“Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” By Danah Boyd (2007
Danah Boyd is a highly published and respected person in social media research, a senior researcher at Microsoft, and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. What I like about her works is she is clearly happily entrenched in the intersection of social media and youths.
Boyd presents data of ethnographic studies to examine online social practices of teenagers who prefer networked publics like MySpace rather than unmediated public spaces. Boyd posits that networked public experiences are important venues for social and personal development and a safe alternative to restrictive lifestyles and cautions in today’s unmediated publics.
I agree that managing and sharing profiles and links is a learning activity that creates community with social norms and queues. When creating a profile or posting, individuals arrange their thoughts, ideas, and preferences. These tasks give pause for consideration and definition of their true selves and viewing others’ profiles is a form of vicarious learning and modeling for behaviors and ideals. Connected profiles, sharing links, and surfing the network creates larger and more diverse communities than would exist in unmediated public spaces where kids gather.
According to Boyd, networked publics are the first place most youths choose to congregate. So thank goodness they have some healthy and positive consequences. They are facilitators for self discovery, social, and cultural learning and, they compensate for the limited freedoms youths have to explore and play in real life (neighborhoods, parks, malls, etc.,)
However, what is missing from this chapter are any negative aspects of social and emotional development on networked publics. Specifically there is no mention of the uniqueness of real life experiences. A person cannot learn intuition or to read a person’s face or body language on networked publics and youths with countless friends online may learn too late they are socially inept at real life conversations.
Surely there was some data in Boyd’s studies that alluded to such issues but, they must have missed the print somehow. Columnist Pamela Paul of The New York Times describes her as a “rock star emissary from the online and offline world of teenagers” and I would have to agree.