2: Social Media 101

What Schools Are Learning about Themselves and Young Technology Users

We are just beginning to understand the consequences of MySpace, Facebook, and their impact on our schools and students.

—Ms. Roberts, principal of Westside High School

Part of MySpace and Facebook’s initial appeal among young people was the fact that even though the vibrant lives they were forming online were so strikingly public, most of their activities, communications, and identities were largely hidden from the adult world. Starting around 2005, however, the relatively veiled world young people were building online was coming to an end. Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace brought more than corporate dollars to the social Web shindig; it also brought greater public awareness and concern about the lifestyles of the young and the digital. Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year tribute signaled the press’s intrigue with the growing role of the social Web in everyday life. Corporate America and the popular press were not the only ones who noticed young people’s move to the online world. In 2006 U.S. lawmakers turned their legislative gaze onto social-network sites.

Earlier that year a Republican pollster surveyed twenty-two Red-leaning districts in an attempt to gain a better sense of the issues that mattered most to them. The 2006 midterm elections were going to be close, and the two major political parties, Democrats and Republicans, were looking to find any edge they could in their bid to control Congress. After hearing the survey results, a small group of Republicans from the House of Representatives, calling themselves the Suburban Caucus, began molding a political strategy they believed could resonate with conservative voters. One of the issues they chose to rally around was the phenomenal rise and influence of social-network sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Convinced that this was a winning issue, members of the Suburban Caucus crafted a bill aimed squarely at social-network sites, the most popular online destination among teens. The primary aim of the Delete Online Predators Act, or DOPA, was to require any school or library that received federal E-rate discounts to block access to any Web site that “is offered by a commercial entity; permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information; permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users; elicits highly-personalized information from users; and enables communication among users.” On July 26, 2006, DOPA was brought before the whole House floor for a vote.

One of the bill’s original sponsors, Mike Fitzpatrick, a first-term Congressman from Pennsylvania, explained DOPA this way to his colleagues in the House: “Social networking sites, best known by the popular examples of MySpace, Friendster and Facebook, have literally exploded in popularity in just a few short years.” Those Web sites, the Pennsylvania Republican added, “have become a haven for online sexual predators who have made these corners of the Web their own virtual hunting ground.” Fitzpatrick and his fellow cosponsors maintained that DOPA would help parents protect school-age kids by shutting off the online pathways cyberpredators use to find minors. “When children leave the home and go to school or the public library and have access to social-networking sites, we have reason to be concerned,” Fitzpatrick told reporters.

By 2004 a decisive majority of teens, 87 percent, used the Internet. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 55 percent of teens were using social-network platforms by 2006. As the father of six children, Fitzpatrick believed that his own family biography made him especially sensitive to parental concerns about young Internet users. “People care about these issues,” Fitzpatrick warned as the bill he cosponsored made its way through the legislative process. “When I go home and go to the ball fields with my wife, this is what people want to talk about, parklands and MySpace.” But DOPA was more than anti-MySpace; it was, in many respects, anti-Web 2.0. And that, more than anything, galvanized a groundswell of opposition.

The most forceful criticisms of DOPA expressed deep concern about the collateral damage—the elimination of most interactive Web applications from public schools and libraries—the bill was certain to cause. DOPA was a sweeping piece of legislation that if passed in its original form would have barred students’ access to more than the popular social-network sites Fitzpatrick and his cosponsors labeled “a happy hunting ground for child predators.” E-mail, instant messaging, wikis, blogs, and a host of other sites that allow users to share content, ideas, and their lives with each other would have also been blocked. DOPA was striking at the very heart of what made the social Web so compelling in the eyes of many—the focus on community, collaboration, interaction, creativity, and self-expression.

Not surprisingly, social-Web enthusiasts strongly opposed DOPA. But opposition came from several corners. The American Library Association (ALA) voiced its displeasure too. Given its promotion of education and literacy, the ALA’s opposition was noteworthy. The organization cited several problems with the House’s technology legislation. Chief among them: the fact that it was too broad, ignored education efforts, and would likely exacerbate the digital divide by making it more difficult for the technology poor to participate in the social Web.

But the ALA’s greatest fear was how the sponsors of DOPA, in the rush to vilify social media, glossed over the educational potential of the social Web. Most stunning was the bill’s lack of understanding of the power and richness of social media and why it appealed to many. In its “Resolution in Support of Online Social Networks,” the ALA proclaimed that it “affirms the importance of online social networks to library users of all ages for developing and using essential information literacy skills.”

The cosponsors of DOPA were not only legislating against technological change; they were also legislating against social change. There was little doubt outside the halls of Congress that the architects of DOPA were out of synch with how people of all ages were incorporating the Web into their everyday and professional lives. The instant and continuous communication practices were more than a source of great pleasure for teens; they were a preferred means of interaction in the adult and professional worlds too. Similarly, the desire to connect with others through the Web was a way of life across a diverse age group. MySpace may have been the brand that teens built but by 2006, more adults than teens were creating profiles.

There was concern that DOPA’s claim to protect kids might actually backfire and drive young technology users underground and beyond the reach of teachers, librarians, and other adult mentors who could help them navigate the Web more effectively and safely. And while it is true that predators exist in the world of cyberspace, it is also true that they exist in the physical world. In the latter, we teach children to beware of strangers, their environment, and suspicious behavior. DOPA threatened to take away resources that could be used to aid schools and the students they serve. A more forward-thinking approach will certainly include funding digital-media literacy programs that educate and empower young people to make smart choices in their engagement with technology.

When the sponsors brought DOPA to the floor, very little research or empirical evidence was cited to substantiate their concerns about social media. Only one study of note was mentioned during the July 26 discussion on the House floor, a 2006 Department of Justice study report titled “Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later.” According to that study, one in seven youth are exposed to unwanted sexual solicitations. Additionally, one in three youth, the report states, are victims of unwanted exposure to sexual material. But the Department of Justice report offered no evidence related to the Internet behaviors of students at schools and libraries.

