Teen Consumption and Production of New Media
Preliminary Research

David Zemmels
Comm 6640
Summer 2006

This is should be considered preliminary research motivated by increasing teen use of the New Media and Internet Communication, focused on-line community-based web sites.  This is an important area of study for a member of Higher Education since this age group will be entering University within the next 5-10 years, so are the next generation of college students. Two key studies found that teens are far more ‘wired’ that any other demographic, and they are consuming more media in less time than ever before.

I ask: what does this mean about the way this new generation thinks, communicates and learns with new media, and how can communication-based rhetorical scholarship be used to answer this question? In the last few years, there has been little qualitative rhetorical scholarship in the area of changing habits in new media consumption, although there are obviously immense changes captured by several interesting quantitative studies. Changes in new media consumption and practices are rapid, and this group of ‘wired teens’ appears to be driving it to a large extent since 9 out of 10 of them are the consumers of these new media. Does rhetorical scholarship have the tools to analyze these fleeting on-line artifacts?

These artifacts represent important trends that shape the fabric of online culture, but they move so fast that traditional scholarship cannot keep up.  Quantitative analysis can identity trends in discourse much faster that qualitative methods, so using the two methods in tandem is the best way to capture the trends before they fade away and give way to the next hot trend.  Individually, they may or may not be meaningless, but collective research in this style could be helpful to document these artifacts before they are gone, erased, off-line.

I chose 3 web sites for rhetorical analysis that appeared to be frequented by teens that fit the demographic of a wired teen as defined by Pew research studies cited below.  I examined the sites daily for 10 days, taking a snapshot approach for rhetorical analysis.  Further research will track trends over longer periods of time and compare the results.

I initially conclude that the critical approaches suggested so far by the literature are not adequate for studying the kind of sites I chose, mostly because the most common characteristics of the culture surrounding the sites is that new media and Internet users, particularly teens, are no longer just consumers of media, they are increasingly creators of it.  This makes the distinctions between rhetor and audience almost impossible to separate, and is the biggest shift in media usage that research found. And the content is not just text contributions such as blogging, e-mail and instant messaging; now video imagery are becoming commonplace.

Quantitative Research on “Wired Teens”

In an increasingly ‘wired’ world, growth in the use of Internet communication technologies is particularly prevalent in teens. In the first of two key reports, the Pew Internet & American Life conducted studies on teen use of technology.  In the study dated July 2005 (Lenhart, Madden & Hitlin, 2005) on teen use of media, they classify teens as 12-17 years old and labeled them “Millennials.” They found that this group is very technology savvy, as evidenced by the finding that almost 9 out of 10 teens use the Internet. Clearly, youth are driving the transition to a fully wired and mobile nation both culturally and technologically, since 87% of teens are fully wired, compared to 66% of adults.  In other words, teens are “digital natives in a land of digital immigrants” (Lee Rainie, “Life Online: Teens and technology and the world to come.” Speech to annual conference of Public Library Association Boston. Downloaded 08/06/06 from http://www.pewinternet.org).

       The second report, a Kaiser Family Foundation study (Roberts, Foehr & Rideout, 2005), classifies children ages 8-18 as “Generation M” where the M is for media.  The survey found that the amount of media being consumed is increasing faster than the hours spent consuming it.  This means teens are multitasking: watching TV while surfing the web or text messaging while watching videos online. This could have significant ramifications for how they learn and listen when in school, as in every other part of their lives.  Will the tradition lecture/discussion format of undergraduate classes continue to hold their attention? Is that the best delivery method, or is it dated? How much longer will assigned readings be the best way for these students to learn a topic? What electronic forms of reading and learning will be best suited for this generation?

The Kaiser study did look at the relationship between grades and media usage and there wasn’t a significant difference between those with high to low grades in school, except that those with low grades tended to spend more time on video games and less on reading per day.

       Further, teens are not just passive consumers of New Media, but active producers.  Another Pew study (Lenhart & Madden, 2005) found that “57% of online teens create content for the Internet. That amounts to half of all teens ages 12-17, or about 12 million youth.”  These teens have a very different understanding of media in their lives that any previous generation. This generation has been steeped in media.  They understand at an almost unconscious level the fundamentals of media presentation such as narrative structures, editing, etc. It should not be surprising that they can and do create media without formalized training as media producers or in the technology.

Doing Rhetorical Analysis of Internet Communications

Armed with the research data outlined above, I must consider first what it means to do rhetorical analysis of new media virtual environments, as opposed to more traditional rhetorical analyses of written texts and other artifacts. Does it require different approaches?

