Research into teenage use of social media by the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley was published earlier this month. Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher Mizuko Ito and her team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth media use.
Some of the main findings are that young users are using online networks to extend friendships which mainly exist in the real world. Sites like Facebook and Myspace allow them to deepen relationships and be in constant contact with their friends.
A smaller group seek out connections with others who share niche interests, and some seek opportunities to build online reputation and share their accomplishments with a wider audience.
In both these friendship and interest based communities, young people are increasingly learning from each other in a self-directed way. There is growing evidence of peer to peer learning, especially that users are building technical and media literacy as they experiment online.
The researchers suggest that social media has changed the way that young people socialise and learn. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technical skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning.
While teens may not welcome adult attempts to facilitate their friendship based networks, the researchers suggest that in interest-driven participation, adults have an important role to play. Here adults can have a role in setting learning objectives, and acting as role models, sharing their experience in the context of the specific interest of focus.
The research is online - there's a two page summary, as well as the full report available here.
One of the objections careers advisers most frequently raise for not using social media is the belief we should not "invade teenage space". This research seems to offer a helpful differentiation between friendship and interest driven use of social media. I believe educators and advisers can definitely play a positive role in the latter. However we do need to take note of the preference the teens in this study clearly have for learning from their peers.
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