Online LGBT+ Communities and Exploration of Alternative Identities

Abstract

With the evolution of online spaces, the way young people develop and explore their identities and various communities has changed drastically. For those in minority groups, like the LGBT+ community, the evolution of online spaces has become a place where they can learn and experiment with the identity and engagement with communities in a space that is safer than doing so in offline environments. The main argument is that online spaces provide LGBT+ youths with a place where they can effectively explore and develop their gay or queer identity through experimentation online and participating in supportive online communities. Anonymity, cyberbullying, and privacy are topics that are also referenced and addressed throughout this paper, in relation to youth (especially those in the LGBT community) and their online practices.

 

 

Introduction

The development of online spaces and social media has provided young people with a way to explore their identity through online communities, especially within minority groups like the LGBT+ community. Throughout this essay we will be using some terms whose definitions are often argued about. When discussing ‘youths’ this age range directly references those between the ages of 13 (which is the age restriction for many social networking sites or SNSs) to 20. Identity will be referenced as the character and intricacies of a person who make up who they are, which can be subject to change over time and with new experiences. What qualifies as a community is often debated between scholars, but in the context of this essay we will take community to mean a network of people, connected by a common interest, demographic, or location. In this paper I will argue that the evolution of online spaces and communities provides youths, especially those in the LGBT+ community, with a safe space to research, experiment with, and develop their identity, alternative communities, and societal constructs. Van Der Nagel & Frith (2015) assert that the freedom the web contains, with options like pseudonymity and anonymity, provides “important avenues for productive identity play, self-exploration, and behaviour contextualisation online”; Greenhow & Robelia (2009) “analysis revealed that SNSs … allowed students to formulate and explore various dimensions of their identity and demonstrate twenty‐first century skills”. Engaging with other people and different information online is a healthy way for teens and young people to broaden their knowledge, interact with others, build relationships, experiment with identity, break away from perceived limitations, and test social boundaries. While the internet can obviously provide some dangers in regard to privacy, especially to children and teens that may be vulnerable, the positive effects of engagement in online spaces far outweighs the negatives.

 

Gain knowledge on different communities

Adolescence is a time of change not only physically but mentally, where young people are exposed to new and exciting experiences and try to find how they fit in with those around them, and how they wish to construct and portray their identity. Many young people may identify as a minority and are overwhelmed by not fitting in with those around them, and lack access or have limited access to discourses that sway from the majority in their physical communities. However, many young people become interested in different subcultures, race, gender, sexual orientations, religions and more, and want to seek out more information on what interests them. Furthermore, many are not in an environment where it is safe or acceptable to pursue information on alternate lifestyles. However, with the development of the internet and online spaces, young people have an infinite supply of information at their fingertips, where they can pursue information about their interests in a way that is exclusively controlled by them. The LGBT+ community, among many other minority groups, have benefitted greatly with the introduction of the internet, Subrahmanyam, Greenfield & Tynes (2004) saying “the virtual world of teen chat may offer a safer environment for exploring emerging sexuality than the real world.” LGBT+ support has grown exponentially over the last few years, and many websites, like Tumblr, are hubs for those within the community. The internet not only provides support in exclusively online spaces, but can help facilitate engagement and understanding with offline communities as well. In a study conducted on sample group of 16-24-year-old LGBT youth, “results suggest that LGBT youth are motivated to fill gaps in their offline sexual health resources with online information. Further, participants perceived the Internet as an efficient way to discover offline LGBT events and services relevant to sexual health.” (DeHaan, Kuper, Magee, Bigelow & Mustanski, 2013). From these studies, we can see how young people can access information on subcultures and minority groups in order to help form their identities, with “results indicating that new media enabled participants to access resources, explore identity, find likeness, and digitally engage in coming out.” (Craig & McInroy, 2014).

