For Teens, Most Social Networking is Not So Social

Conventional wisdom says that teens dominate social networks. Not so. The oldies are crashing the party. The vast majority of those who frequent these sites networking sites are over 25 years old, according to comScore.

OK then. Social network sites must then be about being social, right? Again not so. According to new data from The Pew Internet Project & American Life Project, some 55% percent of teens who publish to these sites do so through restricted profiles and pages. Further, 66% of teens who are socially networked have their profiles blocked from view by anyone but their friends.

Comments

[Donna Papacosta]

As the mother of teenaged girls, I can attest to the importance of blocking non-friends from entries at "social" sites. We've been teaching the kids to do this since they were old enough to reach the keyboard. Believe me, the network of existings friends is big enough! Why invite trouble?

[Ewan McIntosh]

Everything's relative:
http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/01/only_55_of_teen.html

Their socialising might be behind passwords but that still leaves a lot of kids living an open online life, many more leading a conversational, non-stop communication online and compared to years gone by, that's a whole lot more communicating by kids than ever before.

I just don't get the attitude of those who believe it's all evil out there. Inviting more communication, more acquaintances? It's the stuff that entrepreneurs and successful politicians, businessmen and women, educators and geeks are made of! ;-)

[drew olanoff]

I think that these teens are still socializing, but marking their profile private forces someone who finds them to "request" them to be their friend. Kind of like at a party/bar when someone approaches you, you can be selective. Still social, just still selective.

[Pascal Van Hecke]

I guess that _is exactly_ what allows them to be social online.

Most people still are held back from posting personal or sensitive stuff because they do not want to be read by complete strangers, or (for teens even worse) their family/parents.

Restricting access to friends/peers allows them to be their full social self online.

Unfortunately this means they have to roam within one single platform (typically Lifejournal or Msn Spaces), since we're still far from cross-platform trust relationships and permissions - that is what systems like OPenID eventually should provide us with.

[Otis Gospodnetic]

In the early days of Simpy, when I talked presented it to various crowds (no, not VCs) of people who were all super interested in "social software", this is exactly what I would point out. A lot of people seem to equate "being social" with "sharing everything with everyone". I always relate that to real life, where people don't share everything with everyone. People don't expose themselves to everyone. People stick to their social circles. Simpy supports "share with everyone", "share with different groups/circles", and "don't share" modes, which matches the real life, I think.