YOUTH AND NEW MEDIA: CONSTRUCTING MEANING AND IDENTITY IN NETWORKED SPACES

By

David R. Zemmels

A prospectus submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Communication

University of Utah

March 2010

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF LITERATURE
CHAPTER THREE: METHOD
BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Introduction

This project serves as the instrument to ask: how do youth, particularly teens (ages 13-17) use new media technologies in their daily lives? How do they make meaning, and how does the usage constitute their identities? These questions will be answered by looking for a connection between the nature of children’s relationships with peers, family, strangers, mediated content, and the various means of communication employed.

The history of media in society coincides with decades of research concerned with media and their influence on society. Each new communication medium brings with it great promise for personal expression and democratic values in society, but also great concerns about the perceived effects on the mass population. Both paradigms of media influence are usually directed towards categories of people considered less educated, vulnerable social groups, thus in need of paternalistic oversight.

A category of special concern has always been the child in society; they are generally constructed in these debates as vulnerable, passive subjects, not active participants in mediated experience. By in large, youth are typically excluded from the debate concerning media and its effects, influences, and democratic potential. Youth are an interesting social and cultural category, but one that is not taken seriously as actors in their own social world.

With the rising popularity of “new media,” the term used here to identify social media and other Internet-based forms of communication information and entertainment, this paternalistic tradition of defining the child remains very powerful in popular and academic discourse, and expands in the social context of home, school, and in the communities that exist within, around, and in between these social institutions.

Despite grand claims made on both sides of the debate about the nature of media influence, relatively few researchers have tried to answer basic questions about how and why youth engage and make meaning with new media in the context of their everyday lives. New media have the potential to be even more influential in the social construction and maintenance of youth identity and culture than previous forms of media. Also at stake is a widening “digital divide,” or restrictions to access the potential benefits for many young people, which needs to be acknowledged. This differentiation in levels of access, globally as well as locally, will be a limitation in any study of this nature.

The tradition of treating youth as special audiences is starting to be rethought; with that rethinking comes a need to accept youth in new media research as a social and cultural category in order to fully account for the role of media in their daily (Ito, 2010; Livingstone, 2002; Wartella & Jennings, 2000). In these reformulations, media and technology are not seen as deterministic, but the embodiment of social and cultural relations. There is undoubtedly some influence by new media on the way youth think, act, and learn, but the debate needs to be empirically and theoretically informed, rather than driven by the latest forms of academic and popular social anxiety and moral panic.

This project helps to fill this gap by documenting an activity–based study of American teens (13-17 years of age) and their material engagement with new media. Study participants will verbally report what they are experiencing as they experience it. A hybrid form of protocol analysis using experience sampling method (ESM) and new media technology will document and record the on-line activities of study participants in real-time. The design of this study allows me to collect data on youth’s engagement with new media, in the moment of that engagement, for analysis and discussion.

Statement of the Problem

Media Influence on Society: Old Concerns, New Problems

In the post-industrial modern age, media is often to blame as society laments a loss of innocence and tries to recover an imagined time gone by where life contained more certainties. As each new medium appeared, concerns about potentially negative effects on the general population can be found throughout the history of mass communication research in the United States.

Utopian and Dystopian Paradigms

The history of media and their relationship to society represent the range of utopian and dystopian traditions. Proponents of the former see opportunities for participation, self-expression, play, learning and support of democratic values (Giddens, 1991; Goldman, Booker, & McDermott, 2008; Poster, 1997). The latter see an end of innocence, traditional values, and authority. The result is a long-standing tension between democratic enlightenment and effects paradigms for media research in the social sciences.

The utopian tradition sees the media as primary opportunities for democratic participation in the public sphere, and even more so with the advent of the Internet (Dahlberg, 2001). With regard to youth, it is primarily in media education where society can enhance the role of youth as critically engaged, democratic citizens most effectively. From this perspective, educators develop students' capacity for reflection and self-expression through engagement with those power structures that limit such acts (Livingstone, 2004). Often referred to as “media literacy,” the democratic promise evolves from the productive tensions that arise from educators' desire to protect and prepare students to live in a media saturated society (Poyntz, 2006).

On the opposing side are those who see media in much more sinister terms, exhibiting a long history of ‘moral panics’ and ‘social anxieties’ about the effects of media going back to the VCR, television, radio, comic books (Drotner & Livingstone, 2008; Wartella & Reeves, 1985; D. Williams, 2003), as far back as the late 1800s and dime novels (Grimes, Anderson, & Bergen, 2008). The lengthy list of physical and psychological social ills attributed to media includes addiction, anti-social behavior, violent behavior, sexual deviancy, obesity, and so on. Issues of children’s exposure to new media are “magnified by technological potential to digitise all text, images and sound and, hence, to facilitate convergence across hitherto distinct media platforms and services” (Drotner & Livingstone, 2008, p. 2).

The Power of Media

While the debate about the influence has raged, conceptions of the actual power of that influence have evolved. Disagreement stem from the notions of power of media to directly influence viewers verses the power of individuals or groups to decode, and so potentially resist, media messages.

Wartella and Reeves (1985) trace how, from 1900 – 1960, most researchers saw media as having a direct linear impact on all audience members. In the 1970s, researchers began to recognize that media had a more indirect, but still undifferentiated impact on audience members.

By the 1980’s, conceptions of media influence began to differ sharply from mass media research up to that point, instead reflecting a trend toward concepts of agency and literacy in media reception. This was exemplified by a shift towards a non-linear way of thinking about media effects which began with Stuart Hall’s classic paper on encoding/decoding (Hall, 1980). Mass communication was reconceived as two different but closely related overlapping spheres: encoding by media producers, decoding by media audiences; each dependent on shared, intersecting types of cultural knowledge, conventions, and resources. In other words, “Meaning emerges in the interaction among content, context, and communicants” (Anderson & Meyer, 1988, p. 89) making the audience but one of many influences on meaning. The cultural object is at the center of this interactive process, where meaning is not fixed, relying instead on the cultural conditions of its reception. Understanding the influence of media becomes a circular rather than a linear process of media participation in everyday life: “That daily life represents both the start and the end of this process serves to underline its cyclic nature; technologies both arise from, and find their place within, the conditions, practices, and meanings of ordinary people’s lives” (Livingstone, 2002, p. 47).

Social Constructs of ‘Child’ and ‘Media’

Within media research and policymaking resulting from this reformulation, assumptions about the effects on children continued to follow a different logic. Through all the research, children were treated as separated and differentiated from the general population (Wartella & Reeves, 1985). They were not thought of as typical audience members, and research agendas regarding children tended to reflect and be formed by public debate, “rather than research shaping public concerns or policy” (p. 120).

The continuing debate over media effects appears to be more complex than simple concern for the child’s wellbeing. The central question is whether media are good or bad for them, but such questions are inevitably framed as an either/or choice, and answers are presented in totalizing terms that don’t appear to have a problem making generalizations about child and media.

Child as Nostalgic Fantasy and Political Opportunity

Henry Jenkins (1998) argued that childhood is a discursive invention of the last 100 years and can be used as a potent political metaphor in post-war society. Buckingham (2000) points out that the discursive concept of “childhood” often represents a nostalgic fantasy of the past, one whose traditional certainties have been eroded and undermined at the end of the 20^th Century. Children are perceived as becoming more violent, anti-social, and sexually active, thus embodying larger social fears about declining social standards and norms. This is exemplified by social concerns about “child” and “childhood,” which “have long been established as discursive sites through which adults can conceptualize and (re)construct the past, present and future aspects of society” (Selwyn, 2003, p. 351). Therefore, the discursive invention of child is really a matter of power, used to exert control over young people and deny them rights as “autonomous and active agents,” (Buckingham, 2008b, p. 183) thereby justifying and reinforcing their dependency on adults.

The Media Problem. Media are typically deeply implicated in this debate between good and bad influences for children in society, and caught in the tension between the various stakeholders in the debate. Media may be blamed somewhat unfairly.

In an cultural analysis of media research on violence and aggression in media and society over the last 100 years, Grimes et al (2008) argue, “we see a body of scientific work whose origin derives less from empirical evidence than it does from political opportunism” (p. 31). Each new form of media is “quickly connected to the ongoing and often intractable problems of that society” (p. 50), a connection used by politicians for political gain, who in turn provide finding for science to study the problem, which becomes the media problem framed as the effects of the media. Research looking at the media problem is usually directed towards categories of people considered less educated, vulnerable social groups, thus in need of paternalistic oversight. In the context of this social/scientific construct, Grimes et al (2008) define the typical object of study as the Other, a group whose membership does not include those at the top of the dominate social structure but instead reflects those perceived as lower “on the socio-economic ladder that the population/race/ethnic origin/religion of the dominant population” (p. 50). Children heavily populate this segment of media audiences.

