Messenger and social network sites as tools for sociability,leisure and informal learning for Spanish young people

General considerations about the Internet

A first relevant fact is that almost all of the Spanish students claim to have connected to the Internet some time in their lives (96.7%). Besides, most of them connect regularly (53% of them connect, on average, one hour a day; it is also significant that 13.6% of them claim to be almost always online).

In this context, and in relation to the place, frequency and intensity of the Internet use by teenage boys and girls, as well as to the effective parental control over this use, it is important to highlight in the first place that the majority of teenagers (94.5%) mainly connect to the Internet at home, with 59.2% of them claiming to have a connection in their own bedroom. Internet availability in private or personal spaces increases with age (it is more frequent among those between 16 and 18 years old than among those between 12 and 15 years old). The same happens, in parallel, with the time they devote to it, which is slightly greater among the older teenagers interviewed, who also gradually migrate their main hours of use, from afternoons to nights or to connect at any time. All these data together suggest an established pattern of Internet use for teenagers in their households which becomes more flexible and diverse as they grow up, which is in principle a natural development of habitual dynamics between generations that often translates into discussions and negotiations regarding the use and consumption of technology and media (see, for example, Hagen, 2007; Livingstone and Bovill, 2001; McMillan and Morrison, 2006; Tabernero et al., 2008).

On the other hand, the data corresponding to how the Internet has been introduced are particularly interesting. Among all of the users, 53.6% claim to have learnt to use it by themselves, whereas 21.8% have learnt with the help of some relative (parents, uncles or aunts, brothers or sisters, cousins). Nevertheless, all in all, the data reveal that most teenagers learn to use the Internet in informal contexts, either on their own, with their families or with friends, and therefore in contexts unrelated to formal education (barely 19.9% of the interviewees claim to have learnt at school or in academies).

Actually, what clearly emerges is that, for teenagers, the Internet is a leisure space, which is clearly separated from formal and daily educational contexts. The following extracts are typical of the young people’s responses to such questions as ‘Do you use the Internet to study or to look for information?’ and ‘Do they recommend you web pages at your secondary school?’:

. . .

The comparison of the effective uses of the Internet with how it is perceived by young people reveals some fundamental characteristics related to how they introduce digital technologies into their daily lives. Although entertainment (95.1%) and information (80.2%) are still two of the main functions attributed to the Internet, so is participation (‘The Internet allows me to share the pictures I take, the videos I make’) (81.9%). Nonetheless, in this respect, to ‘share’ particularly suggests that teenagers have strongly integrated the Internet into their daily lives, as an online extension of their offline lives.

Instant messaging

It is noteworthy that 94.5% of teenagers that use the Internet have one or more email accounts; but only 4.6% use email as their main tool of online communication, whereas 89.9% have one or more instant messaging accounts (Messenger, Skype, Jabber), which are the main tools for socialization and entertainment.

The characteristics of use of instant messaging accounts corroborate that the activity articulated through Internet tools and services is primarily supported by friendship or interest relationships (see Ito et al., 2008). Thus, the principal uses (of a lot) of these accounts are to talk to friends (89.3%) and about what interests these young people or what they like (71.3%), which far exceed the uses involving relationships with people not related to their daily social circle, or to family or teachers (talk to people they do not often see, 48.5%; talk to relatives, 36.7%; talk to teachers or monitors, 3.1%). This also exceeds practical uses, such as solving problems regarding their studies (44.2%).

In terms of language, this communication that is clearly associated with sociability reveals some noteworthy strategies. Young people openly express certain preferences in communicating through the Messenger. Concision, for instance, to ‘get to the point’, is particularly highlighted. Monotonous conversations or conversational tags that are so prominent in interpersonal verbal communication are not regarded positively. It is OK to say ‘hello’, but a conversation full of tags related to the phatic function of language is of no interest to them at all:

In conversations with young people, it is clear that they concede a lot of importance to the exchange of sentences that might be thought to fulfil a clear referential function (that is to say, those containing relevant information) or an expressive function (icons or sentences reflecting specific states of mind), according the well-known model of the functions of language introduced by the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson (1960). The fact that someone is available suffices to start a conversation, which is bound to be oriented to ‘explain something interesting’. Thus, it is possible to claim the existence of something we could call an MSM Code, a code that is built on technological competence and the cultural capital involved in the use of the tool (Valenzuela et al., 2009).

Regarding this MSM Code, and in relation to the observations made by the different groups, a series of good communicative practices aiming at socializing through instant messaging can be detected. These practices include:

These communication protocols and practices show the foundations of a digital competence orientated to manage their social capital, their opportunities to socialize and their identity.

