Social Identity & Gender

The reading I related to most concerning social identity is Banet-Weiser's "Branding the Post Feminist Self." This article discusses the many YouTube videos posted by adolescent/teen girls that feature them dancing and/or singing to popular music and referencing commercial pop culture. Banet-Weiser argues that this presentation of self for public display is a way for these girls to create a "brand" for themselves, but within the context of what is prescribed by the media and culture industries. She relates this to McRobbie's post feminist discourse in which cultural spaces are formed that reflect the way feminist values are engaged with and incorporated across society in institutional practices, education, the work environment, and media. This article claims that the self-branding in these videos often emphasizes hegemonic female sexuality (what Dobson would call "hetero-sexy") and encourages girls to BE a product available for "consumption" by themselves and other viewers.

I found this piece especially relevant to my own experiences because, as I tweeted a few days ago, I have made numerous YouTube videos like the ones Banet-Weiser describes with my friends over the years. In them my friends and I would dress up in my old dance costumes, choreograph dances and create a full-blown music video to whatever song we happened to be obsessed with at the time. Banet-Weiser says that girls who produce these videos don't create a new image of gender but work within and against cultural definitions. My videos always featured us performing hegemonic feminity, confining to that particular gender representation because we thought it was fun to be sexy. Thinking critically about it now, I would agree that what we were doing through these videos was self-branding: we wanted to be "those hot girls that make the music videos," and to this day we get comments on Facebook asking when we're going to make another one.

Banet-Weiser talks about the importance of comments/feedback to the self-branding process and its valuation. When viewers comment on a video, it provides a conscious recognition for the producer that people are "buying" their brand. Often, she says, these comments are objectifying the girls' bodies and brings them back to a familiar gender script, which doesn't quite fit with the way these post feminist videos allow for simultaneous performance and contradiction of gendered identity. I would argue that the objectifying comments go hand in hand with the effort to present hegemonic female sexuality--if, as Banet-Weiser claims, girls are not truly creating new gender representations, why should we expect anything but old responses to gender? For my friends and me, these videos were a way to display femininity specifically to elicit these types of comments from our friends--because honestly, who doesn't like to be called hot once in awhile? Banet-Weiser notes that self-branded girls are encouraged to be self-reliant and empowered; it seems that one way to empower oneself is to embrace the gender norms that have been in place for so long and make them one's own.

Nicole - @nmf255

(I was thinking about including this link. I know I will regret it, but my videos are here: www.youtube.com/user/shoproightproduction )

Women's MySpace Photos Don't Self-Represent a 'Hetero-Sexy' Ideal?

Among this weeks required readings, I took issue with Amy Shields Dobson’s text “The Grotesque Body’ in Young Women’s Self Representation on Myspace.”  It may very well be because I have a familiarity with art history, but Dobson’s work relies entirely on the work of Mikhail Bahktin’s 1965 work - which contrasts ‘grotesque bodies’ in  the carnivaleque setting, and ‘classical bodies’ in Renaissance statuary.  When realizing Dobson’s work rests upon the shoulders of this obscure work, the entire legitimacy of her paper is called into question for me.  (While this blog post could easily turn into an art history lesson, I will not let it go in that direction.)  Let it be sufficient to say, that life and art are two separate entities, and reality seldom matches ideality.  Even in contemporary depictions of women in the media, we are aware of a patriarchal male influence, and the submissive and idyllically-attractive female is more often present than not.

For Dobson to wager that there are strong ‘social and political underpinnings’ to a handful of Myspace photos is laughable.  Academics have a tendency to read into everything, and on occasion extrapolate on something that may barely even exist.  I completely doubt women’s ‘grotesque’ self-representation as a method of feministic subversion of gender stereotypes is the intention of young girls when sticking out their tongues in profile photos.  (More ‘unfeminine’ behaviors are also listed.)  But moreover, the sample of 45 MySpace pages of Australian girls between 18-25 is a small niche sample, which Dobson deliberately sought as examples for her paper.  The author has found specific photos simply to fit her thesis.  Additionally, it would be interesting to question some of these girls, to ask if they had any conscious  intention, or what their intentions of self-depiction were.  I wager that these 18 to 25-year-olds likely didn’t have the charged ‘social and political underpinnings’ the author seeks.  Additionally, one questions who was the photographers were in these images - which may be relevant in terms of gender and representation.

