’. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that this sort of equation bears striking similarities to the attitude of Gregor’s boss and family member who seem to rely heavily on assumptions about Gregor, in turn forcing him to ignore his changing reality to focus intently on work in a way that literally kills him.

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As this book makes clear, technology is not experienced, understood, approached, or used in a uniform manner, and it cannot be stripped from the changing realities users have with technology, nor from the user’s socio-cultural experiences and resources. Unfortunately, modern educational response to technology seems to wilfully attempt either to ignore and ban social media or to attempt to dissect it, teaching skills deemed essential for the modern market place. Coding, programming, and Boolean logic pervade how education is engaging with social media, attempting to position young people for the modern job market. Much like Gregor  – who is expected and pressured to continue his job as a salesman by his boss and family despite the many new and obvious challenges raised by his adjusting to life as a grotesque giant bug – users, designers, educators, and researchers often default to treating young people as workers in a tech-driven marketplace, ignoring and sidelining the complex social experience of young people. We see this through banning of social media in the classroom, through a focus on programming, through the abdication of responsibility to discuss social media in classroom thanks to myths of digital natives that still pervade modern education. The approach seems to be that we can ignore the bug in the room and focus on creating a productive worker. In the same way that much of the absurdity of Kafka’s novella comes from the manner in which a giant bug is expected to continue about its everyday life as a salesman in the face of such a large change, it is bizarre to treat the Internet as a set skills for the workplace and ignore the social aspects of it. The work presented here is an earnest attempt to correct for this approach in modern education, taking young people’s engagement with social media seriously by paying overt, close, and detailed attention to their engagements with social media platforms, in turn attempting to account for how best to understand and theorise their identity presentations in these environments. Rather than ignoring social media, or attempting to carry on as normal in preparation for the workplace, this book makes a case for close attention to, and engagement with, the many changes social media has bought to young people in and out the classroom. Our experiences and engagements with technology are constantly shifting, and any approach towards introducing technology in education should understand that there can never truly be an easy catch-all solution. Comic Theory, detailed within this book, attempts to provide a frame for understanding how we engage with technology in a nuanced way, an approach which is vital if we are to see the increasing influx of technology in education. Rather than assuming, for instance, that apps can be designed and used as a sort of ‘first response’ to student mental health issues or that homework can be automated through pre-brought maths programmes that children complete online, the framework detailed here allows us to understand that technology is embedded and enmeshed in our lives in ways that have large repercussions for introducing it into the education cleanly and uniformly. Instead, the case is made here through Comic Theory that our engagements with technology are individual, guided, and navigated in an ongoing way by the socio-cultural embedded design of the platforms we use, the user’s socio-cultural resources and expectations, their experiences with technologies, and a number of other overlapping factors.

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The context and experiences of a pupil to date are not shed when they enter a classroom and are not sidelined when they engage with technology. This does not provide easy solutions for educational practitioners or researchers, nor is it meant to. Reality is messy, but the crucial takeaway here is that this mess is vital and cannot be stripped away or ignored. We cannot throw technology at education as a way of removing that mess, as if all young people are all technology adept and able to learn if we only find the right combination of technology, environment, and pedagogy. Instead, we should understand that technology is bound up in our lives in many messy ways. We can (and I argue, must) attempt to understand and account for this mess, rather than disregarding or ignoring it. That is what this book attempts to do – dwell in that mess and provide a way of conceptualising and thinking through the many overlapping elements that shape how we are experiencing and using technology. Rather than disregarding this mess, Comic Theory centres it and forces us to deal with it as an essential element of our experiences with technology. It is hoped that through this we see that this messiness is crucial to how we use technology and that educational practitioners, policy makers, and researchers can and should contextualise technology rather than generalise. Doing so may help critically reconsider, for example, the racial implications of algorithms, the coding of gender as a binary, or the need for decolonisation of online curricula. This work is being done outside of the field of education by researchers such as Safiya Noble, Deborah Lupton, Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, Noortje Marres, danah boyd, Rumman Chowdhury, and countless other exciting researchers to whom this book owes a tremendous debt of gratitude. I raise this list not to single out any researchers, nor to position myself amongst them, but to emphasise here that the work to explore technology in a critical sociologically informed manner continues at a pace, yet education seems resistant, if not overtly hostile at times to reflecting on this work. In this manner, I position this work as the response of a digital sociologist working in the field education to the current laissez faire attitude towards technology in education. In doing so, I hope to emphasise and build upon the work of researchers such as Sonia Livingstone, Akwugo Emejulu, Gerard Goggin, and others who have built a much-­needed case for the need for engaged critical digital citizenship in education to understand the lived realities of young people online and the socio-cultural implications of technology. Crucially, this work must be done from a purposeful position of exploring what the Internet is (not merely from looking at the potential of the Internet) and how it is experienced by young people (not just telling them how they should behave online). As Emejulu and Mcgregor (2019, 143) make clear, this means overtly teaching young people to be engaged and critical digital citizens rather than compliant uncritical cyborgs: The critical heavy lifting about digital technologies should not be left to cultural theory and science and technology studies scholars and digital privacy and rights activists. We think the apolitical stance of digital education amounts to an abdication of responsibility about what education in digital spaces might mean and what education in these spaces might be.

In this manner, I hope this book adds to the voices of research in education engaging in work which overtly attempts to engage in a serious consideration of the realities of social media in the lives of young people. Gregor physically hurt himself

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trying desperately to prepare for work whilst ignoring his increasingly complex reality as a bug. I would heavily suggest that education too is in grave present danger of hurting young people by focusing on social media as a clinical set of logics, coding, and programming focused on preparing young people for work whilst ignoring their lived realities and engagements with technology. With this in mind, this introductory chapter will start by laying out the participants around whom the subsequent chapters of this book revolve.

1.2  Selecting and Introducing the Participants As mentioned earlier, this book revolves around 45 interviews conducted with nine 17–26-year-olds, discussing their experiences and engagements with social media. Throughout the next six chapters, I will explore a range of themes arising from these interviews, culminating in a presentation of a theoretical framework through which to understand identity presentation online. I will be using excerpts and analysis from these interviews to explore each theme in the words of the young people, who offer crucial insights into each of the issues raised. The choice of participants here is worth discussing as it presents some challenges to how we approach and understand social media. As I will discuss in detail in Chap. 2 of this book, a definition of social media is often complicated and can cover a broad and growing spectrum of participants, uses, technologies, and platforms. Social media is a broad and seemingly ever-expanding domain with a range of users utilising the platforms for a range of reasons. As boyd (2015) highlights, social media is more than the sum of the term’s parts. In this case, the social aspects of social media are many and varied. Added to this is the notion that researchers should not be prioritising only those who post content alone but that there are many reasons to utilise and engage with social media. This includes many ‘passive’ users of social media who frequently are overlooked in digital research, but who nonetheless interact with and through social media in interesting, common, and noteworthy ways (Weller 2016). This is particularly noticeable given the range of options available to social media users and the literature that highlights the importance of participation beyond content production alone. Barnes (2015), for example, notes that consumption and ‘passive’ engagement holds equal importance to louder, more obvious content production and that these engagements should be equally focused upon during consideration of social media. Indeed, some suggest that content production is an atypical use of social media (Bright et al. 2014). This need to account for a broad array of online experiences is often disregarded in digital research, often with the assumption that the loudest voices online are the most active. Approaches have been taken towards detailing and selecting perfect participants for rich data collection in online research, including criteria such at the purposeful selection of participants who produce substantial amounts of data (See Kozinets 2010). Whilst such approaches have produced useful and thoughtful work, such approaches potentially risk obscure engagements beyond content production

1.2  Selecting and Introducing the Participants

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(Weller 2016), or the consideration of aspects such as the work done in creating content (Ditchfield 2019). When initially undertaking this research, I originally aimed to find participants who were heavy users of social media, hoping that active and interactive participants that produced a wealth of data would allow for a discussion of social media that was informed by substantial experience in content production. However, it quickly became clear once I began talking to potential participants that whilst finding users who produce large amounts of content can be useful, such an approach may be bias in its favouring of a particular type of user. In the initial interviews, the potential participants began discussing the myriad ways they had of using the Internet as a social space; of the plethora of methods, tools, and techniques at their disposal for interacting and acting online; and of the vast variety of their approaches to selecting and uploading appropriate material. Certainly, there were large disparities in how substantive and data-rich their actual online updates were and how ‘active’ the participants were, but nonetheless their engagements with social media were all important, varied, and specific to their situation. Participants discussed, for example, the ways they used Facebook to ‘stalk’ their friends and family without actively engaging with them or the ways in which they considered themselves a part of a YouTube community just by watching the videos and vlogs of certain personalities, even without actively commenting on the posts. As participants, they didn’t fulfil a checklist of useful and ideal traits, but I decided very quickly that I should not dismiss their usefulness to focus on participants who produces masses of content. The focus instead quickly became and engagement in discussions around how they were using, consuming, and engaging with social media through interviews conducted at regular interval throughout the 12 months of data collection. Doing so enabled a move away from considering the content they were producing to instead understand the role social media was playing in their lives. Rather than deciding what constituted good ‘active’ participants, I decided to let a group of nine participants tell me their stories and their engagement with social media, stories which are detailed in this book. Some practical guidelines were nonetheless put in place to find participants who used social media enough to discuss their engagements with the platforms in a detail manner over the course of the year. The age range selected here (17–26) allowed for a consideration of a number of interesting transitional life stages of young adults, though of course there is a need to conduct research around social media use across various age ranges. Though the age range here is somewhat older than many pupils and older than the focus of much educational research, the discussions around key transitional moments in young adulthood provided unique insights into the embedded nature of social media in the lives of young people. Further to this, this sampling of course cannot be perceived as attempting to make claims about broader populations. Indeed, the theoretical framework presented in Chap. 6 of this book, Comic Theory, suggest that each individual will engage with social media in unique yet guided manners and that the manifestations of our narratives online can usefully be considered in a small-scale individual manner. Whilst our engagements with social media will be guided by the design process, and whilst certain uses and engagements are encouraged at often the expense of others, engagements with these

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platforms can still be largely unique and individual manners. Even across a sample of nine participants in this research, the range of engagements was readily apparent. As such the aim of this research is not to provide claims for a broad population but to aid in the development of a theoretical frame through which we can examine and understand the creation and maintenance of identity performance online as emergent narrative constructions guided by design elements and closure. Arguably no discussion of how identity is produced online can truly hope to be generalisable through data collection alone. It is this theoretical model, detailed in Chap. 6 of this book and constructed from the data produced with and by these participants, that is aimed to be generalisable and applicable to how we interact with and through social media. As such, this book attempts to balance a discussion of individual cases, and a comparison of emergent themes amongst participants, with an approach that aims to present a theoretical frame through which we can consider the manner in which identity performances emerge. I would also like to discuss why this research around social media took the seemingly analogue step of holding face-to-face interviews with young people rather than, for example, following and documenting their online interactions. One of the key reasons for this is largely ethical – I gave overt agency to the young people I documented to share and tell me about what was important to them. The appeal of public data is largely understandable from a research standpoint. In many ways it is a researcher’s dream: a plethora of easily mineable data that takes minimal collection and that is presented in a consistent and extractable format. The use of public data is also (arguably) largely covered ethically in that this data is shared publicly by the producer of the content on platforms that often cover the use of data for a range of purposes in the end-user agreements. Users have the option to remove themselves from publicly sharing their data and can choose to ‘lock’ their accounts if they do not wish to share their data publicly. Many researchers therefore argue that there are readily available opt-in security measures, that the data is largely public by choice, and that open access and treatment of data to for a data-rich environment can be a positive for research (Fairfield and Shtein 2014). However, the argument against assuming that publicly sharing data is fair-game for researchers is rather obvious. Firstly, there is no informed consent for the use of the data for research purposes. This is an issue that has been increasingly in the public eye through occurrences such as researchers purposefully manipulating Facebook feeds without user permission (Kramer et al. 2014) or through the well-­ documented Cambridge Analytica scandal. Though the data for many of these cases is technically public for anyone to read and access, this of course does not automatically mean that researchers should use it without making people aware that their data is being taken and used for research purposes. Crawford and boyd (2012, 672) sum up this notion, asking questions of this approach towards the access of ‘public’ online information: should someone be included as a part of a large aggregate of data? What if someone’s ‘public’ blog post is taken out of context and analyzed in a way that the author never imagined? What does it mean for someone to be spotlighted or to be analyzed without knowing it? Who is responsible for making certain that individuals and communities are not hurt by the

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research process? What does consent look like? It may be unreasonable to ask researchers to obtain consent from every person who posts a tweet, but it is unethical for researchers to justify their actions as ethical simply because the data is accessible. Just because content is publicly accessible doesn’t mean that it was meant to be consumed by just anyone.

The above objection to the use of public data does hint at a larger issue, namely, that researchers shouldn’t assume that all ‘publics’ are equal. If a user shares something publicly they understandably may not feel that this alone means that it will be largely seen and accessed. It may be meant for a specific group of people: a ‘specific public’. In the same way, some of the participants of this study noted that they felt that not all ‘publics’ are equal. Some, for example, noted that being public on Twitter was less problematic than being public on other platforms, as they felt the fast-moving nature of Twitter meant their data was soon forgotten and replaced with newer content. This echoes the concerns raised by Dwyer et al. (2007) who noted that specific platforms fostered different attitudes towards what data was shared and how publicly it was shared. There are also potential issues with the assumption that publicly shared data is public by choice. Public is for many people a default for participating in social media (Crawford and boyd 2012). Research has shown that privacy settings are often sacrificed online in order to interact successfully on platforms geared towards extracting user data and that participants can feel the pressure to interact publicly (Cho 2018). As Cho (2018) highlights, public-by-default designs can be particularly harmful to communities such as queer youth of colour, they note: Users are not fully in control of or even fully aware of the visibility to their network of all consequences of all their actions on the platform…These design choices rehearse heteronormative assumptions of publicity of act and speech into the design of a platform, a rehearsal that is also synonymous with the imperatives of platform capitalism. (Cho 2018, 3195)

As such, the awareness of the public nature of data may not be consistent for all users, and it cannot be assumed that just because we can access the data, this data was intended for public use and consumption in unproblematic ways. This bears out in the analysis of the data presented in this book, which notes that privacy is often negotiated between user and design and that the boundaries of the performance are negotiated in this regard, with participants noticeably accepting trade-offs in the level of their privacy in order to participate in these spaces. The findings from this data reveal complicated relationships with public data. Participants appear to walk the line between a need to be public and a desire to control their data and image. As detailed in Chap. 5 of this book, some participants felt they had to doctor their content, whilst others merely noted they sacrifice privacy for ‘better’ social interactions on sites such as Twitter. For the participants, the decision to opt out of public interaction was not so much an opt-out of having their data read as it was opt-out of the full experience of social communication online. The participants talked about how they maintained control in some ways via blocking and reporting, but as they wanted to participate in the social sphere, they felt they had no real way of maintaining control over ‘lurking’ and over researchers using their data without interacting with them. For the participants, to go private was also to severely limit social interaction and to limit people finding them. To go private was to lessen their

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social impact. In order for public and private to be dichotomous, they ought to be exclusive and exhaustive categories. But for participants in this research, it was neither; it was a false dichotomy that should not be upheld by researchers or relied upon without due ethical consideration. Rather than assuming that public interaction is a singular category, researchers should be careful to acknowledge the many nuances at play in public interactions. Public should not be thought of as a catch-all category, but instead researchers should acknowledge that there is, as Waskul and Douglass (1996) put it over two decades ago, such a thing as being ‘publicly private’. The interactions may be publicly accessible, but the participants may view these interactions as less public, possibly even as private. The same may be true of archival data that seems to be more prevalent these days in ‘big data’ studies. The research presented here suggests that the assumption of public and private should not be made with a consideration of what these mean to the participants and how these boundaries have been reached on a person-by-person, platform-by-platform basis. Essentially then, keeping this discussion very much in mind during the data collection process, this research did not collect public data from social media platforms directly. This is in part a practical matter. Given that this research did not focus upon one or two platforms, but instead sought to give voice to the participants’ understanding of social media and to discuss their use of a wide and broad range of sites, it would be impractical and in some cases impossible to access all of the social media platforms that the participant was using. Some sites platforms are, for example, location bound and can include sensitive information despite being public, including data platforms such as Grindr and Tinder. Others such as Snapchat are temporally bound. Others still work through anonymity or pseudoymity. I could not reasonably follow and observe the participants engagement on these platforms in person, and I could not reasonably know which posts the participant has sent and which have been sent by others. Similarly, as I own an Android phone, some platforms that are Apple exclusive would not be easily accessed. As such, and given the fact that my participants had a large range of platforms and sites between them, reasonably observing and capturing data from these sites over the research period would have been problematic and often impossible. To therefore choose to only focus on one or two easily accessed platforms would also provide a reductive picture of their complex online experiences. The approach taken in this research as such purposefully sidestepped this discussion of what data we should have access to, presenting a third tenable option. Rather than discussing the data produced by participants, this research positioned the experiences and thoughts of the participants in regard to social media as being of key importance. In essence, the data publicly produced is less important here than the thoughts and machinations of the participants in the production and consumption of this data. As such, the data detailed in this book is the result of in-depth discussions with nine 17–26-year-olds about their engagements with social media. With this in mind, I will now introduce the nine participants around whom this book revolves: Brandon was a 26-year-old white male living on the south coast of England with his girlfriend and working in finance. He described himself as optimistic and happy.

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He used Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram at the start of the research period and joined some forums towards the end specific to his interests in motorbikes. He accessed these mainly through either a phone or a desktop computer. Brian was a 26-year-old gay white male living in London and working as a research assistant. He had a broad range of interests and spent a lot of his time with his research, describing himself as a ‘typical nerd’. He used Facebook and Twitter to produce content, but also regularly accessed a wide range of other platforms for reading, posting content, and discussing issues. Brian accessed these platforms across a range of technologies, including phone, tablet, laptop, and computer. Isabel was a 25-year-old white female living near London with her partner and working in sales. She mainly used Facebook and Twitter, but also noted that she used WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat on occasion for a variety of reasons. She described herself as blunt but loyal to her friends. She accesses these platforms almost exclusively on apple devices, usually an iPhone and an iPad. Kirsty was a 24-year-old white female living on the south coast of England and worked in communications. She described herself as often whimsical and bubbly and had an interest in literature. She mainly used Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn at the start of the research and accessed them on her phone, laptop, and work computer. Molly was a 17-year-old white female. She had just sat her final exams for her A-Levels at a school in the south of England and lived at home with her mother, her step-father, her step-sister, and two brothers. She described herself as a shy person who spent a lot of time following her hobbies of dance and music. The research period coincided with several key events in Molly’s life: turning 18, leaving school, going to university, and moving away from her family. She used Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat during the research period and accessed these from a smartphone, a laptop, and a shared family computer. Nina was a 21-year-old white female living in the south of England after just moving out from her parent’s home. She worked in construction and regularly used Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and a musical theatre forum. She had many hobbies and was frequently busy fulfilling interests in music and culture. She accessed these platforms on a range of devices including work computers, desktop, laptop, and iPhone. Oliver was a 21-year-old white male living with his girlfriend near London. He was working in a primary school and training towards being a teacher. He described himself as geeky and spent his free time playing videogames and watching TV. He used Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit regularly and accessed these through a PC, and phone, and an iPad. Sally was a 21-year-old British-Asian female, living in the south of England with her parents. She was in her final year of university at the beginning of the research period and used Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram across several devices. She described herself as geeky and often talked about her love of fandoms. She spent much of her free time updating Tumblr, reading books, and watching TV. Willow was a 24-year-old British-Asian female living in the south of England. She worked as an office assistant and accessed social media via her phone, laptop,

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and computer. She was shy and geeky and spent her free time indoors reading and playing videogames. At the start of the research period she used Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter regularly.

1.3  Dissecting Social Media To return to where this chapter started, this book represents an attempt to understand and take social media seriously, considering what it means to young people and how we can better realise and recognise what this means for an understanding of the social in education. This requires granular and detailed approaching of the Internet as it exists today with an understand that this is a quick moving field, and an attempt to unpack what the role of the Internet is, what its limitations are, and what it can yet be. Much as the opening of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis details Gregor waking up as a bug and proceeding to slowly, carefully take stock of the familiar yet alien surroundings in which he now finds himself, so too is there a need to examine and take stock of social media, the Internet, and our engagement with technology in order to better navigate our way through it. Chapter 2 of this book therefore echoes Gregor’s early steps in The Metamorphosis taking stock of the new body he finds himself inhabiting. We will be taking a close and detailed look at the reality of social media in which we find ourselves. This includes defining what social media is and how young people are using it, as well as purposefully dispelling some myths about what social media isn’t. In Chap. 3 we begin exploring some of the new insect appendages, focusing here specifically on the devices we use to connect to social media, and how devices can change our uses and engagements with these platforms. This comes with an understanding that platforms, despite having a consistent name and aesthetic across devices, are largely different beast on different devices. In Chap. 4 we begin to take stock of the world around us beyond our immediate appendages, exploring what is ‘social’ about social media, which voices social media emphasises and minimises, and how a user’s socio-cultural experiences impact their engagements with platforms. This situates social media as overtly social in a way that cannot be separated from the offline. Chapter 5 presents a detail look at the internal struggle between Gregor’s mind and the new body he now finds himself in. The discussion, presented through the participants words, moves towards considering how identity performances online are negotiated in complex ways between socio-culturally grounded users and specifically designed platforms. Chapter 6 dwells more deeply on this same topic, this time building a presenting a new theoretical framework, Comic Theory, this which we can begin to frame identity presentation online as the result of complex ongoing negotiations between users and platforms. Finally, this book concludes with a discussion of what this close consideration of social media might mean for educators, educational research, and educational

References

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policy, in the hope that we can avoid the dire fate Gregor succumbs to through the wilful disregard of his new reality in pursuit of a futile clinical and detached view of the world. I will finish this introduction by noting that it is important as educators that we take the insect seriously, that we understand how it moves through the world and how it works, and that we understand the limitations and the advantages of this new reality rather than assuming that we can crowbar existing stratifies onto digital appendages. Nor can we just ignore them and hope they go away. This metamorphosis is one that we can and must begin to understand and uncover, rather than ignore and neglect. This book presents one such attempt to document this process. I encourage anyone involved in education to begin this process themselves, not just leaving this work to those interested in technology. Comic Theory presents a frame which purposefully enmeshes the social, the digital, and the cultural and which dwells in the messiness these issues present. I encourage educators, educational policy makers, and educational researchers to take the steps towards unlocking Gregor’s door and working with him to avoid his dire fate.

References Barnes, R. (2015). Understanding the affective investment produced through commenting on Australian alternative journalism website new Matilda. New Media & Society, 17(5), 810–826. boyd, d. (2015). Social media: A phenomenon to be analyzed. Social Media + Society, April–June 2015, 1–2. Bright, J., Margetts, H., Hale, S., & Yasseri, T. (2014). The use of social media for research and analysis: A feasibility study. A report of research carried out by the Oxford Internet Institute on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions. Cho, A. (2018). Default publicness: Queer youth of color, social media, and being outed by the machine. New Media & Society, 20(9), 3183–3200. Crawford, K., & boyd, D. (2012). Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication & Society, 15(9), 662–679. Ditchfield, H. (2019). Behind the screen of Facebook: Identity construction in the rehearsal stage of online interaction. New Media & Society, 2019, 1–19. Dwyer, C., Hiltz, S. R., & Passerini, K. (2007). Trust and privacy concern within social networking sites: A comparison of Facebook and MySpace. In AMCIS 2007 (paper 339). Emejulu, A., & Mcgregor, C. (2019). Towards a radical digital citizenship in digital education. Critical Studies in Education, 60(1), 131–147. Fairfield, J., & Shtein, H. (2014). Big data, big problems: Emerging issues in the ethics of data science and journalism. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 29(1), 38–51. Kafka, F. (1915). The metamorphosis (W. Muir & E. Muir, Trans.). Franz Kafka: The complete short stories. London: Vintage, 2005. Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing ethnographic research online. London: Sage. Kramer, A.  D. I., Guillory, J.  E., & Hancock, J.  T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-­ scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788–8790. Waskul, D., & Douglass, M. (1996). Considering the electronic participant: Some polemical observations on the ethics of on-line research. The Information Society, 12(2), 129–140. Weller, K. (2016). Trying to understand social media users and usage: The forgotten features of social media platforms. Online Information Review, 40(2), 256–264.

Chapter 2

Defining Social Media…It’s Complicated

Abstract  This chapter deals with the seemingly simple but surprisingly complex task of defining social media. We begin with a discussion of what social media isn’t, working through some of the common and pervasive myths around social media and young people, before moving on to discuss some of the difficulties in offering a clear definition of social media. Given the continuing evolving nature of platforms, including the addition of new ways of interacting, the ever-growing diverse ways of engaging with and through platforms beyond social interaction, and the use of various social features on a wide array of platforms that may not traditionally be considered overly social spaces, we discuss where (if anywhere) the boundaries of social media sit. We then move on to discuss the importance of a platform-specific approach to understanding social media and then finally reflect on data drawn from a series of interviews with young people to discuss how they understand, define, and use social media. Keywords  Social media · Social networking · Digital natives · Moral panic · Young people

2.1  Introduction There is no denying the increasingly important and ubiquitous role of the Internet and of social media in the everyday lives of many people today. Social media has quickly become incredibly popular – both important and mundane, widespread and individualised, a source of global political power and a space for sharing GIFs of cats. Social media contains multitudes and is experienced, used, and present in many of our lives in a variety of ways (see Miller 2011; Wang et al. 2015; Anderson and Jiang 2018). In its relatively short existence,1 the Internet has quickly come to

1  The birth of the Internet is, like many aspects of digital history, nebulous. Some trace it to Leonard Kleinrock’s work in packet networking in the 1960s with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Ruthfield 1995). Others credit Tim Berners-Lee’s work at CERN in the 1980s (Couldry 2012)

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serve many broad functions and roles in everyday life, from social interaction and action (boyd 2015), to news (Hermida et  al. 2012), shopping (Schivinski and Dabrowski 2016), business (Qualman 2009), politics (Shirky 2011), and many more growing diverse uses (Irwin 2016). Given the seemingly increasing popularity of social media, especially amongst our youth (Lenhart 2015; OFCOM 2019), there is a pressing need to understand exactly what social media is and how young people are using social media in their daily lives to act and interact. This means a need to consider not only the amount of time young people are spending online (a topic discussed in more detail later in this chapter) but also what their experiences are (if indeed these can be considered universal, another topic we’ll discuss later) and how social media may shape their complex social lives (a theme we’ll return to throughout this book). Though the use of social media is spread amongst all age ranges at an increasing rate (Perrin and Anderson 2019), young people in particular2 access the Internet more frequently at an increasing rate (Lenhart 2015; Anderson and Jiang 2018). This is for a complex range of reasons (Malvini Redden and Way 2017) beyond just the suggestion that they are young and therefore somehow ‘native’ to technology. This idea of ‘digital natives’ in particular is a myth that educational researchers, policy makers, and practitioners must dismantle and a topic that we will return to in detail later in this chapter. Nonetheless, the latest OFCOM (2019) figures do highlight heavy usage by young people, noting that 83% of 12–15-year-olds have their own smartphone, that 69% of 12–15-year-olds have social media accounts, and that 99% of 12–15-year-olds go online for 20.5 hours per week. This suggests that social media is playing a large part in the lives of an increasing majority of young people, even when lower age limits of social media platforms are being potentially flouted (Livingstone and Ólafsson 2018). Indeed the same 2019 OFCOM report suggests 18% of 8–11-year-olds in the UK have a social media profile and 47% have their own device, a statistic that suggests young people have an online presence even when platforms restrict lower age limits. This presence is seemingly significant and pervasive in the lives of young people. Statistics suggest that in the USA, 92% of

with the first ‘website’ launching in 1990 (still live at http://info.cern.ch/). Some place it as early as the 1950s with the emergence of WANs (wide-area networks) and other networks like the SemiAutomatic Ground Environment (Kim 2005), or to 1962 with J.C.R Licklider’s work at MIT on the ‘Galactic Network’ (Leiner et al. 2009). For the purpose of this book, we’ll be focusing on the internet from roughly around 2000 onwards, when there appears to have been a shift away from the Internet as a little used communication medium amongst those in the know to a heavily utilised method of mass communication and interaction. In 1993, only 1% of the information sent through two-way telecommunication networks was via the Internet. By 2000 this figure was 51%, and by 2007, it was placed at more than 97% of all information sent (Hilbert and Lopez 2011). This signifies a massive shift in the last 20 years towards mass communication via the Internet, followed by capitalist investment in infrastructure across a number of industries, such as the introduction of broadband and the huge boom in educational technology (themes that we will return to in Chap. 3). 2  At increasingly and notably early ages (Livingstone and Ólafsson 2018; Jones and Glynn 2019)

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teens go online daily, with 24% reporting that they are online ‘almost constantly’ (Lenhart 2015). Indeed, Lenhart (2015) notes that the majority of teens access the Internet several times a day at least, visiting an increasingly diverse range of destinations. Only 12% of teens reported accessing the Internet just once a day. As these spaces broadly are becoming increasingly relied upon in the everyday social lives of young people, the ways in which identity and interactions play out on- and offline must be of crucial interest to researchers, educators, parents, the media, and users and non-users of social media alike. It is worth noting here, however, that much like young people and their use of social media, this growing body of statistical data shows no sign of slowing or abating any time soon, seemingly suggesting that Internet use in the global north appears to be generally strong and pervasive. Whilst these quantitative readings are broadly useful, these sort of statistical barrages of data about young people and social media in the paragraph above lack qualitative depth around the lived experiences of young people on- and offline. Nonetheless these narrow data snippets often form the basis of the discussion around social media, in the public and in the media writ large. This shallow reading of youth and social media becomes the ever-present narrative undercurrent of public discussion and consternations, with the gaps left from this mass data around the actual lived experiences of young people on- and offline seemingly filled with fears, myths, assumptions, and misunderstandings. The ways the public fills in the gaps about what young people are doing online from this unabating mass of statistical data has roots bleeding back to long-held extant fears around youth. This often belies and supersedes the much-needed deeper discussion that is increasingly required to understand the various complex roles that social media plays in the lives of young people, a discussion that is ever-present in digital research (see Livingstone et al. 2018, for example) but which often fails to penetrate the broader discussion, especially in education. This chapter, and indeed this book in general, aims to move beyond broad statements about young people and social media to instead understand how young people’s experiences of social media, their lives on- and offline, their identities, and their experiences across various digital and non-digital domains result from the complex, ongoing, and continual negotiation of various shifting factors, actors, and technologies. Though exploring and dwelling in this complex mix, this book begins to lay the groundwork for a theoretical framework to understand and map the enmeshing of the various factors that shape youth experiences of social media. This is vital if we are to understand how Internet use is largely effected and shaped by socio-cultural backgrounds and exposures to a variety of discourses and media narratives (see Dyer 2016). In order to explore beyond these pervasive broad statistics about teens and social media use, this chapter will discuss what social media is and what research tells us about how young people understand and engage with it. First, however, given the propensity of daily stories about young people and social media, it is worth doing some myth-busting and talking clearly about what social media isn’t.

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2.2  D  ispelling Some Myths and Moral Panics: What Young People Aren’t Doing Online Increasingly we are seeing a large rise in concern about social media and young people, with uncertainties around how young people are using social media, what spaces they are using that parents and teachers may not know about, what ‘normal’ usage is, and if young people are addicted. Unfortunately this well-meaning concern is being exacerbated and fuelled by misinformation and long-standing generational fear. Headlines appear in the Daily Mail in 2016 claiming ‘Social media-obsessed teenagers are so frightened of real life some won’t even answer the door’, articles in The Atlantic ask ‘have smartphones destroyed a generation?’, and the Observer headlines implore parents to ‘stop children bingeing on social media’. As with many changes involving young people throughout history, this has led to growing ‘moral panics’ about ‘kids today’. McRobbie and Thornton (1995, 561–562) note of this that: The same anxieties appear with startling regularity; these involve the immorality of young people, the absence of parental control, the problem of too much free time leading to crime, and the threat which deviant behaviour poses to national identity and labour discipline.

We see these observations from over two decades ago still present today, much as they were when highlighted by Geoff Pearson (1983) who discussed the same attitudes towards young people in the 1930s and 1940s. As with past moral panics, our concerns about young people and social media are shaped in no small part by our collective fears – of youth, of our own mistakes, of our growing irrelevancy, and of our increasing distance from being ‘cool’, none of which are all that unique or new as concerns and fears. Throughout history we see fears of media and of new technological inventions coded as ways of explaining and justifying broader concerns around issues such as race, youth, gender, and sexuality. These include fears of televisions as ‘idiot boxes’ that are ‘obstructing a moral lifestyle, and impairing mental and physical health’ (Syvertsen 2017, 55); fears of video games causing youth violence (see the largely debunked Anderson and Dill 2000 paper); fear of comic books causing violence (Springhall 1998); fears of flapper dancing causing sexual promiscuity and manly behaviours in young females (see Hall 1922); fears of dungeons and dragons causing Satanism (Lancaster 1994); and more recently fears linking hip hop to inner-city crime as seen in an article in The Times (Mararike et al. 2018) detailing ‘Drill, the “demonic” music linked to rise in youth murders’. The list goes on. Lest we think these fears of media and technology are a twentieth-century peculiarity, I would like to detour quickly to highlight two of my personal favourite cases of moral panics around media and technology.3 The first being the case of Jonas

3  For a brilliant achieve of newspaper articles documenting fears of technology from horseless carriages and bicycles to headphones and radios, I would encourage you to explore the pessimists archive at https://pessimists.co/archive/.

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Hanway, an Englishman in the 1750s who, reportedly after a trip to Europe, began using an umbrella around London when it rained. Onlookers were recorded to be shocked by this ‘effeminate’ behaviour displayed publicly by a man and were even recorded as being violent towards Hanway, heckling him, and pelting him with rubbish (Waters 2016). The second case is considerably older, coming from Plato’s Phaedrus composed around 370  BC.  In Phaedrus, the Egyptian King Thamos is detailed discussing his fears around how writing might impact the capabilities of younger generations to remember ideas, stating: If men learn this [art of writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to ­remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks (Plato, Transl. Hackforth 1973).

The point here being that this is nothing new yet seemingly we refuse to learn from this ongoing fear of youth. This landscape of fear and concern around technologies and youth can often be confusing for parents, teachers, and others concerned with young people, but worryingly can also be truly dangerous in regard to how we treat young people. Nowhere has this been more apparent recently than in the case of the ‘Momo Challenge’ in early 2019, a story which obscured, diverted, and refracted concerns around young people and mental health onto a collectively manifested and exaggerated fictional totemic ‘folk devil’ (reminiscent of Cohen’s [1972] work around moral panics). With origins in online rumours dating back to 2018, the ‘Momo Challenge’ was reportedly a ‘suicide game’ where a sinister-looking bird-­faced woman named Momo would appear on children’s phones telling them to complete an escalating series of tasks, culminating in self-harm and suicide. Early reporting in the media linked this to deaths of children in South America, and the stories were met with concern from parents, statements from police forces4 and school boards,5 posts about the craze from celebrities such as Kim Kardashian,6 and a flurry of new stories. Of course, the Momo Challenge was not actually real, but nonetheless the stories spread far and fast. It has even been suggested that, because of this press coverage, Momo was manifested into existence, with the UK safer Internet Centre noting ‘It’s a myth that is perpetuated into being some kind of reality’ (Waterson 2019). To any media scholar, this should remind you instantly of Jean Baudrillard’s (1994) concept of hyperreality in which he posits that fiction and reality are so closely intertwined in modern life that it becomes difficult to separate one from the other. Whilst concerns parents were seemingly talking to their children about the dangers of a fictional bird-lady on their phones in the immediate aftermath of the Momo Challenge, the underlying concerns from which this story manifested – concerns around social media, young people, and mental health – were left under-discussed. 4  See here https://www.psni.police.uk/news/Latest-News/250219-psni-statement-regardingmomo-challenge/. 5  https://twitter.com/LimestoneDSB/status/1100822007829024768 6  https://www.tmz.com/2019/02/27/kim-kardashian-youtube-kids-momo-challenge/

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Though there are well-meaning fears that young people are suffering through a mental health crisis driven in no small part by social media, the research is rather clear, highlighting that adolescent well-being is not strongly linked to technology use (Orben and Przybylski 2019). Nonetheless, there has been a great deal of handwringing around the ‘screentime’ debate, with the logic that screentime can correlate somehow to an increase in mental health issues or a lack of ‘proper’ communication (See Turkle 2011). It is worth noting that Orben and Przybylski find in no uncertain tone that, though worthy of academic study, the search for easy answers around screentime is obscuring more nuanced discussion around youth and social media, suggesting ‘that the outsized weight given to digital screen-time in scientific and public discourse might not be merited on the basis of the available evidence’ (Orben and Przybylski 2019: 177). The blame for these moral panics cannot, of course, be placed solely in the hands of concerned parents, nor with the media. As Ophir et al. (2019) go to some length to point out, key studies that have captured public attention in claiming a link between social media and mental health in young people, such as Twenge et  al. (2018) heavily discussed paper, are misleading in their measurements, analyses, and results. As researchers, we should also be careful to understand our role in shaping public narratives.7 Despite the hard work of many researchers in dispelling these myths around social media causing mental health issues, we nonetheless see increasing reports of educators reacting to social media in extreme ways, punishing young people and blaming social media for complex mental health issues. This includes schools increasingly banning phones to improve the mental health of young people, such as the school I attended in my teen years: St. Bede’s in Redhill, Surrey, UK. Headmaster Stephen Crabtree detailed his plans in the summer of 2019 to ban phones from the school to improve mental health and encourage communication, suggesting this would allow pupils the ‘time to simply be children again’.8 I couldn’t be more disappointed in this decision. This move to scapegoat social media and screen time in lieu of actually providing mental health services and support for young people should be truly worrying to anyone involved in education, and it is evident that mental health issues need to be treated rather than removing some of the means through which mental health issues manifest themselves. Though links between sleep and social media screen usage are notable and telling, in general the focus should not be on time spent, but the way we use social media and the content we see, seek, produce, and consume. As Ophir et al. (2019: 5 [my emphasis]) note: the risk for adolescent depression rises when the adolescent avoids positive and constructive daily behaviors (e.g., exercising or interacting with friends online and offline) and when he or she lacks community support or meaning in life (e.g., attending religious services), regardless of new-media screen use.

7  It should be noted that Twenge seems rather undeterred by this and has continued to explore links between low well-being and frequent social media use (see Twenge 2019). 8  https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/st-bedes-school-redhill-ban-16400248

2.2  Dispelling Some Myths and Moral Panics: What Young People Aren’t Doing Online

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With this need for a more nuanced discussion of social media in mind, the framework presented in Chap. 6 of this book presents a way to situate online content in the complex and multifaceted lives of young people, rather than treating them as a catch-all category and assuming a one-way relationship between social media use and behaviour. Nonetheless, there are many myths that pervade about young people. One in particular that is present in education stems from an urge to categorise young people as a collective through the ever-present narrative of ‘digital natives’. You will notice this is the only section in this book in which I discuss or use the term digital natives, despite its popularity amongst educators and despite this book exploring in detail how young people are engaging with social media and digital spaces. There is good reason for this, as laid out here and indeed in this entire book. Originally conceived by Prensky (2001), digital natives refers to the generation of young people born roughly after 1980 who, because they have been exposed to digital technology from birth, have a different approach, fluency, and use of technology than previous generations whom Prensky labels ‘digital immigrants’. The term digital natives has passed somewhat into its public parlance and has quickly been adopted as a way of helping to understand why young people are competent and comfortable with computers. The notion of digital natives, despite its popularity (particularly amongst educators), has nonetheless been widely discredited and criticised (Jones and Shao 2011; Helsper and Eynon 2010; Judd 2018). There are a numerous reasons for this criticality, not least because digital natives is such a broad and sweeping term. To assume that young people universally will have the same or comparable experiences of technology merely due to exposure is far too simple and misunderstands the well-­ documented digital divides that straddle socio-cultural categories such as class, ethnicity, race, and gender (Carpio 2018; Hargittai 2018; Mihelj et al. 2019).9 As Shah and Abraham (2009, 26) note: It is necessary to promote research that grasps that not all digital natives are equal. Each context will have certain norms by which digital nativity is understood and experienced. Dismantling the universal digital native and considering contextualised digital native identities might also help us move away from speaking of the digital native as a necessarily elite power-user of technology.

Indeed, as the above quote highlights, the use of ‘digital natives’ also highlights some of the problems around attitudes towards technology we see in education to date – the idea that exposure is related to competence. Though there is much to be said for discussions of using technology as a pedagogical tool for younger generations (see Morgan 2014, for example), considerations of students and pupils as digital natives can be harmful to approaches to learning for both teachers and pupils. Blanket assumptions of competence by younger generations can be problematic and deter from the need for holistic, critical, and engaged guidance from older generations, which may serve to undermine calls for digital literacy and critical digital

9  For more information about digital divides, see Chap. 4 where social inequality online is discussed at length.

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citizenship in schools.10 Students have been suggested to lack, for example, search skills to find and evaluate suitable research (Duke and Asher 2012). Using an ‘immigrant/native’ dichotomy in education can lead to ‘structurally embedded de-­ privileging of the role of the teacher’ (Bayne and Ross 2011, 161–162) undermining their ability to guide and work with students and pupils on, in, and through technology. It is also far too simple to assume older generations lack competence, willing, and ability to utilise technology (Hill et al. 2008) or that they are unable to become ‘native’ (Bayne and Ross 2011). Further, positioning of older generations as digital immigrants can serve to undermine critiques of technology by these users, meaning ‘their dissent can be delegitimised as symptomatic of their ignorance, backwardness or resistance to change’ (Bayne and Ross 2011, 162). Further to this, it is worth highlighting and emphasising the linguistic flaw and danger in dwelling on an ‘immigrant/native’ divide. As Bayne and Ross (2011, 164) point out, such a rhetoric ‘inevitably evokes complexities and anxieties around migration, integration, and racial and cultural difference in Western society’. Even with a charitable reading of this stretched metaphor of the native pitted against the immigrant as inherently different in their approach to the world, Prensky’s (2001, 2) claims of immigrants as ‘heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners’ should be a warning to any use of this as a concept as a notion of generation assimilation, superiority, or difference. In reality, beyond such easy generational catch-all assumptions, we see young people with varied and complex existences that are mediated by, through, on, and with technology to different degrees, for different purposes, and with different results. In this regard, the research and discussion in this book focuses upon the need to consider how technology is embedded in the lives of young people and how the relationships between technology and humans are mediated in an ongoing manner to create complex identities, actions, and interactions. As Shah and Abraham (2009, 29) aptly suggest: It is necessary to overcome the physical-virtual dialectic when speaking of digital natives and to consider them as techno-social identities who straddle, like Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, the realms of the physical and the virtual simultaneously.