Remarkably, one of the main sources of evidence rallied in support of DOPA was a popular television show, Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” After presenting what he believed was some startling data from the Department of Justice report, Fitzpatrick then turned to the Dateline series. “Even more startling,” he announced, “has been the visual evidence offered to millions of Americans through the news outlets like NBC Dateline’s: ‘To Catch a Predator’ series.” At least four other supporters of DOPA mentioned “To Catch a Predator” in their floor remarks.

“To Catch a Predator” shone a primetime spotlight on the Internet’s underbelly; that place where adult predators, usually men, went looking for sexual encounters with teenage girls and boys. The show typified and even fed the public panic that made social-network sites, in the minds of some, the most dangerous of online life. Debuting in 2004, the opening episode caught eighteen men, including a priest and a college student, using the Internet to hook up with underage youth. Almost overnight, the show made online predatory behavior a national source of nonstop chatter and its host, Chris Hansen, an instant celebrity.

Members of the House of Representatives were making laws based in part on the hype and hysteria ignited by a television show that eventually came under fire for questionable tactics and ethics. One of NBC’s partners was an online vigilante group called Perverted Justice. Based in Park City, Utah, members of Perverted Justice used the Internet to lure adults into salacious online chats while pretending to be teens. Observers from the legal and law enforcement fields wondered if Perverted Justice’s tactics prevented pedophilia or promoted it. In a provocative profile of “To Catch a Predator,” Rolling Stone magazine wrote that for the members of Perverted Justice, “hunting predators is both the coolest online game they’ve ever known and a life calling.”

The premise of “To Catch a Predator”—teenagers talking to strangers online—is terribly misleading. A 2007 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 91 percent of teens interact online with people they know. Young people’s migration to the digital world is not driven by a desire to meet strangers online but rather to maintain and enliven their off-line relationships. Its flaws and misrepresentations notwithstanding, “To Catch a Predator” was an overwhelming hit on the House floor as members used it to make their case against social-network sites.

When it was finally time to vote, the bill passed by an overwhelming margin in the House, 430–15. But that was as far as DOPA would get. After the 2006 November election shifted control of Congress from Republicans to Democrats, the Web 2.0 legislation never made it to the Senate floor. DOPA may have run its course, but the debate about the steadily evolving role of the social Web in America’s schools was just beginning.

Around the same time DOPA was making its way through Congress in 2006, the MacArthur Foundation was launching a $50 million initiative to learn more about kids and digital media. In 2008 the Foundation released the details from a massive study of teen online behaviors. In a white paper titled “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project,” the collaborators write that “new media forms have altered how youth socialize and learn.” The researchers who executed the study found what those who have investigated young people’s online media behaviors consistently find—that young people spend most of their time online with the same people they interact with off-line. Breaking with popular opinion, the authors add, “Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technical skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society.” Rather than deny teenagers access to social media, educators and policy makers are advised in the report to learn more about how new technologies engage and empower young learners.

In truth a growing number of educators have been experimenting with how schools and libraries can leverage the online platforms that are a pervasive part of young people’s digital media experiences. One risk taker in the education world who embraced social media early on was Beth Evans, an associate professor and electronic services specialist at the Brooklyn College Library.

In a 2006 article published in netConnect, Evans called on educators across the country to take the plunge into the social-media pool. Doing so, she maintains, creates an opportunity to turn formal learning environments—schools, libraries, and museums—into dynamic learning environments. “Given the popularity and reach of this powerful social network, libraries have a chance,” she writes, “to be leaders on their college campuses and in the larger community by realizing the possibilities of using social-networking sites like MySpace to bring their services to the public.” She should know. In March 2006 her library became one of the first in the nation to establish a presence in MySpace. Evans’s experiment with social media made her a celebrity in the library world. In 2007 the Library Journal included her among a list of thirty individuals recognized for innovation. Eager to learn more about her experiment with MySpace, I spoke with Evans.

Evans’s decision to take Brooklyn College Library into MySpace was inspired by her teenage daughter. At some point in 2006 she began to notice that her daughter, who was fifteen years old at the time, was not responding to her e-mails. One day Evans asked her daughter why she was ignoring her e-mails. “Oh, I never see them,” her daughter replied. “I don’t really use e-mail that much anymore. I just read what people send me on MySpace.” Evans realized that her daughter was part of the next wave of young technology users, and that if her daughter was not using e-mail, there was a good chance that her daughter’s friends were not using it either. She was right. A 2005 study of teens and their online communication behaviors found that they prefer applications like text and instant messaging to e-mail by a wide margin. The study writes, “When asked about which modes of communication they use most often when communicating with friends, online teens consistently choose IM over email.” The report adds that “many teens disparage email as something for ‘old people.’”

Evans described the conversation with her daughter as “one of those lightbulb moments.” Around the same time, she also began to notice the rising number of students using computers in her library to frequent online destinations like Facebook and MySpace. In both her personal and professional life she was witnessing, as she writes, how young people “stay tuned to their computers, managing their stables of friends and peeking into everyone’s social space.” Evans told me that her library “went to social networks because that’s where we felt like we could find students.” It was an opportunity for the library to interact more directly with young learners. Today, the idea that a library might exist in an online community is not unusual at all. It seems as if everybody—corporations, organizations, universities, TV networks, and even major contenders for the presidency of the United States—are using social media to directly engage their constituents. But back in March 2006 it was an especially outside-the-box idea for a university library to go into MySpace. In 2006 Facebook did not permit groups to build a profile.

Evans did not have enormous expectations during Brooklyn College Library’s initial journey into social-network sites. The truth is that she did not know what to expect. “I thought it would energize us and frankly be fun to do,” she said.

