Instant Messaging, Literacies, and Social Identities

Cynthia Lewis, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

Bettina Fabos, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

Everybody does it. It's like I've grown up on it. It's like how you felt about stuff when you were growing up.

— Sam

Sam, a 14-year-old girl, was one of seven participants in this study of young people's uses of Instant Messaging (IM). We want to take a moment to consider Sam's comment as a way of providing a conceptual framework for this study. To Sam, IM did not feel like technology, a term associated in many people's minds with objects that are complicated and difficult to understand or operate. When technology becomes “normal” in this way, it is no longer complicated, nor is it notable to its users. It is a fact of life, a way of being in the world, a producer of social subjects that find it unremarkable—so unremarkable that it seems “everybody does it.”

The social subject that develops in relation to this invisible technology is one who expects access, expects to be connected to friends at the stroke of a key, and expects to read and write in particular ways that lead to fulfilling connections with those friends. As Bourdieu (1997) put it, “The experience of a world that is ‘taken for granted’ presupposes agreement between the dispositions of the agents and the expectations or demands immanent in the world into which they are inserted” (p. 147).

Sam's dispositions and the expectations placed upon her were in agreement. But it is important to note that these expectations did not emanate from her world at home. We suspect that because of Sam's assumption that “everybody does it,” readers are imagining Sam to be middle class with economic resources that would locate her on the advantaged side of the digital divide. This was not the case. Sam happened to live in a community that had very inexpensive, municipally owned cable access, making home Internet access possible across class lines. Sam's parents were custodians who placed high value on their children's education and managed to purchase a computer to provide Sam with what they perceived to be a school advantage. Her mother found the computer to be mysterious and confusing—in other words, technological. Her father was an avid Internet user, but with concerns about Sam's interest in IM. Our point, for now, is that through the happenstance of living in a community with inexpensive cable access, through daily use, through peers who stayed connected, through generational and other social identities that we will discuss in this article, and through all the social codes and practices that come with these social identities, Sam was positioned as a social subject who took IM for granted—one who had ways of reading and writing that were natural to her as part of her daily practice with IM. These ways of reading and writing through a technology that she did not view as technological were different than ours, and, we suspect, different than most of her teachers.

The anxiety that results from this difference has been discussed by Luke and Luke (2004):

The perception of crisis [over perceived loss of print literacy] is an artifact of a particular generational anxiety over new forms of adolescent and childhood identity and life pathways: fundamental ontological and teleological changes in childhood traceable to global economies, cultures, and technologies. (p. 105 )

Here, they make clear that the crisis is not to be found in the child or adolescent as subject, but in the teacher, researcher, and policymaker as the adult subject whose anxieties about new adolescent identities lead to the valorization and reification of print culture.

We are interested in the kind of social subject constructed through IM—the social identities that shape and are shaped by the practice of IM. To this end, we examined the uses of IM among seven youth (four females and three males) who regularly used this technology in their daily lives. We wanted to know what functions IM served in their lives: For what purposes did they use this form of digital literacy? For what reasons and under what circumstances did they find it most compelling? These are the research questions that led us to understand more about our participants as social subjects who shape and are shaped by particular technologies. It is our hope that insights gleaned from this research will help us to make school literacy more engaging for students and more meaningful to their present and future lives in a digitally mediated world.

Instant messaging (IM) came of age in 2000. Although the interactive message tool dates back to the 1970s, when researchers began to send real-time text messages on Unix-based networks, the technology became instantly popular in the late 1990s, when America Online (AOL) engineers introduced the Buddy List (Guernsey, 2001). The list basically allows users to manage multiple simultaneous exchanges and also track their buddies' appearances and disappearances. Internet users, and young people especially, gravitated to the social and playful exchange tool, and IM became a communication phenomenon. Industry insiders called IM the latest “Killer App” (Weise, 2000), and technology trackers projected that IM would surpass e-mail as the primary online communication tool by 2005 (Latchford, 2003). By 2003, 70% of online teens ages 12–17 used instant messaging. One fourth of all online teens see IM as their main communication tool (Zucco, 2003). In the United States, IM use among youth has surpassed that of other forms of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), including chat rooms (Herring, 2004). Although users typically manage three or more ongoing exchanges at once (Lenhart, Rainie, & Lewis, 2001), each IM exchange is dyadic.