Whilst there are other myths worth addressing and unpacking around technology and young people, it is through this lens of a need to consider ‘techno-social’ identities when approaching the experiences of young people today that we turn to a consideration of how best to define and understand ‘social media’.

 See Chap. 7 for a discussion of digital literacy in education and the need to teach criticality over compliance.

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2.3  Understanding ‘Social Media’

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2.3  Understanding ‘Social Media’ Given that social media has become an increasingly ubiquitous (Curran et al. 2016) part of everyday social life for a wide variety of users (Perrin and Anderson 2019), research has been keen to unpack the effects of the many aspects of social media upon our actions and interactions (Ariel and Avidar 2015; Salomon and Brown 2019; Barker and Rodriguez 2019). The subject has attracted a lot of interest from a variety of fields ranging from sociology (Curran et al. 2016; Daniels et al. 2017), to psychology (Seidman 2013), geography (Kitchin 2013), business studies (Safko 2010), and education (Marsh et  al. 2016). With this broad scope of approaches, there are a similarly wide variety of approaches towards understanding, considering, and defining social media. This section will therefore detail the scope of this research in regard to social media, discussing the key aspects of social media as they pertain to a focus upon identity performances. A common task I set my students in the first lecture of every year is to define ‘social media’. This seemingly simple task, to define something so ubiquitous in modern life, becomes quite complex quite quickly as my students realise that they are unsure about where social media begins and ends. The inevitable responses that come at the end of this short group task are either hyper-specific, focusing on one or two aspect such as ‘public posting’ or ‘networking’, or are extremely broad, encompassing all communication online. Some centralise Facebook as ‘default’ social media with variations spinning off from this; others attempt to account for all variations and include such methods of interacting as email, financial transactions, and dating apps. One aspect however that unfailingly is centred in almost all definitions from my students is that social media me is a space for people to interact and post content online. As Chap. 4 of this book discusses in detail, there is an understandable tendency to centre our understanding of social media around this ‘loud’ and obvious public data that seems to be ostensibly at the heart of ‘social’ media, but in reality our experiences and uses of social media move far beyond just social interaction alone. You only have to be on Facebook for a minute to see some on the variations available on this platform alone. Facebook has groups, advert after advert, videos, news, private messaging, games, and spaces where you can buy and sell goods; the list goes on and changes frequently. Seemingly social platforms are expanding their focus far beyond social interactions alone. It could even be argued that companies such as Facebook and Twitter centre user interaction as the purpose of the platforms but that their interest lies in collecting and producing data about our habits, clicks, and footprints online. As David Beer (2018) rightly points out, this ‘data gaze’ follows users online and offline, restructuring and re-contextualising many aspects of daily life. In many ways, given the complex and multifaceted nature of these platforms, the term ‘social media’ is somewhat of a misnomer that, at the very least, makes users, observers, audiences, and researchers consider these spaces to be social first. Nonetheless, the term has quickly come into the zeitgeist, seemingly replacing old

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terms such as ‘web 2.0’ and ‘social networking ‘, making it somewhat hard to discuss the growing mass of unique online experiences covered by spaces as diverse as Grindr and the Daily Mail message board without somehow invoking social media. Indeed, along with ‘traditional’ social media platforms diversifying their offerings into a range of different functions and features beyond user-produced content, we are also seeing other platforms integrate social elements to encourage some form of engagement and interaction, such as the proliferation of comment boards and forums on a wide variety of online spaces. Ostensibly then, ‘traditional’ social media platforms are extending far beyond social interactions, and at the same time a wide variety of diverse website, games, and platforms are integrating social elements into the users experience, making a strict boundary of where social media begins and ends increasingly hard to define. This complex landscape poses somewhat of a challenge to any researcher looking into social media, as choices have to be made about where to focus one’s attention when trying to capture online experiences in a manner that allows a holistic and accurate representation of online experiences. Questions emerge when approaching research around the topic of social media, including exactly how broad an approach towards social aspects online the researcher needs to take, exactly what social elements the research will consider, and how to deal with features beyond the social aspects of these complex platforms. Beyond the well-known and much researched features and practices associated with Facebook and Twitter (Oz et  al. 2018), a growing range of online platforms today purposefully attempt to utilise features that encourage varying forms of social interaction between users (Stroud et al. 2016; Wu and Atkin 2018) around a range of content (boyd 2015; Curran et al. 2016). Features such as comment sections and sharing buttons are, for instance, increasingly common across a wide array of sites and have been noted for their ability to generate social interaction (Toepfl and Piwoni 2015). Research has also looked at other features that can encourage social interaction, including the up-voting of content (Leavitt and Clark 2014; Tarsa 2015) or simple view counters (Lange 2007; Rieder et al. 2018). The ubiquity and commonality of these elements on a wide array of websites potentially blurs the line between dedicated social media platforms and platforms that contain social elements and that foster an interactive environment around the content of that site (Canter 2013). Given this variety of features that encourage different forms of social interaction, there is limited agreement about what exactly can be considered ‘social media’ and what cannot. Whilst platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are comfortably accepted as social media, other platforms with social elements are nonetheless often excluded from this discussion. This can be seen in choices around how large-scale statistical data is being collected about social media. A study from PEW (Lenhart 2015), for example, collected data on a range of platforms for their expansive survey on Internet usage, but chose to delineate only seven platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Google+ and Vine) as social media platforms. This is despite the fact that in amongst the other platforms were popular platforms with social elements, such as Pinterest, used by 22% of teens (Lenhart 2015); discussion boards, used by one in six teens; and anonymous sites and apps such as Yik Yak and

2.3  Understanding ‘Social Media’

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Ask.FM. Indeed, platforms such as Pinterest have been highlighted for their social elements and the range of communities that emerge around the sharing of content (Hall and Zarro 2012; Tekobbe 2013; Guidry et al. 2016). Since 2018, PEW now collect data on nine platforms, removing Tumblr, Google+, and Vine adding YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, WhatsApp, and Reddit (Perrin and Anderson 2019). Again, this contains some odd exclusions, including the removal of Tumblr which continues to be a thriving platform (Byron et al. 2019). Interestingly, research has found that even if the social element does not serve as the site’s primary purpose, the inclusion of these interactive features can nonetheless foster an attitude of social interaction and even a sense of community (Barnes 2015; Zhou et al. 2016). Manosevitch and Walker (2009, 22), for example, in their study of the comment section of two news websites noted that despite neither site explicitly encouraging it, there were ongoing social conversations in the comment sections of the sites, suggesting ‘that commenters did not simply ‘parachute’ in and leave their opinion. Instead, they engaged with one another as well as the issue under discussion’. This presence of social engagement through comment sections is also confirmed by Canter (2013, 604) who found ‘buoyant levels of interactivity between readers in comment threads’ in UK newspaper comment section and by Barnes (2015, 823) in Australian newspaper comment sections who found that many commenters were ‘actively forming a virtual community, fuelling their own sense of identity through the submission of comments and the dynamic played out through established relationships within that community’. This sense of community and engagement has even been noted in comment sections and platforms that allow anonymity. Coles and West (2016, 47), for example, note ‘the majority of posts are of an interactional nature’ and that ‘online members do not treat each other as being anonymous – even when posters real names and identities are unknown’ (Ibid, 51). This strongly suggests that there is a need to broaden approaches to social interactions online beyond just Facebook and Twitter alone if we are to get a fuller picture of the rich variation of online social interactions. There is also a need to expand understandings of the activities and purposes of users on more easily identifiable platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter (boyd and Ellison 2008; Kowert et al. 2016). As mentioned earlier, it is increasingly clear to see that these platforms are not exclusively social and focused on peer-to-peer interactions alone, a point that has been being made in research for a decade now (Kwak et  al. 2010; Smock et  al. 2011). Indeed, these spaces are increasingly offering diverse ways of engaging, with various possibilities for action and interaction (Bucher and Helmond 2018). This makes providing a holistic definition of social media difficult. Many of the traditional criteria that have been used to separate and delineate the core of social media’s essence in the early days of online interaction are being thrown into question by recent developments in platforms. Aspects that were once considered essential in separating social network sites(SNS)11 from other  boyd and Ellison (2008, 211) make specific use of social ‘network’ site (SNS) rather than social ‘networking’ site, noting that ‘what makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks’.

11

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spaces online (see boyd and Ellison 2008 for an early list of core features) are now questioned, with newer platforms which might be considered under the moniker of ‘social networking’ removing the need for dedicated public profiles (Khazaei et al. 2016; Pangrazio 2018) or a dedicated list of connections (Black et  al. 2016). Similarly, social platforms have wholeheartedly integrated private messaging (O’Hara et al. 2014; Karapanos et al. 2016), meaning the notion of a separation of public and private social spaces that some research has previously attempted to maintain is becoming increasingly questionable (Korhan and Ersoy 2016; Utz 2015). Beyond the blurring of social media into a range of other platforms and spaces online, it appears there is also an issue of synecdoche12 in the existing literature dealing with social media. This can be problematic when attempting to consider the nuances of social media as certain aspects may be exclusively foregrounded and used to generalise all social experiences online (Smock et al. 2011). An example of this synecdoche can be seen in use by Hughes et al. (2012), who (understandably for research published in 2012) position Facebook and Twitter as the key platforms online and generalise about the entirety of social media from these two platforms. More recently, Davis (2016, 137) has suggested that ‘social media are interactive, nonanonymous, network-based Internet technologies that allow for the sharing of user-generated content’. Whilst this is a generally accurate description of how some users interact on certain platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (though certainly this is not all a user can and does do on these platforms), this certainly cannot be applied or generalised to all social media. This is especially apparent given the recent resurgence of anonymity in complex ways in social media (Ellison et  al. 2016) and the popularity of platforms such as Reddit and Tumblr that do not require the sharing of personal information. In Davis’ case, their earlier work (Davis and Jurgenson 2014) hints at the need for a broader definitions, highlighting that a large number of users use more than one social media platform and defining social media thusly: ‘by social media, we refer to the set of interactive Internet applications which facilitate (collaborative or individual) creation, curation, consumption, and sharing of user-generated content’ (Davis and Jurgenson 2014, 477). This second definition allows for a wider array of social platforms that does not limit aspects such as anonymity (Coles and West 2016). None of this is to say that Davis’ definition provided above is not a consideration of some of the most important and prevalent aspects of social media, but it is a clear ontological choice to focus on a specific aspects of the platform – in this case the interactivity, the lack of anonymity, and the sharing of user-generated content – over other uses of these complex multi-faceted platforms. Such synecdoche poses problems for what researchers focus upon when they engage with these platforms, which provide more than just avenues for social interactions between users. It appears, given the growing range and variety of social platforms, that not only is there a need  Synecdoche refers to the use of a part to refer to the whole or vice versa, for example, the use of ‘Hoover’ to refer to all vacuum cleaners or the phrase ‘boots on the ground’ to refer to military troops.

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to consider an array of platforms when considering social interaction, but there is also a need to pay attention to the particularities of that platform rather than generalising the scope and shape of social interaction online. Indeed, the research documented in this book emerged from an early study where I attempted to do this myself, focusing on Facebook and Twitter alone to attempt to understand social media. I quickly found this to be notably restrictive and a limited way of understanding social media. Instead, it must be noted that ‘social networking’ represent one aspect of social interaction online and that experiences on these platforms are increasingly diverse. It is also apparent, given the increased presence of social features on a range of platforms alongside the diversification of features offered on platforms such as Facebook, that SNSs are increasingly less of a discrete and wholly distinct category, hence the choice to use ‘social media’ as a broader ‘catch-all’ category throughout this book. Whilst traditionally SNSs foreground a rather specific from of social interaction (see Dabbagh et al. 2015), it is clear that today platforms offer far more than social interaction and foregrounding this aspect may only enhance synecdoche. Of course, this is also true of the term ‘social media’, which seems to similarly foreground social interaction. At its broadest ‘social media’ has to cover a range of complex and overlapping functions across a wide range of spaces, blurring into and out of a variety of other platforms and including functions far beyond social interactions alone. As such, there is no easy answer to the task I set to my student of defining social media. Nonetheless, if I were to proffer a suggested way to conceptualise social media, I would point towards the Ancient Greek concept of an ‘Agora’. Agorae were the social hubs of the Ancient Greek world, literally meaning a ‘gathering place’. They were, ostensibly, marketplaces that served as key locales in Greek athletic, artistic, spiritual, and political life. On the one hand, they were important spaces to be and to be seen; they served as places to socialise, interact, discuss politics, and generally be a part of Ancient Greek life. On the other hand, they served as decidedly commercial spaces. The embedded nature of this dual functionality is still reflected in the Greek language today, and from the word Agora, we get two Greek verbs ἀγοράζω, agorázō, ‘I shop’, and ἀγορεύω, agoreúō, ‘I speak in public’. Modern social media also blurs a market and a social space, producing different variations and iterations on this theme, emphasising some aspect, and minimising others to produce an increasingly hybrid experience for the user. This still misses many aspects of the social media experience however. In this manner, social media is a rather imprecise term to describe these platforms. For the time being, given the progression of the term into public parlance, social media serves as an imprecise, synecdochic, fuzzy, but inescapable category whose centres may be easily located but whose boundaries become rather obfuscated. One aspect of importance to note about the term social media is its distinction and distance from the use of the term ‘site’. ‘Sites’ are increasingly fraught in digital research, representing a hangover of ‘website’. Social media however is rapidly moving away from the website-only format towards the use of apps and various ‘blackboxed’ interfaces (Light et al. 2018). Statistics suggest that 95% of American

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teens have or have access to smartphones which they use to access the Internet (Anderson and Jiang 2018). Some of the increasingly popular platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok (Şimşek et al. 2018) are viewed only in app-based form on mobile. Equally, sites like Twitter and Facebook can be reached on a range of different devices. Given the shift to a range of platforms beyond just websites (a trend that looks likely to continue to evolve with the influx of augmented and virtual reality), the need to avoid synecdoche, and the various uses of these platforms beyond networking alone (Smock et al. 2011), I warily choose to make use of social media as a problematic but inescapable term. Given this position, my research aims to purposefully consider a broad array of online platforms and considers social media at its broadest point  – as platforms through which users engage with, through, on, over, and about media, albeit alone, with other users, or with a range of entities both human and non-human. Such a broad approach naturally covers spaces and platforms which may not traditionally have been considered, including emails and video games. However, this broader focus opens many possibilities for a close engagement with a broad array of experiences. Obviously, due to the abundance of easily mineable data from a wide audience, Facebook and Twitter currently attract a lot of attention from researchers, especially in regard to ‘big data’ research. Nonetheless single-platform research and the implications drawn from it do not match the experiences of many users for whom social interaction is happening across a range of platforms (Smith and Anderson 2018). As Carr and Hayes (2015, 49) highlight, a narrow focus ‘could impede theoretical development of social media more broadly’. Increasingly, user contribution and engagement with a range of materials across a range of platforms has allowed for many diverse spaces to build social community, in turn encouraging new forms and models of social interaction that should not be ignored by researchers in favour of larger platforms like Twitter (Kowert et al. 2016). It is clear that with the growth in user interactions across a plethora of diverse platforms, those findings drawn from one social media platform cannot be applied universally (Katz and Crocker 2015; Stroud et al. 2016). As discussed in Chap. 6, because of the possibilities a broader consideration of social media offers for research, a theoretical frame is needed that is capable of moving beyond a reliance upon the structures and affordances of Facebook and Twitter alone. Given this, this chapter will now move on to consider some of the implications of a broader approach towards social media and what this might mean for how we consider social interactions online.

2.4  More than a Feature Beyond the need to consider a broad range of platforms, there is also a need to consider the specificities of each platform and the unique ways in which they may be used. This is aptly highlighted by Stroud et al. (2016), who note that across 155 functional similar news websites, the use of social features such as social media buttons, hyperlinks, polls, and comments largely differed from one site to the next.

2.4  More than a Feature

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They found little support for any ‘interactive convergence’, instead noting ‘many differences in the adoption and use of interactive features based on medium and target’ (Stroud et al. 2016, 339), highlighting that the context of the site plays a large part in how users engage with these features. This suggests that merely noting the presence of specific features when considering social media is not enough to understand how they are being used to socially act and interact, as the same feature may be used in different ways for different effects on different platforms. Such an approach further complicates a clear definition of social media, as the features of these platforms potentially become less important that the culture and environment in which they are placed. This point is echoed by Bucher and Helmond (2018, 251), who note call for platform-specific approaches to social media which ‘emphasize the specificity of platforms as a socio-technological environment that draw different users together and which orchestrate the relations between different platform users’. In this manner, it is apparent that any analysis of social media should look at how features are utilised and used in context, paying attention to the use of features from one site to the next rather than assuming that specific features and elements alone will create and foster similar uses across a range of contexts. This can be further highlighted by literature that focuses upon cases of ‘trolling’, anti-social, and uncivil behaviour online, which research suggests may be more prevalent in certain contexts, such as sites and platforms that offer anonymity (Coles and West 2016; Massanari 2017). This certainly does not mean that anonymity itself is always utilised for trolling, and it should be noted that, in some contexts, anonymity can in fact be used in a supportive manner (See Dyer 2017). In this manner, research has highlighted that the context in which features are found can shape their use. Rowe (2015), for example, looked at the comment section of the Washington Post which allows users to post anonymously and compared the comments to those left on the Washington Post’s Facebook site where users had to use personal Facebook accounts to leave a comment. Rowe found that the Washington Post website had far more incivility and impoliteness as well as a greater likelihood for purposefully directed hurtful comments than the Facebook page. Similar findings have been found by other researchers (Cho and Acquisti 2013; Hille and Bakker 2014; Van der Nagel and Frith 2015). It appears then that interactive affordances, such as comment sections, are not used in uniform manners. Context, it seems, matters. Given this, researchers have begun to question the treatment of a vast range of social media platforms as analogous entities simply due to a commonality of features (see Bucher and Helmond 2018). Work has begun to highlight that many unique factors and contexts can affect the ways in which users engage with features (Dyer 2015; Kowert et al. 2016; Stroud et al. 2016). Katz and Crocker (2015) make the key point that researchers should be careful to contextualise the use of features such as the ability to take and post selfies. In the results of their survey conducted into the subject of selfies then noted that: ‘when it came to selfies, the users that we interviewed suggested that they viewed selfies generated via Snapchat differently than ones published on more public platforms or saved onto mobile communication devices’ (Katz and Crocker 2015, 7). It would appear therefore that focusing upon the affordances offered is not nearly enough to understand the platform, there is also

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a need to consider the use of those affordances on a platform-by-platform basis in relation to the individual user as well as the intended audience, further echoing calls to understand social media as socio-technical assemblages (Bucher and Helmond 2018; van Doorn 2011; van Dijck and Poell 2013). In the case of Katz and Crocker’s (2015) findings, they noted that: rather than being a single phenomenon with a singular purpose of engagement, we found that the selfie category encompasses a range of use and intention. The platforms, subject matter, and audience all impact how users engage with selfies and the reasons for taking them. (Katz and Crocker 2015, 10)

My own previous research in this area (Dyer 2015) similarly highlights the need to consider the specificities of the platform, noting that despite Facebook and Twitter sharing many similar features, a number of factors such as the differences in how these platforms frame the reasons for socially interacting shape how users interact, who they interact with, and how they present their identities. Similarly, Duguay (2016) has looked at the differences in use between Vine and Instagram for queer women, noting that despite both platforms ostensibly involving the sharing of visual data, the types of interactions varied, with Vine interactions showing creativity, and Instagram interactions revolving around expressions of beauty and gender. Though both platforms revolved around the sharing of visual data, as Kunze (2014) notes, Vine allowed more creative control and editing, which in turn impacted how users approached conceptualising and sharing visual data. This more nuanced approach and attention to socio-technical designs has been seen across a variety of fields of research (Bowler et  al. 2015; Karimov et  al. 2011; Postigo 2016). Kowert et  al. (2016: 3) in particular issue a call to researchers to ‘consider the idiosyncrasies of these different social platforms, particularly when one is discussing any potential positive or negative impacts they may have on individuals’. They go on to highlight that: although they [social media platforms] all provide a basis for promoting interaction between users via the Internet, their social utilities, or more specifically their key features and ability to connect users and provide a sense of social connectedness, vary widely. Recognising the unique characteristics of different mediated, social spaces is key to understanding what role these different social services play in our everyday lives, how they are utilized, and what social impact (if any) they may have on users over time. (Kowert et al. 2016, 5)

It is this call for contextualisation that this book therefore aims to provide, not only focusing on a wide range of platforms but also considering the specificities of design within those platforms, as well as providing an attention towards how different socio-culturally situated users experience and navigate these features. Research suggests that even simple differences between platforms may result in different manifestations of identity, different forms of social interaction and action, and changes in how the user negotiates and understands these spaces (Stroud et  al. 2016). The approach towards social media when considering identity online therefore needs to be both broad, with attention to the wide variety of social spaces online, and specific, with attention to the designs and experiences of specific platforms.

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2.5  How Young People Define Social Media Whilst we have considered what social media is, it is worth briefly considering more specifically what it represents to young people. Through moving beyond the unhelpfulness of digital natives as a term, we can still broadly consider what existing literature around young people’s interactions online reveal about their understandings of social media and what role social media plays in their social lives and social development. Specific differences have been noted generally in the use of social media by young people, including changes in frequency (Agosto and Abbas 2013) and reasons for engaging with the platforms (Antheunis et  al. 2014). Data suggest that young people are vital to the growth of social media (Boulianne 2015; Herring and Kapidzic 2015) and that ‘those ages 18 to 29 have always been the most likely users of social media by a considerable margin’ (Perrin 2015, 4). However, it is not just the widespread nature of these platforms that is important to the young people, but rather the increasingly important role they play in contemporary social life (Robards 2014), ‘shaping how adults and youth interact with each other in school, at home, and at large’ (Goldman et al. 2008, 185). This role of social media in the lives of young people has been much-discussed, sometimes in slightly hyperbolic fashion but also in a way that highlights the growing importance of social media as a space for young people to develop identities. It has been argued, for example, that social media is now ‘compulsory among groups of young people’ (Hodkinson 2017, 272). Research suggests social media platforms play an increasingly integral role in how young people socialise, interact, and form identities (Wartella et al. 2016; Wood et al. 2016). For example, in their survey of nearly 100 students, Mazzoni and Iannone (2014, 303) suggest that social media forms ‘part of the functional organs that support emerging adults in their ability to connect and to be connected to a social network and to develop and maintain it over time’. Though, as we discuss in Chap. 4, social inequality pervades online spaces, and as highlighted earlier in the discussion around ‘digital natives’, young people’s experiences cannot be so easily generalised, it is nonetheless apparent that social media is playing some role in the social interactions and identity presentations of many young people today. Indeed, social media now serves many purposes in the social lives of young people including enhancing broad socialisation and independence (Vickery 2015), serving as a means of emotional connection (Wood et al. 2016), increasing self-esteem and well-being (Antheunis et al. 2014), increasing a sense of closeness with contacts (Valkenburg and Peter 2007), and decreasing loneliness and improving self-reported adjustment (Yang and Brown 2013). Given the many important social experience that now have the potential to be filtered through social media, especially at the broadest definition as seen in this chapter, it is important to interrogate how these various platforms are affecting and shaping how young people are presenting themselves and how they are acting and interacting. With this in mind, in my own research with young people, I have attempted to understand how social media, at its broadest definition, is understood and experienced by young people and how identity emerges from the enmeshing of

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socio-culturally grounded individuals as specifically designed platforms. It was with this broad approach in mind that I asked my participants to define social media for me. As discussed earlier, this is no easy task, but it was nonetheless an important question to ask, not only to understand how young people viewed these sites, but also to ensure that as an interviewer I was not already priming the participants by only asking about, for example, Facebook or Twitter. In this manner, my interviews for this research project revealed a variety of platforms that were used by the participants for social interaction, suggesting the need to account for and consider more than just Facebook and Twitter when considering social interaction online. During the interviews the participants were asked what they considered social media to be. They provided a number of variable suggestions, some idiosyncratic to their particular method of engaging with social media. For example, Isabel provided the definition of social media as ‘a way to communicate with your friends and acquaintances, I’d say. And a bit of a newsfeed to see what’s going on in the world’, suggesting the notion that social media may involve more than just communication and that in this case it was used for information gathering also of both local, personal, and global issues. Brian too provided a definition informed by his particular use of social media platforms. He noted social media to be: Brian: Like, anything that has a forum or has avatars or profiles I consider to be social networking, in one way or another. Harry: Does that mean you use more than just Twitter and Facebook then? Brian: Umm. Yeah, I guess it does, I (.) I have a whole bunch of sites I use and post stuff on, but not (1.) not in any regular sense. I do post on a whole bunch of things though. Facebook and Twitter just feel a little bit more (.) overtly social. It’s in your face kinda.

Indeed, many of the attitudes towards social media expressed in the interviews appeared to reveal a hierarchy in the participants’ consideration of social media that predominantly stemmed from their experiences of Facebook. Nonetheless all participants used a variable range of platforms; Brian used two platforms for content production and browsed numerous other platforms. Brandon used four platforms regularly. Isabel used two platforms. Kirsty used three platforms, Nina used five platforms, Willow used nine that she discussed during the sessions, Molly used four, and Sally used four. All participants however used Facebook and Twitter in some form. Brian seemed to hold Facebook and Twitter as separate for the manner in which they seemed to overtly revolve around social interaction, but nonetheless acknowledged that social media can be broad. Later he discussed engaging with and through more than just these two platforms, noting ‘I use a lot of other websites, but, when you say social media everyone thinks Facebook and Twitter’. He further clarified this remark, discussing how for him the distinction lay not in the social capabilities of the platform per se, but his personal level of engagement: Brian: I use a lot of them, but don’t have an active presence. So things like YouTube, and Vine, and umm (.) I would go on but I would never contribute to them (.) Harry: So you don’t consider that use of the sites? Brian: No, because I’m not actively giving to the site. I’m (.) milking the site. I don’t think that, like (.) I would never use YouTube for its intended purpose. Well, I don’t know, I use YouTube to watch videos, I suppose that’s the intended purpose. But I would never put videos on there.

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Notably Brian later expanded his list of platforms his uses to include Google+ and Tumblr. This suggests that Brian was aware of a range of sites, but only felt he actively contributed to a few. For example, Brian notes: I feel like you have to be more active. Like, I feel like, the same as YouTube, I don’t use YouTube, I’m not a YouTuber, and I’m not a Viner or whatever the equivalent would be, I’m a, a, I watch. I’m a voyeur.

Brian however later did give some parameters to what he considered to be social media, again suggesting that Facebook is more explicitly social media to him. He detailed that he defines the boundaries of social media as not specifically including ‘texting apps’: Brian: I’m on, I’m social networking sites on my phone as well, WhatsApp, Grindr, those kind of things as well. Harry: You don’t consider that social media? Brian: No, it is, but on a different level. It’s basically texting.

It appears that for Brian social media is a broad field but that there is some degree of definition with certain platforms that are more explicitly, traditionally, or overtly social. Other participants were noticeably more comfortable to express a broader view towards social media. Kirsty, for example, understood social media in a rather broader sense, noting her blog and personal website as forms of social media. Kirsty suggested ‘I suppose I have a website which technically to extent is a social media site, in as much as people can comment and get involved on it’ as well as noting: I did have a LiveJournal account for a while, which I had a lot of interaction with the fandom community on there, which is a totally, but thinking about it, a lot of people that I knew through LiveJournal I didn’t have any other contact with, so I guess in some ways that is a social media site.

For others participants however there were particular affordances that made certain platforms more or less social in their view. For example, Brandon noted that to him social media needed to contain a marker of ‘identity’. He stated that: anything that is completely anonymous I would have thought is not social media, just purely on the basis to me is putting some sort of name, whether it be your real name or not, or some sort of identity, communicating with some sort of identity.

In this manner, there appeared to be no stable definition of social media amongst the participants. Despite all participants utilising Facebook and Twitter, there were a broad array of other platforms used for a variety of forms of social interaction, particularly by some participants. For example, Nina used a wide array beyond Facebook and Twitter, including platforms like Pinterest and a musical theatre forum that she accessed frequently and used in a variety of manners. Willow too discussed several platforms that fulfilled social functions for her, detailing how she used two video gaming services, Raptr and Steam, socially. She discussed that users were able to share captured videos of their gaming sessions and could livestream their gaming sessions to an audience. She noted that on Raptr ‘you set up a profile, you set a profile picture, you get a username’ and that it allows for ‘tracking where

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I rank up against other people in terms of how much I’ve played’. Willow also discussed Steam, another video gaming service which allows users to: show you how much you’ve played in the last week, and it’ll rank you up against your friends and up against the community as a whole. Like, how many, this is the average amount of hours you’ve spent, or sorry this is the amount of hours you’ve spent, this is the amount of hours your friends have spent, and this is the average amount of hours that the community spent playing it, like the average member of the community has played this game this week for like x amount of hours.

Willow noted that this can be particularly social: you add your friends, like people you know, or people you like talk to on forums, like steam forums, and play the same games in, like, people that maybe you watch stream stuff or something, or you’ve met online. So it, like, and Steam I always thought is more for meeting up with people that you’d want to play with at the same time.

Beyond this, Willow also discussed comment boards, noting that they served as overtly social spaces for her. She suggested that communities form around the discussion of certain topics: you don’t really know each other, but because you’re all talking about the same things in the same context, you definitely get a feel of personalities…people will refer back to comment boards from a couple of days ago, like ‘oh yeah, you mentioned last article that your dog was dying, how’s that going?’ or something.

She later suggested one particular comment section she frequented where this social factor was explicitly encouraged and acknowledged: Willow: At the end of the week normally, they’ll do what they call an open thread. Which is ‘here is an article that doesn’t actually say anything, other than comment in the box’, like talk amongst yourselves, basically. And there’s a couple of other sites that do it. Harry: I often wondered what that was. So, I didn’t realise what it was. Willow: It’s basically, they just put up, like one a week normally, which is basically like (.) which is what are you doing this weekend, what are you playing this weekend, which is basically just people, just, talk. What are you doing this week, how are you, it’s like, umm, tell us what you’re on about, how has this week gone for you, what have you been up to? It’s like, because as I was saying, even though it’s commenting on an article, if you’re regular enough people sort of set up, maybe not in the same sense of community, but you kind of get to know people. Or get to see people commenting all the time, that people are sort of interested in other people’s lives.

Willow suggests here that for her, the social experiences and relationship that are formed in these comment boards are often pseudonymous, but nonetheless are still purposeful and often intimate. She notes: despite the fact that you have no idea of anything, like, I wanna say personal, but I know some really personal stuff about all of them, apart from the fact that I don’t know their names and I don’t know, umm, anything.

She highlights one case in particular of a woman who had been talking in the comment section about living with her partner’s ex-mistress, Willow says she knew: like how she feels about the fact that she has to put up with her husband’s mistress, although they’re not having a thing any more, and it’s stuff like that, except I have no idea what her name is, where she lives, how old she is, anything like that. And it’s just odd.

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These spaces then appear to fulfil different social functions and purposes and provide different social experiences and understandings. This also shows, as discussed earlier, the importance of context in understand features like comment boards and anonymity. In this case it appears the anonymity was a useful feature for sharing personal stories. Indeed, in a similar manner, and detailing the broad scope of social experiences facilitated online, Sally also discussed how video games can serve social functions for her: Like games where you play with other people, like online role playing games, you can join groups or teams with their friends or just random people in general and they become friends…You hear of people starting relationships with other people who they’ve met online in video games and stuff. I’ve seen a bunch of discussions on games about literally anything under the sun, from cats and parenting tips and just telling stories.

This suggests that social media is a broadly different experience for each participant. Each gains different social experiences online, responding to, enacting, and fulfilling different practice, needs, and experiences. Their understandings of social media, and therefore experiences of social media, appear largely variable. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Facebook and Twitter were used by all participants in some format and appeared to be noted as the most explicitly social formats, though again, with a variety of uses dependent upon a number of factors. Whilst Facebook and Twitter are evidently popular, the interviews nonetheless suggest that the use of multiple platforms is increasingly common and that future research should consider more than just a few specific platforms (Carr and Hayes 2015; Lenhart 2015) when attempting to understand how user are using the Internet to socially interact and act. All participants made use of at least two social media platforms during the study, with some using up to nine different platforms. Indeed, Molly highlights a key reason to consider a range of platforms when considering social media, noting that: I think other people use Facebook differently to other things, because on Facebook they only tend to be friends who they’ve actually met, but on Twitter and other ones lots of people follow sort of random people that they don’t know.

For Molly, Facebook appears to be the exception to social media usage, not the rule. Despite its popularity, Molly suggests it in some way acts as the outlier for social media usage, and that not only should it not be considered typical of all social media, but that it may be atypical of other social media. This serves as a further crucial reflection for future research into social media. Despite being currently popular, Facebook’s popularity may in fact make the experience of this platform rather unique, meaning data generated from this platform may be notably less generalisable to other spaces online. In essence, the uniqueness of Facebook made the platform an outlier in their social experiences online; it was the exception, not the rule. It was therefore engaged with in a different manner from other platforms. As Brian put it: I guess they’re all kinda the same, but all other social media feel like (.) community. And if you’re not talking it’s just (.) it’s snooping without being part of that community. I don’t know. It just feels (.) Facebook is different.

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Brandon also expresses similar sentiments, noting: I think Twitter and Instagram, I think, they’re a lot more specialised (.) in the way that they are designed, whereas Facebook feels a lot more kind of generic.

2.6  I mplications for Educational Researchers, Policy Makers, and Educators As the data above suggests, social media is notably more complex than it may originally seem and perhaps broader than we might originally consider. This manifests itself in education in a number of crucial ways, for example, there are interesting documented cases of young people using classroom apps as social media, such as Google Docs, which allows users to ‘collaborate’ on a document. Whether we like it or not, social media is already in our classrooms at all levels. Consider it ‘passing notes 2.0’. The findings here suggest that social media can be considered in a notably broad manner. Whilst discussing and considering social media in the classroom, we should show caution when using Facebook as an example of social media. Whilst currently broadly used, it is clear there is more to social media than this platform, and indeed it may be the exception rather than the rule. Whilst it is readily apparent that Facebook and Twitter are popular and that they are currently an integral aspect of social interaction, this research highlights that a focus on these two platforms alone is not enough to understand the entirety of young peoples’ diverse experiences of social media. There is a need to move beyond a focus on one or two platforms, a need which is all the more apparent given the growing array of platforms through which users can now interact, each offering different ways of expressing identity, consuming and producing content, and socially interacting. As such, not only is there a need to consider a broad approach towards social media, particularly when considering the social media uses of young people (Wartella et al. 2016); it is also clear that there is a need to consider the specificities of these platforms in their own right and to examine the diversity of experiences and uses they can offer, as Willow’s experience with anonymity makes clear. The broad array of platforms and spaces that need to be considered when approaching social media research is starkly apparent when considering how the participants define social media here. Even within a small sample, there was a noted variety of approaches towards social media, with the participants’ definitions of social media reflecting the diversity of their experiences online. Asking the participants to define social media therefore revealed an important consideration for future research into social media, that the researcher’s conception and understanding of social media may not match the user, and that a consideration of how participants conceive of social media may aid an understanding of their engagements with and through the platforms. This is true in educational policy. There is a clear case to build an understanding of social media not from our assumptions but from the experiences of young people.

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It is apparent that there are a variety of approaches towards defining social media and that social media is not understood or used uniformly by users. As such, it seems odd that research should attempt to take a uniform approach towards social media when collecting data by focusing on experiences on one or two popular, but potentially atypical platforms. Doing so risks prioritising a certain approach over other equally legitimate understandings of social media. This research suggests therefore that a similar approach, placing the definition and scope of social media in the hands of participants, should be taken by future research in order to understand what these spaces mean to the participants. Asking the participants to define social media allowed for a deeper consideration of what social media was for the participants and helped in an understanding of how they conceived of these spaces. As Lefebvre (1991) notes, understanding how social spaces are conceived of by the users of that space can help better reveal and unpack the practises enacted within those spaces. This can be essential for classroom approaches to social media also. Rather than an educational response which assumes usage, we can begin to understand the lived experiences of young people in a more realistic manner. As this chapter makes readily apparent, understanding and defining social media is somewhat of a complex task, especially as the boundaries of terms such as ‘social media’ can obscure the manner in which these platforms offer experiences far beyond social interaction alone and the manner in which a wide array of spaces online now offer ways of interacting with a range of entities. As the research above highlights, the job of defining social media perhaps is not a task for the researcher, but crucially a task for the participants if we are to better understand the broad array of social experiences present online.

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Chapter 3

Devices and Technology: How the Way in Which We Access Social Media Affects Our Experiences, Uses, and Identities

Abstract  Beyond looking at the platforms themselves, when considering how social media is shaping our experiences and interactions online and offline, there is also a need to consider the devices through which we access these platforms. This chapter provides a look at how technology can change our actions and interactions and highlights the need to move beyond thinking of social media as a unified experience across different devices. A social media platform may look, feel, and act differently based on the devices we are accessing it on, in turn affecting our experiences of these platforms. Rather than treating a platform as a uniform experience, this chapter highlights the need to consider how we are accessing and experiencing these platforms and which features may be excluded, included, emphasised, or minimised due to the devices we access them on. We begin with an exploration of a history of technology shaping our experiences and interactions, online and offline. This discussion highlights not only how technology shapes our experiences but also how technology is not neutral and is not experienced in the same way by all users. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, and other socio-cultural resources permeate our experiences with technology. Building from this discussion, this chapter presents data from a year-long series of interviews with young people to explore how technology shaped their social experiences and their use of social media platforms and how their engagement with technology is crucially socio-culturally grounded. This includes one participant who moved from a joint family computer to a mobile phone, a move which impacted how and why she utilised social media in complex ways. Keywords  GPS · Technology · Social media · Mobile phone · Family computer

3.1  Introduction As established in the last two chapters of this book, social media continues to progress and change, adding new ways of acting and interacting. Importantly, it is worth considering in detail that the devices and technologies through which we access social media also continue to evolve and change. This may seem a fairly obvious statement, but it has rather large repercussions for anyone studying or engaging with © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. T. Dyer, Designing the Social, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5716-3_3

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social media. Whereas, at one time, sites like Myspace and Facebook were a fairly uniform experience for users, now Twitter on an Android is a different experience to Twitter on a laptop or Twitter on a tablet or Twitter on an IoT-connected smart device. Though nominally the same, these platforms can now be experienced in vastly different ways by users. Certain features may be emphasised or minimised, added or removed, centralised or placed in the periphery, or easier or harder to use. The problem this poses researchers in terms of practicality, research design, ontology, and analysis seems not to have been fully grappled with in a meaningful sense to date. Consider, for example, the increasingly commonplace practice of collecting Twitter data around a specific hashtag for some form of research, an approach which might, for instance, collect online data for a specific period to analyse a range of aspects such as sentiments, topics, reactions, and emotions (see Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Cappellini et al. 2019). The researcher may collect this mass of data on their desktop. The data that the researcher is looking at an analysing in this case is not the same data that the participant actually produced if they used a smartphone to produce the original tweet. The design and layout are different, the features may be different, and the experience of Twitter may be different. Yes, the researcher has analysed ‘a Twitter’, but is this generalisable to the entirety of Twitter, and is the an accurate representation of Twitter? Many researchers will likely collect and analyse data on some form of desktop or laptop computer, yet when 84% of adults in the UK use the Internet ‘on the go’, 79% of which access it via a smartphone (Office for National Statistics 2019); the Twitter the researcher experiences and uses may be largely different from the users’ experience and uses. Can this Twitter that the researcher is accessing and analysing even be considered to be the same platform? When we conduct an analysis of social media data, can we be sure that the data collected is an adequate representative of the data as is was understood and created by the user? What differences might the means of access make to the users intentions, actions, interactions, and content? The research detailed within this chapter and the book in general considers how user and platforms enmesh to result in complex user experiences, actions, interactions, and identity performances. In order to consider this and generate ways of theorising identity, there is a need to consider how the growing range of devices through which users access these platforms shape and effect how users experience and utilise social media. As such, this chapter will begin with a consideration of the progression of technology, and the need to socio-culturally ground our understandings of how technology is used and experienced, before reflecting on data from a year-long series of interviews in order to consider the range of ways in which young people are experiencing technology and how this is shaping their uses, experiences, and engagements with, on, and through social media.

