On the Rapid Rise of Social Networking Sites: New Findings and Policy Implications

Abstract

Social networking sites have been rapidly adopted by children and, especially, teenagers and young people worldwide, enabling new opportunities for the presentation of the self, learning, construction of a wide circle of relationships, and the management of privacy and intimacy. On the other hand, there are also concerns that social networking increases the likelihood of new risks to the self, these centring on loss of privacy, bullying, harmful contacts and more. This article reviews recent findings regarding children and teenagers’ social networking practices in order to identify implications for future research and public policy. These focus on the interdependencies between opportunities and risks, the need for digital or media literacy education, the importance of building safety considerations into the design and management of social networking sites, the imperative for greater attention to ‘at risk’ children in particular, and the importance of a children’s rights framework in developing evidence-based policy in this area.

Full text

On the Rapid Rise of Social Networking
Sites:New Findings and Policy Implications
Sonia Livingstone* and David R Brake
Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science,
London, UK
Social networking sites have been rapidly adopted by children and, especially, teenagers and
young people worldwide, enabling new opportunities for the presentation of the self, learning,
construction of a wide circle of relationships, and the management of privacy and intimacy.
On the other hand, there are also concerns that social networking increases the likelihood of
new risks to the self, these centring on loss of privacy, bullying, harmful contacts and more.
This article reviews recent findings regarding children and teenagers’ social networking prac-
tices in order to identify implications for future research and public policy. These focus on the
interdependencies between opportunities and risks, the need for digital or media literacy edu-
cation, the importance of building safety considerations into the design and management of
social networking sites, the imperative for greater attention to ‘at risk’ children in particular,
and the importance of a children’s rights framework in developing evidence-based policy in
this area. 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation 2009 National Children’s Bureau.
Social networking among UK children and teenagers
Every few years, governments, the public and even technology providers are taken aback by
the unexpected take up among young people of yet another innovation — email, chatrooms,
texting, instant messaging, blogging and, recently, social networking sites. Public policy
aspirations quickly capitalise on these youthful enthusiasms, seeking to revitalise agendas of
informal education, health and lifestyle advice, and civic participation. Simultaneously, tech-
nological innovations afford the commercial world new possibilities for targeted and embed-
ded marketing, while public policy is also required to address new online risks to children’s
well-being. This article reviews recent findings regarding children and teenagers’ social
networking practices in order to identify key recommendations for the future research and
public policy.
Most social networking sites are intended for teenagers and adults, though some have no
lower age limit and some target younger children. In 2007, 42% of UK 8–17 year olds had a
social network profile, including 27% of 8–12 year olds and 55% of 13–17 year olds.
1
Simi-
lar figures hold in other countries, and use continues to grow worldwide, though it may have
peaked in the USA and UK among young people (comScore, 2008). Ofcom’s (2008) survey
found that most users visit social networking sites daily or every other day, with parental
restrictions on use reported by 62% of middle class users (74% of those under 13), but fewer
than half of working class users of any age; further, middle class and younger children are
also more likely to have set their profile to ‘private’ (i.e. accessible only to friends or family)
CHILDREN & SOCIETY (2009)
DOI:10.1111/j.1099-0860.2009.00243.x RESEARCH REVIEW
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— 61% of social network users overall have restricted access to their profile in the UK and
similar figures apply in the USA.
2
Social networking sites, like much else on the Internet, represent a moving target for
researchers and policy-makers. Having recently reached the mass market, they continue to
evolve as domestic broadband access increases and digital technologies of all kinds, includ-
ing GPS location tracking on mobile platforms, become more available. Several previously
‘closed’ social networking sites now allow their users to incorporate features created by third
parties and let users log into third party sites using their profile information, potentially
undermining corporate responsibility for users’ privacy protection.
New opportunities for self-expression, learning, communication and networking?
Because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as pro-
duced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices,
by specific enunciative strategies [and] within the play of specific modalities of power (Hall, 1996: 4).
Identities are constituted through interaction with others. Increasingly, the sites in which
young people perform and experiment with identity include the online domain. As both
technology and its uses evolve, this reconfigures the possibilities for social identity construc-
tion in ways that are not yet fully understood. But what remains constant, driving online
and mobile communication, is young people’s strong desire to connect with peers anywhere,
anytime — to stay in touch, express themselves and share experiences. Contrary to popular
anxieties about isolated loners who stay at home and chat to strangers online, as distinct
from the sociable kids with healthy face-to-face social lives, empirical research undermines
any sharp line between online and offline, or virtual and face-to-face. Rather, youthful prac-
tices are best characterised by the flexible intermixing of multiple forms of communication,
with online communication primarily used to sustain local friendships already established
offline, rather than to make new contacts with distant strangers (Boneva and others, 2006;
Gross, 2004; Mesch and Talmud, 2007), and this applies equally to social networking (Ellison
and others, 2007; Valkenburg and Peter, 2007a,b).
