Worried About the Wrong Things

by Jacqueline Ryan Vickery

  It has been more than six years since these observations were first noted and since then we have seen yet another change in the popularity of social media. To a certain degree, the move away from Facebook probably can be attributed to the number of adults now on Facebook. In 2014, Facebook saw an increase of more than 80 percent in the number of users 55 and older and an increase of 41 percent in users between 35 and 54 (Saul 2014). What was once considered a province of young people has become a common area for people of all ages.

  In the physical world, teens desire spaces of their own. Historically, such spaces have included soda shops, drive-in theaters, arcades, and shopping malls. The Internet has become a popular “hangout” for youth precisely because physical spaces designated for young people have been diminishing (boyd 2014). As more and more teachers, parents, and authority figures began using Facebook, teens understandably sought out spaces away from the adults in their lives. If we look to the popular sites that have begun to replace (or at least supplement) Facebook—apps such as Instagram, Tumblr, Vine, and Snapchat—we note the use of photos and images has taken on increasing priority. Young people once wanted to move away from the cluttered pages of MySpace, but it appears the appeal of images and multimedia platforms is winning out over the static and still primarily text-based format of Facebook.

  The changes in networks and the user interfaces are limited explanations for why teens are abandoning Facebook, but there is more to consider. Yes, teens are seeking their own spaces where they can converse with friends away from the watchful eye of parents and authority figures. However, I am also hearing that young people expect greater control over their networks, their identities, and ultimately their visibility. As 18-year-old Cindy (Asian-American) explained to me over breakfast one morning, “Facebook just doesn’t give you a sense of control. They’re always changing things. I don’t know, I just feel it’s easier to use Tumblr the way I want … and I don’t know, it’s more of our space, you know?” Her comment alludes to the ways Facebook has continued to expand its reach to many other areas of the web by serving as a portal to other sites. Owing to changes in the interface and the algorithms, more and more information and more and more interactions are publicized within and beyond the site itself. And the archival nature of the site records past relationships, interactions, and expressions, often in acutely visible ways. In and of themselves these are not inherently bad or misguided moves on Facebook’s part. From an economic perspective Facebook’s increasing visibility strategies may be a successful business decision, but from an identity and privacy perspective, they are adversarial to teens’ preferential interactions, experiences, and expectations of visibility.

  “Just don’t post it”: The Problem with Individualizing Privacy

  Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, explained his approach to privacy during an interview with Maria Bartiromo of CNBC: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it” (Google CEO on Privacy 2010). This presumption that privacy is primarily about hiding “bad” information is also echoed by the advice adults give teens when discussing online privacy. Young people often are told not to do the “bad” thing in the first place, and they most definitely should not post anything online that they wouldn’t want everyone to see. Research repeatedly and consistently demonstrates that young people care about their privacy (boyd 2014; Livingstone 2008; Madden et al. 2013); nonetheless there is an assumption that they reveal too much information about themselves online—information that “horrifies their elders” (Henley 2013). The practice of sharing information that adults do not understand gets misinterpreted as a disregard for privacy. Sharing information about oneself and one’s peers often gets constructed in pathologizing or demeaning ways. For example, taking “selfies” (photos of oneself) is often described as narcissistic and self-centered behavior (Giroux 2015; Gregoire 2015) and is sometimes even linked to addiction, body dysphoria, or mental illness. The psychiatrist David Veal has been quoted as saying “Two out of three of all patients who come to see me with body dysmorphic disorder since the rise of camera phones have a compulsion to repeatedly take and post selfies on social media sites” (Keating 2014). This rhetoric is reflective of the harm-driven expectations of risk that we have seen throughout this book. These risk-driven narratives emerge frequently in medical, social, legal, and educational debates. The persistence of pathologizing and demonizing young people’s social media practices makes it far easier to blame young people themselves instead of holding society responsible for violating their expectations.

  For example, administrators at a Georgia high school wanted to teach students about the risks of sharing information about oneself online. To demonstrate their point, they gave a presentation to parents and students during which they displayed a photo that the administrators perceived as over-sexualized of a student, Chelsey Chaney, wearing a bikini. The photo was presented as an example of what kind of photos young people should not share online. It had been taken while the young woman was vacationing with her family; she had then posted it to her Facebook account, which was visible only to friends and friends of friends. By using the photo and the young woman’s full name, the school—though aiming to teach about privacy—had violated her expectations of privacy by quite literally using the photo as an example of what not to do on social media. (Here I do not mean that the girl should not have shared a photo of herself in a bikini, but rather that the school should not have used the image as an example at a school assembly.) Chelsey Chaney sued the school for breaching those expectations. She explained: “I understand people are going to look at it, that I put it out there, but for a school administrator to target me as an example of a bad child?” (Judge tosses part of lawsuit … 2013). Her point is valid: it’s one thing to re-share the photo to make a point, but it’s another to shame a high school student in front of the entire school (teachers, students, and parents included). An attorney representing the school responded that he “finds it perplexing that someone is suing for millions for a picture she herself posted on the internet” (Rudra 2013).1 What the lawyer and school failed to understand was the context in which the student shared the photo (a photo that was arguably not inappropriate): it was shared on Facebook for her friends and family members to see, it was not intended to be shown to the entire student body and their parents within a context that was intended to shame the student. The gendered nature of shame also needs to be emphasized. It is not inappropriate for a teen girl to be in a bikini on the beach with her family. It isn’t likely that the school would have used a photo of a teen boy in his swimsuit on the beach to illustrate the point. The shaming and harm-driven rhetoric that aims to regulate teens’ practices are often gendered and reify expectations that teen girls (and their adult-perceived sexuality) are inherently inappropriate and at risk online (see chapter 2).

