Logged in or locked in? Young adults’ negotiations of social media platforms and their features

Abstract

Drawing on empirical data from qualitative interviews, this article explores young adults' everyday experiences of 'logging in' and their accounts of their engagement with social media platforms, in particular Facebook. By doing so, it shows how 'logging in' can turn into feelings of being 'locked in'-both in relation to personal data-mining and expectations of participation. The paper highlights the complex ways in which young adults responded to these feelings and negotiated connection and disconnection on social media platforms by deploying tactics of limitation and suspension. For example, in order to regain control of their time and negotiate their relationships, young adults tactically used Facebook Messenger's previews to bypass read receipts and temporarily suspend connection. Using de Certeau's distinction between 'strategy' and 'tactics', the article argues that although young adults managed social media platforms on an individual level (by deploying 'tactics'), their understandings and negotiations of the platforms were significantly shaped by the platforms' designs and features, by the strategies of the corporations owning and operating them as well as embedded within the asymmetrical relations of power of platform capitalism.

Rethinking social media for qualitative research: The use of Facebook Activity Logs and Search History in interview settings

“…While reproducing to some extent a neoliberal culture of measurement might be difficult to avoid, we urgently need to rethink the repertoires of sociology to take up the opportunities raised by digital data and platforms for qualitative research while avoiding the pitfalls of dataism. In this context, as social researchers we need to critically engage with the data and tools that we use, their architectures, designs and affordances but also with the broader ideological and economic systems of power relations in which they are embedded (Langlois & Elmer, 2013;Fuchs, 2014), and the ways in which they form an active part in mediating how we know the social (Ruppert et al, 2013).To respond to these challenges, we need to reflect collectively on the lively characteristics of using digital platforms and data in interview settings, and the complex ways in the digital data assemblages we produce in doing so shape and feed back to the research data and the research process.…”

“…This article draws on data collected during my doctoral research which explored the meanings that young adults ascribed to social media, their everyday engagement with the platforms and in particular their perceptions of peer monitoring and profile checking practices on these platforms (see Gangneux, 2018Gangneux, , 2019 for a detailed analysis). As part of the research, I conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with young adults aged 20-25 living in Glasgow (n= 19 women and 13 men) and coming from a relatively privileged background.…”

“…As part of this stream of research, scholars have examined how the designs, architectures and affordances of digital devices -social media platforms in particular -shape users' engagement with and understandings of these technologies (Kaun & Stiernstedt, 2014;Lupton, 2015;Bivens & Haimson, 2016;Lupton, 2017;Bucher & Helmond, 2018). Importantly, studies have also pointed to the specific political economy in which users engage with digital technologies and in particular the role of corporations in promoting notions of a 'social' Web and of platforms as 'neutral' technical infrastructures facilitating social connections while downplaying the ways in which personal data is turned into commodities and users subject to ubiquitous profiling and targeted advertising (Gillespie, 2010;van Dijck, 2013;Fuchs, 2014). Furthermore, scholars have called attention to the importance of understanding the digital data generated by users, produced through the platforms (meta-data) and/or inferred by corporations are not static, nor isolated.…”

Logged in While Locked Down: Exploring the Influence of Digital Technologies in the Time of Corona

“…First, they keep us from logging out metaphorically speaking because of the addictive inevitability ( Markham, 2020 ) with which they have invaded all aspects of our lives (cf., Berry, 2020 ; Gilroy-Ware, 2017 ), and second, if we were to somehow succeed in logging out, for example, by forsaking social media, we run the high risk of excluding ourselves from a number of communities ( Pangrazio, 2019 ), not only in the virtuality of social media but also in the “real” world where it would be hard to interact with others who have not chosen to limit their use of social media and proceed to talk about what goes on there in the real world. Logging out would then, in effect, amount to locking oneself out ( Gangneux, 2019 ).…”

Tactical agency? Young people’s (dis)engagement with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger

“…This in turn impacts on relationships as well as can become a source of anxiety and feelings of being overwhelmed (Baym, 2010; Chambers, 2013; Chayko, 2017; Fox and Moreland, 2015; Hall and Baym, 2012). Another strand of work has demonstrated that the infrastructures of social media platforms as well as Big Tech companies’ ideology and commercial strategies set to systematically extract and commodify personal data, play a significant role in shaping user’s engagement with and understandings of the platforms (Gangneux, 2019; Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Fuchs, 2014; Hintz et al, 2018; Pangrazio, 2019; van Dijck, 2013). These strands of research have been critical in exposing and examining the power structures and socio-technological relations that users – among whom young people – have to continuously navigate.…”