Introduction: The Young and the Digital

[Facebook is] a big part of our lives . . . in this day and age. And if you’re not a part of that, then you’re missing a huge part of your friends’ lives also.

—Erica, twenty-two-year-old college student

In 2004, Rupert M. Murdoch, chairman of the third-largest media conglomeration in the world, News Corporation, saw the future—and it was digital. Murdoch’s life in the media business began in 1953 with the purchase of a small newspaper in his native Australia. Over the span of his legendary career, Murdoch built a fortune and a global media empire by buying up print and television properties all across Europe, Asia, and North America. But Murdoch’s empire was showing signs of aging. New media technologies like the Internet were eroding the once taken-for-granted power of the old media guard. The print business, for instance, was steadily decreasing in value as digital content and citizen journalism ascended. Television too was appearing more like a relic in the age of interactive and user-generated media. In a Washington, D.C., speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Murdoch openly acknowledged his troubles.

“I didn’t do as much as I should have after the excitement of the late 1990s,” he told the gathering. “I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along. Well it hasn’t, it won’t, and it’s a fast-developing reality that we should grab.”

The man Time magazine called “The Last Media Mogul” and the self-described “digital immigrant” spoke like a technology convert. “We may never become true digital natives but we can and must begin to assimilate to their culture and way of thinking.” In a tone that matched the urgency of the moment, Murdoch added, “It is a monumental, once-in-a-generation opportunity . . . if we are successful our industry has the potential to reshape itself and to be healthier than ever before.”

According to insiders at News Corporation, it was a 2004 Carnegie Corporation survey of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds that galvanized Murdoch. The study found that 44 percent of the respondents use an Internet portal at least once a day, whereas 19 percent reported reading a newspaper. Among the youngest respondents in the study, 10 percent believed newspapers were trustworthy, and a miniscule 4 percent thought they were entertaining. In a summary of the report titled Abandoning the News, Merrill Brown writes, “This audience, the future news consumers and leaders of a complex, modern society, are abandoning the news as we’ve known it, and it’s increasingly clear that a great number of them will never return to daily newspapers and the national broadcast news programs.”

Carnegie’s core finding—that newspaper readers were a dying breed—was a wake-up call for Murdoch. The report clearly suggested that part of Murdoch’s life work and legacy, the print empire he built at News Corporation, was about to be made obsolete in the midst of great social and technological upheaval. In the next ten years the company, in its current state, would be culturally irrelevant and economically vulnerable in a world gone digital. More than anything, the Carnegie Corporation survey convinced Murdoch that News Corporation needed to get young and digital . . . and fast.

In 2005 Murdoch made his move. He summoned top News Corporation executives from around the world to New York in February. Their mission was simple: craft a plan that would take News Corporation into the digital future. On July 15 the company announced the creation of a new unit they called Fox Interactive Media (FIM) to, among other things, coordinate News Corporation’s Internet properties into a cohesive plan and robust digital media experience. Members of FIM acknowledged that while the media giant was well suited to attract older media users, its current structure was ill suited for young media users who were making what MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte called “being digital” an ordinary way of life.

On August 9 News Corporation acquired IGN Entertainment, Inc., a gaming, film, and male lifestyle portal, for $680 million. It was the company’s third Internet acquisition in three months for a combined total of $1.3 billion. But the real prize was a deal News Corporation revealed on July 18, a mere three days after officially announcing the creation of FIM.

Once News Corporation settled on a short list of Internet properties to consider acquiring, one site quickly rose to the top of their list. For several weeks the global media conglomerate had been in serious talks to buy the Los Angeles–based Intermix Media. Intermix owned some thirty dot.coms, but the crown jewel was the Santa Monica–based social-network site MySpace. As FIM entered into negotiations with Intermix, what they saw in MySpace was the future of the Internet and the future of media—bottom up and user driven rather than top down and corporate driven.

In 2005 the fastest-growing Web sites, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, were the ones young people, ages twelve to twenty-four, were most likely to visit. Many of these sites had several things in common: they allowed users to create and share content, while also providing strong social and community-based features. Between November 2004 and the same period in 2005 the number of unique visitors to MySpace expanded from 2,874,000 to 24,495,000. That was a massive gain of 752 percent. During the same period, Facebook grew from 932,000 to 5,869,000 unique visitors for an increase of 530 percent.