  Throughout the entire incident, the school held Chelsey Chaney responsible and blamed her for having posted a “sexy” picture of herself online. From the school’s perspective, the expectation was that once the photo has been shared in any context, it was justifiable for others to re-share it in any other context. In attempting to teach students about the value of privacy, the school actually perpetuated the dangerous ways in which students (or anyone) should not act. As one social media theorist explained, “So obsessed with young women’s sexuality, the school becomes preoccupied on the women in the photos, echoing that now familiar refrain that shames and blames the victims of privacy violations instead of focusing on the violators” (Jurgenson 2013). The adult expectation was that sharing anything online—in any context—negates an individual’s right and expectation to privacy. In a talk to tech industry professionals, danah boyd (2007) drew an important distinction between public and publicity, arguing that just because something is publically accessible does not mean it is intended to be publicized: “Publicizing their material without their knowledge is a way of taking control away from them.” Although boyd was talking ab
out technical affordances of the platforms that publicize users’ content (a point I will return to later in this chapter), the statement is applicable to other situations, particularly when adults re-appropriate young people’s content in a different context. This is but one example of the ways in which popular discourses of risk and expectations of privacy falsely assume that privacy is an individualized norm and practice. Focusing solely on the individual dismisses and ignores the collective and contextual role that peers, adults, institutions, and networks play in shaping the contours and expectations of privacy.

  Although young people do have a responsibility to manage what they choose to share online, including with whom and where they share information, they cannot control what platforms, institutions, and peers intentionally and inadvertently reveal about their identities and relationships. Discourses of visibility need to take into account how the disclosure of particular identities opens up some teens to greater risk for discrimination and judgment. Arguably, privacy expectations must expand beyond individual strategies for hiding “bad” information about oneself, but must also consider how collective peer contexts and various stakeholders are also responsible for respecting teens’ privacy, norms, expectations, and online practices. What the participants in this book express is that they seek opportunities for networked online identity explorations and interpersonal relationships that are contextually situated (rather than the converged and public identity of Facebook) and they expect networks and adults to acknowledge and respect their practices and norms. As a strategy for maintaining privacy, they employ differentiated practices that allow them to use different media for different aspects of their lives and with different people. In doing so, their conceptions and expectations of privacy tend to differ from how parents, teachers, the law, and social media sites understand privacy. Analyzing what sites and apps participants are using and for what purposes provides productive entry into considering and analyzing young people’s expectations of identity, privacy, and visibility; their expectations and practices highlight the need to approach privacy from a collective—rather than an individualized—perspective.

  Doing Identity

  From a discursive perspective, youth is often constructed as a transitional period of “becoming”—a period in which young people explore and experiment with different modes of expression and identification (Gabriel 2013). “Identity,” David Buckingham explains (2008, p. 8), “is something we do, rather than simply something we are.” Judith Butler (1990) explains that identity is something that is performed; such a perspective comes from an understanding that identity is not fixed, but rather is fluid. In other words, identity is never accomplished, but rather is constantly evolving and is constantly negotiated throughout a lifetime. Such a perspective understands that identity is contextually situated—individuals do not possess one true identity, but rather different identities are articulated and performed in different contexts. For example, a young girl constructs and performs the identity of “daughter” at home with her parents and constructs and performs the identity of “student” at school and that of “friend” with her peers. The girl is not any more authentic nor fake by articulating or performing any one of these identities at any given time, but rather each are authentic manifestations of her identity as they are experienced and expressed in particular moments, contexts, and roles.2 We must also keep in mind that, far from being an individual choice, young people’s understanding of their identities is largely constructed from the social and cultural cues in their environment, as well as from their embodied sense of self.

