My professor has asked me to present a piece of research at the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association (MAPACA) conference this October. I mulled over a number of research topics that I would find not only interesting, but feasible. I decided that my study would focus on identity formation in the internet age, as it was a discussion topic I had recently had that I thought was rather interesting. While there has been some very interesting research on internet usage, I think that the full effects of new technologies on our ideas of self have not fully been realized.
So, now I had a realm of inquiry from which to draw, but I still had to formulate a more specific topic of research. I found a few good papers regarding internet use among teens that I thought were heading in the direction that I was looking to go. The one that was to influence my abstract the most was a study by Huffaker and Calvert about teenage blogs. Now, I say it influenced my abstract because my abstract was due for submission before the bulk of my prior research had been assembled. To be honest, it’s still being assembled. I am still using it as the basis of my research, but I’m still ironing out the details!
One of my major concerns for running a study that involved human participants was that the bulk of my research would have to take place over the summer. While a college campus is usually overrun with participants, the summer semester limits the pool and thus wouldn’t be the easiest method of getting respondents to a survey. Instead I had to think of an alternative pool. Rather than following Huffaker’s lead and searching out student blogs, I thought I would take a current hot topic in the media - MySpace.
MySpace is one of the fastest growing, most popular websites on the net right now. If you’ve never heard of it before, I don’t know how you ended up here or what rock you’ve been hiding under. It started as a small site for fans of indie rock music to meet other fans and socialize. It quickly blossomed into a behemoth that outshadowed the, until then, reigning social networking site, Friendster. If you have any doubt as to the veracity of this, take note of the fact that MySpace was recently bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million dollars. That’s million, with an ‘m’. Not bad for some indie music geeks with some coding skills, eh?
Personally, my history with online socializing goes back to the early nineties. The internet existed then, but it was far from what we know as the internet today. Most people didn’t have access to that internet, and html was still a project used mostly be academics to share information. The place to be at that point, as it had been for years, was on Bulletin Board Systems or BBSs (for a whole pile of BBS related stuff check out textfiles.com). BBSs were mostly small hobby sites set up by local enthusiasts. By the time I was on the scene, some had grown to large (30+ users at a time) sites. Each site had it’s own features, such as games, file downloads, live chat, email, and access to message servers like FidoNet. This was also the birthplace of the personal profile. Part personal bio, part personal ad, the profile was how users on the system came to define you. Your profile was how you chose to define yourself in the online world.
And then, in came the internet. My first ISP came through the BBSs. They started offering access to IRC and internet email, and then direct internet access through special dialup numbers. But soon, direct internet access was the de facto connection standard, and small servers were sucked into the void. All was not lost, though. While BBSs had mostly died out, they were reborn on the web, albeit in different form. Today’s popular format of web forum is an example of this, essentially a web-based BBS, complete with profiles, chat boards, and internal messaging.
So, MySpace is essentially a modern reincarnation of those 80’s BBSs only a vastly larger scale. While my local BBS might contain a couple hundred people from my local area, MySpace now has a critical mass of over 95 million members (31.75% of the US population). This is a prime place for research participants…
There are, however, some caveats to finding them, at least in a case such as this. I am looking to study teen use of the internet because it is during the teenage years when identity exploration is at its peak, and thus technologies such as these can have their largest effect. I mentioned earlier that MySpace is a current hot topic in the media, and the attention is mostly focussed on child predators. Although only about 10% of children are molested by strangers, it has been the locus of attention in both the media and recent internet legislation. In reaction to this, MySpace has put certain limits on the access to accounts for members under the age of 16.
Now, I’m not going to complain about the fact that they are taking steps to protect children from online predators. I feel this is a good thing. Their methods may not be effective (what’s to prevent me from lying about my age in order to talk to kids?), but I think the ultimate responsibility lies with the parents and not online services. That said, it presents a few unique problems for my own survey methods that need to be worked around.
MySpace limits the access to profiles of teens aged 13-15, and recently made a rule that anyone over 18 can only add a younger person’s profile if they know their full name or email address. Because of this, I had to limit my study range to 16-18 year olds. I wanted to have randomly chosen respondents to my survey, so these are the only profiles that I have random access to. It’s still not a very straightforward process though. While MySpace allows you to search profiles across the site, the lowest search age is 18. There is a backdoor to this, though.
In the profile creation/edit page you can add schools that you have gone to by looking them up in a database. If you click on the link for that school, you are taken to a version of the search page that only shows people who have also listed that school. From this search page you are allowed to search for current students back to the age of 16. I have access to the complete zip code list for the U.S., and wrote a script that would randomly choose a few hundred zip codes from that list. From that list, I used the Public School Review to search for High Schools within those zip codes. With a high school for each zip in hand, I then add that high school to my MySpace profile and search for students (aged 16-18) who are students of those schools. I then used a random number generator to randomly choose profiles from within those search results. The URLs are recorded so that I can send a survey to each person, and parse their profile for relevant demographic/language use information.
The survey I’m creating is a story for another day. It’s not yet completed, but I’m currently assembling a couple of different measures that will help me to get at the information I’m after. My ambition is to have it up and running in the next two weeks, so that I can have at least a month to gather data and then at least a few weeks to actually interpret it and write up a paper on it. Of course, school starts again at the end of next month, so I am going to have plenty of juggling to do. This project is taking up a major portion of my brain space right now, so I’ll be posting a lot more on it as this story develops…
I’ll most likely be launching an offshoot of this site strictly for information regarding this project, including the results and finished paper whenever it is done. Until this, please let me know if you’re at all interested. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Leave a Reply