Child as Computer User

Beginning in the 1990s, it may be no surprise to learn that the utopian/dystopian debate continues: “Computer technology has ushered in a new era of mass media, bringing with it great promise and great concerns about the effect on children's development and wellbeing” (Wartella & Jennings, 2000, p. 1). The debate may continue but core dynamics seem to be changing. By the beginning of 21^st century, the notion of “child computer user” has become one that is perhaps even more paradoxical and complex in political, academic, and popular discourses than past notions of the child consumer of media.

Statistical evidence supports claims of an ever-greater influence of new media in young people’s everyday lives: 9 out of 10 teens (ages 12-17) are fully wired, compared to 66% of adults (Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin, 2005); and young people are multitasking by consuming more media in their daily lives, but not sending more time doing it (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005). A 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.” Not only is there compelling survey-based evidence that communication technologies increasingly occupy a pivotal role in the lives of young people, but progressively more new media is “generally produced by youth, for youth, in the youth sphere, not within the constraints of any traditional social or educational institution” (Sefton-Green, 2006, p. 296).

This generation has been variously described as Generation M (for media) (Roberts, et al., 2005), digital kids (Hsi, 2007), millennials (Lenhart, et al., 2005), and “digital natives” inhabiting a world along side “digital immigrants” (Prensky, 2001) . They are spending more time with media than any other activity, except sleeping, putting today’s children “in the vanguard of a revolution in both technology and culture” (Heim, Brandtzeg, Kaare, Endestad, & Torgersen, 2007, p. 426).

Taken together, this suggest a fundamental shift in youth’s relation to media, especially a breakdown of the producer/consumer dialectic that remained relatively consistent throughout the history of mass media up to this point. Teens with this level of access to digital technology and the Internet probably have a very different understanding of media in their lives than any previous generation. This generation not only can consume media as defined in the traditional mass media sense, but also—given the digital media production tools now available at little cost and requiring little training from digital video cameras to camera cell phones to free video and audio editing software—can produce media and distribute it via the Internet onto mobile phones and many other digital devices. In other words, this generation is steeped in media and understands the fundamentals of digital media production and distribution. Youth’s relationship to media is situated within an interactive participatory environment (Jenkins, 2006, 2009), with the primary difference being in form, audience, and distribution of media (Sefton-Green, 2006). Rather than mass media consumers, they are the “me media” generation contributing to the media economy with a potentially global audience.

From these fundamental shifts comes something new for the media problem, adding fuel to the uncertainty surrounding the notion of childhood in the late modern era; the growing “digital generation gap” is causing even more panic and anxiety for adults (Buckingham, 2000; Livingstone, 2003). The result is a deepening conflict, if not an outright paradox: The notion of a generation of children having an innate ability to learn and use new technology, therefore perceived as technically more proficient in its use than adults, while continuing to be constructed as vulnerable, passive subjects who are not considered competent agents in their use of media. Not only are young people playing a key role in the form and content available through new communication, entertainment, and information technologies, they are the expert in the use of media technology, explaining the complexities of new media technology and practices to their parents. This creates a paradox of seemingly irreconcilable perceptions about youth and media, and represents a constant struggle to fill the “gap between parental strategies and children’s tactics for media usage” (Press & Livingstone, 2006, p. 190).

Social anxieties over potential effects of media are no longer limited to simple claims of children’s exposure. Perceived effects of new media are spreading beyond the influence on the individual child. Adding to ongoing concerns is the transformation of the social constructs of home, school, and community, in which media plays an increasingly significant and constitutive role. Livingstone (2002) identifies the decline of public leisure facilities, after school activities, and “street corner culture” as some reasons leisure is increasingly focused on the home. The result is the “domestication” of media technology, giving media the opportunity to directly impact “doing things as a family” because family time is increasingly synonymous with media time. The impact of media on home life is discussed in more detail in the following chapter.

A Reality Check: The Digital Divide

Access to new media technology and the Internet “is highly stratified, with significant inequalities across and within households in all nations studied” (Livingstone, 2003, p. 154). This disparity is often referred to as the “digital divide,” a gap between those who use the computer and those who don’t. Often this is interpreted as youth on one side and adults on the other, as discussed above, but there is a difference between a “generational gap” (Herring, 2008) and between “the technology rich and the technology poor, both within and between societies” (Buckingham, 2008a, p. 14). A Kaiser Foundation report (Children, The Digital Divide, and Federal Policy, 2004) evaluates federal data and shows significant gaps in the United States in the quantity and quality of digital access for children in all these areas and society’s ability to provide the skills and content that are most beneficial for the education experience. This divide is not limited to the affluent and lower-income members of a society, but also because of education, ethnicity, gender, family status, geography, and disability on a global scale (Castells, 2001; Livingstone, 2007) that has a continuing effect in contemporary notions of a mediated society.

Participants in this study will likely be biased towards young people with access to the Internet through their home or school in an urban environment, therefore living on one side of a “digital divide.”

(Re)conceptualizing Child and New Media in Research

With concerns about the influence of media perhaps greater than ever, empirical evidence of the everyday activities of young participants in mediated experience is minimal. There is “a serious lack of knowledge in public and academic domains about the social meanings, uses, and consequences of new media” (Livingstone, 2002, p. 2). In an effort to provide a more balanced empirically based analysis of the influence of new media on the child computer user, new approaches to the study of youth, identity, and community are emerging, becoming an important area of scholarly research in an underserved area. There is recognition that new media, like the media that preceded them, do have an influence, but “if media have changed in the past 50 years, so too have the contexts of childhood, whether this is charted in terms of the social structures of family or community, of consumer and labour market expectations, or of values and identities” (Livingstone, 2002, p. 21).

As I have suggested, there are potentially significant changes as captured by the quantitative evidence discussed above. More is needed. Quantitative analysis of statistical data can identify trends in cultures much faster than qualitative interpretive methods, so I believe that building a qualitative study off of quantitative findings is the best way to capture the contemporary moment before it fade away or gives way to new forms of social constructs. Individually, the findings may or may not be meaningful as a generalizable hypothesis, but collective research in this area could be helpful to document these transient artifacts before they are gone, erased, off-line.

Children as social beings have not been well served by past scientific and popular cultural assumptions about the child and media and there is little direct empirical evidence for how youth construct and maintain self and social communities, particularly in new media spaces. To understand the child in the age of Internet-based media, the relationship between “child” and “media” is in need of reconceptualization. Most prior research in the field may be said to focus on “what the media do to children” as opposed to “what children do with media” (Heim, et al., 2007). By reversing the equation, the tradition of treating youth as special audiences needs to be rethought.

Perhaps more challenging to research is a lack of integrated study of media use across multiple media channels. Heim et al (2007) argue that “one cannot simply examine one technology at a time in order to understand the complex patterns of media use among children.” Much of the research on youth and individual media technologies focuses on specific technologies such as cellular phones (Kaare, Brandtzeg, Heim, & Endestad, 2007), a strategy less useful in an age of “media convergence” (Jenkins, 2006). Youth are multitasking by consuming more media, but not spending less time doing it (Roberts, et al., 2005), strongly suggesting that millennials view media use as integrated, if not interchangeable, across multiple digital devices. In this context, it is artificial to try and separate various media channels for research, especially when youth do not necessarily make such distinctions in their everyday practices.

Theoretical Orientation

In order to participate in the development of new constructs for media research, this study sets aside traditional frameworks and a priori conceptions about youth audiences and their relationship to the newest of media: Internet-based communication, entertainment and information.

This research takes a grounded approach. Theoretical frameworks will remain open to accommodate emerging interpretations. This theory building approach is informed by historical philosophical thinking in cultural construction of identity, rhetorical analysis of digital media communication, principles of visual communication, and current research in audience studies in new media public and private spaces, especially as it relates to young people.

The earlier discussion of media research argues that theorizing about media and culture has shifted toward the understanding that identity is a complex social process. In this formulation, there are no unifying truths, only negotiated, contested and contextualized processes for the social construction of reality. Socially, biologically, and technologically determinist views of media and technology, especially constructs of the child, are limited in their assumptions when applied to contemporary media users. New conceptual constructs of media reception and social construction of identity in this context “emphasize its multiplicity, diversity, simultaneity, fluidity, surface, and relational production” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002).

The umbrella term, “postmodernism,” is generally applied when describing this shift in conceptualizing social processes, and this meta-theoretical lens, and all it entails, is particularly useful in the study of the contemporary condition, and sets the stage for theory building in new media social environments in particular, as discussed in the next chapter. Taking this perspective is appropriate because “modern” theories, while providing an important foundation for interpreting data collected in the field, may not adequately account for the fluid, fragmented, and indeterminate aspects of cultural meanings in today’s heavily mediated society, nor for the diversity and complexity of real-life new media interactions. Perhaps most importantly, traditional media studies fails to acknowledge lived experience of childhood and child’s relationship to media (Drotner & Livingstone, 2008; Heim, et al., 2007; Ito, 2010; Livingstone, 2002; Selwyn, 2003; Steele & Brown, 1995; Wartella & Jennings, 2000).

