Privacy in Public: Creating “MY Space”
“My mom always uses the excuse about the internet being ‘public’ when she defends herself. It’s not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. I do journals so I can communicate with my friends. Not so my mother could catch up on the latest gossip of my life.” – Bly Lauritano-Werner.
For Lauritano-Werner, privacy is not about structural limitations to access; it is about being able to limit access through social conventions. This approach makes sense if you recognize that networked public makes it nearly impossible to have structurally enforced borders. However, this is not to say that teens do not also try to create structural barriers.
Teens often fabricate key identifying information like name, age, and location to protect themselves. While parents groups often encourage this deception to protect teens from strangers, many teens actually engage in this practice to protect themselves from the watchful eye of parents.
Fabricating data does indeed make search more difficult, but the networked nature of MySpace provides alternate paths to finding people. First, few teens actually lie about what school they attend, although some choose not to list a school at all. Second, and more problematically, teens are not going to refuse connections to offline friends even though that makes them more easily locatable
Another common structural tactic involves the privacy settings. By choosing to make their profile private, teens are able to select who can see their content. This prevents unwanted parents from lurking, but it also means that peers cannot engage with them with some without inviting them to be Friends. To handle this, teens are often promiscuous with who they are willing to add as Friends on the site. By connecting to anyone who seems interesting, they gain control over the structure. Yet, this presents different problems because massive friending introduces a flood of content with no tools to manage it.
While deception and lockdown are two common structural solutions, teens often argue that MySpace should be recognized as myspace a space for teenagers to be teenagers. Adults typically view this attitude as preposterous because, as they see it, since the technology is public and teens are participating in a public way, they should have every right to view this content. This attitude often frustrates teenagers who argue that just because anyone can access the site doesn’t mean that everyone should.
In unmediated spaces, structural boundaries are assessed to determine who is in the audience and who is not. The decision to goof off during lunch is often made with the assumption that only peers bear witness. In mediated spaces, there are no structures to limit the audience; search collapses all virtual walls. Most people believe that security through obscurity will serve as a functional barrier online.
It is easy to lambaste teens for accepting the cultural norms of the ‘in’ crowd, but social categories and status negotiation are core elements in teen life; this is part of how they learn to work through the cultural practices and legal rules that govern society. On MySpace, teens are directly faced with peer pressure and the need to conform to what is seen to be cool. Worse, they are faced with it in the most public setting possible – one that is potentially visible to all peers and all adults.
Teens are not necessarily well-prepared to navigate complex social worlds with invisible audiences, but neither are adults. While MySpace is public, it is unlike other publics that adults commonly face. This presents a generational divide that is further complicated by adults’ mis-readings of youth participation in new media.