Women living today as well as in the Renaissance don’t often walk around in public with the sole purpose of embodying a ‘hetero-sexy’ ideal as Dobson says.  If one was capable of taking photographs of real life with ease in any era, this statement would probably hold true.  When a 1950s housewife is spending time with friends or family, she probably had no intention of looking like the Venus of Urbino (

).  So for Dobson to find profundity in the lack of ‘traditional femininity’ and lack of mainstream heterosexual pornographic aesthetic - (which she defines a s large artificial looking breasts, high heals, excessive make-up, revealing clothing or clothing which draws attention to sexual and erogenous zones) - is laughable.  

Misalignment of this aesthetic and female Myspace choices of self-representation goes without saying.  What a male sculptor in Renaissance Italy chooses to depict and what a teenage girl of present day depicts of herself, would no doubt differ.  On top of this, coining terms such as ‘hetero-sexy,’ and a certain amount of academic unprofessionally exists in the Thesis title “Bitches, Bunnies, BFFs and Badass Chicks: Feminist Representation or New Masquerade?  A feminist performance theory analysis of young women’s self representation on Myspace.”  If anything in particular can be drawn from Dobson’s work, perhaps it is the significance that women today even have an opportunity to negate patriarchal representation (whether it is in contemporary advertising, or Renaissance statuary) - through social media.

Justin Tuma 

Blog#4 my response to Dobson's reading

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A reading that I would like to discuss is "The 'grotesque body' in young women's self presentation on MySpace" by Dobson. Firstly I will summarize her idea and talk about my feeling and opinion about the article. 

Referring to Mulvey’s idea, Dobson says that female bodies in mass media are “positioned as ‘to-be-looked-at’” and “viewed from a ‘masculinised subject position/ gaze’” (11). Images of female bodies are constructed around fetishistic and voyeuristic “scopophilia”: fetishistic scopophilia depends on “idealizing, fetishising and thus distancing the body of the women, in a narrative of pure visual spectacles” and voyeuristic scopophilia depends on “demystif[ing] the body of the woman by voyeuristically following and watching her…leading to discovery, humiliation and punishment of the female by the male” (11,12). As Dobson shows, the examples of fetishistic scopophilia can be found in high-gloss fashion magazines such as Vogue . The images of female celebrities in the high-gloss magazines fit in “classical” or “traditional” femininity; they symbolize idealized female images, “of mystery, glamour and unavoidable distance from the viewer” (11,13). On the other hand, Dobson uses representations of female celebrities in gossip magazines to exemplify voyeuristic scopophilia. The images of the celebrities in gossip magazines reveal their private, real, “unfeminine” self, which are often seen as “grotesque” involving “flesh, bellies…mobility and sometimes moments of pleasure or exchange with other bodies”(14). The celebrities are demystified, degraded, and humiliated by their “’grotesque’ openness and depiction” of themselves (11). 

What Dobson takes note of in the article is that the woman’s “unfeminine”, “grotesque” representations of self, which are accompanied with degradation and humiliation of her image, is spontaneously produced by the young on MySpace. She thinks that the grotesque self-representation of the youth, such as the images that show them making “’silly’ or caricatured faces” or showing their tongues and making a masculine pose, might be considered to subvert “both gender stereotypes and the type of sadistic pleasure Mulvey associates with voyeuristic narratives and modes of viewing” (7).

