Why Youth Heart Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social

doing this, teens are taking social interactions between friends into the public
sphere for others to witness.

. In reference to
actions or texts, public often implies that the audience is unknown and that strangers may
bear witness.

the properties of the mediating technologies, namely persis-
tence, replicability, and invisible audiences.

While broadcast media take
advantage of persistence, it is not as if anyone could go to the television and watch my
fall whenever they wish, but if my fall is uploaded to YouTube or MySpace Video, this is
possible.

Social network
sites allow publics to gather. At the same time, by serving as a space where speech takes place,
they are also publics themselves. The sites themselves also distinguish between public and
private, where public means that a profile is visible to anyone and private means that it is
Friends-only.

when I say that I embarrassed myself in public by tripping on
the curb, the public that I am referencing includes all of the strangers who visually witnessed
my stumble. The audience is restricted to those present in a limited geographical radius at
a given moment in time

Mediating technologies like television, radio, and newsprint change everything. My fall
could have been recorded and televised on the nightly news. This changes the scale of

is important to distinguish these sites as publics, not simply public, and networked publics,
not simply publics.

In some senses, public is quite similar to
audience as both refer to a group bounded by a shared text, whether that is a worldview
or a performance.23 These words often collide conceptually because speaking to the public
implies that the public is acting as an audience.

Fundamentally, social network sites are a category of community sites that
have profiles, friends, and comments.