3.2  Technically Social It is apparent that a fixed understanding of our experiences and uses of social media is inherently hampered by the relentless pace of innovation and changes in the technology used to access it. At the time of writing, social media is largely accessed via

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smartphone for many users in the UK (Office for National Statistics 2019), and in the USA, fully 58% of 18- to 29-year-olds say they mostly go online through a smartphone, with rising figures similarly seen across all age groups (Anderson 2019). This shift to mobile technology has changed a number of notable aspects of our social experiences on- and offline. As technology has become more accessible, less niche, and able to handle more data (Poushter et al. 2018), our ways of accessing social media continue to change, including current progressions into accessing social media through the Internet of Things (IoT), a term commonly used to describe the rise of smart devices and appliances (van der Zeeuw et al. 2019). The progression of technological capabilities afforded by mobile technology has allowed for easier access to a wider range of options of social interaction, moving beyond text-­ based content seen in early days of social media to voice (Llinares et  al. 2018), images (Thulin 2018), selfies (Abidin 2016; Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 2015), and videos (Burgess and Green 2018) becoming increasingly central to social media experiences. This means other previously centralised ways of interacting may be undergoing change also. As Thulin (2018, 465) notes “at the same time, SMS and voice calls have been removed from the centre of young people’s social communication” signalling how changes in technology are creating changes in how we socialise and which aspects of social interaction are prioritised and minimised. This spread of mobile technology has also changed how users consume social media and online content, making it more portable, pervasive, and easily accessible (Boczkowski et  al. 2018), which in turn restructures, reinforces, and challenges various aspects of our social lives in unforeseen and nuanced ways (see Vanden Abeele et al. 2018). In terms of content on these platforms, the progression in technology over the decades, such as the introduction of broadband (Dewing 2010), has meant in turn that social content online has become less niche, with early content like MUDs being notably fantasy-based (Dourish 1998), and instead has become more important to various aspects of the operation and organisation of everyday social life both big and small (Bayer et al. 2016; Chun 2016). It has been noted, for example, that users now: experience intensive flows of brief and transient notifications, messages, snaps and updates to follow and respond to concurrently with other activities offline and online. More and more things must be fitted into the background, and a state of perpetual contact (as discussed by Katz and Aakhus 2002) is increasingly becoming an actuality, a practice. (Thulin 2018, 477)

One aspect that has been of developing concern for educators and parents is that the development of mobile technology has given young people more control and agency over how and when they can use technology for social interaction (Dobson 2018; García-Gómez 2018), allowing them to produce more data and access social media more frequently (Anderson and Jiang 2018). The negotiation of agency has led to growing concerns about the content and the manner of social interactions young people are engaging in, a tension that is likely to continue as young people gain greater agency over media consumption and production in various ways pertinent to education (Stoilova et al. 2019). Smartphones now are increasingly popular

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and are, according to PEW data, the main means of access to social media today for many users in the global north (Anderson 2019). The majority of social media consumption is now purportedly done via smartphone, with Anderson (2015) suggesting ownership of these devices has almost doubled since 2011, and is likely to continue to grow. The development of the devices used to access social media has had a number of effects upon how users act and interact online and offline, including aiding the rise of new forms of social interaction and new forms of social capital emerging from this. This can be seen by looking to the selfie, driven by the dominance of portable devices and the emergence of increasingly advanced camera technology on phones leading in turn to a growth in interactions through largely visual mediums on platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram (Bayer et al. 2016; Piwek and Joinson 2016; Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 2015). Katz and Crocker (2015) note that selfies are increasingly commonplace and accompanied by an ecology of filters and editing software, with 96% of respondents in the UK taking selfies. They also note importantly that selfies are increasingly serving a conversational function and being used in social interactions, a point echoed by Bayer et al. (2016, 966) who note of snapchat that it forms the ‘typically mundane, quotidian “little snippets” of everyday life’. Research is increasingly exploring the various new etiquettes for data sharing and image sharing that have emerged due to the advance in mobile technology, including changes in the expected time taken to respond to messages (Mai et  al. Borderer 2015), and attitudes towards a peer’s content (Katz and Crocker 2015) as well as particular awareness of privacy settings and practices (Hart 2017). For example, though users can technically capture another user’s selfie via ‘screen-­ capture’, Katz and Crocker (2015, 2) note that ‘user etiquette makes such activities taboo and saving Snapchat images can result in being defriended’. Other researchers argue that the time limited and non-archival nature of Snapchat messages and images affect our interactions and identity performances (Piwek and Joinson 2016) and even our social relationships both on- and offline (Bayer et al. 2016). Charteris et al. (2014, 389) similarly argue that the disappearing nature facilitated by Snapchat enables users to ‘take up a range of discourses and demonstrate discursive agency in ways that support social mobility through shifting relationships with their peers’ (Charteris et al. 2014, 389). In this manner, the progression of technology brings new social etiquettes, patterns, expectations, mediums, and behaviours, changing our experiences in myriad ways. Given these changes in composition patterns, styles, content, etiquette, locations, and the various other unfolding changes brought about by new technologies, it is clear that our experiences and uses of social media cannot be disconnected from the technology through which we access them. Changes in technology have led to changes in how users contextualise and approach media forms for social interaction and will continue to do so as technology evolves. It is apparent that any research hoping to understand how users are acting and interacting online should pay some attention to the technology through which users are accessing social media. Indeed a fixed understanding of social media is inherently hampered by the relentless pace of innovation and change in the field, both in terms of the hardware available and in

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terms of the social media platforms themselves. Social media appears protean and transient, changing, mutating, and fluctuating with the seemingly relentless march of technology. Indeed, many apps have started from a position of purposefully changing or ‘disrupting’ the current social media landscape (Kobie 2019), the success of which can change and alter the form and style of social media quickly. In this manner, researchers should unpack how these ongoing changes shape and effect the form, function, and boundaries of social media, and educators should be prepared to change their approaches to social media in a flexible manner. Some of the most interesting insights into the relationship between the evolution of technology and our changing social experiences and priorities can be found through briefly looking at the history of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology and the myriad forms of spatial navigations and experiences these technologies have opened up. The navigational potential of GPS provides us with tools for locating and positioning ourselves within a space but crucially also provides ways of (re) presenting a given space that has broad and myriad social implications, including which spaces are seen as important, who uses a given space, which aspects of a given space are emphasized and minimized, and even how a space might be used and experienced.1 Researchers have suggested that the integration of features such as location check-ins on social media has enabled the integration of physical locations into social interactions in new ways (Saker 2016) or as Cramer et al. (2011, 65, [italics in original]) put it, ‘ultimately, what this means is that location has changed from being something you have (a property or state) to something you do (an action)’. Research into the effects and use of GPS in social media provides an example of how a new, relatively innocuous piece of technology can be used in many varying way and manifest many different forms and experiences of social action and interaction. For example, Saker (2016) has studied how sharing your location via check-in apps such as Foursquare allows users to show and share places they are physically visiting. Saker has looked at the ways in which location and identity can become intertwined thanks to GPS and location-sharing social technology, noting that the affordances provided and offered by this technology allow for new and novel manifestations of identity. Through interviews with users of Foursquare, Saker explores how location-based capabilities provided by wireless GPS technology, 1  It is always important to keep in mind that if we are to conceptualise GPS technology as a tool for translating the world around us into a new format, that no act of translation can ever completely represent a space with accuracy. Choices must be made in the act of translation as to how best to represent that space and which aspects will be included, excluded, emphasised, and minimised. As Monmonier (2018, 1) notes, ‘not only is easy to lie with maps, it’s essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a screen, a map must distort reality’. This indeed is true of all social experiences online, which serve as a translation of reality into a new format. It should not be assumed that offline reality is presented neutrally, accurately, or without bias online. Digital spaces acting as representations of social and physical reality are always and purposefully curated. The process of representation is therefore one that cannot assume a ‘blank canvas’ for identities to exist, emerge, and flourish in a neutral manner. Much as maps provide a curated representation of reality, so to do all social spaces online.

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along with the design of Foursquare as a social space, enmeshed identity and location, with users ‘conflating the places they frequented, and the symbolism they attached to these environments, with their own identities’ (Saker 2016, 945). Similarly, Humphreys and Liao (2011) discuss another ‘geo-tagging’ service called Socialight that allows users to ‘check in’ to locations and discuss them via the platform. They note that Socialight allows users to ‘communicate through place to allow users to create place-based narratives’ (Humphreys and Liao 2011, 407). The technological capabilities provided by building GPS into a platform socially allow users to create new narratives and interact in new and meaningful ways around, through, in, with, and about location. As Schwartz and Halegoua (2015) suggest, there is a need to consider this enmeshing of location, technology, and identity in more detail. They evoke the term ‘spatial self’ to uncover this enmeshment, noting ‘spatial self’ refers: to a variety of instances (both online and offline) where individuals document, archive, and display their experience and/or mobility within space and place in order to represent or perform aspects of their identity to others. These are historically rooted practices that combine lived and/or imagined social and spatial realities in order to express identity and socio-­ spatial position. (Schwartz and Halegoua (2015, 1644))

Indeed, GPS technology has many implications for the methods through which we can socially interact (Erikson 2010), including for surveillance purposes. For example, Bales et al. (2011) have looked at methods of using location data to help maintain long-distance relationships via an application that implicitly sends your partner your location data when you reach a frequently visited location and receives your partner’s location data when they do the same. They note that this allows partners to maintain awareness of each other’s location and that, importantly, this changes social interaction away from an explicit obligation to an implicit reception of data that can be used to express information without direct action from the user. Of course, there has also been resistance to such uses of locational data. Such tracking of location of children by parents can undermine trust (Boesen et al. 2010), responsibility, and privacy (Fahlquist 2015). As others have pointed out (see Arnold 2003), this ‘always on’ surveillance mentality was not always received kindly by users, many of whom have actively resisted sharing location data and who pushed back against the pressure ‘to not only adopt social applications such as location-sharing, but also to be responsive and accessible at all times’ (Page and Kobsa 2010, 174). Others have looked at how the location-based technology, and in turn the locations themselves, has been ‘gamified’ for social interaction via popular apps and websites such as Munzee and Geocaching which allow users to discover hidden scannable codes or caches in various locations hidden by other users. O’Hara (2008), for example, discusses how the process of collecting geocaches becomes bound up in a social identity within a wider online community, changing how users acted and interacted online and offline. She notes that the enmeshing of location and technology provided a new lens for viewing location, and that ‘online participation can be a significant influence on associated location-based experiences and vice

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versa’ (O’Hara 2008, 1186). Similar findings were noted by Ihamäki (2015) who suggested that the GPS facilitated specific tribe cultures between ‘geocachers’, enabling and creating new ways of interacting and knowing the world around them. Farman (2009, 1) highlight this point, suggesting that geocaching provides a unique new social space and new forms of social interactions by enabling a ‘blending of material and virtual interfaces, notions of presence and absence, visible and invisible, and utilitarian and playful purposes of everyday objects’. For education, the implications of these new forms of interaction in, on, with, and around place offered by the technological development of GPS through applications and sites such as Geocaching provide not only geographical educational opportunities but also provide new forums for the development of social skills and encouraging students to engage in new forms of socialisation (Ellbrunner et  al. 2014). In this manner, through using GPS to gamify locations, our social experiences and understandings of spaces and people change. It should be noted however that this is not separate from existing social inequity and often these technologies themselves exacerbate existing inequities in myriad conscious and unconscious ways. This is discussed in more detail in the next section of this chapter, but as Schwartz and Halegoua (2015, 1653) note ‘this form of representation carries many biases and limitations that researchers should take into consideration in their work’. This is uniquely true of education. As Cottom (2017, 214) points out, educational technology is often designed with a ‘roaming autodidact’ in mind – a user who is is a self-motivated, able learner that is simultaneously embedded in technocratic futures and disembedded from place, culture, history, and markets. the roaming autodidact is almost always conceived as western, white, educated and male. as a result of designing for the roaming autodidact, we end up with a platform that understands learners as white and male, measuring learners’ task efficiencies against an unarticulated norm of western male whiteness. It is not an affirmative exclusion of poor students or bilingual learners or black students or older students, but it need not be affirmative to be effective.

We will return to this point later in this chapter, but for educational researchers, policy makers, and practitioners it is crucial that we recognise the many ways in which technology is not separate from the world around us. GPS technology of course is not the only technology that has changed methods, modes, and forms of social interaction and identity presentation. Other studies have looked at how self-tracking technology can be used for social interaction. Devices such as ‘smartwatches’ allow for tracking of various statistics such as sleep patterns, exercise, body weight, and heart rate. The tracking afforded by this technology not only has implications for fitness and personal health but also has become a tool for social interactions via online media, through both general platforms such as Facebook and Twitter that have accommodated this new social data format (Wang et  al. 2016), and dedicated sites and communities for those interested in fitness tracking (Esmonde and Jette 2018). As Chen et al. (2016) highlight in their study of the effects of fitness apps on diabetic and obese patients, new communities have formed and can form out of the technological capabilities provided by this new technology, in turn changing the manner in which users engage with the media as well as the manner and format in which the data is produced, uploaded, and shared.

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As technology continues its relentless progress, our habits and styles of engaging with these tools changes, and the ways in which the aid, supress, frame, and shape social interactions also change. In this manner, a consideration of social actions and interactions online cannot and should not attempt to separate these interactions from the various technologies through which they are enacted. In many complex ways, our experiences are enmeshed with technologies and their capabilities. However, whilst social media emerges in part through this confluence of design choices, capabilities, and the technology through which these platforms are accessed, as discussed below, we should avoid viewing this in a deterministic manner and instead understand that user experiences and engagements with technology are continually socio-culturally grounded in complex ways.

3.3  S  ocio-Cultural Grounded Experiences of Technology: ‘Technology Is Neither Good, nor Bad, nor Is it Neutral’ We began this chapter by discussing the fact that smartphones are usurping computers as a main source of Internet connectivity. Whilst this is true at the broadest level, research also shows that this varies considerably across socio-cultural and socio-­ economic lines, with white adults in the USA having higher access to both smartphones and broadband Internet (Anderson 2019) and with higher earners and those with college degrees similarly having more access to both smartphones and broadband (Anderson 2019). Anderson (2019) notes that over one in four lower-income adults (compared to only 6% of high earners) and over one in four adults without some college education (compared to only 4% of those with college education) are smartphone-only users without access to home broadband. She also notes that: For example, 92% of adults from households earning $75,000 or more a year say they have broadband internet at home, but that share falls to 56% among those whose annual household income falls below $30,000. (Anderson 2019, 4)

It is apparent that socio-cultural and socio-economic resources shape how we use and experience technology. In this style, it is worth reflecting upon Melvin Kranzberg’s (1986) much cited first law of technology: ‘technology is neither good, nor bad, nor is it neutral’. Though this may seem somewhat purposefully obfuscated, Kranzberg does expand on this discussing that his meaning here is an attempt to offer a nuanced look beyond ‘technological determinism’ – the idea that technology shapes our experiences in a one-way manner. Instead, Kranzberg’s aim was to consider how technology is imbedded and experienced differently by users across socio-cultural divides or as Kranzberg noted: Technology’s interaction with the social ecology is such that technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves, and the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts or under different circumstances. (Kranzberg 1986, 545–546)

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Written in 1986, Kranzberg nonetheless foresaw the need to consider the way technology is experienced within socio-cultural and socio-economic contexts. Such divides are being seen in real time, with emerging technologies such as the IoT being experienced differently across socio-economic divides (van der Zeeuw et al. 2019). Van Deursen and Mossberger (2018, 122) note that the ‘comparative advantages of the IoT to people will vary based on differentiated skills and resources, enabling smaller groups of people to benefit, and disadvantaging others in new ways’. Whilst technology may be shaping all of our collective experiences, as Wajcman and Dodd (2017, 3) aptly note, the ‘powerful are fast, the powerless are slow’. These divides even shape why we use different technologies, with Tsetsi and Rains (2017, 239) suggesting ‘minorities and younger individuals use smartphones for more social activity, while White, younger, and higher income individuals use smartphones for more news/information activity’. Importantly the same GPS technology discussed in the previous section of this chapter is not devoid of impacting different communities differently and is not created in a vacuum separate of socio-cultural reality. Instead these technologies have been noted to exacerbate extant social disparities in both intended and unintended manners. This point is made in a detailed and precise manner by Safiya Umoja Noble (2018, 1) in her recent book ‘Algorithms of Oppression’, the introduction of which notes that: on the Internet and in our everyday uses of technology, discrimination is also embedded in computer code and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not.

Noble provides detailed examples of the ways in which search engines extend and exacerbate bias around the presentation of gender and race, effectively privileging whiteness. Similar trends have been noted by a number of researchers. Patton et al. (2017, 3), for example, note of the use of the website ‘Geofeedia’ (a location-based social platforms which pinpoints hotspots of expected crime and trouble) that these platforms: exclude communities of color and by so doing turns the technological gaze on them...If communities of color are socially constructed as problematic sites, then this is where the technological gaze goes, in anticipation of a problem – the social controls morphing into punitive cognitive controls.

These new ways of experiencing, augmenting, and understanding social interaction are rife with their own socio-cultural biases which subsequently mean that not every user experiences these interactions nor relates to these technologies in the same manner. Cases have been documented, for example, of the trend of exclusionary practices on apps and dating sites such as Grindr through terms such as ‘no fats, no fems, no blacks, no Asians’ (Scott 2015). Conner (2019, 416), for example, states that Grindr: …seems to have more potential in heightening, exaggerating, and even allowing for the creation of new ways its users can stigmatize or marginalize others: filtering out users based on criteria, blocking, simply ignoring messages, and other methods.

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Others have noted the systemic racial inequalities that manifest themselves when people of colour (PoC) attempt to play Pokémon GO.  In white neighbourhoods, PoC are treated as if they are acting suspiciously (Crockett 2016). In predominantly PoC neighbourhoods, Pokémon GO has been noted as having a lack of in-game resources like PokeStops and Gyms compared to white neighbourhoods (Akhtar 2016). Others still have found ride-sharing apps like Uber discriminate against women and PoC (Ge et al. 2016). Even attempts to correct racial representation and experiences can still centralise whiteness, as Sweeney and Whaley (2019) highlight through looking at skin tone modifiers in emojis. In this manner, technology exacerbates and creates manifestations of extant socio-cultural divide, emphasizing some voices and ways of being social and minimizing others. Technology also acts and is experienced differently by different bodies. For example, technology used in fitness tracking technology has been suggested to be racially biased. The green light technology used by wearable technology does not work as effectively on darker skin types, leading to inaccurate readings (Shcherbina et al. 2017; Hailu 2019). VR technology on gaming headsets such as the Oculus Rift have been found to induce motion sickness in women more than men, with Munafo et al. (2017, 900) stating that they ‘conclude that the Oculus Rift, as a technology, is sexist in its effects’. Added to other socio-economic inequalities around access to technology and data (Anderson 2019), these technologies becomes enmeshed into complex socio-technical assemblages which can present new social dynamics and exacerbate extant issues. As such, there is a need to not only study what forms of actions and interactions are afforded by different technologies but to look at how they are used, who they give voice to, and who they silence. This is extremely important in education, where technology is often used in a broad manner and rolled out to classrooms and learning environments with the assumption that all users will gain the same advantages from these technological interventions. As Cottom (2017) and others highlight, educational technology is often not overtly built to exclude ‘but it need not be affirmative to be effective’. In education we should push back against the idea that just introducing technology into every classroom will fix educational inequity. In many cases, it exacerbates it in unexpected ways. There are of course numerous other examples of technology changing our social experiences in interesting ways, such as headphones, which provide users with the opportunity to disconnect from the immediate audio environment and immerse themselves in music, podcasts, or other audio entertainment. The use of headphones again has implications for different socio-cultural communities, with some critics noting that the ability to disconnect is a luxury not afforded to all equally. For many, the choice to disconnect from their environment can be a risk to their life, as highlighted in the shooting of Dillon Taylor, a 20-year-old killed whilst wearing headphones because he couldn’t hear police officers’ commands. Similarly, a viral article from 2013 detailed how to ‘flirt’ with women who are wearing headphones that essentially amounted to abusing females on public transport as they attempted to reclaim their autonomy. In this manner, females are not afforded the ability to disconnect without abuse or harassment. On top of this, not all socio-economic groups are afforded the luxury of free time, nor access to technology equally (Anderson

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2019), meaning that the luxury of disconnection from immediate locations is not afforded to all members of society with the same risk or cost. As such, it is apparent that a consideration of the relationship between technology and user must consider a range of aspects, not only looking at what new possibilities the technology may provide to users but also how the socio-culturally grounded users may or may not be able to experience this technology equally (Noble 2018). The continuing examples of the varied uses of technology serve as a reminder that, despite the media affordance, researchers need to consider more than just the anticipated or typical uses but also look at how users create personal and unique experiences with, through, and within technology, grounded in their socio-cultural realities (Bar et al. 2016). Nonetheless it is also clear that our interactions are in some way guided, constrained, and shaped by the technology available for us to express ourselves through and with. It is through this enmeshment of possibility and reality that our experiences with technology emerge, as is highlighted in the data detailed in the next section of this chapter.

3.4  T  he Medium Is (Part of) the Message: Technology Changing Uses and Experiences of Social Media Amongst all participants of my year-long series of interviews, there appeared to be no uniformity in regard to their experiences of technology. All of the participants utilised a range of devices to access the different social media platforms they used. These devices were discussed in detail during the interviews, and it was apparent that the use and experience of devices were largely different for each user due to their situation, their needs, and their preferences. Nonetheless, the participants did discuss a range of ways in which technologies changed and augmented their experiences of social media and discussed the role that devices played in creating particular interactions with and through social media for them. Brian, for example, discussed how his social media usage and experience changed when he switched from an Android phone to an Apple phone. He noted that the two technologies had some difference in usability, describing Apple as notably ‘quite clinical’. He suggested: Android was so much easier to interface between Twitter and Facebook, and you could have (.) like, I found I had more control with Android over where things went, than with Apple. I think (.) Apple is easier to use for some people, but (.) they’re so different.

Brian continued from this to note that his usage of social media changed with the introduction of a new device, specifically detailing how the lack of flexibility in Apple’s design led to some frustration and ultimately an unwillingness to use Facebook through his new Apple phone: Android, because it’s such an open platform, people can be really clever with it and do what they want with it. Apple, you have a use and that’s it. And so you can’t control it. Android you can find the app that suits you, find a nice little niche, and work with that. So I found

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3  Devices and Technology: How the Way in Which We Access Social Media Affects… that I am actually using Facebook from my computer more and I, I, I am using my phone less.

The change in technology then from Android to Apple had changed Brian’s engagement with social media. Crucially however, the interview data suggests that it is important to contextualise the effects of devices to each user, as the effects will evidently not be universal. This was made apparent by Brandon, who also noted he had used both Apple and Android devices but found little discernible difference between the two. Brandon responded to questions about his usage and engagement with the two devices with less concern than Brian, noting when asked if there was a difference: Brandon: No, I think probably fairly equally across the different phones, just because I’ve known how to get at them and they’ve all been very easy to access. Harry: Even from Apple to Android? Was that a big shift or? Brandon: No, not a huge shift to be honest.

Instead of changes caused by a shift from Android to Apple, Brandon noted other changes in his usage driven by different technology, specific to his needs and his situation. He highlighted the changes brought about by the addition of a better camera: since I’ve had a smartphone with a good camera there’s been a bigger shift in terms of the way I use it, I certainly now use Instagram a lot more because I have a good camera available to me and I don’t have to use my separate camera, go home, upload my photos, and then put them into the internet. I can just click it from my album.

Brandon also noted other particular changes in social media usage and patterns bought about since gaining a faster and more advanced smartphone. He noted, for instance, that he could more easily diversify his use of social media: I think my habits are possibly changing because previously I’d only have bothered with one sort of social media site and the other two that have come along, sort of Snapchat as well if you include it, have been purely since I’ve had a phone and I’ve got access to all of them at the same time.

In a similar fashion, Sally noted some changes between different devices as well, with her usage patterns and access times changing after an upgrade in phone: On my old phone I couldn’t even access Facebook, I had to break it, because my phone was complaining, umm, so when I went out during the day I’d end up going for about 6-7 hours at a time without accessing social media, but now with my new phone I kind of access constantly even when I’m out with friends. So I’m always checking Facebook or Tumblr or Instagram.

She also later noted some additional differences bought about by gaining a functional mobile phone, particularly highlighting the addition of emojis as a communication tool: I think it also helps that emojis are on phones now, but you can’t get that (.) it’s limited on the actual websites, whereas on your phone you have the standard ones, and then extra ones you can download from the AppStore or Google. I’ve started using emojis a lot, I don’t know whether it’s good or bad but I’ve started to think in emojis, like ‘this emoji perfectly describes my reaction here’, I wish I could react with emojis offline.

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Similarly again, Kirsty also discussed the changes in her use of social media and her feelings of connectivity since upgrading her phone: Well the phone I had before was, well, as my boss at the time flatteringly said, a dumb phone, because it was the literal opposite of a smartphone, I mean it was as close to a Nokia 3310 in this day and age as you could probably get, it literally did nothing…it just didn’t have the power to use any kind of site. I mean, none of the phones I had before this one had apps or anything, so yeah, I umm, in some ways I’ve lost a significant part of my life to having a smartphone now, because I am on call all the time, umm, I certainly, did I even have Twitter before I had a smartphone? I did, but I never used it really. Now I’m on it all the time.

Kirsty later detailed some nuanced and interesting differences in how she used and approached the platforms bought about by the technology she was accessing social media on. She noted that her time spent on the platforms had changed noticeably since gaining a smartphone: I had Twitter but very rarely used it, I think every now and again from my laptop in bed when I was a student, umm, err, and I did have Facebook (.) I checked it less often (.) I suppose when I did check it I would be on it for longer, because by the time you’d bothered to boot up the computer you might as well hang around and talk to people for a while, whereas now I just tend to sort of dip in and out more. So actually in some way I suppose I haven’t necessarily lost time to Facebook, it’s just allocated different.

Given this, it appears that technology can discernibly change the manner in which the user engages with social media. In Kirsty’s case, we can see technology changing and impacting her use and experience of social media platforms. Similar issues when changing between PC and phone were noted by other participants. For example, Willow discussed some individual differences in the style and manner of her interactions on different technologies. She notes: I’d be unlikely to link to, to like post to a friend’s wall with “oh have you seen this” on my phone, because it’s harder to do it. It’d be more likely to be something I’d do on my pc. Also, I’m more likely to engage in longer conversations on messenger and stuff over my computer, because it has a proper keyboard and it’s easier and you can keep the thread of a conversation better, than on my phone where it’s harder to type. I’m much more likely to just do like tiny little ‘yes that’s great’ and ‘all that sounds good’ and y’know ‘we’ll see you then’ kind of things on my phone. Umm. Yeah, I tend to read stuff, read messages on my phone and then reply to them on my desktop.

Again, it is worth highlighting here that it appears that the medium does not affect users in the same manner. Instead, individual users enmesh with technology to produce specific engagements guided by, but not universally bound to, the affordances of that specific piece of technology. Whilst some participants, for example, discussed how their usage of social media noticeably increased on a mobile device, for others, the differences between devices were not nearly as clear-cut. Nina, for example, noted that an iPhone is ‘easier than the actual desktop layout’ but only in a rather perfunctory sense that a user can ‘just scroll easier with your thumb, and you can just like stop it when you want to read something, rather than like getting the mouse up and down. I just, I find it quicker’. Further to this, participants also suggested there was a need to situate technology use as it may change based upon where the user is at any given time. Isabel discussed

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this, detailing how she would use her devices differently based on where she was at the given time. She notes ‘my boyfriend has stopped me checking my phone at home. I like it actually, I can just be with him so I put my phone down and we just hang out’. It would appear then that technology needs to be not only considered on a user-byuser basis but also potentially situated when considering how and why it is used.

3.5  Platforms Are Not Universal Across Devices One aspect of social media engagement that participants noted was that social media platforms are not consistent across all devices. The manner in which Twitter, for example, is presented on a smartphone is different from Twitter on a computer or a laptop or a tablet. A number of the participants discussed this, noting that they preferred using certain devices due to the manner in which they presented the platforms. For example, Oliver, highlighted that: Oliver: The only thing I make the exception to is Facebook, that has to be on computer. Harry: And that’s because of the permissions? Oliver: Nah, I just can’t stand the app. I think it’s a bit counter intuitive and hard to use.

Brian also highlighted this difference, but he emphasised the reverse position, championing the merits of the application over the computer version of the platform. He noted that given a choice, he would choose to access social media on his tablet. When asked why he responded: Brian: Because the apps tend to reduce a lot of Facebook down to (.) although Facebook does this now itself, anyway, but you like (.) you can’t see as much on it and I like stalking people basically. Harry: That’s really interesting, so you like it stripped down and less (.) Brian: Less faff, yeah, I like to just see it as simple as possible. It’s so much easier on my tablet, it’s just the updates without any hassle.

This would suggest that beyond paying attention to the nuances of a range of platforms, there is a need to consider that individual social media platforms themselves may not be consistent and may vary based upon the devices that users are using to access them. Nina’s interviews emphasise this as she highlights the difference between the presentation of different social media platforms on a Samsung phone compared to an iPhone. She noted she had gone through: three Samsung galaxies that have broken. And I did use Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram on that, but I actually used it a lot less than when I had my iPhone, because I found it harder to use, because it was more like the computer. Whereas Apple sort of had their own layout, but the Samsung, it was sort of the same as the computer and I didn’t like that. So I actually ended up using my laptop more, than my phone, which I didn’t like.

Not only did these differences affect how Nina accessed her social media platforms, they also changed the ways and the amount that she used the platforms. She suggested: I wasn’t on it as much, so I didn’t update anything as much, I didn’t put as many photos up while I had it, because I didn’t like using the camera on the phone. Because I normally just take a photo on the iPhone and upload it to Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook, and just, you

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know, put a comment on it. But with the Samsung I didn’t like taking the pictures, and I didn’t like the layout, and I didn’t like anything

For Nina therefore the variation in the presentation of platforms across different devices changed how she used social media in a number of manners, including the style and regularity of her updates. Nina particularly highlighted the device-specific layout of the platform as an aspect that affected how she experienced the platforms. Willow too also noted different presentations of the same features on different technology. She highlights Facebook Messenger in particular as a being different on her phone as compared to on her computer and suggested she would ‘actually prefer sending stuff from my phone than sending it from my Facebook, cos they make go through three extra steps to get it full screen on my bloody laptop’. It appears therefore that there is a need to consider that social media platforms are not consistent across technologies and that a user’s experience of that platform may be bound to the particular device through which they are accessing it. This would further suggest that there is a need to consider device-specific organisation of platform features when considering identity performances online. Indeed, as Nina’s case showed, the presentation of social media on her Samsung devices led to her interacting in a markedly different manner. For Nina, the experience of a platform could not be assumed to be consistent across devices, and therefore her engagement with, and use of, the platform also could not be assumed to be consistent.

3.6  T  he Difference Between ‘Having’ and ‘Having Access to’ Technology A number of the participants suggested a marked difference between how they viewed and used different technologies, noting that they reserved certain devices for specific purposes, in turn affecting how they engaged with these devices. The interviews suggest that there is a need therefore to contextualise and situate the technology that users have access to rather than merely noting their access to that technology. Brian, for example, noted in his interviews that he would make use of different devices to engage with different aspects of a social media platform. He discussed his use of Twitter, noting that he would use his computer when possible to view the current trending topics on Twitter but that, if he wanted to compose and send a tweet, he would tend to use a phone: I wouldn’t feel right using Twitter on my laptop. I don’t know why. It doesn’t seem (.) Like, if I’m looking for a news story I’ll go on Twitter on my laptop and find a trend. Because then you can scroll through all the tweets quicker. But if I’m tweeting it’ll be from my mobile, because you can send a text or you can just literally just ‘blup blup’ send to Twitter.

Indeed, this notion of specific devices for specific purposes was not restricted to Twitter for Brian but was considered across multiple platforms: Facebook (.) I don’t know, it does actually feel nice to do it on your computer. It’s a computer thing at heart, it’s made for the computer, I think the apps have a lot of redundancy and they just narrow it down into basically a Twitter format.

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Brian later expanded upon his preference for using a computer when accessing Facebook, noting: I just feel like I want to take my time with my Facebook, I think, and when I’m on my mobile it feels very quick and like I don’t feel like I’m typing properly, whereas Twitter you can just go ‘blurp’ and it’s on Twitter and I don’t mind, but with Facebook I quite like to take my time with it.

He later further expanded upon this, detailing why he specifically and intentionally reserved his engagement with Facebook for a computer: Well, it’s the whole sitting down and typing. It’s feels more intentional, more of a (.) choice. I think the computer just feels more of a meaningful choice. It has weight to it.

Brian was aware that the specific technology he used changed the way he approached updating, and therefore he reserved specific devices for specific purposes. The intentional notion of sitting down and actively engaging rather than browsing meant he could interact in what he felt was a more meaningful ‘weighted’ manner. For Brian, specific platforms were bound to specific uses, and this reflected which technology he used when accessing and posting on these platforms as he felt the different technologies carried different connotations and merits. Similar findings were suggested by Kirsty, who noted that she’d use a computer for ‘lengthy posting on Facebook’ and that she found Facebook ‘really irritating’ on her phone, causing her to use it ‘less and less’. Brandon also noted that he assigned specific functions to specific platforms, highlighting that ‘for sharing photographs I only use my phone, because it’s much more convenient. It’s very easy’. Other uses of technology for specific purposes were also noted by Kirsty, who suggested: So yeah I don’t tend to use my smartphone as much for Facebook any more, except to sort of scan what other people are doing, umm, but I do use it almost exclusively actually I use it for Twitter. I don’t tend to use Twitter so much on other devices, as I say because the app is so simple and it’s also capturing photo, cos if you’re gonna tweet you might as well tweet a photo, and yeah capturing a photo on a phone is so much quicker than doing it and putting it on a computer and all the rest of the jazz.

Similarly, Willow noted her preference of specific devices for specific tasks: I don’t use the Twitter client so (.) erm check Twitter from my (.) my computer only occasionally. Facebook mostly from my phone again but sometimes from my PC and Reddit is normally always from my PC. Once or twice I have read on my phone but not very often.

Some differentiated uses of technology were also noted due to the participant’s feeling over the security of using a phone, meaning they restricted their use to PC only. For example, Oliver notes his usage of devices as: PC is Reddit all the time, and Facebook. I refuse to use the Facebook mobile app. Simply because it makes me, it wants me to install the Messenger and I will have nothing to do with an extra app from Facebook.

This suggests that there is a need to consider that a platform can be used and reserved for specific purposes by the user, which informs the technology they will use to access it, and vice versa. The interviews highlighted several occasions when a user’s engagement with technologies was bound to and by their specific needs and

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situations. For example, Oliver details his preference of his PC over mobile phone given that his phone use is restricted as ‘I have to remember how much data or usage it uses, because it keeps updating and checking and sending off messages and doing stuff, and I’m not on an unlimited tariff thing, err, yeah’. Oliver also notes that this is locationally specific for him, so that, ‘At home, if I’m in front of my PC, I will obviously use my computer, if I’m lying in bed or wherever then iPad, if I’m on the go then it’s phone’. Similarly, Sally notes: ‘I use my phone more though, especially cos I’m out most of the day so a lot of the stuff I do is away from my laptop’. Indeed, the use of specific technologies for a range of specific reasons extended beyond purely social media, with other factors also affecting how and why a user would engage with a given device. Brandon, for example, notes that, though he has a laptop, he uses it for dedicated purposes and that he often would not use it for social media: Like I don’t bother looking at Facebook or Twitter on a computer. If I’m at a computer normally I’m doing something particular. Normally I’ve gone there for a reason, and I’ve gone to the effort of finding my laptop charger and turning it on. It’s a lot of effort just for Facebook.

A similar usage is noted by Willow, who discusses her desktop computer noting ‘when I’m at my computer I use my computer for actually gaming so I don’t tend to use it a whole load for social media because normally when I’m at my pc I’m doing something’. Given this, it appears there is a need to consider the specific context and situation of the user when understanding how and why users utilise technology; there is also a need to understand that technology may serve different purposes to different users and as such may not so easily be considered analogous. The technology Molly used to access the social media platforms in particular highlights the need to situate technology for the user and presents some interesting issues in regard to her specific experience of social media and her specific social situation. At the start of the research period, when Molly was still living with her parents, she had two different mediums through which to access social media. Molly had been given her own mobile phone at 18, which she used as her main method of accessing social media platforms, and also had access to a joint family computer, which she said she used fairly frequently for a number of purposes. She described her usage of the family computer thusly: I could use it in the evenings. To “do homework” [she uses air quotes]. But mum would never (.) check on me, so I could do whatever I wanted really. It was upstairs, in the loft where my mum worked from home. We’d do homework there but nobody was really checking on me. But she could have easily. But like I say, I’m shy, so I didn’t really put anything about me online. So I just checked Facebook and stuff. It was fine.

Molly notes that she did prefer to use her phone for social media whenever possible. In the second interview, when asked about the family computer, Molly attested her preference for her smartphone when accessing social media noting when asked if she still used the joint computer to access social media: ‘Not really any more, no. not since I got the phone’. Later she reflected upon the joint computer, noting:

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3  Devices and Technology: How the Way in Which We Access Social Media Affects… (.) I kinda forgot how it felt before. They were (.), like I was, there were times when I was (.) when it was so annoying like if my mum and her boyfriend were watching something online (.) our TV broke, so they used to watch online a lot. But if I couldn’t, my phone was fine then. It was, like my phone was for social media, the computer was school work and researching.

Indeed, Molly contextualises the technology, noting that she made use of them for largely differing purposes. She notes ‘my phone was for social media, the computer was for school work, research on the internet and emails none of which were particularly interesting for me as an evening activity’. Nonetheless, in terms of pure functionality, Molly notes that there was little tangible difference between the two technologies, mainly because she felt that as she was only browsing, the functionality differences were not sizable. When asked about the difference between the two in terms of her experience with social media, she notes ‘well, like, seeing as I only look at them it’s (.) kinda the same on the phone as the computer (.) but, like (.) it’s easier. It’s mine’.

3.7  I mplications for Educational Researchers, Policy Makers, and Educators Though in essence the two technologies of mobile phone and family computer may seem largely different, Molly’s experiences of the platforms whilst using the two different technologies were not vastly different. Though browsing appeared to be easier on the phone, this didn’t seem to be too large a deterrent from using social media, and the differences in terms of using the platforms for browsing appear largely perfunctory for Molly. What does appear to be a deterrent however was the access to the machines and the manner in which she contextualised the technology. Once we situate the technology and pay attention to its meaning and context for the user, it becomes clear that, for Molly, the medium wasn’t the message, the context was. What was important was the specific role she assigned to that technology. Molly suggested that family computer was for homework largely. She acknowledged that she would use it for other purposes including social media, but it did not appear to be the main purpose she ascribed to the family computer as a medium, which she suggested numerous times was for homework. Molly suggested she tended to prefer using the smartphone for social media usage mainly because it was easier (‘the phone’s easier because it’s just in my pocket’) and because she owned it (‘It’s mine and I can use when I want without worrying’). Given this, it appears that there is a need to consider the difference between ‘having’ and ‘having access to’ different technologies in terms of engagement with them. Care should be taken to not just note the platforms that participants have access to but to understand that platforms may vary in function and contextualisation for the user as they approach them with different socio-cultural resources, needs, and contexts. This raises some questions for the treatment of technology in social media research. Lenhart’s (2015, 2) much cited survey of social media usage

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reported to ask participants ‘whether they ‘have or have access to’ a list of five tools: smartphones, basic cell phones, desktop or laptop computers, tablets and game consoles’. However, these interviews suggest that we cannot assume that ‘having’ and ‘having access to’ technologies are the same thing. For Molly, it appears they patently are not; the joint family computer was something she had access to, the phone was something she had, as she notes when she says ‘It’s mine and I can use when I want without worrying’. It appears therefore that technology is not a neutral machine used to access anything; it is situated and the users apply different approaches and purposes to different technologies, informed by their specific situations and needs. Here, in Molly’s case, her joint computer was a family computer. Though she knew she could access social media on it and that her experience of it may not be that different for the purposes for which she was using the platforms, she largely chose not to make use of it for that function. If we were to only consider her output, there is little noticeable difference between her engagement across the devices she chose to create content on either. However, if we explore her approach towards the devices and her use of them, it is clear that there is some noticeable variation. The interviews suggest therefore that a deterministic approach to technology should not be taken but that instead researchers should aim to understand the unique and unfolding role that technology plays within each user’s life. The changes technology creates in terms of interaction were not noticeably uniform within this sample, appearing to be unique to each user. Though larger research samples may be able to discern some trends in usage, this research suggests that there is a need to purposefully problematize this and consider the role of technology within the user’s life. Sally noted of Facebook, for example, that ‘it’s easier to browse other people’s pages on your computer than it is on your phone’, whereas Nina found the iPhone ‘easier that the actual desktop layout’. Indeed, some participants who used multiple technologies noted little to no difference between them. Isabel, for example, found no difference between her iPad and her iPhone. Similarly, Brandon noted that of his multiple devices that ‘aside from the slightly lack of functionality on my phone, I think I use them in virtually the same way’. Molly noted only some minor changes in her usage of social media bought about by a change in technology after gaining a laptop for her 18th birthday. She suggested ‘it’s really great and I (.) I use it a lot now. In my room and whatever I can leave things up and it’s not (.) a problem’. However, she also crucially noted that her engagement and uses of social media platforms were not dramatically changed, especially in terms of a shift in her content production given that she continued not to post on social media that frequently, even with new technology. Given this, it appears that individual users will utilise technology in highly personalized ways, bringing their own experiences, socio-cultural resources, and needs to these platforms to create unique uses, which may be guided by the features afforded by the technology but which importantly will be realised in an individual manner. It is the enmeshing of the technological and the individual through which the individual usage emerges. These cases therefore serve as a reminder that usage of technology varies from person to person and the individual experiences cannot be assumed to be universal. This creates some difficulties for education technology,

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which usually likes to find broad blanket solutions and applications for technology. The reality here is that technology cannot be easily generalised. Context matters, and a less deterministic approach to technology is needed to understand user experiences and account for the variation. Beyond a consideration of the role of design upon the realisation of specific identity performances, this research was also keen to account for the effect of the devices through which the participants were engaging with social media. This was necessary given that research suggests that the development and progression of devices can be tracked concurrently with changes and developments in our Internet uses and habits (Anderson, 2015). It was noted in the interviews, for example, that there was a need to consider that social media was generally not being engaged with in prolonged sit-down sessions. With a growth in mobile technologies, it was apparent that the participants’ habits revolved around checking and browsing social media on a regular basis through mobile devices. Browsing was highlighted as a key aspect of social media consumption for the participants and made up the large part of their reported social media engagement, largely through mobile technology. Indeed, this trend was readily apparent for some of the participants, such as Brian, who noted the use of his mobile exclusively for browsing and a laptop or desktop computer for actual content production. This was enacted for a variety of reasons, including checking on their peers and keeping up with news as it happens. Indeed, it could be argued that the ‘always connected’ nature of social media, notably prevalent in young people in regard to their use of mobile phones (Anderson 2019), has largely lead to the trend of social media for the consumption of news as it happens. A number of studies have revealed a tendency in recent years towards news consumption and production via social media (Hermida et al. 2012). Social media has even been noted for some as their main source of news consumption (Harder et al. 2016). Future research should continue to study and unpack how social media habits change with the implementation of technology. For educational policy makers, this means a dedication is needed to continue to explore the changes technology creates in our habits and behaviours, both broadly and, also, crucially in individual manners. Beyond the tendency towards browsing social media, it was apparent from the analysis that there was little comparable engagement with technology by the participants. Instead, the engagements with technology were realised in a unique manner from participant to participant. This of course does not mean that technology did not affect aspects of the participant’ use of social media but merely that it affected them in a variety of manners. For some, aspects such as the better cameras or clearer interfaces lead to changes in how they engaged online. For others, such as Brandon, the differences were negligible. Arguably one of the larger shifts in technology was shown in Molly’s case, moving from a joint family computer to a phone and eventually a personal laptop. Whilst some changes were noted in how she approached social media, it was noticeable that there were little changes in her engagement with the platforms for social interaction and social functions. However, for others, the changes were larger and more articulated. Brandon, for example, noted a change from a computer to a phone which changes his attitude towards the platforms, noting: I think my habits are possibly changing because previously I’d only have bothered with one sort of social media site and the other two that have come along sort of snapchat as well if

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you include it have been purely since I’ve had a phone and I’ve got access to all of them at the same time.

