SOCIAL INTIMACY IN SOCIAL MEDIA HOW YOUTH PRACTICE FRIENDSHIPS AND CONSTRUCT IDENTITY ONLINE

MALENE CHARLOTTE LARSEN

Keynote presentation at ECREA regional conference:

“Addressing the role of media in interpersonal communication and social interaction – in different contexts and professions”

Aarhus University, Nov 10 2015

About me

•  Associate Professor, PhD, Department of Communication, Aalborg University

•  Research area: Social media and digital youth culture

•  PhD on Danish adolescents’ use of social network sites (2007-2010)

•  Current research projects/interests: •  “Intimacy, social media and youth”

(with Jette Kofoed) •  “Young children (0-8) and digital technology”

(with Stine Liv Johansen) •  Internet based fieldwork and ethical

challenges in internet research

About my research

•  10 years of qualitative research and participant observations

•  Multi-sited connective virtual ethnography (Marcus, 1995; Strathern, 1996; Hine, 2000)

•  Snowballing (Bijker, 1995)

About the talk

The social media landscape among Danish youth (2005-2015)

Methodological and theoretical background

Empirical background (2005-2015)

Three analytical perspectives on social intimacy in social media Constructing identity-in-practice (2005) Practicing friendship by stating “I love you” (2010) Being intimate in private (2015 - initial findings)

Concluding remarks

The social media landscape among Danish youth (2005-2015)

•  From first-generational (Danish) social network sites (SNS) or chat-forums to (American) “big business” platforms

•  From ”networked communication” to ”platformed sociality” (van Dijck, 2013)

•  From public to semi-public or more private communication •  From text-heavy to increasingly visual communication •  From usernames to real names and cross-platform handles •  From a distributed self-presentation to a unified identity (on FB) (Wittkower, 2014)

- to more distributed practices once again •  From social network sites

to social media apps •  From stationary to mobile

internet use

Methodological and theoretical background

•  Nexus Analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004)

•  Combines an ethnographic methodological approach with discourse analysis – especially Mediated Discourse Analysis (Scollon, 2001a, 2001b; Norris & Jones, 2005)

•  Focusing on central mediated actions carried out by social actors – rather than focusing solely on discourse

•  Actions are always mediated by technologies or cultural artefacts (mediational means) •  Discourse, meaning language and texts can, however, be the ‘technology’ that

mediates actions, but not necessarily

Analysing young people’s use of social media as a Nexus of Practice

•  A “nexus of practice” is not a physical place, nor a specific group of people, but:

•  ”a recognizable grouping of a set of mediated actions” (Scollon, 2001a: 150)

•  “a genre of activity and the group of people who engage in that activity” - as opposed to Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998)

•  e.g. “having coffee at Starbucks”, “sending a snap” “using Facebook”

•  A SNS could be analysed as a Nexus of Practice (which could entail various Communities of Practice)

Analysing young people’s use of social media as a Nexus of Practice

(Larsen, 2005: 33, inspired by Scollon, 2001)

Ethnographic focus in Nexus Analysis

•  Does not necessarily focus on a specific field site or a group of people among whom to carry out an ethnography

•  An interest in certain social practices

•  Focusing on central “cycles of discourse” (Scollon &Scollon, 2004) within the Nexus of Practice

•  Engaging, navigating and changing the Nexus of Practice

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  I have created profiles (as myself)

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  I have made ’friends’

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  I have written field notes

•  ”I feel I have a hard time keeping track of my different friends (who is who – who writes what to me and who have I written to). Especially, it is confusing that users can freely change their user names and profile pictures […]. Based on this, I can conclude that it is easier to navigate ones’ friends if you know them IRL.”

(Larsen, 2005: 223)

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  I have taken (a lot of) screenshots

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  I have had informal conversations online and conducted focus group interviews

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  I have used social media features to collect data

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  I have applied a different (more qualitative) approach to collect online questionnaire data (from 2007 – 2400 respondents)

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  I have applied a different (more qualitative) approach to collect online questionnaire data (from 2015 – with Jette Kofoed, in progress)

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  I have coded the data in Nvivo using a Grounded Theory inspired approach (Gibbs, 2002; Welsh, 2002)

Collecting data and engaging with the field

•  But it does not end there…

”To put it crudely, a nexus analysis would like to document or record everything that might be relevant….”

(Scollon & Scollon, 2007: 621)

•  Building an “archive of data” (Rapley, 2007) consisting of: •  Already existing data (e.g. online discussions, blog posts, press coverage etc.) •  Researcher-generated data (interviews, survey-data etc.) •  “Nexus-ethnographic data” (Larsen, 2010) à collecting new data by communicating

research results within the nexus of practice

CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY-IN-PRACTICE Three analytical perspectives on social intimacy in social media

The concept of identity

•  Inspired by Lemke’s (2003, 2008) division of identity-in-practice and identity across timescales

•  Identity-in-practice: •  The short timescales of

situated small-group activity

•  Identity across timescales:

•  Larger institutional scales and lifespan developments

•  Co-existing concepts on SNS

Identity-in-practice

Identity across timescales

(Larsen, 2007)

Using the body as mediational mean

(Larsen, 2005)

ß “Do not write to me before you have commented on my pictures!”

