Blog Post 2

After reading Baym’s chapter and the article on Katherine Pommerening I think her story can best be analyzed through the scope of domestication of technology.  I choose to analyze her anxieties and story through this lens as I feel like Katherine is far beyond being integrated into the technological world and is already completely domesticated and embedded into it. I also felt that this scope related to our society a lot as we are almost as dependent on technology as Katherine is. Technology has been so adapted to young girls and boys lives that they don’t know anything else. The overuse of technology is so normalized with teenagers nowadays that they don’t see anything wrong with their behaviour. New media simulates anxiety in teenagers because they are so emerged into it. An example of how embedded technology is into teenagers lives is how they choose to 'hang out'. Teenagers nowadays no longer have the fear of missing out (FOMO) on real-life group outings, they get FOMO when they aren’t hanging out with their friends on their phones.
Instagram has become the main source of teenagers anxiety. They stress over not getting enough likes, not posting the best representation of themselves, or not getting enough birthday wishes. In the article Katherine mentions her instagram profile. She states “over 100 likes is good, for me. And comments.You just comment to make a joke or tag someone” (Contreta. 2016). She receives validation through her social media posts. Compliments in person mean nothing compared to a comment on your most recent photo. There is an unreal amount of pressure on girls like Katherine. Girls like her are feeling more anxious about their like count on Instagram than their grades, safety or family life.
In another section Baym mentioned that bringing technology into everyday life has caused positive and negative effects. You can see the negative effects through Katherine’s family life. Considering Katherine’s known only a life surrounded by social media she sees nothing wrong with it. She enjoys the positive aspects she gets from social media and her phone, and completely ignores or disregards the negatives. Even though she may not notice the negative aspects that social media and her phone bring her, it doesn’t mean they aren’t there. In Katherine’s life, social media and her phone are affecting her relationship with her family. She is constantly on her phone and has no care of creating a proper face to face connection with her father. This can create anxiety from her father’s point of view. Her father can stress about any harmful images she could be seeing on her phone and fear for his daughter. In Katherine’s eye, her father just doesn’t understand ’the importance of social media’ to a teenager. On the other hand, parents are completely oblivious to what their children are doing on social media and this can cause them to experience moral panic and anxiety.

Baym, N. K. (2015). Making new media make sense. In Personal connections in the digital age: Digital media and society series (2nd ed., pp. 52-57). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.


Contrera, Jessica. “This Is What It's like to Grow up in the Age of Likes, Lols and Longing.” The Washington Post, WP Company, www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2016/05/25/13-right-now-this-is-what-its-like-to-grow-up-in-the-age-of-likes-lols-and-longing/?utm_term=.f08640736a75.

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