“Why Youth Heart Social Networking Sites”

The article “Why Youth Heart Social Networking Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life” was written by Danah Boyd. Danah Boyd is a “Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. I am an academic and a scholar and my research examines social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society”. Basically, she knows what she is talking about.

This article is about why teenagers are so drawn to social networking sites. Boyd talks about the methodology of her research and that she used interviews, online and offline spaces, talking to teens and the perspectives and attitudes about MySpace, Facebook, etc. But she focuses mostly on MySpace. She starts off describing the two non-participants of the social networking sites. The first is “disenfranchised teens” who are those without Internet access in some way and the second is “conscientious objectors” who are, as she says it, politically minded teens who are protesting the site, agree with their parents to not use them, think they aren’t cool enough or are too cool for them and so forth. Something that I thought was interesting in Boyd’s study was that race and class were not major factors for having a profile or not. But gender has a huge influence on whether you ave a profile or not and how you use the profile.

These social networking sites started out as dating sites but then quickly to find old friends, help struggling bands connect with their fans and promote themselves, and creating fictional people for amusement. It is interesting to see just how many ways one could describe public.

This article seems out dated given that Boyd mentioned that MySpace was the main or more popular social networking site for  teenagers, but now the more popular one is Facebook, I believe. This article was about how these sites were used, although it was an interesting article, it seemed redundant. But maybe this is because I lived and am living what Boyd is writing about. She talks about creating profiles and online identity transformed into an offline identity. Why and how profiles are used and how creative teenagers have become in showing off their online personalities. Boyd goes on to mentioning private versus public and everything online is public. And what parents think about the sites, and what the teens think their parents think about the sites, etc. It seems so obvious. This article was interesting and boring at the same time.