From the very beginning, many of Evans’s colleagues in New York and around the country watched with a mix of intrigue and indecision as the librarian began experimenting with social media. Some in the library community asked Evans if Brooklyn College Library’s move into MySpace led to a lot of reference questions from patrons. Evans admitted to me, “I never really thought it would be a huge avenue for that and it really hasn’t been.” Her library uses MySpace to make announcements, unsolicited library instructions, and invitations for those who have signed up as friends. Not too long after building a MySpace profile for her library, Evans began to grasp more fully the power and potential of social media. Evans said she never could have anticipated the opportunities the move into social media has created. “When I look at it now,” she told me, “I think, Wow, it makes a lot of sense that this is happening.”

I asked Evans specifically what social sites have done for the Brooklyn College Library. As she explained how MySpace has “connected us with people like authors, artists, and musicians, usually people involved in culture,” I could not help but notice the excitement in her voice. Evans told me that libraries and the people who work in them tend to be passive by nature.

“Usually,” she reminded me, “librarians may answer a patron’s reference question and then that’s it. We wait until the next patron comes along with a question.”

Social media, she insisted, encourages a much more assertive approach to managing a library. According to Evans, “being in MySpace is like living in the community.” And being a part of a much larger community enlivens her library with a greater sense of purpose.

One example Evans shared with me illuminates how participation in social media can help educational institutions literally reimagine their role in the community. Not long after joining MySpace, Brooklyn College Library was approached by an African art collector from England who asked if he could add them as a friend. The collector also indicated that he was going to be in New York and was interested in talking about his rare collection of African art at BCL. “I realized that this was a great opportunity to do something neat for the community,” Evans said. Under its more traditional tendencies the library would have never been able to identify the British art collector. In addition to posting flyers the library was able to promote the event by using MySpace to link the art collector to its community of friends. It was an educational experience in more ways than one. “Usually program planning begins well ahead of an event date,” Evans confessed. “For example, if we want to do a program in the fall, we start planning several months ahead of time.” Amazingly, planning for the African art program took place in about two weeks, an unprecedented achievement for the library and one made possible by the social Web.

Overall, Evans’s MySpace experiment has exceeded her wildest dreams. Still, she reminded me that maintaining an active presence in the social-media world is a lot of work and one of the reasons many professional librarians choose not to do it. A day or so after we spoke by phone, Evans elaborated on this point by e-mail.

“One genuine concern librarians have expressed about maintaining a presence in a social network,” she explained in her e-mail, “is that it becomes one more thing we have to do, one more place to be, and another stretching of scarce resources.”

For many of her colleagues, Evans believes, “the question becomes, if we go on MySpace, what do we stop doing?” In the practical world this zero-sum approach makes sense. Still, this logic fails to consider the vitality and wonderful upside to social media.

Evans and her library had one distinct advantage that made the decision to go into social-network sites less of a risk—the older community of students they serve. Schools serving a younger population are steadfast in their near-universal decision to avoid social media like the plague. For now, fears about online predators, naïve computer users, misuse of the Internet for personal rather than educational purposes, and quite frankly a lack of information drives the decision to block sites like My-Space and Facebook on school grounds.

But even as schools deny students the opportunity to use the social Web to interact with their peers, they have not been able to ignore young people’s historic move online. Social-network sites, much to the chagrin of educators, are a pervasive presence in the lives of schools.

On a hot summer day I visited Ms. Roberts, principal of Westside High School, an affluent and high-performing public school. The summer break left the hallways vacant, polished, and noticeably quiet. Ms. Roberts and I sat down at a conference table in her office, which was spacious and strikingly neat. Our conversation opened with the topic of technology and the presence of computers at Westside High. “Even though we do not put a computer in the hands of every student, we are technology rich,” Ms. Roberts told me. At the time of our meeting, most of the classrooms, computer labs, and two libraries at Westside were outfitted with new or recently upgraded computers. Westside was also in the early stages of going wireless. The vast majority of the students were well acquainted with computers, technology, and the Internet. “Most of the kids enjoy good access to computers and technology at home,” Ms. Roberts noted.

When the subject of MySpace and Facebook arose, Ms. Roberts admitted that schools are late to the party. “We are just beginning to understand the consequences of these sites and their impact on our schools and students,” she said. Like most schools around the country, Westside blocks access to popular social-network sites. Still, schools are confronting a whole new generation of challenges as they come face-to-face with the lifestyles of the young and the digital. Young people’s persistent and innovative engagement with technology is forcing educators across the country to rethink a host of issues including, for instance, the role of technology in curriculum design, the personal use of technology on campus (i.e., MP3 players, cell phones), and what digital media and technology means, more generally, for the social, emotional, and educational development of school-age students.

“The technology is here and it’s not going away,” Ms. Roberts told me during our meeting. One of the chief challenges facing schools specifically, and society more generally, is teaching young people how to successfully navigate the digital world they are so deeply immersed in. “If we don’t teach our children about using technology responsibly, then we are failing an important part of our mission as educators,” Ms. Roberts said. She likened the need for educating our youth about technology to the same kind of education we offer them in other areas of their academic and personal development.

As a member of a technology task force in a K–8th-grade school, I have participated in a number of revealing conversations with educators about young technology users. Along with addressing technology matters related to infrastructure and curriculum design, our task force has made a commitment to engaging the wider community—students, staff, and parents—about digital citizenship. That is, how to encourage students to think seriously about what it means to be a member of an online community, a citizen in the digital age.

Ms. Roberts is part of a growing chorus of educators who believe that rather than battle with kids over the technologies that they embrace, schools need to engage them in more productive ways. “Just like we teach them how to read and write, we need to teach them how to use MySpace and other digital tools more responsibly,” she said. In very clear-spoken terms, the veteran principal told me, “If we leave our kids to deal with these issues on their own, then we are setting them up for failure.”

