Youth Connecting Online: From Chat Rooms to Social Networking Sites

As media is rapidly changing and different technologies are gaining and losing favour, youth are adapting to these changes in ways that support their developmental needs. This chapter will present research, which demonstrates that as online contexts have changed and evolved, so have young people’s behaviours within them; yet at its core, these behaviours remain connected to important offline developmental concerns. We do this by presenting results from our own research on chat rooms and social networking sites as well as drawing from other recent research on young people’s online lives. We begin by describing an Austrian-American study on chat rooms, which was first published in 2005 in German. Using participant observation and analysis of chat room conversations between teenage boys and girls, the study concentrated on adolescents’ gender and ethnic identity negotiations in the public space. The second study was conducted at the Children’s Digital Media Centre (CDMC@LA) and examined young people’s use of social networking sites; it was presented at the ‘Cybercultures’ conference (4th Global Conference: Cybercultures - Exploring Critical Issues, Salzburg, Austria, March 13-15, 2009) and was recently published in the  Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology . 1  The study investigated emerging adults’ online activities, their use of social networking sites for communication, and the overlap between their online and offline social networks. After describing both studies, we will relate them to other relevant literature on chat rooms and social networking sites and compare the different ways that young people use the currently popular social networking sites compared to chat rooms, which have been around longer. We will show how - regardless of the seeming differences in online activities - both forms of online communication are important playgrounds for young people’s development of identity and intimacy.