The term researchers use is “co-rumination” to describe frequently or obsessively discussing the same problem. The behavior is typical among teens — Why didn’t he call? Should I break up with him? And, psychologists say, it has intensified significantly with e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook. And in certain cases it can spin into a potentially contagious and unhealthy emotional angst, experts say.
Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area - posting of video content online. Online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it.
In “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends,’” a paper this year in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Nicole Ellison, an assistant prof at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being. The Harvard-U.C.L.A. researchers are investigating triadic closure, a concept 1st put forth by the German sociologist Georg Simmel.
A team led by Carlos Guestrin, an assistant professor of computer science and machine learning, scanned about 45,000 blogs and ran them through an algorithm that measures how information propagates. (This is an example of blog research focused on filter, "A-list" blogs.)
Ms. Hargittai says the results show that online social networks evoke real-world communities and demographics. “Online actions and interactions cannot be seen as tabula rasa activities, independent of existing offline identities,” she writes. “Rather, constraints on one’s everyday life are reflected in online behavior, thereby limiting—for some more than others—the extent to which students from different backgrounds may interact with students not like themselves.”
A survey of people’s online communication habits reveals that college students use social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, primarily to keep up with their friends.
Reference list compiled by danah boyd
In 1994, Justin Hall (b. 1974 in Chicago), now an American freelance journalist, then a Swarthmore College student, started a web-based diary called Justin's Links from the Underground, which offered link highlighting (not unlike BoingBoing) and excentric, journaling (e.g., his exploration of "sexuality as a sacred place"). This web-based diary is often cited as the first weblog.
Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites popular among college students boast users who claim hundreds of online friends. But new research shows the count of “real friends” — true intimates — is about five.
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