Equally important was the age of MySpace’s core users. For the period of the negotiations, 25 percent of MySpace users were between the ages of twelve and seventeen and 20 percent fell between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. This was the segment that News Corporation vigorously pursued, the segment that, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, was leading the transition to digital. As Ross Levinsohn, President of FIM at the time, explained, “From a demographic standpoint, we lacked the ability to reach the 15-to-30 year old. [News Corporation] as a company does well at reaching the 30-plus, but we were lacking the youth brand.”

After MySpace was released in Beta form in September 2003, the site officially opened in February 2004. That same month MySpace surpassed Friendster as the number one ranked social-network site and never looked back. As the story goes, the rise of MySpace was totally viral. There were no ads, hip marketing campaigns, or corporate hype. The site benefited from the best and cheapest source of advertising, word of mouth. People joined MySpace because their friends joined. And yet the rise of MySpace was not entirely fortuitous. There was, at least initially, some degree of manufactured buzz involved.

After launching MySpace, founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe hit the trendy Los Angeles night scene. A few years earlier, Anderson was part of a San Francisco–based indie rock band named Swank. Though the band never enjoyed huge success, Anderson’s familiarity with the music scene proved extremely helpful in the creation of MySpace. The site’s creators made music a central part of the user experience. Bands showcased their music while fans created communities around their interests in music. Along with bands, Anderson and DeWolfe invited club goers and models to use the site. DeWolfe compared starting MySpace to opening a bar. From the beginning the site combined key elements and sensibilities—stylish-looking people and edgy bands—that made it a desirable destination for young online social-networking enthusiasts and wannabe celebrities.

“Since we were telling people in clubs—models—suddenly everyone on MySpace looks really pretty,” recalled Anderson. “That wasn’t really the plan. It just kind of happened.”

But MySpace swiftly became more than aspiring rock stars and attractive people. Within a few short months it emerged as the online destination of choice for wired teens. How did the site come from nowhere in 2003 to be one of the world’s most visited online destinations by 2005? Some called it luck. Others complained that Anderson and DeWolfe cashed in on an idea that had been percolating in Silicon Valley for years: the belief that the Web was an ideal place for connecting people to people. As DeWolfe explained, this was the core idea behind MySpace: “People are starting to understand that the holy grail of the Internet is community. The real potential for the Internet that we were talking about 10 years ago is just now beginning to materialize.”

MySpace was not the first attempt to execute this vision, but it was one of the most successful.

The simple genius of MySpace was the cofounders’ decision to build a one-stop destination that combined a suite of applications that appealed to young technology users. For starters, MySpace users were able to customize their own personal home pages that were an established part of the Web. The platform’s Instant Message capabilities, in the tradition of America Online Instant Messenger, permitted rapid communication between users. The blogging features anticipated young people’s desire to talk about anything and everything in the digital public sphere. MySpace’s digital imaging features exploited the appeal of photo hosting applications that make it easy to file and share pictures. And by tapping into music, the creators of the site incorporated an enduring theme of youth culture. Once the site was built the staff did one last thing: they turned it over to users.

News Corporation’s acquisition of MySpace was the social Web’s big bang. In the immediate aftermath of the great dot.com bust in 2000, the major media companies grew cautious about the Web. Murdoch openly bragged that he spent a fraction of the money his rivals spent. The most celebrated failure, of course, was the ill-fated merger between America Online and Time Warner. The MySpace deal, however, was a real game changer. “The Internet is exciting again and once again folks are rushing in,” proclaimed Web 2.0 evangelist and entrepreneur John Battelle in a New York Times editorial. The dollar amount—$580 million—was huge, but the message the deal signaled was even bigger: corporate media could no longer ignore what young people were doing online.

Much of the buzz in the press after the MySpace deal emphasized the millions of young people on the site, the rise in online advertising, and the race to monetize the social Web. In the end, though, News Corporation’s determination to become a player in the digital media space was about more than delivering young eyeballs to an online advertising market that is expected to grow from $9.3 billion in 2004 to $18.9 billion in 2010, according to Jupiter Research. The global media giant was not only vying for a greater presence on the Web; it was also vying for a greater presence in the lives of the young and the digital. Like all hot pop culture brands, MySpace predictably cooled off. What the social-network site represented, though, was much more enduring than the platform. MySpace’s strength, ultimately, was not in what was presumably original about it but, rather, what was quite durable about it. MySpace did not tip because it was radically new. MySpace tipped because it was radically true to what young people have always loved to do: spend time with their peers, while also expressing themselves through a music, style, language, and pop culture experience that is all their own.