Methodological Orientation

To uncover cultural strategies and practices for engaging media, emphasis should be on the need to develop methods of data collection that allow youth go about their everyday lives.

This dissertation will document my activity–based study of American teens’ engagement with new media in networked spaces and the everyday practices that surround their participation. Study participants will be asked to verbally report what they are experiencing as they experience it. As a hybrid form of protocol analysis using experience sampling methods, I will use new media technology to engage and observe their activities, allowing for documentation and analysis of patterns and thinking that may lead to better understanding of the ways in which teens make meaning and construct identity in new media electronic spaces.

Steering a more utopian course, I agree with Drotner (2008) who argues: “Adults need to recognize the validity of these practices in the spirit of democratic participation, and acknowledge young people’s right to have a voice and to be heard” (p. 167). In her review of research on this topic, Sonia Livingstone (2002) calls for new approaches to understanding this relationship:

This will require listening to the voices of youth (teens) when talking about the importance of media in their lives. In this way we can begin to better understand how young people actively appropriate and make meaningful specific media within specific domestic and social contexts. (p. 57)

By listening to youth as they engage communication and entertainment media, researchers are able to consider the context, nature, and extent of new media use.

Interpretive approaches present distinct theoretical and methodological challenges and potential barriers for media research. The notion of “text” for analysis is problematic: new media as texts are difficult to observe, difficult to capture, and difficult to interpret (see Sefton-Green, 2003; Livingstone, 2002). To complicate data collection, the characteristics of the new media user seem to be constantly in flux, which can limit qualitative methods’ effectiveness. Further, for in-depth understanding of the impact of those practices in cultural meaning making, the researcher must observe those practices over a lengthy period of time, and ideally with only casual interactions with participants so as to minimize interference with the enactment of everyday, taken-for-granted media practices. Lastly, because everyday life is often enacted in the home, andwhere the Internet and mobile devices like cellular phones and MP3 music players have made the bedroom the newest site in which to study meaning making (Press & Livingstone, 2006; Steele & Brown, 1995). Data collection becomes even more problematic because people’s engagement with media has perhaps become even more personal and intimate than was possible with traditional mass media.

Contribution to the Field

To summarize, the research goal of this project is to begin to understand the specific everyday practices of youth with regard to media use and from the perspective of young people as agents in their media use.

To that end, I am asking fundamental questions about how youth develop new strategies to navigate the complexities of socializing in new media publics, and using networked public sites to engage in social interactions related to home, school and peers. New sets of categories and practices may emerge. Through this grounded approach to theory building, I will inductively develop the best conceptual frameworks for analysis of the relationship between youth and media in new media environments. Data analysis may lead in a number of directions:

· self-representation and identity construction

· subjective experience of parental monitoring and rules

· hanging image and role of home and school

· transformations in formal and informal learning practices

The results of this project may help in the development of appropriate conceptual frameworks that lead to a better understanding of youth audiences as they engage new media. New and unique socio-cultural practices may be emerging in these cultural activities, and are best understood when youth are recognized as active, thinking media participants who are knowledgeable and self-educated in the technology.

Further, Ito (Ito, 2010) argues, “The development of children’s agency in local life worlds of home and peer culture is inextricably linked to their participation as consumer citizens” (p. 9) making them at the forefront of a “participatory media culture” (Jenkins, 2006), which is primarily a commercial culture. Not only is youth consumption driving the content and form of new Internet ventures, their participation and “user-generated content” are requirements for success. The commercial necessity of youth in new media is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.

My conclusions will contribute to the growing body of research exploring how new media communication, entertainment, and information are appropriated and used by young people, how cultural meaning is made and enacted in their on-line participatory culture, and how this influences their off-line communication practices, peer-group social interaction, family life and the home, and educational pedagogy and curriculum.

CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Introduction

There are several theoretical fields for the study of youth and new media that touch on the domain of this interpretive research project. This chapter reviews the current thinking about the overlapping nature of identity, technology, persuasion, and literacy in new media environments. I begin with a review of the current thinking in social science research, where a break from traditional social scientific approaches has been underway, creating new epistemological frameworks for media research. The review includes theorizing about the subject and cultural construction of identity, rhetorical analysis of digital media communication, and principles of visual communication theory. These fields provide key theoretical foundations for understanding the relationship between new media and youth. After that, I address a body of research that suggests youth engagement with new media is transforming youth culture and requires new conceptualizations for understanding youth engagement with new media. This sets the stage for the specific methods and research questions that will carry this research project forward.

Theoretical Frameworks

The research project is informed by a reconception of research theory and method over the last 30 years, in social sciences generally and media studies in particular, and represents the current state of the break from the totalizing and normalizing practices attributed to Modernism in response to the social sciences having run up against the “posts”—postmodernism, poststructuralism, postindustrialism and so on. The research approaches that have emerged from this break are well suited to building new conceptual frameworks for the study of youth and their relationship to new media communication, entertainment, and information.

Questioning Modernity

The era of Modernism closely parallels the industrialization of Western society. In order to deal with the changes brought about by the transitions into Modernity, such social thinkers as Saint-Simon and Comte appropriated the philosophies of Enlightenment claiming that progress and industry would make the world a better place for mankind, “Modernism is that moment when man invented himself; when he no longer saw himself as a reflection of God or Nature” (Cooper & Burrell, 1988, p. 94).

In the latter half of the 20^th Century, the assumptions of Modernism central to scientific inquiry are questioned, and the social sciences are finding it necessary to rethink long held epistemological assumptions.

The discourse of modernism…is a metadiscourse which legitimates itself by reference to ‘some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working project, or the creation of wealth’ (Lyotard, 1984 quoted in Cooper and Burrell, 1988, p. 94).

Developing this self-legitimating metadiscourse, or “grand narrative,” was perhaps necessary for dealing with the increasingly weighty problems of the emerging industrialized society, but it is this grand narrative, in which modernism essentially puts the answer before the question, that social science research should be most critical. The incredulity toward metanarratives by poststructuralist thinkers, most notably Lyotard, Jacques Derrida (1976), and Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1979, 1991), opened up the possibilities for scholarly research in specific local contexts and recognized the diversity of human experience, allowing for a multiplicity of theoretical standpoints rather than grand, all-encompassing theories.

Postmodernism as Social Science Perspective

A name commonly given to an emerging epistemological position in the latter half of the 20^th Century is postmodernism, although some argue that this position is more appropriately described as “late-modernism” (see Jameson, 1992). Postmodern analyses challenge the ontological status of modernist claims to knowledge of the world. When applied to social science theory, the privilege claimed by modernist in social scientific discourses is called into question. It is a perspective characterized by “the critical questioning, and often outright rejection, of ethnocentric rationalism championed by Modernism” (Cooper & Burrell, 1988, p. 94). Thus, postmodernism can only be conceived as a relationship to the opposing possibility, in a dialectical relationship with Modernism. One does not follow or negate the other, but instead, modernism and postmodernism exist in a mutually constitutive relationship. Bryan Taylor (2005) writes, “Each requires the continued existence of the other in order to appear—through opposition—distinct and coherent” (author’s emphasis: p. 116).

In direct opposition to modernist thinking, meaning is not fixed and we are only “an observer-community, which constructs interpretations of the world, these interpretations having no absolute or universal status” (Cooper and Burrell, 1988: 94). The critical questioning that helps define the postmodern perspective is intertwined with many other contemporary perspectives, such as feminism, neo-Marxism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postfoundationalism, to name a few. Ultimately, postmodernism is best understood as an umbrella term and “the ambiguity of the term stems partly from the enormous work that we ask it to do” (Taylor, 2005, p. 114). In the end, postmodernism may just be a placeholder for whatever term we, or posterity, choose to describe the immediate present.

This body of theory has generated considerable controversy. As Martin Parker (1992) notes, “the key problem raised by postmodernists is the impossibility of having certain knowledge about ‘the Other’ (person, organization, culture, society)” (p. 553). Without the stable foundation modernism provides, how can we be certain of anything? This question is being answered by reconceptualizations of the purpose, goals, and methods for research as discussed next.

Subjectification and the Construction of Identity

Childhood and adolescence are often viewed as a key period in identity formation (Buckingham, 2008b), so notions of identity are central. Survey-based research noted above offers compelling evidence that new media occupy a pivotal role in the lives of youth, and therefore becomes a potentially critical element in the construction of identity.