Unfortunately, I learned that this is exactly what is happening to young students who grow up in neighborhoods and schools that lack the resources to provide the education and instruction that can help them make better choices as they embrace digital media.

In addition to talking with educators in technology-rich schools, I also spent some time with an incredible group of school administrators and teachers working in less affluent schools. One of my first meetings took place at Southside High School, home to students living primarily in working-class households. The school’s head principal, Mr. Reed, greeted me with a warm smile and a firm handshake.

When I asked Mr. Reed about the state of computers in his school, he indicated that they were located in some of the classrooms as well as a computer lab. Southside is far from technology rich. Unlike its more affluent counterpart, Westside, there were no immediate plans to make Southside wireless. In fact, some of the hardware is dated and that limits what teachers and students can do with the computers. At least three teachers told me that the poor state of the equipment in the classroom was actually more of a disincentive for them and their students. One teacher admitted, “If my students finish their assignment before class ends, I’ll give them the option of listening to their MP3 player or getting on the computer. Most choose to listen to music because the kinds of things they want to do on the computer are not possible with the equipment in my classroom.”

Nevertheless, around the country schools like Southside offer their students access to computers and the Internet. The technology tipping point for many of America’s poorest schools began in 1995. That was around the time that the Clinton administration made connecting the nation’s schools to the Internet, especially those in urban and rural areas, a top priority.

In his 1996 State of the Union address Clinton explained his administration’s technology vision this way: “In our schools, every classroom in America must be connected to the information superhighway with computers and good software and well-trained teachers.” The administration’s ultimate goal was an ambitious $2 billion project that would have “every classroom and every library in the entire United States by the year 2000” connected to the Internet. Roughly two years earlier the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) conducted what at the time was the federal government’s most extensive investigation of technology and social inequality.

In its first official report, “Falling through the Net: A Survey of the ‘Have Nots’ in Rural and Urban America,” the NTIA wrote that “in essence, information ‘have nots’ are disproportionately found in this country’s rural areas and its central cities.” The Clinton administration’s determined approach to democratize access to the Web was a response to what researchers, policy wonks, and lawmakers began to describe as the “digital divide,” the formation of the technology rich and technology poor.

Not everyone, however, agrees that technology is the solution to improving the educational performance and life chances of the population the NTIA calls the “information disadvantaged.” As the Clinton administration moved to connect schools to the Web, a debate ensued. Critics questioned the merits of upgrading America’s schools with computers and the Internet when reading and math levels were steadily plunging downward in many poor school districts. An education scholar who also happened to be a vocal critic of wiring every classroom in America called the idea “the romance with the machine,” which, in his words, is “driven by this dream of a magical solution that does not exist.” Despite concerns like these, by the time the Clinton administration left the White House in January 2001, the technological capabilities of public schools in the United States had been massively upgraded.

In 1995 a little more than half, or 56 percent, of white students used computers in school compared to 39 percent of African American students. The U.S. Department of Education found that 3 percent of public-school instructional rooms had Internet access in 1994. Six years later, more than three-fourths, or 77 percent, of public schools enjoyed access to the Internet. It was a dramatic turnaround, one that utterly transformed the technology environment of schoolchildren living in poor and working-class neighborhoods. For these students, schools became the most reliable opportunity to use computers and go online.

Most academic and government study’s argued that barriers to the online world were principally economic and educational, which meant inevitably that race was not too far from the mix. In reality the barriers to the new media and technology landscape for African American and Latino communities were always more complex than the original “digital divide” narrative suggested. As stand-alone variables, household income, education, or even race do little to fully explain the online experiences of blacks and Latinos. However, when you add age into the equation, the complex adoption trends in black and Latino communities turn clearer. Compared to their older counterparts, young blacks and Latinos are significantly more likely to participate in the online world. They are going online from a mix of places—school, public libraries, and in a surging number of cases, home. Actually, the variation in Internet use within racial and ethnic groups is striking. Nowhere is this more evident than with Latinos, the fastest-growing population in America. Whereas 89 percent of college-educated Latinos go online, only 31 percent of Latinos without a high school diploma go online. In the United States, English-dominant Latinos, 78 percent, are significantly more likely than Spanish-language Latinos, 32 percent, to go online.

Since the NTIA’s initial reporting on the digital divide, a more diverse population of teens have found their way to computers and the electronic spaces made possible by the Web. Some of the most heavily recognized barriers to accessing the Web—race, household income, and parental education—are not as invincible as they once seemed. For instance, in a 2005 survey by Pew a majority of black and Latino teens, 77 and 89 percent, respectively, reported going online. Further, in households reporting less than $30,000 in annual family income, nearly three-fourths, or 73 percent, of teens go online. And in households where parents’ educational attainment is a high school diploma or less, nearly three-fourths of teens, or 73 percent, said they go online. Statistical analysis of computer and Internet use by K–12 students from the U.S. Department of Education indicates that youth from poor- and modest-income homes are going online, principally from school.

The contours of the digital divide have grown more complex since 1995. As far back as the late 1990s, when policy advocates, politicians, and researchers were focusing on the access divide, technology activists called for action against what is referred to as the “participation divide.” Access was only half the battle, technology activists warned. Newcomers to the Web also need technology training and education.

In retrospect, fixing the technology access problem was relatively easy as a combination of federal policies, grants, and corporate initiatives made computers and the Internet more widely available than ever before. Young people from poor- and modest-income households are accessing the Internet through schools and public libraries. Genuinely robust participation in digital publics, however, demands more than casual or occasional access to the Internet. As digital media technology evolves into a dynamic form of literacy, personal expression, and involvement in civic life, the participation gap between poor and affluent kids grows more urgent.

