Online Identity and Code-Switching in Teenage Girls on Faceb

Online Identity and Code-Switching in Teenage Girls on Facebook

Participants

• Collection of individual Facebook profiles including Timelines, Posts, Tags, and Comments
• Female users—Ages 16-18 who live in Palmer, AK, attend the same school, have the same friends, and move in the same social circles

Analysis

Terms and Ideas

Self

• Adolescent girls invent an online identity, which is tied to gender and language use
• Individual speech acts online help shape individual identity
• Adolescent girls code-switch depending their audience

• Facebook User
• Friends with one of the participants
• Not Facebook friends with the other participants
• Observer rather than participant observer
• Gathering information has been difficult, but not because of access

Affinity Space

Ellcessor and Duncan

Attention Economy

Knobel and Lankshear

Code-Switching

Sankoff and Poplack

Linguistic Capital

Guy Merchant

Social Capital

Godfrey

Language Use

Online Identity

• Online Community with approximately 1.19 billion active users (September 2013)
• Affinity Space, especially for young adults who naturally congregate in the space to communicate
• Allows for open communication between participants—Is it honest communication? How much does one code-switch to ensure she is understood and accepted?

Differences in language used online versus on Facebook specifically

Code-switching online based on audience

Online technologies allow young people to manipulate and play with identity by taking risks.

Gender Identity

Gender differences are just as present on Facebook as they are in spoken discourse.

Gender stereotypes on Facebook

Data Set #1

Data Set #2

References

Conclusions and Implications

Works Cited

Bailey, Jane et al. “Negotiating With Gender Stereotypes on Social Networking Sites: From ‘Bicycle Face’ to Facebook”.Journal of Communication Inquiry 37.2 (2013): 91-112. Web. 31 October 2013.

Carr, Caleb T. et al. “Speech Acts Within Facebook Status Messages”. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31.2 (2012): 176-196. Web. 31 October 2013.

DeVoss, Danielle N. and Cynthia L. Selfe. “‘This Page Is Under Construction’: Reading Women Shaping On-Line Identities”. Pedagogy 2.1 (2002): 31-48. Web. 15 October 2013

Herring, Susan C. and John C. Paolillo. “Gender and genre variation in weblogs”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10.4 (2006): 439-459. Web. 31 October 2013.

Knobel, Michele and Colin Lankshear. “Digital Literacy and Participation in Online Social Networking Spaces”. Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies, and Practices. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 2008. 249-278. Web. 30 September 2013.

Merchant, Guy. “Teenagers in cyberspace: an investigation of language change in internet chatrooms”. Journal of Research in Reading 24.3 (2001): 293-306. Web. 31 October 2013.

Schwartz, H. Andrew et al. “Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach”. PLoS ONE 8.9 (2013): 1-16. Web. 31 October 2013.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Derek Denis. “LINGUISTIC RUIN? LOL! INSTANT MESSAGING AND TEEN LANGUAGE”. American Speech 83.1 (2008): 3-34. Web. 31 October 2013.

Thomas, Angela. “Digital Literacies of the Cybergirl”. E-Learning 1.3 (2004): 358-382. Web. 15 October 2013.

Williams, Bronwyn T. “‘Tomorrow will not be like today’: Literacy and identity in a world of multiliteracies”. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 51.8 (2006): 682-688. Web. 31 October 2013.

Facebook Login Page Picture

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook

• Adolescent girls:
• Are particularly susceptible to code-switching dependent on audience
• Use informal speech, emoticons, slang, and non-standard grammar while communicating with peers
• Use more formal speech, less emoticons, and proper punctuation when communicating with a mixed group—ie: adults (including teachers) and peers
• More research needed on a larger data set of adolescent girls.

By: Shanna Allen