2 FRIENDSHIP

Sitting in a coffee shop in suburban Michigan in June 2007, Tara, a Vietnamese sixteen-year-old, was asked about Facebook. She giggled and said that she had “an addiction” to the site. She had heard from adults that Facebook might be bad, but “like everyone says get a Facebook. You need to get one.” She made sure to log in often to check for new messages from friends, read updates about her classmates, and comment on friends' photos. For Tara, this type of participation on a social network site is a critical element of staying socially connected. She is not alone. While the specific tools vary by geography, time, and peer group, the teens we interviewed throughout the United States regularly told us that engaging with social media is important for developing and maintaining friendships with peers. While these teens may see one another at school, in formal or unstructured activities, or at one another's houses, they use social media to keep in touch with their friends, classmates, and peers when getting together is not possible. Skyler Sierra, an eighteen-year-old from Colorado, succintly articulated the importance of these new media to these teens' social lives when she explained to her mother that “if you're not on MySpace, you don't exist.”
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For many contemporary teenagers, losing access to social media is tantamount to losing their social world.