Receiving positive feedback

•  "good'damn babe you are hot!”

(Comment to a picture of a 13 year old girl)

•  "you are looking good as hell, sweetie <3<3

(Comment to picture of a 17 year old boy)

•  You are so CRAZY hot, honey <33"

(Comment to a picture of a 15 year old girl)

•  "Ugh some people are getting more and more handsome every day”

(Comment to a picture of a 14 year old boy)

Actively seeking acknowledgement

“I’m bored girls, write in my gb, and please leave a comment in my picture gallery”

“Leave a comment in my picture gallery! they are extremely hot! kisses mille!”

My poll

What do you think of me: J Beautiful J Extremely beautiful J Too gorgeous J Too hot J Too nice

Show result See votes Old polls

(Larsen, 2005)

Self-regulating practices

•  Too vulgar or porn-like pictures are reprimanded

•  ”get a grip !!” (Boy, 18). •  ”This is a weak fake profile why don’t you choose a

picture normal girls would choose…” (Boy, 14). •  ”Cheap, Cheaper, Cheapest!” (Girl, 14). •  ”be careful they don’t pop out.” (Boy, 17). •  ”fake, faker, fakest…” (Girl, 15)

•  A high level of self-regulation of pictures and chat

PRACTICING FRIENDSHIP BY STATING “I LOVE YOU”

Three analytical perspectives on social intimacy in social media

The Love discourse among Danish teens

•  “Hi my always lovely honey <3 Guess what? (; I love you – SOOO much, and you know what, actually more than that! You mean the world to me! You are always so wonderful. So cool, funny, great, sweet, beautiful, charming, wonderful, loving, great… I could go on, beautiful. You are EVERYTHING!”

(Message on the front page of a 16-year-old girl’s Arto profile – written by her best friend)

•  Discourse with a capital D: •  ”… socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, valuing,

acting, and interacting, in the “right” places and at the “right” times with the “right” objects…”

(Gee, 1999, p. 17)

Communicating with strong ties

•  Instead of writing about themselves in profile text, users often wrote about their best friends

•  Status updates, blog posts etc. often mentioned best friends and how much they love them

•  Usernames would often include

name of ‘BFF’s’: •  “idascarolineforever”

(user name belonging to a 12-year-old girl named Ida – Caroline is her best friend)

Using features creatively

•  They “get married” online

•  They use tagging creatively (e.g. “If you are tagged in this picture, I love you!”)

•  The best message: ”I love you”

•  “Because it makes me warm inside and makes me feel like someone everybody loves :D” (15-year-old boy)

•  “it means a lot to me when someone says they love me and I know that they mean it.” (15-year-old girl)

Placing intimate feelings in public space

•  Emotional communication is almost always publicly accessible within the SNS (Larsen, 2011)

•  Not one-to-one, but most often one-to-many, asynchronous (mass) communication

•  Frontstage (instead of backstage) (Goffman, 1959)

•  ”… it is nice to know what someone else thinks of you, and it’s nice that he writes in public so that others can see how fond he is of me :D”

(15 year old girl)

Using each other as mediational means

•  Messages from friends become elements in the individual user’s performance of identity-in-practice

•  They (strategically) use each other as mediational means

Messages from the ones that matter!!

BEING INTIMATE IN PRIVATE Three analytical perspectives on social intimacy in social media

A snap of intimacy – practicing friendship in 1 – 10 seconds

•  Snapchat •  An ephemeral social media platform

where pictures disappear after 1 – 10 seconds •  The second largest social media platform

among Danish young people •  Half of all 12-19-year-olds use

the app on a daily basis (Christensen, 2014)

•  Often used and perceived as text messaging •  Is seen as “more intimate” and more

enjoyable than Facebook (Larsen & Kofoed, 2015; Bayer et.al., 2015)

From the mundane to a high level of self-disclosure

•  Typical snaps •  Food and snacks •  Mundane in-the-moment activities •  (Ugly) selfies (Larsen & Kofoed, 2015)

•  “Polished” photos are shared on Instagram

•  Facebook is reserved for practical communication

•  On Snapchat many users are sharing photos that they would not post on other social media

Signalling trust through intimacy

•  A high level of self-disclosure:

•  ”An ugly picture of myself, but I only send it to my girlfriends and I know that they will not screenshot it. But if they do, I ask them to delete it or else I know that they will not use it in an evil way.”

(14 year old girl)

•  Sending an ugly selfie is like saying: •  ”I trust you enough to share this with you” •  Knowingly: ”You will not pass it on”

(e.g. by taking a screenshot)

•  But what happens when that trust is broken?

Concluding remarks

•  Young people employ many different resources and meditational means to communicate intimate feelings on social media

•  On social media intimacy is heavily intertwined with both the maintenance of friendships and the construction of identity

•  In public or semi-public social media spaces young people are co-constructors of each other’s identity

•  But there is a tendency to communicate more privately •  Young people’s friendship practices are constantly changing due to changes in

the social media landscape - and vice versa…

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION

AAU profile: http://tinyurl.com/le3m6kk

malenel@hum.aau.dk

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