Creative Networking

MySpace was the turning point for social networking. Unlike Friendster, which arrived on the scene at about the same time, it allowed users to combine the media-rich self-expression that blogging was beginning to offer with multiple socializing tools (IM, email, comments, buddy lists, discussion boards, and chat). Suddenly, there was something seemingly made to order for teens. You could call it creative networking or social producingmaybe even collective self-expression.

Friendster, to be fair, has since added a bunch of self-expression features, but it was MySpace's embrace of both publishing and socializing toolswhen it mattered, when teens were looking for something even more social than blogsthat made it a traffic-growth record-breaker (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2. MySpace ushered in social producing and creative networking.

By mid-2005, within two years of MySpace's debut as a social-networking site, Business Week reported that MySpace was getting more page views than Google, and by early 2006, MySpace was welcoming around 200,000 new members a day. Overnight, it seemed, the site's population was bigger than the world's most-populated cities.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have described MySpace as a combination of an alternate-reality game, a nightclub with lots of beautiful people and wannabes, MTV, and a teenager's bedrooma place where, as the Times put it, "grownups are an alien species" ("Do You MySpace?" by Alex Williams, August 28, 2005).

In other words, teens took the site's name literally: It was their space. Grownupsespecially parentswere not even on the radar screen of the average MySpace user. Despite growing evidence that parents were checking out their kids' MySpace activities, young people were in denial.

Part of what made MySpace so fun for them was the very fact that parents weren't there; it was teen space, very much like their own rooms with the door closed or a party when parents are out of town. Yes, it was public, but "private" in a waysomething like when kids go off to college. And MySpace held another contradiction that teens like: "safe" (anonymous) but with just enough riskiness to make it cool, and individual but also delightfully collective.

Young people today have more awareness of the public aspect of social networking, of course. But back to its appeal...

MySpacein fact, the whole Web nowis basically whatever anybody wants it to be. And this is the key to understanding teens and Web 2.0: MySpace, social networking, and Web 2.0 in general are different experiences for everyone who uses them. Why? Because teenagers use MySpace for different things.

Profiles: The New 'Chat'

Some teens spend all their MySpace time checking comments on their profiles and commenting on their friends' profiles, noting how their photos are ranked, and where they're ranked on their friends' "Top Friends" lists. In these cases, MySpace is purely social.

Key Parenting Point

We parents can understand the social Web much better by talking with our own kids about how they use it, rather than relying on reading news stories about it.

Designing and Decorating Spaces

Other teens are into visual self-expression. How you decorate your space says a lot about you. Some teens change background music, graphics, fonts, photos, and links often; it's a lot easier than redecorating one's bedroom, and a lot more people see it.

Creating a profile is also a way to experiment with identitysomething teenagers do a lot and something psychologists say they're supposed to be doing. For some MySpace users, though, profile customization isn't just about visuals; it's also a way of showing off their technical sophistication. MySpace lets people add to their spaces software code they've written or downloaded from other sites, such as PimpMySpace.org and MySpaceCode.com. With this special code, people can add effects like glittery text, animations, clip art, and avatars (animated representations of themselves).

A Public Journal

For some MySpace users, the space is all about blogging or being a writerupdating their online journals every day, every week, or whenever the spirit moves them. It's like an online diary, which is a bit of an oxymoron, because this "diary" is far from private. Some users try to gain at least a little control over who reads their entries, however, by registering as 14- or 15-year-olds, in which case they have the option of letting only people on their friends lists see what they write (though MySpace is expected to change this policy soon, so that anyone can go private). Some parents and law-enforcement people aren't crazy about that.

Interest Communities

MySpace has all sorts of communities.

There are very personal ones, like the people on a user's friends list, and absurdly giant personal communities, like the people on the friends list of someone who's planning to win a virtual popularity contest.

There are also macro interest communities, such as the Music, Film, Books, and Games groups. Of these, the largest by far is Music, the original MySpace community. For a lot of MySpacers, that community is what the site is all about.

Then there are groups one can join to talk about things like hobbies, sports, politics, and parenting (yes, there are parenting groups on MySpace!).

Even entire high schools have created their own communities, run by a student moderator who has been designated by participants.

As with all technologies, there are an upside and a downside to online communities. Teens can learn a lot in groups about things like national politics. For example, we have a 17-year-old Nevada friend who participates in a group moderated by a young person in Washington, D.C. But negative or destructive interests can also be reinforced in an online community; see Chapters 5 and 6 for more on the risks of social networking and how it can be done safely.

Teens' blogs and social-networking spaces are just online extensions or representations of themselves and their lives, with an intriguing, unsettling dose of good ol' Internet anonymity thrown in to keep things interesting.