Social Network Sites & Youth: Understanding Identity Formation in Teenage Social Life

Abstract

One major after effect of the socioeconomic process of Globalization can be termed as the globalisation of culture – Or what media theorist Marshall McLuhan once meant when he said that slowly but surely the world is becoming a "Global Village”. What this has done is put increasing stress and emphasis on the increase of connections of the world and its people. This can be perhaps, better understood by understanding and evaluating the changing dynamics of the relationship shared between the world's youth and their sense of identity It has become increasingly commonplace and fashionable to accumulate the world youth into a kind of Homogenous category and think of them as highly receptive, or, more critically a bit more susceptible to, foreign cultural practices. As some social researchers are increasingly coining the slogan-"If childhood means acceptance, and adulthood means conservatism, youth means rebelliousness.” Hence this concept of a modern day youth gets increasingly linked to a process of cultural borrowing that is disruptive of the reproduction of traditional cultural practices, from modes of dress to language, aesthetics and ideologies. This increasing need for connectivity has also resulted in a rapid adoption of social network sites by teenagers all over the world. This has raised some important queries like- What is it that makes the youth join these sites? What actually are, they expressing in them? What roles do these sites play in their social life? What kind of participatory models are they building up by a use of these sites? These online activities of chatting or messaging are they replacing face-to-face friendships – or can they be termed totally different, or are they complementary? This paper seeks to first put these questions in perspectives and then tries to address them, while exploring the repercussions on youth identities- identity formation, status negotiation, and peer-to-peer sociality.