Digital Young

This month, at Science in Right Words radio show, I choose to talk about the specificities that relationships between teens and youngsters present inside of technological networks. Meaning that I find, and not only me, there are also other researchers that found pretty the same things when talking about social networking at youngsters, that inside of these technological networks like email, forum, chat, Instant Messenger, SMS, Twitter, MySpace, Hi5 etc appear small groups, reinforcing face to face socialization.

For example, we all know that every user of a technological network has a free or a restrained access; either one or another, he or she has to subscribe, getting therefore a brand new identity. This identity becomes “real” in these networks through the famous ID and by different personal data that each user chooses to put on these social networks websites. There are some insightful researches about how users choose what to put and what not to put, in terms of personal data, what data to display on these social networks, at http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/ and also on the Mimi Ito’s blog, a blog that I talk about at I also read category (http://www.itofisher.com/mito/). After getting this new identity, the user starts to find people to communicate with. Either he invites his pre-existing friends (people that he knows from real life), and this is the most common case for youngsters, either he spots people having the same interests or the same passions. Why would a youngster do this? Well, I think that having as many contacts as he can, chatting with his friends on these social networks is a clear sign of social valorization in front of the others. Something like “Hey, look at me how many friends I have!”.

Now, there is something interesting about the evolution of these social tech networks: if at their debut, there was few of them (email, chat rooms), today we can talk about an extraordinary diversification, each one of them having different values, rules and communication forms. There is the new world of knowledge and cultural production. People create content of their own. As Mimi Ito named this phenomenon, we talk about “Peer-to-Peer and Many-to-Many”: “this end-to-end architecture has helped support cultures of peer-to-peer (P2P) media distribution and many-to-many (M2M) forms of communication.” (see her blog).

A prejudice that was shared by all psychologists and theorists of technologies regarding young people’s use of these social networks was that youngsters diversify contacts and that this is a risk to their personal security or that using these networks increases computer addiction etc. I don’t know where do they come with these things, but what is really funny in all this is that practice has always showed the reverse. Meaning that the actual use and the actual practice of a social network demonstrated that youngsters use in a rational way personal data, they are very careful at who and what talk about, and also they mostly “bring” their already-made friends by direct socialization inside of these social networks. They form what other two Japanese anthropologists called “telecocoons”, meaning intimate micro-communities in which they feel protected, formed by people of their own age and with the same passions / interests. This observation might reassure teens’ parents.