Learning how to be normal online [college newspaper comment boards and the college student identity]

Summary form only given. Adolescents do not come to understand the world on their own. Rather, as products of particular environments, young people exist within certain spheres of influence that shape what they expect and know of the world. Much has been written about the role of family, school, and peers in young people´ development of expectations and world-view. An additional vast literature examines the ways in which social media communications contribute to youth´s conceptualization of the unfamiliar, as well as how repeated external messages often succeed in overriding the lessons of personal experience. However, the contribution of comment board involvement to this area of social and personal understanding has been much overlooked. Indeed, few studies have explored how participation in online comment boards inform young users´ offline understandings and expectations of both themselves and of the larger world they are increasingly becoming involved in. Additionally, very little of this research asks how social norms might be involved in the incorporeal exchanges young people take part in online. This research utilized in-depth qualitative interviews, content analysis, and grounded theory methodology to study how college students´ involvement in a campus-specific sociotechnical space created by the online comment board forums of their university´s student newspaper informed offline expectations regarding “normal” student identity. Findings suggest that the repeated patterns of exchange encountered within this space worked to affirm the existence of specific “normal” student behaviors and social processes related to involvements and interactions on campus. Analysis indicates that these patterns strongly influenced online participants´ offline expectations of descriptive and injunctive campus-specific student norms, as well as their understanding both of actions that would be seen as transgressing normality and the responses- such transgressions would evoke. Implications of these findings upon society and technology will be discussed.