As such, it appears use of technology is bound to the user. As has been apparent throughout this chapter, we cannot separate the socio-cultural reality of the user from their experiences with technology. Whilst larger samples may again be able to highlight specific trends in changes over time, these findings argue for a more nuanced and grounded consideration of the engagement with technology and in turn a less ‘broad brush’ attitude to technology in education. Instead, I would suggest that we look at this engagement on an individual scale to instead consider how the enmeshing of user and technology produces unique engagements. As the data bears out, an understanding of the use of technology cannot be gained through a consideration of the technology alone, as though technology makes certain uses easier and more apparent, the use of these features may be fulfilled by the user in an individual manner. For example, Molly was arguably able to produce more content with a dedicated mobile device than she might have been able to on a joint family computer; however, her production habits showed no considerable change between the devices. However we should also be careful not to place undue attention upon the human alone. Indeed, it should be made apparent that the use of the Internet obviously cannot be engaged without these devices, each of which come with their own restrictions and challenges. What this data allows us to consider is the nature in which these restrictions are dealt with by the user and the manner in which each user negotiates their own uses of their devices. A framework to track and consider this will therefore be presented in Comic Theory in Chap. 6 of this book. Beyond this, it is worth considering context to note that devices can be tied to specific purpose for users. This again came through in Molly’s case, as the joint family computer was consigned largely to homework for her. Similarly, Willow noted that her desktop computer was reserved for playing videogames and therefore she tended not to use the desktop for social media. This research suggests then that there is a need to consider the difference between ‘having’ and ‘having access to’ different technologies in terms of a user’s engagement with them. Merely noting the availability of technology (see Lenhart 2015) is not enough to presume use and engagement. Instead, there is a need to account for the fact that different technology can have different meaning and contexts to the user, affecting how they engage with it. Again then, in order to understand social media use, there is a need to ground the technology in the socio-cultural concerns of the user at a given time and location. This should be considered when introducing pedagogical technology. For example, when setting homework online, we should better consider Tressie Cottom’s (2017) warnings about roaming autodidacts and the ways in which access to technology is not the great equaliser. A further point in regard to the use of technology for social media consumption became apparent through the analysis of the data, namely, the notion that the platforms were not presented in a uniform manner across technologies. The presentation of a platform was noted as being variable from one platform to the next, and in this regard, it was noted that the participants’ engagement with the platforms would change based on how the platform was presented and which features were easily

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accessible and emphasised. This is worth accounting for, especially as the participants noted they preferred to use different devices for different platform due to the design. Sally, for example, suggested that ‘it’s easier to browse other people’s pages on your computer than it is on your phone’. Again, this was dependent upon the user. So for Nina, for example, the iPhone was noted as being ‘easier that the actual desktop layout’. Care therefore should be taken when considering platform use, even when following one participant, as their usage may vary based upon the technology through which the user is accessing the platforms. Given that the platforms are not universally presented across technology, future research may wish to consider that, in order to understand the use of a social media platform or the engagement with specific features, there is a need to considering the devices through which these features are accessed. It seems, therefore, that it is the enmeshing of the technological devices and the individual users through which the engagement with social media emerges. Whilst these participants in some manner highlight that technology will affect how we act and interact, it would appear that this may not happen in a uniform manner and individual variation must be accounted for. As such, it is suggested there is a need to consider the technology on a user-by-user basis and to especially pay attention to the ways in which technology exacerbates extant inequity.

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Chapter 4

What’s ‘Social’ About Social Media?

Abstract  This chapter explores what it means to be ‘social’ online. We begin with a discussion of the manner in which our online social experiences, expectations, and engagements are enmeshed with extant socio-cultural resources in various ways. The discussion then moves to consider the various ways of engaging with social media beyond networking and peer interaction, before moving on to consider the importance of research exploring the ways social media is engaged with beyond content production alone. The chapter makes a clear call for a move away from big data research which at best places undue emphasis on content production and at worst wilfully misrepresents online user experiences. Finally, this chapter presents research exploring how young people negotiated the social milieu online and how they engaged with the various social media platforms they used. Keywords  Context collapse · Big data research · Passive social media use · Socio-cultural resources · Content production

4.1  Introduction In the last chapter, we looked at contextualising the technology we use to access social media, exploring how it can be experienced, used, and understood differently by different users and how this may in turn impact our engagements with social media. Here we will explore what exactly it means and looks like to be ‘social’ online, which naturally also intersects with an understanding of the socio-cultural resources, realities, and experiences of users. The ability to grapple with socio-­ cultural issues has long been an issue when understanding and considering what it means to socially engage with the Internet. In 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote and released his much cited ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. The short but provocative work sets out in 16 paragraphs to outline what the Internet is and how it should be understood by users and governments. In one particularly telling paragraph, Barlow declares the following statement:

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4  What’s ‘Social’ About Social Media? We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. (Barlow 1996)

This attempt to strip users of their socio-cultural resources, contexts, and experiences can still be seen today in the heavy-handed introduction of technology in education. Seemingly technological interventions and innovations are introduced into classrooms as a panacea with the assumption all young people will experience it in a similar way, regardless of their socio-cultural contexts. It is of course increasingly clear that the Internet cannot be seen as a space without complex power structures baked in at every level (Noble 2018). Whilst research has been keen to traditionally suggest that social media creates a level playing field between participants or a way of side-stepping extant power structures (Jenkins 2008, 2014; Kerr et al. 2012) and that the Internet offers ‘a more decentralised model of media production’ (Miller 2011, 12), other researchers are increasingly pointing out that this is not as clear cut as we might want to believe and that complex power structures and agential constraints pervade online (van Dijck 2009; Fenton 2016; Noble 2018). It is a critical lens of power structures online which we must consider in order to understand what it means to be social online. To fundamentally alter Barlow’s proclamation of new-found agency online, I would suggest that social media has altered, exacerbated, and mediated the privileges and prejudices of race, economic power, military force, and station of birth. These issues are old and new again or as Daniels (2018, 1072) puts it: The forms of systemic white supremacy we face today are both a continuation of a centuries-­ old dimension of racism in the United States and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms.

Notably, these complex power dynamics can change from one platform to the next as ‘different social media sites structure these production and consumption roles differently’ (Bright et  al. 2014, 14). The role and power of the user online appear to fluctuate from platform to platform, with differing levels of control over how a user can act and interact (Kowert et al. 2016). It is also evident that users are not a homogeneous group. Rather, as Chander and Krishnamurthy (2018) notes, users approach, utilise, and understand social media differently as a result of the socio-cultural resources they bring with them when they approach social media. Our experiences online are therefore subject to complex and shifting power dynamic, user to user, platform to platform. This provides a large challenge to educational practitioners and researchers, a challenge that is all too often ignored as technology is thrown at student as a catch-­ all pacifier, leaning into what Chander and Krishnamurthy (2018) label the ‘myth of neutrality’. Individual differences are side-lined or disregarded in the hope that merely introducing technology into an educational environment will be enough. As this chapter, the previous chapter, and the framework detailed in Chaps. 5 and 6 make clear, technology should not be introduced to an educational environment without an understanding of how the pupils’ contexts, aims, resources, and experiences will shape their engagement with technology, nor the manner in which design is not passive but is inherently political. Though online platforms may emphasise

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their passivity, acting as if the ‘simply pass along the speech of their users to those users’ networks, without editorial input’ (Chander and Krishnamurthy 2018, 401), the reality is that many seemingly neutral platforms produce complex dynamics for users, both intended and unintended by the designers of these platforms (Cottom 2017; Noble 2018). To understand what it means to be social online, we must therefore consider the sociocultural resources of the users and how these enmesh with designed platforms. A particularly interesting example of socio-culturally informed uses and experiences of social media can be seen in the growing body of research that specifically focuses upon the ‘Black Twitter’, the use of Twitter by black communities. Scholars have noted the myriad ways in which race manifests and is experienced and coded online. Florini (2014, 224), for example, notes that as a user’s physical body can often be obscured on Twitter in myriad ways, black communities utilise the linguistic practice of ‘signifyin’, which they note as: A genre of linguistic performance that allows for the communication of multiple levels of meaning simultaneously, most frequently involving wordplay and misdirection..[Signifyin’] allows Black Twitter users to align themselves with Black oral traditions, to index Black cultural practices, to enact Black subjectivities, and to communicate shared knowledge and experiences.

Others such as Williams and Gonlin (2017, 1000) have looked at second-screen viewing of TV shows through Twitter (tweeting along with each as other, in real time or after the show, as a TV show is watched) as a way of facilitating collective meaning making around black womanhood, suggesting that ‘co-viewing acts as a technocultural tool that is community-engendering’. This point is echoed by Prasad (2016, 56) who notes Black Twitter provides a way to ‘critically recreate, reimagine, and revalue the materiality of Black humanity’. Similarly, Sharma (2013) looked at the use of racialized hashtags, dubbed ‘blacktags’, to understand how online racial identities are materialised in unique socio-culturally informed manners through the technological affordances of online platforms. He notes in particular that the use of these features in a specific manner and the emergent identities are unique to Twitter as a platform, and to this particular racial group, suggesting that: Beyond conceiving Black Twitter as a group of preconstituted users tweeting racialized hashtags, Blacktags are instrumental in producing networked subjects which have the capacity to multiply the possibilities of being raced online. (Sharma 2013, 46)

Other research in this vein has looked at the unique uses and appropriations of social media from users of a wide range of socio-cultural communities such as queer communities (Szulc 2018) or Christian communities (Thornton and Evans 2015) who use social media in different ways and approach social media with different goals and aims. Of course, users and their social media practices and identities cannot necessarily be understood in relation to broader affiliations alone (Williams and Gonlin 2017). Researchers have also crucially pointed out the need to account for individual user nuances and experiences beyond broad socio-cultural affiliations. Fox and Warber (2015), for example, note gay users interacted differently based on whether they had publicly declared their sexuality. As such, identity

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performance online becomes framed as a mix of offline social resources and specific formats online to result in unique performances of identity in a specific medium. Our social experiences online are inevitably sociotechnical. We must then ask ourselves why educational technology is so insistent on maintaining a divide between the social and the technical; prioritising algorithms, coding, and Boolean logic without critically examining who these logics prioritise in the classroom; or allowing the social to play a role in our engagements with technology. It has been noted that a user’s socio-cultural background not only affects their approach towards social media but also inevitably their treatment online. Researchers have noted, for example, manifestations of online racism (Topinka 2018), sexism and misogyny (Cole 2015), homophobia (Rubin and McClelland 2015), and the overlapping intersections of these such as anti-black misogyny (Madden et  al. 2018). These manifold unequal treatments of users, manifested in old and new ways online (Brown 2018), suggest that a user’s experiences and interactions online are not uniform nor are they isolated within online spaces. Instead they permeate to and from the offline, bound fast to the socio-cultural. This is aptly highlighted in the cases of trolling and anti-social behaviour through online content, as seen in infamous cases such as ‘Gamergate’ (Quinn 2017) in which feminist and female video game developers and gamers who used social media were systematically hounded and abused because of their gender1 and as such had to develop strategies for approaching and using social media (Massanari 2017). This was not isolated to online hate speech and abuse, with prominent females in the gaming community facing death threats, offline abuse, doxing, and public intimidation. Despite Barlow’s hopeful statements and the perceived neutrality of social media, equal access therefore does not always mean equal treatment, equal representation, or equal voice (Lil Miss Hot Mess 2015; Niedt 2016). Clearly, though the potential for social media is levelling, in reality systemic privileges and the prevalence of socially normative expectations still prevail online, impacting many aspects of the social media experience from how users access social media to how they are treated on it. This is a lesson that educational practitioners and policy makers often seem uniquely unwilling to hear as they pursue ways to build technology in to the classroom in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, again attempting to separate the social from the technical. To do so is to wilfully ignore the many exacerbated and new inequities that emerge through, on, with, and in technologies. It is also important to highlight therefore the importance of platform design in these socio-culturally grounded performances and practices. Research has noted that specific design choices can affect certain socio-cultural groups more than others (Noble 2018). However, it cannot be assumed that platform features alone lead to online abuse. Research suggests that it is not as simple as merely highlighting the particular affordances that are used to elicit abuse (Ariel and Avidar 2015). A 1  It is worth noting that the Gamergate community claimed that they were hounding, harassing, and abusing feminists and females because of their concerns around ethics in video game journalism. It is also worth noting this claim is ridiculous.

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consideration must be given both to specific affordances of the platform which exacerbate specific ways of actions and interaction and to the resources and experiences a user brings with them to these platforms. Sundar (2004), for example, notes in his study of interactivity online that understanding interactions requires looking at both the platform design and the users involved in the interaction. Indeed, design alone can be used in there myriad unforeseen ways, and there may be ‘discrepancies between designer goals and how the features are used in practice’ (Epstein et al. 2015, 1622). Given this, in order to consider the complexities of social identity performances online, a theoretical framework that considers how a user’s individual and broad socio-cultural factors become enmeshed with specific online platforms to produce individual identity performances is needed. An emphasis needs to be placed upon how different users will bring different social resources to social media to produce unique iterations of identity, but with an understanding that their performances will still be shaped to varying degrees by the design of the specific platforms and mediums through which they act and interact socially. As Sharma (2013, 47) highlights in his analysis of racial uses of Twitter, ‘both race and digital networks transformed in their mutual encounter’. With this in mind, Chap. 6 of this book presents Comic Theory, a framework for unpacking the multifaceted creation of an identity narrative impacted and impacting on both the platform and the user’s own socio-cultural background. As the aim of the research detailed in this book is to consider how users negotiate and navigate social platforms to produce specific identity performance this chapter will now move on to consider how best to understand what it means to socially interact online.

4.2  F  rom Networking to Not Working: Accounting for the Array of Online Social Experiences When understanding interaction online, it is apparent that there is the need to examine the reality of the Internet and the embedded role it has in everyday life. In other words, ‘the reality of the Internet is more important that the dazzle’ (Haythornthwaite and Wellman 2002:5). Due to the advancements in social media in the last decade, research suggests that there is a need to consider an increasingly broad variety of social uses and experiences online (Boczkowski et al. 2018; Kim et al. 2014). Interestingly, and perhaps because of the growing variety of possibilities afforded by the progression of technology, there seems to be little consensus as to the exact type of social interactions afforded by social media, with researchers centralising different social aspects of social media in a variety of contradictory manners. For example, Kent (2010) highlights that social media mostly affords specific forms of social interaction that offer, amongst other traits, reduced anonymity, a sense of propinquity, and short response times. Tierney (2013: 34) however defines social interaction online in an inverse manner from Kent, noting

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that it lacks the ‘openness and visibility’ present in (seemingly dichotomous) offline communication. Equally others have counter-argued this, suggesting that we have never been more visible than we are online (Lee and Cook 2015). What emerges when exploring literature around what it means to be social online is a seeming mess of contradictions, with different researchers emphasising different aspects. We can’t even seemingly settle on if the Internet is making us more or less social or indeed if this enforced dichotomy and comparison to other forms of social interaction are in and of itself an unhelpful detraction from understanding what is unique about social interaction online. What is apparent, however, is that there is a growing range of complex and multifaceted social experiences online that need to be accounted for. Crucially, it is clear that research needs to explore beyond the traditional focus upon peer-to-peer networking (Tagg et  al. 2017), especially as experiences online are diversifying, both on traditional platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and far beyond these platforms alone (see Chap. 2). These platforms have long been the focus of research into social interactions online, but it is apparent the rest of the web increasingly needs to be accounted for when considering what social experiences online entail. For example, it has been noted by Bright et al. (2014:15) that: Some social media websites dedicate themselves to a specific theme or niche interest, whilst others attempt to create a more general type of space for social interaction (within which more specific niches can spring up). Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, for example, are generalist: a wide variety of social interactions can take place on them. Other sites such as LinkedIn (a site designed for professional connections) or Mumsnet (a site designed for parents to meet and discuss) have more of a specific theme.

Tagg et al. (2017: 113) aptly highlight this variety by drawing on the following 2010 meme satirising the range of social behaviours centralised across different platforms and how they change our interactions: Facebook – I like doughnuts Twitter – I’m eating a #doughnut Blogger – Read about my doughnut eating experiences Foursquare – This is where I eat doughnuts YouTube – Watch me eating a doughnut LinkedIn – My skills include doughnut eating Pinterest – Here’s a doughnut recipe LastFM – Now listening to “doughnuts” Instagram – Here’s a vintage photo of my doughnut Google+ – I’m a Google employee who eats doughnuts

They go on to note the importance of framing social interaction online as the relationship between the affordances of each social space and the user’s experiences, beliefs, and expectations of these affordances, a point we will continue to return to throughout this book. Given this, we cannot assume that findings regarding the social interactions viewed and researched on ‘generalised’ social media sites can be equally transferred to specific communities online who may interact differently. We also cannot assume that each platform will frame and understand what it means to be social in the same way. The framing of what it means to be social on Facebook may be notably different to that on Twitter (Dyer 2015), which may be

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different to LinkedIn and so on. These choices to emphasise different understanding of being social are not just design gimmicks, but as we are seeing with cases from the Cambridge Analytica scandal or the anti-Rohingya movement on Facebook (Mozur 2018), to the rise of far-right nationalism on 8chan, these choices can fundamentally impact society in profound ways. It is worth highlighting again here that being social online is not just about ‘networking’ with established peers. Networking is, as mentioned above, flexible – actualising itself differently from one site to the next not only in terms of aims and specificities but also in terms of the modes and manners of interaction. Boyd and Ellison (2008) note platforms such as Facebook are commonly used to further and extend already existing connection. However, of course, there are a number of popular SNSs whose primary purpose is to make new connections. Though they may not be included in Boyd and Ellison’s original conception of social network sites, they are nonetheless part of the vital makeup of social experiences online that are increasingly overlapping and bleeding into each other. Indeed, the proliferation of dating sites and the popularity of Tinder and Grindr only serve to prove this point, with Duguay (2017) noting that platforms like Facebook are folded into dating apps like Tinder in complex ways to bolster claims of authenticity. As such, Boyd and Ellison’s (2008, 211) claim that ‘what makes Social Network Sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks’ cannot easily be upheld if we are to account for the growing array of social experiences online beyond this form of networking alone. Indeed, some social experiences online work precisely on not articulating social networks but connecting random strangers (see Chatroulette), and not all social spaces online use articulated friends/contact lists in meaningful manners. Some researchers further problematize the manifestation of the social online, pointing out that multiple social experiences can exist on the same platform (Weller 2016). Much of the research into social interaction online traditionally highlights the maintenance of existing social connections as a key part of social interaction online (Barker 2009; Mendelson and Papacharissi 2011). However, whilst this is undoubtedly one aspect of the social media experience for many users, it is apparent that this is not the only experience and that social interaction can exist for many reasons beyond this. Research has suggested, for example, that users engage in following celebrities (Abidin 2018), companies (Phua et al. 2017), and other interest groups (Lookadoo and Dickinson 2015), alongside using these platforms for the consumption of news, culture, and political information (Boczkowski et al. 2018). These aspects manifest themselves in complex ways which can be used to express aspects of the user’s identity (Tennent and Jackson 2019), produce markers of sociality and belonging (McInroy and Craig 2018), and shape a user’s understanding of the world around them (Chess and Maddox 2018). It appears then that not only can we not generalise the type of social interactions witnessed on social media writ large but we also cannot generalise within platforms as engagements with these platforms may differ from one user to the next. This further highlights the need to consider social interactions on a platform-by-platform

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basis and, importantly, to not overemphasise the importance of networking with established contacts at the expense of other social experiences online. Indeed, it is apparent that there is an increasingly broad array of users online now, creating a variety of social experiences online. This growing body of users, especially on popular platforms like Facebook, has led to interesting new dynamics emerging as users begin to deal with overlapping social circles collapsing into each other. Researchers have highlighted the manifestation of ‘context collapse’ online (Davis and Jurgenson 2014), with users having to balance possible input from friends, family, celebrities, companies, politicians, and news organisations amongst others which increasingly overlap with each other. The affordances online notably make it ‘difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation’ (Marwick and Boyd 2011, 114), leading to the rise of ‘finstagram’ and ‘fakebook’ accounts – fake accounts used to express a user’s ‘real self’ in a controlled manner (See Abrashi 2018). Research has begun to highlight that this context collapse means that multiple social experiences are merging within platforms so that, for example, private and public social interactions might intertwine (Sujon 2018), as might fandom and family or friends and work (Brandtzaeg and Chaparro-Domínguez 2018). Much like we do offline then (Goffman 1959), it appears that users online still manage multiple social styles at once which manifest themselves in unique ways through new affordances (Marwick and Boyd 2011), flattening, for example, lines between a user’s past and present in complex ways (Brandtzaeg and Lüders 2018). Given this brief discussion, it appears that there are a broad array of social interactions online, not only across the growing range of social media platforms but also within the more well-researched platforms, many of which can serve multiple and overlapping purposes for users. It is important to highlight here that if researchers use a specific definition of ‘social’ to shape their understanding of a user’s experience of social media, they risk only seeing a narrow part of the social media experience or assuming that this is the ‘default’ use and that other uses and experiences are merely deviations from this core (Weller 2016). As Brian Larkin (2008, 3) notes, ‘what media are needs to be interrogated and not presumed’. The research detailed below therefore aimed to understand user experience in a broad sense beyond just traditional networking in order to interrogate some of the ways social interaction manifests online for young people online. To do this, alongside asking young people to define social media for me (see Chap. 2), I also asked them to define their uses and engagements with, on, and through these platforms, making sure to explore uses beyond networking alone. As detailed below, this produced a variety of responses. Before unpacking these, however, we must first consider social uses of these platforms beyond just content production alone.

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4.3  Uses of Social Media Beyond Content Production Alone Beyond the idea that there are multiple forms of social interaction online is the idea that social interaction online comprises more than just the production of content alone. Opening Twitter whilst waiting for the bus, hate-browsing an Instagram account, scrolling through the comment sections of a blog, watching a Twitch stream to talk about at school with your friends, and getting lost watching TikTok videos for a solid hour, all of these play a part in our experiences with social media. Whilst arguably these uses still produce data and content through myriad digital footprints, cookies, adverts, and other forms of data tracking, it is clear that these uses are seemingly ‘quieter’ than other ways of engaging with these platforms such as creating videos, posts, and updates. As discussed briefly below, this quieter data production is hugely important to our online experiences, and researchers should avoid generalising social media based upon loud data alone. Focusing only on user-­ produced loud content online, as is the case with much of the ‘big data’ research which is conducted through processing and analysing masses of online user-­ produced content (Hargittai 2015), potentially ignores the many complex quieter uses of social media. In turn, this biases how we perceive social media use by focusing on mass analysis of content alone and risks defining social media on its potential and not its actualised use in practice (Barnes 2015). Whilst social media offers the potential for the audience to create media content, this does not mean that this is the only method through which users engage with and use these platforms, nor is it de facto the main method, nor should it be the only method of engagement that researchers focus upon, as is the case with ‘big data’ research. The reality of the role social media plays in our lives is not just the constant production of content. This holds notable implications for educational understanding of social media and indeed the ways in which we might approach concepts such as ‘digital citizenship’. Increasingly, research is beginning to consider more than just content production and is highlighting the importance of media consumption in the social experiences of young people online (Muller 2012; Edelmann et al. 2017; Koutropoulos et al. 2019). Researchers have highlighted many uses, including boredom, passing time, snooping, and more passive ways of engaging with celebrity ‘fandom’ (Lampe et al. 2006) which seem to make up the majority of our engagements with various platforms. Pempek et al. (2009, 237), for example, note ‘although interactivity is touted as a hallmark of newer media, online users spend a considerable amount of time just watching others’. This broader focus beyond content production as the ostensible driver of social media usage has allowed researchers to highlight and understand a broader variety of traits and uses of these platforms. Mark et al. (2016, 5519), for example, highlight that: social media consumption (as opposed to production) is often lightweight, requiring little effort and often serving as a quick break. As such, it is not surprising that youth report using social media for such things as distraction, a way to fill time, and as a mechanism for socializing.

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Indeed, it has been noted that content production may actually be one of the more uncommon uses of social media (Barnes 2015) and that the majority of content production may be being done by a minority of atypical users (Bolton et  al. 2013; Baeza-Yates and Saez-Trumper 2015). UK data finds that ‘a handful of users contributing extensively to the sites, whilst the majority contribute rarely or never’ (Bright et al. 2014, 14). This highlights the importance of consumption in our experiences of social media. Weller (2016) similarly asks researchers to consider and account for the ‘forgotten’ features of social media that hold interesting implications for our understanding of identity performance and social interaction online. She highlights that seemingly core features of platforms can change over time but that research on features such as following and retweeting on Twitter is more prevalent than research into aspects such as favouriting posts, which has grown in user popularity, leading to some features seemingly being forgotten or marginalised. Minimising these aspects can exclude fascinating areas of research which may reveal interesting findings about user interactions such as content deletion, unfriending, and unfavouriting. It appears therefore that in order to consider the social uses of the Internet by young people, it is crucial that the focus of research is not upon content production alone and that other uses are not seen as secondary or devalued (Barnes 2015). Though this produced content online is rich, obvious, and plentiful, this doesn’t mean that this is the ‘average’ use and experience of social media. The research detailed in this book therefore suggests that minimising the focus merely to interactions through content production reduces and refracts the fullness of experiences online and, as such, the research here purposefully considers a wide range of uses beyond content production. As Crawford (2009) points out, there is often a temptation in digital research to listen to those who speak loudly and who actively participate by producing content, but this ‘privileging of voice’ (Crawford 2009, 527) denies the many nuanced uses of social media beyond merely producing content. This is of course also true of those who produce content regularly, who will inevitably also use social media in manners beyond this alone. Though we have seen a noted growth in big data research which focuses almost exclusively on analysis of online content, Crawford warns against this, suggesting that accounting for more than just content production when considering social uses of social media is crucial as it, in effect, ‘decentres the current overemphasis on posting, commenting and ‘speaking up’ as the only significant forms of participation’ (Crawford 2009, 528). Similarly, other researchers have recently suggested ‘a wider definition of ‘participation’ is needed that is not limited to active contribution, but also includes the act of reading and connecting with audience contributions’ (Barnes 2015, 823). It is my fear, however, that the growing importance and prevalence of ‘big data’ research is placing far too large of a focus upon one facet of the online experience alone, skewing the way we understand and think of online social space and online social experiences. By placing such a large emphasis on an aspect on social media that research suggests is an increasingly minor part of the complex online social experience, this form of content farming appears to further silence an already

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under-­represented aspect of the online experience, presenting a picture of online reality that is simply not representative. Focusing upon content alone potentially ignores the many complex uses of social media and risks defining social media on its conceived potential and not it’s actualised use. At the least, researchers should acknowledge that the masses of online content data, whilst obviously appealing and potentially insightful, are not, and cannot be, representative of the larger online experience. And perhaps at best, researchers should aim to record, report, and reflect the entirety of the online social experience in an ethical, representative, and academically honest manner. By overtly and often exclusively focusing upon farming masses of online content, big data research faces the possibility of not reflecting and illuminating the society it is observing but instead misrepresenting and diffracting online experiences. With this in mind, this chapter now moves on to present data from a year-long series of interviews with young people, focusing upon how they negotiated social experiences online and how they engaged with, on, in, and through social media.

4.4  Content Collapse: Negotiating Overlaps in Audiences A number of the participants highlighted that many disparate social aspects of their offline lives were often converging upon single platforms, causing ‘context collapse’ (Davis and Jurgenson 2014), which changed the ways in which they were interacting and performing identity. This was often discussed in terms of the increased presence of parents and family on some social media platforms. Indeed, amongst the participants, there was even some suggestion that the majority audience on Facebook was now mainly ‘older’ users. For example, Kirsty suggested: ‘I think the audience is growing in other areas purely because it’s getting more accessible’. Brian also noted that older generations are increasingly present on Facebook: Brian: Facebook’s useful still. Especially for some demographics. Like I know older generations are really taking it up to keep in contact with their kids and family Harry: (laughs) do you have any older family on Facebook then? Brian: oh sure. Aunts and uncles and stuff, they’re all on it. I think one of my aunts has 6 different Facebook accounts. (laughs) Why do old people keep setting up more and more accounts? (laughs) But it’s useful for them, for sure.

Nina suggested this too, highlighting Facebook in particular as the platform that older generation are comfortable using. She noted ‘my parents use Facebook; they don’t use Twitter’. Similarly, Willow noted of Facebook that: the connections have grown so far and it’s no longer your friends who you see at school, but also your mum, who you don’t want to freak out, your co-workers, your in laws, your partner’s family, your cousins, etc.

It was noted by the participants that the increased presence of a wider audience than just their immediate peers affected how they chose to act and interact and what

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they chose to share. For example, Nina noted of Twitter that, as her family was less likely to use the platform ‘you don’t have to worry about what your family thinks so much’. Willow similarly noted of teens now engaging with Facebook: I think back to what I was like at that age, and I think, if I had the people on my Facebook that I have now, like my mum and dad, my aunts, I probably wouldn’t have said half the stuff I did. wouldn’t vocalise it.

Sally similarly suggested that her peer group interacted differently due to possible parental presence on Facebook. She noted that ‘some of my friends (.) like at uni they don’t use it for parties in case their dad sees it and gets angry’ and later noted: I definitely think about my family and work on there that I might not want them to see TV shows or how much I like them or even just the few celebrities or male models that I follow.

‘Context collapse’ was also an issue for Kirsty, who worked with social media for her new job in communications. She noted that the audience largely affected how she thought about presenting herself: It was the end of the world when I added someone who I used to work with on Facebook who I got on with really well, I said yeah sure, added on Facebook, and of course because I’d added her all my other work mates then could find me and I had to try and explain to them that I don’t add people that I work with on Facebook, I’ve slightly relaxed that rule but I’ve just got much much more careful about what I post.

Here then we see Kirsty directly changing her manner of acting as a result of different contexts converging upon one platform. She later expands on this to note: Increasingly now that all my social media I think, bar none, is connected to someone I work with, so that kind of takes away the choice not to think about it [how I act].

It is worth noting however that some of the participants suggested that they had developed tactics to deal with this convergence of different audiences online. A number of participants noted that the intended audience for a given update could be controlled by the user on certain platforms to make sure that only certain contacts viewed certain updates. Brian noted, for example, that he could change the security settings on Facebook so that he could know who was viewing his content. He suggested that: So for me (.) I can have like different versions of myself on Facebook and nobody would know really. Like I can doctor the audience so I can express my views on some things without other people seeing it. Cos like I’ve got family and friends and bosses and colleagues, people from all different aspects of my life. I can make sure I know who’s seeing what so I don’t have to worry about expressing liberal views without worrying about less liberal people.

Other participants noted a different range of tactics for dealing with the overlap of different aspects of their offline lives. For example, a number of the participants did not utilise the security features afforded by certain platforms but instead chose to maintain an active divide in who they allowed to follow their updates. Brandon, for example, acknowledged that disparate aspects of his life converge online but noted that he could keep these converging aspects of his social life separate on Facebook. He suggested that ‘with Facebook I’m very careful to keep my work

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colleagues, or anybody that I interact with in a professional sense separate’. Nina also noted similar coping mechanisms, suggesting she kept her work friends separate and tried to maintain the divide. She noted of her colleagues that: I didn’t have them as friends until I left, and then they were like oh I didn’t know you liked that, I didn’t know you did that, and all that sort of stuff, and now when I meet up with them I’d say I’m more me, so I’d say yeah it is different.

Isabel similarly acknowledged that ‘I don’t have anyone from work on Facebook’. It appears therefore that online, not only are broad aspects of a user’s social lives represented across a range of platforms, but, given the ubiquity of social media in social life, these aspects can increasingly overlap, affecting how users act and interact in various ways. The participants seemed aware that increasingly a broader array of their social lives was being represented and present online and, on Facebook in particular, noted that this affected how they thought about updating and interacting. As Marwick and Boyd (2011) and others (Davis and Jurgenson 2014) noted with the term ‘context collapse’, users are having to balance possible input from friends, family, celebrities, companies, and others and come up with ways of dealing with this increased presence. As we will discuss in more detail in later chapters, for some this meant engaging with specific features to maintain a divide, and for others this meant altering the content and style of their updates. It appears that users, as much as they do in offline life, juggle multiple social aspects and present themselves accordingly for a specific audience. However, the specific scope of the audience available to perform to appears to be largely tied to the spaces in which the users are performing. This further highlights the need to consider design online, as it can evidently affect and shape the specific audiences that have access to the given performances.

4.5  Moving Beyond Content Production The interviews highlighted clearly that there was a need to consider uses of social media beyond the production of content alone. Browsing appeared to be a particularly large use of social media for all participants and an important aspect of their social media experience. All participants noted their use of various platforms for browsing and reading as a fairly regular occurrence and suggested that it formed a part of their average engagement with the platforms, if not their most common use of the platforms. Browsing for the participants was their regular engagement across a wide range of platforms. Molly’s engagement with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, for example, was a frequent, almost daily, occurrence. However, for Molly, the platforms were almost exclusively used for ‘browsing’ the updates and content posted by close friends. She noted: I don’t think I’ve ever posted a video. I don’t really post on Facebook at all, I occasionally put, I don’t really post on Twitter, I like retweet things, like the dance groups I’m in and

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4  What’s ‘Social’ About Social Media? things, like, if they’re important, and I post some photos on Instagram like if I’ve been on holiday or whatnot. But not that often.

Oliver similarly discussed how he went on Facebook ‘(.) once a day I have a good browse (.) you know, I check my notifications’ and that on Reddit he participated by ‘upvote, downvote, do all that, I don’t really post, because by the time I’ve come up with something witty the whole thread is 10 hours old and I feel pointless’. Sally too mentioned that ‘I don’t really write that many updates, status updates’ and notes of her use of Tumblr that ‘I don’t really put my own stuff up there I usually just reblog other people’s things’. For Kirsty, posting was often the exception and was reserved for specific purposes, where as her main engagement revolved around browsing. She suggested ‘it tends to be kind of (.) If there’s something to celebrate, I guess, I tend to stick it on Facebook. Umm. But beyond that I don’t post a lot’. Similarly, Willow noted, despite going on Twitter regularly, that ‘my last tweet was 295 days ago’ and that, in regard to Facebook, browsing forms her normal engagement with the platforms: Willow: so I tend not to really write about stuff, I don’t really (.) feel the need to broadcast loads of stuff on Facebook all the time. Harry: Sure. Willow: Erm, and I don’t really like doing it (.) erm, so I tend not to – I’ll, I’ll like write normal like happy birthdays to people, or occasionally I’ll put up status erm like big events or something or I’ve erm. Or commenting on other people’s stuff that people have tagged me on or whatever, but I tend not to (.) really post.

The participants highlighted that browsing was not always a mindless task for them but that it filled a range of particular social functions, often serving to keep the participants informed about their friendship groups, specific news, and topics of interest. This was noted by most of the participants. Isabel, for example, highlighted that she browsed regularly, checking ‘Facebook every day, several times a day’ to find out about her peers as ‘It’s useful to see it all and know what they’re doing’. Brandon too noted ‘it’s mainly liking things and reading for me, keeping connected with what everyone else is doing’. Nina noted frequent browsing as a social function, suggesting of Facebook ‘I use it to, look at what other people are doing, sounds a bit stalker-y, but what they’re doing, what they’re saying, and have a laugh at it and all that sort of stuff, and I’ll post things up’. Similarly again, Kirsty suggested that: Facebook actually tends to be my substitute for gossip magazines in some way, you know sort of catching up on what other people are doing. I realise that I’m quite a selfish Facebook user because I very rarely actually post, I tend to just use it to read other people’s goings on.

Molly also suggested browsing for her served a social purpose of keeping informed about her peers, a point she particularly highlighted after moving to university. She noted: I still basically don’t post on Facebook. Just see what everyone else is doing. Especially (.) people I don’t see so much now. Like school friends. It’s really useful to know what everyone’s up to, even if I don’t post much.

This suggests that there is a clear and present need to account for browsing when considering how users engage with social media. Whilst these participants shared

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little common usage of the platforms in terms of content, the clear function of browsing was central to all accounts. Browsing formed the main engagement with these platforms for the participants and served a range of social roles and functions. Given the importance and regularity of browsing, future research should be reticent in over-prioritising content production alone. Beyond browsing updates, other uses of these platforms were also noted by the participants. Isabel, for example, noted that she mainly did not use social media to post content but instead chose to communicate via private messaging if she wanted to communicate. She highlighted that ‘I don’t post stuff much. If I want to talk I’ll normally use messenger’. In a similar manner, Sally noted that Facebook’s integration of a private messaging system changed how she used the platform for social interaction and private group interactions: I do group convos with my friends. So I have one with two of my best friends, one with those two girls and two others, one with all four of them and a couple of others. It’s ridiculous, like we couldn’t just have one or two group convos, we have to have a hundred. But we’ll organise nights out or drinks and dinner or just have a general conversation and it’s a way of keeping in contact.

Other participants talked about consumption beyond peer content. Brandon, for example, noted that browsing social media could keep users informed about a number topics including news: I suppose it’s useful for simply keeping tabs on what’s going on in the world. Generally, important news tends to be written about by other people. So a lot of news I tend to see through people’s reactions to it on social media.

Similarly, Brian highlighted the presence of news on social media, emphasising Twitter in particular, noting ‘Twitter’s so instant and so quick. I just use it to see trends and also science news. More so in a way than I use like Google news, RSS feeds, I use Twitter instead’. In a similar manner, Kirsty noted ‘if I’m reading Twitter then it tends to be that I’m finding out world news’. Sally too gained a wide range of information from Twitter: Twitter I usually just use it to keep on top of news in a way, and like, when new episodes of TV shows come out, new books, umm, promos, stuff like that, and some current events as well.

It appears therefore that it is worth remembering that, just as an increasing range of websites are acquiring social capabilities and encouraging some form of interaction amongst users, so too are social media platforms gaining additional capabilities beyond purely traditional peer-to-peer social content posting (see Chap. 2). Another use of social media beyond content production that was noted by the participants was social organisation and planning. Brandon highlighted of Facebook: I suppose I use it almost as an extension of kind of like my office tools, like it’s an extension of my email and my calendar, because I use it for sort of planning and for planning events and seeing what events are coming up, for remembering friends’ birthdays, and getting in touch with people when I don’t know how else to reach them. It’s very useful.

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In a similar manner, inspired and influenced by her particular socio-cultural situation, Sally made use of social media as a study tool to aid her university studies: I’m part of quite a few groups, err, my specific course group and a general study group…a couple of times we’ve organised events over a group message and a couple of times we’ve actually created an event page. I don’t think it makes a difference. After graduating and starting an office job, Sally later discusses how social media continued to provide a range of uses for her. Again this was sensitive to her given and new situation, with the platforms this time proving to be a useful work tool: I think that’s the one good thing about Twitter in my opinion, that you can talk directly to entities like public transport and the police and you get that feeling of understanding what’s going in real time. Like, I’ve been on the train and it’s being held at the station for some reason and the guards won’t say why, so I just search the station on Twitter and find out in seconds that it’s cos there’s trespassers on the tracks.

This highlights the manner in which our engagements with these platforms not only extends beyond content production but that it is bound to our socio-cultural situations in nuanced manners, a point which we will return to in the next two chapters of this book.

4.6  I mplications for Educational Researchers, Policy Makers, and Educators For the participants, social media served a number of uses and functions beyond just posting content. Posting content was far from their main method of engagement with the platforms. Instead, as Sally and others account across the course of the year of research in which she graduated and started her first job, contextualise social media use for each user is important, and we should endeavour to understand how it fills a particular purposes for them beyond content production alone. Though a larger sample size may be able to highlight some trends in terms of engagement through content production, this small sample size serves to problematize any single conclusive statement to instead highlight that the engagement with social media emerges from the enmeshing of specific platforms with individual user drawing upon all of their specific socio-cultural resources. Interestingly, most participants felt that their consumption was abnormal, selfish, or somehow unusual and were frequently surprised when I pointed out how normal content consumption was. This suggests a deep disconnect between the noted reality of these platforms and the expectation of an ‘average’ user. In part, education could go a long way to demystifying social media and to challenging the platforms framing of social as equivalent to content alone. Future research could explore this disconnect between how users perceive an ‘average’ user and what this ‘average’ user might look like in reality. The interviews highlighted a point of consideration for research in regard to treatment of online data, specifically suggesting the need to consider the entirety of

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the social media experience beyond just data production. Though for some of the participants the public content they produced was not sizable, the social functions these platforms serve were nonetheless tangible and important. As such, seeking only participants who produce a wealth of content, as is seen in various popular methodologies both qualitative (e.g. Netnography [Kozinets 2010]) and quantitative (such as ‘big data’ research), may be problematic for understanding the reality of social media. A range of uses need to be considered alongside purely content production alone. All of the participants discussed using a range of various platforms for social interaction online. What was most apparent from the discussion of their engagements across this range of platforms was the role that browsing and consumption played for the participants. In this regard, the findings of this research support the important role that browsing plays in our social media experiences. This research holds that browsing and consumption should not be ignored and should be accounted for when considering the role of social media in social life. This is also true of discussions of social media in a classroom. Again, we can help to demystify the reality of social media for young people and help them critique the ways in which these platforms frame what it means to be social. Though for some of the participants the public content they produced was not sizable, the social functions these platforms served were tangible and important. It was noted that browsing served a social function for the participants. In the case of Molly, for example, browsing was largely her only engagement with the platforms. Yet she noted that she followed three separate platforms to keep up to date with the various social aspects of her friends that were posted across these three platforms. For Molly, browsing enabled her to gain this social knowledge and to feel connected with her peers. This raises many issues with regard to how we treat online data. It is so tempting and easy to take a ‘big data’ view towards collecting and processing social media data in order to look for emergent trends in topics and content. However, the data that is often captured through trawling this produced content cannot be considered representative of the reality of social media for users. The main aspect that is under analysis in much of the ‘big data’ research appears to not even constitute the main aspect of social media engagement. With the increased prevalence of mobile technology and the use of social media for a range of social function including news and social consumption, it is apparent that in order to understand the action and interaction of social media users, researchers cannot simply sit at the other side of a screen and read a user’s posts. Browsing cannot be ignored from sociological research online. More than this, it is apparent that content production should not be overemphasised and considered with undue focus. Of course, it is important to note that this is not just an issue for large-scale qualitative data but also for small-scale, in depth, and ethnographic research online. Kozinets (2010) approach towards ‘netnography’ has proven to be a popular method for observing online communities and continues to be utilised to gather insights into the manner in which social communities form online. Kozinets (2010) proposes that to gather the richest data, there is a need to actively seek out those users and communities who produce a wealth of content. Whilst this is understandable, if we are just viewing the community in situ of the website, it is apparent that this is

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potentially an atypical picture of social media engagement and that equally rich data that is more representative of the average engagement with social media can be gathered from understanding and considering users who do not actively produce content. If we are to study social media in its entirety, this means studying it is its actualised and repetitive mundanity. This also means challenging and critiquing the means through which the platforms frame what it means to be social, looking past these to consider the actual usage by users. Whilst produced content is readily apparent and obvious when viewing these spaces, research should be able to lose its bias towards this fixation and begin to unpack the mundane and consumptive reality of social media in the lives of users, which, as this data and others (Barnes 2015; Weller 2016) reveals, can be equally rich and varied and can reveal a great deal about social media use and social media users.

