Real Cool vs. Virtual Cool
: This article originally appeared in SLJ’s Extra Helping. Sign up now!
Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 6/30/2008 3:56:00 PM
While many teens seem to live in the virtual worlds of social networking sites, online chat rooms, and multiplayer games, teen social networking expert danah boyd has found that a virtual social standing rarely transforms and trumps status in the real world.Boyd’s theory stems from her recent response to author Clay Shirky’s post earlier this month on whether online standings in virtual societies can affect us offline, and if so, how. Author of Here Comes Everybody, Shirky describes on Talking Points Memo Café (TPM Café) the satisfaction he gets from playing “World of Warcraft,” (WoW) for example, and notes he’d rather spend time with a WoW master—basically, a virtual celebrity—than with Tiger Woods.
But to boyd, he may be an exception—at least measured against teen-based behavior. Citing studies with her Digital Youth group at the University of California at Berkeley and USC, she explains that while online standings certainly have meaning to teens, these rarely transfer offline. Why?
“For most teens, the status that matters is that which is conferred in everyday life,” she writes on TPM Café. “Everyday friendship and dating matter more to them than the connections that they make online.”
That may seem both reassuring and confusing to anyone who has spent significant time with teens. After all, this is a group willing to text each other even if seated in a lunchroom just inches apart. But that may be the point—that for teens, technology is a means of reinforcing connections made inside their physical communities, and not a way to alter them.
Boyd admits that teens do gravitate to subcultures online, as Shirky does with WoW, and derive status from these arenas. But for most teens, and perhaps adults as well, social standings will continue to come from real-world interactions—that is until country clubs start offering WoW Masters tournaments, and perhaps some high schools add them to their varsity rosters.
Talkback
Related Content
Related Content
Sponsored Links
