Despite being distinct, online social spaces are governed by norms and conventions reminiscent of those that govern offline social spaces. Our research into the ways young people’s ‘private’ or ‘quasi-private’ spaces are managed indicates that the strategies used to exert a sense of control over sites like Facebook borrow heavily from the strategies employed to manage offline private spaces like the teenage bedroom. In this article, we explore these continuities and then consider the limitations of applying a bedroom metaphor to online social spaces. We then consider how these strategies of control are related to a process of ‘marking out’ the narrative of ‘growing up’ both in online and offline social spaces.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	Bedroom metaphor, bedrooms, growing up, identity, social network sites, strategies of control, young people
Research Division:	Language, Communication and Culture
Research Group:	Communication and media studies
Research Field:	Communication technology and digital media studies
Objective Division:	Culture and Society
Objective Group:	Communication
Objective Field:	The media
UTAS Author:	Robards, B (Dr Brady Robards)
ID Code:	95869
Year Published:	2014
Web of Science® Times Cited:	20
Deposited By:	School of Social Sciences
Deposited On:	2014-10-09
Last Modified:	2017-12-14
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