As I have discussed in previous writings (COMM 4350, Spring 2006), new media as Internet Communication is best be described as a collection of fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials. This challenges implicit modernist rhetorical assumptions about the permanence of the text as a repository of true meaning, as stable, coherent, and knowable. Thus, as Warnick suggests: “Rhetorical criticism, particularly that which was grounded in neoclassical rhetoric, seemed poorly suited to study these new media forms of communication” (2001: 61). I will briefly summarize my previous findings in three specific areas in which the study of Internet environments challenges traditional critical rhetorical practice as it relates to this research: (re)defining the text for analysis, the changing nature of the audience and authorship, and the ambiguity of public discursive space.

(Re)defining the text for analysis: we must immediately recognize that as text becomes hypermedia, it transcends the physical limits of print media by becoming an information system that is fluid; constantly changing and updating.  The challenge in rhetorical analysis becomes defining that text, and justifying the boundaries chosen to define it. Unlike traditional forms of rhetorical analysis, which are best suited to printed texts that unfold linearly over time and in idea, hypertext environment is an “unstable and rather limitless text” (Warnick, 1998b: 75). Hypertext, characterized by the text’s ability to link to other texts, raises difficult questions about the starting point of textual analysis as well as the point of closure. One can never read all the text in the way printed texts can be read, nor even be sure (s)he is reading the text in the same way other users of hypertext are reading it.  Rhetoricians of new media must recognize that hypertexts cannot be mastered, only sampled.

The changing nature of the audience and indeterminacy of authorship: Defining the identity of the audience as distinct from the author is increasingly difficult. In cyberspace, messages are ‘fanned out,’ cut and pasted, e-mailed and forwarded, making identification of a specific message for a specific audience difficult: “Everyone is a rhetor and everyone is an audience” and  “the notion of a discrete audience for a discrete message has become quite problematic” (Warnick, 1998b: 77). Messages in cyberspace are being shaped to the needs and expectations of the audience, as with any mass mediated environments, but now audiences can reshape the messages, pass them on, thus becoming the rhetor. This disaggregation of the audience leads Warnick (1998b: 78) to advise that any rhetorical analysis of new media be very careful making any claims about audience “effect.”

Further problematizing notions of audience and author is the very nature of virtual identities and events, which can be easily constructed in ways that have very little to do with “off-line” conceptions of self and the ‘real’ world.  Genders are reversed, images are altered, anonymity is relatively easy to maintain, and pseudo realities and events (often focused on parody) are created for the sake of entertainment. Authors of electronic texts often and routinely disguise their identities, indeed it is expected and assumed. Turkle (1995) found that participants often swap genders and construct identities that are purely virtual. On-line participants “become the authors not only of the text, but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction” (Turkle, 1995: 11).

The ambiguity of public discursive space: There is growing and significant evidence that Internet communications are changing the very notion of public discursive space. “The new century has witnessed the emergence of two distinct publics – one in real life and the other in the virtual reality of cyberspace,” which is “a discursive space produced by the creative work of people whose spatial locations are ambiguous and provisional” (Mitra & Watts, 2002: 484-486). Internet communication, and the web and new media access it provides, enable dispersed individuals to use Internet Communication technologies to form discursive cybercommunities based on shared values and interests. 

As result, one side effect is that relationships online become a constant negotiation between our online and offline selves, between the many representations of self and other (speaker and listener), and the electronic interface through which we represent ourselves in the cyberworld. This demonstrates the potential for one’s presence in public discursive cyberspace to produce multiple, and potentially conflicting identities.  Individuals are part of both online and offline communities in different spatial locations, each potentially grounded in different and perhaps competing attitudes and values.

Research strongly suggests that the ideology of Western hegemony in culture has infiltrated online communities as well. On-line discursive space is not immune to realities of off-line society. Warnick (1999), concerned about how audiences are hailed or interpellated online, identified and analyzed specific instances of CMC where women have been marginalized and excluded even as they were being invited to become involved. Inspired by Turkle’s (1995) observation that “we construct our technologies, and our technologies construct us and our times” (Turkle, 1995: 46), Warnick found patterns of what she describes as “the discursive construction of elitism” (2).

It is this area of the Web that interests this researcher, and the focus of the Web sites chosen for analysis.

