Technologically situated: the tacit rules of platform participation

The ways in which young people use digital platforms develop with experience, and are guided by changing understandings of what they should – and should not – be doing online. As such, young people continually develop tacit rules and understandings that guide their platform participation. While based on social interactions with peers and other online contacts these rules are also technologically situated through the architecture of the platform. Based on research with Australian teenagers, this paper explores the ways in which Facebook shapes the communicative practices of young people, and how these were experienced and interpreted by them. Using the platform as a framework for the study demonstrates that some aspects of the Facebook architecture were particularly significant in structuring socialities, particularly: notifications and login for establishing habitual digital practices and norms; the prominence of images to (re)present identity; and the use of metrics (i.e. ‘likes’ and ‘friends’) to negotiate identities and relationships. Each of the participants initiated a range of strategies and rules to negotiate the ways in which the technological and the social were experienced through the platform. The paper concludes by considering the dominant values and social relations implicated through Facebook – and how they often reproduce dominant offline values and power relations.