Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Why is Facebook so popular with adolescents?

An interesting discussion opened up in class around the popularity of Facebook, an online directory that connects people through social networks at schools. My prof submited a loaded question to the class: What makes Facebook so popular with adolescents?

He then offered a story about a colleague’s daughter. She’s 14 years old, bright, capable… but is doing poorly in school. According to her mother, she spends a majority of her waking hours on Facebook. “What gives?”

I had just finished reading Feenberg and Bakardjieva’s introductory chapter in Community in the Digital Age  when a couple of ideas came to mind.

Facebook resides somewhere at the crossroads of the consumption model of the Web and the community model. Scrolling through the variety of people, pictures, stories and connections within Facebook, the user is presented with a host of identities and communities in which one may participate. As a consumption model, Facebook offers information and news that is searchable and retrievable. Participants represent themselves or the idea of themselves online for others to desire, emulate, ignore, discard or drink in. Users are able to freely view, click and pick their way through “the goods.”

Unlike many consumption-modeled websites, Facebook allows participants to talk to one another, to sense and see other presences, thus serving as an authentic community. Facebook allows relationships to spawn among groups of individuals where they can interact, crisscross and reinforce one another. For a 14-year-old girl, Facebook is a place where she can try on any number of identities and relationships. Facebook serves her as a vehicle that allows her “to traverse the social world, penetrate previously unattainable regions of anonymity,” and expand her social reach (Bakardjieva, 2004, 122).

It seems clear that the online virtual community fills, to some extent, a void in her face-to-face community, satisfying some pressing need.

Sherry Turkle notes that such online communities as Facebook afford our 14-year-old what Erik Erikson dubs a psychological moratorium, a key feature in adolescent identity formation. Turkle writes:

the adolescent moratorium is a time of intense interaction with people and ideas. It is a time of passionate friendships and experimentation. The adolescent falls in and out of love with people and ideas. Erikson’s notion of the moratorium was not a “hold” on significant experiences but on their consequences. It is a time during which one’s actions are, in a certain sense, not counted as they will be later on in life. They are not given as much weight, not given the force of full judgment. In this context, experimentation can become the norm rather than a brave departure. Relatively consequence-free experimentation facilitates the development of a “core self,” a personal sense of what gives life meaning that Erikson calls “identity” (Turkle, 2004, 108).

 In a sense you begin to feel why many reactionary elements in society are against having adolescents participate in such online communities as Facebook. If you were to randomly poll several hundred teenagers and ask them if they find school boring, I’m willing to bet an overwhelming majority would respond “yes, and how!” Online communities offer a range of possible friendships, cliques, and means to experiment in ways that face-to-face communities cannot.

So, it seems that on a certain level Facebook offers adolescents a number of affordances that school never will. Of course, I am offering this argument as a simplification, ignoring a variety of other relevant concerns and affordances of face-to-face communities. Growing up is never easy. With today’s social software affordances like Facebook, things will not get necessarily easier for today’s youth. Similarly as adults, we all face issues of identification and negotiation at multiple levels. Wenger (1998) notes

One problem of the traditional classroom format is that it is both too disconnected from the world and too uniform to support meaningful forms of identification. It offers unusually little texture to negotiate identities: a teacher sticking out and a flat group of students all learning the same thing at the same time. Competence thus stripped of its social complexity, means pleasing the teacher, raising your hand first, getting good grades. There is little material with which to fashion identities that are locally differentiated and broadly connected. It is no surprise, then, that the playground tends to become the centerpiece of school life…, that the classroom itself becomes a dual world where instruction must compete with message passing, and that some students either seek their identity in subversive behavior or simply refuse to participate” (Wenger, 1998, 269).

One could argue that many parents have trouble responding to the identity development of their children and become disengaged and disconnected from the thoughts and feelings of their offspring. Clearly if parents and schools are not offering meaningful forms of identity formation (i.e., membership) and negotiability then children will likely seek communities and economies of meaning outside of it.

So, why does our 14-year-old example find Facebook more intriguing than her face-to-face schooling? That is the question. Should Internet communities like Facebook re-examine how they are used? Should researchers focus on examining how social software is being used, discerned, articulated, and how they affect real people in specific situations? Perhaps sites like Facebook represent a means for helping to clarify identity formation and should be encouraged.

Things that make me go hmmmm….

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References:

Bakardjieva, M. (2004) Virtual togetherness: An everyday life perspective. Feenberg, A. and Barney, D. (Eds.) (2004). Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Feenberg, A. and Barney, D. (Eds.) (2004). Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Turkle, S. (2004). Our splir screens. In Feenberg, A. and Barney, D. (Eds.). Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.