“Social networking sites”
As Rosen (2007) points out, the speed at which electronic communication and the creation of virtual communities has taken place is rapid, and continues to accelerate. He notes that cable TV took seven years to reach fifty million viewers; MySpace, on the other hand, took only two and a half years to reach 125 million subscribers. Rosen also comments that for the older generation, the widespread use of virtual communities tends to be a matter for concern, whereas to teenagers, it is a normal and accepted part of their everyday life. Boyd (2007) describes social networks such as Facebook and MySpace as almost universally prevalent amongst teenagers in the US, and states that studies carried out in 2006 indicated that the majority saw participation in such sites as a sign of social status, of being ‘cool’. Research into social networking sites can provide valuable insights into questions of identity, peer socializing, and the concept of ‘status’ in young people’s interpersonal relationships. Boyd points out that the basis of social network sites is profiling, and the publication of personal and demographic information is essential to both the creation of self-identity online, and the formation of virtual communities based on shared interests and values. Whilst this has enabled users to reconstruct their public identities to appear more ‘cool’, maximizing some features and minimizing others, it has also, as Rosen points out, been a source of concern for parents who are worried about the amount of personal information their children are making available to remote strangers on the Web. (Maglio (2008), on the other hand, argues that the real danger of social networking sites is that