Blog post #2: Jen Bechard

 Hey everyone, 

In this blog post I’ll be analyzing the scene from Eighth Grade through Nancy Baym’s concept of ‘the social shaping of technology’ to arrive at a conclusion about our ‘individual and collective anxieties’ surrounding our interaction with technology. In the scene in question, Kayla sits on her bed scrolling through an impressive bracket of social media apps and sites. I most want to focus on the end of the scene, in which Kayla arrives at the Instagram page of Aiden, her crush. As she looks at one of Aiden’s posts, she beings kiss her hand, presumably pretending to be kissing him. Her dad then ‘barges in’, causing Kayla to start and throw her phone across the room in embarrassment.  

I think this latter part of the scene is the most interesting, especially when viewed from a ‘social shaping of technology’ lens. When Kayla arrives at Aiden’s profile, she does something unexpected with the app. As she kisses her hand, she is using the app as a tool to live out a particular utopian ideal of hers; namely, kissing her crush. By doing this, she is, in a sense, fusing her being in the ‘physical world’ with her being in her virtual world. In other words, she maps her physical desires onto the social technical affordances of the app (desire to kiss crush is mapped onto Instagram post of crush). It’s like she’s inhabiting a liminal space between the physical and virtual; she’s not really ‘in’ her bedroom since her focus is not on her surroundings, but she’s not really ‘online’ either since she is primarily engaged in a physical activity rather than an online activity. 

I believe that this part of the scene demonstrates a ‘social shaping of technology’ perspective since Kayla’s interaction with the app is in a sense unique. Her activity is not wholly determined or dependent on the affordances of Instagram; one can imagine a preteen girl daydreaming about kissing her crush without looking at his Instagram post! Her use of the app in this way is primarily located in the social rather than the technological. In turn, however, the app allows her a new, and perhaps enhanced, way to daydream as her physical and virtual existences mesh. I think, however, that this enmeshment hits on Baym’s explanation of our anxieties surrounding digital media (and their precursors). To highlight what I mean, imagine if Kayla had been daydreaming about her crush but was not on her phone with her earbuds. She would have heard her father knock on the door and wouldn’t have been so aggressively surprised when he opened it. In this case, she would have been much more ‘present’ in her physical space than she had been as she used her phone. So, as evidenced in this scene as is reflected in many others throughout the film, one’s occupation of a liminal space between the physical and virtual, a space created through a social shaping of technology type of interaction, may compromise their interactions in both realms. It had put Kayla at a greater risk of being ‘found out’ by her father, and she broke her phone as she threw it (presumably to ‘snap’ her back into the physical world) which, if the damage had been more severe, could have stunted her existence in the virtual world entirely.  

Anyway, thus concludes my grand ontological theory of that one scene in Eighth Grade. Let me know what you think :-) 

Jen Bechard