About a year after the acquisition of MySpace, I went into the field with a small research team and began talking with young people about the role of technology in their lives. Our approach was also influenced by my involvement in the MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative. Our goal was simple: to understand young people’s emphatic embrace of social and mobile media technologies. We collected surveys, conducted one-on-one interviews and focus groups, and visited the places—home, school, and online spaces—where young people spend the bulk of their time. It was a full-scale immersion into what I call the digital trenches. As we emerged from the trenches, our perspective on young people’s engagement with new media technologies grew more detailed and dynamic.

In the pages that follow, you’ll find an intimate and evidence-based portrait of a generation we simply call the young and the digital. Before our work began, I was fully aware that teens and young twenty-somethings were shifting much of their leisure activities online. But as we began to analyze the data from the surveys we collected and transcribe the stories young people shared with us about their technology-rich lives, it was vividly clear that digital is more than the tools and technology they use—it is, quite frankly, a way of life. This was especially clear in the rise of social-network sites like MySpace and Facebook.

In a relatively short time period, going online to communicate with friends, classmates, and acquaintances has become the activity of choice for most teens and young twenty-somethings. As Erica, a twenty-one-year-old college student, told us, “I only know two people who are not on Facebook.” And she is right. Her generation is immersed in a world of social-networking enthusiasts. Ninety-seven percent of the people we survey have a personal profile on a social-network site. More than half, 58 percent, subscribe to at least two or more sites. In fact, many young people describe social-network sites as a routine part of their daily lives and can barely recall what life was like without them. Young people use social-network sites to manage many parts of their lives, including, for example, their day, their personal and professional ties, their schoolwork, and also to communicate, forge cultural identities, and connect to their world and the people around them.

Most people under the age of twenty-five cannot imagine life without connected communities. As Melinda, a twenty-one-year-old aspiring film producer, proclaimed during our conversation with her, “What do people do without Facebook?”

Three-quarters of the people in our survey visit a social-networking site at least once a day. Half of them visit three or more times a day. And a growing number of them can identify with the unabashed claims of twenty-four-year-old Kendra.

“Oh my God,” she shrieked during our one-on-one with her, “I am on MySpace all day!” Kendra elaborates on the intensity of her engagement. “I’m not ashamed to admit it. It is the first thing I check when I get on the computer, the last thing I check when I get off, and the most frequented site in between.”

As you might expect, people are drawn to computer-mediated social networks for a variety of reasons. Occasionally, we come across those who feel a certain degree of peer pressure to use social-network sites. The primary motivation in instances like these is the fear of becoming socially alienated.

“It seems like everyone uses it [Facebook] to do things now,” says Renee, a twenty-three-year-old college graduate. “What would I be missing if I weren’t on it?”

Twenty-two-year-old Dale also admitted that he “felt a lot of peer pressure to get on [MySpace] and make a profile.” Dale says, “Right before I joined, it had been sweeping the nation, just before it swept the world.” Initially, he resisted setting up a profile. Several of his friends were on MySpace, but he noticed how it consumed much of their time and energy. Speaking somewhat jokingly, and as if MySpace were a drug, he explained, “I knew that if I started using I wouldn’t be able to stop using it. I would be just like everyone else and be on it like fifteen hours a day.” Dale, in his words, did not want to “turn into a MySpace nerd.” Eventually he gave in. “I was rusty at first but then once I got the nuances down, it was really plug-in and play.”

Kevin, a talkative nineteen-year-old, shared a similar story with us. Like Dale, he deliberately stayed away from the whole social-networking craze. “I told myself I would never do it. I was totally against MySpace and Xanga.” He thought that all of the pages looked too much alike and that his time online could be better spent with things he was truly passionate about, namely games and Web comics. But when he arrived at college, all of his dorm mates and college buddies were on Facebook and it became difficult to keep up with the online conversations and community they shared. Then, after just a couple of weeks of class, he had a generational epiphany.

“I quickly realized if you don’t have a Facebook [page], it’s like not having a cell phone. And if you don’t have a phone, you are totally cut off from the people around you.” After a few seconds of self-reflection, Kevin added, “It sounds really shallow, come to think of it. What has our society turned into?”

