Text messaging in the school lives of American high school girls

ABSTRACT

Digital technologies open new windows for ethnographic explorations of cultural experiences. In this paper, we examine text messaging among academically talented teenage girls of colour at three US urban high schools. Texting introduced a new communication modality into the girls’ lives and created a space for new discourses mediating their participation in school. We draw on the concept of ‘serious play’ to reveal the paradoxical nature of the girls’ texting. At each school, distinct text-messaged discourses emerged – with implications for ethnographic studies of discourse and young people’s commitments to schooling.

KEYWORDS:

• Text messaging
• discourse of schooling
• serious play
• teenage girls
• ethnographic methods

Acknowledgements

The authors are also especially grateful for the contributions to data collection and analysis of Terra Morris and Kate Starbird. This article has been through several iterations over time; the authors thank all who have commented on it during its long gestation period.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Margaret Eisenhart http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8013-4233

Notes

1 Linguists have also studied texting, particularly its distinctive orthography and grammar, and found variations by age group and gender (Baron 2008; Tannen 2013).

2 Beyond anthropology, interest in serious play or serious games is evident in theories of gaming in computer science, psychology, and engineering (e.g. Farman 2010) and in theories of communication, linguistics, and organisational management (e.g. Hinthorne and Schneider 2012; Sanchez-Garcia 2010). These authors have identified four salient characteristics of serious play: (1) Serious play is actively performed (not observed) (Hinthorne and Schneider 2012); (2) Serious play is characterized by flexibility and ‘quirky’ shifts in rules that accompany imagination, improvisation, and inversion of the status quo (Sutton-Smith 1997); (3) Serious play is a safe space for experimenting with the possibility of acting differently, narrating events differently, and experimenting with new identities or novel solutions – any of which may lead to new ways of thinking and acting outside of ‘play’ (Bateson 1972; Hinthorne and Schneider 2012; Holland et al. 1998; Vygotsky 1978); (4) Serious play is not just for enjoyment or release; it is also goal-oriented. ‘Serious play involves reflection on the activity itself in a way that directly connects the play space to real-life issues and concerns’ (Hinthorne and Schneider 2012, 2808).

3 All proper names are pseudonyms.

4 E-Data Viewer was written by a graduate student researcher specifically for this project. It is available on request from its author.

5 These three categories emerged from our inductive analysis of the girls’ threads.

6 In online dictionaries of texting language, ‘hahaha’ is defined as a laugh or laughing; ‘muhaha’ is defined as an evil laugh.

7 All texting excerpts have been reproduced exactly as the girls wrote them, including their spellings, punctuation, placement of emoticons, etc.

8 (year, month, day, time).

Additional information

Funding

The authors wish to thank the US National Science Foundation (HRD #1036662) for their generous support of the research reported in this paper.