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Chapter 5

Enmeshing the User and Design: How Is Identity Managed Online?

Abstract  This chapter presents a sustained look at data collected from a year-long series of interviews with young people to consider how they framed and understood identity online. The data reveals a number of elements which shape how identity manifests online. First we consider how the design features present in social media shape identity performances online. Adding further complexity to this, we briefly consider the role of third-party apps in augmenting possible experiences of social media, before moving on to explore how a user’s socio-cultural resources and realities might shape their engagements with social media in an ongoing flexible manner. Finally we explore identity performances online as a negotiation between socio-culturally grounded users and specific platform designs. It is suggested that identity performances online emerge from the enmeshing of user and design in an ongoing manner. The data presented in this chapter lays the groundwork for the new theoretical framework through which to understand identity performance online, proposed in Chap. 6 of this book. Keywords  Identity · Identity negotiation · Identity theory · Identity performance · Design · Social media · Digital duality

5.1  Introduction In the previous three chapters, we have considered how young people define, use, and access social media and how this shapes their experiences and their interactions online. For the next two chapters, we move on to look more closely at the subject of how best to understand identity performance and presentations in social media. These next two chapters work very much in tandem, with this current chapter presenting data from a year-long series of interviews with young people which serves to problematise what we consider to be identity online and the next chapter presenting the beginnings of a solution to how we can theorise identity online.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. T. Dyer, Designing the Social, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5716-3_5

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Our experiences online, as we have seen in the previous chapters, are a blend of old and new; extant socio-cultural resources meet new ways of emphasising, defining, and encasing what it means to be social. Rather than ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’, the theoretical framework proposed over the next two chapters builds on previous understandings of identity whilst acknowledging what is unique about how identity manifests is specifically designed spaces with unique and often restrictive ways of expressing and presenting ourselves. What does it mean to present identity in 140 or 280 characters? In 6 s videos? In interactive livestreams? In filtered selfies? Whilst the answers to these issues present a unique understanding of identity in a specific moment in time (e.g. the interviews were conducted before Twitter expanded its character limit to 280 characters), the framework presented over these two chapters allows for a consideration of how identity is negotiated online in an ongoing manner between human, non-human, and inhuman agents. It is also hoped that the framework presented here will allow us to reconsider and reconceptualise how we theorise and consider identity offline. Building upon the discussion in this chapter around how young people are engaging with, on, in, and through social media, the framework detailed in the next chapter helps us better consider identity as an ongoing negotiation between multiple agents. Taken together then, these two chapters build towards an understanding of identity performances as complex ongoing negotiations between socio-culturally grounded users, embedded tools and technologies, and specifically designed spaces and platforms. It should be noted here that we will save a definition of identity for the next chapter, as this is a complex and controversial issue in and of itself. The discussion in this chapter explores how young people understand their identity online. This was built through guided tours of their profiles during interviews, and other methods for unpacking their understandings of their identities, include methods of discussing identity in abstract manner, such as asking participants to imagine their profiles were film scripts (Robards and Bennett 2011). In particular, this chapter will focus attention towards the role that the spaces we interact within (or, if you like, the staging of our identity performances) play in changing, shaping, and mediating how, in this case, young people are performing identity online. This question is of grave concern to many educators, parents, and policy makers thinking about how these ‘brave new realities’ of social media might influence the identities, actions, and interactions of young people. Beyond the moral panics detailed in Chap. 2 of this book, it is clear there is broad ongoing concern for how much social media design is influencing the identities of young people today. Discussions of the rise of alt-right proud boys and cyberbullying trolls abound, alongside concerns around narcissism, anti-social behaviour, and body dysmorphic influences online. Though these fears can often be quite exaggerated and can lack nuance in the media coverage generally, it is clear that in no small part they stem from a concern of just how much social media might influence us, our identities, intentions, actions, and interactions, online and offline. Just how much agency do we have in controlling and shaping our own identity online? Are we restricted to only emphasising some forms of interaction and some manifestations of identity

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over others? Are social media platforms restricting how we can act and interact? How susceptible are we to the design whims and intentions of social media creators? Does social media push us down certain paths at the demands of advertisers? These questions are inevitably complex, but it is hoped that both the data in this chapter and the new theoretical framework detailed in the next chapter will begin to answer some of these questions that sit at the heart of many of our fears, hopes, and concerns about young people and social media. We will begin by exploring data collected from a year-long series of interviews with young people in order to understand how they see their identities online. The data will consider four different aspects of the relationship between user and design in the complex negotiation of identity performances. First we will look at how design aspects of the various platforms the participants used shaped their identity performances, considering what was lost or restricted by these affordances and what was gained or augmented. We will then consider the use of third-party applications to augment various design aspects and the effect this added layer of complexity had upon identity performances. The third section looks at how the changing socio-­ cultural experiences of the participants over the course of a year affected how and why they used social media platforms, as well as how their understanding of other social media platforms shaped their actions and interactions online. Finally, this chapter will explore how the boundaries of identity performances were negotiated between user and design and how users felt about this negotiation. This will focus upon what sacrifices and compromises were made around identity and how agency was negotiated in an ongoing manner. Before we dive into this data, it is worth recapping what we have considered so far in the previous chapters. It is evident that social media is increasingly important to young people and their daily social lives, though the precise roles it plays are notably varied due to a number of complex factors, making sweeping generational conclusions near impossible and reductive. We can however say that social media is an increasingly centralised aspect of social interaction and an influence upon the development of their social actions and interactions. Importantly, it is clear that the use of social media platforms is diversifying, with young people regularly present across multiple platforms. This range of platforms present a variety of different spaces and modes through which to express and perform identity, with the affordances differing from one platform to the next, providing users with a variety of social uses beyond just networking alone. Further to this, it is apparent that to understand the social media experiences of young people, there is also a need to account for the devices through which they are accessing these spaces. Importantly, their engagement with these spaces does not involve just producing content, but a range of other aspects that also need to be accounted for. Finally, there is also a need to account for the socio-cultural backgrounds, experiences, contexts, and resources that young people bring with them to the platforms, which may change the manner in which they engage with these spaces in myriad ways. Given this, the next two chapters here will consider how young people enmesh with these platforms to produce unique user-specific and platform-bound identity performances. Though there are complex moving elements here, it is hoped that the framework detailed over

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these two chapters can provide some clarity to better understanding this complexity and give shape to the ‘messiness’ of the reality of social media. It is also clear that many different approaches can be taken towards understanding what social media is and that defining social media can be largely problematic due to the ever-changing and disruptive nature of the field. Beyond this, social media can be approached, understood, and experienced in a range of ways by different users. As such, I seek here to offer no fixed definition as to what social media is in terms of specific affordances. These are likely to continue to change and diversify. Neither will I attempt to define social media via its relationship to other online media, as the differences between these categories are increasingly porous. I will also not define social media via the content created on it, as this diminishes other essential roles played by users of social media. Given the broad range of social media platforms, and the growing diversity of social media, this research put the task of defining social media into the hands of the participants. Rather than telling participants what I was looking for in terms of social media usage, I let them tell me how they made sense of social media and their interactions on these platforms. This allowed me to consider on an individual basis what range of spaces they use for social interaction and how they utilise these spaces to perform identity in ways that were attentive to changing relationships and uses of these platforms over the 12 months the interviews were conducted. This was partially an attempt to capture the growing range of diverse and purposefully heterogeneous sites, but also a way to allow participants to show me their own definitions of ‘social media’ usage beyond just networking with offline contacts. As such, through allowing the participants to define social media, this research was able to explore how online design and user enmesh to perform identity on a specific platform-by-platform, user-by-­ user basis. Indeed, it is worth dwelling on the idea that the uses of social media again potentially vary from user to user, and from platform to platform, and that individual approaches need to be taken into account alongside a consideration of how social action online is guided through design elements. Currently, there is a lack of research that attempts to account for and reconcile the various aspects raised in this discussion, or provide a bridge through which we can consider the many facets that shape and form interactivity online accounting for ideas beyond content production. Though attempts have been made to consider the effects of design upon our actions and interactions online, they have focused upon specific aspects of design (Coles and West 2016; Ksiazek et al. 2014) or specific platforms (Duguay 2016) through a comparison of popular websites (Dyer 2015), or specific technology. Though these specific and focused approaches wielded precise and useful results, the aim of the research documented here was to embrace a purposefully messier reality of social media usage that changed, morphed, and bled across various overlapping aspects and in turn attempt to make some sense of this mess. The research detailed here, and the framework in the next chapter, aim to move beyond a focus upon specific aspects, instead relying upon the interpretation of the users as to what social media is to them and how they negotiate this growing range of heterogeneous platforms. As such, a theoretical framework is needed that allows for individual interpretations

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an understandings of social media whilst also accounting for how the user’s experiences of these platforms and their subsequent actions, interactions, and identity performances are guided and mediated by aspects of platform-specific design. With this in mind, we will begin by exploring how the young people who took part in a series of interviews conducted over the course of a year understood the diversity of platforms and features available to them online.

5.2  D  ifferent Platform, Different Design Features, and Different Social Performances of Identity During the interviews a number of the participants discussed how the designs and the specific features present on a range of platforms affected the manner in which they acted and interacted. The interviews highlighted that a range of design choices could guide and affect actions and interactions online, but also highlighted the need to also account for this is a nondeterministic fashion. This meant understanding that the manifestation and actualisation of social interaction and action online were unique to the enmeshing of a particular user with these design features, as different users would interpret and utilise these features differently. In other words, the participants’ actions and interactions were bound to, and emerged from, the specific platforms and their specific designs, but the interactions and actions that emerged from the engagement with these features were realised in unique and individual manner. Brian in particular discussed a range of features that he noted affected his actions and interactions online. He drew attention to the presence of hashtags on Twitter, suggesting that their specific functionality made communicating during and about big events online a lot easier, making him more likely to use Twitter to discuss these events: So Twitter I use for big events, social events, and for (.) so for things like tomorrow, like big political events, is Twitter, and if you want to find (.) and because of the hashtag system, I know Facebook have tried to bring it in, but because of the hashtag system, to find people that care about it, or whatever, then definitely Twitter is the place to go.

This was not the only design feature of Twitter that Brian noted as guiding his actions and interactions; he also later discussed the effects of the then 140-character limit on Twitter as an aspect that affected how his actions and interactions were framed and realised. Tellingly, he offered that: I feel the character limit really forces your hand though. It makes you think really carefully about what you want to say, and how you want to say it. You have to nail it quickly as well. Like if something is happening right then you want to be the first to talk about it, so you have to be quick and you have to be funny, and you have to be short.

This shows that, for Brian, the particular design choice of 140 characters, along with the consistently active temporal nature of the platform, meant that he framed and approached his actions and interactions in a particular manner, aware that he had to

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rely upon both brevity and speed to interact and display his identity in an effective manner. He further highlighted that Twitter’s specific design also made certain formats and uses harder than others, changing the type and form of the content he chose to post on Twitter: …if I want to share an image I put it on Facebook. Like people won’t look at your images on Twitter because they’re normally either (.) if they’re on their phone it sometimes comes up, it sometimes doesn’t, it’s a bit funny, and also people won’t follow a link to a, a thing. So I’m sharing an image I will definitely share it on Facebook.

This was not unique to Brian. In a similar manner, Isabel also noted that she would not use Twitter for photos highlighting that ‘I don’t really see the point in it on Twitter cos it’s gone in a second’. For Brian this further extended to the content posted on each site, with specific content and specific ideas shared on certain platform due in no small part to the design features. For example, Brian noted that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, a current trend at the time of the interview that involved sharing videos of someone throwing ice on their head to ostensibly draw attention to ALS and raise money for charity, was often not present on Twitter ‘because it’s a visual. People don’t watch videos on Twitter’. Brian then was aware of a range of design restrictions that resulted in him preferring to engage with the platform around trending topics and current events. His content was curtailed to be brief and temporally relevant and was often presented in a non-pictorial form. Given that the updates he posted were shorter, there was a need to be curt and quick. The identity that Brian presented was guided by design but importantly realised in an individual manner as he chose how to act and interact in an environment that he felt restricted his content in form and style and that encouraged discussion of events as they happened. The notion of user-specific uses of these features can aptly be noted when considering Brandon’s interactions on Twitter. Brandon also noted that the design of Twitter constrained and shaped his interactions and actions, but for Brandon, this manifested itself not in concerns over being curt, current, and witty, but in concerns over the manner in which his updates would be construed by the reader. He noted that he felt he could only discuss certain topics on Twitter because: character limitation does an awful lot to restrict what I would otherwise would have posted about, like the topics I would otherwise post about, because I can’t put context into it.

This consideration of features and intent was not restricted to Twitter alone and emerged as a point of discussion across a range of platforms. Brandon, for example, used Instagram as: a kind of stream of consciousness, just from an image point of view, so I don’t ever justify anything on there, I will just put a photo up because I think the photo itself looks cool or, sort of because I think that people will draw their own conclusions. I don’t feel like I need to explain that.

Beyond Facebook and Instagram, Brandon suggested in his interviews that he felt Facebook was slightly more ‘interactive’ than other platforms. When we discussed why he felt this might be the case, it became apparent that certain design features

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made it appear as if there was an ongoing conversation happening around the content on Facebook in particular. Brandon noted: I sort of see lots of posts that friends have liked, or shared, or commented on, because lots of other people as well as them have done it, so I don’t know if it’s the way that it works, but the very popular very very popular posts seems to make their way into everybody’s newsfeed at some point, so I’ve seen a lot of things that are not originated by friends of mine just purely because a few of my friends have commented on it or interacted with it, so therefore it’s kind of keeps coming back up to my attention, and more often or not it will be something that I will have a reaction to again and again (.) It keeps the conversation going by putting it at the top of my feed every time.

Facebook’s choice to show users the content that was being commented upon recurrently created a more interactive feel for Brandon and encouraged ongoing interaction around a given piece of content. Brandon expanded upon how this was unique and different to the manner in which he perceived the other platforms he used, noting: I think Facebook is at little more interactive, I think for me at least Instagram seems to be very much a sort of browsing, sort of just simply seeing what other people want to share with the world, rather than reacting to it, to them, and for me Twitter probably similarly actually, just simply it sort of feels like a lot of kind of little snapshot updates about what somebody is doing, sort of at that moment.

Again, this was grounded in Brandon’s needs and expectations, but nonetheless these aspects were also of consideration to all participants, though their framing of their interactions through these interactive features varied. This was noted, for example, by Nina, who suggested that the continual re-emergence of content and the general slower pace of Facebook led to her sharing different content and performing identity in a unique manner on different platforms. She noted: The other day I was like ‘oh I have a headache grr’, whereas I wouldn’t put that on Twitter, cos I wouldn’t put a little update like that, because it just gets lost in the time stream on Twitter which is fine, whereas on Facebook, I don’t know. People will be like ‘oh are you okay?’, and that sort of thing.

For other participants, different aspects of platform design were highlighted as fostering specific manners of acting and interacting, unique to their given needs and situation. Isabel noted one aspect in particular that she felt changed the way that she was able to discuss subjects on Facebook, highlighting that the groups feature allowed dedicated places for like-minded users to discuss specific topics. In her particular case, this manifested itself in discussions around politics. She suggested: it’s hard to explain really, but the way that umm Facebook is set is kind of segregated into different stuff, isn’t it? So you can literally go to groups and stuff like that, whereas Twitter’s very much a stream of chat. Like individual profiles and then what they do, but all shouting at once in a never ending mess.

For Isabel the partitioning off of particular areas to discuss dedicated topics led to different social styles emerging on Facebook than on Twitter. She highlighted that this partitioning fostered a slower feel with dedicated group areas which meant that people could interact around content more easily. She noted: ‘I think Facebook is,

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it’s got groups and sections and stuff so you can post images and videos and they’ll stay there longer for people to talk about’. Other participants noted there were a range of other features that would affect how interactive they perceived the platforms to be. Whilst this was guided by design, it was realised in a unique manner by each participant to their specific needs. Oliver, for example, discussed the fact that Reddit allowed community moderators. By allowing for community self-moderation, Oliver felt that often the level of interaction was variable depending on the quality of moderation, and as such his participation in the sub-Reddit was therefore also variable: when you get a good moderated subReddit, like r/games, sticks to the point, keeps going with it, the mods are fantastic, who keep it on track. And then you get others that are just a chaos and you can’t be bothered with it.

For Brian, however, interactivity was bound up in the notion of current topics. In his comparison of the design of Facebook and Twitter, he noted Twitter’s specific design as fostering a greater sense of ongoing temporally bound interactivity: Twitter has so many trends, so many fads that are so quick passing. And I think Twitter’s an important (.) I think people would mind, but I don’t think the world would mourn the loss of Facebook, whereas I think people would mourn the loss of Twitter, because of things like the live-tweeting of things, that you wouldn’t get on Facebook in the same way, because the audience is live and commenting right then and there.

However, Willow noted that she felt she was more likely to interact around shared content on Facebook, not Twitter. In comparison to Brian, who suggested the ability to comment upon events as they were happening inspired ongoing interaction on Twitter, Willow noted her engagement with shared content was affected by being able to view a preview of that content on Facebook: If someone shares a link on Twitter and the tweet’s not something I’m particularly interested in I won’t click on it (.) if someone shares a share on Facebook I’ll still have a general idea of what the thing they were sharing was, because there’ll be a little picture and a little bit of blurb and sometimes if I’m really bored I’ll just click on it to see what the hell it’s about, because it’s not just a web link, it’s not just, it’s got a tag line and a photo and a bit of text underneath, it’s not just a web link, a site address, so. I’m more likely to click on it.

Sally on the other hand noted aspects of Facebook’s design that she felt hindered the interactivity of the platform: Sally: it’s kind of hard to keep track of what’s going on Facebook, I found. Harry: How come? Sally: Just because their trending system is really bad. It’s kind of like, you get three little items at the top right hand corner of your page and if you don’t look at it you don’t see it, whereas Twitter it’s quite easy to kind of see what people are talking about? Especially because quite a lot of the trending tags there’ll always be someone on the newsfeed talking about it, or commenting on it, or something like that.

Given this, it appears that the engagement with platforms and the perception of their interactive merits appears to be individual and aligned to the specific needs of the user, but nonetheless intimately bound up in the design affordances of a given platform. I would suggest from this that it is through the enmeshing of user and design

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that a given use of the platform emerges. This was succinctly noted by Isabel who highlighted that engagement with the platforms varies from individual to individual. She noted that on ‘Facebook you’ve got a whole variety of people and the way that they behave on there. Like I’ve got friends who only share videos, and some people just text, yeah’. This concept of the enmeshing of user and design can further be highlighted if we reconsider the idea of uses of social media beyond content production. Despite these platforms often being set up explicitly to encourage users to want to produce content, a fact long noted by researchers across a range of platforms (Keenan and Shiri 2009), Molly choose not to fulfil this potential and to engage with them in her own manner for her own social purposes. She noted that she felt no real pressure to create content online, saying ‘with my friends I don’t feel really pressure (.) and I think my friends (.) they know that I’m not (.) posting things about myself online now’. Instead Molly used the platforms in her own manner and for her own purposes. In essence, Molly decided how to engage with the features of these platforms which she used almost exclusively to browse content rather than to produce content. Molly did however report elements of design that aided her particular usage of platforms and encouraged her to sometimes produce content. In particular, Molly noted that her content production increased once she was afforded the ability to set her profiles to private, controlling who saw what information about her. Some platform provided her the ability to be more private than others. For example, in an interview conducted after she started attending university, Molly noted she had started using Snapchat as a messenger system with her sister as it allowed a format that she felt was very controlled and through which she felt any images sent were not permanent. She noted: Everybody uses it and it’s easy to get on. So I thought I’d try it, and I like it. It’s (.) my step-­ sister is at uni in [northern UK town]. She doesn’t like texting really. So it’s my message (.) way of messaging her now, to catch up and check in with each other and have quick chats. I don’t mind sending her a picture of me. She won’t like judge me, and its fun with all the stuff it’s got. We’re family so it feels (.) it’s nice.

Molly later also suggested that ‘It’s also less (.) has less (.) it’s not permanent so I feel like I can maybe use it more without worrying’. When given the option to be private, her usage also increased on Instagram: Molly: I guess I post more on Instagram now though. Because I know less people can see it, in terms of who I let see it and follow me. I (.) I rarely post picture of like me alone. More of what I’m doing and who I with but that (.) that’s like (.) I don’t like taking pictures of myself really. But I’m using it more. I’m just, not that sort of person who really wants to, to comment at all like ‘oh you’re so pretty’ because often that (.) they just say things and don’t really mean that, you know? So I don’t see the point of all that. But I’ve started putting up some stuff, especially as I can control who sees it now. It’s fine. Harry: Is there like (.) Is there anyone in particular you really don’t want to see your stuff or is it the public? Molly: umm, like no one particularly I don’t want, you know. It’s more just (.) knowing who’s seeing it and not having to worry about it.

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Here we see that the affordance of privacy as a design feature encouraged interactivity, but only when combined with Molly’s specific needs and situation that produced the given unique identity performance, bound in both the design and the user. When Molly felt she could control the image constructed by other people in regard to her identity, she felt more ready to share content, though still with a degree of care over the content. In this manner then we see design features shaping how we are acting and interacting online to present our identities. It is apparent here that any understanding of identity online needs to understand and consider how design shapes our experiences and expectations online and controls various elements of our identity from one platform to the next.

5.3  T  he Use of Third-Party Apps to Augment Design and the Effects of This Upon Social Interaction Whilst the above section highlights a need to consider various design features enmeshing with individuals in order to better conceptualise identity online, it is clear that even this concept can itself be complicated by the complex systems present through which we can access social media platforms. As discussed in Chap. 3, a platform’s presentation can vary from one device to the next. However, it can also be augmented with third-party apps that can change aspects of the platform’s design in an array of manners, affecting how users utilise these platforms. From highlighting certain design features to changing colour scheme, or from restricting access between certain hours for productivity to adding filters for photos, our experiences of platforms are augmented by layers of additional and overlapping technologies, platforms, algorithms, and features. This was discussed by a number of the participants. For example, Brian noted that the control over aspects of design afforded by third-party apps might increase his usage of Twitter. He suggested ‘if I find a really nice app that does Twitter, like tweetdeck used to do but now they started charging, then I would use Twitter more’. Similarly, Kirsty discussed the use of third-party apps that help her engage with social media in a manner specific to her situation: I use Hootsuite at work, in my professional sort of capacity, and again it’s good to a point but even the pro version does have bugs. The analytics on it are crap, mind you, and of course as a marketer it’s quite annoying not being able to analyse the reach you’ve had.

She also highlighted another application, named ‘If This Then That’ (IFTTT), that augments the design of the platforms and helped her present identity in specific manners, again informed by her specific situation. She described it as a: Brilliant app, absolutely love it. More useful professionally, than personally to be honest, but I really love. So mine’s automatically linked up to, if I ever remember to do something on Instagram, then it posts it to Twitter as a native picture.

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Willow also noted the use of these augmenting applications, highlighting ‘on my phone see I use a custom app which looks very different from the Twitter app’. She detailed the differences and how they helped her change the design of the platform to suit her specific needs: I don’t use the Twitter client on my phone, I use erm a different app and it’ll save where I leave off so I scroll up to most current, whereas on Twitter on desktop, and this is me not having used it in a while, you normally start at the latest stuff and have to scroll down and I prefer scrolling up rather than scrolling down – dunno why, but it just I prefer – I think because otherwise I’m coming in on conversations and discussions that have like started before and I’m seeing the end of, so I prefer to scroll upwards through the conversations and follow the thread of things that are happening, rather than scrolling down and going what on earth is going on and then waiting to get the fiftieth tweet before I understand what’s happening.

Sally also pointed out different way of augmenting platform design, noting that on Tumblr she was able to add extensions which changed the design of the platform and altered how she used it. She highlighted one example in particular that allowed her to use the platform in a more streamlined fashion: I have an extension on there that makes it so much more user-friendly. It just makes using it easier. So, without the extension, to reblog a post you have to click on the reblog button, which brings up a pop-up on the page where you can add like a comment or tags, and then you have to click the reblog button again. And depending on the size of the post, it can take a couple of minutes for it to load up and then for it to post to your actual blog. With the extension you just hover over the reblog button and a little pop up comes up. You can add a comment but the most important thing for me is that you can save a set of tags. So once the pop up comes up you can just click on the saved tag and then hit reblog and it’s done. I love it.

Here then we can see a range of specific augmentations of platform features to alter the manner of engaging with the platforms specific to the given user’s needs. Given the rise of third-party apps, it appears that it is worth considering that there are tactics and resources the user can employ to actively alter aspects of the design of the platform to suit their given needs and situations. This adds considerable wrinkles to any attempt to consider design features in a uniform manner. It is also worth remembering, when looking at and analysing online content, that not every user will be using the ‘vanilla’ version of the platform and that the specific manifestation of the platform they are using may affect how they choose to share content and generally act and interact. This has large repercussions for researchers, who should be aware that how they see a tweet, post, or update on their device may be very different from how it appeared to the person posting it. This layer of complexity is worth considering in any research that wishes to understand the effects of design on users, as engagement through a social media platform may be mediated and augmented along the way through other platforms and apps with their own range of features, designs, and options.

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5.4  A  ccounting for the Offline in Online Identity Performances Whilst this chapter so far has looked at design features and their possible role in guiding our actions and interactions online, it is evident that any identity performance online is intimately bound to the user’s socio-cultural situation. I suggest that online identity presentation emerges from the enmeshing of an individual user with a platform design. The resulting identity performance is informed by the design of the platform, which guides and shapes how the user is able to present social identity. However, the identity performance is equally realised in a unique manner as each user draws on their socio-cultural experiences and resources to complete their specific narrative, which they bring to bear upon the juxtaposed design elements. During the interviews a number of extant social factors were discussed with the participants which effected how they felt their identities manifested on specific platforms. Brian brought up his awareness that specific users would engage with the platform in a variety of manners, informed by their socio-cultural situations. When asked about the consistency of identity presentation across social media platforms, he noted: for people, every day people like judges, teachers, anybody, has to draw that line between people they have in the office and people that are their friend. You can’t have (.) umm professional (.) like there has to be a cut off, you can’t share everything with your employers or your employees, and you certainly can’t share it with people that work for you or that you’re involved with work, like social workers, or teachers, or anything.

Brian later revealed how his own socio-cultural situation, specifically his homosexuality, could lead to unique engagements with social media features: I know particularly in the LGBT community, that is a genuine problem for a lot of people who aren’t out or aren’t comfortable (.) portraying themselves in a certain way around certain members. You almost have to have a split identity. And even with work life balance, but even just in your personal life. And a lot of people don’t feel comfortable in being themselves.

Kirsty similarly revealed during the interviews that her approach towards social media was largely influenced by her specific situation and the social knowledge she bought to the platforms. As she worked in online communication, she noted that her identity was ‘semi-formed by sort of professional concerns as well’ and noted that her job largely effected how she understood and engaged with social media. She provided a particular example of this: Yeah, and actually again from a sort of professional that works with social media on a daily basis, my boss regularly has said that he expects me to use my personal social media to promote the charity and the work that we do, and he has a real problem with me having separate work and personal Twitter feeds, for instance, or Facebook feeds. I put my foot down on it because I wasn’t comfortable, but there is a question I think about authenticity and umm also, yeah, I dunno I guess you can’t insist on it because of employment law and the rest of it, but umm, that’s a dilemma that I face fairly regularly.

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Kirsty later noted that she had adopted a single Twitter account, which changed how she approached interacting on Twitter. She suggested ‘my Twitter feed is shared, I tend to use it slightly more professionally than personally umm, so I only have one Twitter’, specifically noting that ‘I tend to use it a bit more to signpost stuff that sort of shows I’m interested in the right things for my work’. She later details an example of this, noting ‘I do a lot of live-tweeting on it at the moment’ for big events at work. Kirsty also noted other effects of her particular situation in regard to employment, discussing her attitude towards profile images: Facebook tends to change a lot more, but at the moment (.) I think again because the other two are professional facing, or professional focused, I don’t like to have my partner in my pictures on them, because actually I think there’s a huge thing about being seen to a woman with a partner and suddenly you lose a lot of professional influence. So whereas my Facebook photo quite often has me and my partner in them, I would never do that for Twitter and LinkedIn.

It is evident then that Kirsty’s specific engagements with features, and in turn her interactions and identity presentations, were informed by her specific social resources. Another pertinent discussion of a specific situation affecting the participant’s approach and attitude towards social media was found with Willow. She detailed her specific situation noting: I’ve got some mental illness, so I think I probably pay a huge amount of attention (.) because I pay a huge amount of attention to how I present myself in real life all the time ever (.) and I know I’m not necessarily the typical experience, because I’ve seen an awful lot of people with various mental illness have said that actually interacting online is a lot easier, whereas for me it carries exactly the same level of stress, apart from the fact that I can’t see how a person is reacting. So it actually carries an added level of stress for me. I can’t see how they react, I can see how they choose to react to it, but I can’t see how they immediately react. So I don’t like that as much. So I don’t tend to put much up, basically, it’s why I tend to sort of stay away.

Willow’s specific situation shaped how she interacted on the platform and engaged with the design features. She noted that she would ‘struggle with the idea that I have anything worth saying’ and expanded this, noting: so I tend to stay away from, like, Facebook and Twitter, both feel like they need to be (.) I know a lot of people don’t feel the same way, but they feel more important. It feels like there’s more weight.

By holding interviews with the participants regularly over the course of a 12-month period, I was able to track and account for changes in the participant’s socio-cultural situations and how this shaped their engagements with the platforms. Over the course of the research period, I was able to track major life events like starting university, leaving home, and starting a first job. Some participants highlighted that shifts in their offline lives could lead to changes in how they engaged with online design features to present identity. Brandon, for example, noted: I’ve definitely noticed that in some workplaces that I’ve had it’s been very much keep people separate from work…However, in my current office there’s maybe 12 or 13 people who wouldn’t often socialise outside work, but that all have each other as contacts on Facebook

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and very regularly make open comments about what somebody has posted up about last night.

Nina also discussed how changes in her offline situation led to changes in how she performed identity and how she approached the platforms as social spaces, noting of previous work colleagues: They’re on my Twitter because they followed from the day of my interview, like [the company] themselves, and then I had to be really careful with what I said for the year and a bit I worked there, I wouldn’t say anything controversial, in fact I stopped using I stopped really using it as much because they were following me and I knew if I blocked them it was really suspicious because um they even asked me to stalk other people that had blocked them, even though I’ve left the company, which I have done on one occasion because she was slagging off a customer.

Sally also detailed how changes in her life impacted how she approached and used social media. As a university student, Sally noted that social media provided a way to study efficiently. She highlighted Facebook, suggesting: it’s kind of also an easy way to share documents from lectures from my uni mates, and you know, ask general questions for groups, like the anthropology group or my course group. So it’s just an easier way to keep in contact with them because I don’t have all their numbers.

However, Sally noted that her engagement with the platforms changed after leaving university and beginning to work at an office: One of the guys I work with, we don’t have each other’s phone numbers, but we message a fair bit outside of work (h) and at work too (h) over Facebook messenger. It’s useful like that because sometimes he gives me a lift home or if one of us is on holiday and we need to get in contact we can, or if I’m ill I can message him and ask him to tell my boss I’m not in. I think (.) it’s interesting that we’ve been working together for almost a year now and we only talk over Facebook Messenger, like we don’t use our phones as phones with text messages or calls.

Sally noted changes in both her content and her attitudes towards social media after leaving university to start her first job. She highlighted that: Tumblr I used to go on every day, I’d check it as soon as I got in and just kept scrolling down until I caught up with the previous night. But I just don’t have the time anymore now I’m at work, it’s a lot to keep it going so if I have a spare fifteen or twenty minutes I’ll load it up and scroll until I give up and then I’ll move onto something else. I used to religiously refresh Tumblr every ten minutes because I followed so many people there would be loads of new posts, but yeah, now I just check it once a week or once every two weeks.

This would suggest that an understanding of identity online should not only be attentive to how users bring socio-cultural resources with them to online spaces but also that identity presentation is an ongoing and malleable issue that adapts with the user, relevant to their given situation and concerns at any given time. Another case of changes in offline situation affecting engagement with social media was apparent with Molly. Before going to university, Molly noted that her main contact on Twitter was with ‘people who I know already, who I’ve like met face to face’ and that:

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To be honest, because, like, I mainly use it for friends and people I already know there’s not really any need to put anything up there. Like who am I putting it up for? I’ll tell the people who I tell in person, it doesn’t have to be there forever, because it’s not really important enough to be anywhere forever. It’s just (.) stuff.

However, upon moving to university, Molly began to follow different kinds of users beyond just known offline friends: Molly: I use Twitter a lot more now. A lot (.) A lot more as a like a professional place. I pretty much only follow researchers and like government groups. Or people to do with education, primary education. Harry: That’s cool Molly: Yeah, it helps. Like, I feel it’s really helpful. I get the most up to date stuff, lots of knowledge about everything. It’s really great. I think I follow like 5 other people who aren’t professional. People I know already. I keep it separate I guess, cos they’re all on Facebook.

Molly also noted that the change in context affected her concerns about social media and, therefore, her engagement with the platforms and their specific features. She noted that she felt she had to be wary about who was viewing her content: we had a lecture. They said other students had been kicked of their placements and NQT stuff for not being (.) professional on Facebook and stuff. So I feel like I have to be careful online about it all.

It is important to highlight however that though the context through which Molly engaged with Twitter as a social platform did shift to accommodate her growing professional concerns, her usage largely remained the same. She noted, ‘I still haven’t tweeted anything. Not myself. I retweet and follow, it’s a way of reading and being professional for me. It’s like my professional space, that side of me’. This shift in context for Molly did bring about a change in the manner through which she approached Twitter as a platform. However, given that her usage did not largely alter from one context to the next, it appears that a consideration of identity online must be careful to highlight a consideration of more than just produced tangible content, as discussed in detail in the previous chapter. Though she was still not producing content on the platform, Twitter served largely different purposes for Molly before and after joining university. Put simply, Molly’s social situation changed her engagement with, and contextualisation of, social media, but did not significantly alter her content output. The notion of social situations impacting our online engagements and experiences in a variety of ways in an ongoing manner, as seen above, highlights the need to reconsider the notion of a clean and clear online/offline divide and emphasises the need to contextualise social media usage (Jurgenson 2012). The participants’ specific offline contexts clearly produced unique engagement with social media. Though, depending on the user, this did not always change the content created, it was evident that this did change their engagement with the platforms in line with their given concerns and interests. Whilst this research is keen to question easy online-offline divides, it is worth noting therefore that the translation of offline reality into the online realm is not a direct and perfect translation, but instead it is a specific translation that has the effect of emphasising certain aspects and

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minimising the importance of others. As such, though it is clear that the offline is translated online, future research should consider unpacking what aspects of the offline are overtly emphasised and which aspects are minimised, with a consideration of what the effects of this may be. It should not be assumed that offline reality is presented neutrally online. The Internet is always and purposefully curated, and an awareness of this must be held, particularly when tying the emergence of audience to the design of platform, given that, through design, certain communities may be minimised or silenced on specific platforms.

5.5  I dentity Boundary Negotiation Between User and Design: Tactics, Trade-Off, and Compromises So far in this chapter, we have seen that our actions and interactions online can be understood through an attention to design and an attention to socio-cultural resources and experiences. For the remainder of this chapter, I want to focus more specifically at the interplay between these elements, the negotiation of the boundaries of identity performance between user and design. We will theorise this concept more fully in the next chapter, but for now, the focus remains on exploring the participants’ understandings of their identities online. The interviews highlighted that the participants’ identity performances were negotiated in a user-specific and platform-specific manner, as individual users enmeshed with the specific design features to negotiate what was included in a materially heterogeneous identity performances and what was excluded. For the participants, much of this manifested itself in concerns over the audiences online and who was able to view content and profiles. Because of Twitter’s open and public design, Brian felt that he had to actively alter how he presented his identity, controlling and tapering the content of his messages. He noted: ‘Facebook is there for me to, to socialise with my friends, I suppose, to put my opinions. I wouldn’t dare put my opinions on Twitter, because you can’t restrict it’. Interestingly, the idea that ‘you can’t restrict’ audience on Twitter is not entirely true as users are able to set their profile to private and choose who views their content. When I question him on this specifically, he replied: oh sure, yeah, you can (.) but it’s a catch-22 sort of thing. If you want to get everything out of Twitter you have to accept that it’s going to have to be public. You just have to restrict what you say. You play the game and change what you say.

Brian later expanded on this to note when asked about audience control on Twitter: It’s not something you can do on Twitter if you want to go online. You kinda want attention, you just don’t get to decide what attention, so you have to be more (.) careful with what you say. You have to hold yourself back and think ‘what would someone think about this?’.

This is rather telling in regard to the notion of identity online. Despite being offered the option through design to protect his content, Brian seemed to think this was

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simply not an option if he wanted to use Twitter ‘properly’. He felt therefore that he had no control of the public nature of the platform and that this was bound up in the design of the platform. Instead, for Brian, the boundaries of his identity performance had to be negotiated by altering his content rather than by negotiating with design. Brian later expanded upon this notion and discussed that platform specificity of this boundaried negotiation: But I think in a way Facebook does have more permanence, but you can doctor that permanence to people you trust easier, whereas Twitter you either get all public or all private, there’s no in-between.

In this manner, it is clear that Brian’s negotiation of the boundaries of his materially heterogeneous identity presentation was bound to a negotiation and trade-off between himself and the specific platform he was using. Brian was not the only participant to grapple with the need to be public on Twitter. Brandon also felt that the control of privacy was non-negotiable on Twitter, and therefore he felt he had to accept that this aspect was out of his control and instead alter his content: Twitter I feel I have no real control at all, because I know fully that everything I put on there is available to everyone, umm, which probably limits my use of it a bit.

He later expanded up this, suggesting that this negotiation of the boundaries of his identity was not only platform specific, but also shaped his subsequent interactions and expectations: I share more specific info, like what I’m doing and where I am on Facebook as well, because its, to me, it’s safe and I trust the people I let follow me. On Twitter or Instagram, because I don’t know who’s going to see it, all the stuff I share is vague and kinda loose.

In a similar sense, and again driven by the specific controls afforded to her by each platform, Nina noted that she too felt she had to accept trade-offs in her performance and alter her actions: the other day I posted a post up, I can’t remember what it was, and I wrote the word, definitely, and I spelt definitely wrong, and I got all these tweets back about how I spelt, and they were like you definitely should learn how to spell definitely, and so I deleted the tweet in the end, and now I’ve decided never to type the word definitely, because I can’t spell really well. So yeah, I think I do change for the audience, cos with Twitter anyone can read it…whereas on Facebook it’s my friends, so if there’s a spelling mistake they’d let it slip, so I’m not really, I’m just sort of more, relaxed with what I say on Facebook.

For these participants, their usage of Twitter as a platform was largely informed by the audience, but also importantly was tied to the public-first design of the platform and their lack of willingness to engage with the design affordances to police this publicness. As such, they felt the only option they had to control the identity performance was through the content they placed on the platform. If we consider the implications for a consideration of identity performances, this in essence means that the boundaries of what was included in the materially heterogeneous identity performances were felt to be non-negotiable in terms of privacy, so despite being

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afforded the ability to enact some control, a trade-off in content was made to be able to participate fully on the platform. However, on some platforms, the participants felt that the scope of the audience could be controlled through the design affordances of the platform, allowing the participants freer reign over the content and subject matter of their posts. For example, Kirsty noted that design features in Facebook could be utilised to the user’s benefit in order to patrol who could access and read their posts: I’ve started to use the privacy filters on things a lot more than I ever used to. Now that I sort of have to think about it, I’ve got a lot more careful about making sure that everything’s friend locked and that sort of people that are in the same groups as me can’t necessarily see what I’m putting out.

Here then we see Kirsty using the design of Facebook to make sure that her content was only available to the intended audience, meaning that the trade-off in topic was not necessary and design was instead utilised to set boundaries. Similarly, Brian noted he felt that he could utilise the design to his advantage of Facebook, rather than accept the openness of the design as he had done on Twitter, in order to change the audience of his content: If I want to I’ll restrict the post to people that I know won’t go crazy if I share a liberal opinion or a sex positive thing, or whatever, a non-gender binary thing or whatever, like, to people that I know would be offended, and I can doctor them out of it.

He noted that this level of control was nuanced on Facebook and that he was able to negotiate control over many aspects of his performance: I can even control the comments on Facebook if I want. And once it’s out there, I can change how public or private it gets without really worrying. It doesn’t feel as (.) risky as Twitter does.