 

Participate in different communities

Expanding on the previous argument, online spaces and communities allow for young people to engage with communities that they otherwise wouldn’t, and express parts of their identity they may otherwise be embarrassed about in an offline situation. It is true for all ages that many people struggle to find an offline community where they feel they fit in and that has the same interests, however during adolescence where hormones are heightened, and an onslaught of changes can cause a feeling of alienation, this can feel overwhelming to many young people, especially those who may identify with a minority group like the LGBT community. Fear of judgement and the prospect of not fitting in, or being bullied, weighs heavily on teenage shoulders, and having the ability to pursue recreational interests online allows them to engage with communities they may not otherwise, because of geographical constraints or simple lack of confidence. “Peer victimization and unwanted sexual experiences were more commonly reported by LGBT than non-LGBT youth” (Ybarra, Mitchell, Palmer & Reisner, 2015) which causes many LGBT teens to be too afraid of openly coming out or engaging with offline community activities. Having the ability to use a pseudonym or remain anonymous online, also adds that layer of comfort for teens who may be struggling to identify or engage with their community offline and want to keep their online practices separate. Online communities can provide emotional support for young people in the LGBT community and often helps them form friendships, Ybarra, et. al, (2015) reporting “LGBT youth were more likely than non-LGBT youth to have online friends and to appraise these friends as better than their in-person friends at providing emotional support.”

 

Break away from forced identity

In a similar vein, the internet not only allows you to develop your identity but can also act as a medium for you to break away from it; the internet can allow young people to break away from physicality and interact with others free from their insecurities. As noted above, anonymity is a tool that allows people to separate themselves from their offline identity, and experiment with new facets of themselves away from limitations based on their appearance, that they may place on themselves or have placed on them by others. Of young people, Valkenburg and Peter (2011) say “online anonymity may lead to less concern about their physical appearance (eg, pimples, blushes), which may facilitate adolescents’ online self-disclosure and self-presentation, and, as a result, their opportunities for approval and social acceptance. Further than just blemishes, minority groups that are discriminated against can break away from the prejudice they may face because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic status, or location, and interact with others on the web as someone completely different. The same can be said for those in majority groups who wish to gain information about the experiences of those who may face different treatment to their own. This allows young people to interact with others differently from how they normally would, helping them gather more information on how identity impacts the interactions you have in different communities. Having the option to break away from the identity forced on you can be a helpful way for young people to view their identity separate from factors they can’t control, and analyse the way in which they act and react to those around them.

 

Experiment with identity

Generally, everyone experiments with their identity and self during adolescence, and experimentation is essential in both emotional and physical development as well as finding out how they wish to fit into society; Boyd (2007) says “learning society’s rules requires trial and error, validation and admonishment; it is knowledge that teenagers learn through action, not theory.” Pearson (2009) says that identity is performative, changing depending on your environment, and as online you are represented merely by pixels, “these performances exist within the imagination of users who then use tools and technologies to project, renegotiate, and continuously revise their consensual social hallucination”. In other words, “SNS platforms provide areas which are disembodied, mediated and controllable, and through which alternate performances [of identity] can be displayed to others” (Pearson, 2009).  Having the freedom to explore and craft the identity that they want and translate that into the online space, can help teens to figure out if that is a side of their identity that they want to present more of the time. In the LGBT+ community, many young people may have multiple social media accounts, one for their more subdued identity, and one for the part of their identity that is overtly gay. These can be spread over different websites or within the same one, for example a more openly gay persona is displayed on Tumblr than on Facebook. This can sometimes be for safety reasons, shielding their sexuality by having a different profile, and redirecting people in your offline communities to the less controversial profiles. Testing out their different personas and experimenting with how they present themselves online can help to get an idea of how they would like to present themselves as a whole, especially as they become more comfortable with their sexuality or find themselves in a more supportive environment. In Gray’s (2009) study of LGBT+ youth “many shared the belief that their identities expressed inherent desires that they were born with but that remained buried under the baggage of community norms”, which internet exploration and experimentation helped them to come to terms with.

