Week 3 Article Summary: "Context Collapse and Student Social Media Networks: Where Life and High School Collide"

Key Terms

• Context collapse: Online social media networks provide a space for free expression and, in the process, create the potential for their social groups to mix, which results in context collapse.
• Virtual third space: These online platforms provide them with a social interactive space, neither school nor home, and it's not a primary field for any actor, and people can freely socialize with one another. This space provides more options to the teens for social connection.

The article aims to explore social media use among high school students, looking at how online social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat serve as virtual third spaces, bridges across physical environments, communities, and purposes. The study focuses on the following research questions:

1. What social media tools are high school students using?
2. What do high school students’ personal and school communities look like?
3. How do high school students use social media tools to access and interact with their personal and school communities?
4. What types of connections do high school students maintain with school adults and official school channels via their school media networks?
5. In what ways are high school students managing context collapse?

Sample and Study:

24 students in Grade 10 (English class) & 24 students in Grade 12 (Economics class) = Total 48 students

The authors visited both classes for three consecutive days in 2016. A 3-day, 50-minute social media lesson focused on tools, networks, and context collapse. The data was collected via observations, a survey, and two worksheet activities with a focus on student tool use; the worksheet focused on student social networks and how those networks overlap on different social media tools.

Data Analysis: Closed survey items were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, and open items were analyzed for common themes.

Findings:

1. Social Media Use: It was found that the most popular social media tools were Snapchat and Instagram with 79% and 63% of all the students respectively reporting daily use. The table below shows the purpose of the use of social media, which highlights that females use 100% of social media to interact with members of personal communities while for this purpose males use social media for 94%.

Table 1. Use of Social Media Tools within Communities

Interaction Purpose	Female	Male
Interact with members of personal communities (e.g., sports, clubs, religious organizations)	100%	94%
Get information about personal communities	77%	88%
Interact with close friends 77% 94%	77%	94%
Interact with other friends 1	100%	94%
Interact with family	100%	94%
Interact with adults at school	47%	71%
Meet new people	93%	77%

 2. Student Communities

·       Personal communities: Personal communities were defined as groups outside of school that did not require membership at a specific school. Students reported belonging to a diverse range of such groups, though most had relatively few they regularly interacted with. These personal communities included church groups, sports leagues, and performing arts groups.

·       School community: The school functioned as a community itself. Many students attended together for several years or even throughout their K-12 education. Within this larger community, students participated in various school-sponsored sports and clubs. They also reported belonging to friendship groups, ranging from best friends to those they regularly ate lunch with.

·       Difference across grades: Among 10th graders, church and school-based groups were the most popular personal communities. In contrast, 12th graders more often belonged to work and community-based groups and reported greater involvement in sports and club activities.

3. Communities and Tool Use

·       Personal Communities and Tools: students were intentional about which tools to connect with which communities. For example, Snapchat was used to interact with people known in real life. Instagram and Snapchat were most frequently used to connect with close friends and larger peer communities.

·       School Communities and Tools: The school did not use social media tools to formally encourage student interaction, and students did not report any organized or officially sanctioned use of social media to support school-based activity groups. Senior classes used GroupMe to connect and plan school-related events.

4. Facebook as a Unique Tool: In the survey, only 38% reported being non-users, while 46% indicated using Facebook at least weekly. Facebook emerged as the predominant tool for connecting with family, driven by two factors. First, it was the social media platform their elder relatives already used. Second, students preferred not to have family members connected to them on other platforms. By accepting family as Facebook friends and downplaying their Facebook use among peers, they created a space where context collapse was unlikely. 

5. Social Networks and School Adults: The school has official social media channels, such as a Twitter account, but these are primarily used to broadcast information to the larger school community, including parents. Students reported occasionally checking and following these accounts but did not interact with them (e.g., exchanging messages), which was corroborated by reviewing the activity on these accounts.

6. Context Collapse

  Example of Context Collapse

Figure 1 shows a 10th-grade student's communities. Her school and travel softball teams overlap by 2 members, and her church and friend groups by 4. Her softball connections do not overlap with her church and friend groups. She uses Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat for her softball team and Facebook for church members. She interacts with many outside of school, a few of whom attend her school.

Figure 2 illustrates her social networks. Instagram is her largest, overlapping significantly with Twitter and Snapchat. These networks exceed the size of her communities, indicating extensive online connections. She knows 10% of her Instagram network and 45% of her Twitter and Snapchat networks in real life, while all her Facebook connections are known personally, with a slight overlap with her school community. 

Managing Context Collapse: These students were highly attuned to who they connected with, what they shared online, and how they used different tools and multiple accounts for different purposes. They managed context collapse in various ways.

Reflection: The paper by Dennen et al. (2017) resonates with me, as I share similar behaviors to the teens in the study. Although I am on Facebook, I don't primarily use it for social interactions. Instead, I use it for information purposes, such as joining Tallahassee-based groups to stay updated on city events and news.

I also have a large network on Facebook, even though I rarely interact with many of these people and don't have their phone numbers. It allows me to stay connected with a broad range of individuals. In concentric circles, Facebook represents the outermost circle of my social connections, encompassing many people with whom I have limited direct interaction. 

Reference: Dennen, V. P., Rutledge, S. A., Bagdy, L. M., Rowlett, J. T., Burnick, S., & Joyce, S. (2017, July). Context collapse and student social media networks: Where life and high school collide. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on social media & society (pp. 1-5).