Digital Socialization? An Exploratory Sequential Analysis of Anonymous Adolescent Internet-Social Interaction

This paper applies “extensive sequential analyses” as described by Oevermann in 1996 to a personal account posted on the MTV website A Thin Line (ATL), to the respective anonymous responses posted by account readers and to the website as the pragmatic framework of this interaction. This analysis shows that interactive websites are understood as social spaces where one can find a counterpart for intimate, socialization-relevant interaction. This means that a large amount of confidence is placed in the Internet and social media to provide new possibilities for the discussion of central personal life issues. Beyond the reconstruction of this transformation of social reality, this analysis enables the quality of this interaction that competes with traditional socialization contexts to be judged. P, a 17-year-old girl, is able to control the communication of her private problems in a new way through the use of digital interaction structures, filtering the interaction. The anonymous counterparts are assured by the character limits that they only have to participate superficially and without any major involvement. In the case of traditional instances of socialization, such an unattached and filtered interaction is already an expression of its failure. The Internet-based interaction analyzed here lacks key qualities of socialization interaction.