Author: H. Finne
Contact: @HFinne
H. Finne’s #teachread work can be found on: DeviantArt
Categories: Social Media
Tags: Social Media, Identity Formation, Teens, Web 2.0, Privacy, DeviantArt

Trespassing on Posted Land

Last year while I was helping a kid set up to write his essay on GoogleDocs— happily ensuring he’d never lose his progress again!– I noticed, as he navigated past his inbox, a few Fanfiction.net emails.

It was a moment of intense temptation. Were they author alerts, or reviews? What might he write? Was he secretly a better writer out of class than in? How could I use this to engage him, to work with him, to help him learn more?

I didn’t look, of course, and I didn’t ask him.

Aside from the fact that I didn’t want to embarrass him, I didn’t want to intrude on a student’s private outlet with my teacher business. That incident has replayed itself a dozen times in my mind as I look for an answer to the question of whether I believe social media has a place in the classroom.

Yes, it’s potentially useful. Actually, I think social media is awesome. It’s engaging, it’s immediate; kids tend to resp ond well to it, and the novelty factor of being handed a computer is still strong enough in many classrooms to command instant attention from students who’ll groan at pen and paper. But while many sites have enormous potential—cell-phone polls for instant feedback, Google’s powerful, flexible, and free package of services, Twitter backchannels, Facebook study groups—I’m not entirely on board. And here’s why.

Every time I refresh the front page of DeviantArt (where I chose to post my responses to my YA novels, American Born Chinese and the forthcoming Friends With Boys,) I feel guilty about being there. Not because I have anything against the site, but because I

know I’m here with an academic ulterior motive, and I feel like I’m trespassing on posted land.

The beautiful thing about DeviantArt, for me, is how big and varied it is. While there are any number of professional artists who use DA to ho

st their work and drum up business—you can even sell prints directly through the site!—it’s also open to anyone to register, so the range of content is incredible. At any one moment the front page might hold a few self-taken photographs, a pencil sketch on notebook paper, a poem, a piece of fanfiction, an oil painting, or any one of a thousand other things.

© n-gon-stock on DeviantArt

The thing is, every image or piece of writing is a glimpse into someone’s life, and as a teacher, I’m hesitant to pry into those lives. Don’t get me wrong—plenty of them are intended to be seen and spread around, and I’ve been pretty heavy-handed with the +fav button considering how briefly I’ve used the site. But looking at sketches of characters, avatars created by various users (many of them adolescents) to represent themselves to the world online, I’m reluctant to study them too hard.

These pieces are posted in public, so of course there’s nothing wrong with looking at them—but the danger lies in assuming that we’re the ones they’re trying to connect to.

On DeviantArt—and many sites like it—people are defining and redefining themselves in new ways, making careful choices about the face they show the world. Choosing an allegiance to one art style may mean making a ton of immediate friends, based on that shared preference, and simultaneously cutting off just as many potential friendships by labeling yourself as a member of one subculture, and not another.

And while I hate to see things reduced to such arbitrary binaries, I think the ways in which social media sites offer lone users an easy way to find a niche is where a lot of their value lies. This is especially true, I believe, for people separated by physical distance from like-minded peers—the chance for new and meaningful connections based on shared interests and philosophies, around the world and across cultures, is plainly awesome.

But I wonder if these sites would be such fertile ground for conversation and relationship-building, particularly by adolescents, if they were more strictly held under an adult gaze. I remember the mass outcry among college students when Facebook opened up its membership to anyone with an e-mail address, instead of requiring you to have a participating college’s address—the sudden possibility of your parents reading your Wall meant a change in discourse which, while possibly for the better, definitely limited what people were willing to talk about.

I’m hesitant to bring these sites into the scope of my classroom, not because I don’t see their value, but because I think it’s important (particularly for adolescents) to have some outlets that aren’t always monitored, always a part of someone else’s agenda. If I did use social media—whether Twitter, a blog, or something like DeviantArt—I’d insist that students create a school-only identity to keep things separate—not a bad idea to begin with in terms of web safety.

Still, the questions keep nagging me. What happens if I come across kids’ profiles naturally? Twitter uses complicated and surprisingly prescient algorithms to suggest people for you to follow; Facebook generates list upon list of people you may know; even the most casual browsing of a forum might reveal a familiar avatar, or a user handle that matches whatever your students are tagging their notebooks with. In that situation, what do you do?

That’s one I don’t have an answer to, but it’s a question that’s not going away any time soon.