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Growing up on Facebook

by Brady Robards (Author) Siân Lincoln (Author)
©2020 Textbook X, 210 Pages
Series: Digital Formations, Volume 109

Summary

Growing up in the era of social media isn’t easy. With Facebook now having existed for more than a decade and a half, young people who have grown up using social media can look back and see earlier versions of themselves staring back: nostalgic moments with friends from school, reminders of painful breakups, birthdays and graduations, posts that allude to drama with family, experiences of travel, and blurry drunken photos. How do we make sense of our own personal histories inscribed on and through social media? What are the implications for future careers, for public trust in social media companies, and for our own memories?
Growing up on Facebook examines the role of Facebook, and other social media platforms that have emerged around Facebook, in mediating experiences of 'growing up' for young people. Based on interviews with the first generation of young people to grow up with social media, the book covers education and employment, love and relationships, family life, and leisure (drinking, travel, and music). It touches on processes of impression management, privacy, context collapse, and control, and raises critical questions about the standards we hold social media platforms to, as they become the guardians of our personal histories.
The book will appeal to both academic and general audiences alike. Students and scholars in media and communications, the sociology of youth, and beyond, will find strong connections to the literature and acknowledgement of the methodological detail of the study the book is based on. The themes and issues covered in the book are also of broader interest, and will appeal to people who have themselves grown up in the era of social media, to parents, educators, anyone interested in how we look back at social media as a personal memory archive.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chapter One Introduction
  • Chapter Two Is Facebook Still Cool? Was It Ever?
  • Chapter Three Sites and Spaces of Growing Up: Blurring the Digital and Physical
  • Chapter Four Scrolling Back through Facebook Timelines: Making Sense of Digital Traces
  • Chapter Five Shaping and Performing Professional Identities: From Education to Employment
  • Chapter Six Love, and Making It ‘Facebook Official’
  • Chapter Seven Mediating Family Life
  • Chapter Eight Documenting Leisure: Partying, Travel, Music, and Hanging Out
  • Chapter Nine Disconnections, Absences, Conclusions
  • About the Authors
  • Index
  • Series Index

cover

About the author

BRADY ROBARDS (PhD, Griffith University, Australia) is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Monash University.

SIÂN LINCOLN (PhD, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom) is an independent scholar.

About the book

Growing up in the era of social media isn’t easy. With Facebook now having existed for more 109 than a decade and a half, young people who have grown up using social media can look back and see earlier versions of themselves staring back: nostalgic moments with friends from school, reminders of painful breakups, birthdays and graduations, posts that allude to drama with family, experiences of travel, and blurry drunken photos. How do we make sense of our own personal histories inscribed on and through social media? What are the implications for future careers, for public trust in social media companies, and for our own memories?

Growing up on Facebook examines the role of Facebook, and other social media platforms that have emerged around Facebook, in mediating experiences of ‘growing up’ for young people. Based on interviews with the first generation of young people to grow up with social media, the book covers education and employment, love and relationships, family life, and leisure (drinking, travel, and music). It touches on processes of impression management, privacy, context collapse, and control, and raises critical questions about the standards we hold social media platforms to, as they become the guardians of our personal histories.

The book will appeal to both academic and general audiences alike. Students and scholars in media and communications, the sociology of youth, and beyond, will find strong connections to the literature and acknowledgement of the methodological detail of the study the book is based on. The themes and issues covered in the book are also of broader interest, and will appeal to people who have themselves grown up in the era of social media, to parents, educators, anyone interested in how we look back at social media as a personal memory archive.

“Robards and Lincoln’s book sets new agendas for the study of social media and new questions for those interested in young people’s lives.” —JOHANNA WYN, The University of Melbourne

“This engaging book reveals what happens to human development as it is enveloped in the architecture of platforms. Robards and Lincoln offer remarkable insights on life, love and maintaining a sense of self while growing up, on Facebook and off.”—ZIZI PAPACHARISSI, University of Illinois at Chicago

“A deeply nuanced look at the impacts of popular social media technologies.”—ALICE E. MARWICK, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“Robards and Lincoln insightfully peel back the contextual subtleties of identity work in the digital age.”—SONIA LIVINGSTONE, London School of Economics and Political Science

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

←vi | vii→

 

Acknowledgements

Like all books, this book was only made possible by the efforts and contributions of more people than can be named on the front cover.