 

While I was reading this article, I could not stop relating this article to the Japanese term, “hengao”, which means “an ugly face”. This term started to come into vogue when photo sticker booths got popularity among female teens in Japan. It is still a popular activity for Japanese school girls to drop in at photo sticker booths after school and take a photo sticker together with friends. At school the girls exchange their stickers with those of other friends and collect the stickers in their own notebooks. So in their notebook, they see photos stickers of their friends and their friends’ friends (I feel it is similar to Facebook in the way that you can see your friends’ photos and also some of your friends' friends pictures). The term, “hengao”, was firstly used to refer to an ugly, silly face purposely made by Japanese girls when they take a photo sticker, and now it is used to refer to a silly face in any types of media including photos and videos. I also used to like to collect silly-face photo stickers of the people at my network (including my friends and friends of my friends). .

On SNSs I use, I find some of my Japanese friends using sticker photos with their “hengao” as their profile pictures and also many other female friends having profile pictures that show their “grotesque” self-representations, which are far from what we usually associate femininity with. I think those unfeminine self-representations on SNS have a potential to suggest a new female image to the traditional femininity or can at least disrupt it as Debson says: however, I don’t know if they will result in subverting gender stereotype applied to women. It seems to me that a lot of women are able to produce “grotesque” representations of themselves publicly only when they are on the media of SNS. Those who present their “’laddish’ or ‘blokeish’ behaviors ” in their SNS pictures do so because they unconsciously think that their audiences are their friends or friends’ friends - the people in their networks – not the entire public (even though their pictures are available to an unspecified large number of people on the SNS). Their grotesque bodies shown in their profile pictures seem to be directed to the people they know in a similar way that Japanese high school girls do not take “hengao” sticker photos to distribute them to everyone. It is true that some of female SNS users might create  unfeminine self-representations for feministic purposees (to protest against the stereotypical femininity). But it might be hard to say a number of “grotesque"self-representations made by various female SNS users can subvert traditional feminity because those female users might try to conform to the socially-expected femininity if they were on other media platforms that make them more aware of the public gaze.

Sachi

Why are we not migratory birds? Even when its grown hostile, home's home.

At face value, danah boyd’s early commentary on class distinctions between Facebook and Myspace from 2007 and her eventual metaphor of white flight in 2009 create a very compelling narrative about what is and isn’t happening on some of our most beloved social networks.  After I had came across her first blog-essay “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace,” I spread it like gospel, repeating it in a sort of ‘hey look – the internet is as cliquish as real life!’ kind of way. It focused, unlike her latter talk/paper which refines the argument into a jeremiad about the internet failing us as a social equalizer, on dividing users into two more broadly defined groups, “hegemonic teens” and “subaltern teens.” These are terms more likely to be used in the relationship between political economy and culture and I believe create a more compelling argument than he pessimistic claims of white flight.

As though we were talking about migration in real life, it is easier for me to believe that pull-factors of Facebook were a greater motivator for class-conscious teens than the push-factors that made them stop using Myspace. (I think many of us who were savy were also aware that media frenzy over creepy crime on Myspace was overblown.) Look at Facebook’s provenance: nothing is more emblematic of American middle class dream of ascendency than Harvard and the other Ivies. Much of boyd’s argument in 2007 was centered around the culture and aesthetics of Myspace versus Facebook: the first site was either ‘gaudy’ and ‘ugly’ or ‘bling’/’fly’/‘phat’ depending on who one asked, and the other was clean-cut, white and did not allow for user customization.  As I mentioned boyd’s terminology of political economy earlier, I’d like to add another comment on the economics of the situation, also drawing on her apparent technological determinsim. To me, the brash commercialism of Myspace’s user and band pages, adorned with abrasive banner ads (and recently acquired by Newscorp), seemed an antiquated method compared with Facebook which at the time appeared to function purely for socializing functions. Brands had not yet been attracted to the site and been personified like Dr. Zuckerstein’s monster. Although I had never felt a need to join Myspace, like a good determinist, I was more consciously conerned with the site’s design and purpose elements rather than its demographics. (When I would lament the jarring visual and aural nature of the pages, it would usually be those of my peers at my public school, who were mostly of the same race and class.)

