Published: January 10, 2009
Young People are Social Networking in Droves
By Jessica Hilberman 
Find a Date, Then Change the World
Each morning when I launch my Internet browser, I go through the same routine: e-mail, news headlines and Facebook. I spend a few minutes checking in on my friends and then I buckle down to work. It's the same at the desks of 20-somethings across America. Whether they prefer MySpace, Facebook or another social site, everyone takes a minute each day (at least once) to say hi to their pals. It's called "social networking," which is a buzz term for interacting online and building social circles online.
Today, young people in the United States are networking in droves, connecting online and using online relationships to build their lives and even effect change offline. Social networks are being used for everything from dating to organizing protests and finding jobs for the poor.
Teens and people in their 20s make up the age demographic with the highest percentage of users of MySpace and Facebook, the largest social networking sites, according to a study on Web communities and social life by Rubicon Consulting. Michael Mace, scribe of the Rubicon blog, recently wrote that the social sites online have a larger impact on younger users of the Internet. "The Web has taken on an important role in social lives of Web users," Mace wrote of the study's findings.
That role is to keep young social networkers connected and involved with everyone they know, from family and friends to professional colleagues. Social networks are more than just an updated version of Mom's Rolodex. Young networkers have grown up with e-mail, digital organizers and cell phones. They are comfortable making connections from anywhere with Internet access, from a mobile phone to an iPod Touch. Rather than ask for your business card, they'll add you as a friend on Facebook.
According to Seth Porges, associate editor at Popular Mechanics, the Web is becoming more social - and enabling sociability - because of its portability. "Because of the mobile nature of these devices, they really allow online social activity to become increasingly indistinguishable from offline social activity," Porges says.
Porges anticipates that with the migration of Internet-based social activity from the desktop and laptop to mobile devices, more people will adopt programs that allow them to use the Global Positioning System on their mobiles to reach out to others. Within two years, he expects to see "applications that allow people to see which of their friends are nearby so they can meet up. ... As opposed to substituting for real-life interaction, they are going to facilitate it more. Instead of just chatting with a friend from my house, I'm going to be able to see who is walking around in the neighborhood and easily meet up with them for coffee," Porges says.
Even without GPS-enabled phones, younger Web users already have a way of letting each other know exactly where they are and what they're doing at any moment; it's called microblogging.
Popular Mechanics' Porges says the trend in microblogging is "most obvious through services such as Twitter, which allow people to broadcast one- or two-line updates on what they are doing" or looking to do. Microblogging is not tied to a particular Web page, and sites such as Twitter allow users to update their blog "feeds" through text message or SMS (short message service), and then broadcast those updates to social networks like Facebook. It's blogging and networking at once. On Facebook, Porges says, constant "status" updates by users also serve as a kind of microblog because a person's friends are all notified when that user's page is updated. A microblog can act like a phone tree on steroids - when one person shares information about an event, a protest or a video with his or her network, that information can be reposted until it has traveled far away from its original source.
Ben Rogers, driver of the Filene Research Institute's CU Tomorrow Project and director of Filene's 30 Under 30 initiative, recently wrote a report for his organization about the ways credit unions are using social networking to reach out to young people. "Social media might as well be Greek to most credit unions, which are generally small, local financial institutions, but that's slowly changing," Rogers says. By reaching out through social initiatives like blogging and allowing members to rate and comment on financial products (the way customers rate products on Amazon.com), the businesses show they're literate in the Web culture of their younger users. It shows, Rogers says, "that the institution gets it: that sharing and social media is how young adults interact with each other and that savvy, authentic companies can interact with them."
Rogers knows when the institutions he works with hit their targets. At 29, he is a veteran user of social networks - a Facebook user and a Twitterer. Rogers says: "There's a pretty active credit union Twitter group. Most of the chatter through the day is more like water cooler talk than anything. About a quarter of what we tweet is links to credit union or financial stories. The rest ranges from where we are today, what our kids are sick with, and what we're listening to on our headsets. It's a great way to share things we've stumbled onto during our daily Web browsing."
For a young professional like Rogers, Twitter provides a fast, satisfying way to reach out and connect with colleagues, friends and family. "For those of us that blog, [Twitter is] also a convenient outlet to announce our newest posts. For a home worker, it's like having an office of intelligent people sharing news and pretty often arguing over politics and the economy," he says.
To learn more about other ways young people are using social networking, see "People Use Social Networking to Fight Violence, Extremism ( http://www.america.gov/st/democracy-english/2008/December/20081201162445EMsutfoL0.986767.html )" and "This revolution brought to you by Facebook ( http://blogs.america.gov/freepress/2008/04/28/this-revolution-brought-to-you-by-facebook/ )."
Jessica Hilberman is a writer and editor who has published widely on the subjects of technology, health, popular culture and urban issues. She lives in Northern California.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
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