Social Networking

I recently read an article called ‘Why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life” by Danah Boyd.

He talks a lot about the social networking sight ‘MySpace’ and its influence and evolvement with today’s youth; I found it really interesting as I used to use MySpace when I was in secondary school and for a short time after. MySpace was the hotspot for everyone, and literally everyone I knew was on it, from friends at school and friends out of school. Social networking was the way and still is now to keep in contact with those closest, people don’t tend to use the phone as much anymore to keep in contact and to arrange to go out, people do it through social networking sites. It’s a way to keep up to date on what's going on with friends, it’s free and easy. Social networking sites seem to play an important role in teenager’s social lives. It’s a place where teens can go and work out their own identity and status. Networking sites likes MySpace and Facebook carry certain properties: persistence, search ability, exact copy ability, and invisible audience something that isn’t present in face-to-face public life. Networking sites enable to expand your curiosity and search anyone on the web, seeing other people’s personalities and profiles, but by still remaining invisible.

Social networking sites are open to everyone, race and social status don’t play a part in joining the sites, as long as you have internet connection you can join, ‘Poor urban black teens appear to be just as likely to join the site as white teens from a wealthier background'(Boyd, D 2007:3) MySpace enabled bands to join up and create their own webpage’s where they could advertise their music and have their own music uploaded for anyone to listen too, this quickly attracted the attention of indie rock musicians which created a sort of genre for the site, the site was mainly dominated by the indie/rock scene and was a place to show your individuality and personality.

Social networking sites are based around your own profile, which you create, more so for MySpace where you can edit and create and completely personal page, with many websites where you can design your MySpace profile through, or even for the more creative you could completely transform your page using html. Most other sites blocked you from being able to edit your page to the extent you could in MySpace, this wasn’t intentional, MySpace left a hole, where early adopters that they could personalize their pages by adding codes, this wasn’t simple, the site its self doesn’t offer you help on how to customize your page but their where many others that would, this for me was the best thing about this specific social networking site, being able to completely transform your page to look how you wanted it to look, and also learning at the same time about different codes and html. People where able to express their creativity and personality through a website. There is so much to explore through social networking even though other like Facebook don’t leave room your personalizing your profile you can still have your own page and be close to all your friends and really tell the world your likes and dislikes.

Boyd, D. (2007) 'Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life', MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning - Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.