To confront boyd’s more recent work head on, did she not in 2008 write that social networks “are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network” (boyd, 2008, Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship)? [Props to whoever brought this point up in class last week, by the way.] So why is she so concerned that stratum of society we don’t come in contact with IRL are not part of our social circles online?  I would be curious to see a similar demographic and connections study of social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr that do not rely on reciprocal ties but instead on the unexpected, often serendipitous results of #tag searches. Carefully following searches for a variety of terms, like my neighborhood, my interests or favorite artists have yielded both connections (sometimes only one-way) with a variety of users or at least a number of new perspectives and voices, even if they doesn’t evolve into relationships that rival personal friendships.

Lastly, on the notion of ‘white flight’ or at least aspirational middle-class and upper-class teens leaving Myspace for less grungy/blinged out pastures: Why haven’t the number of push-factors, like the descent of our parents and younger siblings, and brands, and bosses and advertisers on Facebook, combined with near constant changes to the visceral interface and underlying privacy mechanics caused another exodus of plucky users to services like Google+ or Diaspora? I think when Facebook arrived and took dominance, Myspace was still appealing only to a fractured user base. Facebook has a wider appeal and has established a working monopoly of social networking – look at Facebook connect as the go-to system for rapid-networking over new services like Spotify, within which there is room for deviance. Even members of boyd’s subaltern find ways of subverting the system and personalizing the aesthetics and message of their page.

-AK

Blog post # 3 It's all about the freedom

Hasinoff’s discussion regarding the production of sexual identity on line is interesting because it analyzes the widely accepted believes that girls who have constructed sexual representations of themselves online are either victims or irresponsible individuals. The point regarding that sexting is an media production is very true—the girls’ sense of identity and understanding of adulthood often comes from mass media outlets and the cultural industry, therefore the sexual expressions are an indisputable outcome of the value system that surrounds the girls. In addition, society does not clearly distinguish the categorization between self-elicited sexual expression and nonconsensual sexting. Singular standard and values are forced upon adolescent girls to reject their sexual desire for the prevention of possible “predators” and unauthorized usage of their messages and images. To suppress natural tendencies for the sake of safety by using scare tactics is unrealistic, especially as Hasinoff quotes Dohrn, girls are subjected to more surveillance and punishment than boys. 

 

I would argue in agreemtn with Hasinoff that online interactivity is not as simple as some of the activists' s argument debasing the girls’ active sexting online. Because as Banet-Weiser echoes in her article, “the construction of the self is not an insular, isolated activity, but is rather situated in a media and cultural context that involves a dynamic between the self and others.” The involvement of medium, content and feedback is an important component during the process which self representation is created. The post feminist self is dictated by an overwhelming sense of sexual freedom, truthful expression (might often be outrageous or violent as in the case of Barbie doll), but the crucial aspect is that girls have utilized internet to explore gender and sexual identities as well as the opportunity to be free.


Ivy Y. 


 

Race, Digital Media, and Obama

I found the reading on digital media and race within the context of
President Obama’s presidential campaign to be particularly interesting
since this election was such a momentous occasion for our generation.
This election was the first to be in the midst of the old versus new
media debate, and Everett focuses on how significant it was for Obama
to have utilized digital media as a means of mobilizing support for
his campaign amongst young people. She follows the “Internet as a
democratizing force” trajectory and says that digital media enabled
“youths of color” to be more politically active, for instance by
utilizing social networking to effect change in their communities
(148). In this regard she implies that digital technologies have made
politics accessible to most everyone regardless of background.

Everett also notes Obama’s “careful cultivation of a race-neutral or
transcendent political persona” and America’s desire to be
race-neutral, corresponding to her original question: “Have we become
postracial yet?”.  Parallel to the freedoms of the Internet, a society
in which race is not an issue is an ideal that would promote identity
free of preconceived notions.

