This article explores the potential role of sustained social media use in longitudinal qualitative research. We introduce the research design and methodology of a research project exploring sustained use (five or more years) of the social network site Facebook among young people in their twenties. By focusing on this group, we seek to uncover how 'growing up' stories are told and archived online, and how disclosure practices (what people say and share on social media) change over time. We question how we can understand the 'digital trace' inscribed through the Facebook Timeline as a longitudinal narrative text. We argue that 'scrolling back' through Facebook with participants as 'co-analysts' of their own digital traces can add to the qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) tradition. QLR and the scroll back method attend to a similar set of concerns around change over time, the depth of inquiry, and uncovering rigorous, rich life narratives. We explore limitations (especially around intentionality) and ethical challenges, while also arguing for the inclusion of these often highly personal, deep, co-constructed digital texts in qualitative longitudinal research.We also consider how the scroll back method could apply to other digital media, as the sites and applications that people user diversifies and changes over time.

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For the past 12 years, Facebook has played a significant role in mediating the lives of its users. Disclosures on the site go on to serve as intimate, co-constructed life records, albeit with unique and always-evolving affordances. The ways in which romantic relationships are mediated on the site are complex and contested: “What is the significance of articulating a romantic relationship on Facebook?” “Why do some choose to make socially and culturally critical moments like the beginning and ends of relationships visible on Facebook, whereas others (perhaps within the same relationship) do not?” “How do these practices change over time?” and “When is it time to go “Facebook official”?” In this article, we draw on qualitative research with Facebook users in their 20s in Australia and the United Kingdom who have been using the site for 5 years or more. Interviews with participants revealed that romantic relationships were central to many of their growing up narratives, and in this article, we draw out examples to discuss four kinds of (non-exclusive) practices: (1) overt relationship status disclosures, mediated through the “relationship status” affordance of the site, (2) implied relationship disclosures, mediated through an increase in images and tags featuring romantic partners, (3) the intended absence of relationship visibility, and (4) later-erased or revised relationship disclosures. We also critique the ways in which Facebook might work to produce normative “relationship traces,” privileging neat linearity, monogamy, and obfuscating (perhaps usefully, perhaps not) the messy complexity of romantic relationships.

How does music transform the contemporary teenage bedroom from the mundane (doing homework, sleeping) into a dynamic cultural and social space? Previous research has suggested that, in an exclusively female sphere, the role of music in teenage girls' bedroom culture was purely one-dimensional, part of the ideology of romance that rarely went beyond the adoration of the pop idol. More recent research not only demonstrates that both teenage boys and girls engage in bedroom culture, but also that, as a cultural form, music is integral to the creation and evolution of their youth cultural biographies, and works as a 'soundtrack' (DeNora 2000) to their social lives. In this paper I explore the dynamic relationship of young people, bedroom space and music. Through in-depth ethnography, the complexities of the musicalisation of everyday teenage life are examined using the theoretical concept of 'zoning'. Music is used by teenagers as a way of creating a specific type of atmosphere in their bedrooms. The dynamics of this are primarily controlled by the individual, depending on their age, their mood, the time of day, what other activities they are involved in and who else is occupying that space (friends or siblings for example). The creation of atmosphere through music is often spontaneous, of the moment and inter-changeable. Significantly, music is a medium through which the boundaries of public and private space are necessarily blurred. For example, music played at a high volume spills out of the bedroom zone into other rooms in the house. Music is also used as a 'prequel' and a 'sequel', facilitating getting ready for nights out on the town, setting the right tone and atmosphere. The further multi-layering of bedroom and music zones is also explored in relation to new technologies such as the Internet, which have the capacity to zone music from the physical into the virtual and back again. Finally, what is the significance of music in shaping a teenager's cultural biography? Here teenagers' influences on their musical interests are examined as evolutionary, alongside how musical biographies are translated into bedroom content.