 

Risks of exposure to infinite publics

One of the main issues with having such a free and open space as the internet, is privacy issues. While most SNSs provide privacy features, many young people choose not to enable these features, allowing strangers to follow their profiles and potentially gather information that could come to harm them in both online and offline spaces. Two factors could potentially be affecting why young people are choosing to have open profiles; O’Sullivan (2012) discusses the “online disinhibition effect”, which has been observed that “we reveal far more personal detail and seek more private information from others when we communicate using these technologies [online spaces] than we would in person”; In a small study conducted by Gershon (2012), interviews with two groups of students revealed that many didn’t understand how public their digital writing [and posting] was. Pearson also discusses how identity and relationships are performative, with a front stage performance meant for the public, and back stage meant as private or intimate, saying “online, these mediated environments mean that there is a blurring between front–stage and back–stage: what feels like an intimate space can be under the watchful electronic gaze of a large unknown audience; what is being acted out as a front–stage performance could have no witnesses.” (Pearson, 2009). Whatever the cause, this lack of understanding or disregard for privacy among young people, is an especially concerning topic when considering people who want to physically harm or violate children get unlimited access to photos, information, and the identities of vulnerable young people.

 

Cyberbullying and anonymity

Cyber-bullying is often contributed to the fact that when online, a sense of responsibility for one’s words or actions is lessened by the fact that the people are separated by a computer, and so the sense of accountability is somewhat reduced, especially in teens who are just learning how to properly communicate and navigate the world and others around them. Van der Nagel & Frith (2015) say:

“Flaming, trolling, and doxing are all negative consequences related to anonymity and pseudonymity online. As many people have argued, the ability to comment under disposable identities, or even under no identity in the case of anonymous comment sections, can encourage people to act in uncivil ways.”

Trolling has become a fixture on almost every social media site, where people write provocative comments for the sole purpose of getting a reaction out of someone, which arguably fosters unhealthy interaction and teaches young people that it is something normal and even common to want to evoke negative reactions from people with differing opinions. Performing, or being the victim of online cyber-bullying and bullying practices like trolling, can negatively impact a young person’s formation of identity by teaching unhealthy ways of interaction and lowering confidence.

 

Learn about and form relationships

Many arguments against use of SNS’s claim that if we are only interacting through devices then ‘real’ relationships are not able to be fostered, as young people don’t learn to communicate face to face, or form ‘real’ bonds. However, Maczewski (2002) notes that the net generation, those growing up surrounding by the internet and technology, “Rather than losing social skills, N-Geners are actually developing these skills at an earlier age than their parents’ generation. N-generation children have a new medium to reach out beyond their immediate world… learning precisely the social skills which will be required for effective interaction in the digital economy.” Although written before the spread of SNS’s, Wellman & Gulia’s (1997) research into online vs offline communities also discount the negative argument, saying they basically function in the same ways, and that “people on the Net have a greater tendency to develop feelings of closeness on the basis of shared interests rather than on the basis of shared social characteristics such as gender and socioeconomic status”, which can “foster high levels of empathetic understanding and mutual support”, which is a deeper and more useful connection than a community that is only joined by location. The internet also provides a space where those with difficult lives can turn to in order to experience relationships that are healthier or more supportive, a pattern which has been observed by Wolak, Mitchell & Finkelhor (2003); their studies found that teens who are highly troubled and have difficulty in relationships with their parents, two occurrences which are not uncommon with LGBT+ youth, were more likely to form online relationships. In these situations LGBT+ youths can turn to those with similar interests or situations online, in order to form supportive relationships and develop their ability to communicate in a healthy way. Giving teens full control over their online interactions can be stressful and frightening for their guardians, however, allowing teenagers to experiment with boundaries in an online environment could be beneficial in learning social etiquette in an environment that is safer than it would be offline. Exposing teens to a safe, removed environment where they may encounter opinions and discourses different from their own, and allowing them to interact as they please provides an experience that may otherwise be dangerous to them in ‘real’ life.

 

Conclusion

We can see how youths, especially LGBT+ identifies, use online spaces as an environment to explore, experiment, and develop their own identity, learn social boundaries, and participate in alternative communities. Online, where a person can share as much or little of their information as they like, LGBT+ youth can be shielded from backlash and potentially dangerous situations they would otherwise encounter if attempting to perform the same activities in their offline environments. Learning about their identity through research, performance, and engaging with online communities can help LGBT+ come to terms with themselves, and inform them on how they want to present themselves in their offline, everyday lives.

 

References

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