friends

by: danah boyd

In youth culture

When I read the Chicago Tribune's coverage of why teens have eschewed dates for school dances, I wanted to scream. This shift has nothing to do with "the way young people view personal relationships in the age of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter" (and not just because teens don't use Twitter in significant numbers yet).

by: Nancy Baym

As regular readers know, I have been working on a survey about the nature of “friending” on Last.fm. The study is motivated by a few concerns:

Developers have given us the term “friend” to use, yet it often seems a poor fit. How do people within these relationships define them?