Why Youth <3 Social Network Sites: The Role of the Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life

Danah Boyd is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communitation at NYU, 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 (danah.org). On top of these many positions, Boyd also maintains a blog. Her research centers around social media, and it’s implications on society. This reading, Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of the Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life, deals specifically with social media and it’s affects on the middle and high school aged children.

This article, which details Boyd’s research regarding social network sites, establishes a relationship between technology and the younger generation, and questions why and how social networking influences teenage social life. The study itself was conducted over a two year period and monitored teenagers on MySpace. It was determined that teenagers flock to MySpace for many reasons: to segregate themselves from adults (parents), to establish a sense of identity, and to become celebrity-like figures within their social groups.

I would agree that the influence of technology is important to understand, but for me at least, this all seems almost common sense. This is where I find interest in this study — this is all common sense for me, but maybe not the older generation. Many people who lived and participated during the MySpace days would probably read over this and thing and wonder why it’s such a big deal. Mundane tasks like making a profile and creating a “top 8” are blown into these great social acts. What we, the users, don’t realize is, stuff like this didn’t exist. We assume social media is just a regular part of life — not anything that merit’s academic research. But it does. Step back and look at it from a different perspective: to anyone outside of the internet generation, this is something honest-to-god bewildering. We’ve become assimilated to the idea of social networking without realize that there was a world that existed without it.