Theoretical Solutions for Rhetorical Analysis of Internet Communication

One aspect of scholarly constructions of knowledge that the overall problems outlined above appear to challenge is the primacy of Modernist notions of theory building. Instead, new media rhetorical scholars advocate methodologies that avoid generalizing and “analyze specific instances of CMC” (Gurak in Warnick, 1998: 74) since the texts are “often anonymous, dispersed, fragmented, and constructed for audiences whose reactions are hard to identify and describe” (Warnick, 1999: 3). This view is further substantiated by Foot, Warnick and Schneider (forthcoming) who, in a study of Web-based memorializing, see the phenomenon as an example of “an emerging set of practices mediated by computer networks” thereby aligning their research with “the practice turn in contemporary theory” that they see as emerging across the social sciences and humanities. They posit, “Web practices encompass the acts of making by which Web site producers create, appropriate, manipulate, link, and/or display digital objects that can be accessed by Web browsers.”

Along these lines, researchers have employed a number of strategies and criteria for defining and analyzing ‘digital artifacts,’ which I will use in this analysis. 

The first step is letting go of print-centric methodologies for studying text and discourse. Warnick (1998b) suggests that hypertexts “might best be studied as a system of circulating signifiers in a larger discursive environment” (76). Once these “systems of text” are identified, “regularities and patterns of communication behavior” will emerge to assist in understanding how these discourses function, leading to identification of specific rhetorical strategies in web sites such as composite narratives, argument schemes, texts co-opting or appropriating positions, and visual presentation as supporting or replacing verbal messages (Warnick, 1998b: 82).

Another solution offered by rhetorical scholars of Internet communication is “intertextual” methodologies. Intertextuality “considers the way in which a single text is connected with other similar texts” rather than how it connects to a receiver, and where “the effectivity of a single text depends on the larger discourse it is part of” (Mitra and Cohen; 1999: 182). In the digital realm, every Web text has the capacity to be ‘linked’ to many others Web texts. Indeed, without the ‘hyperlink,’ the Web would not exist since each text would live in relative isolation on individual computers. Hyperlinks are the glue that holds the form of the World Wide Web, at least as we know it.

The popularity of a Web site is also a common criterion for text selection, as defined by the number of ‘hits’ a site gets. It seems more is better since, as Mitra (1997) argues, it is far more likely that the ‘popular’ pages will address the tensions he was interested in studying (164).

Zappen (2005) suggests interesting new considerations for rhetorical analysis in cyberspace; that studies of new digital media explore “not only persuasion for the purpose of moving audiences to action or belief, but also self-expression for the purpose of exploring individual and group identities and participation and creative collaboration for the purpose of building communities of shared interest” (322). The three sites studied in this essay are good examples of discursive space for self-expression and identity exploration.

Constructs for Rhetorical Analysis of Internet Communication

Given the anonymous, dispersed, and fragmented nature of Internet communication, it is difficult to identify specific constructs for humanistic scholarship.  One way suggested by the literature of conceptualizing what role the Internet could play in real and virtual life is to identify patterns in the characteristics of Internet communications as artifacts for analysis.  These patterns can be developed into dimensions that form a heuristic of characteristics to use for systematically and comparatively analyzing Web discourses. Gurak (1997) identified some basic characteristics of the technology that could be an early formation of dimensions of Web discourse for further study: speed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity. Each of these characteristics affects the quality and quantity of communication online in significant ways.

In a study of Web-based memorializing, Foot, Warnick and Schneider (forthcoming) offer eight dimensions they found in their research, of which they suggest three that could be useful for investigations of other forms of CMC: voice, co-production, and intended audience. They see voice as being either “a single (individual or collective) voice or multiple voices.” Co-production refers to whether a Web site is “produced entirely by a single individual or organization, or is there evidence of a co-produced process” between independently organized actors. Since the mode of address in the text of a site has a presumed intended audience, one can ascertain much about the values and self-identification of the producer(s) of a Web site.

Finally, Mitra and Watts (2002) present a compelling case for voice as a construct that can help us think about the Internet and cyberspace as discourse, and offer a much more complex notion of the dimension than Foot, Warnick and Schneider. Mitra and Watts (2002) argue that traditional social theory assumes an identification of place when thinking about voice as a construct. Cyberspace as a site of public discourse has no boundaries; it emphasizes “placelessness.” (480).  Further, structures of power are contingent on the centrality and place. Since the discourse of cyberspace is made of many voices with no physical place, this decenters any one voice as privileged over another. To reclaim the construct of voice, they suggest a more Ciceronian ideal of the consummate rhetor where “the eloquence of voice becomes critical to gaining a wide acceptance rather than the connection among speaker, place, and power” (490). In this view, “meaning is now produced in a process of negotiation between a speaker and reader where power is not a commodity held by either of them” (491). Mitra and Watts (2002) offer four conclusions: the responsibility of the speaker changes; the irresponsible voices on the Internet are now open for review, and the reader must take a position of responsibility and authority, and choose between the voices (and the need for new forms of media literacy); and finally, “scholar interested in examining the Internet phenomenon should begin to consider carefully what is being said and how” (494-6).