The contemporary roots of subjectification are found in the theorizing of Louis Althusser, who provided an important epistemological “break” from the Marxian theories of cultural identity by placing the individual at the center of that process rather than focusing on how ideology manifests itself within capitalist society. Althusser endeavored to develop a systematic theory of how a culture perpetuates itself through its people. Based on Althusser’s famous example of “hailing” the subject on the street, “interpellation” is the process by which a subject is constituted, and takes place through, and is reproduced by, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs): family, religion, education, media, art, etc. These IDAs are responsible for inculcating the subject into the social order. In Althusser’s view, the subject is relatively stable and fixed, once interpellated into existence.

Beginning in the 1970s, post-structuralists such as Jacque Derrida (1976, 1978) began to problematize such a strict closure of meaning and argue that there is more ambiguity in the constitution of the subject and that foundations of meaning are contingent and contextual. Althusser’s vision of the subject was too simplistic and could no longer account for the “diasporic” nature of society at the end of the 20^th Century (Appadurai, 1996). Contrary to Althusserian contention that ideology is ahistorical, history is injected into matters of subjectification. By historicizing the construction of subject, it follows that, as Edward Said (1983) argues, the foundational of meaning in texts is also contingent and contextual. Texts cannot exist alone, but must rely on other texts to have meaning.

We must then take into account the context in which the subject or text is constituted, and the multiplicity of contexts available. The subject is now seen more as in an environment of competing interpellations, where the failure of one interpellation normally means the success of another.

Judith Butler builds on Althusser’s concept of interpellation, but from another direction. She argues that it does not take into account the importance of the language being used to constitute the subject, nor that interpellation is possible without the subject being present or by some means other than voice: “the subject need not always turn around in order to be constituted as a subject, and the discourse that inaugurates the subject need not take the form of a voice at all” (Butler, 1997, p. 31). Butler claims society constitutes an individual by naming, and that constituted subject could be surprised at the way the “socially constituted self” might look. Indeed, one need not even know about “being constituted for that constitution to work in an efficacious way” (p. 31). It is from this philosophical perspective that I make the assumption that media has an important active role in the construction of cultural and personal identity.

Traditional media is not as interactive as new media. How does injecting interactivity affect assumptions about media and identity? That remains to be definitively pinned down, but Slavoj Zizek (1989) offers a very different notion of how the subject is formed, which might be useful in conceiving identity in new media spaces. Zizek seems to see the subject as imaginary to the extent that it is only a ‘quilting point’ or nodal point where many diverse and even competing ideological positions converge (feminism, democracy, etc.). Zizek’s idea of multiple ideologies existing simultaneously at interconnected nodal points mirrors the dispersed but overlapping nature of the Internet, tying the technology of the Internet to issues of identity.

In summary, theorizing about subjectification has evolved from simply “hailing” on the street to language constructing the subject without their presence or knowledge, which in turn creates the opening for theorizing of mass media as no longer just representing reality, but constituting it. In research of new media environments, long standing theoretical perspectives regarding identity may remain an important lens for looking at how users in the new media environments form and maintain personal and groups identities and how that relates to their analog world subject positions.

Rhetorical Theory

Rhetorical analysis assumes that communicative acts have persuasive potential, so it is important to critically evaluate meaning in these acts. Rhetorical Theory appears to be a good approach for analyzing data collected on communication practices in new media spaces. James P. Zappen (2005) discusses how 2000 year old traditional rhetorical strategies can function in digital spaces and summarizes rhetorical research in digital spaces into three categories: basic characteristics, affordances, and constraints; opportunities for creating individual identities; and potential for building social communities. These may prove to be very important characteristics of new media-based communication practices, but there are some challenges for the researcher.

In determining the legitimacy of the message, traditional agent-centered neoclassical rhetorical theory relies in large part on evaluating the experience, education, values, and purpose of the author. It is how the message gains credibility and the authority by which it speaks.

A central challenge to rhetorical theory is that the identity of the author and authenticity of a text are indeterminate in new media environments. Barbara Warnick recognizes that “in a hypertext environment, author, audience and text are dispersed” (2001) and has studied how credibility, intertextuality, and interactivity function rhetorically in these contexts (2005). Warnick identifies for rhetoricians four general areas in which the rhetorical study in Internet environments challenges traditional critical rhetorical practice: (re)defining the text for analysis, the changing nature of the audience, the indeterminacy of authorship, and the ambiguity of public discursive space. Hypertext environments are an “unstable and rather limitless text” (Warnick, 1998b, p. 75). Hypertext, characterized by the text’s ability to link to other texts, becomes pliable and dispersed over time, space, and thought. This raises difficult questions about the starting point of textual analysis as well as the point of closure. Unlike printed texts, texts in hyperspace are rhizomic in nature, to use Deleuze & Guattari’s metaphor. Web sites often do not have an identifiable author (Warnick, 1998a), anonymous posting can actually inspire and promote trust participants (Gurak, 1997), and on-line discussion groups and authors of electronic texts often and routinely disguise their identities; indeed it is expected and assumed (Turkle, 1995). Mitra and Cohen (1999) identify some of the unique characteristics of the Internet and the analytical challenges posed by it. The characteristics include the inherent intertextuality and non-linearity of hypertext communication.

Interestingly, participants in Internet communication do not seem to require evidence of authenticity. It appears that aspects of the electronic medium itself seem to confer creditability on a message. As several researchers have found, participants tend “to treat all representations as true” (Mantovani, 1996, p. 126; see also Reeves & Nass, 1996) in on-line communication environments. In one of the earliest examples of rhetorical analysis in new media environments, Laura Gurak (1997) found that on-line discussion groups do not handle controversy well. Participants, drawn together by their like-mindedness, tended to penalize anyone who disagreed with the group norms. 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 (Rheingold, 1993).

Voice as Rhetorical Construct

Mitra and Watts (2002) suggest “voice” as a new construct for analyzing rhetorical communication in on-line space. Mitra and Watts (2002) argue that to legitimize a “voice” in mediated spaces, authenticity of the voice must first be questioned. In the off-line world of traditional mass media, authenticity is typically associated with centers of power and cultural capital. In the rhizomatic structure of the Internet, there are no centers and the powerful people or organizations that have traditionally determined the content of mass media are bypassed, participants who wish to evaluate legitimacy in new media interactions in social media must find new ways to do it. They define “authenticity” in networked public spaces as “a multi-dimensional construct that includes the notion of truth, accuracy, eloquence, and an ontic connection with lived experience” (p. 490). Mitra also studies how immigrant Indians living in the West form diasporic discursive communities using the WWW technology (Mitra, 1997). This is an example of communities that exist nowhere and everywhere at the same time: communities whose only physical existence is as “a rhizomatic connection of computers that span all known spatial boundaries” (Mitra & Watts, 2002, p. 485). The construct of voice can span cultural as well as geographical boarders, something that must be recognized in rhetorical analysis.

Visual Communication Theory

The primary purpose of this study is to document social practices, but these practices are becoming conflated with the consumption and production of visual media. Internet-based communication is increasingly visual in nature, bringing to the fore conceptions of self-expression, self-representation, and aesthetics of communication through the production and distribution of visual content in interactive mediated spaces. Prior to digital technology, that was the purview of artists and media professionals only. As previously discussed, people with minimal equipment and training can produce visual content for the Internet.

An analysis of visual data captured in this study may provide conclusions about visual representations of self and the role of visual materials in meaning making in new media environments. With increases in network speed, computer capacity, and the ubiquity of digital cameras and cell phones, new media environments are including increasing visual-oriented means of communication.

Visual Rhetoric and Semiotic Theory. Representation Theory and Aesthetic Theory are useful perspectives for analysis of visual data. Representation Theory is generally concerned with how images represent things in the world: people, objects, landscapes and so on. This project is less concerned with an analysis of how images are perceived psychologically, and more with what meaning is communicated through pictorial representations in new media environments. Two theoretical sub-domains of representation inform this stage of the project: Theory of Visual Rhetoric and Semiotics Theory.

Visual Rhetoric refers to the study of visual imagery through the lens of rhetoric (Foss, 2005). Kenney (2005b) demonstrates how rhetorical criticism can be applied to visuals found in new media environments. Rhetorical appeals can be achieved through the structure of visual information, and the analysis of the persuasive value of text layout, color and choice of images on web sites.

Semiotics Theory, a linguistic-based theoretical position, has been successfully applied to visual media. At base, it is the study of signs and codes in visual imagery. Central to any analysis of visual representation is the relationship between the sign and the object (Kenney, 2005a). This theoretical lens is traditionally “concerned with how signs ‘mediate’ between the external world and our internal ‘world,’ or how a sign ‘stands for’ or ‘takes the place of’ something from the real world in the mind of the person” (p. 99). For the latter, C. S. Peirce’s triadic model of semiosis: sign, object, and interpretant, has proven successful in past analytical projects. Peirce further defines signs as iconic, indexical, or abstract, the difference being the resemblance of the signified to the signified, as understood by the interpretant.