Still, most young people we meet were eager to set up an online profile and connect to their friends. They entered computer-mediated communities because they were curious and excited about the opportunity to extend their off-line relationships into the online environment. “I did not feel obligated to do it [join a social-networking site]; I did it because I wanted to,” said Sidney, a twenty-six-year-old paralegal we met. Like many of the young people we spoke with, Sidney was already using the Web for social communication before the arrival of sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. Most of the young people we meet have a history with e-mail, chat rooms, and Instant Messenger and consider their use of social-network sites a logical progression.

But it was after a conversation with twenty-two-year-old Erica that I began to comprehend the true pull and power of social-network sites. Her motivation for getting involved in online “friending” was simple, profound, and representative of the cultural sensibilities that made social media a generational touchstone.

“It’s a big part of our lives in this day and age,” she said candidly during a conversation outside a small café. “And if you’re not a part of that, then you’re missing a huge part of your friends’ lives also.” Erica elaborated. “It’s hard to relate to the people that you are friends with if they have this big force in their lives and you are not a part of it . . . it’s the impact that it has on real life.”

Like most of the young people we met, Erica moved online to do what I call life-sharing. Social and mobile media platforms have emerged as the dominant technologies in young people’s lives because they offer something that television never has and never will: the constant opportunity to connect and share their lives with close friends and acquaintances. As much as anything else, social and mobile media platforms enable young people to share stories about their day, their mood, and their lives through a wide array of digital content such as pictures, blogs, small messages, and video. Sharing our lives with others via the Internet and mobile phones means we are constantly connected, accessible, social, and, sometimes, vulnerable. Life sharing, in the end, is as much about community as it is the individual.

In the pages that follow you will meet a number of people, including teens, college students, parents, and educators. Among them is a group that I call the four-pack, that is, four young men who let me follow them closely for about six months. I visited them in their dorm and spoke with them on many different occasions. They also kept very intimate diaries that charted the media they used, as well as their views about technology. By any definition, the four-pack—Brad, Derrick, Chase, and Trevor—are gamers. Their leisure activity of choice is games, and during a typical week each spends about fifteen to twenty-five hours playing them. Indeed, games are the common denominator in their strongest and most meaningful social ties.

In the past, society has tended to think of games as antisocial. Violent games, critics claim, make young people aggressive and less caring of others. The classic stereotype of gamers—glued to a screen, skillfully manipulating a controller, and socially isolated from peers—still prevails. But as I got to know the four-pack, I realized that games play an extraordinarily social role in their lives. Much like users of social-network sites, these young men were drawn to games, in part, as a way to bond with their friends.

Though Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was the console of choice among the four-pack, they also enjoyed Nintendo’s Wii, a more modest machine. Referring to the Wii, Brad says, “So many of the games are centered around playing with multiple people.” The social aspects of the system made it a favorite in the eyes of Brad and his buddies. In the dorm, where the four-pack live, residents even got together and hosted a Wii bowling tournament, complete with a big projection screen and brackets. About forty people entered what evolved into a full-fledged sporting event with a cheering section and even an announcer. It was a community event and a big party. Laughing about the whole experience, Brad says, “It was getting pretty ridiculous toward the end, with people cheering and pulling for their favorite bowler.” But this is exactly what social games and social media do—they bring people together.

Brad’s description of the virtual bowling tournament is striking when you consider the current debates about the alleged threats that new communication technologies pose to the health and vitality of informal public life and community in millennial America. As I listened to Brad talk about the bowling tournament, I considered the well-traveled argument made by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Citing declines in, among other things, bowling leagues, civic participation, and volunteerism, Putnam argues that Americans, starting around 1970, began retreating from informal public life and into the privacy of their own homes. One of the main culprits of this declining sense of community among Americans, Putnam argues, is the growth of media in our homes.

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, no media was more dominant in our lives than television. The debates about the impact of television content—especially sex and violence—are familiar to most. The debates about the impact of television viewing as an activity—where we watch, how often, with whom, and the social consequences—are not as familiar. Among researchers who study television viewing as a leisure activity, the medium’s greatest legacy is how it influences our connection, or lack thereof, to our neighbors, communities, and the world around us. According to Putnam, “TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, especially social gatherings and informal conversations.” The end result, Putnam asserts, is the erosion of social capital or the sense of neighborliness, mutual trust, and reciprocity that binds people together and strengthens community.