Analysis

I chose 3 web sites for rhetorical analysis that appeared to be frequented by teens that fit Pew’s demographic of a wired teen.  Two sites are identified specifically by the Pew Report as examples of web sites frequented by teens, and the third was a convenience sample recommended by my daughter, who herself fits the demographic of the wired teen well. 

They all rely on forms of visual communication as well as textual forms of communication in their community building and communication activities. They appear to be populated by self-selecting individuals who share a common interest as denotes a cyber community Web site online.

All the research online was done in a 10 day period of August 12 – 22, 2006.  I considered this a useful window for defining the rhetorical artifact because I felt that by the end of that period, I began to see repetition and patterns of usage of the sites by participants. So it is considered a snapshot of that time period and may not necessarily be generalizable.  However, this is consistent with the literature cited above that suggests that it is reasonable to ‘sample’ a discourse in order to find examples of “an emerging set of practices mediated by computer networks.”

YouTube.Com

Established in February 2005, YouTube allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. Hence, the site’s catch line is “Broadcast Yourself.” It seems to be a web sensation, serving up over 100 million videos per day according to a CNN report. While there is no evidence on the site that it was created specifically for teens, that group seems to be the primary users of the site based on random samples of individual profiles and the apparent age of people in the videos.  There are interesting exceptions, like a 79-year-old man from England whose online ramblings are widely viewed (his first video has had 1,626,652 views in the first two weeks), but most of the more popular videos are posted by teens. Popularity is a criteria suggested by Mitra (1997).

Video content ranges from personal videos to rock videos to movie trailers, clips from TV shows and movies, and even whole documentaries. YouTube explicitly does not allow adult or pornographic materials, presumably a necessary ingredient for a web site focused on wired teens, and does not allow posting of copyrighted materials, although such material can found in abundance. One source went so far as to call YouTube.Com the Napster of video.

MySpace.Com

MySpace.Com is a fairly mainstream site with the catch line “A Place for Friends.” It is described as “an online social networking service, allowing users to share messages, interests and photos with a growing body of friends. Users can send emails, post videos, listen to music, and write blogs...” (Retrived from Answers.com, 08/12/06). Founded in 2003 as a site for rock musicians to share their music and videos, it was sold to News Corporation in 2005 for $580 million dollars. This fact alone speaks volumes for the mainstream interest in these Web communities.

It is more specifically a blogging site, rather than a media site like YouTube.Com, but video media is also prevalent.  Another parallel is that the “Most Popular Blogs” are by younger people, although not necessarily teens as the Pew report categorizes them. 

MySpace.Com is explicitly focused on creating online community of friends.  For example, the moment I created an account, I already had a friend waiting for me: Tom.  I wondered who this person could be and why he was so quick to want to be my friend.  I found out he is actually an employee of MySpace.Com who is detailed to help new users if I have any questions or problems.  Indeed, he is everyone’s friend as I discovered, and there is even an interesting and amusing popular video someone made about how Tom has become their best friend.

Perhaps due to the highly commercialized nature of MySpace as it has evolved since its inception, many of the personal sites actually are links to commercial sites.  It has become an almost conflicting mix of commercialism and personal self-expression, communication and community building.

Vampirefreaks.Com

This is a somewhat different community than the first two. This one my daughter suggested. She is 14 years old, has more than one electronic device with her at most times, and uses the Internet almost every day, thus fits well into the demographic of a wired teen as described by the Pew Report.  She describes the site as an “alternative MySpace” that is populated primarily by “Emo kids and Goths” (personal communication, 08/08/06). What is telling and interesting about this view is that it implies that the Internet and new media in general, and MySpace specifically, are already considered mainstream by at least some wired teens, who then use that as the standard to which alternative spaces are judged.

Unlike the first two, this site is focused on a specific group of people: youth alternative views of society. The log-on button says, “Prepare to be Assimilated,” supporting the idea of the apparent need of users to belong to the community created through the site. The site boasts over 500,000 members, so is a fraction of the size of the other two.  Random viewing of member profiles suggests that most are teens or 20-somethings. Unlike the other two sites, video isn’t a main communication option.  Users mostly upload a few still images of themselves and their favorite band, etc., but otherwise the site has a traditional text based community site structure.

Users are primarily organized by “cults” which are essentially user groups found on the other web sites. An on-line retailer called “fuckthemainstream.com,” where users can buy ‘official’ Goth clothing and accessories, sponsors the site. Therefore, on the surface, it appears is a community formed by shared values as defined by material consumption, to a large extent.  However, digging deeper in the site, I found a college student studying computer programming started it in 1999. He claims to have added the online store so he could afford to manage the site full-time.

