The online article, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life” by Danah Boyd makes some interesting points in defense of teenagers’ participation in social networking sites. Boyd focuses primarily on MySpace as a platform for online expression following the popularity of Friendster. Friendster was originally developed as a website intended for meeting members of the opposite sex (or same sex) and allowed users to write testimonials in an attempt to gather credibility and gain interest from strangers in their friends’ online selves. The pages themselves followed a specific template and focused on characteristics that would be important to someone searching for a potential partner (age, sex, location, photograph, etc).
MySpace built on Friendster’s idea by allowing users to connect with people while doing away with the restrictions of bans on CSS and HTML code, allowing for greater online expression and creativity. This motivated users to want to share their online profile with friends and peers. According to Boyd, “Many began participating because of the available social voyeurism and the opportunity to craft a personal representation in an increasingly popular online community” (4). Online profiles became intentionally formatted to gain attention from a suspected audience and MySpace gave users the ability to control who that audience included. However, there was no way of knowing who was viewing what and how often, thus the “invisible audience,” of social-networking sites was born.
The invisible audience can be defined as the audience in unmediated spaces which views our expressions as public material. The audience’s interpretation of us can be complicated by time and place because they may not have the intended reaction and there is no way of knowing what their reaction will be. As a former user of MySpace, I was mostly aware of my audience because my settings were set to friends only. However, I would often accept people who were not my friends or keep people on my list who weren’t my friends anymore for the purpose of personality performance. In high school, private cliques are formed and gossip roots out those who are unwanted. Identifying online is slightly more difficult because the settings make it such that conversations cannot be overheard but are either public or private for certain members. In short, you can allow parties to view material that is seemingly involuntarily presented for them. I’ll give an example to clarify this point.
Following high school I had an extremely rocky relationship with an ex-boyfriend who also chose to identify online. He was very interested in web design, running several online sites, and also had a MySpace and Facebook profile. Following one of our many break-ups, I posted a blog on MySpace about how much I hated Valentine’s Day, seemingly written for friends (as it was public) but written with him in mind. I never addressed him or our relationship specifically but you could pretty much hear the bitterness in my tone. He of course read it and responded angrily. Since we weren’t on speaking terms and wouldn’t see each other for awhile this was my way of publicly addressing him. Thus, my opinions were validated without actually having to confront him outright. In a sense, it was easier to be passive-aggressive online than it was in person. As Boyd states, “Situations like this highlight how context is constructed and maintained through participation, not simply observation. When outsiders search for and locate participants, they are ill prepared to understand the context; instead, they project the context in which they relate to the individual offline onto the individual in this new online space” (17). Since then he and I have reconciled (although we’re not still together) but to this day participate in the intended/unintended audience conundrum of online sharing.
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