There were many disparate concepts posed this week, so I'll do my best to string together something coherent. One idea that struck me very quickly was the difference between thoroughly Western girls who often find the Internet to be a place for exploring aspects of their identity through otherwise impossible statements of honesty (and conversely, dishonesty or similarly "bad" behavior, predicated on a perceived sense of anonymity and/or invincibility) and the Arab girls in the essay in Girl Wide Web 2.0, "Degrees of Caution: Arab Girls Unveil on Facebook," who understood that the Internet could only be a place for the most basic communication, and that the exploration of identity can very easily translate into public displays of impropriety. Typical communication between peers in the Instant Messaging world is rife with possibly embarrassing, written honesty, without real consideration of the consequences. As Stern observes in Instant Identity, the conversations girls engage in are often filled with gossip, ostensibly about their peers, which is both natural to adolescent behavior, but also solidifies the typical construction of female identity. I know I did it, growing up, though as I consider those periods retrospectively, I know many of my conversations had quite a bit more depth than that as well.
One very small detail that I'd like to point out is that when I was reading the section about girl-on-girl aggression via IM clients was that the author, who appeared to have quite a time deciphering the slang that the girls use, did not pick up on the fact that an asterisk denoted a correction of a misspelled word, though the word was ironically even misspelled upon being corrected [the section in question is when "babyfizzle" corrects herself saying "lest" to "lets*" and Stern observes parenthetically that this appears to have no meaning (Stern 35)]. Stern's efforts to interpret her subjects often seem to be grasping at something completely foreign and her conclusions seem to me to be a bit misguided or otherwise reach too far or not far enough for meaning. Adolescent aggression, when played out in this fashion, rarely amounts to much more than expletive-laden arguments, and treating it a precursor to violent outbursts seems to underestimate the average teenaged girl's capacity for self-restraint, at least by my observations. Not to be too dismissive, but many of Stern's observations, while very respectful and mostly even-handed, seem to treat her subjects as though they're not simply a different culture, but a strange new species to be examined and picked apart with great confusion. Then again, many adult observations about youth culture come across that way, more silly than insightful.
On a different note, I find the scheme of these conversations so interestingly dichotomous from the aforementioned Arab girls and their behavior. The Arab girls are very image conscious, both out of fear of damaging their reputations, and also because conceptions of decorous behavior are engrained into their gender(ed) identity. Gender-appropriate behavior is even policed through observations of same-gendered Facebook friends (Leage and Chalmers 32). I liked the observation from the girl who deemed her struggle between her culture's expectations and her own truth, what she felt would be appropriate behavior, to be a "double-identity." It seemed, however, that restricting access to a few friends allowed for the true formation of a constructed identity that did not require stifling emotions or uncomfortable censorship. This negotiation is worlds apart from the girls who feel the gaze of their family members and approach this new frontier with weariness as a result.
Finally, just to briefly touch on advertising, one of the things I find most interesting about social network advertising that wasn't mentioned in the text at all, as consumerism as a theme was isolated to discussions within IM culture, is that the way you construct your identity on social networking sites determines the ways in which you are marketed to. The ads you are given are determined by what information about yourself you choose to make readily available on the site. For example, most of my ads usually have to do with UCF, reproductive health, clothing, upcoming shows, and things that the site logically gleans I'd appreciate and possibly peruse. Sometimes, I'm certain I only get certain ads because I'm a girl and there are certain presumptions to that effect of what might appeal to me. The automatic weeding out of irrelevant marketing is the creation of an advertising utopia and it often works. The relationship between identity construction and consumer demand creates very interesting implications for our future, though it's often so accurate as to be uncanny and make me wonder what I should put out on the Internet at all.
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