http://tags.library.upenn.edu/tag/youth PennTags Feed http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/40735 http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/40735 <p><em>Why Youth Heart Social Networking</em> discusses social networking&rsquo;s origins, allure among youth, and the manner in which it is exercised.&nbsp; For the purposes of my piece, I will focus chiefly on elements related to social networking creation.&nbsp; Boyd evaluates the impetuses and propagators that contribute to youth writing &ldquo;themselves and their communities into being.&rdquo;&nbsp; Chief among the contributors are opportunities to engage with pre-existing friends, participation in a community atmosphere, entertainment, potential partner identification, identity assertion, and individual liberation from the confines of private life.&nbsp; Online site tools such as website customization maintain and cultivate youth interest in social networking behavior.&nbsp; Moreover, users are able to define social situations through their manipulative behaviors (e.g. customizing pages with a particular color or ladening it with a song).&nbsp; The article also discusses the intricacies of creating one&rsquo;s profile page with particular regard to peer dictation and influence.&nbsp; Moreover, the challenge of maintaining a public life in a private, manipulative space, presents further opportunities and barriers to social networking.&nbsp; <br /><br />Boyd&rsquo;s piece provides compelling insight in one of its minute details: youth often initially engage with social networking sites simply because &ldquo;that&rsquo;s where [their] friends are.&rdquo;&nbsp; Meaning, such as the intrinsic want for community or identity assertion, develops progressively with participation on the social networking sites.&nbsp; Moreover, it appears that social networking, the entity, is not the primary object of youth attraction.&nbsp; Rather, it is social networking locations such as Myspace.com or Facebook.com; such locations provide spaces for youth to determine their identity and status via evaluation of online cultural cues.&nbsp;&nbsp; Once determined, I perceive that the chief maintainers of youth interest in social networking revolve around the agents&rsquo; ability to one, explore and two, manipulate one&rsquo;s identity, determined by content forms (e.g. favorite books and friends) and online social norms (e.g. number of friends).</p> http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/project/36760 http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/project/36760 An anarchist world...a surrealist world: they are the same. -Andre Breton Jean Vigo