Why Youth Heart Social Networking discusses social networking’s origins, allure among youth, and the manner in which it is exercised.  For the purposes of my piece, I will focus chiefly on elements related to social networking creation.  Boyd evaluates the impetuses and propagators that contribute to youth writing “themselves and their communities into being.”  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.  Online site tools such as website customization maintain and cultivate youth interest in social networking behavior.  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).  The article also discusses the intricacies of creating one’s profile page with particular regard to peer dictation and influence.  Moreover, the challenge of maintaining a public life in a private, manipulative space, presents further opportunities and barriers to social networking. 

Boyd’s piece provides compelling insight in one of its minute details: youth often initially engage with social networking sites simply because “that’s where [their] friends are.”  Meaning, such as the intrinsic want for community or identity assertion, develops progressively with participation on the social networking sites.  Moreover, it appears that social networking, the entity, is not the primary object of youth attraction.  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.   Once determined, I perceive that the chief maintainers of youth interest in social networking revolve around the agents’ ability to one, explore and two, manipulate one’s identity, determined by content forms (e.g. favorite books and friends) and online social norms (e.g. number of friends).