Reading together

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Time photoOur course invites you to work with data collection and analysis, readings, and discussion around the field of literacy studies

My very late update!

My very late update!

Alright, so since I couldn’t get my sh** together this week it’s now Tuesday and I am finally posting. Apologies for the delay!

I chose to participate in the Adolescent Literacy group simply because kids are fascinating and it amazes me how effected we are long term by the things that we experience as a child. Our group is largely focusing on social media and the effects it has on self image and building a powerful opinion in oneself during the crucial times of middle school and high school (which also happens to be when social media becomes prevalent in most children’s lives). What I am quickly noticing is that social media sites are either acting as a forum for kids to be their true selves with unfettered access to expression or they are acting as yet another way to hide behind a persona created by society. For example, MySpace became popular when most of our group was in middle school and promoted self expression through choice of music, backgrounds, personal blurbs, as well as lists of likes and dislikes. However, these choices also became tarnished because of the “top ten friends” list which could be altered however the owner of the profile chose. This caused chaos throughout my middle school because it became the list of who’s who and feelings got hurt. It also acted as yet another way to ostracize someone from a group or characterize them as cool or uncool. Also, certain groups began choosing the music that they would all have on their profile, even going so far as to make sure that it was always in the same order on every single one of their profiles, therefore setting them apart from the rest of the online community. This same situation and those similar to it happened in many school systems and it completely takes away the individuality of each person, but because the girls didn’t want to be ousted or judged by their friends they allowed their peers opinion to shape their actions and it became a symbol of pride to have the same songs on your list as a group. In this particular case MySpace promoted the act of creating a false persona in order to fit in rather than supporting individual expression. I had Britney Spears on mine and I have always been more of  a George Strait kind of girl so looking back I know I fell into the “hidden self”category.

These tropes of what a person should or shouldn’t be still follow us around when we get older and continue to create doubt within ourselves. Yes, older does equal wiser in this case and hindsight is 20/20 but we still base opinions of others off of what their online self presents. My grandma appears political when she isn’t and you would think my life revolves around school and my two dogs (which it kind of does currently), but those aspects are simply what we choose to show the online world. My life and past times expand far beyond what can be found on my Facebook page but an outsider is highly likely to judge me on that evidence alone. Moral of the story would be that online life is vastly different from real life and that through this literacy practice judgments, misconceptions, and false representations are unavoidable and it is our duty to remind ourselves that a profile does not represent the entirety of the real person.

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