Since digital communities hadn’t fully arisen until the early 2000s, their formation and popularity has divided the population into two distinct groups: those who understand the nuances and subtleties of the way the communities operate and those who do not. This split in understanding can be thought of, more generally represented, as a division in age. A division between young individuals who grew up with and incorporated these digital communities into their social life, and the older population whose adolescence was not predicated on the existence and use of digital social platforms. In Danah Boyd’s “It’s Complicated”, she discusses reasons as to why digital communities inevitably become grounds on which younger individuals escape parental supervision and create more nuanced social techniques and understandings to “properly” interact with one another, a disconnect that Danah Boyd believes propagates misunderstanding and misinterpretation. It is this disconnect between the younger and older individuals, usually understood as being the children and adults, that engenders this misunderstanding. But where does this misunderstanding stem, and what ideas does it concern? In what I’ve gathered from the reading I believe that this misunderstanding between younger and older individuals is a result of differing ideas and concerns regarding context and perceptions of private and public space. Though an adult may view an online social community as a single interactive entity operating under a single set of rules, this is not the case for the adolescent individual. For the teen, a single digital space or community can be more accurately translated into multiple distinct physical spaces that lend themselves to a variety of rules. For instance, Danah Boyd tells of a younger boy who voices his frustration with his sister who continually abuses her ability to comment on posts that he thinks shouldn’t include her. Though he understands the conversation as being more of a private one between individuals that he views as being relevant, his sister understands the posts as a public interaction, and an invitation to join in. Here Danah points out the complex way in which individuals perceive the various spaces that digital communities provide. Individual ideas concerning private and public space dictate the ways in which actions within social digital communities are read. For some, digital communities represent a private space composed of family and friends, a place in which anything can be shared. For others, digital communities remain a part of the bigger structural system of the Internet, an incredibly public space where all information is accessible and shareable.
Because of the inhuman qualities of the Internet, the process of composing an identity, for the adolescent, has become more abstract. Instead of having one’s identity tied to a sort of physical being, it is constructed through the use of digital devices that produce nontangible extensions of the self. It is the sort of peer-to-peer driven nature of these online communities that creates an identity for the individual. No matter how the teen views his/her digitally fabricated self, whether it is in a serious or joking manner, that version of the self becomes an indicator of how that individual aspires to be understood in a specific social context. However, as the lines distinguishing between the real and digital self become more and more blurred, one must be careful not to become too heavily invested in any form of online socializing. Since the structural apparatus supporting these communities are rigid, an individual obviously cannot interact socially with something that is, utterly, non-human. An affordance that comes with social digital communities, which must be recognized, is their inherent non-human structural qualities and restrictions that ultimately shape the way users interact with one another and form any semblance of an “identity”. What I’m trying to say is that Identity shouldn’t be confined or attributed to a digital, non-real space, but rather something that permeates all realms of “existence”. A perspective that I believe would allow for a more healthy understanding of the self.
Does it count as “eavesdropping” if you peruse content that isn’t related to you? I think it’s akin to shouting in a room where everyone is shouting: you think everyone is too wrapped up in their own convos to notice you but really there’s someone you don’t notice listening in, then they unexpectedly voice their own opinion and you’re kinda like “okay but who invited you into my business”. That’s what I thought of with the kid and his sister.