At the heart of the explosion in online communication is the desire to construct a valued repre-
sentation of oneself which affirms and is affirmed by one’s peers. Observation of teenagers’
social networking practices reveals the pleasure they find creating an online ‘project of the self’
(Giddens, 1991). A typical teenager’s MySpace profile had a big welcome in sparkly pink, with
music, photos, a love tester, guestbook and dedication pages, all customised down to the scroll
bars and cursor with pink candy stripes, glitter, angels, flowers, butterflies, hearts and more. As
she said, ‘you can just change it all the time [and so] you can show different sides of yourself’
(Danielle, 13, quoted in Livingstone, 2008a). Friends’ responses are often strongly affirming,
offering mutual recognition in the peer network (Valkenburg and others, 2006).
Teenagers have long decorated their bedroom walls with images expressive of their identity,
also keeping a diary or photo album, sending notes and chatting to friends. So does online
social networking make a difference? Few claim that social networking has dramatically
transformed children and young people’s lives, but its specific affordances do appear to facil-
itate changes in the quantity and, arguably, the quality of communication: these include the
ease, speed and convenience of widespread access and distribution of content, connectivity
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throughout a near-global network, the persistence and searchability of content over time, the
facility to replicate, remix and manipulate content, and settings for managing conditions of
privacy, anonymity and exchange (Boyd and Ellison, 2007; Ito and others, 2008).
One consequence is the wide circles of friends (or ‘friends of friends’) sustained by social net-
working teenagers: a survey of US 13–18 year olds found the average number of social net-
working contacts is 75 (Harris Interactive, 2006). Self-report methods may distort the picture
— an analysis of contacts on a random selection of public MySpace profiles for users aged
16+ found the median number to be only 27 (Thelwall, 2008), though contacts numbering in
the hundreds are commonplace (Salaway and others, 2008), this enabling bridging social
capital — the creation and maintenance of extensive social networks of weak ties (Ellison and
others, 2007). A second consequence important to teenagers is that social networking sites
enable them to overcome the embarrassments of face-to-face communication, because they
afford asynchronous, noncommittal, playful interaction in which the management of ‘face’
and negotiation of flirting, misinterpretation and innuendo is more controllable (Livingstone,
2008a). Third, social networking disembeds communication from its traditional anchoring in
the face-to-face situation of physical co-location where conventions of trust, authenticity and
reciprocity are well understood, re-embedding it in more flexible, complex and ambiguous
networks in which, it seems, children share advice and support with peers (Heverly, 2008).
Possibly, those who do not engage in social networking miss out on more than just commu-
nication. The think tank, Demos, challenges the public sector to keep up with and enable ‘the
current generation of young people [who] will reinvent the workplace and society’ (Green
and Hannon, 2007: 62). Educators and advocates of new digital literacies are confident that
social networking encourages the development of transferable technical and social skills of
value in formal and informal learning (Crook and Harrison, 2008; Ito and others, 2008).
Many public sector and non-governmental organisations, from educators to child welfare
workers to activist movements hope that through social networking services they can address
young people on their own terms, putting the potential of viral marketing to positive use.
3
However, whether these wider benefits exist is yet to be established by empirical research.
New risks of privacy invasion, bullying and dangerous contacts?
New opportunities tend to be associated with new risks (Livingstone and Helsper, in press).
The UK’s Home Office Task Force on Child Protection on the Internet (2008) identifies a ser-
ies of risks to children’s safety associated with social networking — bullying, harassment,
exposure to harmful content, theft of personal information, sexual grooming, violent behav-
iour, encouragement to self-harm and racist attacks. Anxious headlines — ‘Knife a Pal on
Facebook’ (Clench, 2008), ‘Facebook spells end of lasting friendships, says expert’ (Smith,
2008), ‘MySpace Invaders: Evil Lurks on Teen Sites’ (Webster and Edwards, 2007) — certainly
overstate the problem, but there are grounds for genuine concern. Such research findings as
exist link social networking with a range of content, contact and conduct risks to children
and young people, including some perpetrated by children themselves.
