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The Construction of Identity on the Internet

Oops! I’ve left my diary open to the whole world!

Stockholm Institute of Education, farzaneh.moinian{at}lhs.se

This article is based on an ethnographic study carried out by the author on children and young people’s diaries in a Swedish web community called ‘Youngsters’. Its goal is to provide an insight into what some children write in their diaries in this web community and what the favourite topics are as depicted in these narratives. The focus is on the children’s voice and notions about their life: family, friends and schooling. The issues raised in the article also relate to advantages gained by using the internet as an engaging and interactive research arena by and for children. Results indicate that, in spite of all the risks and moral panic related to children’s internet usage, it is possible to gain access to children’s own accounts of their life and to get an ‘inside picture’ of their thoughts by studying the self-presentations and diaries they create in a web community. The importance of these diaries, the author emphasizes, is in the fact that they are written by children for other children.

Key Words: children • family • friends • internet • schools

Childhood, Vol. 13, No. 1, 49-68 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0907568206058610


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