Teens And Social Media Essay

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With the birth of the Internet roughly twenty-five years ago, came a new medium for language use; and, thus, a new public for sharing and exchanging information. In a society that is largely information and technology driven, new communication and screen-based technologies have become the culturally diverse ways of acquiring knowledge and developing cognitive styles through literacy around the world. Meta-communicative technologies, like popular social media sites and other virtual communication platforms, are the contemporary institutions of the public sphere where people navigate social relations, exchange information and construct competences by participating in different forms of literacies.
In seventeenth-century France, le public, emerged …show more content…

What boyd suggests here is that these “networked publics” have become spaces for teens to navigate social relations and share information just as they do in there daily lives outside of the spaces. For example, in a chapter from Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media titled When Friends Who Talk Together Stalk Together: Online Gossip as Metacommunication, authors Graham M. Jones Bambi B. Schieffelin, and Rachel E. Smith discuss how teens “stalk,” “creep,” and “lurk” in online publics like Facebook “scouring [the site] for information of personal interest to gossip about on IM or Instant Messenger. Gossiping is a practices that takes place outside of these virtual publics, however, the Internet has enchaned these forms of communication for teens. In addition to hanging out and gossiping, teens also use these meta-communicative platforms to create and end relationships with one another. In her ethnographic account titled, Email my Heart, Ilana Gershon examines how teens use instant messaging to “mediate break-ups” (Gershon 2008). These new technologies not only have significant implications for communication, but also literacy

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