Shaping Youth Discourse About Technology: Technological Colonization, Manifest Destiny, and the Frontier Myth in Facebook's Public Pedagogy

Abstract

As youths spend more time engaged in social media and informal learning experiences online, they interact with the public pedagogy of technological spaces. The public pedagogy of technological spaces, specifically Facebook, functions to create a habitus for the way youths act and respond in digital discourses and digital culture. This article contends that Facebook's public pedagogy seeks to shape how young people view technology, and we examine the rhetorical strategies Facebook uses to both normalize and celebrate its vision of current cultural changes. We illustrate how through its discourse, specifically through a construction of a modern-day version of the frontier myth, Facebook seeks to craft users with particular dispositions who behave in particular ways online, and how it disciplines dissent on its site.