Because I generally cannot know the intentions of the maker of visual images, relying on rhetorical and semiotic analysis is appropriate because both make that assumption.

Aesthetic Theory. An analysis of the relationship between visual representation and identity in new media spaces suggests an approach that includes media aesthetics, since the creator/producer and the consumer of media are seen as merging into the new media spaces. I postulate that aesthetics play an important role in representation through digital visual content, and in the perception of authenticity in on-line spaces, a problem for rhetorical analysis as discussed above. Mitra and Watts’ (2002) construct of voice in the evaluation of authenticity may also benefit by equating the eloquence of voice with the aesthetic qualities of representation.

Traditional aesthetic theory as studied by the disciplines of philosophy and science would not fit well into this particular analysis. The visual arts perspective offers the best opportunity to analyze aesthetic visual communication for implicit meaning and visual understanding. My assumption is that there are many representations through imagery created by professional or aspiring artists, but many other participants may not trained in formal and aesthetically informed creation of visual forms of communication. Much of the content in social media sites appears to have the “lo-fi” qualities of point-and-shoot digital cameras and cell phone quality video and images created by “amateur” authors, but may still exhibit inherent aesthetic qualities that inform the analysis. Dennis Dake (2005) provides a useful perspective for understanding aesthetic relationships that permeates images created by professional and amateur alike: an interaction between the three components of object, viewer, and maker. This parallels Peirce’s triadic model of semiosis making all analyses from this viewpoint both rhetorical and aesthetic.

Toward New Epistemological Frameworks in Social Science

Intertextuality and Context

From the postmodern perspective discussed above comes an understanding of social discourse and cultural production as contextual, which is an essential point of reference for an analysis of social interaction in new media environments.

Intertextuality

Questions about the influence and meaning making in media reception, beginning in the 1980s, directly paralleled postmodern thinking about the nature of social interaction as texts, and their relationship to the production of cultural meaning. Analysis originating from this perspective conceptualizes social discourse and cultural production as non-linear, non-hierarchical, horizontal, and interconnected, with an inherent intertextuality.

From the postmodern perspective, the metaphor of intertextuality is used to conceptualize social texts as transient entities that are situated within a broader cultural “economy” of textual interaction. Intertextuality refers to the interplay of texts, or the quality of a text as “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (Genette, 1997). Foucault argues that social texts should not only be critically analyzed from a discursive framework, but the dialectical relationship between texts should be examined. This examination of intertextuality reveals how texts recontextualize and incorporate each other as well as reveal what is left out of the discussion (Foucault, 1979). This opens the possibility that discourses surrounding new media are created and maintained much the same way media are defined and redefined in dialectical relation to each other in a process of remediation, as discussed later (J. D. Bolter & Grusin, 1999).

If no textual artifact exists alone or in insulation, it is important to situate research within the context surrounding cultural production of meaning, in a particular time and space, and this is especially the case in new media research. Gone are the days when research methods assumed the subject was ahistorical and fixed under the gaze of primarily Western scholarly interpretation. From this understanding emerge theories of dialectics, which are useful to describe unique spatial-temporal relationships facilitated by use of new media. This conception of time and space, as an approach to analysis, is embodied in Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope.” Bakhtin (1981) defines the chronotope (literally, “time-space”) as “almost a metaphor” for “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (p. 84). Bakhtin sees the time and space in which a text exists as inseparable from one another, with time being the fourth dimension of space. He recognizes that there can be multiple and even overlapping chronotopes that enter into a relation of dialogic opposition, mirroring, or mutual transformation. While Bakhtin confines his use of the chronotope to “a formally constitutive category of literature,” he recognizes that the concept is also “applicable in other areas of culture,” opening the door to broader application of the concept by scholars. The conception of chronotope and its use to express the situated and connected relationships in culture allows for new ways of thinking about the construction of knowledge.

Practical Logic of Everyday Action

I argue that the examination of media as cultural artifacts of chronotopic and intertextual meaning-making is directly connected to everyday practices of media participation; practices that to the individual are self-evident and taken-for-granted. Pierre Bourdieu brings social theory and the study of specific practices together. Due to the limits of theoretical understanding of practice in conventional sociology, he offers the logic of practice, which “aims simply to bring to light the theory of practice which theoretical knowledge implicitly applies and so to make possible a truly scientific knowledge of practice and of the practical mode of knowledge” (Bourdieu, 1980, p. 27). Bourdieu incorporates the logic of practice into what he calls the “habitus,” “which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical function” (p. 52). The habitus consists of ingrained practices, “a spontaneity without consciousness or will” (p. 56) in a circular reproductive system that is generative, not fixed. Persons acting on their habitus are what constitute culture, rather than ideology or some other dominant force. Agency manifests itself through these practices, which researchers can study using the dialectical relationship between material practices and the concept of habitus in the ongoing conduct of everyday life. The habitus guides social practices and is observable from the outside, and thus describable.

The intertextuality and chronotopic notions of analysis, combined with a focus on the scientific study of daily practices, create a firm theoretical foundation for this project. New media practices need to be documented and observed in specific context in which they occur in order to begin to describe patterns in the use of specific technologies in new media environments. Next, I suggest a conceptual framework well suited for inquiry in new media spaces.

The Rhizomatic Metaphor for Inquiry

The “rhiozome” concept for social practices has come up several times in this document. Rhizomatic analysis is useful as a metaphor because of the multiplicities of network of connected screens: computers, cell phones and other digital devices. A particularly useful postmodern meta-theory for research in diffused, overlapping, and intersecting new media spaces is the conception of rhizomatic inquiry. As an analysis of media and youth culture, specifically in new media environments, this project embraces the metaphor for postmodern era research first proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987). Deleuze and Guattari argue that traditional scientific approaches to the building of knowledge are inappropriate to studying postmodern culture. They used the term "rhizome" to “describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.”

Cooper and Burrell (1988) help to clarify how the postmodern perspective relates to the rhizomatic metaphor. They argue, “Postmodern discourse begins with the idea that systems have lives of their own which make them fundamentally independent of human control” (my emphasis, p. 94). Rhizomatic analysis distinguishes between totalizing unities of modernist scientific principles and non-totalizing multiplicities that may be more appropriate for social research. This is a very important philosophical reconception of research in the 21^st Century.

Transformations in Youth Culture

The foundational ideas that supported the ‘grand narratives’ of modernism are crumbling. No longer can it be assumed that the human agent is privileged, at the controlling center of things. A review of the literature marks the transformations society is undergoing as a result of new media. The transformations in media technologies are changing our notions of self, family, home, and school.

Identity and Technology

The history of scholarship at the intersection of technology and identity builds from where the previous discussion of subjectification left off. Some of the earliest works focused on the mediated existence of the body and related identity politics; a notably example is Donna Haraway’s (1991) “Cyborg Manifesto.” More recent perspectives look at identity from different theoretical and methodological perspective: the networked society (Castells, 2010), the digitalization of society (Clippinger, 2007), and Sherry Turkle’s (1995) seminal work that examines identity from a psychological perspective, focusing primarily on youth. Each in different ways examines fluidity identities in mediated digital spaces.

Identity and Youth

The relationship of youth and media is closely intertwined with the concept of identity, yet “identity is an ambiguous and slippery term” (Buckingham, 2008a, p. 1). One reason perhaps is that the conceptualizations of identity continue to evolve and transform, with psychological, social, cultural, and philosophical scholars positing countless definitive theories of identity construction and management.

In a broad survey of the current thinking about youth and identity, Buckingham (2008a) identifies what he sees as the fundamental paradox of identity: the term implies both similarity and difference. Identity is understood as something that is unique about each individual, something that we own. Identity also implies a connection to a broader social group, such as cultural identity, national identity, and other affiliations of shared interests and values. However, the common denominator is that adolescence is often viewed as a critical period in identity formation by a wide range of disciplines and intellectual paradigms.

Buckingham (2008a) continues by identifying five key approaches to framing identity and the implications for the study of youth and new media. First, he maps out identity as a psychological account of the developmental process, citing the work of scholars such as G. Stanley Hall, Erik Erikson, and James Marcia. Second are sociological approaches, which he sees as very similar in that they see young people as “a passive recipient of adult influences, a ‘becoming’ rather than a ‘being’ in their own right” (p. 4). He does note a recent trend towards attempts to understand youth cultures in their own terms, rather than from an adult notion of socialization. Buckingham identifies a third more interdisciplinary perspective that is concerned with the relationships between individual and group identities. Here, identity is understood as a “fluid, contingent matter” which is “more appropriate to talk about identification rather than identity” (p. 6). Erving Goffman’s work on identity presentation and management is central to this perspective. Fourth is a perspective he terms “identity politics,” which refers to activist social movements that explicitly question social power in social identity research, resisting repressive construction of identity by others; the aforementioned work by Butler’s (1991, 1997) being an example. Fifth, Buckingham contrasts the modern social theory approaches of Anthony Giddens and Foucault. Giddens sees identity as what he calls a “self-reflexive…project” individuals have to work on. Rather than liberating, Foucault might instead describe this process as “self-monitoring” or “self-surveillance.”

