Accomplishing authenticity in a labor-exposing space

The present work, through an ethnographic study of MySpace (N = 96), examines the ways in which authenticity is accomplished within a labor-exposing space. To maintain authenticity, actors must make invisible the extensive labor of self-presentation. Certain online spaces, such as social network sites and personal interactive homepages, can be thought of as labor-exposing spaces, in that they give actors clear and explicit control over self-representations, making impressions of spontaneity difficult to accomplish ( ,  and ). I discuss and delineate several strategies used by participants to maintain authenticity on MySpace. I conclude that while the priorities of identity processes remain stable over time, the ways in which we accomplish identity are culturally, historically and materially contingent.     

MySpace is your space? Examining self-presentation of MySpace users

The study examined the role of self-presentation on MySpace pages through the information users post on their sites. MySpace users were more comfortable with posting the broad pieces of information, like gender, race, zodiac sign, and hometown. They were not as willing to present personal information like income, whether they smoke or drank or groups they belonged to. Age and motivations for creating a page were major predictors of how much information people revealed about themselves.     

Changes in adolescent online social networking behaviors from 2006 to 2009

As online social networking has become an immersive and pervasive phenomenon, traditional considerations and expectations of personal privacy have been drastically altered. This paradigmatic change has led to adolescents possibly making themselves vulnerable to embarrassment, censure, damage to one’s name or reputation, or even victimization by others because of unwise postings or revelations online. The current study sought to determine the extent to which adolescent information disclosure on MySpace.com has changed between 2006 and 2009. We found significant changes in the nature of personal content made publicly available across the two time points and a trend in which teens are being increasingly more selective and discrete when it comes to what they share and with whom they share it.     

“What South Park Character Are You?”: Popular Culture, Literacy, and Online Performances of Identity

In this essay, I study MySpace and Facebook pages, as well as interviews with the university students who created them, in order to address how online literacy practices of contemporary convergence culture both use and are filtered through popular culture. Though their answers to questions of intent, audience, and rhetorical choices varied, students shared a common reliance on popular culture content and references appropriated from other sites to compose their identities and read the identities of others. They used popular culture icons, catch phrases, music, text, and film clips in postmodern, fragmented collages that seem simultaneously sentimental and ironic. The construction of these pages illustrates how popular culture practices that predate online technologies have been adopted and have flourished with new technologies that allow content to flow across media as well as increase the ease of audience participation. Online technological changes have changed what it means to be part of an “audience” by changing how individuals respond to and adapt popular culture texts to their own ends, such as the construction of identities on web pages. By creating potentially global audiences for any web page, these online technologies have changed the relationship of the popular culture audience members and their peers. The intertextual nature of popular culture texts creates opportunities for multiple readings of social networking web pages in ways that destabilize the identities students believe they have created.     

Image and video disclosure of substance use on social media websites

The present study examines young adults’ use of social media websites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, to post public images and videos of themselves depicting alcohol consumption, inebriated behavior, or recreational marijuana use. A content analysis revealed that the majority of image and video representations of alcohol consumption depicted females in social gatherings while images and videos depicting marijuana use depicted solitary males. Videos typically were viewed frequently and gained positive ratings. Among a sample of college students, one-third of participants reported having posted a picture depicting substance use on a social networking site, with 97% aware that others engage in this phenomenon. Students’ perceptions of alcohol-related postings were generally positive or seen as a matter of individual choice while marijuana-related postings were generally viewed more negatively.     

Age differences in online social networking – A study of user profiles and the social capital divide among teenagers and older users in MySpace

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.     

Alice in Technoland

At their most supernatural, interactive design environments can have a transformative effect. They take the visitor to somewhere else. By actively involving the public they are both ‘porous’ and ‘responsive’, beckoning us like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland to enter and participate in another world. Here Lucy Bullivant kicks off her introduction to this issue of AD by looking at an installation designed by Daan Roosegaarde for the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam which epitomises this approach. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychologists’ attitudes and ethical concerns regarding the use of social networking web sites.

Most psychologists seek to control self-disclosures they make to patients, but the Internet’s rapid development and widespread use over the past decade have introduced new problems for psychologists trying to avoid inappropriate disclosures. A total of 695 psychology graduate students and psychologists were surveyed about their current use of social networking Web sites (SNWs), opinions regarding regulation of online activities by the American Psychological Association (APA), and interactions in clinical work as a result of online activities. Established psychologists seldom use SNWs and may lack the experience to provide relevant supervisory guidance. No consensus about the need for APA guidelines emerged. Historically, APA has not issued guidelines in technological areas of rapid change. Thus, graduate training and continuing education should address the ethics of SNWs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arup Associates

A specialist architectural division of the wider Arup group, Arup Associates has a unique composition and ethos. In its studios, teams of architects, structural engineers, environmental engineers, urban designers and product designers work alongside each other on the design of buildings from a project's inception. It is an interdisciplinary approach that the practice pioneered in the 1960s, and which has been reinvigorated in the last few years by a new emphasis on ‘unified design’ – a radical wholeness in thinking and execution. Here, Jay Merrick talks to Arup Associates' principal Declan O'Carroll and considers his vision of an architecture capable of addressing complexity and sustaining humanity in the face of modernity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.