In keeping up with the times, the MJ2 team recently attended a symposium on Youth and Social Media. The keynote speaker was Danah Boyd. She is a social media researcher for Microsoft Research New England, and her recent dissertation focused on how American teens socialize in public networks like MySpace, Facebook and more. During the presentation, Boyd made a few key points. One of her main statements that particularly interested our team was—“in the social media space, teens are just continuing their goals and desires”.
“Youth deeply want to hang out in person, their online activities are extensions of their daily activities…the hanging out process that youth perform online is deeply educational in the formation of learning social practices.”
Later, this quote took life when the panel of high school students spoke about their social media habits and attitudes. They discussed how social sites and texting affect their home and school life. One student gave an example of learning social practices when she explained “Facebook Official”. To them this is everyday language and part of their social norms. To be “Facebook Official” meant to declare your dating status on Facebook. For example, if you were dating someone, but Facebook still said you were single, then your relationship was not considered “official”. For this demographic, knowing this social practice is vital to fitting in and learning how to navigate the halls of high school. We found this to be very informative, especially with our recent interaction with this demographic out on Face Forward, a Facebook initiative that is hoping to connect some 30,000 young Catholic men and women in Central Ohio.
As we listened to her speak, we also followed along on Twitter. Here are a few highlights:
• We need to open our eyes to what is happening in online spaces – this technology sheds light into what is happening in society today.
• The Internet is a great equalizer; however, there is inequality in access, and divisions are present offline as well as online.
• Data suggests that bullying doesn’t occur more today, it is just more visible because of social networks.
• Social media has inverted privacy: it is now public by default and private through effort.
• Fear mongering has led kids to distrust talking to any adults online, including ones that can help them.
• Online networks differ from offline by persistence, replicability, searchability, scalability, invisible audiences, and collapsed contexts.
• Teenagers believe they use social media because they recognize it as a necessary part of their social world.
To find out more about Danah, visit http://www.danah.org or read part of her speech.