Transformations of Home and Family

Parental and political claims of media effects continue to spread beyond the individual child. The 21^st Century has brought many changes to the youth within the family home and beyond. Of growing concern are the transformation of the social constructs of home, school, and community, where new media plays an increasingly significant role.

Livingstone (2002) notes that leisure is more focused on the home than ever before. Many of the changes revolve around “doing things as a family,” which has become synonymous with media time. More recently, the location of “screen-based” media such as TVs, VCRs and computers began to migrate away from the main family space, and towards more individualized spaces, particularly the bedroom or playroom. The result is homes are media-rich environments featuring distinct family (shared) and personal (bedroom) “cultures.”

This trend in youth and leisure time in the home is coupled with what Livingstone (2002) calls the “social constructions of independence.” The conception of children in home has changed, giving rise to the class called “adolescence.” Children are growing up faster, but attaining adult status later. She argues, “The dominant narrative of childhood, and hence the relations between parents and children, concerns the balance between dependence and independence” (p. 172). The new family class of adolescence has emerged and “the media are of growing importance to this group in all domains: identity, culture, education, and consumption” (p. 173).

Also directly affecting the home culture is the aforementioned “digital generation gap:” the notions of children having an innate ability to learn and use new technology, playing a key role in acquiring skills of Internet, then explaining to adults. This creates a paradox within the constant struggle between parental strategies and children’s tactics for media usage (Buckingham, 2000; Livingstone, 2003; Press & Livingstone, 2006).

Transformations in Learning Practices

In a somewhat ironic role reversal, the learning potential of new media technology for adults seems to be largely disregarded. Seton-Green (2006) points out a difference in research between adult and youth media consumer or user; youth is usually positioned as learner. Power relationships between text and audience are constructed in pedagogical terms, which have implications for out of school learning through media. If there are no direct media effects, can there be a valid transmission model of pedagogy? Questions like this leads to more complex ideas about students as active audiences.

The discourses that typically surround efforts to integrate technology into the educational environment embody many of the characteristics of technological determinism. From this point of view, technology is a neutral good for society but seen to have effects on its users no matter how it is used, nor in what context it is used; “an autonomous force that is somehow independent of human society and acts upon it from outside” (Buckingham, 2008a, p. 11). He describes such educational discourses in education as “information determinism,” where information is seen as neutral good and that somehow by providing access, learning will follow. He argues that success will not be found only in providing better access to information, it is in how that access is integrated into academic thinking and pedagogy, especially as it relates to the every day experiences of today’s youth. Taking advantage of informal learning practices and other out-of-school daily experiences youth have with new media is where teaching and learning can be enhanced (see Gee, 2004).

Transformations in Media Literacy

Most of the discussion about how to integrate media experiences with learning practices falls under the rubric of “media literacy.” Questions about media literacy often embody broad concerns about students and their relative preparation for being successful in the learning and life. Like concerns about media influence in general, the concerns defining the media literate young person resurfaces as each new medium emerges (Anderson, Forthcoming). Livingstone (2003) summarizes current definitions of media literacy in a four-component model. A literate student should be able to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages across a variety of contexts. This last component—creation—is the basis for Voithofer’s (2005) definition of new media as combining production as well as reception of educational media. This is a skills-based approach where it is assumed that people can attain a deeper understanding of media and its conventions and possibilities if they experience the creation of symbolic texts first hand. What was once limited to television production studios is today a skills-based approach advocated across many disciplines that have not historically considered production methods beyond writing.

Livingstone (2002) notes that the transformation in the notion of literacy “involves a shift form a rule-based model of education to the more immersive ‘learning by doing’” (p. 229). She argues that literacy does not involve “serious” uses of computer alone, because learning can also come from playing electronic games to generate the skills and competencies that matter most for Internet communication technology (ICT) use (See also Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 2003). Livingstone later notes, “Interestingly, ‘learning by doing’ is a model in tune with liberal approaches to early childhood education, but this is generally replaced as children get older with the rules-based approach” (p. 233).

Perhaps a better way to conceptualize media literacy in the age of the Internet is as “digital fluency” (Hsi, 2007), which includes understanding the digital tools to gather, design, evaluate, critique, own, synthesize, and develop communication messages, but also understanding that the Internet and other forms of electronic expression are not neutral, but implicated is the diffusion of power in society.

New Conceptualizations for Media Research

At the nexus of competing interpellations, overlapping social structures, new literacies, democratic discourses, and social anxieties, is a new logic for media and the participatory practices of new media users within this logic. This logic summarizes several key conceptual differences developing between an approach to the analysis of new media and traditional perspectives on mass media.

New Media: A Definition

The terminology surrounding the social phenomena under study is often vague. Defining on-line media practices using terms like “digital,” “virtual,” and “interactive” tends to delimit the scope of analysis in different ways. “New media” has become something of a catchall term used to describe any and all emerging and evolving digital technologies, mostly the result of the last two decades of innovations in personal computing, the Internet, and cellular telephony. To continue with the rhizomatic metaphor, this analysis uses the term “new media” to broadly describe “the intersection of traditional media with digital media” (Ito, 2010) and the “remediation” (D. J. Bolter & Grusin, 2000) that inevitably follows the emergence of each new medium. Remediation is the process in which a medium “appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of real” (p. 66). This process of remediation has existed as long as media itself, but is greatly accelerated by digital media. Therefore, in this project, the ”new” in new media is digital communication formats but also old forms of media reconstituted and redistributed as digital media content over the Internet to personal computer, cellular phones, iPods, and so on.

Moreover, by using the term ‘new’, we must recognize that media encompassed by this term are currently new, but “always on the verge of growing older” (Ito, 2010). For this analysis, these media under study are new at this historical moment: this is an empirical description of youth interaction with the new technologies for on-line representation, but without a value judgment about their relative “newness.” Once again, time and posterity may ultimately need to decide how we define and remember the current condition.

The Logic of New Media

The Internet transcends spatial boundaries that structure real life and replaces them with a rhizomatic connection of computers. The contemporary logic of new media lies in a dialectical relationship between contemporary culture and media technology. The new participatory culture embodied by this logic, and therefore the conceptual framework for research, has two distinct but interrelated characteristics: emerging and evolving media technologies in digital form and the social practices (communication, entertainment, information) that have emerged from, evolved around, and been enabled by the specific technologies.

To some extent, the idea that Marshall McLuhan (1994) famously postulated many years ago now—the medium is the message—may be more appropriate than first believed. He argued that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study. In terms of research, common sense might suggest that digital technologies and cultural practices are separate objects of analysis in many ways. Technologies are architectural structures comprised of wires, computers, and human interfaces. Social practices are material manifestations of culturally structured symbolic interaction and representation. One is comprised of “things” in the world; the other is comprised of social practices that construct and are constructed by culture.

Despite that, the two domains are inextricably intertwined. One structures the other in new media environments. This idea is not necessarily new: Raymond Williams (1975) made powerful arguments for a dialectical view of television technology as both shaping and shaped by its use and appropriation in society. The same can be said for new media, but the affordances of new media technologies significantly transform the dialectical relationship into something new and unique to new media participation.

Taking this idea of the architecture of social media defining the act of communication further, Lev Manovich (2001) suggests that new media, particularly social media in the context of identity and community formation, are a complex negotiation between our multiple selves (on-line and off-line) and the computer structures and operations through which we represent these selves to others.

In other words, in this contemporary moment, “life takes place on screen” (Mirzoeff, 2002). This is the logic of new media, and perhaps what is most new about it, as compared to traditional media. As dana boyd[1] claims, “Login to Twitter. Login to Facebook. What you see is a world that you've constructed.” Lev Manovich (2001) sums this up by suggesting, “new media follow the logic of the postindustrial or globalized society whereby “every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and select her ideology from a large number of choices” (p. 42). This logic explicitly rejects the notion that participants in “networked publics” are passive agents constituted as subjects through their media consumption. Instead, a key characteristic of new media is the recognition of participant as an active agent in new media environments and a producer of content for those spaces.

Howard Rheingold recently affirmed the view[2] that the networked structure matters in analysis because “the technical architecture effects human communication.” According to Rheingold, the level of understanding of the architecture of the site and its human interface has a significant impact on questions of power, control, and freedom of expression. As a source of discursive power, the technical structures of the Internet are much more closely tied to the subject’s ability to speak and participate, or have a “voice,” in networked public spaces. The reader may recall that voice is a metaphorical construct proposed by Mitra and Watts (2002) for the study of power in on-line spaces. This suggests that the technical architecture of new media, especially in the form of social media, allows the subject to construct the media, even as media hail them as subject, to a far greater extent than any communication media before it.

