Conclusion: Make it what you want it to be

Tags

conclusion, generation y, millenials, relationships, social media, technology, thoughts

My conclusion on this subject feels similar to Turkle’s. When I began this project, it was because of the memories I had with my boyfriends in high school. I would call my boyfriend’s house, hesitantly asking if my boyfriend was home to his mother, or sister, or whoever answered the phone. When I got my first cell phone three months before I turned 16, it changed everything. Yes, we also spent hours speaking on AIM, the formerly popular AOL Instant Messenger, and making cryptic away messages or MySpace bulletins to get the message across.

Yet, now when I flirt, or when my friends flirt we ask each other questions like, “What should I text him? Is this okay? If I say, ‘Hanging out, what are you doing?’ Is that all right or should I put a winky face next to it?” We’re creating rules of text-based etiquette, but none of us know how to play the game.

Turkle made a conclusion where she said, “The ties we form through the Internet, are not in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.” When beginning romantic relationships, we are looking to be thought up, for that preoccupation. However, we need to control it before it controls us. Turkle suggests simple rules like no texting during dinner, or limiting Facebook interactions to one hour total instead of every 20 minutes for 3 minutes all day.

Analyzation – How I got to this place

Tags

Facebook, relationships, social media, technology, thoughts

I have something to admit: my current boyfriend of almost two years does not have a social media presence. While I am active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and sit on my email for several hours a day, my boyfriend doesn’t do any of that. He has email, but it’s not even a Gmail account. When we started dating, I saw this as a detriment, because, well it’s weird. I even went so far as to believe he had a fake Facebook.

(As an aside, I know many females who have gotten tricked by the fake Facebook. Many means two, but that still means it’s enough to be a trend. A boy they’re dating will say, “Oh I don’t have a Facebook,” so the girls don’t even look for it. Then on a day of boredom, they find it and find out there’s an entire life they didn’t know about. THIS HAS HAPPENED TO MORE THAN ONE FRIEND.}

After a while–and some slight Facebook creeping–I began to believe he was being genuine. I began this project because I have a hard time believing that all the media we’re consuming doesn’t have an affect on us. I think a big effect it has on us is what I just displayed: we can’t trust anyone. Turkle’s Alone Together talks about the phenomenon that what you display on your profile page is hardly you more than a representation of you. That scares me, because it’s like we’re a version of ourselves all the time.

When we’re a version of ourselves, the only ones who know us are friends who have been with us for years. I also think some people are better at splitting themselves up online. I keep seeing this trend where people use online or texting etiquette in real life. If I know you, I will say hello to you in the hallway, or if we make eye contact, in any instance. I have more and more people who are amazed by that, and tell me they don’t do that. I think to myself, “Why not? We know each other, so why wouldn’t we wave hello?” I’ve hit a point where I think it’s because of technology. In online etiquette, we have the ability to ignore someone’s presence entirely so sometimes we imitate that in real life.

I love social media and have no intention of giving it up. I just think we need a newer version of The Rules. We’re making up our own online etiquette in our dating lives and daily life and it’s happening to our detriment. When I began dating my current boyfriend, he did a slew of things I was unaccustomed to from calling me more often than he texted me, to opening my car door for me. I was shocked, it was like all of a sudden I was dating this species I had heard about, but didn’t know existed in real life.

As an example, I was casually dating someone who had no problem not ever texting me again as a way of telling me we were not hanging out anymore. He did that even though we would see each other again in social situations and act like nothing happened. Turkle’s book keeps talking about how talking about online interactions in person is unspoken. I’m not sure it should be. If we’re making the rules, I want to have the ability to say “You stopped responding to my texts as a way of ‘casually’ breaking up with me and that was inappropriate.”

I wanted to see if other people had the same difficulties or anticipations as I did. While many said this way of life was the only one they knew, there were those who thought critically and said, “Maybe this isn’t the life I wanted, but it’s how I’m here.” I can’t imagine my personal growth or development without my first website, or blog, or AIM profile, or Myspace. Each was a piece of my growth.