Brian later articulated the importance of the affordance of control through design and what this meant for the manner in which he could present identity: I feel like I can control my Facebook because I can limit the views, I can limit the audience, my online identity with Google(+) is terrifying. I genuinely don’t know who sees what circle is, I can’t, no. I just don’t understand it. And I feel like I have no control over my Google identity. My Facebook identity, I can portray myself to select groups of people in a certain why, and limit the audience, and with Twitter, umm, I control myself very well on that.

Similar sentiments were noted by Brandon, who suggested that ‘I think Facebook is just safer. I know who’s seeing it so I can let my hair down. I can say whatever I like really. It’s not as much of an issue’. He expanded to note that the control over the boundaries afforded by Facebook’s privacy features meant that he could interact in a less restricted manner: in terms of the information I put out there, it doesn’t, even though it does require a certain amount of information in order to have an account, I don’t feel I have to lie because I can hide it easily enough with the privacy settings, and I feel that I can control the audience that my posts go to, even on a case by case, so if there’s something I want to publish to a wider group I know how to do that and I know how to restrict access to others.

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Brandon later again further suggested that he felt he needed to be: a lot more careful with the content I put out on Twitter because I know it’s a lot less easily policed, so I would probably be a lot less inflammatory or a lot less controversial with anything I put on Twitter, whereas with Facebook I know that the audience I have I know at least vaguely people that can see that, so I suppose I’m slightly less concerned about whether I’m going to offend people.

Brandon telling felt that his reliance upon design features of Facebook to maintain the boundaries of the identity performance could occasionally lull him into a false sense of security, leading him to take less care over his content. He suggested: ‘I possibly put up quite a lot about my life, knowing that the privacy settings I’ve given, sort of shield a lot of people from seeing it, so I possibly take less care now than I used to’. This suggests then that the boundaries of identity performance occur on a platform-­by-platform basis for the users, who reach their own conclusions about how they choose to present themselves within the confines of the specific platform and its affordances. On some platforms, this seems to manifest itself in active and conscious monitoring of the user’s activity, and on others, it manifests in a reliance upon the design features, or in a mix of these elements. In each case, it is clear that it is not possible to separate the resultant identity performance from either the user or the platform design; the performances emerge from the enmeshing of these elements to produce specific performances with their own negotiated boundaries. Again, of course, this is specific to the individual user. For example, contrary to the previous examples provided above, Isabel noted that she was largely concerned with policing her interaction on Facebook because of the specific audience present there, rather than the more generalised audience on Twitter. She noted that she had to temper her responses on Facebook at times, noting: ‘I try not to reply. I usually write it and then just delete it’ and later adding, ‘If I was gonna write something and I know that I had friends that would be completely offended by it, I wouldn’t put it up’. Similar content regulation on Facebook was noted by Willow, who unlike other participants did not utilise the affordances of Facebook to control the specific audiences of her post, meaning she felt she had to temper the content of her messages. She noted: ‘I know you can set different settings so that only some people see your Facebook stuff and other people don’t, but that’s just too much hassle and I can’t be arsed’. Instead Willow chose to doctor and curtail her performance on Facebook, so much so that she noted ‘my stuff on Twitter is actually more personal’ than the doctored content she placed on Facebook. She suggested this was because she felt she could curate the audience on Twitter effectively with the design features there, later emphasising that: ‘you’ve gotta add people on Facebook that you know, because otherwise it’s insulting apparently’, whereas in regard to Twitter she felt: I have curated who I have on Twitter, so they tend to be people who have fairly similar viewpoints to me, um, politically, so I tend not to sort of have to put up with the same level of crap.

This further highlights the need to consider the enmeshing of individual user with individual platform design. The negotiation and trade-offs between user and design

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are enacted in an individual manner, informed by the specific user and their needs, and bound to the specific design of the platform. An interesting version of different identity work and boundary negotiation with the design of platforms was noted by Nina. She discussed how the design of Twitter led to her taking more care in the presentation of particular aspects of her identity than she did with similar features on Facebook. She compared the ‘about me’ sections provided for the user to describe themselves, present in different manifestations on both Twitter and Facebook. She noted of Twitter that the maintenance of this aspect of her online identity was often crucial and of importance: Twitter is really important, cos, like, say for example I want to find someone and I’m not quite sure if it’s them, I’ll look at that, cos their timeline could be full of rubbish, like hashtag loser or, just complete random statements. Whereas that top statement says is from so and so or works in M&S or and I’ll be like oh I know who that is now, it is the person I mean to follow, so I’ll follow them.

This led to Nina putting a lot of care into how she maintained this aspect of her identity presentation on Twitter: Twitter is always important. I always try and think of something to put in my Twitter bio cos I don’t like mine, and I can never think (.) and I actually probably change it once a month? Even just slightly. Just by putting like a comma or a full stop. You do change it. It’s the first thing you can see on people’s pages.

However, on Facebook, this aspect of identity presentation was not as central for Nina to the overall identity presentation, and therefore the maintenance of this feature was not as crucial for her, despite ostensibly being offered the same ability to present identity: Whereas Facebook you’ve got all the pictures, and the layout of it, like the pictures, the videos and stuff, you can just watch really quickly and you can be like yeah that’s the right person. But one on Facebook I haven’t changed since I first went out with my boyfriend 4 years ago.

Sally also noted that she did not maintain this aspect of Facebook. When asked why she suggested: Because I know no one reads it! Because, um, like, when I, when my uni friends added me, I literally just told them what name I was under, because I’m not under my full name, and umm, once I was friends with one of them, it was really easy for the rest of them to find me because they just went through their page, and it came on their pages, their homepages, that I was friends with them, so it was really easy for them to add me.

It appears therefore that the engagement with design features is largely platform-­ specific and cannot be separated or isolated from the specific platform, as it may not be used consistently. Despite both platforms offering the ability to ‘write’ identity in textual format, Nina feels this was not as important on Facebook, given that the design allowed identity to be confirmed in a clearer, less ambiguous manner. What is important in regard to identity performance therefore appears to be inconsistent across platforms. Of course, even this element of identity presentation was not consistent across the participants. An example of the need to account for the specific

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user can be seen in the case of Willow, who noted she did not maintain her Twitter ‘about me’ section with as much regularity as some of the other participants: It’s not something I think about so much on Twitter, because I tend to use it like it’s almost a news site, so I don’t really think about my end of it or what I’m presenting a lot. I sort of set it up and then I’ve just kind of left it alone, whereas on Facebook I’m quite careful about how I choose to present myself and describe myself.

In terms of the negotiation of the boundaries of identity performance between user and design, Willow telling discussed that she feels she was ‘forced’ into presenting herself in certain ways due to the design of both Facebook and Twitter: Willow: actually feel like they force me to fill stuff out whereas I’d rather not. Harry: Both of them [Twitter and Facebook]? Willow: Both of them, yeah. Like I said, my Twitter bio was empty for ages and I eventually felt like I had to put something there, even though I don’t really feel like I wanted to put something there. Um. And Facebook it does feel like you have to fill shit out, cos it otherwise it goes why haven’t you filled out and you haven’t done this and you haven’t updated it like six months (.) the site just constantly pressures you to do it. Update your Facebook profile! Every time I go on Facebook it has that little tiny thing update your Facebook profile. Um. You’ve got 14 steps to go through! No matter how many times I skip through them it’s like do them again!.

Further to this, Willow later provided some strong and interesting insights into the materially heterogeneous nature of identity on Facebook. She noted that she felt that the design of the platform did not allow her to express enough of her identity, and that the afforded design elements were too confining for her to be able to adequately express identity: It doesn’t feel like I have a huge amount of control over my identity. Mine is the same as everybody else’s, although I can pick bits and pieces, how much attention do people actually pay to all that kind of stuff, if 90% of the time you’re looking down your feed? So even if I’ve got a nice cover picture and nice profile picture, how big is that in people’s screens? So what you actually recognise is just kind of, sometimes you don’t pick the details out, you just recognise a vague shape and colour. It’s even (.) even if I control what’s on my actual page how often do people go there?

Willow did not feel therefore that her identity presentation was fully under her control and that the identity performance afforded to her through platform design did not emphasise the features and aspects that she found to be important. For Willow, the ability to present self through an ‘about me’ section was largely unimportant: It’s not really for anybody, it’s for Facebook, so I don’t really care enough to change it. And I can’t think of the last time I looked at anyone else’s unless I was specifically curious to see something about somebody. And that’s not very often. I don’t think in the last 3 years I’ve ever bothered looking at it, and because you know most of the time people don’t bother updating it.

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5.6  I mplications for Educational Researchers, Policy Makers, and Educators The interviews presented in this chapter suggest that identity performance online emerges from the enmeshing of an individual user with individual design features, with the boundaries of the emergent materially heterogeneous identity performance maintained in an individual way by combinations of different users and platforms. In this manner, the boundaries of the performances are also noticeably negotiable and subject to change. In terms of a consideration of the impact of design, the analysis revealed a number of ways in which identity performances were constrained and mediated by the design of the platforms and highlighted that the given performances could not be considered in isolation from the platforms through which they emerged. The participants revealed their awareness of the restrictions of design on their use of the platforms. For example, Brandon noted of Twitter that ‘character limitation does an awful lot to restrict what I would otherwise would have posted about, like the topics I would otherwise post about, because I can’t put context into it’. In this manner, it was clear that the design affected how the social was enacted and how the users considered and approach identity performances online. The findings here therefore match those of previous research in noting that design shapes social action (Karimov et al. 2011), with participants able to engage with an array of features to present identity (Stroud et al. 2016) specific to the given platform (Lafkioui 2013). Matching other research, the data here highlights that the growing range of platforms ‘afford a variety of tools that potentially extend and compromise impression management’ (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2011, 254). This should be a consideration when discussing online behaviour in educational settings. It is apparent that online actions and interactions are bound to design features and that the actions of young people online are not only a result of their agency alone. As we will unpack in more detail in the next chapter, there is a need to understand our online actions as the result of the enmeshing of user and design. Further to this, the interactions with design features were noted as being platform-­ specific. It was found that even if different platforms had common features, there was still variation and specificity in the manners in which the participants approached the platform and the features. In this regard the findings confirm the work of researchers such as Van Dijck (2013), who noted that though platforms can share similar modes, the arrangement and presentation of these modes will affect how they are utilised and how identity is presented. This was found to be evident by the participants, who despite being offered the ability to ‘write’ their identity on both Facebook and Twitter, chose to engage with the features in different ways, based upon how they understood and contextualised the given platforms. The same feature was therefore given different prioritisation and consideration on each platform, in line with the specific contextualisation of that platform by the user. As such, it is clear that the user of features cannot be assumed to be uniform across platforms and should be instead considered and situated on a platform-by-platform basis. Adding

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further nuance to this notion is the need to consider the use of third-party applications which augment the presentation of the platforms, further making any conclusions about the specific uses of design features questionable. The presence of third-party apps presents a unique and emergent challenge to discussions around the relationship between design and social interaction. This research therefore highlights this as potential area of future exploration, with a consideration of the effects of variation in the presentation of a given platform via the use of third-party applications likely to provide some insight into how the presentation of features can affect online action and interaction. However, it appears that a consideration of the growing array of design features only considers one end of the equation of identity creation and that, in order to understand the impact of design, a more nuanced model is needed. Rather than presenting a full deterministic approach to identity performance as a concept at the whim of design feature, this research was keen to build an awareness of identity work as situationally bound and emergent. With this in mind, it is clear that there is a need to acknowledge, as Mendelson and Papacharissi (2011) rightfully do, that the array of features online only offer the potential to extend and compromise impression management. Moving beyond a consideration of design alone, we should understand how the potential of this design is understood by the user of that space and what this interpretation means for subsequent identity performances. As such, it should be noted that although no trends can be unpacked as to the specific effects of specific features from a small sample size, this research questions the notion of such conclusions as reached in previous papers (see, e.g. Ksiazek et al. 2014) which claim certain features will have a fairly uniform effect upon an audience. Whilst we may be able to say that the potential for interactivity is greater through certain features, or that with the presence of this feature, interactivity increases on a platform, this research suggests that a feature is nothing without a socio-culturally grounded actor and an actor nothing without staging and props on and through which to perform. It is through the enmeshing of these factors that the social performance of identity emerges. For example, in the analysis above, it was noted that despite platforms often being set up explicitly to encourage users to produce content, Molly chose not to fulfil this potential and used the platform in her own manner for her own social purposes. This means, in essence, that an overt prioritisation of humans when looking at interactivity online is problematic in that it denies the very real effects of design, but that, equally, an overt focus upon the technological features that afford interactivity is also problematic and does little to provide equal consideration to both the human and non-human in the creation of the social (Latour 2005). From this, I suggest from that that a theoretical framework is needed that allows for, and demands, an active consideration of human and non-human elements in a manner that considers that features constrain and guide our available interactions, but that also acknowledges that these are realised on an individual person-by-person basis. The consideration of this is all the more necessary at a time when experiences and audiences are diversifying online, bringing with them myriad combinations of human and non-human, enmeshing to create specific identity performances. With

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this in mind, in the next chapter, we will move to begin to theorise what this means for our understanding of identity online and how the creation of specific identity narratives are negotiated online.

References Coles, B. A., & West, M. (2016). Weaving the internet together: Imagined communities in newspaper comment threads. Computers in Human Behavior, 60, 44–53. Duguay, S. (2016). “He has a way gayer Facebook than I do”: Investigating sexual identity disclosure and context collapse on a social networking site. New Media & Society, 18(6), 891–907. Dyer, H. T. (2015). All the Web’s a stage: The effects of design and modality on youth performances of identity. Sociological studies of children and youth, 19: Technology and youth: Growing up in a digital world (pp. 213–242). Jurgenson, N. (2012). When atoms meet bits: Social media, the mobile web and augmented revolution. Future Internet, 4, 83–91. Karimov, F. P., Brengman, M., & Van Hove, L. (2011). The effect of website design dimensions on initial trust: A synthesis of the empirical literature. Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, 12(4), 272–301. Keenan, A., & Shiri, A. (2009). Sociability and social interaction on social networking websites. Library Review, 58(6), 438–450. Ksiazek, T. B., Peer, L., & Lessard, K. (2014). User engagement with online news: Conceptualizing interactivity and exploring the relationship between online news videos and user comments. New Media & Society, 1–19. Lafkioui, M. (2013). Multilingualism, multimodality and identity construction on French-Based Amazigh (Berber) websites. Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée, 18(2), 135–151. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mendelson, A. L., & Papacharissi, Z. (2011). Look at us: Collective narcissism in college student Facebook photo galleries. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 251–273). Oxford: Routledge. Robards, B., & Bennett, A. (2011). MyTribe: Post-subcultural manifestations of belonging on social network sites. Sociology, 45(2), 303–317. Stroud, N. J., Scacco, J. M., & Curry, A. L. (2016). The presence and use of interactive features on news websites. Digital Journalism, 4(3), 339–358. Van Dijck, J. (2013). “You have one identity”: Performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn. Media, Culture & Society, 35(2), 199–215.

Chapter 6

Comic Theory: A New, Critical, Adaptive Theoretical Framework for Identity Presentation

Abstract  Through a sustained engagement with sociological theories of identity and the social, this chapter builds the case for a new theoretical approach to considering identity presentation online. This chapter begins by exploring previous sociological approaches toward identity, specifically focusing upon Goffman’s work around the performative nature of identity. The chapter then progresses to discuss the work of Foucault in understanding the manner in which Discourse shapes our social experiences, before moving on to discuss Actor-Network Theory as an approach for understand the social beyond a focus on human influences alone. Finally, Barad’s work around agential realism is introduced as an approach that allows for an understanding of the ways in which humans and non-humans negotiate the boundaries of the social world in an ongoing manner. It is suggested that a frame is needed that brings these four approaches together, and as such, the chapter takes one final turn towards considering Comic Book Studies as a field of research which allows for a detailed look at narrative construction between socio-culturally bound readers and specifically designed media. Using this as a frame, this chapter proposes and introduces Comic Theory as a new framework to understand identity performances online as an ongoing platform-­ specific negotiation between user and design. Keywords  Comic Theory · Actor-Network Theory · Latour · Foucault · Post-­ structuralism · Discourse · Barad · Agential realism · Goffman · Identity performance · Identity negotiation

6.1  Introduction The previous chapter presented a sustained look at data from a series of interviews conducted with young people over the course of a year, exploring how they understood and negotiated their identities online. The data suggested that social media users negotiate a growing plethora of online social spaces in order to perform identity and that the given identity performances emerged from the enmeshing of © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. T. Dyer, Designing the Social, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5716-3_6

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socio-­culturally grounded users and specifically designed platforms. Though the data itself, as with any data collected around social media, dates itself rather quickly, this notion of identity as a negotiation between various actors, human and nonhuman, holds a number of compelling implications and challenges for how we define and understand identity. With this in mind, this chapter aims to begin the work of laying out a new theoretical framework for understanding identity which incorporates the ongoing negotiations present in online actions and interactions. In this manner, though discussions of social media are inevitably bound to a specific moment in time (the character limit on Twitter, e.g. has doubled since the interviews were conducted), it is hoped that the framework here provides a contribution to thinking about our online actions and interactions that is far more durable. In order to do so, this chapter will start by first exploring how identity has traditionally been theorised. Identity is such a frequently used term that it has become ambiguous and heterogeneous and perhaps even over-utilised. Despite the diversity and extensiveness of literature discussing the concept of identity, or perhaps because of the breadth of this research, researchers have suggested that it is still a concept that is poorly understood and frequently under-conceptualised (Buckingham 2008). Yet identity is a topic that nonetheless is particularly pertinent given the rise and proliferation of social media, and the evident connections between social media and identity, with platforms seemingly serving as spaces through which we can perform and present ourselves to an audience (boyd 2014; Kietzmann et al. 2011). Though common parlance and certain fields of research (such as psychology) tend to focus explicitly upon identity as an internal notion, for the purposes of this framework and research, we will focus less of identity as understood from an inner understanding of self-conceptualisation (Rogers 1961) and instead focus on the ways in which user identity is actualised and how it is realised and expressed externally. As such, the approach towards identity will be focusing upon social performances, social actions, and social interactions, given for and to a variety of audiences (Goffman 1959). These social identities will be considered as negotiated in, and emerging from, a variety of social media platforms, though crucially, as discussed in the last chapter, not always resulting in content production. In the following sections of this chapter, therefore, I will focus on discussing definitions and theories of identity that best relate to external expressions of identity. Following this, the chapter will move on to consider how best to account for the role of design in shaping identity performances, looking at the issues raised by Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2005) and Barad’s (2003, 2007) work in agential realism, before considering how the ideas raised in the field of Comic Book Studies can help address the manner in which individual narratives of identity are created by the enmeshing of a particular platform with an individual user.

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6.2  Positioning Identity As mentioned in the introduction, within the field of sociology, the focus of identity research generally shifts from relationship between self and identity towards a focus on the relationship between identity and the social situations and settings in which it is formed and enacted (Goffman 1959; Pearson 2009). However, there is still much variation within this focus in regard to the conceptualisation of social identity. Given the variety and breadth of the discussion surrounding the concept of identity, this chapter cannot hope to fully discuss the ways in which identity has been conceptualized in sociology. It is worth noting however that sociological approaches straddle ‘macro’ approaches (which understand identity as a broad cultural category that is tantamount to the ongoing performed acts, attitudes, and behaviours of a group of people) to more ‘micro’ approaches (which focus upon identity as an individual response to a given situation), as well as approaches which attempt to disrupt this dichotomy to understand the interplay between broad categories and individual variations. It is worth noting here that the approach detailed in this chapter positions itself towards an understanding of identity as a malleable performance, responsive to context and yet still informed by socio-cultural resources and experiences. As discussed in the previous chapter, given the importance of design features in shaping how our identities manifest online, there is a need to consider identity as malleable and bound to specific locations, not just the result of consistent exposure to broad social groups. It is equally true though that through also highlighting the social and often group-based nature of online actions and interactions, we can begin to explore the ways in which our identity is drawn from our understanding of, and exposure to, the social situation around us, and not just the physical spaces we interact within. An approach towards identity is needed that positions identity as a complex, and crucially, malleable and responsive performance, specific and adaptive to the setting in which the social interactions take place, and able to account for individual variation, whilst still acknowledging the impact socio-cultural experiences, histories, and resources have on how we approach any given social situation. In order to build such an approach, this chapter will begin by drawing upon an understanding of identity from the dramaturgical approach of Erving Goffman (1959). The word identity comes from the Latin root idem, meaning ‘the same’, yet identity is often viewed as a sign of independence and difference, a consistent point of reference that makes each of us somehow unique. Whilst many theories around identity lean into the idea of a consistent, often singular identity (Jenkins 2014), Goffman and his work in dramaturgical identity subverts this to look at the existence of multiple malleable identities consisting of external performances given in and as a response to specific locations and situations. In essence, Goffman suggests we, as performers of identity, choose appropriate social cues, actions, and interactions to taper and adapt for different settings and audiences. Crucially, rather than focusing upon a consistent identity as the unit of measurement against an inner notion of self, Goffman’s approach here suggests instead we treat identity as a variable, responsive to, and appropriate for, any given situation. In his key text, The Presentation of Self

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in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959) argues that the primary focus of analysis should be upon interactions and exchanges between the performer and an audience. Goffman defines and discusses identity performances as ‘all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period…before a set of observers and which has some influence on the observers’ (Goffman 1959, 32). The key component here is the notion of audience. For Goffman, identity performance was something that occurred before, in response to, and for an audience; performers give their performances for the audience in order to influence them in some manner. The audience play a part in the performance by providing feedback, by judging the authenticity of the performance, and by providing the frame by which the performer approached the performance (Goffman 1959). This also allows for the ongoing adaptation of the specific identity performance, as Goffman suggested that performances proceed in line with the feedback provided by the audience. For Goffman then, identity is socially created and crucially is plural, changeable, and responsive to a given location and audience (Brissett and Edgley 2005; Tseëlon 1992). This approach therefore provides a useful frame when considering, as the approach detailed in this chapter aims to, the effect of a given situation on social actions and interactions, in that it allows for a view of identity that situationally bound, socially contingent, and malleable. Indeed, in research into social media and identity presentation, Goffman’s work has proven useful to explore the ways in which users respond to the specific situations of social media including considerations of specific features such as location check-ins (Bertel 2016) or privacy feature (Tufekci 2008), to broader considerations of social media as a space for ‘playful’ audience-focused identity work (Pearson 2009; Bullingham and Vasconcelos 2013), and the collaborative nature of the construction of an ongoing identity online (Marwick and boyd 2011). Goffman’s crucial ontological shift is in the focus of his analysis, which is upon the performances themselves as units for evaluation and not upon the individual as a performer of identity. Whilst other approaches, such as Symbolic interactionism (Stryker 1980), conceive of identity as multiple and adaptive, Goffman’s work ranks a successful performance against how far it deviates from a ‘core’ self but how successful it is for that social situation (Gonos 1977). In this manner, Goffman’s positioning negates criticisms of an identity performances given for an audience as ‘inauthentic’ (Gouldner 1970), instead questioning the notion of what could be considered authentic through proposing that any performance is judged every time by a potentially different audience. The multiple and fluid nature of identity performance that is the focus of Goffman’s work does not mean that identity performance is inauthentic, or deceitful, but merely that it is adaptive to the social situation as is necessary (see Bertel 2016 for an example of this in practice in social media research). A successful performance is not subject to a value judgement of authenticity in this manner but is co-constructed by the audience and the actor. A performance is successful if it has met the needs of the audience and if it is appropriate for the social situation in which it is performed, not if it is consistent against a base level. In this manner, Goffman largely avoids commenting upon actual ‘self’ identity (or as he termed it, ‘ego identity’ [Goffman 1968]), which he raises only to highlight his work as a separate issue, joined ostensibly through the use of the same

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nomenclature (See Burns 1992; Clarke 2008). Despite criticism, Goffman’s approach does not claim to discuss or account for the entire experience or notion of identity. This was something Goffman acknowledged more explicitly later in his writing beyond the seminal ‘the presentation of self’, moving past the rather broad understanding of identity performance as the oft-cited ‘all the activity of a given participant’ (Goffman 1959, 26), to instead acknowledge later that: ‘a performance, in the restricted sense in which I shall now use the term, is that arrangement which transforms an individual into a stage performer’ (Goffman 1974, 124). In this manner, Goffman attempts to understand more clearly a specific aspect of identity, namely, how we adapt our presentations for the given social situation. To avoid confusion and in order to draw focus towards the performative nature of identity examined in the data presented in the previous chapter, the framework built here will use the term ‘identity performance’ in order to discuss the performance of social actions and interactions within given social situation and acknowledge that this is a curation of appropriate actions and interactions, not a core notion of self. Goffman’s approach to identities as such positions them as ‘fluid’. They are not fixed, isolated, or self-contained but are instead fragmented, multiple, heterogeneous, socially bound, and adaptable. Whilst such an approach therefore lacks consideration of where the skill resources to conduct such performances come from, Goffman’s approach does present a usable framework for considering the effects of situation upon variations in performances of identity, a useful starting place when understanding social media design impacts our actions and interaction. For the purpose of the framework being built in this chapter, this key differentiation provides a useful frame to consider how identity performances, and thereby social actions and interactions, are given for a particular situation, with the social situations viewed as the catalyst for the given identity performance. Goffman’s focus upon malleability in terms of how we act and interact in social situations seems particularly suited to contemporary online interactions as researchers have observed users with multiple changeable and adaptable identity performances aimed at and for the increasing variety of changeable audiences and platforms online (Abidin 2016; Davis 2016). It is suggested that ‘the reality of users’ lived experiences is that most users incorporate multiple platforms into their communication practices in order to access the people and networks they desire to influence’ (Zhao et al. 2016, 89). This can lead to a wider variety of situationally bound performances online. Nonetheless, it is apparent from the data presented in the last chapter that, beyond the effect of audience alone, there is a need to acknowledge the role of non-human elements in informing and shaping how identity emerges. Whilst Goffman astutely considers how an individual performs to an audience, it is clear that ‘audience’ can be a looser topic online. The specific situations presented online raise some issues in terms of how users present themselves to multiple audiences and how users deal with the shifting multiple identity performances. Varis and Blommaert (2015), for example, note that the growth of viral social media posts online suggests that social actors cannot often account for all possible audiences online, leading to augmentations in content and a potentially diverse conception of audiences. Similar

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observations have been made in regard to ‘context collapse’ and multiple converging audiences online, as discussed in Chap. 4 of this book. Further to this, whilst Goffman’s work allows for a consideration of how identity is responsive and specific to situation, it crucially doesn’t look at the role of the design of that situation in shaping the identity performances. Goffman does note that we choose appropriate social cues, actions, and interactions for different settings and audiences but does not overtly consider in any detail that this choice is not boundless, made instead from the available options within that location. To extend Goffman’s analogy of identity performances, whilst the audience certainly does shape how an actor performs, so to do the props and staging available to the actor. As highlighted in the data presented in the last chapter, this is a particularly important factor to account for. Indeed, Richey, Ravishankar, and Coupland (2016) note that the changeable nature of identity can be potentially problematic in certain situations online when situational cues are misread, leading to inappropriate posts which can damage identity impressions, highlighting that ‘technology-enabled interactions don’t constitute a perfect situation where performers can access a full range of social cues’ (Richey et al. 2016, 604). Others have similarly highlighted design choices such as asynchronicity as factors that may affect how we choose to present ourselves online for a range of audiences (Hogan 2010). The effect of design and technological factors is a theme that we will return to later in this chapter when we discuss Actor-Network Theory and other theoretical frames that help unpack the effects of design, but it is apparent here that whilst Goffman’s work can aid a consideration in terms of how the audience co-constructs identity performances, his framework does not fully account for the effects of the design and the layout of the stage in and upon which the performances take place. It also crucially provides little-­to-no attempt to unpack identity beyond performed social action, an issue that, as highlighted in the previous chapter, needs to be considered given that research suggests the majority of users utilise social media for more than just content production alone (Barnes 2015). Nonetheless, the dramaturgical approach appears particularly useful for the flexible nature of online interactions as it holds that we must view identity as multiple, changeable, and performative, with the emphasis of analysis upon the responsiveness to the situation. As such, and following the work of Goffman, the new framework presented at the end of this chapter frames identity as malleable and adaptive to the specific situation and environment in which it emerges but additionally aims to account for how the design of this situation affects the specific performances that emerge. Evidently a number of other factors must be accounted for when considering why users of social media interact and act in the manner they do online. We will begin by considering socio-cultural factors more fully, beyond the narrow framing which Goffman’s focus on situation allows. To do so, this chapter will now move on to consider post-­ structuralism (Foucault 1977), an approach towards understanding social structures and situations that are often combined with Goffman’s work when considering interactions both online and offline, before moving on to consider how best to account for the role of the physical design of the staging upon our social actions and interactions.

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6.3  A  ccounting for Socio-cultural Resources and Experiences in Identity Performances Given the notion that identity performance can be thought of as fluid and changeable through the use of the dramaturgical model, the question then becomes, what changes identity performances? For Goffman the answer to this question was that it was audience, and in particular the individual performer’s conceptualisation of that audience, that changed how individuals approach and shape identity performances. For Foucault, however, the concept of social influences on behaviour was broader than the given audience in any situation and was purposefully homophonous. At its heart, Foucault work argued that our knowledge and definition of the world around us were not arbitrary and static but rather purposeful, flexible, and worthy of interrogation. Inspired by Kant’s attempts to present the reality of the world around us (noumenon) as a separate notion from how we thought of the world (phenomenon), Foucault’s work considered how our knowledge of the world around us could be a method of social control or of social power (see Hendricks 2008). Foucault thus suggested that the manner in which we understand and know the social world around us, and thus how we act and interact within that world, is informed by the intimate and constantly shifting relationship between ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’, a topic upon which much has been written. To briefly (perhaps glibly) summarise Foucault’s work around the relationship between power and knowledge, Foucault focus in his work was exploring how our understanding of the world was constructed and maintained, what this construction revealed about those who work to maintain this particular knowledge of the world, and how these constructed conceptions of the world work to maintain certain social ideals and standards (Miller 1990). Foucault’s work has been used to argue that these constructed categorisations of the world around us (or Discourses as Foucault termed them) serve to shape how we know, approach, and experience society and that in turn these constructions often serve to enforce and maintain the claims to power of those within the structures of power, allowing them again in turn to maintain their control of discursive knowledge. This relationship between power and knowledge was, for Foucault, cyclical; knowledge maintained and legitimised the power structures, which in turn controlled and constrained knowledge. In this manner, Discourses extended beyond statements of fact to ways of ‘systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak’ (Lessa 2006, 283). Discourses then are socially constructed and reveal the ideological beliefs and social expectations of a period in time; they define, control, and become an accepted and often normalised way of acting, looking, thinking, knowing, and speaking about a subject at a given moment in time (see Rowse 2005). Importantly, Discourses then are not only our way of knowing, understanding, and framing the world; they also work to shape our experiences, actions, and interactions within the world (Pennycook 1994). As Miller and Fox (1997, 36) argue, Discourse shapes possibilities which people ‘use in conducting their everyday activities and interactions’. Further to this, and importantly for this research, this means Discourses can also manifest

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themselves in the physical world around us and can be conceptualised as emerging in visual and spatial forms (Richardson and Jensen 2003). Though Foucault never provided an analysis of space himself, he acknowledged the importance of considering the design of spaces, noting: ‘A whole history remains to be written of spaces– which would at the same time be the history of powers’ (Foucault 1980, 149). Foucault provided an example of this in his work on the penal system, and in particular the much-discussed Panopticon, a system designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century to maximise surveillance and to elicit compliant behaviour in prisoners who were always potentially monitored from a centralised tower around which the cells were located. Whilst Foucault largely used this as a metaphor for the self-regulation and internalisation of power’s gaze which manifests in compliant behaviour (Foucault 1977), evidently the physical design of a Panopticon holds power beyond metaphor. Physical spaces can embody Discourses and can be used to enforce and reinforce certain behaviours, social actions, interactions, and power structures (Crampton and Elden 2007). As Markus and Cameron (2002, 16) argue, ‘the constructions of reality which are made apparent in Discourse will very often be apparent in the way a building organises space’. This has been noted by a number of researchers in buildings such as shopping malls (Voyce 2006) and libraries (Radford 1992) and through features such as spikes placed on pavements to discourage rough sleeping by people experiencing homelessness (Dee 2015). Spaces then, as Foucault (1977, 148) argued, ‘are at once architectural, functional, and hierarchical’. The same can be seen as being true of social media platforms, which in their design may suggest certain emphasise and prioritise certain manners of acting and interacting through design. A Foucauldian understanding of Discourse can therefore help understand the ways in which power is expressed and people, actions, identities, spaces, and practises are defined and governed. This can be critical to an understanding of identity using Goffman’s dramaturgical frame, as Discourses can be seen as informing and shaping the manners and methods through which individuals are interacting (Hacking 2004) and can frame the performer’s and audiences’ understanding of appropriate identity performances and social conventions (Bordo 1993). Regarding identity, Foucault suggests: The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike… In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain Discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis-a-vis of power; it is I believe, one of its prime effects. (Foucault 1980, 98)

Here Foucault is arguing that there is no core inherent human characteristic that controls our social interactions and identity performances. Instead, human actions, interactions, and identity performances are a product of the existing Discourses they are exposed to and are a product of their society at any given time. In a similar manner to Goffman, Foucault throws into question the notion of a singular core identity or self, instead attempting to understand why it is we believe there is a self. Through this line of questioning, Foucault comes to the conclusion that the self is the result

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of the social spaces and situations an individual finds him or herself in and the Discourses they are exposed to. In essence, Foucault manages to account for the socio-cultural positioning of the individual in regard to how they approach and realise social action and interaction. Given this positioning, it is easy to see the overlap between Goffman and Foucault. It is through this understanding of identity and human interaction that we can begin to see how the Discourses we are exposed to will make a difference in how we frame our social actions and interactions (Hacking 2004). Indeed, Goffman states ‘when the individual presents himself before others, his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of society’ (Goffman 1959, 45). We can also consider how Discourses are manifested in our actions and interactions given and chosen for specific audiences, reinforcing their normalcy and claims to legitimacy. Indeed, Goffman also states our social interactions ‘establish the means of categorising persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories’ (Goffman 1968, 503). We can also begin to consider that if Discourses manifest themselves in the physical layout and design of the world around us, then the design of the social spaces and technologies around us can also influence how we are able to act and interact socially. Goffman and Foucault however provide no framework to specifically examine the design of social spaces upon the manner in which we socially act and interact, and as such, a further shift is needed towards a framework that purposefully examines the identity performances that come from the enmeshing of design with socio-cultural and discursively bound individuals. In this vein, other research has combined Foucault and Goffman to consider how online interaction is negotiated, constrained, and shaped by a number of factors (Rymarczuk 2015; Westlake 2008). Willett (2008), for example, unpacks the manner in which agency and power are negotiated online and notes, for example, the trend of girls dressing virtual dolls that ‘positions girls as sexual, as needing to be skinny, and as constant consumers of fashion and accessories’ (Willett 2008, 49). She concludes by suggesting that ‘that young people’s online identities must be viewed not only in terms of active engagement, but also in relation to the structures which frame those activities’ (Willett 2008, 65). Through drawing on both Goffman and Foucault, we are able here to begin to frame how an individual’s action and interactions within a given environment are guided by their socio-cultural background and exposure to Discourses, as well as by the specific situation in which they find themselves. This is especially pertinent for the research being presented here given that Discourses are also physically and spatially grounded and specific, with design drawing on and enforcing specific aspects of offline and pre-existing, as we discussed in Chap. 4 of this book. As Couldry suggests, when considering interactions within a space we must acknowledge ‘the spatially specific accumulations of “constraints” and “coercions” on action that flow from human life being lived in coordination or competition with others’ (Couldry 2012, 26–27). By this, Couldry suggests that our actions and interactions within a space are often constrained and guided by a number of accumulated factors specific to that location. A reading of the Internet as a space for social

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interaction can therefore consider how our actions and interactions are coerced and constrained within a given environment, both through broad socio-culturally bound Discourses and through the specific restrictions of the immediate environment. Different spaces and sites can be considered as emphasising different Discourses and methods of socializing (Dyer 2015), meaning that platforms must be considered in an individual and specific manner whilst still accounting for the user’s understanding of, and expose to, larger social structures, powers, and Discourses. As Hook (2005) suggests, researcher utilising Foucault’s work should attempt to consider what make ‘certain acts, statements and subjects possible at certain specific locations’ (Hook 2005, 10). As such a framework is needed that allows for the impact of specific location design along with a potentially deeper understanding of both the systemic structures and logics of the particular media culture. Foucault and Goffman both provide a useful starting point for such a framework, but in order to understand the importance of location beyond the audience-focused framing of Goffman, a further theoretical turn is needed. Given this, this chapter will now move on to look at how best to account for the effects of the specific platforms upon, in, and through which identity performances emerge, first considering if and how Goffman can be used to account for and conceptualise the notion of space and place.

6.4  A  ccounting for the Role of ‘Staging’ and ‘Props’ in Identity Performances Whilst we have so far in this chapter accounted for the manner in which identity can be framed as a situationally specific response to an audience (Goffman 1959) and grounded in the socio-cultural exposure of the performer (Foucault 1980), there is a need to account for the manner in which identity performance is affected by the physical reality and design of the specific situation, not just enacted upon it. One of Goffman’s key papers on the subject of social analysis was entitled ‘The Neglected Situation’ (Goffman 1964). Though he was talking about the subject of the analysis of face-to-face interactions against other methods of communication, this title aptly sums up his neglectful treatment of the role of the physical setting in identity performance. Whilst Goffman accounted for the effects of the audience upon a performance, he did not adequately account for other aspects that may affect the performance of identity, particularly, as Bullingham and Vasconcelos (2013) point out, aspects that have arisen since the rise of social media. Research suggests that the physical settings in which identity performances take place impact and shape a given performance and that physical spaces provide a variable range of props to potentially amplify, minimize, or extend aspects of our identity performance (Gieryn 2000; Huot and Rudman 2010). With this in mind, the framework presented in this chapter is keen to extend Goffman’s ideas on the performative nature of identity to not only consider the effects of the audience upon a situationally specific

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performance of identity by a socio-culturally grounded actor but to also account for the effects of the specific ‘staging’ and ‘props’ available to the actor. In this analogy, ‘staging’ can best be thought of as the physical design and layout of the spaces in which performers are acting and interacting, and ‘props’ can be thought of as the tools, modes, and accoutrement made available to the actors to aid and shape the performances in a variety on manners. Goffman was however aware of the potential impact of situation upon identity performances and did acknowledge and account for the presence of staging and props in a performance. In particular, Goffman acknowledged the role of ‘setting’ which he defined as including ‘furniture, décor, and physical layout’ (Goffman 1959, 32). For Goffman, however, these objects merely served as tools through which the performer could augment, supplement, and reinforce their performance, rather than objects that were a part of the performance in their own right. In Goffman’s framing, an actor chooses props and tools to serve their performance, with interaction between performer and setting being a one-way relationship of a performer using props. Goffman presents the performer therefore as being in control over the objects and space around them, rather than viewing identity performance as arising from the interplay between staging and performer. Critically, Goffman does not continue on to acknowledge that these props that the actor chooses from are often not limitless but are also often situationally specific (Stroud et al. 2016), can vary from location to location much like audiences, and could be chosen for the performer (Perinbanayagam 1990). Nowhere is this more overtly clear than in online social space, where restrictive and purposeful framings of what it means to be social can be seen. Some platforms purposefully limit the choice of props, for example, Twitter’s character limit (Gilpin 2010) or Snapchat’s use of image filters (Chopra-Gant 2016). As such, online users do not have a limitless range of props to utilise but a curated set from which to choose. As Bennett and Bennett (1981: 18) stated, ‘all social interaction is affected by the physical container in which it occurs’. That the actor chooses the props then is only partially true; the actor chooses the props from those available to them in the particular setting they find themselves. This is a crucial difference that this work aims to overtly account for in order to understand the effects of design upon our actions and interactions on a platform-by-platform basis. Law and Moser (1999) further attempt to complicate the relationship between actors and props, highlighting that we should not so quickly draw a division between people and props and that the relationship between these aspects should not be considered a one-way relationship. They note that: Goffman’s division between people and props – which is also one built into much social and organisational analysis as well as common sense – insists that it is people who act rather than objects. But in our way of thinking…the division does not work and the division between people and their surroundings has become blurred. (LLaw & Moser 1999, 253)

The turn signalled in this quote, a turn towards accounting for the agency of non-­ human ‘actants’ in shaping the social around us, is a still contentious issue within sociology, and one which continues to progress alongside the growth in frameworks

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such as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which I discuss in more detail below. Interestingly, this divide seems less problematic in other schools such as Geography which, for example, note that ‘public urban space has a mixed character as a concrete abstraction, as a product, and as a producer’ (Lehtovuori 2005, 151). It is readily apparent here though that the relationship between props and actors is not as clear-cut as Goffman holds it to be. Goffman’s failure to account meaningfully for the impact of setting upon identity performances is particularly noticeable given the detail and precision with which he thoroughly analyses and approaches the complex relationship between performer and audience. For the purpose of the work presented in this chapter, the same detail and scrutiny will be applied to the relationship between the performer and the ‘staging/props’, with the relationship positioned as two-way and with identity performances seen as emerging in part from the interplay between social actor and the specific location in which they are performing. If we are to consider the role of design in producing and mediating specific identity performances, a theoretical framework is needed that accounts for how humans interact with, in, and through specific social spaces. Much like the subject of identity, this has been considered in a range of ways which we do not have space within a chapter to cover in enough depth. These include the work of Lefebvre (1991), who adopted a Marxist positioning to consider social spaces as continually evolving realms that emerge conceptually through the interaction between the manner in which space is conceived by designers, the manner in which it is co-opted conceptually by the users of that space, and the spatial practises that happened within that space. Such an approach allows for a consideration of the stylised and purposeful presentations and choices made by designers but nonetheless relies heavily upon the interpretation of the researcher to presume the ideals and intent of the designer of a social space without any proposed method of verification (see Goonewardena et al. 2008). Arguably what is important is not how the researcher conceives of the designers’ intent but how those who use the social spaces conceive of it and how they subsequently negotiate and interact in these spaces (Unwin 2000). This is astutely demonstrated recently in Ditchfield’s (2020) work examining the processes social media users engage in before posting content online. Lefebvre provides no solution to this problem as his focus is upon the abstract concept of space across many levels rather than the users’ experiences (Stewart 1995). Further to this, Lefebvre focus is upon space as an abstract, and not, as is needed here, a understanding of the physicality of space. Indeed, subsequent theories have attempted to show that the separation of the conceptual and physical realm is problematic, unnecessary, and often ineffectual (Latour 2005). Other approaches towards understanding the role of the physical non-human in shaping human action and interactions can be found in the works of Marshall McLuhan and the Toronto School of Communication Theory in the field of media studies, most well-known arguably for coining the aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ (McLuhan 1964). Using this aphorism, McLuhan argued that media studies should focus less upon the messages being communicated through media and more upon the medium through which they are being sent, positing that the adoption of new mediums of communication changed ‘the scale and form of human

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association and action’ (McLuhan 1964, 9) and, as such, the focus of analysis should be upon ‘the physical and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes’ (McLuhan 1964, 24). McLuhan’s approach here however is notably one direction, focusing upon how technology impacts humans without an acknowledgement of ‘the user’s ability to exert control over content’ (Nash 2012, 199). The data presented in the previous chapters suggests an approach is needed that understands how the participants’ socio-cultural backgrounds shape how they contextualise, understand, and interact in, on, and with technology, as well as considering how technology is shaping their social actions and interactions online. Rather than focusing on and prioritising either the medium or the message, an approach is needed that focuses upon the relationship between the medium and the message. Actor-Network Theory (or ANT [Latour 2005]) appears to offer a happy medium between Lefebvre’s largely conceptual approach to the effects of design and McLuhan’s overly deterministic approach towards the effects technology can have upon our actions and interactions. Despite being somewhat notoriously (perhaps purposefully) difficult to fully summarise, and, as Latour (2005, 9) himself suggests, having ‘a name that is so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept’. It is not a unified theory as such (as Latour himself noted [see Latour 1999]) but rather as an epistemological positioning that situates the non-­ human as an impactful and impactive element in creating reality. ANT offers a useful conceptualisation of the social beyond just a result of human action and interaction (Sayes 2014). Instead, ANT frames the social as a specific manifestation that emerges from the interactions between specific users with their own socio-­ cultural resources and specific non-human features and affordances (Law 1999; Mützel 2009). It is from the ongoing enmeshing of the human and non-human factors that a locationally specific manifestation of the social is realised. Rather than approaching technology as impacting all users in the same manner, ANT considers how individual and situated users are interacting with specific mediums to create a socio-technical reality in unique manners (Latour 2005). Despite being a relatively new sociological theory, ANT has proven widely popular as an ontological turn towards a consideration of the non-human in the formation and ongoing creation of the social, with Latour, Callon, and Law, along with researchers from a broad array of fields such as urban studies (Farías and Bender 2010), maritime studies (Dolwick 2009), geography (Bosco 2006), and education (Fenwick and Edwards 2010) using the approach to detail various complex socio-technical realities. Through this work, ANT attempts to purposefully invert the idea that the physical, natural, and technological worlds are passive realms that humans effect to instead look at how the human and the physical realms affect one another, in turn presenting a bidirectional approach to the relationship between humans and technology. From an ANT perspective, to butcher McLuhan’s words, the medium is also part of the message. ANT at its core attempts to break down long-standing dichotomies between realism and objectivism (Mützel 2009). It starts from the position of dealing with many of the criticisms raised in previous sociological theory by entwining human elements, social categories, and Discourses with the non-human: the natural, the

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physical world of things, and the design of bodies, technologies, artefacts, and so on. In this regard, the focus of analysis often falls upon the artefacts that emerge from the specific entwining of these disparate elements within a specific given locale. Rather than positing social actions, interactions, and effects as something that happens upon the realm of the non-human, ANT argues that the social emerges from the intertwining of the human and non-human (Murdoch 1998). This is perhaps best summed up by Fenwick and Edwards (2010, 3. Emphasis in original text): Actor-Network Theory examines the associations of human and non-human entities in the performance of the social, the economic, the natural, the educational, etc. The objective is to understand precisely how these things come together  – and manage to hold together, however temporarily  – to form associations that produce agency and other effects: for example, ideas, identities, rules, routines, policies, instruments, and reforms.