Since it began documenting American’s online activities, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has considered a wide array of factors—race, gender, income, education, and region, just to name a few. When it comes to understanding what people do online, no factor is more powerful than access to broadband. Individuals living in broadband homes gain access to the Web’s full potential. And yet the broadband homes, offices, and college dormitories that facilitate substantial involvement in computer-mediated communities are not universally available to all. Ultimately, this means that the digital lifestyle and what it offers young technology users—new media literacy, empowerment, social ties, and access to social and professional networks—is not available to all. So, even as a greater diversity of young people is online, not all digital experiences are created equal.

Ten years ago the majority of the students attending Southside High would have been unable to participate in the social Web. But these young people maintain relatively active lives online, especially in digital hot spots like MySpace. In a series of focus groups with tenth graders from Southside, we learned a lot about their engagement with social-network sites and mobile phones. One of the unintended outcomes of the digital divide debate is the tendency to overlook the active lives that poor and working-class youth maintain online. When Pew conducted its first study of teens’ use of social-network sites in 2006, it found that black and Latino youth were slightly more likely to have personal profiles and create content for the Web than their white counterparts. The students we met from Southside are enthusiastic about the technologies that afford opportunities to express themselves and connect to each other. In addition to the Web, they were all using mobile phones. Still, they struggle against formidable odds. In addition to lacking access to broadband at home, youth from low-income households, importantly, lack access to the networks of informal education and support that make navigating the challenges of digital citizenship more manageable.

During my meeting with Mr. Reed, I gained a clearer view of how the digital divide has grown more complex and how social media shapes life at his school. One particular and especially instructive case involved an incident of cyberbullying, a term used to describe the mean-spirited and reputation attacks that occur online. Cyberbullying comes in various forms and may include, for example, someone taking a private correspondence—an e-mail or text message—and posting it so that others can see. In other instances, it may involve using the Internet to spread rumors or embarrassing pictures about someone. The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that almost one-third, or 32 percent, of teens say that they have experienced some form of online bullying. In that same survey Pew also found that teenage girls are more likely than teenage boys to be harassed online. “Older girls [15–17] in particular,” Pew writes, “are more likely to report being bullied than any other age and gender group.” In all of the schools I have visited, affluent or not, episodes of cyberbullying are common.

Mr. Reed explained how one Southside student came under attack from a group of young women who used the Web to spread rumors about her personal life. Though they turned out to be untrue, the rumors were extremely hurtful and caused the young victim a tremendous amount of emotional pain and stress. Hopeful that the attacks would fade away, the young woman initially said nothing about the incident to any of the adult figures in her life. But the rumors persisted. Desperate for some support, she finally approached one of her teachers and told her what was happening. After hearing about the young woman’s predicament, the teacher decided to take the matter to one of the school’s assistant principals. Eventually, the matter made its way to Mr. Reed.

“The young girl was in tears when she came to my office,” the principal told me. “It was clear that she had been hurt and had no means of stopping the attacks.” Her teacher noted that she seemed withdrawn and lonely. The young woman explained that her reputation had been ruined and that the rumors had isolated her from the other students. Even more tragic was the fact that she could not turn to anyone at home about the matter. Her grandmother was her legal guardian but, like many older Americans, was completely oblivious to the Web and her granddaughter’s online activities.

The grandmother’s lack of knowledge about social media meant that she was not a viable source of support for her granddaughter in this instance. After holding a meeting with the young student and her grandmother, Mr. Reed realized that the older guardian had no clue about MySpace or that her granddaughter used it. The lack of communication within their household about the use of digital technology and social media forced the teenager to confront the matter on her own. By the time her teachers and guardian became aware of the nature and severity of the attacks, it was too late; the young woman’s mental and emotional state had already been damaged.

I tell the story of the young woman’s situation at Southside High in order to illuminate how youth in less affluent communities are severely underserved when it comes to gaining greater knowledge and strategies for navigating the social consequences of the social Web. Unlike their more affluent counterparts, the schools in economically challenged communities do not have the resources to offer classes or bring in an outside expert to discuss the latest developments in new media. Making matters worse is the fact that poor schools rarely if ever benefit from the social capital found in more affluent schools. Social capital in this instance refers to the intangible benefits that usually come in the form of parents who use their professional and informal networks to enrich a school’s learning environment.

Let me share an example from my own personal experience that illustrates the vast advantages more affluent schools possess compared to their less affluent counterparts. Earlier in this chapter I mentioned my involvement with a technology task force at a K–8th-grade school. Practically all of the parents at this small private school are college educated and represent a diverse community of successful professionals, entrepreneurs, and active figures in community and civic life, volunteer work, and board of directorships. The hidden benefits of self-employment, high-income occupations, professional prestige, flexible work schedules, or a stay-at-home parent allows a large percentage of parents to devote significant time and effort to the school in the form of committee and volunteer work.

In 2005 the parent council, along with the school’s headmaster and communications director, noticed that the use of technology, especially among the older students, was undergoing a notable change. Translation: many of the students discovered MySpace and Facebook. Suddenly, parents of seventh and eighth graders found themselves confronted by the sticky appeal of two of the Internet’s fastest growing communities. If you have ever talked with a parent whose teenage son or daughter has developed an intense love for MySpace or Facebook, you may notice the “deer in the headlights stare” some of them develop. The parent council and administrators agreed that everyone at the school—students, staff, and parents—needed to be educated about social media and teens’ technology behaviors. One of the first things the school did was tap the rich informal networks parents in the school have cultivated. Doing so brought the school into contact with online innovators as well as business and thought leaders. Next, the school invited an Internet security officer from a local firm to deliver a presentation to parents and students about the Internet.

Among other things, the officer talked about the need for student’s to exercise greater caution in their online activities and the kinds of personal information they post online. Within days of the security officer’s presentation, parents began using e-mail to circulate various articles and reports about teen life online, creating a lively yet informal community of dialogue and learning that gave them more information and the confidence to discuss the Web with their children. The officer’s comments struck a chord with many present that evening. One parent explained to me that after attending the program her fifth-grade daughter told her, “I don’t think I want to get on MySpace.” The mother’s reply: “Good, because I don’t want you to use it either.” Even so, a growing number of parents at the school gave their kids consent to create a personal profile.