In other words, the relationship between the technical architecture and the participant is where the overall experience of participation in social media is constructed. As previously outlined, critical theorists have been concerned about the role of media in constructing, or interpellating, the individual as subject. Each social medium has a technical architecture that affords and constrains the various options for the construction of self in different ways, while the participants (understood as producers/consumers), in turn, define the site and its aesthetic through their choices and contributions. Foucault argues that the construction of self is a cycle whereby our identity is constituted by culture, but we in turn create that culture through our social practices (Foucault, 1972; 1979), which is a very useful way of thinking about self in social media.

New Participatory Practices

The previous section suggests that new technological innovations are deeply entwined with material social practices. Power is diffused throughout social practices. Social practices construct, and are constructed by, these relationships. It is therefore a circular process, rather than linear or hierarchical. Continuing the rhizomatic metaphor that has no centers, beginnings and ends, I argue that the best opportunities new media spaces can offer for inquiry is the nexus points where multiple overlapping social spheres intersect, creating social nodal points which are most commonly thought of as on-line communities. At the heart of on-line social practices is its participatory nature, where socializing takes on the very character of the Internet itself.

The following is a review of some conceptual frameworks that may help guide preliminary analysis. Most are drawn primarily from Ito (2010), which is a compilation of findings by 28 researchers gathered over 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork. This book provides the most up-to-date and useful frameworks for defining the conceptual structures and boundaries in which to situate the analysis.

Participatory Culture

As I already alluded, new media are artifacts of culture and society that are undergoing a major transition in the relationship of media to consumers and producers, which has a particular impact on media studies research. James P. Zappen (2005) notes, the dichotomy between mass audience and media producer is replaced by a complex negotiation between on-line and real selves, representations of selves, listeners, and readers, and our many selves and the computer structures and operations through which we represent these selves to others.

We are moving away from media understood as “consumption” of, and “audiences” interacting with, books, magazines, television, films, and radio. Instead, we begin to understand media as a relationship that not only encompasses the intersection of these older media, re-represented as digital media, but widespread “participation in digital media production” verses simple consumption, and “networked publics” rather than audiences.

Resistance to this rethinking comes down to a matter of parental, educational, and political control. In RL (real life), sources of power and control over discourses are often related to factors such as physical location and state ideological apparatuses, to use Althusser’s term, such as the military, schools, etc. Because of the physical structure and protocols of the Internet, attempts to control or censure Internet messages are seen as a disruption in the network, and messages are simply re-routed (Castells, 2001). Thus, these sources of power have far less influence over on-line discourses. Since there are no centers on the Internet, the concepts of power centers and cultural capital in media such as broadcast networks in traditional conceptions media are disrupted.

Participatory Media Culture

Through this document, I have used the term participant to describe the subjects of this study, and for a reason. An important characteristic of new media, specifically social media web sites, is the constitutive role of the users, in terms of personal voice and sociability. Henry Jenkins (2006) describes this as “participatory media culture,” which differs sharply from traditional conceptions of audiences as passive media spectatorship, and also conceptually separates these types of social practices from new media contents that are more accurately defined as information gathering via the Internet. Jenkins write:

A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices (Jenkins, 2009, p. xi).

Youth are a core user group in these participatory media cultures, and their social interactions in contemporary culture are increasingly accomplished through networked gaming environments and social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. This project does not consider gaming environments and all that that entails in terms of identity and play except for the chance engagement with such environments by the participants of this study.

User-generated Content (UGC)

These sites have another common characteristic that can be considered a subset of media participation; the production of “user-generated content.” Each of these web sites have a unique technical architecture that exists as a structure in which much of the site content is produced and/or provided by the participants: “All new media is generally produced by youth, for youth, in the youth sphere, not within the constraints of an educational institution” (Sefton-Green, 2006, p. 296). Media is no longer merely consumed by an audience; on these sites, it is almost entirely produced by participants.

Networked Publics

Participants in social media sites can no longer be thought of as audiences, mass or otherwise. Ito (2010) uses the term “networked publics” as the social space where on-line participatory culture is enacted, and where traditional media are remediated in digital form and user content is generated and distributed. For youth, this is seen primarily as between a space between life in the home and public life, such as in schools.

Genres of Participation in Networked Publics

Ito (2010) employs “the notion of genres of participation” (p. 15) to differentiate between types of social media sites: friendship-driven and interest-driven. Ito (2010) defines friendship-driven web sites as such because they reflect “the dominant and mainstream practices of youth as they go about their day-to-day negotiations with peers and friends” (p. 15-16). They find that for most youth, the sites MySpace and Facebook are based on local networks that are “their primary source of affiliation, friendship, and romantic partners, and their lives mirror this local network” (p. 16). Interest-driven web sites are defined by practices such as “specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities” (p. 16) as the primary purpose of the sites. Unlike friend-driven social media sites, I can easily access most of the visual content generated by people I do not know and who need not accept me as a friend, although there are occasionally image folders that only a defined subgroup can open. This is a fundamental architectural difference that seems to distinguish the sites defined as “interest-driven.” The other is that the type and goal of the user-generated content appears to be very different, perhaps as a result of the technical structure as much as the intended audience.

Conclusion

Users of these social media sites engage in social practices that seem to appeal primarily to younger people. This is shown to be so through research (Livingstone 2002, 2003, 2007; Sefton-Green, 2006; Heim, 2007; Ito, 2010) and quantitative statistics of social media use (Lenhart, 2005a, 2005b; Roberts, 2005). My own research focus is on the appropriation and use of new media by young people, and the impact of their participation in social media technology in terms of identity, learning, and community formation. Therefore, the focus of analysis is on how their “communication, friendship, play, and self-expression are reconfigured through their engagement with new media” (Ito, 2010).

CHAPTER THREE: METHODS

Introduction

As I have already argued, media and technology should not be viewed as deterministic, but an embodiment of social cultural relations. Too often, media research focuses on the content of media but does not try to answer basic questions about how and why youth engage and make meaning with new media in the context of their everyday lives. “An explanation for the central place which media occupy in children’s lives should be sought not in the nature of media themselves, but in the context of daily life into which they have been introduced” (Livingstone, 2002, pp. 77-78).

In answer to the challenge by scholars such as Livingstone, this project will document an activity–based study of American teens (13-17 years of age) and their material engagement with new media. Study participants will be given a laptop computer and asked to verbally report what they are experiencing as they experience it. As a hybrid form of protocol analysis using experience sampling method (ESM), I will use new media technology to document and record their activities in real-time. The design of this study allows me to collect data on youth’s engagement with new media, in the moment of that engagement, for analysis and discussion.

Documenting a Historical Moment in the Rhizomatic System

The Internet itself can be conceptualized as a rhizomatic structure, designed to resist attack, and without centers, beginnings or ends (Castells, 2001). As argues above, research in new media environments can be perhaps better understand social practice and meaning making in specific contexts of human experience; contexts of both time and place. It is therefore important to examine particular practices at particular historic moments, and account for the contiguous and overlapping social actions in new media spaces.

This analysis should be understood as a snapshot: an historical moment in an evolving social and cultural rhizomatic system that is decentralized, fragmented, and transient. Looking at the roots of these practices does not shed much light on the current modes of identity and meaning because they are constantly changing as participants continue to experiment with and use social media technologies in ways often unintended by the creators of the technologies. As a basic methodological assumption, the metaphor of a rhizomatic system is a useful one: we can best serve the construction of knowledge by looking at one piece of the system, and how it relates to the pieces immediately around it.

In fundamental ways, new media spaces are both different from and similar to traditional social interactions structured by geographical space. It is the same because we are perhaps more likely to be influenced by that which is nearest to us. It is different in new media spaces because direct interactions are based on connections through nodal points defined by common interests, which have little to do with geographical location. We can look at this system from a broader or higher level, and see more connections, but detail is somewhat obscured. The advantage of this view is that overall patterns remain relatively constant. Or we can don a jeweler’s eyepiece to look inside particular connections in fine detail, but the surrounding terrain is often blocked from our view. The challenge at this level is that if we look away, then look back, the details already may have changed, so we must choose our moment, and pay attention.

This study follows the metaphor of the jeweler’s eyepiece to sample and document, in fine detail, a small piece of the terrain that is youth practices in new media spaces.