Latour’s work therefore aims to emphasise and reappropriate the realm of the material in sociology in order to understand that the realm of the social does not exist in a vacuum and is not the product of human action alone (Fenwick and Edwards 2010; Mützel 2009). Crucially, as it pertains to Goffman, Latour argues that objects should not be an afterthought or positioned as a separate realm upon which social actions and interactions take place but that objects should be given equal consideration with humans during analysis. As Law (1999, 2) suggests, ‘entities take their form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relations with other entities’. Law argues that as such, the prioritising of human entities alone in this equation, as has been traditionally prevalent in sociology, is largely questionable. This is often misconstrued in critiques of ANT as an undue placement of agency upon the non-­human. Crucially, ANT is not suggesting that non-human objects are afforded ‘intentionality’ in their ability to impact human actions and interactions (Law 1999). They are not acting upon us with intent of forethought of their own volition (Martin 2005), but intention or not, they still impact upon how we can act and interact. This does not mean, as some have suggested (Collins and Yearley 1992), that ANT means humans and non-humans must be considered equal but that they must be equally considered. The focus that ANT provides is not to suggest that there are not differences between these elements but that we should approach them with a ‘generalised symmetry’ (Callon 1984), to afford equal consideration to their potential roles in forming the world and the social. To emphasise this need for generalised symmetry, ANT uses the term ‘actant’ to describe human and non-human entities on the same level, rather than differentiating between them (Callon 1986). Latour therefore defines actant as ‘something that acts or to which activity is granted by another…an actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of action’ (Latour 1996, 373). Social entities can be considered at once actors and networks, in the sense that they are able to impact upon and act within the world as actors but that they are formed as locationally specific entities due to the enmeshing of many elements, human and non-human (Fenwick and Edwards 2010). Hence, the duality presents at the heart of the term ‘actor-network’ (Latour 2005). ANT attempts then to view actor-networks both as actors that impact the world around them and as networks

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realised within the situation which they find themselves due to the relationship between a number of materially heterogeneous elements (Law 1999; Latour 2005). As they are the result of a number of interacting elements, both human and non-­ human, they are susceptible to potential changes in the formation of the network. ANT holds therefore that such constructions cannot be assumed to be pre-given (Whittle and Spicer 2008) but are instead negotiated in an ongoing manner between many heterogeneous elements specific to that given situation (Latour 2005) and are not immune from deconstruction; they are at all times potentially unstable (Latour 1999). Importantly for this research, each enmeshing of these elements is locationally specific and emerges from the specific iteration of non-human and human present in that location (Latour 2005). In other words, ‘entities achieve their form as a consequence of the relations in which they are located’ (Law 1999, 4). Thus ANT allows for a much-needed move away from understanding the social as solely human and instead offers a consideration of the physical world’s role in the creation and formation of specific iterations of ‘the social’. As Kowert, Domahidi, and Quandt (2016, 5) highlight, ‘Recognising the unique characteristics of different mediated, social spaces is key to understanding what role these different social services play in our everyday lives’. ANT’s positioning therefore continues Foucault’s line of enquiries into the construction of the world we inhabit, taking an anti-essentialist, relational stance to observe the world but importantly looking at these constructions beyond just the sole lens of ‘Discourse’ to acknowledge the very real and impactful role of the material world. As Vis (2009, 116) puts it, ANT looks ‘beyond language to all entities’ to position discursive formations as one of many elements that might affect how reality emerges within a specific location at a given time. In this manner, ANT attempts to view society as a ‘thick, rich, layered and complex matter’ (Latour 1996, 373). Therefore, ANT can be considered as decentralising the object (Law 2002), following on from the post-structuralist turn of Foucault and others which aimed to de-centre the human subject. If, as post-structuralism holds, subjects can be considered heterogeneous and fluid, ANT holds that objects can too (Latour 2005; Pickering 1993). Objects can be considered fluid as the many actants that network to create the object are heterogeneous and are in interaction with each other (Law 2009). Indeed, to further complicate the matter, and in an attempt to ontologically move away from the anthropocentrism prevalent in sociology, ANT holds that nothing can truly be assumed or considered a complete and separate actant, free from the input and influence of any other actant (Law 1999). Instead everything must be deconstructed, evaluated, and considered to understand how it has come to be the way it is and how it impacts the world around it (Latour 2005). Given this, ANT potentially provides a useful frame to continue to work of Goffman and consider identity performances. Using ANT, not only can we consider how the audience effects the identity performances present, but we can also deconstruct and consider the many other elements of the location-specific performance, including non-human ‘staging’ and ‘props’. Indeed, using ANT as an identity performance can be seen as both a network of human and non-human elements, working together to create the specific identity performance being performed, and also as

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an actor itself in even larger aspects of the specific social situation. Or, as Law (2009, 147) suggests, ‘people are relational effects that include both the human and the nonhuman’. These relational effects can be seen as continually under progress or as Callon (1987, 93) puts it: Reducible neither to an actor alone nor to a network…An actor-network is simultaneously an actor whose activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a network that is able to redefine and transform what it is made of.

Whilst ANT provides a useful frame to consider identity presentation beyond the human alone, ANT is somewhat focused upon tracing the networks that enmesh and not necessarily upon the ongoing effects of this enmeshed actor-network. ANT, in the vein of Foucault and others, focuses a gaze on the past to understand the construction of the present. Through this focus, the meaning and effects of these locationally specific social actor-networks are not fully explored in ANT. In essence, ANT is concerned with the construction of specific actor-networks, not the effect of them. Whilst ANT does provide some consideration for how this actor-network then acts as a constructed whole in a social situation (in particular through a consideration of what Callon 1991 terms ‘punctualisation’), the work built in this book aims to account more closely for how identity is formed through the enmeshing of human, inhuman, and non-human elements and crucially to explore the boundaries and actions that constitute a given identity performance. This means providing a framework for understanding the boundaries of identity going forward: how social actors are perceived and constrained within a given location, how they are able to act and interact within that space, how they are supposed to act and interact within that space, and how these boundaries are negotiated, perceived, and potentially challenged by the individual user. To examine and understand the importance of the boundaries of an actor-network and the restrictions these can place upon how an actor-network can thus act and interact within any given space, a further discussion is needed, one which can be provided through the work of Karen Barad, presented in the next section of this chapter. It is worth mentioning here, before moving onto the work of Barad, that ANT can be unendingly cyclical in nature, an aspect of ANT that can often make for a confusing logical spiral. The punctualised actor-networks can affect the actants that play a role in creating it as an actor-network (Collins and Yearley 1992). Or, in other words, an actant can be part of an actor-network and affected by that actor-network. Latour’s approach at times therefore loses some of its impact in discussing specific aspects as it far too often becomes lost in following infinite unending relations. Such an approach has therefore been heavily criticised as lacking focus and prioritisation (Castree 2002; Fine 2005), most noticeably and scathingly by Collins and Yearley (1992), who suggest that the cyclical line of thinking leads ANT into an unanswerable epistemological ‘chicken and egg debate’. Indeed, utilising ANT as a usable theory of analysis has proven noticeably tricky in sociology (see Walsham 1997), a fact that Latour himself was aware of (Latour 1999, 2005). As Latour (1990, 121) notes ‘explanation does not follow from description; it is description taken that much further’. The concerns with using ANT as a theory may in part be due to the

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fact that ANT is not a single theoretical perspective; it is more of an ontological positioning that attempts to acknowledge the role of the non-human in social situations and provides a re-contextualisation of the realm of the social (Sayes 2014). As such, it does not provide a framework through which the relationship between humans, non-humans, and social Discourses and structures can be examined and followed in an ongoing manner. Instead ANT merely reframes the focus of analysis by stating that there is a relationship between these elements that should be accounted for. Given this, a workable theoretical frame is needed that is informed by the ontological concerns of materially heterogeneous consideration presented by ANT but that presents a model through which the relationship between the human, the non-human, and the Discursive can be examined. In order to progress such a model, we will take one more theoretical turn towards agential realism (Barad 2003, 2007, 2011).

6.5  A  gential Realism and Agential Cuts: Accounting for the Narratives Paths Not Chosen So far in this chapter, we have looked at identity as a social performance (Goffman 1959), considered the socio-cultural influences upon our contextualisation of social interaction (Foucault 1977), and positioned identity performances as the ongoing enmeshment of human and non-human elements (Latour 2005). One final theoretical brink is needed to further uncover identity as an ongoing materially heterogeneous identity performance before we begin to build the wall of a theoretical framework to bring these elements together. The final brick here comes from the compelling work of Karen Barad. Barad (2003) developed the notion of agential realism in part as a response to the overly complicated view of endless relations and self-fulfilling actor-networks proposed by ANT (Barad 2007; Simon 2015). Barad’s approach still considers the way the social emerges from the enmeshing of locationally specific materially heterogeneous actants, but rather than ‘following the actor’ (Latour 2005) to observe all of the actants that form parts of continually unending networks and actors, Barad’s focus is upon how we create the boundaries around these materially heterogeneous elements to form an actor, what makes the boundaries of these actors specific to this locale (Dale and Latham 2015), and what these boundaries mean for how we act and interact within a given social location (Søndergaard 2013). Through this line of questioning, Barad aims to allow for considerations of how specific actor-networks have come to be through their relations, what has been excluded and discarded from specific actor networks, and what constrains, confines, and defines the agency of the actor-network (Barad 2003; Shotter 2013). It is this shift towards a consideration of the process of emerging and the boundaries constructed of the emerging actant that Barad highlights as crucial for an understanding of reality (Barad 2011). She suggests therefore that ‘the world is an ongoing open process of mattering through which ‘mattering’ itself acquires

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meaning and form in the realization of different agential possibilities’ (Barad 2003, 817). Or put another way: empirical claims do not refer to individually existing determinate entities, but to phenomena-­ in-­their-becoming, where becoming is not tied to a temporality of futurity, but rather it a radically open relatingness of the world worlding itself. (Barad 2011, 148)

Barad refers to this relational entwining as ‘intra-activity’ (Barad 2003, 2007). She purposefully uses the term intra-activity to distinguish from interactivity (see Dyer 2016). For Barad, interaction suggests that two or more separate, pre-determined, and distinct entities are coming together to create a new entity, whereas intra-action suggests that all entities emerge together through and with each other to make and delineate specific iterations of entities (Marshall and Alberti 2014). It is through this process of intra-action that boundaries of knowledge and power are formed and enforced (Barad 2003). As part of this fixation upon how we create materially diverse elements into boundaried actors, Barad proposes that we should not only view the specific iterations of actors that are presented to us; we should also consider how they came to be presented in that form (Højgaard et al. 2012; Juelskjaer 2013). That is, Barad proposes that we should also consider the detritus – that is lost and removed on the way to the specific iteration of the social (Herzig 2004). Drawing on a wealth of feminist literature, Barad asks for an engagement with the non-human in the social, suggesting that ‘agential cuts’ are made to determine and shape the boundaries of what can act and interact within any local setting and what is considered a complete and appropriate actor for that space (Barad 2011). Barad suggests we should pay attention to ‘agential cuts that produce determinate boundaries and properties of ‘entities’ within phenomena’ (Barad 2007, 148). The approach here becomes more focused than ANT, whilst still acknowledging the myriad heterogeneous elements that form a specific actor-network, so that the focus is upon ‘agential cuts; cuts that constitute boundaries, categories and ‘properties’ of phenomena, cuts through which specific concepts and specific material–discursive reconfigurations of the world become meaningful’ (Juelskjaer 2013, 757). Through agential cuts, we engage in the process of labelling and defining those around us, creating and maintaining categories and boundaries to make sense of a world of infinite relations. The object of enquiry becomes the practices and boundaries of the locationally specific material-discursive (Barad 2003), accounting not just for the non-human in the construction of the social but also the role of Foucauldian Discourse in shaping our engagement with the material world around us. In this manner, Kaiser and Thiele (2014, 166) argue agential cuts are material-­ discursive negotiations which ‘co-constitute subjects, objects and the ongoing pattern-­formations in which they/we participate’. Or, as Fenwick and Edwards (2013) argue, ‘an agential cut is always a performance: the boundaries distinguishing knower, known and knowledge do not pre-exist the cut. Further, an agential cut can only be performed in a local moment and place’ (Fenwick and Edwards 2013, 59). It is this essence of agential cuts creating locationally specific boundaried wholes out of the enmeshing of materially heterogeneous elements and Discourses

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that is crucial to Barad’s work. As Barad astutely puts it, ‘cuts cut “things” together and apart’ (Barad 2007, 179). These cuts, rather than an endless web of relations, provide a tangible consideration of how the social comes together in a given setting through the meshing of Discourse, materials, and humans. In order to adopt this consideration, Barad heads towards what could tentatively be seen as a post-Actor-Network Theory, an approach that grounds its understanding heavily in the work of post-structuralists such as Foucault and Butler (Barad 2007) in that Barad’s approach acknowledges the power in naming and defining the boundaries of specific realities, allowing a researcher to look at the manner in which these boundaries are maintained and negotiated and how ‘knower, known, and knowledge’ (Fenwick and Edwards 2013, 59) are formed from and around the enmeshing of materially heterogeneous elements. Using agential cuts, Barad (2003, 2007) holds that assemblages also have ethical consequences and ethical implications as each specific iteration of an assemblage works to exclude or reduce other iterations (Marshall and Alberti 2014). This works much in the way that Foucault described the power of Discourses and the inherent links between power and knowledge; as Discourses become more and more accepted, and more ratified by institutions of power, alternate Discourses become ignored, removed, and even possibly punished. The same is true of Barad’s assemblages, certain iterations become expected and realised as truth though their proclivity and ubiquity, at the expense of other iterations. However, Barad’s view of this is necessarily grounded in heterogeneous materiality. As Marshall and Alberti (2014, 27) put it: Butler’s work, building on Foucault, interrogates the way regulatory regimes, particularly norms, produce disciplined/ideal and therefore ‘normal’ bodies from the plurality of forms taken by matter…For Barad, what is lacking in Butler and Foucault is a sense of how the actual matter of bodies is inseparable from – and productive of – the on-going process of their materialization.

This understanding plays a critical and crucial role in considering the design of websites and how specific iterations of identity are guided and realised by and through this design. We begin to see how design manifests ‘correct’ forms of interaction between humans and non-humans and how other aspects are discouraged, frowned upon, or even banned. By accounting not only for the manifestations that arise but also those that are not permitted to arise, Barad’s approach allows for a consideration of how the dominant ideals maintain their claim to realism and maintain their power. We can also consider how subversive or antithetical assemblages are dealt with, and we can begin to see how specific iterations are guided into being in a ‘materially discursive’ manner (Barad 2003). Through the approaches seen in this chapter so far then, we can begin to move towards considering identity a materially heterogeneous entity (Latour 2005), specific to a given location (Goffman 1959), that is defined and boundaried in a specific manner (Barad 2003), a manner which limits and controls the action and agency of this ‘boundaried’ actor and situates its role within the given setting. It is how these boundaries are understood by the performer that, as we saw in the data from the last chapter, provides insight into how their identity performances are constrained and shaped in any given platform

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and, crucially, provides insight into how the performer negotiates and challenges these boundaried restrictions to create novel performances of identity. Whilst these elements are present across the disparate theories presented so far in this chapter, I would like to propose a way of bringing these ideas together to present a coherent and flexible model for understanding identity performance as ongoing and locationally responsive material-discursive acts. In order to do so, we will take a turn towards the realm of media studies to explore how narratives are co-constructed in comic books. I believe that through the work being done in the field of Comic Book Studies, we can see the parallels between the disparate perspectives presented in this chapter and the manner in which narrative construction is understood in comic books. In doing so, we will begin to build what I propose here as ‘comic theory’, a theoretical framework for which positions identity as a co-constructed ongoing material-discursive narrative.

6.6  N  arratives in Comic Book Studies: Closure, Intertextuality, and Extratextuality Comic Book Studies is a field of studies that looks at how a narrative is formed through the placement and processing of juxtaposed images (Dyer 2016; McCloud 1993). Comic Book Studies is a useful field that provides a workable model of the relationship between materially heterogeneous elements that include human, non-­ human, and discursive elements that enmesh to create a cohesive, specific, and individual narrative. The focus is upon the co-construction of a narrative between materially heterogeneous elements that include socio-culturally grounded humans, complex multimodal non-human elements, and materially discursive elements. When reading a comic book, the various elements of a comic form a narrative, informed by the reader’s own socio-cultural background and experiences of other texts in order to create a boundaried individual narrative (Bongco 2000) guided by elements of design which may emphasise particular narrative readings and discourage others (Lefèvre 2011). In this manner, Comic Book Studies explores how a completed user-specific narrative reading is formed and filled out by many parts working together and impacting each other (McCloud 1993). The resultant narrative of a comic is completed by an individual and stylised manner by each reader, but this process of creating is guided and shaped by the media form itself, by the reader’s socio-cultural resources and experiences, and by the stylised design choices of the authors (Chute and DeKoven 2006). I posit that by adapting the ideas presented in Comic Book Studies, we can build an understanding of identity performances that pay close, purposeful and detailed attention to the ways in which human, non-­ human, and discursive elements intra-act to create boundaried, socio-culturally saturated, materially heterogeneous, locationally specific, ongoing, and individually manifested narratives.

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It is important to highlight that Comic Book Studies, like many other fields of media studies, is more than happy to expand the focus of study to consider elements beyond just humans alone and is comfortable in not maintaining the divide between human and non-human to instead embrace the reality that our perception of the world is filtered through our interaction with the various material and non-human elements around us. As Barad and Latour both suggest, this hang-up seems to be uniquely maintained in sociological theory in ways that obscure our understanding of the social significantly. Comic Book Studies astutely asks how narrative creation is shaped and guided by various aspects such as page design, style, modal arrangements, shapes, sizes, and colours (Herman 2010), as well as considering the influence of the reader’s socio-cultural background and their experience of, and exposure to, other media forms that they draw upon to understand and interpret a particular comic book (McCloud 1993). Each reader’s constructed narrative is therefore guided and influenced heavily by design, without which there would be no narrative to emerge (Dittmer and Latham 2015), but the narrative is ultimately realised in a personal, stylised, and particular individual manner. The reader understands, makes sense of, and completes the comic book narrative through the concepts of closure, intertextuality, and extratextuality (McCloud 1993). It is these concepts, expanded upon below, that allow for and demand a consideration of design elements, socially grounded contextualisation, and individual stylised agency to understand how an individual narrative is reached. Comics offer us a distinct media form of study and consideration in its own right  – not quite art, not quite written narrative text (McCloud 1993). But it is this interplay between text and image and the sequential nature of comic books that has produced pertinent and useful questions for all media forms, which help us understand the interplay between design aspects online. McCloud (1993) defines comics as ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer’ (McCloud 1993, 9). For our discussion of digital identity performances, the important aspect of this definition is the idea of juxtapositioning and of the deliberate sequencing of images and text within a space (Groensteen 2013). The fragmented nature of the images that appear in comics requires active interaction and interpretation from the audience. The reader must make sense of the design; they must continuously connect and interpret the individual graphic units (or panels) provided by the authors of the comic and actively produce and make sense of a narrative whole (Herman 2010). The reader is not only required to make sense of the movement from one comic panel to the next but also understand its place within the page and the larger comic and narrative (Berlatsky 2009). The focus of Comic Book Studies then is to understand how the reader makes sense of the design and interprets the panels and pages to create a narrative whole. This narrative is guided by the design but is also open to interpretation and variation by the reader, who, due to the juxtaposed nature of the images and text provided, becomes involved in deciding exactly what happens between the panels, creating an individual personal narrative, guided by themselves, the media form, and the author (McCloud 1993). McCloud therefore posits that comic books ask the reader to play an active role in creating a narrative but that their role is guided and shaped by the

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design, the features of the images and texts, and the nature of the medium itself (McCloud 1993). Some gaps between panels require more input from the reader than other, thus requiring larger narrative leaps and assumptions on the part of the reader (Groensteen 2013). McCloud (1993) suggests therefore that comics are a highly and constantly participatory media form as the audience has to actively and consistently be engaged in creating the narrative in order to make sense of the juxtaposed images they are provided with. The images and design that are presented to the audience in comics only reveal parts of the overall story; the audience is left to literally ‘fill in the gaps’ between each image in order to create and make sense of a continuous narrative (Cohn 2013). They are presented with a series of discrete images and have to create a continuous whole from these images (Groensteen 2013). The act of creating a continuous whole narrative out of the separated images the reader is presented with is known as ‘closure’ (McCloud 1993). The main space in which this closure is committed is the area between the panels known as the ‘gutter’ (Groensteen 2013). However, it is important to note here that closure can also happen within images and comic panels as the audience attempts to make the image a fully realised whole. The gutter however represents the space where two separated pieces of text become one joint narrative, as the reader attempts to ‘connect the dots’ to create a continuous, unified reality. This act of closure can heavily involve the audience as they dissect and compile the given information from panel to panel. The ‘gutter’ between the panels can be seen as the space where human imagination comes into play; although comics themselves are largely visual, in the gutter between the panels, the users are free to engage and call upon all of their senses to fill in the gaps (McCloud 1993). Each image acts as what Lessing (1766), who was discussing the effects of framing on pieces of art, described as a ‘pregnant moment’, giving birth to a whole world that is fleshed out by the reader. Closure is a useful term when considering how a narrative whole is created as it not only implies that the audience takes an active role in creating the story but it also allows for a consideration of how this narrative whole is created in a personalised individual manner, as well as how this process is guided by the material design elements of the comic book (Round 2007). Closure suggests that the narrative created will not be the same for each reader despite reading the same text; it is a narrative that is personal, affected by our own perceptions, experiences, and understandings (McCloud 1993). Closure is potentially informed, influenced, completed, and experienced differently from person to person (Cohn 2013), as, when presented with a series of images, different users may draw upon different experiences and frames of reference in order to make sense of the gap between the two presented images. The question then becomes what are these gaps filled with? Comic Book Studies suggests that closure is aided and achieved through utilizing and linking the images given within the text to our extratextual knowledge and our intertextual experiences (McCloud 1993). Here extratextuality can be understood as the audiences’ use of experiences and knowledge beyond solely that which is given in the text, allowing them to understand and make sense of the text (Stein and Thon 2013). This includes

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socio-cultural background and real-life experiences. Intertextuality, drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) work, is understood as the audiences’ ability to link the given text to other texts they have experienced and consumed in order to make sense of what they are reading (McCloud 1993). Through intertextuality and extratextuality, each narrative is experienced on a personal level and may differ from the narrative created by another reader as different readers draw upon different extratextual and intertextual information to understand and contextualise the narrative presented in the design, whilst still being guided towards a particular narrative by the design of the comic book (McCloud 1993). Comics then can be seen as offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments ‘which we then connect, via closure, to mentally construct a continuous, unified reality’ (McCloud 1993, 67). The reader’s individual narratives therefore can be considered a co-construction between the user, the media form, and the design (McCloud 1993). It is important to emphasise that this process, whilst requiring the input of the reader to make the narrative meaningful, is largely subject to design. McCloud highlights that the level of interaction and input required from the audience to create this narrative whole and make meaningful sense of the disjointed images they are presented with can change based on how much information they are given by the authors in each image and how much they have to do to connect one image to the next (McCloud 1993). It is also influenced by many elements such as the types of lines used, the border around each image, the style of presentation, the colour pallet, the textual information, and many other design features that suggest how the narrative should continue (Groensteen 2013). The narrative creation therefore is by no means completely boundless; it is restricted and guided by the design and form of the comic book and could not be completed without the design of the comic book. McCloud highlights that certain actions can be taken by the author and artist to restrict the amount of work to be done by the audience to create a narrative and to guide the reader towards a certain understanding of events (McCloud 1993). The degree of involvement required by the reader to fill in these gaps can vary depending on how much the two images differ or the types of ‘transitions’ used from panel to panel (Lewis 2010). Some panel transitions will require very little information to be filled in by the reader as not much happens between the panels, whilst others can require the audience to be heavily involved in rendering the transitions meaningful (Groensteen 2013). However, the audience is kept constantly involved in making sense of the media form from image to image (Berlatsky 2009). The involvement of the reader doesn’t just involve decoding from panel to panel but also within the panel as they make sense of the art style and apply the information to reality. The reader also has to decide the order to read the panels and plays a part in constructing the overall narrative and the page. This process of closure and completing the narrative therefore emerges from the enmeshing of design feature and the reader or, as McCloud (2006) terms it, ‘dynamic construction’. In essence then, Comic Book Studies highlights that the readers’ understanding of a media form can be guided by their own readings and interpretations of the narrative (closure), their socio-cultural resources (extratextuality), and their understanding of similar media (intertextuality), as well as by the design of the media

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form and the amount and type of space they are given to create their own understandings. Comic Book Studies suggests that cohesive completed narratives can therefore be thought of as collaboration between a reader and the design, with the user utilising stylised individual understandings informed by a number of issues and the design purposefully suggesting the completion of a narrative. By highlighting that narrative can be both guided by design and also open to the user to place their own understanding drawn from their inter- and extratextuality and their socio-­ cultural understanding, Comic Book Studies presents comics as a complex media form with multiple influences producing specific narratives. Comic Book Studies offers us therefore the ability to highlight and draw out the relationship between the design elements of the media we consume and our role in the construction of a narrative. It also helps us think of the media forms, and indeed social media platforms as we will discuss in the next section, as networks formed of many heterogeneous actants, human and non-human, combined to make specific and unique narrative realities (McCloud 1993; Groensteen 2013). Given this, I propose that we can utilise comic books as a theoretical lens to understand identity performances online and suggest the introduction of Comic Theory to view identity performances online as materially heterogeneous narratives that are site specific and formed through the user’s individual engagement with a design that is created to guide and shape specific boundaried performances of identity. Different social media platforms will offer different ‘transitions’, asking the user to sometimes do more or do less to complete the identity performance narrative. The completion of this narrative will not only be informed by the design but will be completed in an individual and stylised manner, with each user drawing upon differing intertextual and extratextual ideas and concepts to commit closure and negotiate the boundaries of identity performances. As such, identity performances can be thought of as a narrative that is formed of the interplay between user, design, and socio-cultural issues and ideals, bringing the theories of Latour, Barad, Foucault, and Goffman.

6.7  I ntroducing Comic Theory: Understanding Identity Performances in Social Media Through the Lens of Comic Books Comic books offer a practical and actionable lens through which we can reconcile the different understandings of social identity performances, bridging the divides between the impact of form and media, the impact of personal interpretation and understandings, and the impact of socio-cultural Discourses. Given that the focus of Comic Book Studies is often upon the reader’s interpretation of these elements, we can begin to build a focus upon how design can impact the construction of a narrative without assuming the intent of the designer. Instead, the focus is upon how this design is experienced, approached, contextualised, negotiated, and understood by the reader to make a coherent narrative. As researchers we cannot assume to know

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the motivation for the choices of the designer; however, we can realistically measure and observe the effects of these choices and attempt to understand how they have been negotiated by individual participants, especially if we gather this perspective from the users of the platforms. As such, the proposed Comic Theory detailed below attempts to understand identity performances online as emergent from the interactions between socio-culturally grounded users and platform-specific design as users negotiate the boundaries (Barad 2003) and identity performance on specific platforms accessed on specific devices. Users create their own narrative closure through extratextual and intertextual readings of the narrativebuilding features of the platform, with the selection of these readings and the subsequent closure guided and influenced by aspects of design which may encourage certain ways of committing closure to users with different intertextual and extratextual experiences. Importantly this process is purposefully approached and analysed from the perspective of the users, with the aim of understanding how they negotiate and utilise these factors. As shown in the previous chapter, an overt discussion of negotiation with users can reveal how they feel they are able to resist suggested closures, or engage in novel uses of the platforms, or why they feel they should comply and compromise certain aspects of their performance, or how they arbitrated an identity narrative with the platform features, or how their specific sociocultural resources and experiences lead to unique engagements with features. Through approaching online identity performances as a narrative construction of juxtaposed design features, completed and co-constructed by the user parsing and negotiation with design features in a way that is informed by other textual experiences, socio-cultural non-textual experiences, and their interpretation of the intentions of the designer, we can begin to build a suitably detailed, complex, flexible, and yet manageable understanding of identity. The ideas raised in Comic Book Studies reveal how narrative creation is a negotiated and location-specific concept and also reveal how a media form can be considered as the emergence of the relationship between human, discursive, and non-human elements, working together to create a narrative reality. In this way, Comic Book Studies treats the role of the non-human in the creation of a narrative in a similar manner to the notion presented by Barad (2003, 2007) in which the boundaries of reality are negotiated in a location-specific manner by the interaction of various materially heterogeneous elements. By utilising this location-specific materially heterogeneous approach in Comic Theory and by focusing upon how this power and agency in the creation of a narrative are negotiated between multiple elements, this approach is able to consider in a practical manner, and in greater depth and breadth, the degree to which social media platforms involve the user and how the user renders the given information meaningful to form specific iterations of identity performance. In essence, this framework provides the ability to unpack a platform-specific performance negotiated on and through those platforms. Indeed, Foucault in 1993 noted the importance of environment in shaping and creating social actions and interaction and the links between space and knowledge. He noted that it was ‘somewhat arbitrary to try to dissociate…the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves. If separated, they become impossible to

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understand’ (Foucault 1993, 246). I propose that approaching social media performances from this angle could provide much-needed practical and workable insight into how a personalised experience is shaped and formed in social media. Social media is highly structured, and many of the platforms have made choices in regard to design aspects of the site that encourage certain behaviours and restrict or deny others. Studies into social media therefore should not presume that the ability for interactivity offered online necessarily means greater freedom or control, as the availability of props to interact and act through is not limitless but purposeful and chosen in advance, which can restrict and shape how we are able to act and interact (Noble 2018). It is how we produce identity performances from, through, on, and with these chosen modes and restrictions that we should then unpack. This can be aided by utilising the concepts of closure, intertextuality, and extratextuality which help understand how the finished narrative is guided by design features and realised in an individual manner by users drawing on their experiences of other texts and socio-cultural resources. By using the ideas of closure, we can consider how the individual user is guided towards certain identity performances by the specific design of the platform. Closure, in essence, suggests that the construction of the narrative of an identity performance is the result of the enmeshing of human, inhuman, non-human. It suggests, in a similar manner to ANT and Barad, that the ongoing identity performances are always and continually locationally bound and realised as a result of the specific user and the specific design features coming together to create the performance. Crucially, it also demands that the identity performance can never be considered purely human or purely technological alone. It is not the medium that is the message, and it is not the human that creates the specific identity performance; it is always and essentially the result of the specific human committing closure guided by and grounded in the specific features. The identity performance could not happen without either element; they are intertwined and both creating the identity performance, which would not be possible without the other. There could be no identity performance without the user to perform it. And there could be no identity performance without the design features through which to perform it, features which ultimately restrict, confine, and frame the performance. Therefore, not only do humans and non-humans co-habitate online spaces, they co-produce them, impacting upon each other, with humans shaping the content of media and the media shaping and mediating the actions of the humans. In this manner, the boundaries of the identity performance are negotiated between materially heterogeneous elements (Barad 2003) with all elements, human and non-­human, shaped and informed by socio-cultural Discourses that pervade in all temporal directions. This then echoes and follows the pioneering work of theorist such as Sara Ahmed (2006) in understanding how socio-culturally bound bodies are oriented in, through, and with socio-culturally bound space. Using the concepts of closure, extratextuality, and intertextuality, Comic Theory is explicitly nondeterministic; each performance is always and necessarily individual due to the unique enmeshing of user and design. Design features will never affect every user uniformly (Ahmed 2006), but nonetheless they may suggest the ‘ideal’ or preferred usage, minimising unwanted uses and therefore, in a Baradian

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sense, creating boundaries around identity performances. Of course this notion of an ideal or preferred usage suggested by design will not be interpreted, approached, or even understood in the same manner by all users. As previously mentioned, it is the user’s interpretation of the designer’s intent that matters for when the object of analysis is identity performances, not the interpretation of the researcher, though much can and should be gained from discussion with designers about their design choices, especially if this leads to more ethical and thoughtful design. Researchers with access to designers should continue to explore disconnects between designers and users (see Noble 2018). The interpretation and explanation of design elements in the work conducted here are placed upon the individual user, as it is ultimately their individual performance and their negotiation and perception of these features that we can aim to unpack. I suggest therefore that anyone wishing to utilise the ideas presented here should aim to understand and explore how each user perceives these platforms and design features and how they negotiate with these features to create boundaried identity performance from materially heterogeneous elements. It is the realisation and manifestation of individual performances that this approach is keen to unpack. With closure, the relationship between human and design features is crucially malleable. Much as with the idea of transitions in comic books, sometimes the user will need to do more work to complete the identity performance and will be allowed freer reign over the performance of identity to construct a more stylised narrative. Equally, sometimes the features will be presented in such a manner that the user will not have to input very much at all to complete the narrative. The relationship between these features should not be presumed. It is also crucial to note, again in a nondeterministic manner, that this does not mean of course that this potential will be realised by all users, as some may choose to utilise the larger freedom in different manners and some may create narrative leaps where little space is provided in manners that may not be anticipated by the designers of the platforms. Each user will approach social media in a unique way for unique purposes, with features being utilised and contextualised differently for and by each user, as discussed in Chap. 4 of this book. This is largely where the concept of extratextuality comes into play. Extratextuality looks at how each user draws on their experiences outside of a text to understand and contextualise that text. When transposed to identity performances on social media, extratextuality still allows for an understanding of how design guides identity performances but looks at how the approach towards design is contextualised and grounded in the unique manner by each user, informed by their socio-cultural background. Examining extratextuality will allow for contextualisation of the identity performance, with an understanding of how the user’s specific situation affects the manifestation of identity on any given platform, and a consideration of the different dynamics present on social media for users from different backgrounds. This takes on extra pertinence given that not all social actors are equal and different features and online contexts may allow for some inequalities to pervade or may equally challenge them (Nguyen 2016; Noble 2018). An examination of extratextuality and how the user approaches and uses certain platforms and features based on their socio-cultural experiences, resources, and expectations will

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help therefore to account for the reality that not only do socio-cultural issues impact how users utilise social media (Sharma 2013), they also affect their attitudes towards it, their treatment on it, and their experiences with it (Rubin and McClelland 2015; Noble 2018). Comic Theory therefore aligns itself with Barad’s notion of agential cuts (Barad 2007, 2011), allowing for a greater consideration of how power and agency are negotiated on a platform-by-platform basis. Crucially, in this way, Comic Theory holds that identity online is always and continually grounded in, and contextualised through, offline reality and Discourses, thus challenging the notion of digital duality (Jurgenson 2012). Comic Theory also allows us to consider the notion of intertextuality, as the user’s exposure to other media forms may affect how they approach and utilise this media form. Using intertextuality to view social media, we can understand how they function as texts whose meaning to the user is shaped by their relation to other texts, both online and offline, known to and accessed by that user. In turn, social media can be seen as impacting and affecting how readers understand and approach other texts, both online and offline, in an intertextual manner. Intertextuality therefore offers yet another frame through which academics can conceptualise the breakdown of digital dualism and the merging of the online and offline world (Jurgenson 2012). Importantly, the social identity performance and engagement of and with these features do not have to be realised through the production of content alone. As established in Chap. 4 of this book, using social media involves more than just producing content alone. The mere possibility of equitable interactivity offered by media does not always mean this means of bidirectional interactivity will necessarily be taken up. Users will utilise social media in different way to interact socially and to be social. I suggest then that it is hugely important to account for uses of social media beyond just content production alone and to do so in a way which does not place them as secondary uses. One aspect that Comic Book Studies does not capture, but that Chap. 3 of this book reveals which needs to be accounted for when considering identity performances online, is the medium through which these platforms are accessed, the technology. This is understandable considering that comic books only traditionally come in one format. Though recently there have been attempts to look at the impact of the Internet and digital forms on comic that suggests that this format offers unique challenges and opportunities for narrative completion due mainly to the format through which it is accessed (Gilmore and Stork 2014). Nonetheless, this is an aspect that is important to account for with digital research as Chap. 3 highlighted and is an aspect that has been shown to affect how users utilise social media. As such, Comic Theory aims to also account for the technology used to access social media, doing so in a manner in part inspired by McLuhan’s (1964) approach towards the effect of technology upon the given manifestation of our social actions and interactions. Crucially though, this will not be done from a technologically deterministic viewpoint but will also be approached from a user-by-user basis, drawing again on the understanding and perspective of the user in order to unpack the role of the technology in their specific formation of an identity narrative. Driven by an understanding of intertextuality and extratextuality affecting how users approach a text to

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complete a narrative, it is clear that there is also a need for an understanding of how technology used to access the platforms impacts the user’s contextualisation of the platforms, their understanding of their role on the platforms, and their completion of the narratives. As Chap. 3 also showed, technology can serve specific purposes in our lives, and contextualising technology is largely important. Many of the criticisms of Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2005) revolve around the unwieldly nature of the infinite web of relations that the ontological shift demands. In many ways, ANT seems unfocused, aiming a lens at everything and anything in a theoretical butterfly effect model. Critics hold that if everything is a series of relationship, then practically conducting research into a subject is nearly impossible as the subject unfurls into relations both that it is formed of and that it plays a part in the formation of. To truly attempt to account for the ANT reality of a subject, a research would have to attempt to account for the entirety of the network that creates the ongoing and ever-shifting actor-network or find ways of highlighting key elements as they perceive them, the onus here often being on the interpretation of the researcher and not, as the data and approach here suggest, the interpretation of the social actor in their negotiation of overt material heterogeneity. ANT’s approach is impractical at best and impossible at worst. Comic Theory however aims to offer a happy middle ground. It provides an embrace of Barad’s (2003) work in examining the boundaries of actor-networks that form the materially heterogeneous social reality and also enquires why these boundaries are the way they are, how these boundaries are negotiated, and what they exclude and include. Comic Theory as such aims to embrace the necessary role of the reality of non-human objects to impact upon our perceptions but also offers a practical method accounting for the negotiation of agency in the creation of a narrative from the perspective of the user. For Kant, the noumenon reality of an object is separate and distinct from our perception of the object, which is not impacted by the reality of the object. For Comic Theory, however, I would suggest that this distinction is eluded as a purposeful focus is placed upon how a narrative reality is created by, and emerges through, the interaction between the reality of the physical world and the human perception of this. If we are going by Danah boyd’s definition of social media as a phenomenon (boyd 2015), then Comic Theory aptly helps us unpack the role of the noumenon in the formation of a phenomenon, affording the physical reality of the noumenon equal consideration to our perception of it. I hope here that Comic Theory begins to offer a practical approach to unpacking the relationship between human, non-human, and inhuman. In considering intertextuality and extratextuality, it provides researcher a tool to understand how the user navigates, contextualises, and understands social media platforms, considering a number of elements that play equal roles in the creation of the location-specific narrative performances through the eyes of the user of that platform. It is the aim of this framework to focus upon the effects of the specific locations in the negotiation of the narrative. This of course cannot claim to fully unpack the unended Latourian network of relations that go into forming social identity performance online, nor does it claim to consider every element. Instead this study aims to account for a missing focus in digital sociology upon the very real and tangible impact of

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technology and design upon our social actions, interactions, and the performance that emerge through our use of technology. Thus Comic Theory is informed ontologically by the sensibility of Actor-Network Theory and Barad but acknowledges that to truly follow an infinite web of relations is impractical and to claim to speak objectively to any true, thorough, and complete actor-network is practically impossible and ontologically dishonest, as choices must be made by a researcher about what to include and exclude from analysis. Here, these choices are largely placed in the hands of the social media user to understand what they consider to be important. Whilst this cannot be a complete consideration of the multiple actants, silent and loud, seen and unseen which shape the social, we can begin to shape a telling of the social as understood by the person navigating it. In many ways, and following the ideas of Barad (2003), it is the blackboxing of these actants, the creation of a presented whole formed of many actants, that should be the object of enquiry, not the following of infinite webs of unending relations. Given this, and to attempt a useful starting summary, I propose Comic Theory as a model that: • Sees the relationship between design and human in online identity performances as always and inherently bidirectional and co-dependent, with both design affecting the user’s framing and actualisation of social actions and interactions and individual users understanding, contextualising, and acting in novel manners within this space. • Socio-culturally grounds the performances of identity in the user’s specific background through the concept of closure, extratextuality, and intertextuality, thereby suggesting that digital duality cannot be maintained. • Also understand that design choices are always and inherent socio-culturally bound in intended and unintended ways and cannot be seen as neutral. • Overtly acknowledges and understands the effect of the material and physical nature of these spaces in which people are acting and interacting as causal elements in the final identity performances. • Understands that each identity performance is unique and individual due to closure, thereby allowing for novel and individual interpretations of identity and accounting for how different users understand, experience, and contextualise technology differently. This provides a direct avoidance of the deterministic issues of McLuhan and others to understand that each user will realise the potential of technology in different ways but that their uses will nonetheless be guided and bound by the possibilities offered through the technology. The realisation of this will be unique for each user and informed by their socio-cultural background and the socio-culturally infused designs. • Understands that the resulting identity performances emerge in a location-­ specific manner through specific non-human and human elements and thus can be considered malleable, negotiable, and temporally specific. • Establishes and interrogates the boundaries of identity created in a given social space in line with Barad’s work around agential realism, questioning what narra-

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tive readings, actions, and interactions are excluded and how these boundaries are (re)negotiated, realised, and/or flouted by users. Understands that individual identity performances can also circumvent design ideals to create narratives not considered or anticipated by designers. Understands that being social online involves more than just producing content. Places the emphasis of understanding the implications of the design choices made within the social spaces that the user is interacting in, on, with, and through upon the user. This purposefully removes the researcher’s interpretation of the designers’ intentions in regard to design choices and instead focuses the attention upon how the user contextualises, understands, and interacts with the design of the social spaces. Allows for a consideration of the role of technology in shaping engagement with social media.