First and foremost, we would like to thank our participants. We spoke to 41 young people in Australia and the UK over the course of the project. Their words and insights have given this project substance and life, as they navigated nostalgia, embarrassment, and a few awkward moments as they scrolled back through their Facebook Timelines with us.

In the latter stages of the project, we were assisted by two colleagues—Benjamin Pinkard in Australia and Jane Harris in the UK—who worked with us to help with recruitment and to conduct a portion of the interviews. Thank you Ben and Jane. We acknowledge the University of Tasmania and Liverpool John Moores University for funding the initial data collection and some writing time and to our colleagues at these institutions for their support.

Brady would like to acknowledge Professor Andy Bennett, who supervised Brady’s PhD, where some of the initial ideas and approaches later developed in the Facebook Timelines project were born. We are also both indebted to Andy for introducing the two of us, and starting us on this research partnership and friendship.

We thank and acknowledge our various academic communities who contributed to the intellectual development of the work by listening, asking questions, ←vii | viii→and pointing us in productive directions as we shared findings from the project along the way. We especially acknowledge the delegates at conferences hosted by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the Australian Sociological Association (TASA), and the Digital Intimacies symposia, where earlier manifestations of the ideas and findings in this book were presented. In particular, we want to acknowledge Paul Byron, Crystal Abidin, Kath Albury, Paul Hodkinson, Jean Burgess, Ben Light, Stefanie Duguay, Son Vivienne, Brendan Churchill, Ashleigh Watson, and Emma Kirby. The foundations of this book were borne out of a special issue of New Media & Society published in 2014 called ‘10 years of Facebook’. We got to work with a number of outstanding scholars when doing this issue and we thank them all for stellar contributions.

Finally, we are greatly indebted to the staff at Peter Lang. We thank our initial Acquisitions Editor Kathryn Harrison and then Erika Hendrix who guided us through the latter stages of the book. We are also greatly indebted to the Digital Formations Series Editor Steve Jones for supporting the idea and providing feedback as we went. Both Erika and Steve were obscenely patient with us as we asked for more extensions than we care to admit. Thank you!

Parts of Chapter Six ‘Love, and making it “Facebook Official” ’ appeared in the form of a journal article published in Social Media + Society in 2016, volume 2, issue 4, under the title ‘Making It “Facebook Official”: Reflecting on Romantic Relationships Through Sustained Facebook Use’. We thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their help in shaping the ideas in this chapter.

Brady dedicates this book to Luke Newman—his Facebook stalking powers are unmatched.

Siân dedicates this book to Yannis Tzioumakis & Roman Tzioumakis—with so much love.

Details

Pages
X, 210
Year
2020
ISBN (PDF)
9781433142765
ISBN (ePUB)
9781433142772
ISBN (MOBI)
9781433142789
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433142758
ISBN (Softcover)
9781433142741
DOI
10.3726/b17295
Language
English
Publication date
2020 (May)
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2020. X, 220 pp.

Biographical notes

Brady Robards (Author) Siân Lincoln (Author)

Brady Robards has a PhD in sociology from Griffith University, Australia. He is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Monash University. Brady’s work is published in journals such as New Media & Society, Qualitative Research, Sociology, and the Journal of Youth Studies. Recent books include Digital Intimate Publics & Social Media and Youth & Society. Siân Lincoln has a PhD in sociology from Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. She is an independent scholar. Her monograph Youth Culture and Private Space was published in 2012. She has also published widely in a range of journals and anthologies. She is co-editor of two book series: Cinema & Youth Cultures and Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music.

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