This is the third in a series of posts reviewing “It’s Complicated” by Danah Boyd.
Boyd tells a compelling story about a young black man from Los Angeles who was applying to an Ivy League university. He wrote a strong essay about how he wanted to leave the gang culture of his community and build a new life for himself. This was exactly the type of candidate the university was keen to attract.
And then they googled him and found his online profile. It was full of gang symbolism, bad language and his gang activities. The university was shocked by his lies.
Except, as Boyd points out, perhaps his application wasn’t a lie; maybe he really did want to leave the life that was opening up before him. However, before he had left it he had to survive within his environment; perhaps he was “simply including gang signals on his MySpace profile as a survival technique.”
He may well have imagined his audience to be the people in his offline community and not the university admissions committee. He may well not dare talk about his desire to go to a prestigious university for his community and was doing what we all do, all the time; presenting different parts of ourselves to different people.
Boyd’s point is that the intended audience matters when it comes to interpreting what teens are saying. This is regardless of who the actual audience is.
And this leads us neatly to another of the key ideas I’d begun to get hold of before reading this book, but really crystallised for me. It’s the notion of context collapse.
When contexts collide and collapse.
At the heart of this is that all people present different facets of who they are depending on context. The challenge that new technology brings is that it makes it very different for contexts to collapse.
In yet another of her striking anecdotes, Boyd examines the case of a young man who friended a college recruiter on Facebook. Another friend of his was horrified. The friender of the recruiter was using Facebook to present one part of his identity, his solid dependable side. The young man who was horrified saw Facebook as a totally different context, in which he could express the side of him that was a young man growing up, boasting, drinking, using foul language; his audience was totally different.
This mattered because both young men needed to impress the recruiter, and the default for Facebook settings are such that friends of friends can see your profile unless you work very hard to stop this happening.
Facebook collapsed two very different contexts and risked the horrified young man’s chances of being recruited.
There are six posts in all in this series of posts reviewing It’s Complicated. In order the posts are:
2 Pingbacks