Findings

I observed a wide variety of fragmented and dispersed texts and imagery, but three patterns circulating throughout stood out.  They are the aesthetic qualities of the interfaces, the increasing of production of media by participants of these sites, and the blurring of public and private in these discursive spaces.

Design Anarchy

One aspect of these web sites that is a noticeable pattern is what has been called “Design Anarchy.” The three web sites offer no new technologies and aren’t especially well designed or laid out as web interfaces. This does not seem to detract from their popularity.  In fact, it seems to be unnoticed at least, and embraced as best.  Some users seem to take pride in relatively unique expressions of self by customizing their personal sites.  There are opportunities to customize MySpace and YouTube personal sites with images and colors in the background, etc., but my research found that few really took advantage of these options. Those that did most often made what an artist might call ‘questionable’ design choices.  The result is sites with poor visual layouts, often crowded with hard to read text and hyperlinks, random photos, and almost always with music playing automatically upon entering the site.  A professional web designer would probably say that most all the rules of good graphic design and interface had been broken.

This seems to problematize Mitra’s conception of voice as taking its authority from “the eloquence of voice” in which it is presented.  I suspect this may be a generational issue.  Older generations that grew up with nightly news anchors and others may use eloquence as a criterion in which to judge the authenticity of the ‘speaker,’ but teens are less concerned with eloquence and privilege the quality of the entertainment experience, and perhaps even the challenges to traditional ways of doing things, even aesthetically. Authenticity of the experience seems to be accomplished through the ideas presented more than the manner of its presentation. This seems to move new media analysis even further from ideas like McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” In these cases, the medium seems a secondary consideration. The message is the content of the site, not its method or quality of presentation.

Me Media replace Mass Media

Given the Kaiser report, traditional more passive consumption of mass media is not being replaced as yet. Instead, teens are multitasking to enable not only increased consumption but also increased production of new media forms. With only minimal technical knowledge, and access to a digital camera and computer, anyone can now produce and distribute media online, and teens are doing it. One news source called this new type of media usage “Me Media.” 

While there is every conceivable kind of video content found online, it is the personal ‘video blogs’ that are most interesting from a rhetorical perspective, and perhaps not coincidentally from a popularity perspective. I picked videos to study with the most ‘views,’ so based on popularity as Mitra (1997) suggests, and they were usually short ‘snapshots’ of someone’s personal life.  For example, a 17-year-old girl from Australia, who did a rapper imitation, received over 600,00 views in the three days after she posted the video on YouTube.Com. She is also prolific, posting 9 videos in one week.  One was a direct response to posts by others, answering their questions (“I am from Australia, this is an Australian accent” pointing to her mouth) and other details about her life, such as footage from a dance concert she recently performed in.

Another very popular ‘video blogger’ is a young white girl with the screen name of ‘lonelygirl15,’ who appears to be around 16 years-old, although her YouTube.Com profile says she is 103. She has posted 21 videos in two months and has had a total of over 1,166,000 views (as of 08/20/06). Her video posts have the appearance of home movies where she talks about everything from being mad at her parents and her boyfriend, to her views on religion, science, and current events. From a purely technical perspective, they are always single camera set-ups in what appears to be her bedroom at home. There are messes on the bed and floor, and posters on the wall: a typical teenager’s room. She usually speaks directly into the camera (direct address) like she is having an intimate conversation with you (the viewer.)  However, the video submissions are clearly heavily edited, so her narrative is being carefully constructed prior to posting. Indeed, there is a marked increase in complexity of the videos, in terms of message as well as technical handling, as time goes by. She seems to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the medium and its potential. This may be evidence that Generation M has an almost subconscious but extensive understanding of media practices such as narrative structure, editing, etc.

One interesting point alluded to above is: although YouTube.Com is primarily a video-based site rather than a text-based site, it is still quite communicatively interactive like other blogs.  There are conversations going on through video response submission, message boards, and chat rooms.  Someone makes a video, others post videos within hours, sometime minutes, in response. There are many instances when it is even a conversation of sorts, similar to IM and such.

There was frequent evidence of the blurring between rhetor and audience afforded by these communication technologies.  A term that has emerged in popular literature that best describes how these types of texts circulate throughout the public virtual sphere is “viral video,” which refers to “video content, which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email messages and media sharing websites.” (1) Media now spreads not only through linear channels like television, but spread in time and space like a virus: infecting computer systems as a video is played and replayed, posted and reposted, edited and re-edited, copied and pasted.