Over the years the spread of communication technologies throughout our homes has turned them into private hubs of information, communication, and nonstop entertainment. Ray Oldenburg, a sociologist, goes so far as to claim that the most predictable social consequence of technological innovation is that humans will grow further apart from each other. Discussing the decline of informal public life in America, Oldenburg writes, “Increasingly, her citizens are encouraged to find their relaxation, entertainment, companionship, even safety, almost entirely within the privacy of homes that have become more a retreat from society than a connection to it.” This outlook, developed long before home and ubiquitous computing, persists today. But is the shift to screens that are more personal, social, and mobile really making us less connected to each other?

Conventional wisdom has long maintained that time spent at home with television is time spent away from friends and public life. And yet, computer and mobile-phone screens represent very different kinds of experiences than the ones traditionally offered by television. A great irony of life on the computer screen is the fact that we usually go online alone but often with the intent of communicating with other people. Among the teens and young adults that we talk to, time spent in front of a computer screen is rarely, if ever, considered time spent alone. Rather, the engagement with technology is viewed as an opportunity to connect with friends. Granted, connecting via a mobile phone or Facebook is a different way of bonding, but, as I argue in the following pages, these practices are expressions of intimacy and community.

Another common view is that the new media ecology is turning young people into a herd of social recluses more interested in the gadgets they own than the people in their lives. And it is true—young people are enthusiastic about the technology they use. But what may surprise you is that they are equally enthusiastic about their friends and acquaintances. The Wii bowling tournament is a great example of how social media platforms can bring people together, rather than pull them apart. No matter where they are—sitting in class, driving a car, or holding a face-to-face conversation—the twenty-five-and-younger set are constantly using a screen to connect to their peers.

Digital media also has its limits. All of the euphoria about social and mobile media notwithstanding, it does not seem to be bringing people together across the long-standing barriers of race and class. In 1996, two MIT scholars, Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, published a paper investigating whether or not the electronic communities forming on the Web represent a global village or socially exclusive forms of behavior. In their paper, Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson maintain that increased connectivity has the potential to create diverse communities by providing individuals the opportunity to come together across social as well as geographical boundaries. A less sanguine outcome strikes many others as a very real possibility. Acknowledging this outcome, Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson write, “Just as separation in physical space, or basic balkanization, can divide geographic groups, we find that separation in virtual space, or ‘cyberbalkanization,’ can divide special interest groups.”

The more we learn about teens and young twenty-somethings’ use of social and mobile media, the more complex and fascinating the story becomes. College students’ daily use of Facebook, for instance, reveals an intriguing paradox. Facebook makes it possible for the young people we meet to connect with each other “all day, every day.” And that is what they are doing—practicing unprecedented degrees of community as they maintain constant connectivity. Still, even as their use of Facebook brings them together in extraordinary ways, it also reinforces their social and geographical distance from “others,” especially MySpace users who they commonly view as unsophisticated, uneducated, and undesirable. Oddly enough, the way they use new media technologies creates both fascinating expressions of community and disheartening instances of what we call digital gating—the maintenance of social and geographical boundaries.

The move to more personal, social, and mobile screens marks a pivotal moment in our cultural history. Importantly, it signals the fall of one screen, television, and the rise of another screen, the computer, as well as notably different ways of being in the world.

In 2000 the number of households with a computer crossed the 50 percent threshold in America. Roughly four years later more than half of American households had access to the Internet. There were no celebrations or fancy pronouncements; nevertheless, the steady adoption of the networked computer ushered American life into a whole new frontier. An assortment of unique properties—its speed, availability, and the intensity and breadth of the information accessible online—makes the networked computer the most compelling household screen ever. It is also the most versatile screen to settle in our homes. We use it for leisure, work, learning, playing, shopping, bonding, civic engagement, and personal expression.

Researchers have gone to great lengths over the years to understand how social and ubiquitous computing has changed our lives—in some cases for the better and in other instances for the worse. The story, much like life itself, is rich, complex, and defies simple answers. In the following pages, I tell parts of the story, primarily from the perspectives of the young and the digital, the first generation of Americans who will spend most of their lives in a world where personal, social, and mobile media are common, widespread, and fully integrated into our daily lives.