Danah Boyd is a social network researcher who focuses on the effect of social media sites like Facebook and Myspace on society, mainly on young people. In this particular article, Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life (http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf), Danah brings up important aspects of the life that lead youth to social networking sites, as well as factors that result because of that shift. In the text, she talks about how the trends of teenage people having access to both the internet and social media sites was on the rise. Because of this, many teenagers felt that the ‘cool’ kids had Myspace, or equivalent, accounts and also signed on. From there, the online culture expanded and created issues like online social rules, privacy, parental controls, and safety. Dranah then finishes by saying that the social media sites are a new way for teens to experience the public, and that at some point they have to be free to do things on their own and makes mistakes in order to learn and that the old generations should give some space, carefully.

I feel that Danah makes good points about the trend toward social media sites – In fact, I was in the middle of it. Many of the issues she brings up are still issues today. She does advocate for learning from what teens are doing now, in order to help the younger generations from making mistakes. Well I feel that this is a good idea, I am curious how it would be done. Neither schools nor parents tend to be competent enough on average in the next generation’s technology to be able to properly train others. The constant shifting of social norm and online etiquette would make what ever the teachers and parents learned in their youth to be out of date. The social sites could attempt to have a tutorial, but very few people would read those, especially considering how few people pay attention to the legal notices from software.