However, we are still a great distance away from achieving these
milestones. Everett does acknowledge the digital divide within the
country. Accessibility to technology as well as interest in politics
is dependent on income, education, and culture, among others. Many
people do not have Internet access; others who do don’t necessarily
utilize it for political activism. At this point, it does not seem
like the conveniences of the digital age can be closely correlated
with minority political involvement. Obama’s role as a black man
running for president was ground for racial tensions and discussions
about it, despite any attempts at a race-neutral persona. The country
certainly looks to a time when society can be postracial, but that
time likely will not come for many more years.

Cindy H

Blog post #4

Although we talked about it at length in our last class meeting, I am especially intrigued by danah boyd’s ideas about racial divides on SNS Facebook and MySpace. In her chapter, “White Flight in Networked Publics?”, boyd offers an argument that the exodus of teenagers from MySpace to Facebook mirrors the well-documented migration of American white and upper-middle class families from urban centers to the suburbs.

boyd positions MySpace as the abandoned city where the less fortunate of society are forced to stay and deal with the crime, graffiti and clutter that the city represents. As boyd points out, MySpace became overpopulated as more and more teenagers created profiles. Crime grew as security decreased and “graffiti” appeared as users took liberties with their profile design. In opposition to all of this was Facebook, which becomes a symbol of safety and cleanliness in the same way that the suburbs represented a more desirable space of existence than the city. Additionally, as two different networks, Facebook users become appropriately separated from MySpace users, as was inevitable in the move from urban centers to the suburban communities.

In boyd’s argument, this metaphor plays a pivotal role as her conclusion points out that the division between Facebook and MySpace users has racial underpinnings.

One of the most interesting points she brings up is the perception that Facebook users have of MySpace users. She notes that in 2009, mainstream media pronounced MySpace as “dead” because “white middle-class journalists didn’t know anyone who still used MySpace” (boyd 219). I find this interesting because it calls into question my own perception of MySpace and what it can be used for. I don’t use MySpace and as a late adopter of social media, I didn’t use MySpace for very long before the so-identified “white flight” occurred. Though I belonged to a racially diverse group of friends in high school I can safely say that learning in a private school, we had a similar socio-economic status. This fits into what boyd identifies as one of the reasons for teenagers moving on to facebook. boyd’s article, particularly this section, definitely makes me want to examine my identity as a Facebook user as opposed to a MySpace user.

 

I wonder what the demographics on MySpace and Facebook are like now. I would be interested to see if boyd’s argument still holds water in a time period with over 800 million Facebook users. If white flight actually occurred from MySpace to Facebook for Facebook’s suburban qualities, what is occurring now assuming that some of the users that remained on MySpace during boyd’s study have since transitioned to Facebook.

@roxyredstar    

Girlfights

If I had the ability to track my pictures from Myspace into the Facebook times, I think the trajectory of the photos would be a fitting study for Dobson. For the last eight years I have probably had over a thousand pictures taken with the same group of ten girls. The Representation of Female Friendships on Young Women’s MySpace Profiles, a research study written by Amy Dobson, hit entirely too close to home for me, so I had to write about it.

To start, I’m not admitting to being one of the “Girls Gone Wild”, EVER, but, my group of best friends from middle school up until now has definitely had our moments of getting wrapped up in the ‘gloating’ publicly about our strong friendship. So, Dobson’s article was eerily familiar. Dobson focuses on 45 females, ages 18-21, using their Myspace profiles in Australia. She spends time examining the images and text filling the page and comes up with two key constructions of female friendships on Myspace: 1) That “friendships are presented as idealistically party-oriented and rowdy” and 2) that friendships are “also presented as idealistically close, loyal, and intimate- comparable in the depth of feeling and connection expressed to romantic partnerships or family ties” (127). This, according to Dobson, leads the viewers of the profiles to imagine these women in an idealistic female-centered universe, which is all encompassing and almost completely satisfying to their own social and emotional needs. Throughout the article, Dobson’s main concern is with the way that female friendships are represented as part of a single female’s overall identity performance within the online frontier.