I romanticize pre-Internet because I imagine how much harder it was to prove someone was being disingenuous. Liars existed before the Internet, but now I feel like they’re around me all the time. They have a great Twitter account, but are assholes in real life. It’s a phrase, “Great on paper.” I feel like I meet so many individuals that are Great On Paper. I don’t think lonely people are drawn to the Internet, I think the Internet is a place where we invent who we are. That scares me, because it allows us to be anyone.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey with me. I have a few followers now (Hi! Thanks for stopping by!) and I think I’m going to keep updating this as I continue on the difficult world of online etiquette and real life etiquette.

Privacy and Authenticity

Tags

Facebook, generation y, millenials, privacy, relationships, social media, trust

I keep seeing parallels in my research between authenticity/trust and privacy. Some of those surveyed, and some sentiments in my class have said, “Even if you see everything on my profile, there are only so many things I want you to discuss with me.”

This changes with the evolving world of privacy. Generation Y views privacy very differently than previous generations, according to a study by Pew Research Center (Baumann). In a study, 67 percent agreed that Millennials will continue to broadcast personal information online (Baumann). In that case, we should be comfortable with sharing our lives with someone online. However, in romantic relationships, there is a fear of partners not being authentic. There are horror stories about women who meet men who seem perfect, but secretly have affairs using social media as their facilitator.

The lesson here is that sometimes people are untrustworthy. However, most of the respondents to my survey seemed to have a natural distrust of their potential partners and use social media to confirm or deny that suspicion.

The other day, my roommate texted a boy and didn’t get an immediate response. He noticed that said boy tweeted from his phone a few minutes later, causing him to question this boys true feelings (“is he ignoring me on purpose?”). While it can make it easier to be in contact with someone, sometimes social media makes it too easy.

When relating to my past few blogposts, this seems like something that is plausible. People juggle their relationships with their work and don’t question the balance between the two. In Alone Together, a person called it a “life-mix” (Turkle). A combination of life online, with a stable social life and work-balance. Online etiquette tends to eliminate the etiquette we used to learn in real life.

Pew’s article had an interesting quote about the changing sense of privacy. “It will be clear by 2020 that everybody has, if you will, skeletons (or nude pics or infidelities) in the closet, and it will be seen as absurd to make morality judgments based on these. In an ideal world, denying a person life or livelihood on the basis of these will be seen as a form of extortion, and condemned by society at large,” said the article (Baumann).

Should we be giving people some slack? What shows up on our social media profiles may be there forever, but people develop and mature over time. Someone who may have been untrustworthy in their 20s may mature to be a social, trustworthy adult. Of course, if that happened, they would probably clear their profile of their shady past.

Since WordPress won’t let me embed this link from The Onion, here is a video called:
Report – Every Potential 2040 Presidential Candidate Already Unelectable Due to Facebook

Works Cited

Baumann, Michael. “Pew Report: Digital Natives Get Personal.” Information Today 27.10 (2010): 18. Academic Search Premier. Web. 19 Apr. 2012.

How Facebook is used

Tags

Facebook, Loneliness, sexuality, social media, technology

The more I read Sherry Turkle’s. Alone Together, the more I identify with the characters in her book. In its conclusion, Turkle argues technology was supposed to be as solution for what we think we want, not what we want. What we thought we wanted was to be closer than ever, but what we got was feeling more alone.

Take this infographic about how Facebook is used daily. Most of the interactions involve liking a status, followed by commenting on one. Liking a status is a form of passive interaction–the only thing that involves direct interactions are writing on the comment. What is interesting about this, is many feel that it is too intrusive to comment on something if they are not close friends with another. My posts on how desperation and creeping play into the online social network shows how one self-identified creeper thinks that you can only interact with certain people on Facebook in certain ways.

On the other hand, Facebook and online communication allows people to show a truer version of themselves. Immediate communication allows the possibility for humiliation, while communication through text-based communication allows a wall of mystery. One respondent to the survey said,

I feel more confident contacting someone over social media than I would in person at times. I feel that social media also allows people to become more sexual in the beginning stages of relationships than they would if their interactions only occurred in person; I feel this is primarily because online or through social media, you are not seeing someone face to face and do not have to automatically worry about their immediate reactions to things you say or suggest to them.

