High School and Social Media

This week in EME6414 I choose to read one article, titled Teens and social media: A case study of high school students’ informal learning practices and trajectories, on student social media use in high school. One reason I choose this article was to learn about the life of students since I am a teacher. While I currently teach middle school students, I started student teaching with high school students. I found this article very interesting because I did not go through high school having a smart phone.

In fact, most of high school I carried around a Nextel phone (You know, the ones that have that weird walkie-talkie like feature). I hated that phone, I couldn’t text, and it was awful having my parents on loud speaker every time they wanted to check up on me. Finally, junior year I saved up to buy a flip camera phone through Verizon prepaid WITH TEXTING! I thought this phone was the best, I could now text my friends and take selfies.

So basically, in high school social media wasn’t on our mobile devices. If we wanted to access Facebook, or even Myspace, we waited until we got home and finished our homework (or at least I did, my parents had a strict homework-first policy). We had digital cameras and uploaded photos to Facebook through SD cards.

This article, provided insight on how students these days are communicating with each other. They are mostly on snapchat and Instagram, and hardly use Facebook. I knew middle school students weren’t really on Facebook because I have made multiple references to this social media site when teaching and I’m often meet with weird looks and comments like “Ms. Stewart, only adults use Facebook!” I also found interesting that the high schoolers in this study follow many people they do not know in person on Snapchat and Instagram and try to get as many followers and likes as possible, which is the complete opposite of how I use these two social media apps.

In terms of context collapse, it seems like they are only concerned with their parents and parents of friends mixing in their social spheres. I think this is expected of this age since they are trying to grow up and find themselves without the watchful eyes of adults. Another reason why they aren’t concerned with personal vs. professional context collapse could be the fact that they aren’t adults working in professional setting just yet. I’m sure as they grow and their spheres grow this could be an issue as well.