From MySpace to Facebook - Are Teens using Social Media in Different Ways?

I was glad to see that one of our blog post prompts for the week focused upon danah boyd’s work on teens using MySpace and the ways in which they created, manipulated, and projected online identities through social media that worked within the agendas of the social communities to which they belonged. Several times as I was reading boyd’s fascinating and detailed analysis in her chapter “Writing Oneself into Being,” I jotted a “still?” or simply a “?” on the margins of my copy of the text. While the material made for compelling reading, I was equally compelled to consider how relevant boyd’s conclusions were in light of close to almost six years of evolution in the world of social media (I like Nakamura’s point that web years are like dog years, so that we should think of 6 years as a seeming 42!).

            What changed during the intervening years? Boyd’s UC Berkeley dissertation was completed in 2008, a time in which MySpace reigned supreme in the world of social media among young adults, though Facebook was beginning to become popular among college undergraduates. With its emphasis on music sharing, it was particularly attractive to teens, for whom the recommendation, transfer and discussion of music is a key element of identity and social interaction. Between 2005 and 2008, MySpace was the most visited social media website in the world, and for a short period during those years it was the most visited website, surpassing Google. After 2008, with the emergence and growth of Facebook, MySpace’s dominance quickly eroded, and now has a much smaller number of consistent users.

            The differences between MySpace and Facebook offer strong clues as to why Facebook eclipsed MySpace. While MySpace was (and still is) very useful for sharing, promoting, and even selling music in ways that Facebook does not allow on its platform, the number of features available in the creation of an online identity is far more limited. Facebook has features such as the “Wall” that allow for an interactive exchange with “friends” (people you have admitted into your list of people who can access varying elements of your Facebook presence), and a status update feature that allows you to quickly let friends know what you are doing, thinking about, or feeling. It is coordinated with photo-sharing programs in a way that allows photos to be easily posted. It has chat and private messaging capabilities. Above all, the “like” and the “share” buttons on Facebook are extremely powerful tools that instantly link users to friends in extremely easy ways. Such is Facebook’s massive presence in contemporary culture that so much webcontent already has links to Facebook built in to make such sharing easier. Finally, responding perhaps to the analyses of boyd and others which demonstrated the extent to which the control of accessibility was a key concern for social media users, Facebook is constantly developing and changing its “privacy settings” in ways that create controversy and invoke larger questions of privacy, ownership, and access to personal material posted on the web.

             Obviously, many of boyd’s points still hold true despite the migration of teens from MySpace to Facebook. Boyd’s thesis in this chapter is that teens use social media as one way to present a version of identity (“self-presentation”), and they manipulate that identity in ways that invoke Goffman’s “impression management.” Yet at the same time, as other of the authors we have read this week have argued, the potentialities and non-potentialities inherent in the use of these technologies and mediated environments in themselves affect the ways in which users can conceptualize their own identity.  I would argue that the features that differentiate Facebook from MySpace are for the most part features that fall in line with the needs that boyd sees in the teen experience of identity and social media, and that many of her points are even more true for Facebook than MySpace. It probably explains why Facebook has supplanted MySpace.

            Facebook to an even greater degree allows teens to do the two things that seemed central to their use of MySpace, according to boyd; first, to project a version of themselves that rides a fine line between difference and unity with their peers and second, to control access to their profile so that they are guarded against adult surveillance and perceived danger from unknown adults. The second, quite easily, is enhanced by Facebook’s myriad ways in which the content visible to the web onlooker is controlled by the user, most importantly through the “Friends List” but then by the division of those friends into various groups. Postings can be designated as visible on various levels to various groups. All of this, of course, is predicated on the user going and adjusting the visibility and privacy settings, which many, many users do not do. One would think, then, that teens would be particularly good at adjusting the privacy settings to control their web “signal.” I’m not sure I see this in my students, though I haven’t asked this extensively. When this issue comes up, students still seem to be relying on the idea that, “people who don’t care won’t find me,” similarly to boyd’s 2008 findings. Many times I have had discussions with classes and individual students about the necessity of “being careful” about who they are friending, and what kinds of messages they are sending to those who can access their accounts. This is always attended with varying amounts of surprise, concern, and perhaps a heightened awareness that was not present before.

            What I feel boyd’s analysis misses, situated as it is in 2008 before the development of features that make Facebook so attractive, is the degree to which it allows the user to be “present” and “connected” to friends in very immediate and intimate ways, despite RL distances between those friends. When I talk to my students, this seems to be the element they like about Facebook, even while they will complain about aspects such as time-wasting, advertising, friends who in some ways make a nuisance of themselves on their feed, or the discordance between social worlds, as when an older family member comments on a thread populated by peer comments. It seems to me that MySpace encouraged a more static relationship to the profile identity posted by the user, while Facebook encourages a constantly-shifting and changing identity. In many ways, the identity projected on Facebook at a particular moment, through newly-posted photos taken and posted immediately from a smart phone, comments on the wall by friends, the latest item shared by the user and the comments its engendered, and the items coming from larger Facebook communites made when the user “likes” something, has the possibility to be completely different 30 minutes later. If boyd emphasizes how hard teens work to maintain stable identities in MySpace, Facebook poses an even greater challenge to identity control, since the elements constituting that identity are constantly shifting, and identity boundaries are incredibly permeable due to friends’ ability to influence what shows up on your feed.

            Yet I feel that the impermanence of the Facebook identity in many ways predicates the idea that your friends are “present” in a manner that the more static MySpace did not. Your status and theirs, a photo of what just happened to me, my Spotify playlist popping up on my friends’ feed – community is always present. The fact that it changes so frequently adds to the feeling that one is part of the dynamic flow of RL, even if that flow cannot always be controlled. If we allow that teens are particularly clued in to the demands of belonging to a group and yet creating an individuality within that group, the wide array of features found on Facebook cater to just such a mission. I feel that this demand to be “present” is something that, while implicit in what boyd is saying in her article, would today demand a reckoning in an account of teens’ interaction with social media.