There has been a blowback on the Atlantic article that asked if Facebook was making us lonely. One of the responding articles argued the old truism: Facebook doesn’t make you lonely; lonely people are more attracted to the Internet (Frick).

In 2011, I have a very hard time believing this. When Turkle first began writing her trilogy on the space for computers, she wrote her second book in 1995 about online social gaming networks like Everquest or World of Warcraft. These existed prior to the true definition of social networks. I believe prior to this, lonely people may have been attracted to the Internet. Today, the Internet is a piece of our lives, as intertwined as a cell phone. I think the next logical step is Facebook.

Works Cited:

Frick, Walter. “BostInno | Boston Startup, Tech, Education and News.” Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? Nope. Bostinno, 14 Apr. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. <http://bostinno.com/2012/04/14/is-facebook-making-us-lonely-nope/&gt;.

Monhollon, Tiffany. “What’s An Average Day on Facebook? [Infographic].” Social Media News, Strategy, Tools, and Techniques. Social Media Today, 5 Feb. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. <http://socialmediatoday.com/tmonhollon/440122/facebook-facts-whats-average-day-facebook&gt;.

Desperation and Facebook

Tags

communication, desperate, Facebook, generation y, millenials, relationships, social media

I’ve heard several versions of this story before: my friend was added by some guy on Facebook that she likes. She immediately checks out his profile, looks at his statuses, photos, interests, and creeps on his profile. She immediately regrets liking it, or writing on his wall, or starting a Facebook chat.

The immediate fear is that she’s coming across too desperate or eager over social media. I use the gendered she because in my experience, women are concerned about this. But of course I’m sure it happens to everyone. In my survey, I asked: Do you question whether you act desperate or too eager when you interact with someone you are romantically interested in via social media websites?

The results of this show something I had been suspecting for a while: everyone in my generation is afraid of how to communicate on the Internet.  People are afraid that by communicating via social media, lest they look eager, desperate, or worst of all like a loser. This is backed up by an article in this month’s Atlantic, titled “Is Facebook Making us Lonely?”

The short answer is yes, but only because of the way we use Facebook. ”If you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals—by using the ‘like’ button, commenting on friends’ posts, and so on—it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls ‘composed communication,’ are more satisfying than ‘one-click communication’—the lazy click of a like,” (Marche). Basically, if you use Facebook in order to attend events, meet up with friends, or make dates, it can be a facilitator to your social life. If you use Facebook to see what everyone else is doing while you are working on a project, or sitting alone in your apartment, you will feel more lonely.

At I wrote about in my introduction, Americans live in a world of alienation. The Atlantic used an important statistic: In 1985, 10 percent of Americans said they had no one to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had one good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant (Marche).

In the beginning phases of a relationship, there is a lot of getting to know the other person. This allows skepticism and carefully crafting messages. In a response to the survey, one respondent said, “It’s easy to look at a girl/guy’s profile and then question why there seems to be a guy/girl who is constantly writing on her/his wall or taking pictures with her/him. In that way, it can drive you crazy & make you jump to conclusions.”

On the other side of the coin, a respondent said “Honestly, it is very difficult for me to imagine romantic relationships without the presence of social media. It really is an incredible tool in discovering how truthful a person is being and figuring out whether the person online is the same person offline.”

I think truthfulness and appearing desperate or eager are linked. As the other respondent noted, looking at who is writing on their wall can drive a person crazy and lead them to believe they aren’t being entirely truthful about their intentions. This in turn makes people feel lonely. Is there any way to combat the spiral of emotions that comes with waiting for someone to reply on social media?

Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, which delves into online interactions wrote:  “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.” While the Internet may have changed the way we interact with each other, maybe what we are lacking is trust.

Works Cited

Marche, Stephen. “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic. May 2012. Web. 16 Apr. 2012. <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/&gt;.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic, 2011. Print.

Why is texting part of social media?

