Social Media and Youth

When examining young people’s experience of social media, it is useful to extend the notion of social media to appreciate not only the antecedents of some current youth online practices, but also the development of research concepts and frameworks related to this topic. For many researchers and media commentators the term social media refers principally, and narrowly, to the more communication and interaction oriented parts of the internet, including blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook, and microblogging sites such as Twitter, as well as to diverse platforms for sharing audiovisual material (e.g., YouTube, Flickr). The words “social media” first started to be used in 2005 and reflected an interest in the growth of relatively more recent interrelational parts of the internet, sometimes called Web 2.0 (Ito et al., 2010). Yet prior to these more recent applications, social and communicative elements of the internet predating Web 2.0 had been used by youth – for example, instant messaging (IM), email, and chat rooms. In addition, youth had developed the forerunners of some current social and communicative practices via other, older media, including texting, as well as the more general uses of mobile phones. Given the emphasis in current social media discussions on the creation and sharing of content, it is worth noting that before Web 2.0, mobile phones were being used by young people to exchange audiovisual content (e.g., with Bluetooth) as well as to take and post pictures online. Young people learned about creatively fashioning and sharing textual messages – as well as the symbolic meanings of those messages – through their use of texting and IM. Many of the research issues, concepts, and frameworks (such as understanding the place of information and communications technologies