Reading Response: Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites

In Boyd’s piece, she focuses on discussing certain questions that have arisen in response to the rise of the use of social network sites by teenagers in the United States as well as other countries. Some of the questions raised appear to be easily answered at first, such as “why do teenagers flock to these sites” (as many teens might answer, because “it’s cool.”) but when looked at in more depth, they raise some of the other questions, such as what exactly are they expressing on them, and are like face-to-face friendships; are they different or complementary? One of the ones I found most intriguing was what they learn from their participation, as the question of what is gained by using the internet is asked by many. A question Boyd left out which is just as important though, is what do they contribute by using these websites.

In reflecting on past readings, one thing these social networking sites enable is Warschauer’s idea of social capital, and the contribution of it. All three types of social capital are demonstrated when teenagers use websites like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster etc. The bonding of social capital occurs among groups of friends when they connect online, such as the two girls mentioned by Boyd who made fake profiles for their parents to see and had other profiles that they kept active. The bridging of social capital I felt was exemplified by the girl quoted at the start, saying how she posts things on her Xanga that she doesn’t feel she is able to share in class, because “I think if kids in school read what I have to say and how I say it, they'll want to be my friend.” This provides the opportunity for members of other social groups to reach out to her, and therefore bridge social capital. The norm related social capital is also shown in Boyd’s piece, when she describes how often when starting a profile online, teenagers will look to other profiles of their friends to see what they said, and what is acceptable to post.

In asking what exactly is it that they are expressing on these websites and if these are different or complementary to face-to-face friendships, I would have a month ago said that they are very different at least in regards to those who have not met online. That being said, after learning about virtual as fake and virtual as potential, it brings me to reconsider that question.
Boyd’s concept of networked publics was also an interesting one, as she describes a networked public as being mediated, the network mediating the interactions between members of the public. This made me think of websites like Wikipedia, or even Google chat, and if Boyd would consider them to be a networked public, as the argument could be made that there are not enough rules and boundaries for chatting that could make it considered to be mediated. Many of the parents of teenagers who are using these social networking sites would most likely also not consider them to be mediated by the network, and in need of more regulations.
Overall, while Boyd’s piece was intended to answer questions, for me it ended up raising more questions about the usage of the social networking websites and how it benefits those who use them, and perhaps also how it might provide a disservice to those who use them.

Peer Teaching Reflection

Alison and I were at first both stumped over what topic to use for our peer teaching. Finally we asked each other, what are we good at? Alison mentioned she had recently helped a friend of her dad’s set up a profile on one of the dating sites, called gofish.com. I had also had some experience with the online dating world, having tried it out myself, so we decided, why not teach others how to successful use online dating sites! Both of us had been to main dating sites such as eHarmony and match, however once we started to research, we found out there were plenty more than we realized. There was no way to compare them all, so we decided to focus on certain ones.
Since we could not afford to pay for memberships to each site, we were fortunate in that many sites allowed you to have a free trial, and several were actually free. At first we just browsed the sites to see how they worked, but then we narrowed our focus. We asked ourselves what we would want to know about online dating if we didn’t have a clue what it was about – which is how we came up with the idea of the WWW theme – Who (can you meet and how), What (can you find), and where (do you go to meet them).

We took notes on what our findings were, and then prepared the power point to guide people through. We wanted the handout to be something useful, to contain something people would want to hold onto and could use in the future should they decide to go and try online dating. While searching reviews of dating sites we came across the site that had tips for taking better photos of yourself for online profiles. Now this may seem like a silly idea, however when putting dogs and cats up for adoption, the photo you put up I know is extremely important, and there are definitely do’s and don’ts for that as well as how to write their biographies. Because of this, I thought that perhaps many people are not aware of how much of a difference a good photo or biography can mean, so we decided to give people a copy of those tips. In addition, we felt that a list of the sites we had checked out would be helpful, along with safety tips, as many people seem to underestimate the problems that can result from an unhealthy match made online. We decided then to try to find something funny for the last part of our handout, and settled on a “lingo” cheat sheet, as some of the ads we found were hard to decipher!

In reflecting on the assignment as well as reading the responses, I feel overall we did a good presentation as people seemed genuinely interested in what we had to say. I wish we had rehearsed the actual presenting more, while we had an outline we had made for presenting, we both felt that it was important to have the presentation be more conversational than strictly formatted. I felt that this may have hurt our presentation somewhat, because Alison and I both have different speaking styles, and unfortunately neither one of us has psychic capabilities, so are not able to know what the other person is about to say or tell the other person what to say. That being said, I felt that though there may have been some stumbling during the presentation, that it was overall successful, and the responses we received seemed to reflect that as well.