Methodology

This study takes a grounded approach. Introduced by Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), it is an inductive theory generating methodology of ‘discovery’ for conceptualizing ‘latent’ social patterns and structures. This approach discourages the adoption of a priori categories, dimensions, and perspectives for data analysis. From this approach, fundamental questions can be asked about how youth develop new strategies to navigate the complexities of participating in new media spaces, and use networked technologies to engage in social interactions related to home, school and peers. Through this grounded approach to theory building, I can achieve a better understanding of these everyday social practices, then inductively develop the best conceptual frameworks for analysis.

Research Questions

My dissertation will be structured primarily around answering two broad research questions, one functions to situate the cultural context; whether or not new media is considered an important and necessary aspect of the participants’ everyday existence, and the dimensions that emerge from the data to support the assumption in the study that it is. The second question then looks to define the specifics of their relationship to new media. These are the most important goal of this dissertation and will receive the most attention.

RQ1: Is new media important to young people in their lives? If so, why?

RQ2: What specific patterns and practices are evident as youth (age 13-17) make meaning and construct identity in technology-mediated social environments?

Youth engagement with social environments may include their often interrelated and overlapping engagement with peers, parents, school, entertainment, and the virtual communities that are formed in between these social spheres.

Questions three and four are corollary to the first two, but occupy equal importance in the overall study. One relates to the technologies themselves and how they may structure the communication practices and processes, and the other interrogates youth assumptions about new media practices.

Changes in new media technologies are rapid, and this generation of “wired teens” appears to be driving it to a large extent. Their practices may represent important trends that drive innovation in new media technologies, as well as shape the fabric of teen culture.

RQ3: In what ways do young people participate, gain access, and create and/or maintain user-generated content in new media environments, given the affordances and constraints of each technology?

This question also provides some opportunities to gather data on new media in their lives across multiple media technologies (e.g., television, computers, cellular phones, iPods), an important question in an age of “media convergence” (Jenkins, 2006), where youth seem to view different media technologies as interchangeable.

Further, this question may cast some light on specific uses for technology to gather and share information, since these digital natives are the next generation of college students; the findings may have particular importance for teaching and learning pedagogy in higher education. This is an important area of study for scholars and teachers alike.

RQ4: What are the assumptions, perceptions, and concerns, if any, young people have as they engage new media environments in everyday life?

I may uncover “taken for granted” realities of new media engagement from the perspective of the young people themselves in terms of dealing with issues of authenticity of information, privacy, anonymity, access, gender, race, sexuality, and other dimensions relating to their engagement with new media technology. Such findings may be informative for the development of media literacy strategies specifically and general Internet-related policy decisions about in new media in the future.

Protocol

I will employ a hybrid form of protocol analysis using experience sampling method (ESM). New sets of categories and practices may emerge from protocol analysis, where participants are asked to verbally report what they are experiencing as they experience it (Ericsson & Simon, 1993). “Protocol analysis is a rigorous methodology for eliciting verbal reports of thought sequences as a valid source of data on thinking” (Ericsson, 2002). A hybrid form is employed because the goal is not analysis of thinking processes related to specific tasks assigned by a researcher, but of the everyday feelings and thoughts participants have as they engage new media.

Protocol analysis originally emerged as one of the principal methods for studying thinking processes in cognitive, behavior, and psychology research. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi successfully integrated protocol analysis into mass media research. They recognized that “methodological and theoretical limitations make it difficult for social scientists to adequately access the impact or value of any form of leisure or medium of communication”(Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. xii). This research project draws from their methodological model because “it is designed to provide a picture of the way people feel as they move through everyday life” (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. xiii), not test a particular hypothesis about the communicative practices of teens. This method does not attempt to explain social artifacts or objects, but is used to describe the experience of digital technology. Participants are not asked to describe or explain how they use new media. Instead, they are asked to remain focused on on-line activities and merely give verbal expression to those thoughts that emerge while navigating the WWW, generating content, socializing, and so on. Validity is assessed by analyzing the information expressed as verbalized thoughts and comparing that to the on-screen activities, providing evidence that the concurrent verbalization reflects the mediated practices in which they are engaged.

Experience sampling. Experience sampling method (ESM) refers to set of techniques to document human behaviors, thoughts, or feelings as they occur in real-time. Larson & Csikszentmihalyi (Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1983) coined the term experience sampling method, which refers to any assessment of experiences having three characteristics: in natural settings, in real-time, and on repeated occasions. This can include ‘naïve’ accounts of events because validity comes from repetition, not specific responses. Subjects can be asked to report in response to a number of signals or cues: this study asks participants to report on particular events in naturally occurring new media activities. Instead of making written notes in journals, as is typical of this method, participants will be asked to verbally report what they are thinking and feeling, in the moment and context of its engagement, to assess their condition.

Logistics

Each participant will be given a laptop computer with popular web browsers and other communication software. In the background, Morae, a usability testing and user experience research software package, will record key aspects of the user’s activities, synchronized with the capture of their verbally reported thoughts and feelings as they occur in real-time. The software documents and records video and audio (through the built-in camera and microphone), on-screen activity (screen shots), and keyboard/mouse input each time the laptop is used. In this way, the computer records their new media experiences and activities in the “natural context of their occurrence, among the actors who would naturally be participating in the interaction, and follows the natural stream of everyday life” (Alder & Alder, 2000, p. 81).

Many of the inherent challenges of media audience research are mitigated by the use of this technology. The software, Morae, is an excellent tool for protocol analysis methodology because it records what the subjects are doing and saying in the moment of engaging new media interfaces, without interfering in the activity. The collected data represents contextualized and situated communicative practices in the moment they are negotiated and enacted because the data collection instrument becomes a part of the study participant everyday life. Since the laptop is portable, data can be captured in both private and public domains, such as peer interactions in school, at coffee shops, and so on. A comparative analysis of private and public socializing practices becomes possible. Admittedly, conclusions about such data will be limited because of the many variables added, but it may help provide some insights into youth media culture as it is enacted in public domains.

Interviews

In some cases, participant’s time with the laptop will be followed by an in-depth interview designed to probe their overall use of media technology and the range of media channels available to them, including questions about simultaneous use of different media technologies. Through interviews, young people can talk about their world, to comment on the world around them and their everyday activities, “about key features and processes of the scene” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 176) that may be missed using the software documentation process. As respondents, they should speak only for themselves, providing a personal narrative of media use. As Lindlof and Taylor write, “narrative is absolutely central to art, spirituality, community, and a sense of self, and thus encodes human desire at the deepest levels” (p. 180). This is important to understand because the research questions directly relate to meaning making and identity construction.

An important component of the interview process will be a hybrid of “photo elicitation,” a technique using photographs “to elicit new, extended responses from subject…so that the narrative is enriched by increased breadth and density” and “empowering subjects, providing them a central role in the telling of their own stories” (Denton, 2005, p. 412). With the appropriate respondents, excerpts of the recorded data from their time with the laptop will literally be used to interview the subject.

Combining the Morea recorded data of verbal reports with in-depth interviews will further improve validity for an analysis of patterns and thought processes of youth in the act of using new media.

Analysis

Textual Analysis. The model for coding the self-reported textual data is based on the grounded approach, also known as the constant comparative method (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). This is a multistep process to begin generating theory from data.

In the first step, I will use a combination of open coding and in vivo coding methods to ground the text. Open coding is the initial coding of data to identify, name, categorize and describe phenomena found in the text. This stage of coding is typically “unrestricted” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002) because the categories are not yet defined. Categories begin to emerge by comparing each incident to other incidents in an ongoing process to find commonalities. Strauss and Corbin (1990) stress that the process of describing and coding is dynamic and occurring over time in the research setting.

For the interviews, in vivo coding is typically used to code the terms used by the study participants in the interview.

The next step is to begin to integrate categories using axial coding. This is the process of relating coded categories to each other, using both inductive and deductive thinking processes, to identify relationships that may reshape ad refine categories as connections are made between them.

As a final step in the analysis, I will begin the process of “dimensionalization” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 222) as the last phase in conceptual development of the data. The purpose is to identify properties of the categories for further analysis to look for common characteristics across categories. Once I feel I have reached some level of saturation and thematic stability, I can move on to constructing interpretive claims.

Throughout this process, I will be making personal memos, short documents I write to myself during the analysis of data to “serve to flesh out the thematic qualities of the coding categories, or how the meanings shift across time, social actors, or other dimensions” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 220).

Visual Analysis. While of secondary importance to this project, a significant amount of visual data will also be generated by the Morea software. To aid in an analysis of that data, I will apply principles of visual communication for analysis of screens through which young people represent self and other in new media environments. These representations will be analyzed in terms of visual presentation: visual media as rhetorical and aesthetic.

There will be high quality images of representation on-line, particularly on sites like Flickr.com, which appear to be dominated by professional artists and photographers, who are assumed to create more carefully calculated representations of trained artists. I am also interested in much more “spontaneous” representations of self and other. Indeed, this is a major characteristic of new media: anyone can represent self in mediated spaces, with or without formal training or technology instruction.

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