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Space, Place and Environment pp 1–20Cite as

New Spaces, Blurred Boundaries, and Embodied Performances on Facebook

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Part of the book series: Geographies of Children and Young People ((GCYP,volume 3))

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is how young people craft their identities in digital spaces in ways that embody their offline identities. Digital spaces are created through interrelations-between (Massey 2005). While sites such as Facebook may appear to be a place and space in their own right, Facebook can also be understood as a multiplicity of spaces-between created through interrelations (Massey 2005). On Facebook, young people present and perform their identities to multiple audiences, including online “Friends” (where “Friends” indicate digitally mediated online connections), offline “friends” (materially-based offline “friends”; see Boyd and Ellison Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230, 2007), family, employers, and extended social networks of acquaintances. Many of these audience members will have expectations of the young person’s performance based on offline interactions (Boyd, Why youth (heart) social networking sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, identity and digital media (pp. 119–1442). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008; Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City: Doubleday, 1959). With both online and offline interrelational spaces, young people negotiate blurred public/private boundaries, multiple performative spaces, blended audiences, and relationships anchored by offline connections (Blanch et al. International Journal of Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments, 2(1), 70–84, 2014; Boyd, Why youth (heart) social networking sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, identity and digital media (pp. 119–1442). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008; Marwick and Boyd New Media & Society. doi: 10.1177/1461444810365313, 2010; Zhao et al. Computers in Human Behavior, 24(5), 1816–1836, 2008).

This chapter explores the way a group of young women negotiated the tensions created by merged educational and social spaces when Facebook was used for formal educational purposes. These young women were senior students at an urban high school in New Zealand. During group and individual interviews, these students described how they adapted their online identity presentations to multiple audiences. For these young women, Facebook was not a separate place/space. Instead, Facebook was a continuation of materially-located spaces and interrelations-between.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, University of Otago, 145 Union Street East, PO Box 56, 9016, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Keely Blanch

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  1. Keely Blanch
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Correspondence to Keely Blanch .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Karen Nairn

  2. Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

    Peter Kraftl

  3. Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Tracey Skelton

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Blanch, K. (2015). New Spaces, Blurred Boundaries, and Embodied Performances on Facebook. In: Nairn, K., Kraftl, P., Skelton, T. (eds) Space, Place and Environment. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 3. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-90-3_20-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-90-3_20-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-4585-90-3

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