Abstract
The explosion in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Friendster is widely regarded as an exciting opportunity, especially for youth.Yet the public response tends to be one of puzzled dismay regarding a generation that, supposedly, has many friends but little sense of privacy and a narcissistic fascination with self-display. This article explores teenagers' practices of social networking in order to uncover the subtle connections between online opportunity and risk. While younger teenagers relish the opportunities to recreate continuously a highly-decorated, stylistically-elaborate identity, older teenagers favour a plain aesthetic that foregrounds their links to others, thus expressing a notion of identity lived through authentic relationships. The article further contrasts teenagers' graded conception of `friends' with the binary classification of social networking sites, this being one of several means by which online privacy is shaped and undermined by the affordances of these sites.
Abstract
The aim of this research was to investigate age differences and similarities in the use of the social networking website MySpace, to explore potential differences in social capital among older people (users over 60 years of age) compared to teenagers (users between 13 and 19 years of age). We used locally developed web crawlers to collect data from MySpace’s user profile pages, and to quantify any differences that exist in the networks of friends of older people and teenagers. Content analysis was applied to investigate differences in social activities between the two age groups on MySpace, and the way they represent themselves on their profile pages. Our findings show a social capital divide: teenagers have larger networks of friends compared to older users of MySpace. On the other hand, we found that the majority of teenage users’ friends are in their own age range (age ± 2 years), whilst older people’s networks of friends tend to have a more diverse age distribution. In addition, our results show that teenagers tend to make more use of different media (e.g. video , music) within MySpace and use more self-references and negative emotions when describing themselves on their profile compared to older people.
Abstract:
Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook serve as "networked publics." As with unmediated publics like parks and malls, youth use networked publics to gather, socialize with their peers, and make sense of and help build the culture around them. This article examines American youth engagement in networked publics and considers how properties unique to such mediated environments (e.g., persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences) affect the ways in which youth interact with one another. Ethnographic data is used to analyze how youth recognize these structural properties and find innovative ways of making these systems serve their purposes. Issues like privacy and impression management are explored through the practices of teens and youth participation in social network sites is situated in a historical discussion of youth's freedom and mobility in the United States.
This study is a discourse analysis of media representations of young people’s participation in the summer riots that spread across the UK in August 2011. Drawing on articles published in three UK newspapers The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Sun this paper critically assesses the ways in which the media identified the behaviour of young people as symptomatic of a general moral decline in British society. Along with the media portrayal of children and young people during these events, the study also highlights the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as a further way of questioning the reporting practices of mainstream media. Articles 2, 12 and 13 will have specific focus in the study, in order to evaluate the media’s recurrent misrepresentation of young people’s participation in decision making on matters concerning their own wellbeing.
Abstract
In 1989, while reporting the well-publicized attack on a female jogger in New York City, the media discovered wilding, a newly stylized word used to describe sexual violence committed by a group of urban teens. Sociologically, the term wilding became particularly significant due to its racial connotation, perpetuating a stereotype of young Black (and Latino) males belonging to a dangerous class. This work explores the contours of moral panic over wilding by attending to elements of race, class, and fear of crime, especially as they manifest in the media. The findings contribute to a critical understanding of youth in society by offering an interpretation of wilding, a distinctive form of moral panic that symbolizes not only a threat to society at large but also to a political economy that reproduces racial and social disparities.
Although child abuse is a favourite topic for media stories, there has been little research on how the media portrays such issues. The present research examined the media construction of child abuse in a comprehensive sample of all 1302 reports on the subject during 1995 in a representative quality and tabloid newspaper in NSW. It was found that: the focus was on ‘hard news’ reports of individual cases and the most atypical and sensational ‘child abuse horror stories’; irony or incongruity between the offence and the offender was emphasised; child abuse was popular as a topic for ‘soft news’ (human interest) media stories; criminal justice agencies were the predominant sources used for the stories; child abusers were individualised and demonised by the press and used to promote ‘law and order’ agendas; and there was little coverage of the social causes of abuse and prevention issues. Although both the quality and tabloid press demonstrated these features, there were some marked differences between the coverage in the two sources, such as a much greater emphasis on individual cases in the tabloid press.
This paper provides an analysis of media discourse surrounding the arrest, trial, and conviction of Norfolk farmer Tony Martin for the murder of 16-year old Fred Barras, a Traveller from Newark, Nottinghamshire. The paper argues that discourses about Travellers (re)constructed in the media during the Martin affair showed evidence of both older, stereotypical representations of Travellers and newer ways of locating them in relation to contemporary societal anxieties about “dangerous youth”, the “underclass”, and “social exclusion”. The coverage was often emblematic of political discourses in Britain, which too often emphasise the moral failings of the “excluded” without any significant discussion of the sources of inequalities.
This was reinforced by the selection of images – and perhaps especially by the iconic image of one black, hooded young man which appeared on at least five front pages following the first day of the disturbances, and in many reports since then (see www.frontpagestoday.co.uk/2011/08/09/archive.cfm). The newspapers consistently featured large, dramatic images of what the Daily Mirror called ‘young thugs with fire in their eyes and nothing but destruction on their mind’, or the Daily Express called simply ‘flaming morons’.
The spectre of the mob, of marauding gangs, of the violent underclass, has a long history; although in the Conservatives’ account of the social collapse of ‘Broken Britain’, these fears have taken on a new urgency. These young people, we were told, had not been sufficiently socialised: they were led simply by a kind of ‘childish destructiveness’.
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