CyberCommunities as public social spheres

As previous research has found (including Turkle, 1995, Reeves and Nash, 1996), communication and social practices remain largely the same in virtual space as they do in RL, and in some cases, negative practices are even enhanced by the virtual environment. The difference seems to lie in privileging the act of experiencing something on-line over actually doing something. Internet communications appears to afford a greater opportunity of participation, but is it an illusion of participation more than action?

The most significant finding for me is that while I was struck by the quantity and interest in producing amateur videos and images, as I already said. There is the willingness to upload personal moments for the whole world to see. Is “Me Media” actually becoming the new form of mass media?  It is not just a select few friends, family and acquaintances as with e-mail and other seemingly now passé forms of electronic communication. While there are many videos intended for public consumption, like music videos, etc., there seems to be little embarrassment in also putting on-line a video that was shot in one’s bathroom mirror of oneself dancing to a favorite song: it is out there for the world to see, respond to, and comment on. Otherwise private moments are being documented and placed online. Talk about wearing your life on your sleeve! This is an example of a significant shift in what teens appear to perceive as public and what is private, another line that is blurred by new media technology. Perhaps there are not two publics, as Mitra & Watts (2002) suggested, but one new kind of emerging public space where the line between personal and private, and what is for public viewing, are blurred and contested. Do wired teens see a difference any longer?

In a unique way, there is an intimacy as well as distance at the same time.  Users are invited into the intimate details of one person’s life, but without really knowing whom the person really is. As another example of this, the #1 most popular blog (in terms of views) on MySpace.Com during the period I studied was by a woman whose profile says she is 27 years-old, but she says “It clearly states on my profile that I am lying about my age.”  This statement leads one to wonder what else she is lying about and why, but that is probably part of the appeal of her blogs.  The question that came to my mind is:  is her true identity really important for anyone other than those asking for a date in RL (real life)? Her blogs are long monologues (self-proclaimed “rants”) about everything from society in general to individuals within it, to her views on sex, politics, driving on freeways, and so on. Her blog posts are edgy, laced with explicative statements and candor about herself, her relationships, and life. They are entertaining, intriguing, and complex.  This seems to be definitive of the most popular sites so why people are looking for on these kinds of web sites.  If the purpose was to fulfill an experiential need for readers, it does so well.  Does it matter who actually wrote the blogs?  I think not.  People enjoy it without proof.

Interestingly, there is increasing examples that these amateur media producers can occasionally become forces that need to be reckoned with by the traditional public spheres through mass media institutions. A recent article out of Virginia entitled “Senator's comment stirs up Web hornet's nest” was distributed nationally beginning on 08/16/06. It was about presidential hopeful George Allen who, while on a routine campaign stop, made a simple statement that appeared to be racist. It might have been missed completely except it was caught on video by an amateur videographer.  Within hours the video clip was on YouTube.com and by the next day, “Allen's footage was the most-watched of the day -- with more than 77,000 views” according to the article. The article speculates that this incident “may have been the most concrete example of an even more sophisticated, constantly evolving Internet audience.” Further, the reporter supported the notion of how rapid change in media is afforded by Internet technology: “A year ago, campaigns struggled to keep up with Virginia's insatiable political bloggers. This election cycle already is being referred to as The Year of YouTube -- a reference to a popular Web site that allows users quickly to upload, search for and play video snippets.” In the 2004 election year, e-mail and web sites (Howard Dean’s fame for example) were the new political frontier, and it was bloggers that held sway on public opinion. This year is becoming “the Year of YouTube” for mid-term elections, a site that only started in March 2005. I eagerly await next year’s trend.

Otherwise, there were many other clear examples of wider social and cultural practices being enacted in virtual space. There seems to be little difference as Reeves and Nash (1996) and Gurak (1997) noted between the real world and virtual public spheres.  My observations support previous research that found that most of the intricacies of social practice in public life are carried into these virtual environments.  I offer three example.

First, one of the ties that bind these communities together is irreverence toward traditional social authority that is common in youth. Another is defining that alternative self through commercial consumption.  VampireFreaks.Com links to the on-line retailer called “fuckthemainstream.com” is where users can buy official Goth clothing and accessories. Thus the mere act of purchasing something from this site defines one as not mainstream, and part of this particular on-line community.  Defining mainstream is not even necessary, one just needs to choose that which claims to be the alternative.

Second, the phenomenon of ‘flaming’ is common on every site I visited. It seems that virtual public discourse does not handle controversy any better that traditional public spheres of discourse. Gurak’s (1997) study of online discussion groups found that participants, drawn together by their like-mindedness, tended to penalize anyone who disagreed with the group norms. Gurak and others found that group deliberations could degenerate into ‘flaming,’ which is very aggressive behavior that seems to be enhanced by the anonymity and physical separation of individuals in cyberspace.

