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.
Rights-based approaches to children’s digital media practices are gaining attention offering a framework for research, policy and initiatives that can balance children’s need for protection online ...with their capacity to maximize the opportunities and benefits of connectivity. But what does it mean to bring the concepts of the digital, rights and the child into dialogue? Arguing that the child represents a limit case of adult normative discourses about both rights and digital media practices, this article harnesses the radical potential of the figure of the child to rethink (human and children’s) rights in relation to the digital. In doing so, we critique the implicitly adult, seemingly invulnerable subject of rights common in research and advocacy about digital environments. We thereby introduce the articles selected for this special issue and the thinking that links them, in order to draw out the wider tensions and dilemmas driving the emerging agenda for children’s rights in the digital age.
As today's media simultaneously converge and diverge, fusing and hybridizing across digital services and platforms, some researchers argue that audiences are dead-long live the user! But for others, ...it is the complex interweaving of continuities and changes that demands attention, especially now that audiencing has become a vital mode of engaging with all dimensions of daily life. This article asks how we should research audiences in a digital networked age. I argue that, while many avenues are being actively pursued, many researchers are concentrating on the notion of participation, asking, on the one hand, what modes of participation are afforded to people by the particular media and communication infrastructures which mediate social, cultural or political spheres of life? And, on the other hand, how do people engage with, accede to, negotiate or contest this as they explore and invent new ways of connecting with each other through and around media? The features of this emerging participation paradigm of audience research are examined in this article.
Aims and scope
The usage of mobile phones and the internet by young people has increased rapidly in the past decade, approaching saturation by middle childhood in developed countries. Besides many ...benefits, online content, contact or conduct can be associated with risk of harm; most research has examined whether aggressive or sexual harms result from this. We examine the nature and prevalence of such risks, and evaluate the evidence regarding the factors that increase or protect against harm resulting from such risks, so as to inform the academic and practitioner knowledge base. We also identify the conceptual and methodological challenges encountered in this relatively new body of research, and highlight the pressing research gaps.
Methods
Given the pace of change in the market for communication technologies, we review research published since 2008. Following a thorough bibliographic search of literature from the key disciplines (psychology, sociology, education, media studies and computing sciences), the review concentrates on recent, high quality empirical studies, contextualizing these within an overview of the field.
Findings
Risks of cyberbullying, contact with strangers, sexual messaging (‘sexting’) and pornography generally affect fewer than one in five adolescents. Prevalence estimates vary according to definition and measurement, but do not appear to be rising substantially with increasing access to mobile and online technologies, possibly because these technologies pose no additional risk to offline behaviour, or because any risks are offset by a commensurate growth in safety awareness and initiatives. While not all online risks result in self‐reported harm, a range of adverse emotional and psychosocial consequences is revealed by longitudinal studies. Useful for identifying which children are more vulnerable than others, evidence reveals several risk factors: personality factors (sensation‐seeking, low self‐esteem, psychological difficulties), social factors (lack of parental support, peer norms) and digital factors (online practices, digital skills, specific online sites).
Conclusions
Mobile and online risks are increasingly intertwined with pre‐existing (offline) risks in children's lives. Research gaps, as well as implications for practitioners, are identified. The challenge is now to examine the relations among different risks, and to build on the risk and protective factors identified to design effective interventions.
This book investigates regulatory and social pressures that social media companies face in the aftermath of high profile cyberbullying incidents. The author's research evaluates the policies ...companies develop to protect themselves and users. This includes interviews with NGO and social media company reps in the US and the EU. She triangulates these findings against news, policy reports, evaluations and interviews with e-safety experts. This book raises questions about the legitimacy of expecting companies to balance the tension between free speech and child protection without publicly revealing their decision-making processes. In an environment where e-safety is part of the corporate business model, this book unveils the process through which established social media companies receive less government scrutiny than start-ups. The importance of this research for law and policy argues for an OA edition to ensure the work is widely and globally accessible to scholars and decision makers.
Children's perspectives and experiences with digital media (digital engagement for short) are becoming difficult to observe and measure in today's highly multi-faceted, personalized and dynamic media ...ecosystem. In response, psychologists are developing a host of innovative methods. These may be broadly divided into those which prioritize children's active participation in research and those which develop techniques for passive observation. This article presents a state-of-the-art review of emerging methodologies to highlight the ethical issues that arise, by drawing on the Belmont principles for ethical research. We identify strengths and weaknesses of both participatory and non-participatory methods and recommend ways for future research to harness the potential of child-centered, responsive, and ethical methods.
I suggest that Social Media and Society will be substantially focused on questions of social change. Thus, I urge a historical perspective that avoids the temptation to consolidate the vision of mass ...media as concentrated, passively consumed, and unidirectional in influence by contrast with today’s supposedly more dispersed, participatory, globalized, peer-to-peer social media. I then observe that many diverse disciplines are interested in social media and express concern that while they have considerable expertise regarding the “social” and “society,” they too-often appear content to black-box “media.” This requires us to enter the fray to explain how the media part of the equation matters too. Since, I suggest, this matters whenever the material or symbolic dimensions of communication are important to or contested within the unfolding action, that is very often indeed. I then suggest some pressing questions to which I hope this journal will contribute. These concern (1) the wider ecology of communication within which, intriguingly, the dimensions that best characterize face-to-face communication are still used as the yardstick by which to judge social (and other) media; (2) the imperative to adopt a multi- and trans-cultural gaze as we grapple with (rather than presume we already know) the ethnographic diversity of social media “users” in all their complexity—including emerging social media literacy and its relation to social media legibility; and (3) larger questions of the theoretical framework by which to conceptualize power relations “at the interface”—of speakers and hearers, producers and audiences, or, today, affordances and users.
Social networking sites have been rapidly adopted by children and, especially, teenagers and young people worldwide, enabling new opportunities for the presentation of the self, learning, ...construction of a wide circle of relationships, and the management of privacy and intimacy. On the other hand, there are also concerns that social networking increases the likelihood of new risks to the self, these centring on loss of privacy, bullying, harmful contacts and more. This article reviews recent findings regarding children and teenagers’ social networking practices in order to identify implications for future research and public policy. These focus on the interdependencies between opportunities and risks, the need for digital or media literacy education, the importance of building safety considerations into the design and management of social networking sites, the imperative for greater attention to ‘at risk’ children in particular, and the importance of a children’s rights framework in developing evidence‐based policy in this area.
This article critically examines how fears of audience gullibility, ignorance, and exploitation impede media studies’ response to the pressing challenges posed by the growing power of social media ...platforms and their innovative datafication practices. I revisit the history of audience research to show how empirical findings contested the pejorative conception of the audience problematically yet persistently imagined by theorists of media power during the twentieth century. As media studies joins other disciplines in responding to the growing datafication of society, I propose that the circuit of culture model can help theorize media (including platform and algorithmic) power by opening up the hermeneutic and action space between production and consumption. In this way, critical scholarship might more effectively analyze such metaprocesses as mediatization and datafication precisely by recognizing rather than erasing audiences’ relation to both the everyday lifeworld and the public world of citizen action, regulatory intervention, and the wider society.
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