6.8  Conclusion: Designing an Identity In this chapter, I have presented a number of theoretical frames, ontologies, and perspectives. We began by considering the concept of identity in sociology, in particular, focusing upon the work of Goffman and his research into the identity performance, and pointing the discussion towards an analysis of socially produced, presented, bound, and conceived identity performances. Using a post-structuralist grounding drawn from the work of Foucault, we saw how Goffman’s dramaturgical frame allowed for an understanding of the complex relationship between social situation and identity performance, but Goffman’s work did not allow for a detailed account of the impact of space and setting upon the realised and actualised identity performances. Therefore, Actor-Network Theory was introduced as an ontological frame that demanded the grounding and contextualising of social analysis within the physical realities from which it manifested on a case-by-case basis. However, though Actor-Network Theory provided a useful ontological frame for unpacking the situation in which social actions and interactions emerge, it did not provide a useful frame through which to understand the relationship between human, non-­ human, and discursive elements in a usable manner. It also presented the possibility of an endless web of actants that influence identity performances in a way that would be impractical to follow. As such, Barad’s (2003) work was introduced as a manner to embrace the boundaries of actor-networks and to make them the focus of enquiry. From this, a model was needed that combined these many aspects into a workable consideration of how platform-specific identity performances were negotiated online. As such, Comic Book Studies was presented as a frame through which Comic Theory could be proposed and through which the analysis of identity performances could focus upon how the user understood and negotiated design elements of the social spaces in which they were acting and interacting, as well as how these

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social spaces guided, shaped, and encouraged the actualisation and realisation of identity performance. Comic Theory provides a framework that allows a consideration of the relationship between human, non-human, and discursive elements and highlights the manners through which humans and non-humans enmesh to form a cohesive ongoing narrative. Comic Theory also regrounds and reintroduces the attention towards the role of the design and the choices made by the designer but argues for an approach to research which understands these elements from the perspective of the user. It also allows for a consideration of how the creation of these identity performances is shaped on a platform-by-platform basis by the user’s individual acts of closure, utilising socio-cultural elements through extratextuality and intertextuality to make sense of the presented and suggested designs. This process of closure is in part guided by elements of design, which present certain preferable narrative readings and suggested interpretations, though these are negotiated in an individual manner by each user. For educational practitioners, policy makers, and researchers, I suggest that, using comic books as a guide, we should aim to view social media platforms as not just texts for analysis but ‘comics’ from which a narrative emerges, with the aim that this will provide a potentially deeper understanding of how many aspects online are bought together and how the audience and design interact through and with the media form to create a specific and platform-dependant reality. The focus when considering social media in the lives of young people, I would suggest, should be upon how each user understands the design of the sites; how this design shapes, guides, and encourages the performance of certain narratives; and how the user, technology, and platform design co-actualise an individual narrative of identity. In particular, we can begin to consider how each user draws upon extratextual and intertextual information, both on- and offline, to complete this narrative. I hope the work begun here can be continued by researchers wishing to explore identity online in a manner that accounts for the materially heterogeneous, socio-culturally infused, individually realised, ongoing, and negotiated narratives we see online.

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Chapter 7

Critical Digital Citizenship: A Call to Action for Educators and Educational Researchers

Abstract  This chapter explores what a consideration of the manner in which design influences social experiences online might mean for educational researchers, educators, and pupils. The chapter begins by critiquing the current approaches towards technology in education, particularly highlighting the one-size-fits-all model of technology in classrooms, the creeping ‘data gaze’ in education, and the attempts to present and view technology as apolitical. The chapter finishes by summarising how Comic Theory (presented in Chap. 6 of this book) can help understand the interactions of young people online in a nuanced and careful manner. To echo Larkin’s (2008, 3) words, ‘what media are needs to be interrogated, not presumed’. This holds true for education and for our understanding of media writ large. It is hoped that Comic Theory presents a method through which this interrogation can take place. Keywords  Comic Theory · Educational technology · MOOCs · Interactive whiteboards · Clinicalisation · Data gaze · Datafication · Educational bureaucracy

7.1  Introduction So far in this book we have taken an in-depth look at how social media works in the lives of young people, drawing on data taken from a year-long series of interviews and close engagement with extant research in the field of digital sociology, considering what this means for educational policy makers, practitioners, and researchers along the way. The resulting discussion highlighted the need for a consideration of identity presentation online as a complex negotiation between user and design, always socio-culturally grounded in a way which suggests that educational approaches around technology cannot simply focus on Boolean logic and algorithms alone. The negotiation between user and design is at all times socio-material, undertaken by:

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• Users with their own intertextual experiences of other social media platforms • Users with their own extratextual socio-cultural experiences, resources, and expectations • Users providing their own interpretation of the socio-cultural dynamics online and the intent of the designers of these platforms • Designs infused in biases and socio-cultural disparities, intended and unintended, which permeate experiences online • Designs which guide certain narratives and limit what is possible online Each of these hold unique and overlapping challenges for how we use and engage with technology in education. In this concluding chapter, I will begin highlighting why this nuanced approach towards identity presentation online matters for education and how we can best grow on this work to help understand the needs and challenges facing young people, online and offline.

7.2  T  echnology as Panacea: The Need to Readdress One-­Size-Fits-All Educational Technology There is no doubt that modern digital technology has had a massive impact on education. Walk in to any classroom in the UK today, and you are likely to find some technology present in these spaces. From interactive whiteboards and various tablets to the mobile phones and laptops of pupils and students, technology is ever-­ present opening up new challenges and opportunities for educators and students alike. There is, of course, no easy solution for how best to make the most of this digitally infused environment, but certainly there are approaches that we can evidently see are not working well for educators and pupils. The question here then should be: Just who are these interventions working for? The answer, increasingly, seems to be businesses. Big businesses are increasingly positioning technologies as essential tools to age-old pedagogical challenges. The most obvious of these recently is the aforementioned interactive whiteboard (IWB). Originally sold as a revolution in education and quickly rolled out to classrooms around the world, interactive whiteboards have become a mainstay in most classrooms. In the UK, for example, the 2003–2004 Primary Schools Whiteboard Expansion project invested £10 million in acquiring IWBs for primary classrooms across the country (see Lewin et al. 2008), a move which Higgins et al. (2007, 221) suggested ‘may be the most significant change in the classroom learning environment in the past decade’. Others have similarly highlighted the ways these technologies seem to have been forced into classrooms worldwide in troubling ways (see Slay et al. 2008). Yet there seems to be issues in providing a useful understanding of what exactly is ‘interactive’ about them beyond offering a touch-sensitive surface, or an understanding of what exactly these whiteboard might revolutionise in education. Though interactive in potential, this does not mean they are de facto interactive in their usage (Northcote et al. 2010; Smith

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et  al. 2005). Allsopp et  al. (2012, 13) highlight that there appears to be a noted ‘dichotomy between what these teachers envision to be the potential for IWBT and how they actually use it’. As others have pointed out in increasing volume, the introduction of these technologies seems to often be: technology-led’ (i.e. it is introduced because it is available) rather than ‘education-led’ (i.e. it is introduced because it is known to meet the professional needs of teachers and the educational needs of children better than existing educational tools). (Gillen et al. 2007, 244)

Indeed, despite being positioned as revolutionary tools, Gillen et al. (2007, 254) go on to note ‘the use of the IWB cannot be claimed to “transform teaching” in terms of classroom dialogue and underlying pedagogy’. This is not, of course, to state that IWBs and other technology cannot be used in creative, new, and innovative ways to invigorate teaching (See Gillen et al. 2007; Kennewell and Beauchamp 2007), but to highlight that we should be critical of the wholesale introduction of technology into classrooms (Slay et al. 2008). As Northcote et al. (2010, 496) note: Popularity and excitement associated with the use of IWBs has meant that significant financial input is required at the school level to purchase, install and prepare staff and students for use of the boards. Decisions to allocate serious financial resources for the purchase and installation of this technology are made without necessarily being informed by convincing research about how the boards impact learning.

Of course, businesses are not just involved in hardware to revolutionise and disrupt classrooms; they are also increasingly producing software to use in the classroom for various reasons. As researchers such as Selwyn (2007, 86) have suggested, this often be ‘directed towards very limited forms of technology use based around the “transferable” technical skills and operational know-how deemed useful in future employment’. The push towards private software in education seems again to be driven by profit and disruption, not necessarily by pedagogical need (Spring and Picciano 2013). As we have seen throughout this book, the reality of technology makes it hard, if not functionally impossible, to strip the social from the technical. Yet educational interventions seem acutely invested in this pursuit nonetheless in a way that (as Chap. 4 of this book highlights) can deeply exacerbate extant social inequity. In essence, the logics of these systems may be producing an increasingly capitalistic mentality towards what skills are essential for students and pupils to learn. This is readily apparent in the increase in business offering quantitative analyses from data collected in classroom. Through comparing the data gained from tracking pupils and classrooms, it seems modern classrooms are not just technology infused but capitalistically infused for a neoliberal market. As Rowe (2019, 276) notes: We are, at all times, producing data, visible and traceable. Teachers are to punch into an online and virtual ‘time-clock’ to digitally record their physical, embodied presence, which is reminiscent of industrialisation and ‘punching in’ on the factory floor (Strauss 2018). The production of student data can be sold to for-profit companies, and the OECD (2013) encourages in their report on the knowledge-based economy, ideally should be sold for profit.

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Big data is now ever-present in modern classrooms at all levels, tracking various metrics to understand student performance, providing feedback about engagement and attendance, providing insights into student mental health, desperately trying to collect as many data points as possible, and quickly positioning themselves as essential parts of education in ways which seem to prove Weber’s warnings about creeping bureaucracy without reflectivity worryingly prescient. We are seeing, for example, educational apps such as Enlitened app (see www.enlitened.org) emerge to track student mental health and well-being, intervening when data suggests an emergent mental health issue. Students are rewarded with free coffee and cinema tickets in exchange for their data, data which in turn is made accessible to educators to track changes at various levels. Whilst undoubtedly useful in some regards, we should be actively questioning what is being done with this data and how, for instance, incentives exchanged for data sits ethically. In many ways this is reminiscent of the stories emerging at the time of writing this book around menstruation-­ tracking apps sharing information with Facebook (Privacy International 2019), or the ongoing discussion about how much personal health information we’re willing to give away via wearable technology (Neff and Nafus 2016). Education is not immune to these same concerns, and we are increasingly seeing educators and pupils subject to panoptic gaze of data tracking multiple metrics in the hope of quantifying education and offering ‘tailored experiences’ at the expense of countless means of tracking, recording, and surveilling students in a panopticon 2.0. Students are often unable to resist these means of tracking, with cases of, for example, student visas and funding reliant on physical presence on a campus recorded by apps and technologies. This reliance on technology and business to fix education should deeply worry anyone involved in education. Beyond the criticisms here of technology for technology’s sake and the creeping data gaze of capitalism in the classroom, the data and discussions presented in this book provide a challenge to the use of technology as a controllable one-size-fits-all solution to educational issues. As detailed in Chaps. 3 and 4 of this book, technology can exacerbate and amplify socio-cultural disparities, create new inequalities, and act in unforeseen ways on different bodies. To introduce technology into a classroom is all too often to assume that technology is not political. This, as Noble (2018) and others aptly discuss, is hugely problematic. Designers may see their technology as neutral, but this is not the case. The very concept of neutrality often stands as a proxy for whiteness and masculinity. A quote raised in Chap. 3 of this book bears repeating here then. As Cottom (2017, 214. My emphasis) points out, educational technology is often designed with a ‘roaming autodidact’ in mind – a user who: is a self-motivated, able learner that is simultaneously embedded in technocratic futures and disembedded from place, culture, history, and markets. the roaming autodidact is almost always conceived as western, white, educated and male. as a result of designing for the roaming autodidact, we end up with a platform that understands learners as white and male, measuring learners’ task efficiencies against an unarticulated norm of western male whiteness. It is not an affirmative exclusion of poor students or bilingual learners or black students or older students, but it need not be affirmative to be effective.

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Examples of this can be seen through looking into VR technology on gaming headsets such as the Oculus Rift, which can induce motion sickness in women. As mentioned in Chap. 3, Munafo et al. (2017, 900) ‘conclude that the Oculus Rift, as a technology, is sexist in its effects’. So to might technology introduced in education often assume neutrality in ways that may be harmful to different communities. Educators should also be careful here in making generational assumptions about technological capabilities or access. Setting homework to be completed through educational software such as the currently popular MyMaths (www.mymaths.co.uk) system can disadvantage those without easy access to hardware and technology to access these systems. UK Data published at the end of 2019 (Blank and Dutton with Lefkowit 2019) suggests that higher proportions of non-users below the median income line have reduced access to the Internet and that as many as 18% of Britons may not access the Internet. Though access is rising, educators should be careful to understand the ways in which technologies are not neutral, and attention should be paid to the ways in which technology may amplify and minimise certain voices in unforeseen ways. The need for this appears all the more apparent when we consider, as Comic Theory suggests, what is negotiated and negotiable between user and design. MOOCs (massive open online courses) are touted as a key expansion area for higher education, providing ‘interactive’ online educational content, often for free, to a seemingly broad audience in line with calls for widening participation in higher education. Whilst an opening up of education is much needed, warning bells should ring when we hear designers such as Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, suggesting in a 2013 Guardian article that ‘MOOCs make education borderless, gender-blind, race-­ blind, class-blind and bank account blind’. These claims of blindness ignore that our experiences online are socio-culturally grounded at all times, with design emphasising certain closures and users constructing narrative experiences through their intertextual and extratextual experiences. Despite the potential to reach vast audiences, research suggests MOOCs perpetuate many demographic problems in higher education. MOOCs are not reaching underprivileged global students with limited access to higher education (Laurillard 2016) and seemingly are completed largely by able-­ bodied users (Iniesto and Rodrigo 2016), employed users (Macleod et al. 2014), and users with advanced degrees (Despujol et al. 2014). In this manner, MOOCs continue deep-rooted issues within higher education in failing to truly speak with and to a broad, diverse audience. As the works of activists and scholars like Lola Olufemi and Priyamvada Gopal have pointed out, this is no surprise given the continued reticence of universities to decolonise their curricula, and, as Gopal (2017) puts it, there is a need to ‘recognise that knowledge is inevitably marked by power relations’. Through this lens, claims of blindness online ignore that knowledge cannot be decoupled from historic, current, and future inequalities, no matter the context of delivery. In this manner, the calls to decolonise the curriculum cannot stop at the physical gates of universities. Instead, we must push for decolonisation of MOOCs and a renewed attempt to move towards the well-­meaning statements of Anant Agarwal with our eyes opened. The blindness Agarwal attributes to MOOCs only works if we are blinkered from the reality of knowledge as

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always political. We could also aptly critique the claims of these pervasive issues as ‘unconscious bias’ given that academia has long built and designed in ways that privilege whiteness and masculinity. In many ways, there is little unconscious about this. Technology can exacerbate this in new and complex way. As the research presented in this book suggests, any attempt to strip socio-cultural contexts, resources, and experiences through the introduction of technology ignores that technology is always and already embedded in our lives in complex ways. As Emejulu and McGregor (2019) discuss in detail, educators’ responsibility should be to engage young people in discussions of these pervasive inequalities driven by technology and not, as Agarwal suggests, to claim blindness. In similar ways to the ongoing battles in higher education at local and policy levels to fund and support humanities, arts, and social sciences, MOOCs too are pivoting to a marketised view of education, catering largely and consistently to those with advanced degrees and often focusing on practical courses in ‘traditional’ hard sciences, computer sciences, business, and engineering. It is apparent that often the humanities and sociologies are the battlegrounds for pushing issues of decolonisation, LGBTQ+ issues, feminist issues, and so on that emerge from technology, and often the sorts of research documented and discussed in this book become an afterthought in education writ large as we focus on technology in a clinical and detached manner. These critical points are largely absent from practical MOOCs in technology, which instead present a neutrality focused on practical aspects. The neutrality of these practical courses is often a default whiteness and masculinity that leads to programming only two genders, or demonetises LGBTQ content on YouTube. There are obviously huge funding and publishing biases in what science is published and presented in academia writ large. The issue evidently runs deeper than MOOCs into science and academia in general providing funding and publication opportunities focused through a specific lens. So in this manner, the neutrality and blindness that MOOC founders espouse are a continuation, reflection, and amplification of a point of view that pervades academia. It is all too easy to see Agarwal’s blindness as a positive – we are just teaching facts and knowledge – but we must critically continue to challenge this claim to neutrality, when, as Foucault continually explored, knowledge reinforces claims to power and power shapes knowledge. It seems this blindness in MOOCs is an attempt to decouple power from knowledge and present knowledge in an ‘open’ format to a broader audience (a point that, as we already discussed, is flawed given the actual audience of MOOCs). If anything, this acceptance and uncritical presentation of knowledge divorced and seemingly distanced from the power structures that uphold, produce, and support this knowledge just reinforce the claims to normality that Foucault deeply asked us to turn our eyes to. Ontologically then, this blindness is a turning of the face away from the hard questions of how this knowledge is produced and sustained. It is not so much blindness as wilfully ignoring. The blindness is agential, a choice to ignore, not a freedom from oppression, a choice to look past rather than to examine. It is the sustenance of this knowledge as ‘blind’ that is in-and-of-itself incapacitating. It is a

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refusal to open their eyes. No wonder then that there is a lack of decolonised literature and a lack of a diverse audience. They are blinding themselves. The fiction of science and practical courses as nonideological and ‘apolitical’ originates and is sustained in its contemporary practice and discourse. We might think of Thomas Hobbes’ description of Native Americans as an apparently inferior race acceptant of poor living conditions or of Hegel’s overt exclusion of Africa from the history of thought because of their supposed inferiority. Or least we think this is settled history, the current discussion around CRISPR technology allowing for designer babies free from disability and ‘abnormality’. In this way, it is not just the history of science that has a particular bias and focus on particular people, but the ongoing reality of science, both through funding, scholarship, publishing, and indeed the knowledge being produced and chased. These are issues bigger than MOOCs, but evidently they still exist in this new form of teaching which purports to remove many of these barriers. It is, if anything, this claim to be above this discussion, to be blind, that I take such strong objection to and which educational researcher, policy makers, and practitioners must actively resist. It is all too easy to close our eyes. We need to open them now more than ever. Much like the funding and publishing problems prevalent in academia which prioritise and emphasise western scholarship and Research, MOOCs here serve as a way of controlling which groups have access to resources to do science. They perpetuate the very systems they purport to disrupt. Again, the resources of higher education speak the right words of ‘widening participation’, but fundamentally struggle to effectively grapple with the idea that the knowledge and curricula they uphold itself is disenfranchising. MOOCs claim to open the doors of the ‘ivory tower’, but if anything, the blindness that Anant Agarwal talks of might be coming from the bright ivory sheen pervading and gleaning from the tower. They are blinded by the reflective ivory of the tower, shining its light outwards and inwards. One final aspect worth mentioning here is the clinicalisation of technology in education. By clinicalisation here I am drawing on Foucault’s sustained body of work unpacking the ways in which topics such as mental illness, bodies, and sexuality have increasingly become treated and viewed in clinical manners. For example, Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1979) unpacks the way in which sexuality has, over time, become the domain of science, with the focus moving from sensuality towards a clinical fragmentation of the body into definable parts. Foucault traced similar lines around attitudes to mental illness being understood in an increasingly detracted, clinical, and medicalised version. I would suggest that this attitude of cold, detached, clinicalisation is increasingly present in modern educational attitudes towards technology and computing as subjects of study. The current statutory guidance of the UK National Curriculum for computing programmes of study (Gov.UK 2019) is a prime example of this attitude. In Key Stage 1 (age 5–7), pupils should: 1. Understand what algorithms are, how they are implemented as programs on digital devices, and that programs execute by following precise and unambiguous instructions 2. Create and debug simple programs 3. Use logical reasoning to predict the behaviour of simple programs

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By Key Stage 3 (age 11–14), pupils should: 1 . Understand simple Boolean logic 2. Use two or more programming languages 3. Understand the hardware and software components that make up computer systems

And so on. Whilst these are useful skills for a modern STEM-driven job market, it is easy to see some flaws with the highly clinical nature of this approach in which logic and hardware abound. What is evidently missing from this approach is an understanding that technology is already embedded in the lives of young people, as the data and discussions in this book aptly emphasise. Technology is social. We cannot be blind to this as well. Educational institutions must provide spaces not only to understand and strip technology down to its constituent parts but to understand the embedded reality of technology. Key discussions around young peoples’ lived realities are missing from this discussion, often in a manner which plays into the pervasive narratives of the ‘digital native’ myths which often convince educators that these discussions of young peoples’ experiences with technology are not within their purview. As mentioned in Chap. 2 of this book, using an ‘immigrant/native’ dichotomy in education can lead to ‘structurally embedded de-privileging of the role of the teacher’ (Bayne and Ross 2011, 161–162) undermining their ability to guide and work with students and pupils on, in, and through technology. At the same time, we seek to somehow strip young people of the embedded nature of technology in education, banning phones in schools and banning social media in classrooms. This is not only futile as there are myriad ways around this but also largely unhelpful to young people and perhaps even an abdication of responsibility in shaping and guiding the morality of young people in our care as teachers and educators. For an apt example of the ways in which pupils will subvert these bans, we can look at the recent rise of Google Docs as a social platform in classrooms (see Loren 2019). Google Docs is ostensibly a word processor, allowing users to ‘freely’ create documents, often collaboratively. As a tool, Google Docs is often not blocked by schools and is encouraged as a space for collaboratively discussing and creating documents. There are documented cases, however, of pupils creatively using Google Docs for live chat, with different colours or fonts used to signify different users (Loren 2019). The collaborative session can be easily deleted, and it may appear to the casual viewer that pupils are just making notes on the lesson plan rather than engaging in passing notes 2.0. It is evident that young people will subvert and undermine technology bans. It is therefore precisely our place to engage them in discussions of technology in their lives rather than assuming this somehow disappears once they enter the school. The data presented in this book suggests these discussions cannot be a clinical list of rules and logics, but must be engaged in their lived realities which are infused with technology.

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7.3  C  omic Theory: Considering Design in Online Identity Performances From the data gathered and analysed, here it is clear that there is a need for a consideration of the many nuances that create specific identity performances online. This book presents Comic Theory in this regard as a framework that allows for the unpacking of the relationship between humans and design that create specific identity performances online. As discussed in Chap. 2 of this book, young people’s experiences online are diversifying increasingly, both in terms of the platforms they are using (OFCOM 2019) and in their social experiences and engagements with these platforms (Weller 2016). Of course, the ability to socially interact is not without boundaries and limitations that restrict, shape, and effect how an individual engages in social interaction. For a long time in identity research, and in sociology as a whole, the restrictions that have been studied and considered are social restrictions. Discourses and audiences have been unpacked through multiple lenses as aspects that shape and restrict actions and interactions, both online and offline. The research detailed in this book attempts to understand the interplay between other unaccounted for restrictions and limitations, specifically drawing attention to an aspect of identity performance that has been neglected in sociology, the effect of design. This focus appears to be especially necessary online given that the platforms present us with specific designs through which to act and interact, restricting the modes and methods through which we are able to present ourselves, be they the ways we can talk, the amount we can say, the topics we can discuss, the ways we can move through these spaces, the representations and image we can use, the colour pallet we are afforded, and a myriad other design choices. Online, every pixel of these social spaces is explicitly designed, and this design is highly curated. As such there is a desperate need in online research to consider how users are able to present themselves and how they deal with and negotiate these limitations and restrictions on identity presentation across a diverse array of platforms that make up the social reality for young people online (Zhao et al. 2016). There is an apparent need to understand how these curated design features are being engaged with to present identity. Goffman’s (1959) research suggests that social identity presentation is largely location specific in that the presentation of identity can change from location to location as the audience for that presentation shifts. The data presented in this book however suggests that there is a need to alter the manner in which we consider the locationally specific nature of identity performances, particularly in highly curated online spaces. The presentation of identity is not just a result of the performer considering the appropriate performance for the given location. Identity performance is instead enmeshed with, bound to, and emergent from that location, drawing on previous experiences and socio-cultural resources. This means that the identity is not just something that happens to take place on a stage, but something that emerges from specifics of that stage and that

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user. The presentation of identity online is therefore inseparable from the location in which it emerges; it is resultant from the interplay between user and design. In this manner, Comic Theory adopts the sensibility towards the non-human that Latour (2005) argues is crucial for the ongoing development of sociology and that is all the more necessary when considering identity performances in heavily curated and designed spaces. The identity performances unpacked in the analysis were phenomena reducible to neither the human nor the non-human parts but were the result of the enmeshing between these elements. The impact of the non-human can clearly not be ignored online, and the participants showed that they were grappling with many of these elements in a considered manner. However, the misleadingly named Actor-Network Theory does not provide a workable theoretical frame to unpack this enmeshing on human and non-human. Instead, ANT merely notes that researchers should attempt to pay attention to the non-human and not diminish or underestimate the ability of these elements to impact the social. Latour, perhaps purposefully given the complicated nature and macro implications of the subject matter, offers no workable framework to account for the non-human in the formation of the social. Comic Theory attempts to address this need for an account of the non-human and crucially offers a workable and flexible approach through which to unpack and account for the enmeshing of human and non-human. It does so in a fashion that allows for variation in the performance but that also unpacks why this variation is present through the concept of a locationally bound performance that is enacted by users with their own socio-cultural resources. It is hoped that, through Comic Theory, future digital research might consider identity performances that are enacted through the features available online, providing a frame to unpack how users are presenting flexible, multiple, and malleable identities on this growing range of platforms. This sensibility towards design allows the researcher to consider why and how users engage with certain features and to what effect. The data show that the trade-offs between location and performer that result in locationally bound performances need to be accounted for in a nuanced manner that allows for variation in the performance, variation in the user, and variation in location. Comic Theory attempts to provide such a consideration, allowing us to unpack and consider this nuance in a manner which is malleable and nondeterministic. Malleability is crucial given that it is established that users can be widely variable in terms of their socio-cultural backgrounds, which they bring with them to these platforms. It is also crucial given that the platforms themselves are largely variable in how they frame social interaction and in how they allow the user to act and interact. The approach towards the enmeshing of these factors therefore needs to be equally malleable and account for the myriad ways in which these variable factors can combine. Closure provides the framework through which to consider this negotiation between user and design in a malleable manner. It accounts for the manner in which design can vary, allowing the user more or less space in which to present identity and offering them an array of features to guide the creation of the identity narrative. It also accounts for the manner in which the users vary, bringing different extratextual and intertextual resources with them to the identity

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performance. This extends both to a consideration of multiple users and the ways in which individual users can change over time and location. The need for this malleable approach bears out in the data, with the platforms and the users enmeshing to create unique performances that changed across time, across users, and across platforms. Comic Theory not only captures this variety but importantly allows a workable framework for a consideration of why and how this variety emerges from the interplay and trade-offs between myriad combinations of user and location. In this manner, Comic Theory is also nondeterministic in its approach. It is apparent from the analysis that the participants did not act and use the spaces in a uniform manner. There were a variety of in the approach taken towards the platform that resulted in vastly different performances enacted for a variety of reason. Design features were not engaged with in a uniform manner and did not affect participants uniformly. Instead, the final performance was a negotiation between user and design, sometimes meaning negotiating content creation or sacrificing privacy. Further to this, tracking the participants over the course of the year allowed for a greater consideration of this flexibility and was vital for showing the shifting nature of this negotiation between design and user. The data highlighted the need for a model that could unpack the complexities of the relationship between human and non-human in a manner that allowed for changes over time, platform, and user. This suggests therefore that though trends can be found in large data samples in regard to how certain features are engaged with, there is a need to consider the subtleties of this engagement. This research further notes that this is best considered from the perspective of the users, as it is their interpretation of how they engage with the features that reveals the importance of these for their actions and interactions online.

7.4  Offering Closure Through the analysis it was apparent that a broad approach towards social media comes hand-in-hand with a broad approach towards the social experiences in these spaces. The social experiences of the participants were indeed largely variable across the range of platforms, with participants using different platforms to interact with a range of users around a variety of topics. This included interacting and ‘networking’ with known contacts, but also importantly involved interacting with a wider variety of contacts around interests and hobbies. Given this, the research notes that there is a need to consider social media beyond networking with established offline contacts (Boczkowski et al. 2018). Though this forms an important aspect of social interaction online, it is clear that this is a specific aspect of online social reality, as discussed in Chap. 4 of this book. Networking with established offline contacts has been the focus of much of the research into online experiences in recent years as social media becomes a tool for the continuation of social capital. However, this research suggests that the participant’s experiences were broader than

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this and included an array of interactions with varied and included wider audiences, engaged with for a variety of social aims. Importantly, this research notes that not only were there broad variations in the participants’ social engagements across platforms; there were also broad variation within platforms. Platforms were not used in a uniform manner, and different participants used the platforms for a variety of different social features, informed by the specific extratextual resources they bought with them to commit closure. Some participants, for example, chose only to follow established offline friends on Twitter, and some chose only to follow celebrities and those with similar interests. Some participants chose to allow their colleagues on Facebook, and others chose to restrict this to more professional websites such as a professionally fronted Twitter accounts or to LinkedIn. The engagement with the platforms is therefore realised in an individual manner by different participants, informed by their extratextual situation. This further highlights the need to consider social interactions on a platform-byplatform basis and, importantly, to not overestimate the importance of networking with established contacts at the expense of other social experiences online. When networking with established contacts was discussed, this included importantly accounting for the growing notion of context collapse that was a factor in the interactions of many of the participants (Davis and Jurgenson 2014), with multiple aspects of the participant’s lives converging upon some of the more popular platforms. Context collapse was noted as a factor that largely affected the identity performances of the participants, shaping how and why they engaged with the platforms to present identity. Brandon notes, for example, ‘I do worry about future problems. Like if a boss sees my posts or something, so I try and keep that in mind when I’m typing’. It was apparent that the participants were largely aware of the audience for their interactions and shaped their performances accordingly. This then confirms Goffman’s (1959) notion of situationally specific identity performed for a given audience. However, it is worth noting that this convergence is only present due to the unique nature of the Internet, again highlighting the need to consider social interaction online in situ as a phenomenon that emerges through and with the platforms, not on them. With a growing array of users present on a range of social media platforms, there is a growing need to prioritise the notion of closure and extratextuality when considering identity performances online. In order to understand why certain messages are expressed and sent, even upon platforms that are ostensibly considered ‘networking’ sites, an understanding of the user’s specific socio-cultural context was necessary. In this manner this research largely questions any divide between the online and the offline. Through discussions of context collapse and the manner in which the user’s extratextual socio-cultural resources affects their specific closure online, it was apparent that the offline and the online are not discrete realms, but are constantly bleeding into each other. The data shows that the specificities and differences of the online realm need to be considered in order to understand a user’s action within that space, but crucially also reveals that the users are grounded within the offline and bring this to bear on their engagement with the online. The notion of closure therefore provides a necessary new lens through which to unpack this

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relationship between specific spaces and socio-culturally grounded users and in the process challenges the notion of digital duality (Jurgenson 2012), arguing that the online is necessarily and continually grounded in the offline realms. The offline realm does more than just bleed into the offline; it informs our actions and interactions and shapes our approach, our reading, our uses, and engagement. They are at all times linked. As such, this research notes online interactions cannot be understood without a consideration of the socio-culturally grounded (inter)actor. It was crucial that this be understood from the perspective of the participants, as it was their specific commitment of closure that was necessary to understand why they presented themselves in the manner they did at that given time within that specific location. In doing so, my interpretations and assumptions of these spaces were not overtly imposed upon the participants, and the research was able to explore how these spaces were read and understood by the participants. This is all the more evident when considering Molly’s case. It was apparent that the change in context that Molly underwent from home to university changed her engagement with social media and her approach to the platforms. She began to follow new users online that were pertinent to her course and also began engaging with new platforms to maintain contact with her friends. In this regard, her usage of the platforms could not be separated from her given situation. Brandon too noted that a change in offices led to different approaches towards what was appropriate to share online. Indeed, most participants suggested that their offline socio-cultural grounding augmented their online actions and interactions in some manner. Following the participants over the course of a year revealed that their engagements with the platform were largely temporally and socio-culturally bound. Future research in this area could therefore consider the effect of specific socio-cultural shifts – such as educational transitions – on social media use. Such changes in situation bring with them evident changes in social needs and concerns. A focus upon a specific shift in socio-cultural situation could allow for comparison across subjects undergoing the same socio-cultural shift and could provide insights into specific concerns and patterns of change during this time. Understanding the participants’ contextualisation of these platforms was therefore vital to proceed to unpack their actions and interactions within those spaces. Through this process, it became apparent that the participants’ contextualisations of the platforms were widely variable and dependent upon their specific situation. Work, studying, friendship groups, and family were all noted as aspects that shaped how and why these particular participants were engaging with the features during the course of data collection. Their uses of the platforms were not uniform, as different concerns shaped how they committed closure and completed the narrative. It is not simply enough therefore to note which features are engaged with. There is a need to understand why these specific features are used in the manner they are. Closure in this regard helped to unpack the participants’ engagement with the features of the website, with the participants bringing their own specific contexts to their engagement with the platforms. Through the interviews it was apparent that the extratextual situation of the participants varied and that their specific situation affected how and why they engaged with the features.

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The concept of closure and extratextuality then allows for a consideration of the enmeshing of user and design, placing the emphasis upon how the design is interpreted and understood by the user, which in turn affect how they engage with the platforms to present identity. In this manner, the design of the platform is enmeshed with the user to produce unique identity performances. The idea of completing the narrative through closure avoids determinism whilst still allowing for a consideration of how the performance is necessarily bound to the space in which it emerges, thus acknowledging and accounting for the real and tangible impact of design. As such, the concept of closure presents a usable and flexible frame with which to understand how the users understand, manage, and negotiate their identities, their interactions, and their actions online in line with their specific needs and situations. Given the ability of Comic Theory to unpack the interplay between user and design, it is suggested that, in future research, the framework should be explored from a range of socio-cultural backgrounds than this particular project was able to access in order to further explore and test the validity of the theoretical framework. Further to this, Comic Theory suggests that there are more manners of engaging with platforms socially than merely producing content and that social media plays many shifting and complicated roles in the social lives of young people. These roles again vary from user to user, platform to platform, and technology to technology. It is therefore vital that we not only consider the nuances at play between user, design, and technology to create specific identity performances but that we also shift our attention away from the obvious data production to consider wider uses of the platform that are equally important to the user and, in some cases, form the bulk of their engagements with the platforms. Comic Theory ultimately provides a workable, usable, and transferable frame through which to consider and account for design in identity presentation and through which to consider the role of the non-human, without the research becoming lost in an unending web of connections. Whereas ANT and similar frames have presented the necessity for a shift towards the consideration of the non-human, here Comic Theory proposes a workable framework to unpack this and to consider the role of the non-human in a nuanced manner with regard to identity presentation. This importantly is presented in a nondeterministic fashion to consider human and non-human enmeshing to create different performances. Identity is ultimately malleable and grounded in the specific space in which it emerges. The performed identity online then is not purely the result of humans. It is guided by the many subtleties and variabilities of design and technology and equally and is shaped and fulfilled by the user. Comic Theory holds that it is these elements enmeshing that produce an identity performance and that are continually renegotiated as the performance plays out. Through this purposefully adaptive approach, researchers are encouraged to move beyond the consideration of one or two platforms alone and instead engage with the growing variety of design elements available across a growing range of platforms. This is increasingly important in social media research if we are to examine the role of social media in the daily lives of users. This evidently involves more than just content production, more than just peer-to-peer interaction, and more than

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just Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, it is noted in this research that Facebook can be considered an atypical social media experience and that focusing upon this platform alone may be misrepresentative to the diverse online experiences of young people. As such, research needs to move beyond the focus on SNS that pervades digital research and acknowledge the complex reality of social experiences online. Finally then, this book wishes to conclude by referring back to the words of Larkin, written in 2008, who noted that ‘what media are needs to be interrogated, not presumed’ (Larkin 2008, 3). Comic Theory holds this to be true, especially in an age when they are increasingly present in the lives of young people. As this chapter makes clear, this is also pertinent to educational technology writ large, which is often utilised in a heavy-handed manner, or, as Anant Agarwal hints, engaged within a manner which presumes and exudes blindness. This interrogation is vital to understand the role of the platforms in the social interactions of young people and, as this chapter discusses, a vital challenge for educators, policy makers, and researchers alike. As this chapter notes, we need sociological understanding of technology in education. It is my hope that, through Comic Theory, this much-needed interrogation can be conducted in a manner that allows for the deftness needed in addressing the growing array of experiences online. The challenge to educational researchers, practitioners, and policy makers remains a simple but necessary response to Agarwal’s claims of blindness: open your eyes. Sociological research continues to explore the overlaps between technology, culture, and education. This work provides a much-needed critical consideration to the introduction of technology in education. In this manner, this research joins others such as Emejulu and McGregor (2019, 132) in calling for a new framing of digital citizenship in education, one which acknowledges that: a developed sense of the political – and how it shapes social and cultural relations – remains largely absent in the field of digital education…Radical digital citizenship should also debunk magical thinking whereby the ‘digital’ is invoked as a fetish, operating to obscure the material inequalities and socially exploitative relations upon which the proliferation of digital technology is premised.

Technology cannot be removed from the political and social contexts in which it is so deeply embedded. Educational responses to technology similarly should not spend time and effort desperately propping up an unsustainable divide between the technological and the social. This does a disservice to our pupils and ill-prepares them for the realities of technology in their everyday lives. As the discussion in Chap. 2 of this book suggests, we cannot assume that young people have the skills to navigate this space, nor can we abdicate our responsibility in shepherding them through this sociotechnical world. As Emejulu and McGregor (2019, 143) go on to state: Digital education can play an important role in helping individuals and groups desire more for themselves than being a commodity and performing a digital self online. We think digital education can help us to desire more from the internet than just the commodification of digital spaces. We also think that digital education can help us understand systemic social, economic and environmental inequalities in a new and different way.

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We find ourselves then at a crossroads of how to work with technology in the classroom. Down one path lies our current destination, bound up in catch-all implementation of technology, in Agarwal’s claims of blindness, in teaching young people to comply to the whims of social media companies in the name of digital citizenship read as good behaviour and in the creeping spectre of bureaucratic neoliberal capitalism into education. Down the other path, the path less travelled, lies a consideration of the ways in which technology continues to exacerbate inequity, an overt attention to the sociotechnical, a promise to build educational policy in a way which encourages young people to be critical of the design of the platforms they use, and a move towards education that liberates rather than pacifies. As Paulo Freire (1985, 122) put it, ‘Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral’. We, as educators, stand in the position to dictate which path we choose for our pupils and how we choose account for technology in education. Neutrality and blindness have pervaded our response to technology to date. It’s time we changed paths.

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