            Approaching the subject from a feminist perspective, Dobson is able to see these presentations for what they really are: “romanticized” and “pleasure-seeking” and maybe even “typically ‘masculine’ in the type of hedonistic and rowdy behaviour” that the young women in the profiles are taking part in (127). Dobson’s research examples are gnarly, for lack of a better term. There are lots of tongues, breasts, tight clothing and offensive words (such as: cunt, bitch, whore, slut) that are, of course, used endearingly (when not being used for the voyeur ‘other’). While young women may believe (maybe a stretch) that they are being post-gender and strong by using such, previously offensive terms, Dobson points out that these aggressive actions towards both the ‘other’ woman as well as men inherently keep previous stereotypes of femininity intact. By degrading the ‘other’ for what they don’t want to be, the women are not doing anything but reconstructing the pre-existing gender binaries.

            It’s a complicated situation though, because as a young woman, you are constantly trying to ‘define’ yourself against something that you are not. If you are not a slut, why not publicize that to the world? If you’ve got ‘it’, why not flaunt ‘it’? You don’t know any better. That’s the naïve way to look at it, but a large amount of young women think this. Dobson says that the young women present themselves as “active, pleasure-seeking subjects, rather than inert, passive objects of other’s pleasure” and this is accomplished through pictures of ‘girl time’ in the form of slumber parties, alcohol consumption (girlz only!!), making out with your friends and trying with all your might to look like you are having as much fun as possible in the pictures (130). This is because no longer do men represent drinking and leisure culture. Now women can sit on the couch with a few beers and watch the game, or something slightly more ‘feminine’, all the while, documenting it! If men can do it, why can’t we? A significant point made by Dobson is that the Internet, specifically MySpace and Facebook, are new spaces of new-media self-representation. Now that we have a forum to post our every moments and Friday and Saturday nights, why not share it with people who act like they care? I mean, I find lots of problems with this mentality, and now as I am older I can really see my earlier faults.

            My friends and I were the type of girl group that was considered ‘weird’ by all people not included. We were constantly called ‘cliquey’ (probably were) and ‘lesbians’ (we didn’t really hang out with anyone but ourselves) to the ‘others’ of our high school. We didn’t go to parties until late Sophomore year, so up until then, we just took lots of pictures together. Not really sexy nor suggestive, but just for shits and giggles. For ex: we’d raid my friend ‘s mom’s closet and put on her weirdest clothing and parade (10 of us) to the grocery store and document it. Our favorites would go up on Myspace and captains entirely devoted to our own inside jokes would accompany them. Why were we so annoying? I wish I could say we didn’t know any better but apparently you still have to figure out your own performance of sexuality the hard way. We even got into squabbles with other girl groups, ON MYSPACE. I remember a ‘popular ‘girl Thea’s Myspace profile interests included “ragging on the Willard Girls” (my group), and thus began a full on Internet war between her group of girls, Crimes of Couture (I am not joking), and my group. After a long exchange of young high school girls trying to prove to each other that they had large vocabularies, it finally ended, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth. Did we have to be that mean? Did we have to play along with Crimes of Couture’s antics? No, not really, but I think Facebook and Myspace really encourage behavior like this. I don’t think it is healthy; the ability to look at all these images. The judgments then turn into pride that we don’t look like that or have those friends, and it all just becomes a cycle of immaturity. Although Dobson’s age range is older than when I encountered these female friendships, I think it still stands true. I love my friends, but after seeing too many profiles like the ones described in this article, I do not want to broadcast it over the Internet.

This article brought to light many gender issues that are still very prevalent in our culture today. We need to stop with the us vs. them theory; we need to stop acting like we are better than the rest, whether it be males or other females, because that will just continue the cycle of performing our own ‘correct’ sexuality versus the supposed ‘incorrect’. 



