“We Put Our Swag All Over It”: Negotiating Local and Global Identity Online and Offline

• In Event: Textures of Social Media Exchange: Youth Identity and Digital Aesthetics in a Global Learning Environment

Abstract

New media continue to find their way into the lives of students, both in and out of school. These tools allow students to navigate relationships with youth from around the world, providing opportunities for them to constantly and reflexively construct a virtual identity in relation to both local and international participants. This study seeks to examine how students use language to construct identities as they relate to local geography as they are encouraged to interact with a global community through the use of a social network site.

Time and space have been reconfigured in the new media age and students find themselves, not face-to-face, but screen-to-screen with members of an international community. The break down of traditional notions of “place” provide a unique opportunity for students to present a self-identity to the world. Students ‘discover the other’ through new media and, in doing so, are forced to reflexively ‘discover the self.’ Language plays an important role since symbolic systems both demonstrate and construct social relationships (Bernstein 1996, Apple 1992) and social network sites provide new opportunities for students to “write [themselves] into being” (Sundén 2003). The work of identity construction is produced through language, which allows students to use these symbolic systems to “present and represent [themselves] discursively, psychologically, socially and culturally” (Kramsch 2009, 20). Discursive practices are integral in identity construction (Buchotz and Hall 2004, Davis and Harré 1990) and the affordances provided by social network sites for these practices will benefit from further study.

The data were collected over a school year at a high school in East Oakland, California. Students were provided with the opportunity to learn digital media and new literacies while simultaneously interacting with international participants on the social network site Space2cre8. This study offers an analysis of identity construction on and offline through language use of the students based around the main research question: How do students enact local and global identities through language (written, oral, digital, etc.) in relation to other students around the world? Students’ verbal interactions during class were recorded and analyzed, as were their written choices on personal online profiles and interactions. Ethnographic field notes were completed after every class and students’ online artifacts were analyzed. Finally, focal students were interviewed to offer insight into their own experiences.

There are implicit tensions in the data. The participating students in this study are deeply connected to their neighborhood and construct who they are in relation to their sense of location. These identities do not indicate openness; instead, often language breaks down opportunities for exchange or dialogue. Student identities “thicken” when they are presented with outsiders, be it within the class or within a virtual community of Others. Students needed to be guided to both interact with and to conceptualize their fellow participants. They identify strongly with their neighborhood and the data indicate a strengthening of these local identities when the students come into contact with outsiders, particularly outsiders who they perceive may challenge their local pride.

Author

• Tracie R. Wallace, University of California - Berkeley