Yet another example is the age-old act of bullying of kids.  In a poll commissioned by Fight Crime: Invest in Kids (2) and released in July, 2006, one third of all teens say they have been a victim of ‘cyber-bullying,’ which means using electronic devices to “send or post cruel or harmful messages or images about an individual or a group.” The report found cyber-bullying to be worse than its schoolyard counterpart because there seems to be “no respite or refuge for the victims as cyber bullying can go on 24-hours a day and invade a victim's home.” While the victim can choose not to read the e-mails for IMs, they cannot control others who might read the messages on web sites, blogs, and other venues online where messages can be posted. So while cyber-bullying is really just a continuation of an existing social practice, it is in some ways much worse and harder to avoid.

Conclusions

My conclusions have two parts: those made at the end of the time period in which I viewed the on-line communities (the snapshot), and an unanticipated turn of events that occurred as I was finishing this essay: One of the video bloggers I studied was exposed as a fraud and received significant mass media attention.  This led to rethink some conclusions.

Initial Conclusions

The constructs recommended by rhetorical scholars mentioned above do not seem to serve the analysis of MySpace.Com and YouTube.Com well, but work better for the Vampirefreaks.Com site. The difference seems to be how targeted the site is: its intended audience as Foot, Warnick and Schneider (forthcoming) suggested.  Thus, those constructs seem to serve scholarly research best when studying sites that served a specific community (on-line or not) where the common interests that drew participants were clearly outlined.  However, these relatively new sites (MySpace.Com in 2003, YouTube.Com in 2005) serve what appears to be a far more randomized and even unintended community. The shared interest is experiencing media, mostly in the form of entertaining short videos, with ‘friends’ with similar interests.  The racial, cultural, emotional, and ethnic ties in the research cited above was less easy to identify on these sites, since the common interest seems to just be personal experience. Hence, ‘Me Media’ and ‘Generation M’ are apt descriptions of these practices. Can it be that the act of electronic media consumption is becoming a culture in itself? How will those overlap with offline cultural practices?

Looking at the specific constructs outlined above, voice, as defined earlier, is as dispersed and fragmented as anything else online.  Therefore, voice as a construct seems less useful on teen oriented sites. But the overall pattern is one of irreverence to outright distrust of anything deemed ‘mainstream.’ The users seem unconcerned with the aesthetic quality of both the web environment of the site or the content.  It is enough that they are enacting and reacting in the community.  It is the quality of the experience that seems to matter most, and entertainment is the preferred experience.

“Co-production” is also challenged because the MySpace and YouTube sites do not appear to be created by an individual or group for anyone in particular, at least not as it is currently used by members. VampireFreaks.Com does speak to and for a narrower segment of society than the other two, but the overall tie between users is loose and fluid.  All three are loosely formed around alternative music, but seem to stray from that quite easily. Indeed, in the case of MySpace.Com, its original purpose was as a forum for alternative music fans, but its unprecedented growth is in areas where people are finding other ways to use the site.  It is an example of unintended consequences in terms of online public space, showing that one cannot necessarily define the audience beforehand, since they will select and construct themselves independently.

I have shown that rhetorical scholars must extend analysis to not just Web site producers as Warnick (2001) suggested, but to Web site participants who can also now create, appropriate, manipulate, link, and/or display digital objects that can be accessed by Web browsers.  As stated earlier, the line separating author and audience is blurred and the sites I have studied all clearly represent this trend: the users produce the content, not the ‘owners’ of the site, and this is the main way in which participants in these communities use these sites.

This is the trend that I suspect will challenge Higher Education in the coming years.  In the TV generations, it was said that the average attention span of a viewer was 12 minutes, which is the average time between commercials.  I suspect that that time is shrinking even further. Generation M probably has an attention span of 2 minutes: new media has become the commercial.  It is served up as finite easily digestible bits of information and entertainment. YouTube.Com currently serves out 110 million videos a day. Teens are producing and consuming video in ways not conceived of even 2-3 years ago.  In higher education, we should see this as the opportunity, and perhaps an obligation, to turn that passion for these kinds of media experiences into a career, not just a pastime.  It is my hope that we will consider responding by 1) finding a way to tap into these passions for mediated experience in teens, and exploit it for teaching and learning purposes, and 2) show them the road to higher aesthetic aspirations in creating and distribution new media: break out of ‘design anarchy’s’ hold. That is the role I see High Education, and primarily the Arts, playing in the future of these people.