One mom, for example, told me that after discussing it with a few people she decided to allow her teenage daughter to use Facebook. She was afraid that denying her daughter access would drive her underground. The one caveat: the mother would be able to access her daughter’s profile. This, I learned, is a common practice. A mother of a fifteen-year-old boy who recently started using Facebook told me that she occasionally looks at his page. A 2007 report by Pew writes that “41% of today’s teens believe that their parents monitor them after they’ve gone online.” This is not unusual. Back in the day, parents snooped around in their children’s bedrooms looking for clues about troubling behavior they may have suspected. What are parents looking for in MySpace and Facebook? Well, a number of the parents I spoke with are not concerned about cyberpredators or the content their children are downloading. Instead, many parents see popular social sites as a way to learn more about the circle of friends their children develop.

Around the time many young people begin expressing an interest in social-network sites is also the time in their lives when they begin to desire greater autonomy from their parents. Peers, during this period, become extremely influential forces in the lives of young teens. Many parents see social sites as a way to peek into their children’s personal communities in order to learn more about them and, more important, their peers. As one mom told me, “I’ve learned a lot about the kids my son hangs out with—their interests, activities, and even the people they hang out with.”

In schools where the social capital, economic resources, and technology are relatively abundant, students, parents, and staff benefit from an environment that can nourish active dialogue and learning. In this instance the learning is mostly informal and outside the classroom, which, in all likelihood, makes it more accessible and possibly more effective. Meanwhile, students and their parents are supplied knowledge and information that can be used to make good decisions about technology usage. The crucial point is not that less affluent schools and parents do not care about technology and its consequences in the lives of the young people they teach and love. But rather that the opportunities to build this kind of informal environment of community and learning are much more challenging when the resources, social and economic, are scarce.

I specifically asked principals and teachers from less affluent schools about education programs related to technology. Four principals, for example, noted that they simply did not have the resources to bring in an outside expert. In addition, the school officials openly wondered to what extent parents from poor and working-class households had substantial enough knowledge about technology and social media to develop any real interests in attending an evening program devoted to the topic. Even though young people growing up in poor and working-class households are gaining more access to computers and the Internet, it is seldom at home and, consequently, seldom under the supervision of a parent or guardian. And parents who are not around when their children go online are less likely to engage them about the perils and possibilities of the social Web.

Another interesting way social media is impacting schools is the growing number of teachers who maintain active lives on MySpace and Facebook. Tweens and teens are not the only ones drawn to the world of social media or the practice of using the Web to share their lives with peers. Starting around 2006, the presence of adults in digital spaces like MySpace and Facebook began to increase sharply. A 2006 report by comScore Media Metrix, a digital media measurement company, notes that “there is a misconception that social networking is the exclusive domain of teenagers, but . . . the appeal of social networking sites is far broader.” A comScore analysis reported that by 2006 more than two-thirds of MySpace visitors were age twenty-five or older. Once a niche for the college crowd, Facebook opened up to anyone with an e-mail address in 2006, setting off a rapid pace of growth. The percentage of people using Facebook between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four grew by 181 percent between May 2006 and May 2007, according to comScore.

Increasingly, teachers and students from the same school are maintaining active lives in the same online spaces. A number of teachers told me that their students have looked them up online. This was the case with Marvin, a young teacher I met. His students found him online and requested to be friends with him. While Marvin interacts with some of his students online, other teachers told me that they were uncomfortable doing this. In fact, one young teacher I spoke with reset her profile to private after learning that a couple of eighth-grade students found her Web page. She wanted to keep her personal life away from her students. In recent years there have been a number of news stories about teachers getting into trouble because of pictures and other materials they have posted online. These are issues that many of us are likely to have to confront as digital media and communication technology makes the line between public and private or personal and professional less distinguishable.

In ways both subtle and palpable, digital technology is breaking down traditional structures of power and hierarchy. Certainly, the line that separates teachers from students can be rendered much blurrier in the “anytime, anywhere” communication environment we live in today. Computer-mediated communication makes it more possible than ever before for a teacher and a student to carry on a conversation or develop a relationship away from school. Interaction in the form of e-mail, social-network sites, or an instant message tends to be more casual and personal than the interaction that is likely to take place at school.

One principal that I spoke with, Ms. White, indicated that this issue is on her radar. “Whenever I interview a prospective teacher for my school, I make it a point to ask them if they have a MySpace or Facebook page,” she said. As our conversation shifted to the topic of social media and how it invades day-to-day life in her school, Ms. White grew more animated.

“I can’t tell you how many teachers that I hire, especially among the younger ones, that have a MySpace or Facebook account.” She added, “Now it’s alien to me, but they do [maintain active lives online] and I know there is an appropriate way to do that.”

Her greatest concern is not that teachers are active online; she realizes that is rapidly becoming the norm. What does concern her, however, is whether or not teachers understand the personal and professional risks associated with the kind of exposure made possible in Web-based communities.

Concerns about teachers participating in popular social-network sites are certainly not unique to the schools I visited. A growing number of teacher organizations and unions are beginning to inform their members about the potential perils of maintaining active lives on high-traffic social-network sites. A few days after we met, one instructor sent me an article from a teacher’s employee union Web site imploring its members to avoid interacting with their students in places like MySpace and Facebook. This particular teacher and some of his colleagues are actively involved in social-community sites and were struck by the urgent warnings their union issued about online “friending.”