SNSs and photologs

Regarding the level and type of contribution of young people to the construction of ways of participatory culture (see Jenkins et al., 2008), it is remarkable that 31.6% of the Spanish teenagers do not use SNSs, blogs or photologs. This information is particularly significant insofar as this kind of tools and services on the Internet are applications that are precisely built around relations of friendship and/or interest, and whose technical characteristics have a direct relation to the social and/or cultural competences on which new models of participatory and collaborative culture are founded (Ito et al., 2008; Jenkins et al., 2008).

The most commonly used social networks are Tuenti (68.5% of SNSs users) and Fotolog (18.4%), both exceeding Facebook (10.1%). On the other hand, the use of blogs among teenagers in Spain is insignificant (only 0.4% of all Internet users within this population group). In this context, the reasons to use these tools and services among young people reveal the importance of them with respect to their social life. Thus, the main uses (of a lot) of social networks in general are to talk to friends (79.5% of the users) and to look at what the contacts in their friends list are doing or talking about (66.6%).

Beyond the importance of social networks, relations of interest and participation (although not necessarily separated from friendship relations) are also fundamental. Other main reasons why the Spanish youth use social networks on the Internet are to talk about what interests they have (63.8%), to give an opinion (61.2%), to send pictures, videos or texts made by themselves (59.8%) and to send/receive pictures, videos or funny material found on the Internet (59.5%). In the case of Fotolog, participation linked to friendship relationships is revealed as the most significant function. Thus, the personal reasons to use Fotolog are, in order of importance, to write or comment on the Fotologs of friends (67.7%), to publish pictures, videos or texts made by oneself (59.8%), to communicate with friends (53.8%) and to write about what interests me/what I like (51.4%).

Another noteworthy aspect is related to the fear that adults express with respect to the possibility that teenagers establish unwanted contacts through the Internet. Regarding this issue, it is important to remember that only 32.9% of the teenagers claim to have some kind of rule imposed by their fathers and mothers about the use of the Internet in general, although, among these rules, the restriction on the type of people to get in touch with is the most important. On the other hand, a minority of 17.3% claims to have friends they only know online. In this context, and considering that 63.7% of social network users frequently update the information on their online profiles, it is essential to pay attention to the most recurrent type of data in those profiles. Thus, the most common data are those providing a more general description of the user (sex, age, photograph, name and surnames, in more than 90% of the cases), than those that allow direct contact (Messenger, email or Fotolog address: under 40%; postal address, mobile telephone number or home number: under 10%).

The different conversations among the teenager discussion groups ratify the data obtained in the quantitative study: the social networks to which teenagers connect are mainly used to establish relationships with pre-existent offline groups of friends. These online relationships are used as an extension of their daily sociability and allow them to widen their social worlds beyond specific spatial limits. So, these users define social networks as places where they can express themselves with a certain freedom about their problems, about daily situations affecting them individually or within a group. For example:

The more the contacts or friends are included, the greater is the chance for interaction, and possibilities of acquiring sociability, support, information and feeling of belonging. Thus, being a member of one or another social network will mainly depend on the amount of contacts young people can add to their profiles (contacts that, as previously commented, already exist in their offline daily life).

The teenagers interviewed not only connect to their network with the purpose of participating with comments or information in their profile or those of others, but frequently, they use their contacts profiles in a passive way, as mere spectators. This attitude of being mere spectators, in a group or individually, devoting their time to looking at things and prying into the interventions and photos of their friends’ profiles is not an activity to be underestimated by associating it to mere gossip. Studies about gossip activity among women (Jones, 1980), or about the activity of fans of television shows (Jenkins, 1992), have shown that gossip allows all of the participants to talk about themselves, their tastes, their opinions or values through a third party that appears in gossip magazines and TV shows. By gossiping on SNSs, teenagers do not waste time, but exchange opinions, discuss tastes, points of view and ways of thinking or doing things related to their identity (see Tufekci, 2008). By gossiping about their friends’ profiles, teenagers work on aspects related to their social and cultural identity without having to talk in the first person about their values, tastes, attitudes, etc. In other words, we can understand gossip as a way to talk about oneself by evoking the actions of third parties. All in all, the active participation on SNSs as a gossip activity shows that teenagers use these tools as social and emotional experimentation laboratories that are mainly oriented towards entertainment. By using social networks, teenagers place part of their knowledge and states of mind into the Internet, thereby acquiring greater amounts of knowledge and sociability opportunities in return (Rheingold, 2002).