Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.24.08 | Gathering with friends and hanging out continues to be a popular teen pastime. Not surprisingly, as American teens have incorporated social media into their everyday lives, technology has started to play a role in friendship practices. In fact, for many teens, social media - and especially social network sites - have become a requirement for having a social life. As Skyler Sierra, an 18-year-old from Colorado explained, “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.”

Teens use social network sites to connect with friends and peers; through these sites, they gossip, flirt, joke, trade support, and share thoughts about their lives. By enabling interaction, technology plays a role in establishing, reinforcing, complicating, and damaging social bonds. Teens learn to navigate social media alongside peer worlds and they adopt their friendship practices to take into consideration the role that technology plays. For example, the public display of relations on social network sites forces teens to consciously articulate who they see as “Friends.” In order to be technically and socially proficient, teens must manage the social awkwardness and drama that can result from such articulation.

The chapter on “Friendship-Driven Practices” examines the role that social media plays in teen friendship, focusing mostly on friendship development and maintenance and the connected issues of status, attention, and drama that teens manage as they negotiate mediated contexts filled with classmates and peers. These friendship practices are not trivial; tremendous learning takes place as teens struggle to make sense of pervasive social and cultural structures.

“MySpacing” Photo courtesy of Luke Brassard, http://www.flickr.com/photos/brassard/138829152