Danah Boyd is currently a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and simultaneously holds other positions in the education and technology fields and in her article, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life,” she talks of the recent concerns on the involvement of social media in the lives of teenagers. Boyd talks of the consumption that social networks have become, and ironically her study on the matter took place during my time in middle school and high school, amidst the Myspace craze. While I agree with many of her points in regards to interactions online versus interpersonal interactions with people in front of you, I would also argue that my initial involvement with social media sites has helped me immensely.

In middle school I had a Myspace account, much like all of my friends, but I wanted to set my online profile apart from all of the rest and began researching how to customize my profile. That is when I began to tinker with HTML coding and started to make custom layouts for my profile page. In hind sight, it was definitely taking my online profile to the next level and my knowledge and hard work would likely have been better applied elsewhere. But the simple act of having the page is what triggered me into learning basic HTML coding, and without having a Myspace, I likely wouldn’t ever have looked into coding by itself.

However, one cannot argue that social networks can be detrimental if used improperly. It is my belief that social networks should be a supplement to your social life, not a complete replacement, and I believe Boyd would agree with me in this point. But really, when was the last time you told your friend “Hey, want to come over later so we can go on Facebook together at the same time?” So instead of focusing on what’s negative about the takeover of society that these networks have created, we should be using them for functions that would benefit society as a whole, instead of turning it into a pseudo-society for those that never leave their house.

Citation: http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf