Cleveland Humanities Festival: 2020 - Andra Siibak

The article offers views for sharing joys and challenges of parenthood and documenting children's lives publicly which has become a social norm in the social media era. Topics include findings from European Kids Online survey amongst 9–17-year-old Estonian youth and parents engage in sharenting when communicating with their family and friends; and indicates that present-day parents are increasingly seeing social media and also sharenting ‘as a ubiquitous part of their parenting experience.

The aim of the study was to explore the reasons that Estonian three-generation families use different web-based platforms for family interaction. Semi-structured interviews (N=13) were carried out with representatives of four Estonian families to study their motivations for communicating with each other through web-based communication channels. Furthermore, we were interested in learning how they had selected the platforms for communication, what topics they discussed and what information they exchanged while communicating online. The findings of our study suggest that web-based communication channels were firmly domesticated in the everyday family routines of our respondents. Our interviews revealed that the Internet and web-based communication channels play an enormous role in supporting and partly also re-establishing inter-generational communication and, thereby, strengthening family bonds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes as a point of departure Erving Goffman's (1959) ideas and the self-discrepancy theory of Higgins (1987) in order to introduce the habits of self-presentation of young people in the online environments. The aim of my article is to examine the reasons for joining SNS and the aspects young people would hope to emphasize on their profile images in social networking sites (SNS). I also focus on the qualities that are considered to be crucial by the 11 to 18-year-olds in order to become popular among their peers in the online community. The analysis is based on the findings of a questionnaire survey carried out in comprehensive schools in Estonia among 11 to 18-year-old pupils (N= 713). The results show that motives with a distinctly social focus dominate among the reasons for creating a profile in SNS. However, visible gender differences occur in the reasons for selecting particular profile images. The findings reveal that girls creating their visual self value both the aesthetic, emotional, self-reflecting as well as aesthetic-symbolical aspects of photographing more than their male counterparts. Furthermore, visual impression management in SNS varies according to the expectations of the reference group at hand, as the profile images of the young are constructed and re-constructed based on the values associated with "the ideal self" or "the ought self". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyse how tween girls in Estonia and in Sweden describe and discover their gender identities when selecting profile images for social networking sites (SNSs). To this end, interviews with tweens in Estonia (N=21) and in Sweden (N=31) were carried out. As SNSs largely exist without the recognisable surveillance of adults, children can explore the social matrix of relating to others, and they also feel safe to try out and display different constructions and reconstructions of their identity. At the same time, in communicating online, impression management is formulated with constant worry about how to construct one's virtual identity so that it will be appreciated and accepted by one's peer group. In this article, our analysis focuses on the most popular posing strategies used by tween girls, which, it turns out, are often marked by reproduction of the dominant heterosexual cultural norms and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.