Abstract
The focus of this chapter is how young people craft their identities in digital spaces in ways that embody their offline identities. Digital spaces are created through interrelations-between (Massey 2005). While sites such as Facebook may appear to be a place and space in their own right, Facebook can also be understood as a multiplicity of spaces-between created through interrelations (Massey 2005). On Facebook, young people present and perform their identities to multiple audiences, including online “Friends” (where “Friends” indicate digitally mediated online connections), offline “friends” (materially-based offline “friends”; see Boyd and Ellison 2007), family, employers, and extended social networks of acquaintances. Many of these audience members will have expectations of the young person’s performance based on offline interactions (Boyd 2008; Goffman 1959). With both online and offline interrelational spaces, young people negotiate blurred public/private boundaries, multiple performative spaces, blended audiences, and relationships anchored by offline connections (Blanch et al. 2014; Boyd 2008; Marwick and Boyd 2010; Zhao et al. 2008).
This chapter explores the way a group of young women negotiated the tensions created by merged educational and social spaces when Facebook was used for formal educational purposes. These young women were senior students at an urban high school in New Zealand. During group and individual interviews, these students described how they adapted their online identity presentations to multiple audiences. For these young women, Facebook was not a separate place/space. Instead, Facebook was a continuation of materially-located spaces and interrelations-between.
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Blanch, K. (2016). New Spaces, Blurred Boundaries, and Embodied Performances on Facebook. In: Nairn, K., Kraftl, P. (eds) Space, Place, and Environment. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 3. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-044-5_20
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