  Since the 1990s, teens have used the Internet as a tool for exploring interests, experimenting with identity, and fostering a sense of community. Early Internet research is often critiqued for constructing a false dichotomy between offline identities as opposed to online identities. There was an inherent assumption that what happened online was somehow less authentic or real than what happened offline (Hine 2000; Walker 2000). Even today the language of “real life” is used to indicate something that happens in the physical world as opposed to the virtual world; but both are “real” in their articulation and effects. Over time, we have come to understand that the Internet provides a means through which we can express ourselves and communicate with others; thus the interactions are no less real or meaningful just because they are mediated. As Butler’s theory of identity explains, if identity is constantly performed, rather than a fixed component of who we are, then both offline performances and online performances become equally significant and authentic. The platform or social context through which identity is performed does not discredit the performative expression of self. Even fantastical or fabricated instances of identity performance still reveal insight into how an individual desires to be perceived.

  Take for example, 18-year-old Regina, whom I met via her blog in 2007. She attended an all-girls school and fell in love with her best friend, a young woman whom she referred to simply as “A.” Because her mother and her friends disapproved of her lesbian relationship, Regina had to keep her relationship with A secret. Regina started a blog so that she could have a place to discuss her own sexual identity (which she admitted was still very confusing to her). Regina found a supportive community of girls online. Her dedicated readers left comments and offered her advice about how to handle her situation at home and at school. They would also suggest other blogs written by people who were in similar situations, thus she connected to a much larger community of lesbian and questioning girls her own age. Here, within the confines of the online world, Regina found both an outlet for sexual expression and identity negotiation, as well as a supportive community that was not available to her in the offline world. The support she found online influenced her offline life, just as her offline life was the impetus for starting a blog in the first place. Regina went to great lengths to keep her blog a secret from her friends and family members (and even her girlfriend)—she used a pseudonym and an alternative email address, she did not publicize the blog, nor did she let her family know she had a blog, and she did not use the blog to communicate with friends from her offline life. Though the blog was publicly accessible, it functioned as a secret and private space for Regina and was an authentic aspect of her life.

  As Regina’s example demonstrates, understandings of private and public are contextual—though she chose not disclose her sexuality in her embodied interactions with friends and family members, on the Internet she could be public about her relationship and her emerging sexuality. Revealing her sexuality online does not preclude Regina from desiring to keep her emerging sexuality private at home and at school. In other words, her having come out in one context does not mean that Regina should have no expectations of privacy in other contexts of her life. Additionally, what Regina’s story highlights is the extent to which using digital media as spaces for expressing one’s identity inevitably leads to questions of privacy. We know that sharing private and sensitive information about ourselves is essential to building healthy relationships, and we all choose to disclose particular aspects of our identities on a daily basis, sometimes willingly and sometimes less intentionally. However, we also understand and assess the risks and benefits of such disclosures and make decisions based on the context of the interactions and relationships. For Regina, the benefits of coming out on her blog—and the community the blog provided her—outweighed the potential privacy risks, but did not negate her expectation of privacy in other spaces.

  As we discuss privacy we must keep in mind that identity and privacy are intricately linked. We willingly and unintentionally give up private information continually, but as we assess expectations of privacy we must always take into consideration the context in which information was disclosed, by whom, and for what purpose. Additionally, privacy is more complicated than merely being “not public”; rather, privacy—both online and offline—is a matter of degree, context, visibility, and control (boyd 2014). Privacy is not a simple binary of “private” and “not pri
vate,” although laws, policies, and expectations (as the Georgia high school example) often tend to reify this simplistic binary. The binary, of course, ignores the complicated nuances of privacy practices and contextualized understandings of identity performance.

  Expectations of Privacy

  In the physical world, visibly marked cues such as closed doors and crowded spaces delineate expectations of privacy. Online, however, cues that might delineate such expectations often are rendered invisible or are more open to interpretation. This does not mean they disappear completely; it just makes things more complicated. Just as the physical world has architecture that helps us dictate privacy norms (e.g., gendered bathrooms with stalls, doors, locks, and so forth that dictate how the space is to be used, by whom, and with what degree of privacy), the online world has its own architecture in the form of code. Lawrence Lessig (1999) has proposed that the architecture of the Internet (i.e., the code) is one of the most important modes of online regulation. Code essentially dictates what we can and cannot do on any given website or app. For example, some websites require you to create an account, a log-in name, and a password before you can access the information. This is the architecture of the site as determined by the code. Other websites might allow you to leave comments, but they do not enable you to upload a video or embed an image with your comment. Again, this is the architecture of the site and is the intentional coding design decision. Much like the architecture of the physical world, the architecture of a website provides context cues about our expectations of privacy. If a website requires you to log in before leaving a comment, you probably are more aware that your comment is linked to an online identity or account, and thus you will have different expectations of privacy than you will have if the site allows you to leave an anonymous comment without creating an account. If you post something to your Facebook profile, you should be aware that it is more visible than if you share the same information in a private Facebook message to a friend. The message feels more private than a post, but of course it is still accessible to people working at Facebook, reminding us that the same information can be simultaneously private (from the perspective of social privacy) and remain accessible in other contexts. It is the dualistic nature of online information as both private and public that makes online interactions, disclosure, and expectations so capricious.