Boyd, Danah. “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life”, Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008, 119-142.
Word Count: 530
Although as surprising as it is is- even though Boyd’s essay written in 2008 is rather out of date. The history still remains the same with the start of sites like Friendster and MySpace, but the recent history that Facebook has developed took place after the publishing of this article- which is fine, just a side note.
Boyd started the essay with a quote from an 18-year-old girl, “If you’re not on Myspace, you don’t exist”, which obviously saying to this girl’s mother (the beauty of generation gaps). Our generation experienced the development of these sites in our prime (teen years)- our mindset and was altered as we started to put ourselves online, which was our existence in that context. The timeline, although it is short, starts out with the launch of Friendster in 2002, then the launch of Myspace in 2003, leading to the launch of Facebook in 2005 (which at first was indeed limited to students attending the same University, so at the time the article was written, Facebook didn’t really reach it’s peak). The whole idea of teenagers learning to participate in online profiles is the main idea of this essay, and the reasons of why and how this could have developed into the subconscious obsession it is now.
I can say that I understand the whole identity-thing on Myspace- as you could go in and alter your profile by figuring out coding, which makes it different than Facebook on an aesthetic level. I had no idea what coding even was when I was 13 or 14, but I succeeded in figuring out to make my profile how I wanted it to look with images and fonts to go with what I considered to match up to be my “online identity”. One thing I find ironic is how there was a time when Myspace was just music, then a bit of everything, but now with Facebook, Myspace is currently winding back down to it’s original purpose: music. The ability to browse through links to different profiles remains a unique phenomenon, as it portrays an endless feed of information and more so a linked community (especially for music pages/fans in Myspaces’s case).
The participatory world of the Internet is one that requires a lot of time and devotion, to make it become what it is through the people that contribute. Internet can be fixed, erased and modified, unlike a printed newspaper, or even being in a public space with a group of friends: “the audience is restricted to those present in a limited geographical radius at a given moment in time” (125).
The community that social networks provide creates an alternate form of expression. Whatever the trend may be, MySpace, Facebook, or Tumblr, it is a facet for people to not only create an online “identity” and profile, but to facilitate communication with no borders. Although the limitless can obviously lead to some odd things you find on the Internet. Will we gain privacy? Or do things become optionally more protected as we become conscious of that service? We throw ourselves into the public, so will teens in the future be even more publicized as the internet develops?
(somehow I figured out coding to choose my own fonts and such at a very young age....My myspace page, a clipping, with my favorite color yellow, oh my)
(music example, how MySpace connects small artists with the ability to market themselves online and ultimately create events and make money from song sales- it's gone back to more of a music sense- nowadays bands use their MySpace as their public group "website")
