Marcela Losantos Velasco, Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencias del Comportamiento, Universidad Católica Boliviana San Pablo
Lien Mostmans, Erasmus University College Brussels, Belgium
Guadalupe Peres-Cajías, Social Communication Department, Universidad Católica Boliviana San Pablo
- Introduction: the rise of Facebook use in street children
This contribution aims to generate knowledge on how street children’s[1] digital identity is shaped by social media. By conducting a study on the Facebook profiles and posts of 20 street children, with whom the Marcela Losantos, to which we will refer to as the first author henceforth- had personal contact in various previous research projects and continued to have regular interactions on Facebook afterwards, we show how street children´s Facebook interactions are shaped by the audiences they aimed to reach and by their capacity to deal with this social media platform´s affordances.
In Bolivia, the most recent Nation Census of people living on the street revealed that there were 3768 persons from which 43% are between 10 and 24 years old (Viceministerio de Defensa Social y Sustancias Controladas, 2015). A significant amount of Bolivians living on the street are children and young people due to an essential failure of care intervention models (Huang & Huang, 2008); and weak family reunification programs (Losantos, 2017) which led most children to grow up in the streets.
In line with other research about children and social media (Livingstone, 2003; Livingstone & Helsper, 2007; Guardia & Zegada, 2018; boyd, 2014) Bolivian street children are actively using social media platforms, especially WhatsApp and Facebook. In the framework of our previous research, we found Facebook profiles of 40 street children living in the city of La Paz and 23 profiles of children living in the streets of the city of El Alto. 48 of these children were using Facebook a daily. Moreover, Facebook is a popular access point for street educators and researchers to contact Bolivian street children.
Street children and youth are keen users of Facebook, although their use patterns have been poorly studied around the globe. Several reasons can explain Their invisibility in this area of research. First, there is a common belief that their living conditions do not allow them to access anything more than the essential assets such as food and clothing. Second, research on education has demonstrated that most of Bolivian street children and youth have not finished primary school; hence it is generally assumed that many of them are illiterate (Huang & Huang, 2008).
Both of these widespread assumptions need to be nuanced. Related to the first point, the country’s largest research on digital (Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2016) use showed that Internet services became cheaper in the last years, internet cafes are trendy for youngsters to get online and there are few legal requirements when buying mobile phone SIM-cards, enabling street children to buy them in most street shops to ‘upload’ data[2] (Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2016). Moreover, new smartphones have become available at a relatively low cost and nowadays second hand or stolen mobile phones can be easily found in Bolivia’s underground markets. Furthermore, even though there is practically no information on precisely how street children and youth have access to smartphones, our own previous research project indicated that nearly everyone from the two street groups that participated in the first author´s previous research project had a one, and was using it on a daily basis, at least for some months during a year. Moreover, that they invest a significant part of their daily earnings in order to acquire cell phones (cell phones or smartphones??) and that they tend to change mobile phones regularly, because such hardware is considered and used as exchangeable tools to get easy and quick money[3].
Regarding the second argument, even though street children have hardly finished primary school, the census shows that 94,1% (Viceministerio de Defensa Social y Sustancias Controladas, 2015) can read and write with a certain degree of difficulty, but well-enough to interact on social media.
Social media has therefore become a powerful connection tool between street children and different audiences, with whom it was difficult to stay in touch with in the past, including international aid organizations, volunteers and professionals that work with street children, and street educators with whom they are in contact in their daily lives on the street. This “virtual sociability” (Cáceres, Señán & Ruiz San Román, 2017; Delgado & Felice, 2013)
had a great impact on the expansion of the children’s social network.
Furthermore, social media also changed the way street children relate to media in general. Only a few years ago, the only relationship these children had with the media was when TV networks or radios decided to report about them, depicting them at the extreme of two poles: a) as ‘victims’ in constant need of help, which corresponded with the social construction of them as poor and disadvantaged; (Bar-On, 1997) and b) as criminals, with feral and untamed characteristics that demand forced interventions to take them out of the street (e.g. Losantos & Loots, 2015). Street children have shifted from being objects of news and passive media consumers by watching TV on the street or in public restaurants and hiding in movie theaters, to become active producers of content in social media, as it will be discussed in the following paragraphs.
In this chapter, we aim to expand the knowledge and research evidence in the field of street children’s use of social media by answering the next research questions:
- How do street children deal with Facebook affordances?
- Are their Facebook profiles and posts influenced by the audience they are aiming to reach?
- How do their Facebook interactions shape their digital identity?
We will describe the research methodology in which Facebook profiles and posts were selected and then analyzed by using a visual and an audience perspective. Subsequently, we will discuss how street children´s interaction with social media is mediated by their capacity to understand and deal with social media affordances and by the audience they target their posts to. Furthermore, we will argue how it shapes street children´s digital identity construction.
[1] Although we prefer the term ‘street-connected’ children or ‘children in street situations’ (Consortium for Street Children, 2018) we will use the term ‘street children’ for reading purposes.
[2] For more information, the online report can be found in http://www.cis.gob.bo/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Bolivia-digital-sello.pdf.
[3] The Nation Census of Bolivian street children showed that all children, aged 11 to 18, have a cellphone at some point during the year. However, as it is second hand or stolen, it stops working, or they trade it or sell it when they are in need of money.
Articulo Completo :
PDF: Street Children and Social Media: Identity Construction in the Digital Age- Marcela Losantos
Investigador Principal
Marcela Losantos Velasco Ph.D