Tags

generation y, millenials, mobile communication, social media, technology, texting

In my survey, I was asked more than once why texting was included as a part of social media in ways to communicate. The answer to that was simple–when I got my first cell phone in 2005, I was given a plan with 100 text messages a month. If I went over, it was somewhere around five cents per text message. I went over A LOT. My dad was flabbergasted as he would make my pony up for every penny (totally deserved). He would yell,”WHY DON’T YOU JUST JUST CALL SOMEONE?!!?”

This was the beginning of my dating experience in a mobile world. I remember speaking with friends for hours on the phone, but as i got older, it became more text based. As mobile communication accelerates, I think it must be included in social media. It’s one of the most intensive ways one can be social with another.

In Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, she discusses her apprehensions about how sociable robots, which she has studied since the 1970s, can eventually overtake human emotion. “We may begin by thinking that e-mails, texts, and Facebook messaging are thin gruel but useful if the alternative is sparse communication with people we care about. Then, we become accustomed to their special pleasures–we can have connection when and where we want or meet, and we can easily make it go away. In only a few more steps, you have people describing life on Facebook as better than anything they have ever known,” (Turkle).

While Turkle is speaking of Facebook in this particular case, this has already happened for text messaging. The fact this question was asked, shows that we live in a world where we are unable to identify why texting is odd. After all, we live our lives online–most of our communication is increasingly text-based.

Personally, the only person I am in regular phone conversations with are my parents and boyfriend who lives 8 hours away. When he lived 10 minutes away from me, we rarely spoke on the phone. I would argue that text messaging allows the same benefits as Facebook messaging–we can have the connection and easily make it go away. If a potential mate doesn’t feel like responding to a text message, a conversation will not continue. It’s the easiest way to tell someone you aren’t interested without having The Conversation. You just stop communication.

“Is talking on the phone social media?” Absolutely not. Though Ms. Turkle agrees with me, I would even argue Skype is probably not social media. She gives the example in her book that a girl speaks with her grandmother every week over Skype while checking her email. Let’s be clear–if you cannot see my eyes focused on you, then you know I am not paying attention. I guess for me, social media has to always include text-based communication. While Skype can fulfill that, it is often used as a video tool. Email threads are the most basic form of social media. It’s an exchange between you and another you are socially engaging with.

The unofficial (working) list of what I consider social media:

• Texting
• Email
• Any text-based way of communicating that precludes eye contact or voice recognition including, but not limited to:
• Facebook (including chat, groups, etc)
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn

Works Cited

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic, 2011. Print.

Surveying Gen Y

Tags

communications, generation y, millenials, relationships, research, sex, sexuality, social media, survey

Because there is not any widely known research for the topic I am studying, I decided to go to the source: my generation. I created the survey and spread the word on group emails from previous classes, Twitter, and Facebook. My intent was to get a range of young adults and hear about their experiences in relationships.

One caveat: My research is primarily on young adults who meet in person and use social media to develop a relationship. It is not inclusive of meeting people online, a criticism I received in my survey. I did this because millenials are classically seen as social creatures (Martin, Monaco), and I do not find my assumption to be a fault of the survey. To broaden my horizon to those who have met on social media websites, and even dating websites would have made the survey too broad. I’m trying to answer this question: how has social media helped how you learn about someone you are interested in? How has it hindered?

With that, here is the reasoning behind each question of the survey. Over 100 people responded to the survey, however I took the responses of the first 100 to make the number-crunching a bit easier. The first few questions were done in order to get demographic information about those taking the survey. Participants between 20 – 29 were the most popular, with 75 percent and they were also had a female skew–with 68 percent female and 31 percent male, respectively.

The next question was, “When you meet someone you are romantically interested in, how long does it take before you have an online interaction (follow them on Twitter, friend them on Facebook)?”

1 – 5 days

1 week

2 weeks

3 weeks or more

I let them find my profile

This question was asked for two reasons; one was to gauge how comfortable/social other people feel connecting with someone they’re interested in online. The other reason was because of a common theme I hear from women, “I don’t friend someone I like, they friend me.” This adds a layer of social media etiquette that is reminiscent of the old wait-three-days-to-call or only-pick-up-the-phone-after-three-rings rule. This is fascinating because it uses traditional gendered games for relationships in an online setting. In fact, one person said:

“If you had asked me 5 years ago, I would’ve said 1 week. Now, I’d say I wait for THEM to find my profile (this is also b/c I’m a woman and I strive for the return to gender roles of men making the first move.”