-Sophie G. 

The ‘Grotesque Body’ Response

In Amy Shields Dobson’s The ‘Grotesque Body’ in Young Women’s Self Presentation on MySpace, the author analyzes females’ MySpace profile pictures in accordance with Bakhtin’s ideas on the body in “popular festivity” as opposed to the “classical statuary in the Renaissance.” She notes the common ‘open mouths’ and ‘protruding tongues’ found on the site, which, according to Bakhtin, “Exaggerates and caricatures the negative, the inappropriate.” Dobson finds that common MySpace images align with his study of the negative representation of grotesque bodies, and focuses her writing on contemporary connections to his theories and such female representation as perceived by viewers. The essay concludes with the question, "Does young women’s grotesque body representation necessarily disrupt the potentially voyeuristic pleasure of the viewer because they are the ones choosing, making and producing the representation?"

I barely frequented MySpace at the height of its popularity, but this reading struck a chord -- since the "carnivalesque" bodies studied by Bakhtin, the human form hasn't changed. When it comes to distorting her body to make a silly pose, a female still has the same limbs and the same tongue, thus producing images that can be easily compared to any study of non-classic representation and "grotesque bodies." Where does the stereotypical "MySpace photo" fit in? Where one can see the photographee's arm stretching to be the photographer? We still see outstretched tongues and unlikely poses on Facebook, but images as such are merely showing a sense of humor to contrast the classic smile and put-together pose that frequents Dobson's magazines.

To address Dobson's concluding question, I feel as though a voyeur can never be the one to choose, make, and produce a representation in any situation; there's no difference between watching a female act unlady-like through a window or on MySpace. The basis of voyeurism is to gain pleasure from watching others, and either way, the voyeur has no power to choose the representation. Not that I'm a practiced MySpace voyeur, but I'd assume that anyone who approaches a social media site with the intention of pleasure takes these "grotesque bodies" into account. Most users do not upload flashy, sexual photographs that are meant to please prying eyes, so a voyeur must make do with what he or she finds, which, in many cases, as a female in a silly, untraditional pose.

 

Jen L.

Media-Mixing and Me

While I have found most of the readings we have done in class very interesting, stimulating, I find it necessary to focus on “Imaging, Keyboarding and Posting Identities” by Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell, as it opened my eyes to prosumption and inspired my final topic. Furthermore, it presents a range of salient points in regards to online identity construction. It opens with a consideration of trying to understand “coming of age” in an ever more digitalized and mediated world: not only is there a considerable digital divide, but there also exists a gap in understanding, as adults who have had to learn cannot understand how natural technology can be for children today.

            The article then goes on to describe technology’s role in the adolescent “identity crisis,” as well as prosumption and digital production as a sort of ongoing experimentation of the adolescent “identity-in-action.” The adolescent identity, in this framework is a bricolage of media products, redefined and reworked, and pieced together as self-expression until the right mix sticks. It then looks at four

            I connected to this because, in reflecting on my adolescence and identity construction, its various stages and phases were defined by the outlet I chose to express myself on. Whether it was Geocities, LiveJournal, MySpace or Facebook (now I find my identity much more separately), each seemed to fit at the time and provided me with tools through which I could express myself. Similarly, as I look at younger kids experimenting on the internet, I am fascinated by their experimentations. While their media mixing is very different from mine, it is, in many ways, the same.

            I found that Weber and Mitchell adequately address this theme by focusing on media mixing in four different contexts. In each, the broad strokes remain the same. Each young person finds his or her voice through mediation However, each medium also has its own idiosyncrasies, allowing certain unique expression, and also prohibiting other kinds. While I did think that this issue could be explored further and more in depth, especially as it relates to media mixing and prosumption, each case study was interesting and tired to the others in interesting ways to create a well-rounded understanding of mediated adolescent identity. 



Ceci