Keeping It Real: Youth Social Networking

While teens may appear to live their lives on social networking sites and in multiplayer games, their standing in the virtual world rarely trumps status in the real one, according to danah boyd, an expert on youth social networking (pictured above).

Boyd’s theory stems from her recent response to author Clay Shirky’s July post on whether social positioning online has any impact offline. The author of Here Comes Everybody (Penguin, 2008), Shirky, in a blog post to Talking Points Memo Café, describes the satisfaction he gets from playing World of Warcraft (WoW), for example, and notes that he’d rather spend time with a WoW master—in effect, a virtual celebrity—than with Tiger Woods.

But to boyd, Shirky’s perspective may be an exception, at least when measured against teen behavior. Citing studies conducted with Digital Youth Research at UC Berkeley, she explains that while online standings certainly have meaning to teens, these rarely transfer offline. Why? “For most teens, the status that matters is that which is conferred in everyday life,” she writes on TPM Café. “Everyday friendship and dating matter more to them than the connections that they make online.” Still, boyd acknowledges that “networked culture” can provide recognition “especially for those marginalized and ostracized people who never did and never will fit into more normative culture.”