articles+ search results

ONLINE social networks, WEBSITES, SOCIAL networks, ORGANIZATIONAL structure, and TEENAGERS

During the 2006-2007 school year, American teenagers flocked to two distinct social network sites: MySpace and Facebook. The division was by no means clean, as plenty of teens adopted both or neither. Yet, in choosing which social network site(s) to adopt, teens reproduced their everyday social networks and began marking digital turf. Their choice was neither arbitrary nor geographically delimited and distinctions existed in every school and community in which I interviewed teens. In examining teens' descriptions of who preferred MySpace from those who preferred Facebook, I found that teens often went beyond identity and taste markers, using the language of social categories, race, and class to make distinctions. The adoption patterns that unfolded between MySpace and Facebook reproduced and publicly displayed social and structural divisions that are a part of everyday teen life. The goal of this paper is to locate the digital distinctions that emerged in a broader discourse of teenage social categories, leveraging ethnographic data to make sense of how teens understood the split that was taking place. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TEENAGERS, SOCIAL groups, EMIGRATION & immigration, COLLEGE students, PUBLIC demonstrations, and COLLECTIVE behavior

In March 2006, over 50,000 teenagers walked out of school to protest immigration policies. Using MySpace, SMS, and IM, they rallied their peers. Although larger protests had occurred earlier, these teens wanted their voices to be uniquely heard. In September 2006, 700,000 + youth joined a Facebook group to protest a new feature. By vocalizing their dissent in this medium, they forced the company to make changes. These events showcase the ways that youth are leveraging social media to build networks and magnify their voice. Both examples highlight how youth engage politically in publics that matter to them and to which they have access. Using social network tools, they leverage connections to spread messages virally, creating solidarity through friends and friends-of-friends. In this paper, I analyze different political practices by youth using social network sites. I also discuss how adults' failure to recognize such political acts discourages young people's engagement. Biography: danah boyd is completing a dissertation that explores how youth engage with digital publics like myspace, LiveJournal, Xanga, and YouTube. As a highly productive graduate student, danah has had her work published in several journals, edited volumes, and conference proceedings, and has presented her work in more than twenty academic venues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ONLINE social networks, FRIENDSHIP, INTERPERSONAL relations, SOCIAL networks, SOCIAL groups, and SOCIAL network analysis

In social network sites, friendship is a feature. It allows users to acknowledge other people on the system and to have their connection permanently cemented into the structure of the system... that is, until a breakup prompts an explicit destruction of the friend relationship both on and offline. This explicit articulation requires participants to consciously consider the social complications of adding or deleting someone. While friendship may seem like a simple matter, having to publicly list who is in and who is out is not that easy. In this paper, I will examine how friendship is constructed in social network sites, how it differs from traditional understandings of friendship, and how friendship technology has complicated the negotiation of relationships between people. I will focus primarily on the friending process in Friendster and MySpace, drawing on three years of ethnographic data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ONLINE social networks, WEBSITES, COMPUTER network resources, and WEBSITE usability

A quick peek into MySpace is bound to overwhelm your senses. Animations are flying, movies are playing, music is screeching, text is blinking, and there are colors galore. The style has parallels to Geocities homepages or American teenagers' bedroom walls. Yet, what is fascinating about these pages is how they emerged. MySpace doesn't support users' modifications; it simply allows users to hack into the form code to alter the underlying HTML and CSS. As a result, a copy/paste culture has emerged as people help each other personalize their page. Taking codes from all over the web, modding them when possible, MySpace users have learned to remix code to construct a digital identity.??In this paper, we will discuss how the codes process serves as a form of structural and social remix. We will argue that copy/paste codes allow people to remix cultural artifacts to say something about themselves. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SOCIAL networks, SOCIAL interaction in youth, YOUTH psychology, PSYCHOLOGY of age groups, PEER relations, INTERPERSONAL relations, and ONLINE social networks

By engaging in public life, youth learn to interpret the cultural signals that surround them and incorporate these cultural elements into their life. For a diverse array of reasons, contemporary youth have limited access to the types of publics with which most adults grew up. As a substitute for these inaccessible publics, networked publics like MySpace are emerging to provide contemporary American youth with a necessary site for peer engagement. While networked publics provide space for various critical forms of sociality, the architecture of the sites that support networked publics is fundamentally different than the physical architecture that we take for granted in unmediated life. Persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences are all properties that today's youth must face in their public expressions. In this paper, I will discuss why youth are deeply invested in networked publics and how these networked publics alter their participation in culture. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]