My next question was about using Google or other search engines to find out about someone. It’s a common theme of future job prospects that you should Google the person interviewing you, and you will probably be Googled. Because generation y has hit an era of a necessary online presence, I was curious to see if they searched for those they were interested in.

The next question asked the best way to interact with someone; meeting in person, talking on the phone, texting, utilizing social media, or other.

This was done for a few reasons–first off I wanted to compare previous methods of getting to know someone with new methods. For instance, texting isn’t traditionally seen as social media. However, texting involves crafting a response in the same way Facebook chatting does. From my limited experience of hearing stories of my family spending hours on the phone, and even remembering doing the same with my first boyfriends, talking on the phone used to be a popular method.** I guessed it would not be as popular. Meeting in person was added in order to see how that compared to newer methods; I hypothesized meeting in person would never go out of style.

The next question asked: “Do you question whether you act desperate or too eager when you interact with someone you are romantically interested in via social media websites?”

This was also done in order to get a response to anecdotal evidence that heterosexual young women are afraid to appear too eager in social networking. At this point, I wish I had asked what the gender the person was as they answered this question, because it would have made another fascinating connection between female social etiquette online.

My last question asked how social media has changed how relationships are formed. This was my favorite question, because answers ranged from thoughtful and characterized to many who felt their lives were not changed at all by social media.

Results of this survey will be implemented in the rest of the blog posts, as I find further evidence to refute or back up the more complex questions.

** I do not have any substantial evidence to back this up, but can point to many instances in my life, my parents lives, and pretty much anyone who dated before 2005.

Monaco, Michele, and Malissa Martin. “The Millenial Student: A New Generation of Learners.” Athletic Training Education Journal (2007): 42-46.http://www.nataej.org. National Athletic Trainers Association. Web. 20 Mar. 2012. <http://www.nataej.org/2.2/EJMonaco.pdf&gt;.

Relating to Social Media

Tags

generation y, relationships, sex, sexuality, social media

In Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Putnam explores a world where adults share less interactions than ever–they belong to less social organizations and barely know their neighbors. His book was published in 2000, after an initial essay from 1995. Putnam couldn’t have imagined the way social media would redefine what he has called “social capital,” the fabric of relationships which holds our society together.

It is true that Americans are more likely to be tied to a television or computer than they are at a weekly bowling club. However, when beginning a relationship, of any sexual nature–my generation is just as dumbfounded. As a Millenial, one of the 80 million who was born between the late 70s and the mid 90s, I have grown up in a world where social media is rampant and ever-changing. Before Facebook was Myspace, and before Myspace was AOL Instant Messenger. The rules our parents adhered to for dating do not apply to us–we’ve never used them. We don’t wait three days to call someone, and we often do not spend hours talking on the phone getting to know each other.

We have always relied on being able to calculate a conversation or find more about someone before we have to have face to face interactions. I’m exploring the changes this brings to the dating world and to sexual relationships. In a survey I conducted, one person was incredibly insightful with this thought: “It is more liberating, because you have time to think before speaking, so you have this sort of power.” With that begs the question, what are millenials losing by being able to calculate a response?

Works Cited:

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Print.

Diving into Research

Tags

generation y, relationships, romance, social media

Generation Y is less prepared in communicating successfully in a romantic way with the opposite sex because their technological advances limit them. We live in a world with Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, talking on the phone and of course, real life. With my experiences and friends I find most people of my generation are uncomfortable with the basic idea of speaking with someone on the phone or when to friend someone they are interested in. I would like to explore this by conducting interviews about the appropriate time and ways to talk to someone with romantic entanglements. I would also like to search articles and blog posts about the ways social media is changing our generation. I’m interested in this topic because I feel as though we’re emotionally stunting ourselves by having so much technology at our fingertips. I hope you’ll join me in my exploration and I will post my findings and research here.