Digital Youth: How Social Media are Archiving, Engaging and Capturing the Lives of Young People

240 Pages·2013·1.19 MB·English

by  Jennifer Pybus

Social Media: Archiving, Engaging and Capturing Youth
Digital Youth: How Social Media are Archiving, Engaging and

Capturing the Lives of Young People

By JENNIFER PYBUS, B.A., M.A.

A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the

Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

McMaster University © Copyright by Jennifer Pybus, August 2013

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McMaster University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2013) Hamilton, Ontario
(English and Cultural Studies)

TITLE: Digital Youth: How Social Media is Archiving, Engaging and Capturing the
Lives of Young People AUTHOR: Jennifer Pybus, B.A. (Simon Fraser University),
M.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Sarah Brophy NUMBER OF
PAGES: vii, 232

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation, entitled “Digital Youth: How Social Media are Archiving, Engaging
and Capturing the Lives of Young People,” examines how children and youth
experience networked sociality in a historic moment that places growing economic
value on the content users generate online. By conceptualizing the digital archive, I
have laid out a comprehensive framework that accounts for the following issues: i)
economic concerns, foregrounded in how user-generated content has become an
integral source of surplus value for the networked economy; ii) privacy concerns,
which relate to the privacy agreements to which young people must consent when
they join social networks, to questions around the rearticulation of private and public
spheres online, and finally to the growing importance placed on the computational
power of algorithms required to process big data; iii) the extended and intensified
sociality engendered by networked affective spaces which produce new ways for
young people to engage with their peers and produce subjectivities; and, iv) the
political possibilities circulating both discursively and as acts of civic engagement. In
addition, given that more ubiquitous access does not necessarily equip young users to
understand the myriad challenges accompanying a profoundly networked and
mediated existence, I argue that more pedagogical techniques and practices are
required. This dissertation concludes by outlining why educators need to integrate
data literacy as opposed to media literacy in the classroom. By foregrounding the
prevalent role that social networks play and will continue to play in the lives of young
people I argue that educators and parents have a responsibility to not only help
children and youth appreciate how their immaterial labour is being cultivated, but
equally to provide them with valuable skills that will not only facilitate new forms of
sociality but civic engagement.

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ACKNOWLEDMENTS

I would like to express my deep appreciation to a great number of mentors,
colleagues, friends, and family who have made it possible to imagine, pursue, and
complete this project.

In particular, I would like to thank Drs. Sarah Brophy, Mary O’Connor and Peter
Nyers for serving on my committee. I deeply appreciate the time they put into this
work, the criticisms, the suggestions, and the encouragement at various stages of my
doctoral studies.

I would also like to dedicate this thesis to my children Sabina and Nico and my loving
husband Mark, who never stopped believing in me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE LIVES OF YOUNG PEOPLE 1
Facebook as the Paradigm of Social Networking Sites 6
A Culture of Disclosure? 11
Structure of the Thesis 13

CHAPTER 1: SOCIAL NETWORKS AND THEIR ARCHIVES OF 23
FEELING
Web 2.0: Understanding Social Networks 26
Are you logged in? Why are Social Networks so Sticky? 31
Towards a Theorization of the Digital Archive 38
What’s Inside Your Archive? – Towards an Archive of Feelings 50
Archive of Feeling 55

CHAPTER 2: PUTTING THE PROSUMER TO WORK: THE PRODUCTION 69
OF ECONOMIC VALUE
The Prosumer – A Culture of Participation 73
How Do Privacy Policies Work, and What Do They Allow to be 85
Archived?
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) 89
The Conflation of Play and Labour: Immaterial Labour 2.0 98
A Case Study: Coke needs your help! 104

CHAPTER 3: YOUTH, CITIZENSHIP, AND SOCIAL MEDIA 112
Citizenship: Sovereignty vs. Connectivity 115
Social Citizenship 117
Cultural Citizenship 121
Acts of Citizenship: Occupy 2011 vs. Kony 2012 124
Occupy 2011 129
Kony 136
The Public Sphere 139

