social media Web sites is among the most common activity of today's children and adolescents. Any Web site that allows social inter- action is considered a social media site, including social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter; gaming sites and virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Second Life, and the Sims; video sites such as YouTube; and blogs. Such sites offer today's youth a portal for entertainment and communication and have grown exponentially in recent years. For this reason, it is important that parents become aware of the nature of social media sites, given that not all of them are healthy environments for children and adolescents. Pediatricians are in a unique position to help families understand these sites and to encourage healthy use and urge parents to monitor for potential prob- lems with cyberbullying, "Facebook depression," sexting, and exposure to inappropriate content. Pediatrics 2011;127:800-804 SOCIAL MEDIA USE BY TWEENS AND TEENS Engaging in various forms of social media is a routine activity that research has shown to benefit children and adolescents by enhancing communication, social connection, and even technical skills. 1 Social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace offer multiple daily oppor- tunities for connecting with friends, classmates, and people with shared interests. During the last 5 years, the number of preadoles- cents and adolescents using such sites has increased dramatically. According to a recent poll, 22% of teenagers log on to their favorite social media site more than 10 times a day, and more than half of adolescents log on to a social media site more than once a day. 2 Seventy-five percent of teenagers now own cell phones, and 25% use them for social media, 54% use them for texting, and 24% use them for instant messaging. 3 Thus, a large part of this generation's social and

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Clinical Report—The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families

Since Windschitl first outlined a research agenda for the World Wide Web and classroom research, significant shifts have occurred in the nature of the Web and the conceptualization of classrooms. Such shifts have affected constructs of learning and instruction, and paths for future research. This article discusses the characteristics of Web 2.0 that differentiate it from the Web of the 1990s, describes the contextual conditions in which students use the Web today, and examines how Web 2.0’s unique capabilities and youth’s proclivities in using it influence learning and teaching. Two important themes, learner participation and creativity and online identity formation, emerged from this analysis and support a new wave of research questions. A stronger research focus on students’ everyday use of Web 2.0 technologies and their learning with Web 2.0 both in and outside of classrooms is needed. Finally, insights on how educational scholarship might be transformed with Web 2.0 in light of these themes are discussed.

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Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship in a Digital Age Research News and Comment

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Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship in a Digital Age Web 2.0 and Classroom Research: What Path Should We Take Now?

As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society. My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties - persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability - and three dynamics - invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private - are examined and woven throughout the discussion. While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens' engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

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Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics

This article brings together two case studies that examine how nontransgender people, “gender normals,” interact with transgender people to highlight the connections between doing gender and heteronormativity. By contrasting public and private interactions that range from nonsexual to sexualized to sexual, the authors show how gender and sexuality are inextricably tied together. The authors demonstrate that the criteria for membership in a gender category are significantly different in social versus (hetero)sexual circumstances. While gender is presumed to reflect biological sex in all social interactions, the importance of doing gender in a way that represents the shape of one's genitals is heightened in sexual and sexualized situations. Responses to perceived failures to fulfill gender criteria in sexual and sexualized relationships are themselves gendered; men and women select different targets for and utilize gendered tactics to accomplish the policing of supposedly natural gender boundaries and to re...

Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity

Introduction: Making masculinity : adolescence, identity, and high school -- Becoming Mr. Cougar : institutionalizing gender and sexuality at River High -- Dude, you're a fag : male adolescent homophobia -- Compulsive heterosexuality : masculinity and dominance -- Look at my masculinity! : girls who act like boys -- Conclusion: Thinking about schooling, gender, and sexuality -- Appendix A: What if a guy hits on you? : intersections of gender, sexuality, and age in fieldwork with adolescents -- Appendix B: Resources.

Dude, you're a fag : masculinity and sexuality in high school

This report summarizes the results of an ambitious three-year ethnographic study, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings-at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. It offers a condensed version of a longer treatment provided in the book Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (MIT Press, 2009). The authors present empirical data on new media in the lives of American youth in order to reflect upon the relationship between new media and learning. In one of the largest qualitative and ethnographic studies of American youth culture, the authors view the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States

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Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project

Hybrid masculinity refers to men’s selective incorporation of performances and identity elementsassociated with marginalized and subordinated masculinities and femininities. We use recent theoriza-tion of hybrid masculinities to critically review theory and research that seeks to make sense of con-temporary transformations in masculinity. We suggest that research broadly supports three distinctconsequences associated with recent changes in performances and politics of masculinity that workto obscure the tenacity of gendered inequality. Hybrid masculinities (i) symbolically distance menfrom hegemonic masculinity; (ii) situate the masculinities available to young, White, heterosexualmen as somehow less meaningful than the masculinities associated with various marginalized andsubordinated Others; and (iii) fortify existing social and symbolic boundaries in ways that often workto conceal systems of power and inequality in historically new ways. IntroductionAgrowingbodyofsociologicaltheoryandresearchonmenandmasculinitiesaddressesrecenttransformations in men’s behaviors, appearances, opinions, and more. While historical re-searchhasshownmasculinitiestobeinacontinuousstateofchange(e.g.,Kimmel1996;Segal1990), the extent of contemporary transformations as well as their impact and meaning is thesource of a great deal of theory, research, and debate. While not a term universally adoptedamong masculinities scholars, the concept of “hybrid masculinities” is a useful way to makesense of this growing body of scholarship. It critically highlights this body of work that seeksto account for the emergence and consequences of recent transformations in masculinities.The term “hybrid” was coined in the natural sciences during the 19th century. Initiallyused to refer to species produced through the mixing of two separate species, by the 20thcentury, it was applied to people and social groups to address popular concern with miscege-nation. Today, scholars in the social sciences and humanities use “hybrid” to address culturalmiscegenation – processes and practices of cultural interpenetration (Burke 2009). “Hybridmasculinities” refer to the selective incorporation of elements of identity typically associatedwith various marginalized and subordinated masculinities and – at times – femininities intoprivileged men’s gender performances and identities (e.g., Arxer 2011; Demetriou 2001;Messerschmidt 2010; Messner 2007). Work on hybrid masculinities has primarily, thoughnot universally, focused on young, White, heterosexual-identiﬁed men. This research is cen-trally concerned with the ways that men are increasingly incorporating elements of various“Others” into their identity projects. While it is true that gendered meanings change histor-ically and geographically, research and theory addressing hybrid masculinities are beginningto ask whether recent transformations point in a new, more liberating direction.The transformations addressed by this literature include men’s assimilation of “bits andpieces”(Demetriou2001:350)ofidentityprojectscodedas“gay”(e.g.,Bridges,forthcoming;

Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinities

This article argues that American adolescent boys become masculine through the continual repudiation of a ‘fag’ identity. Using insights from sociologists of interaction and post-structural theoris...

C. J. Pascoe

Papers

Dude, you're a fag : masculinity and sexuality in high school

Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project

Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinities

‘Dude, You’re a Fag’: Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse

Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out