Revised Conclusions

Earlier in this essay, I asked the question: does it matter if bloggers and other on-line contributors are who they say they are?  I concluded it does not.  What is important to the audience is the experiences themselves, and at least as an illusion of participating in a community.  This appears to help the rhetorician who believes that we cannot know the author’s intent, therefore cannot study it.  We can only study the text itself.

On Sept 9, 2006, two amateur sleuths discovered that LonelyGirl15, the 16-year-old YouTube.com success story discussed above, proved to be a fraud.  She is a 20 year-old actor named Jessica Rose hired by two film directors, Miles Beckett and Ramesh Flinders, to play “Bree,” the home schooled shy teenager with a mysterious religious background.  These two ‘creators’ of Bree posted this statement on the LonelyGirl15 web site:

“Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story—A story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the Internet. A story that is interactive and constantly evolving with the audience” (Retrieved on 09/08/06 from http://www.lonelygirl15.com).

They claimed to have created a new art form. True or false? Or was this just a violation of trust? Many bloggers were amused at being duped, but others were outraged.  Clearly the author and the author’s assumed intent mattered to them very much.  My initial conclusions appear to be wrong.

I wonder if users were more trusting, thus more violated, because it was video-based rather than simple text.  They could see Bree looked like a 16 year-old in her bedroom, there was no chance someone else was masquerading as such as in a text-based medium such as blogging.  Films are recognized for what they really are, a representation of an enhanced and constructed reality. So these filmmakers presented just this, but in a different medium, the Internet. Why were people outraged and surprised? Maybe there were no credits at the beginning, or maybe its because it was found on-line, not on TV or in the theater. I suggest that originally users of any new media needed to learn this for themselves.  Note the famous incident of the War of the World radio broadcast.  I must conclude there continues to be a process of education (cyber-literacy) that must go on when consuming each new iteration of media.  These filmmakers fooled their audience this time, but that audience will be more cynical in the future.

Like the senatorial candidate George Allen incident, the LonelyGirl16 ‘outing’ received significant mass media attention in LA Times, NY Times, MTV News, etc.  This is an example of virtual space overlapping into traditional mass mediated space. Is this now “Mass Media” rather than simply “Me Media,” as are many of the other blogs? Mass Media coverage of event MTV, LA Times, etc. They still perform a gatekeeping function in society. It isn’t ‘serious’ until you see in the traditional media sources, but for how long?

All this problematizes the snapshot in time method for me. By waiting, I came to different conclusions based on the same initial textual artifacts. One thing that is clear from this research is that much of this really turns on user literacy in the use of new media. “Cyber-literacy,” or educating teens about the proper use and understanding of New Media, will be a key issue facing higher education in coming years.  Student users of these new technologies must understand the implication of increased access to our personal lives and those that would use that access for improper activities. I must conclude from an analysis of the Web sites and quantitative research that has come out recently that any conception of media today needs to recognize that while it is a new form of communication, there is little that is new about it as examples of cultural acts. 

Lastly, new media represents a postmodern blurring of the lines between author and receiver, authority and aura. Personalized experience is privileged over authenticity of an object or massification of society. In some ways these sites represent a definitive expression of postmodern thought.  While Internet communication is inherently fragmented, dispersed, and fluid, they are postmodern in that they implicitly recognize the existence of multiple realities and ways of seeing.  In each of these realities is a system with internal coherence and logic to its members and participants, but from the outside look chaotic and disorganized.  I suggest this is why these sites resist rhetorical analysis, at least in the classical sense, but even as scholars try to devise new methods for analysis. Modernist notions of universal truths and logic appear to have no place in these teen oriented on-line discourses.

Footnotes

(1) Viral videos are usually humorous in nature and may range from televised comedy sketches such as Saturday Night Live's Lazy Sunday to unintentionally released amateur video clips like Star Wars Kid. While the viral video phenomenon has occurred in a largely unstructured manner, a number of organizations have attempted to adopt marketing strategies that rely on the distribution of viral video, often with mixed results. (Retrieved from http://www.answers.com/topic/viral-video on 08/12/06).

(2) Founded in 1996, Fight Crime: Invest In Kids is a national bipartisan, nonprofit anti-crime organization led by more than 2,500 police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors, victims of violence and leaders of police officer associations. Cyber Bullying is the use of electronic devices and information, such as e-mail, instant messaging (IM), text messages, mobile phones, pagers and web sites, to send or post cruel or harmful messages or images about an individual or a group. This is a freer form of bullying than traditional physical or name-calling attacks as the individual(s) responsible can be anonymous. (Retrieved on 08/19/2006 from http://www.fightcrime.org/cyberbullying/index.php)

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