Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression

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.

An Exploratory Study of Attitudes Towards Privacy in Social Media and the Threat of Blackmail: The Views of a Group of Saudi Women

“…Based on these findings the authors inferred that interactions through SNSs do not conform to the same social rules or stereotypes as face-to-face interactions, in which there is pressure for males in the latter not to disclose personal information with the same frequency as females. Nevertheless, disclosing private information voluntarily is not the only problem, SNS user's information can also become available to others through tracking by others (Sar & AlSaggaf, 2014), or when SNS reset the privacy settings to the default values (due to the regular iterative changes made to these settings), or when users forget or neglect to change the privacy settings, due to the difficulty in choosing what information to hide (Boyd, 2008;Livingstone, 2008), or fail to properly use the privacy settings because they lack the technical skills as Livingstone's (2008) …”

The effect of social network sites on adolescents' social and academic development: Current theories and controversies

“…Sonia Livingstone (2008) notes that SNS invite "convergence among the hitherto separate activities of email, messaging, website creation, diaries, photo albums and music or video uploading and downloading" (p. 394). For example,YouTube is primarily a video sharing service, but users can add others as their friends or subscribe to a member's collection of videos.…”

“…Adolescents use SNS in a variety of ways. They disclose personal information about their identities and tastes on their profiles (Livingstone, 2008). Teenagers must also add or reject friend requests from their peers, navigating the complicated web of friendship practices (Ito et al, 2009).…”

Digital methodologies and practices in children's geographies

“…The global reach of these technologies has increased children's visibility, bringing to the fore new encounters and the need to cope not only with complex social nuances but also privacy breaches. It has fostered increasing awareness of the complexities of on-and offline spaces and their relationships as young people go about their everyday lives in different socio-spatial contexts (Black, Castro, and Lin 2015;Livingstone 2008;Young 2013). In Prout's words, these technologies 'make the local worlds of childhood more visible to each other' (Prout 2005, 34).…”