The union offered up the following example of a post that appeared on a third-grade teacher’s MySpace page as a kind of cautionary technology tale: “Why are you holding out on the [city name] girls. You need to come down here this weekend for a ladies night full of shots, getting kicked out of bars and puking, but not necessarily in that order.” Allegedly, the young teacher’s principal reprimanded her after learning about the post. Teachers, the union warned, should maintain the same kinds of boundaries online that are established in the classroom. Specifically, teachers are to “avoid adding students to your ‘friend’ or ‘buddy’ list, and don’t post comments on students’ profiles.” Content posted by a teacher on a student profile, the union’s Web site maintains, “could prompt allegations of misconduct, which can lead to parent grievances or negative employment actions . . . and criminal charges may be filed.”

There are certainly risks involved in these kinds of interactions. But traditional boundaries and hierarchies are challenged and the possibilities for new relationships arise. Evidence of this is happening all around us as voters talk directly to candidates, newspaper readers to news editors, and students to teachers, just to name a few examples.

When I raised the issue of teachers using social media with Ms. Roberts, she told me that the real challenge is education—educating students, staff, and parents about the use of digital media. “It’s a great tool, when it’s used responsibly,” she noted. In her view, part of the educational mission of schools today should include engaging their students about technology. “Young students,” she urged, “need to know that when you send an e-mail, it’s not confidential. When you post something on MySpace, you can’t assume it’s confidential.” It is a lesson that adults and professionals must put to practice too.

“This,” Ms. Roberts explained to me, “is the education piece,” a part of the technology learning curve she believes that most schools are beginning to grasp. She suggested that handling this piece, though certainly not easy, is growing more manageable as a result of the educational initiatives schools like hers are actively involved in. But it is the other piece, what Ms. Roberts called “the administrative piece,” that she and her fellow education leaders around the nation, she confided, “have no immediate solution for.”

Much to their dismay, school administrators find themselves dealing with matters and conflicts that take place among students in the online environment. Social media is forcing school administrators to confront a relatively unprecedented dilemma: trying to determine where their disciplinary authority over students begins and ends in a teen culture fully immersed in the online world. As Ms. Roberts readily acknowledged when we talked, “Schools can’t punish for what happens at home.” But what about what happens online? Referring to social media, Ms. Roberts said, “When kids get into disagreements via MySpace or Facebook, it often spills over into the schools.” Society as a whole is beginning to reckon with the social consequences of young people’s persistent engagement with digital technology and how it is rewriting some of the most taken-for-granted rules of everyday life. In this instance the rules involve the disciplinary reach of school administrators.

Most school districts establish strict codes of conduct that individuals involved in student organizations and teams sports are expected to honor. “Participation in extracurricular activities,” one principal told me, “is not a right but a privilege that requires good conduct.” But assessing the conduct of students has become much more complex in today’s environment. In a steady growing number of cases around the country, young people’s everyday lives, off-campus conduct, and indiscretions are appearing online. But when do the online and in most cases off-campus activities of students become a matter that requires the attention of school officials? Several of the principals I spoke with acknowledge that this is a growing area of concern for them and one that the education world is struggling to adequately resolve.

Ms. Roberts shared an incident with me that is likely quite familiar to you by now. One evening students from her school attended a party held at the home of a fellow student. Not surprisingly, in the age of phone and pocket-size digital cameras, many pictures were snapped that evening. But one set of photos eventually lead to controversy. That evening someone took pictures of members from one of the varsity team sports drinking beer, a clear violation of school rules, not to mention federal underage drinking laws. A few days later those pictures surfaced on the Internet and were brought to the attention of the team’s lead sponsor. Upset by the pictures, the sponsor consulted with the principal and then recommended suspending the violators for three to four weeks. But what the sponsor and principal viewed as an obvious violation of school rules that required disciplinary action turned tense.

“The parents,” Ms. Roberts told me, “were very resistant to any disciplining of their children by the sponsor because it was outside of the school and, in their view, beyond our authority.” But the principal believed that the school district had a very firm extracurricular code of conduct, especially when underage drinking is involved. Ms. Roberts noted that even when students are off campus, they are still representatives of the school and thus subject to the codes and standards that come with participation in extracurricular activities. Despite protest from the parents, the principal approved the sponsors’ recommended suspension.

Making these kinds of judgments about discipline are growing more common for school administrators. However, several of the school officials that I spoke with are uncomfortable with addressing student behavior in online environments. While Ms. Roberts readily acknowledges that the lifestyles of the young and the digital are an unavoidable aspect of her school’s life, the principal maintains that she and her staff are not obsessed with students’ online activities. “I want you to know,” she stressed to me, “that we don’t sit down and go to MySpace or Facebook. We are way too busy to do that. We handle that when it comes to our attention.”

A young affable middle school teacher I met talked frankly about his students’ obsession with social-network sites. “They live for MySpace,” Mr. Walker told me. He taught in a school that was home to the children of working-class black and Latino families. Mr. Walker was delighted to see that his students were using the Web. Still, he was troubled by some of their online behavior. During our conversation he suggested that I see for myself the kinds of online identities his students were creating.

Instantly, I noticed some interesting patterns regarding how this community of teens used social-network sites. In nearly all of the twenty or so profiles that Mr. Walker and I looked at, the computer-mediated identities were incredibly theatrical and aspirational. Specifically, his students were living out many of their fantasies through the identities they created on the Web. Among other things, students exaggerated their incomes, occupations, and social statuses.

Much of the “identity work” in the pages Mr. Walker shared with me drew inspiration from hip-hop culture. The young men and women used popular rap tunes to establish a mood and milieu for the online identities they assume in MySpace. Music, for decades, has been a crucial aspect of the self-creation practices of young people. In addition to uploading their favorite rap songs, teens also upload pictures and videos of their favorite hip-hop performers. As we scanned the contents of MySpace profiles, Mr. Walker noted how many of his students were striving to appear older. This, it turns out, is a recurring tendency in young people’s online behavior. A study published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology found that while most teens rarely pretended to be someone else while participating in chat rooms, IM, and social sites, 86 percent of teens did pretend to be older online. Mr. Walker pointed out several instances of his students inflating the age listed on their profiles. One thirteen-year-old student, for example, listed his age as fifteen. Likewise, a fourteen-year-old pupil listed her age as sixteen. Other examples of teens trying to appear older include posing with cigarettes and alcoholic beverages.

