Passing Notes in Class (Lauren Mesley - Blog Post #1)

Danah Boyd’s talk, “It’s Complicated” left me with so many interesting thoughts this week. I think what was particularly fascinating is that this video was posted to YouTube in 2014, more than a decade ago, and a lot of the trends she mentions are trends that reflect my reality (because I was amongst the age group she was studying at the time) but also seem to reflect the reality of today's teenagers. 

Boyd’s talk explored a few different outlets when discussing networked publics, but the one that stood out to me was when she touched on surveillance. Millennials and Gen Z grew up in a world where everything they did online was under heavy scrutiny and judgement by their peers and parents, and anything could be screenshotted, distributed, and saved for later. I’ve always heard this discussed mainly with regards to the fact that these generations are not taking as many risks when it comes to dating (since the social consequences for failure are so severe), but I loved how Boyd looked at it from a different angle: that young people have actually adapted to being in a constant state of surveillance by using inside jokes and hidden meaning to communicate under the radar. This made me think about how content creators I’m seeing on Instagram are finding creative ways to get around the content moderators and algorithm by learning what words get their content flagged and using different words in their place. For example, using “unalived” instead of “killed” or “died.”

If Instagram is the public in the same way that we think of school or a library as the public, then of course teens are going to start speaking in code to avoid surveillance. This is really no different from passing notes in class to avoid being caught by the teacher. I think it’s really important for librarians to understand this aspect of social media because for young people, that is where they are getting their information from. And in order for us to be able to accomplish the goal of being a reliable source of information, we need to be familiar with the social media landscape. 
 

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