Tweens negotiating identity online – Swedish girls' and boys' reflections on online experiences

Abstract

How do Swedish tweens (10–14 years old) understand and experience the writing of their online identities? How are such intertwined identity markers as gender and age expressed and negotiated? To find some answers to these questions, participants in this study were asked to write a story about the use of online web communities on pre-prepared paper roundels with buzzwords in the margins to inspire them. Content analysis of these texts using the constant comparative method showed that the main factors determining how online communities are understood and used are the cultural age and gender of the user. Both girls and boys chat online, but girls more often create blogs while boys more often play games. Gender was increasingly emphasised with age; but whereas boys aged 14 described themselves as sexually active and even users of pornography, girls of the same age described themselves as shocked and repelled by pornography and fearful of sexual threats. In this investigation an intersectionalist frame of reference is used to elucidate the intertwined power differentials and identity markers of the users' peer group situation.

Keywords:

• SNS
• internet identity
• tween
• gender
• age
• interfering identity markers

Notes

1. Playahead and Lunarstorm have been hugely popular among Swedish youth since the late 1990s. But during the last few years, the number of users has constantly decreased to such levels that both Playahead [1 March 2010] and Lunarstorm [8 August 2010] have shut down. Lunarstorm has migrated to a new SNS called LS8.

The owners of Lunarstorm started [in May 2004] the SNS, Bilddagboken [BDB, eng. The Image Diary], which attracted a large youth community. BDB is built upon users publishing photos/images, hosting up to 500.000 new photos/day.

2. This material is part of a larger empirical study on tweens constructing and normalising gendered identities online in Estonia and Sweden in the research project the.GTO.project (http://mt.sh.se/gto), funded by The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen).