Intrusismo y economía sumergida

The group in The Glades that probably show most internal consistency in their social media usage are the school pupils aged 16 to 18 – partly because of the intensity of their interactions as a group. For example, when asking about the use of WhatsApp for groups the answers soon became quite repetitive. Almost everyone had one group that was sin-gle sex, for example girls had a girls’ group in which they could talk and banter about their relationships with boys. However, they also had another WhatsApp group that was mixed and in which they could talk and banter with boys directly. Many also had temporary groups that might be created in order to organise a party, work on a school project, go paintballing and such like. Some also had family WhatsApp groups or belonged to groups devoted to particular interests.

Chapter  5 includes a chart of usage of social media by this age group. It shows that the majority of pupils use at least five out of BBM,⁶ Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook. In general girls have more accounts than boys. Instagram was especially popular among younger pupils, who saw it as more benign and free of the suspect con-tent that circulated on Twitter. Facebook was in marked decline for peer

interactions, though nearly everyone still had their Facebook profile; it was still seen as a useful site for organising parties and for some pri-vate messaging, but was mainly used to keep in touch with parents and other family members. Snapchat became particularly popular during the time of our field work. Some pupils used it pretty constantly dur-ing the course of the day – not just when they were bored or had seen something funny, but also as a minimal way of keeping up a visual con-versation with friends to remind them every hour or so that they were best friends. A platform that we would not normally consider as a social media, but which was popular with many is YouTube. YouTube videos are often shared on social media such as Facebook, but may equally be used for specialist interests. For example, one girl learnt her ballet skills from YouTube and saw it as a means of connecting her with other ballet aficionados.

In general it should be acknowledged that the coverage through-out this volume is distorted towards those platforms that have a more public presence, for instance Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Here in each case a good sample of villagers agreed to let me follow them online, which was not the case with more private platforms such as WhatsApp, BBM and Snapchat. It was far more difficult to engage with these lat-ter sites, and the English study was less successful in this regard than the ethnographies carried out elsewhere. This is a problem, precisely because being private means they are used for many forms of communi-cation that rarely appear on the more public media. These sites tend to be both more conversational and more transient. Snapchats are inherently transient in that they disappear after ten seconds, though everyone is aware of the potential for screen capture, which has made them more wary as to what they send. Fortunately the school pupils were comfort-able with discussing their use of all these platforms in some detail, and occasionally showing us examples.

As well as the main platforms, quite a few others are used by a minority of pupils. These included Tumblr and to a lesser extent Pinterest or ask.fm, while a few 16- year- olds used PlayStation and Xbox as social media. No other platform registered as being used by more than two per cent of pupils. Tumblr seems to have become an important platform for blogging. Previously more comparable with a traditional diary, it has now, like Pinterest, become a collection point for images and items that interest the pupils. Several of them noted that they like the possibilities of anonymity it provides. One girl said

‘Half the stuff I’ve put on Tumblr is so cringey, I  couldn’t put it on Twitter. I’d get it ripped out of me.’ In some cases it was clear that the

pupils’ school friends did not know they had an active Tumblr account.

Pinterest, on the other hand, is not really used as a social media. Many subscribe to Vine for making very short videos that might then appear on Twitter. For one group Imgur was becoming important. The wider ethnography suggested that various dating sites have been around for a considerable period, though they are more used by older age groups.

Grindr is very well established for gay dating. Tinder was growing rapidly around the end of field work, and was starting to have a signif-icant impact on contemporary dating.

None of these have anything like the general reach of platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat and WhatsApp, but there were individuals for whom they are the key site. For example, some boys devote their spare time to gaming and much of their social media is through PlayStation or Xbox. This represents a newly developed feature that has spread since gaming consoles came with voice and webcam connections. For Troy, quite a shy boy, his Xbox was the main way in which he had developed his social interactions. He had linked it up with Skype, though often without the webcam, but he does not link it with either Facebook or Instagram. He notes ‘Whereas everyone else was partying, that’s what I  would spend my time doing, being on Xbox live talking to people.

I didn’t feel left out ’cos of that.’ Within school Troy tended to socialise with other Xbox people. He recognised this was insular, but at least he felt they had something to talk about. Xbox was equally important for his family links, given that his parents were divorced. He did not see that much of his father, so his father set up an Xbox group with the two of them, the father’s new girlfriend and a cousin in order to play games.

This worked well and was clearly important and appropriate for Troy.

Another key and growing factor is the way companies as well as individuals want to create their own configuration of platforms as poly-media. An obvious case would be the Apple Corporation. There are those who organise their music on iPlayer, their visual communication on Facetime, use several apps from the iPhone store and make consid-erable use of their iPads or iPhones. Others are similarly wedded to their Android phones and the Google family. In the long term, however, companies seem to lose their attraction once they become powerful corporations who are seen by users as not just dominant but domineer-ing – a shift that has happened in turn to Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook. By now there is very little sense of an emotional attachment to the products of any single company (apart from some latent regard for Apple); the examples just cited above tend rather to be viewed as pack-ages of convenience that could easily be switched to another option.

Thanks in particular to the ubiquitous presence of smartphones, social media is now seamlessly integrated with other media, to the extent that a text could equally come from WhatsApp, a private mes-sage on Facebook or just phone texting. During the first questionnaire it was quite amusing that the answer to one question became highly pre-dictable. When asked ‘Who do you contact through your landline?’ the almost inevitable response was ‘just my mother’. A couple of years pre-viously everything had coalesced around Facebook, resulting in a messy blend of family, friends, colleagues and everything else, all in the same soup. Today polymedia has expanded choices and separated out niches.

A school pupil could enjoy the public argy- bargy (arguments and banter) of Twitter, but then retreat to the private consolations of Tumblr. He or she could contemplate and admire images on Instagram and organise fun nights out on WhatsApp. As implied by the theory of polymedia, the pupil’s decision about which media to use would be judged by others; it would be seen as reflecting the kind of person they were. The Xbox boy was thereby a typecast figure, but all this is very recent and not fully naturalised, even among those aged 16 to 18. To encounter what may be the future degree of integration into people’s lives, it is worth turning to a still younger group.