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These are frequently discussed as social networking sites, as though the primary activity of these sites is to meet new people and interact with strangers. In fact, young people are using this to socialize with the people they already know, their pre-existing social network. They’re communicating with their friends, people they know from church, from summer camp, from baseball. We have this belief that kids are just addicted to social network sites. If anything, they’re addicted to their friends.

Young people desperately want to connect with the people around them, and often they don’t have the ability to do so face-to-face. In the upper socioeconomic levels, it’s often connected to the tendency by adults to overstructure teens’ lives: tons of activities they’re involved in, lots of homework, living where there’s no public transportation, everybody being afraid that if kids go outside they might be harmed, having to rely on parents to drive them places—a variety of factors that make it difficult to get together with your friends.

Lower socioeconomic dynamics are often very different. It is more common that they will socialize with their peers in person, but geography is still a huge factor. In cities where everybody is bused, it’s not easy to hang out with your friends when they live 20 to 30 miles away. Also, kids are shooed away from places we normally think of as public, because they are seen as a nuisance. We have curfew laws, trespassing laws, loitering laws that are targeted at kids.

You have to deal with properties and dynamics that are not part of what we assume to be everyday life.

You’ve got persistence: What you say sticks around. You’ve got replicability: You can copy and paste something from one place to another. The conversation can quickly move across space. You have searchability: You can find things and grab them at any different point. And the scale is so different. You write something embarrassing, and, like wildfire, it goes across the entire school.

Young people engaging in these sites always have to deal with invisible audiences—people who are there at the same time and people who might search for this 10 years from now. There’s no way you can hold all those possibilities in your head. You just have to create some imagined audience.

You have a collapsing of context. We’re used to specific spaces denoting specific context and adjusting our behavior and our language and our norms accordingly. These things don’t always translate. How do you deal with the collapsing of context and different kinds of language, especially when it gets you into trouble? There’s also the dynamic of the blurring of public and private.

All these things are constantly changing, and one of the things I highlight in my research is how young people are negotiating it. How do they sit there and say, “I have to publicly articulate my friends”? That’s the most awkward thing ever, but young people are doing it. They’re coming up with rules, and they’re learning new skills to deal with it.

1. Persistence. What you say sticks around. This is great for asynchronicity, not so great when everything you've ever said has gone down on your permanent record. The bits-wise nature of social media means that a great deal of content produced through social media is persistent by default.

2. Replicability. You can copy and paste a conversation from one medium to another, adding to the persistent nature of it. This is great for being able to share information, but it is also at the crux of rumor-spreading. Worse: while you can replicate a conversation, it's much easier to alter what's been said than to confirm that it's an accurate portrayal of the original conversation.

3. Searchability. My mother would've loved to scream search into the air and figure out where I'd run off with friends. She couldn't; I'm quite thankful. But with social media, it's quite easy to track someone down or to find someone as a result of searching for content. Search changes the landscape, making information available at our fingertips. This is great in some circumstances, but when trying to avoid those who hold power over you, it may be less than ideal.

4. Scalability. Social media scales things in new ways. Conversations that were intended for just a friend or two might spiral out of control and scale to the entire school or, if it is especially embarrassing, the whole world. Of course, just because something can scale doesn't mean that it will. Politicians and marketers have learned this one the hard way.

5. (de)locatability. With the mobile, you are dislocated from any particular point in space, but at the same time, location-based technologies make location much more relevant. This paradox means that we are simultaneously more and less connected to physical space.

Those five properties are intertwined, but their implications have to do with the ways in which they alter social dynamics. Let's look at three different dynamics that have been reconfigured as a result of social media.

1. Invisible Audiences. We are used to being able to assess the people around us when we're speaking. We adjust what we're saying to account for the audience. Social media introduces all sorts of invisible audiences. There are lurkers who are present at the moment but whom we cannot see, but there are also visitors who access our content at a later date or in a different environment than where we first produced them. As a result, we are having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience. The potential invisible audiences can be stifling. Of course, there's plenty of room to put your head in the sand and pretend like those people don't really exist.

2. Collapsed Contexts. Connected to this is the collapsing of contexts. In choosing what to say when, we account for both the audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood.

3. Blurring of Public and Private. Finally, there's the blurring of public and private. These distinctions are normally structured around audience and context with certain places or conversations being "public" or "private." These distinctions are much harder to manage when you have to contend with the shifts in how the environment is organized.

All of this means that we're forced to contend with a society in which things are being truly reconfigured. So what does this mean? As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.