CHAPTER 4: TOWARDS A NEW DATA LITERACY: UNDERSTANDING 150
PRIVACY IN THE AGE OF BIG DATA
Towards an Understanding of Privacy 153
New Politics of Privacies 160
Conceptualizing Privacy: Agency over the Digital Archive? 163
Conceptualizing Privacy: Big Data, Algorithms and a New Aggregated 170
Subject
Towards a Data Literacy Toolkit 180

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A NEW POLITICS OF THE DIGITAL 190
ARCHIVE

WORKS CITED 197

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LIST OF FIGURES

Page
Figure 1: Screen shot of a social logins 36

Figure 2: Facebook Advertising 47

Figure 3: The initial poster produced by Adbusters. 129

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS

I would like to acknowledge that parts of my first chapter: “Social Networks and
Their Archives of Feeling” will appear in the chapter entitled: “Social Networks and
Their Archives of Feeling,” in Susanna Paasonen, Ken Hillis and Michael Petit’s
Networked Affect, MIT Press, Forthcoming 2013. Parts of this chapter have also
appeared in my article entitled: “The Subjective Architects: When Tweens Learn to
Immaterial Labour,” in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35(4), in 2011.

I would also like to acknowledge that parts of my first and second chapter entitled:
“Putting the Prosumer to Work: The Production of Economic Value” have appeared in
my article entitled: “Networks, Cultural Workers and Their Archives of Feeling,” in
the Journal of Cultural Economy, Special issue on Autonomism and Communication,
published in 2013.

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Ph.D. Thesis – J. Pybus; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies

Introduction: Social Media in the Lives Young People

This dissertation, entitled “Digital Youth: How Social Media are Archiving,
Engaging and Capturing the Lives of Young People,” examines how children and
youth experience networked sociality in a historic moment that places growing
economic value on the content that users generate online. Not only have social media
altered everyday life and cultural practices, bringing about an entirely new
participatory framework for social engagement, they have brought privacy debates to
the forefront, particularly as we watched the case of Edward Snowden unfold in the
media in 2013. This notorious American whistle-blower divulged how the United
States government had been working with the world’s top social networking sites to
spy not just on enemies of the United States but on its allies. After telling the world
that nobody’s online personal data were safe, he was now sitting without a passport in
Moscow, awaiting asylum-seeker status. While it is too soon to fully grasp what the
impact social media will have and already have had on our lives, particularly in the
West where access is easier, it is imperative that we begin to develop theoretical
frameworks and tools to better conceptualize the ontological effects and impacts of
these technologies.
Framing the relationship that younger demographics have with social media
will provide a greater understanding of their relationship with digital culture. David
Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green urge us not to reproduce a paternalistic
relationship with new media and to avoid simplistic discursive frames that focus on
“whether media are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for children” (390). Such reductive and ultimately
prescriptive approaches frame digital engagement in a profoundly pejorative way,
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Ph.D. Thesis – J. Pybus; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies

negating the cultural practices of young people online. Such a totalizing approach
places more power with the structure, as opposed to the subject, instilling a profound
need for regulation. Instead, Buckingham and Sefton-Green seek to complicate the
relationship that young people have with technology, moving away from a morality
that preaches abstaining from, as opposed to understanding digital cultural practices—
in short, moving away from a media-effects paradigm rooted in a technological
determinism that places agency with technology, as opposed to audience members and
users (391).
To account for how young people are using social networks, my dissertation
puts forward the digital profile archive to theorize the diverse ways in which young
people actively curate their online subjectivities. The digital profile archive is
constituted within the networked participatory architecture of Web 2.0, which
facilitates and intensifies sociality, while simultaneously creating new opportunities
for surplus value and exchange. Online marketing can no longer adequately function
without the constant input of user key word searches, likes and dislikes. The cultural
repository that now exists within the circuits of social media have many concerned
about privacy, particularly for young people who will never know a world without
using these networked circuits. Marketing practices have now been revolutionized,
the consumer is no longer, just the consumer but an active producer of the goods that
they will eventually buy. My work therefore introduces the prosumer—the producer-
consumer—to account for the ways in which economic practices rely of the content
that users, particularly young people, produce.
By foregrounding how children and youth are using social media and why
corporations are interested in their content, my analysis then moves on to question
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