The UK Children Go Online survey of 9–19 year olds found that, among those who used the
Internet at least weekly, 57% had seen online pornography, 31% had seen violent and 11%
had seen racist content. Further, 31% had received sexual comments online and 28% had
been sent unsolicited sexual material. A third had received bullying comments online and
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8% had gone to a meeting with someone first met online (Livingstone and Bober, 2005). Two
adolescent practices are likely to exacerbate online risk — the disclosure of personal informa-
tion and the experimental nature of peer communication. Yet it seems teenagers are fairly
though not entirely careful when communicating online. A content analysis of a random
sample of 2423 public MySpace profiles produced by under 18s found that many provided
personal photos (57%), but only a few discussed alcohol consumption (18%), showed images
of friends in swimsuit ⁄underwear (16%), provided real names (9%), discussed smoking (8%),
showed them selves in swimsuit ⁄underwear (5%) or discussed marijuana use (2%) (Hinduja
and Patchin, 2008). A USA survey found that while boys and younger teens are more likely
to post false information, older teenagers (especially girls) are more likely to reveal detailed
personal information: overall, 49% included their school and 29% their email address
(Lenhart and Madden, 2007). An Irish survey of 10–20 year olds found that while 49% gave
out their date of birth, only 12% gave their mobile phone number and 8% their home
address (Anchor, 2007). Since social networking sites are designed for teenagers to provide
at least their name, birth date and photograph, such personal disclosures are unsurprising.
There is growing evidence that personal disclosure facilitates communication risks. While mild
peer-to-peer problems may include teenagers teasing each other by posting ‘embarrassing’ pic-
tures, concerns are growing about ‘cyberbullying’ (Patchin and Hinduja, 2006): a 2006 survey
found that, although 69% pupils were bullied in past year, only 7% said they had received
unpleasant or bullying emails ⁄IM ⁄text messages (Bullying UK, 2006), although another survey
found 20% had been cyberbulli ed (NCH ⁄Tesco, 2006). Higher levels of cyberbullying are
reported in the USA: 72% of 12–17 year olds, an online survey found, had been bullied online
in the previous year, and 85% had also been bullied in school. Although from a self-selected
sample, these figures show how online and offline bullying are linked (Juvonen and Gross,
2008): Hinduja and Patchin (2009) found that 82% of those bullied online knew their perpetra-
tor and 42% who reported being cyberbullied were also bullied at school.
Much research tends not to distinguish modes of communication — email, text, chatroom,
instant messaging or social networking. While 33% of 10–15 year olds contacted in the USA
reported being harassed online in 2007, they were more likely to be harassed through instant
messaging or chatrooms than via social networking sites (Ybarra and Mitchell, 2008). Ybarra
and others (2007) argue that teenagers who communicate in multiple ways online are most
at risk of online victimization, as are those who seek out opportunities to talk about sex with
unknown people and who have unknown people in their buddy lists (see also Internet Safety
Technical Task Force, 2009). Having found that lower self-esteem and well-being is more
common among teenagers who particularly seek opportunities to talk to strangers online,
Valkenburg and Peter (2007a) argue that chatrooms favour such interaction with strangers
more than instant messaging. For social networking, a key factor might be whether a teen-
ager’s profile is set to public or private and whether he or she is careful or casual in accept-
ing unknown contacts as friends. However, research has yet carefully to disentangle the
workings of these different factors — forms of online communication, conditions of use,
characteristics of the young users, and possible adverse consequences.
Policy implications: balancing opportunities and risks in social networking
Children and youth worldwide have adopted social networking sites enthusiastically, partly
because of the erosion of children’s freedoms in the physical world (Gill, 2008). But
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children’s agency should not be overstated, for their practices are constrained by their degree
of digital literacy (which is not as high as popularly assumed; Livingstone, 2008b), and by
the technical designs of social networking sites (which impede easy management of settings
and transparency regarding the commercial use of personal information). In this section, we
identify pressing five issues for researchers and policy makers.
First, opportunities and risks are linked. Teenagers’ experience of a range of opportunities is
positively correlated with their experiences of online risk, so that the more opportunities they
take up, the more risks they encounter, and the more policy attempts to limit risks the more
it may also limit opportunities (Livingstone and Helsper, in press). Further, the more skilled
teenagers are in their use of the Internet, the more they experience both opportunities and
risks (and not, as often supposed, the more able they are to avoid risks). The interdependen-
cies between risks and opportunities are partly due to youthful exploration and risk-taking
practices — it being part of adolescence to push boundaries and seek out new, even trans-
gressive opportunities (Hope, 2007). It is also a matter of interface design — for example,
pornography and sexual advice results from the same online search while filters may block
both; similarly, poorly designed privacy controls can be misunderstood by users seeking to
share intimate information with friends.
Second, as communicative environments develop, so do the media or digital literacy
demands on their users. As long as definitions of media literacy remain contested and
schools remain reluctant to incorporate media education into teacher training and classroom
curricula, children’s knowledge will lag behind the industry’s fast-changing practices of
embedded marketing, use of personal data, user tracking and so forth, most of which is opa-
que to young people as they navigate the options before them. Further, limitations on and
inequalities in digital literacies mean not all young people benefit from the new opportuni-
ties on offer; indeed, providing online resources may exacerbate rather than overcome
inequality as opportunities are disproportionately taken up by the already-privileged
(Hargittai, 2007).