In most instances, though, the desire for a more mature persona took on a decidedly sexualized tone, a form of identity work that worried Mr. Walker. There is nothing particularly new about teens expressing an interest in their sexuality. In fact, teens have long associated sexuality with greater independence, personal control, and a path to adulthood. Many adolescent researchers believe that teens’ exploration of sexuality occurs during a period of immense physical, hormonal, social, and emotional turbulence. Not surprisingly, teens use MySpace to negotiate this period of change.

Teenagers may not own much but they develop a very early and clever sense of the most important thing they will ever own: their bodies. In MySpace, teens take great pride in their rapidly changing bodies and use them quite literally to articulate what I call the “aspirational self.” The incessant desire to control and use their bodies as a source of pleasure and personal expression is a key theme in young people’s journey toward greater social, emotional, and physical maturity. In the MySpace universe this is realized in spectacular fashion.

The young women express their sexuality in ways that reinforce many of the strict codes of femininity in popular media culture. They flirt with the camera and strike poses that are simultaneously provocative and submissive. The young men flirt too. Teenage boys play to the gaze of their peers and subscribe to tried and true notions of masculinity. In MySpace, for example, they perform their gender and sexual prowess through an assortment of hypermasculine poses that proudly displays bare chests, meticulously placed tattoos, and flexed muscles.

On the one hand, these are expressions of their newly found personal freedom as teens, increasingly aware of their maturing bodies and beginning to mark out territory to explore their sexual selves. On the other hand, these expressions are influenced by the meticulously packaged roles that the entertainment industries sell to young people. Typically, these roles are more limiting than liberating, imprisoning instead of empowering.

While doing research for this book yet another digital-media-based buzz word entered our vocabulary—sexting. This is a reference, primarily, to teens who use their mobile phones to send nude or partially nude photos to their boyfriends and girlfriends. Such acts are usually restricted to the more relatively private domain of mobile phones. And yet an image sent to a friend or a companion can eventually end up online or, as one sixteen-year-old girl and her family discovered, printed, distributed, and in the hands of school officials. A sexting incident in a Pennsylvania high school involving fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls and sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys led to charges of disseminating and possessing child pornography. While sexting generates sensational news headlines, the coverage does very little to enhance our understanding of the choices young people make in their use of technology.

First, most teens do not engage in sexting. Second, rather than prosecuting young people, we need to use these as “teachable moments” about technology, sexuality, and intimacy. Teens have long expressed fascination with their bodies and their sexuality. And over the years, the images and narratives in youth-oriented media have grown increasingly sexual. A 2005 study found that between 1998 and 2005, the number of sexual scenes on television nearly doubled. In the age of social and mobile media, teens’ exploration with sexuality will likely become even more curious and adventurous but not necessarily treacherous. The ability to seek out more information and even exchange their thoughts about sexuality creates possibilities for learning how to manage and express their sexual identities in ways that are both safe and healthy.

In the end, most of what I observed was playful and not profane; indeed, exploratory rather than explicit. These teens were using MySpace to play with the sexual and gender identities that are familiar to them and their peers. This explains why many of the young women and men posted pictures of celebrity rappers, singers, and athletes alongside images of themselves. The paranoia surrounding social networking notwithstanding, these environments can actually be a safe place for young people to try out new identities with few risks. Teens use MySpace like a mirror. They try on an identity, look at themselves, and modify as they see fit.

In MySpace the behaviors of teens vividly illustrate what youth culture researchers have noted for many decades: young people build identities that are fluid, constantly in flux, and intensely performative.

Behavior that once appeared strange to many—sharing our lives online with others—is now an ordinary feature of everyday life. It is an example of how technology and, more precisely, how our engagement with technology is reshaping our day-to-day behaviors, cultural norms, and relationships. In his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, author Howard Rheingold reminds us that one of the consequences of technologies that facilitate more cooperation and instant communication is the loss of privacy. I would also add the loss of control over our personal lives and the intimate data that defines who we are. Rheingold writes that “in order to cooperate with more people, I need to know more about them, and that means that they will know more about me.”

Of all the issues raised by social media, none is more salient than the matter of privacy. Notions of privacy, how we define and experience it, are undergoing undeniable change in the age of what Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, calls “radical transparency.” According to one survey of teens, 79 percent of respondents include pictures of themselves in their profile. Sixty-six percent say that they include pictures of their friends in their profiles. The ubiquity of digital cameras and life-sharing media highlights how we have become our own paparazzi, which forces us to rethink what cultural anthropologist Erving Goffman calls the front-stage self, the person we present to the public, and the backstage self, the person who is much more private. In the digital age the backstage self is more likely than ever before to be in view, thus blurring the lines between our private and public selves. In the online world young people are constantly being watched by their peers. Increasingly, others are watching too.

Many of the college graduates we spoke with told us that one of the most common questions that they are asked during an interview is, “Do you have a Facebook or MySpace profile?” College admissions boards admit to looking at the personal profiles of their applicants. Rightly or wrongly, employers and admissions committees are looking at the backstage self and gaining access to young people’s private selves. When I spoke with middle and high school students I asked them one question: “What does your profile say about you?” The truth is we all leave digital footprints. It just so happens that for tweens and teens the footprints they leave behind in MySpace and Facebook will likely impact their prospects for college admissions or employment.

Young people’s migration to digital has forced us all to learn quickly about cyberbullying, the power of media literacy, digital citizenship, and the social benefits and social costs of social media.