ABSTRACT
Across the situations or places available to young people, we have witnessed their desire both for connection and disconnection—for the tactical opportunities to escape their parents’ expectations for shared family life, their school’s valorization of civility, and even their peers’ access to their more private explorations of the self. Since at home and school young people lack the power to manage their identity and social relations under conditions of their own choosing, they are particularly exploiting the new availability of digital networked spaces to pursue such connections and disconnections, thereby constructing and enacting different aspects of the self and, in the process, collaborating in the construction of wider peer networks that accord them a position.