Third, addressing risk cannot be left solely to parents and children, as neither fully under-
stands how to manage this online nor has sufficient resources to do so. Noting confusion
among parents, children and those working in child protection regarding the risks social net-
working poses to children, the UK’s CEOP (2006) calls for ‘safety by design’ so as to build
safety protection into the interface rather than relying on the safety awareness and digital
literacy skills of children and parents. In the UK, the Byron (2008) Review led to a new UK
Council for Child Internet Safety, established to provide independent and accountable over-
sight of commercial self-regulatory practices. At a European level, the EC’s Safer Internet
Programme has supported guidance for pan-European self-regulation of social networking
services (EC Social Networking Task Force, 2009). One key issue is ensuring appropriate
privacy protection for children,
4
leading the European Network and Information Agency to
consider a range of means to address privacy-related threats, identity issues and social risks,
from awareness raising to improving transparency of data handling practices, and from
authentication and consent processes to default software setting and automated filters
(Hogben, 2007; see also Kesan and Shah, 2006).
Fourth, specific attention is required for ‘at risk’ children, given growing indications that
those low in self-esteem or lacking satisfying friendships or relations with parents are also
those at risk through online social networking communication (Livingstone and Helsper,
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2007; Valkenburg and Peter, 2007a; Ybarra and Mitchell, 2004) and, further, that those at
risk may also be those who then perpetrate harm towards others. A balanced risk assessment
should also note that, though dangerous, risks to children from adult sexual predators on
social networking sites are very rare (Internet Safety Technical Task Force, 2009), and more
common is the misuse of personal information by spammers and fraudsters (Jagatic and
others, 2007) and the inadvertent release of personal information harmful to young people’s
reputations and employment prospects (YouGov, 2007).
Lastly, in framing policies to reduce risk, children’s rights must not be forgotten. The UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child includes the right to freedom of assembly and expres-
sion as well as freedom from harm and privacy from the state, commerce and individuals.
Since children are concerned to maintain privacy from their parents, this challenges simplistic
advice that parents should ‘check up’ on their children’s social networking activities, with or
without their permission. The balance between opportunities and risks should, arguably,
be struck differently for ‘at risk’ children, where greater monitoring or restrictions may be
legitimate — moreover, for these children especially, relying on parents to undertake this role
may be inappropriate.
In all, the evidence to date suggests that, for most children, social networking affords con-
siderable benefits in terms of communication and relationships, less proven benefits as yet
regarding learning and participation, and some transfer of bullying and other social risks
from offline to online domains. While there is, therefore, much left to do for policy makers
if children are, overall, to gain substantial benefit from social networking, there is also
much left for researchers to do. In writing this article, we have struggled to find sufficient
empirical research on which to ground our claims. Research must keep up to date with
children and young people’s social practices online, as their enthusiasm for social network-
ing is undeniable and their future uses of this technology may, as so often before, still
surprise us.
Notes
1 These figures from Ofcom (2008) have been rebased for all UK 8–17 year olds and recalcu-
lated by age for this article.
2 A Pew Internet survey of American 12–17 year olds found that two-thirds keep their pro-
file wholly or partially private and that, of the information that is made public, much is
either non-revealing or false (Lenhart and Madden, 2007).
3 Bringing together the British Youth Council, Children’s Rights Alliance for England,
National Children’s Bureau, National Council for Voluntary Youth Services, the National
Youth Agency and Save the Children England, Participation Works (http://www.participa-
tionworks.org.uk/) uses social networking to give children a voice; see also Digizen.org, a
project ‘designed to investigate how social networking services can and are being used
to support personalised formal and informal learning by young people in schools and
colleges’ (http://www.digizen.org/socialnetworking/)
4 In one study, one in six university students expressed high concern that a stranger might
know their class schedule and address but these same students had provided exactly this
information on their Facebook profile, having misunderstood Facebook’s privacy policy
(Acquisti and Gross, 2006; Tufekci, 2008). Emerging tools which enable users to broadcast
their locations and activities online automatically represent a particular threat.
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*Correspondence to: Sonia Livingstone, Department of Media and Communications. London School of Economics
and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK Tel: 02079557710; Fax: 02079557248. E-mail:
s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk
Contributors’ details
Sonia Livingstone is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Media and Commu-
nications and Project Director, EUKidsOnline, www.eukidsonline.net http://www.eukidsonline.net/ She
researches children and young people’s engagement with the internet at the Department of Media
and Communications, LSE.
David R Brake is completing his PhD on web 2.0 usage practices at the Department of Media and Com-
munications, LSE.
Rapid Rise of Social Networking Sites 9
2009 The Authors CHILDREN & SOCIETY (2009)
Journal compilation 2009 National Children’s Bureau