danah boyd wrote Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life in 2007 as a part of her continuous study in social media, social interactions between society and technology, and specifically how it affects young people.

I feel boyd wrote this paper from a sociological perspective. This study on teenagers and their involvement with social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook, brings up that there are “four properties that are not typically present in face-to-face public life: persistence, searchability, exact copyability, and invisible audiences.” These four properties bring up the complications of social networking. I feel all four are important, but copybility seems to be a topic I have previously discussed in other blogs. I think persistence, searchability, and the invisible audience are the most important at this time. Personal details, activities, and interactions that are viewable online are there forever and anyone can look at it if they want to.

Here’s an interesting story that relates to all three properties. I have a Facebook and am friends with three people that were my best friends in grade school. We had not seen each other physically for nearly ten years, but we kept up on Facebook. Recently, we got together for dinner and a lot of the conversation just like this —

A: Yeah, we went to Chicago and Mexico.
L: Ooh yeah, I saw that on Facebook. I love looking at all your pictures. I’m not stalking you I swear!

Me: I had a really cute Christmas. My mom and brother came over to my place. We had a slumber party.
A: Yea, I saw that on Facebook! (pause) I swear I’m not stalking you.

There were a couple more dialogues just like that. At least we all thought it was funny!

With teenagers, I think they do need to be restricted a little more in what they put on onto the internet. I agree that they need to have a form of self-expression, but it shouldn’t be on social networking sites. Who is included on your friends list and the activities you do, show who you are and can lead to tensions that we have seen on the news in recent years.

Come to think of it, I did a research paper on bullying three years ago. From then to now, I realize that so much bullying that gets exposed in news circles stems from drama on these social media sites. It is so crazy to think that these social media sites can spark such terrible things, but also amplify them.

Overall, I think social networking is fun and usefully. We just have to remember that what we put out there is capable of being online forever and people that we might not necessarily want to see our lives probably will.