In chapter five on Danah Boyd’s Taken Out of Context, she says “For many of the teens whom I met, participating on social network sites is a necessary part of participation in peer culture. Social network sites are one of the many forms of social media that fill in social gaps by allowing teens to connect when getting together is not possible.”
The people at Socialnomics parallel this idea in their segment Social Media Revolution. In the segment, they make claims that “By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber baby boomers,” and that “96% of them have joined a social network.” This resonates with the student Boyd interviewed who said “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.”
If this doesn’t sound like a lot, read on. Socialnomics goes on to say that although it took newspapers, radio, and television a varying number of years to reach a 50 million users, Facebook had double that number in a period of less than nine months.
What this says to me is that social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have become a main staple in the average teenage life. It is clear that peer to peer interactions have shifted into cyberspace to fill in the interactions that are being missed by a lack of social gatherings that were commonplace years earlier. At any rate, it seems that social networking has become the new peer world.
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