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This article presents the results of a study concerning the use of online profile pages by adolescents to know more about "offline" friends and acquaintances. Previous research has indicated that social networking sites (SNSs) are used to gather information on new online contacts. However, several studies have demonstrated a substantial overlap between offline and online social networks. Hence, we question whether online connections are meaningful in gathering information on offline friends and acquaintances. First, the results indicate that a combination of passive uncertainty reduction (monitoring a target's profile) and interactive uncertainty reduction (communication through the target's profile) explains a considerable amount of variance in the level of uncertainty about both friends and acquaintances. More specifically, adolescents generally get to know much more about their acquaintances. Second, the results of online uncertainty reduction positively affect the degree of self-disclosure, which is imperative in building a solid friend relation. Further, we find that uncertainty reduction strategies positively mediate the effect of social anxiety on the level of certainty about friends. This implies that socially anxious teenagers benefit from SNSs by getting the conditions right to build a more solid relation with their friends. Hence, we conclude that SNSs play a substantial role in today's adolescents' everyday interpersonal communication.

This article addresses nonprofessional users' expressions of everyday creativity on YouTube, adopting the idea that making entails connecting on different levels. By combining different materials and ideas into a video and sharing it within the social context of the platform, uploaders can connect with its enormous audience. In our first study, we explore patterns in the elements that are used when creating a video. We also question whether these pattern combinations are aimed at different types of viewers. Our results show that videos with self-made content that display various skills are mainly targeted at viewers situated close to the uploader (e.g., family, friends). However, videos that incorporate instances of popular culture, either as a whole (e.g., a pop concert recording) or in part (e.g., remixed with other content), are directed at a much broader audience. In our second study, we question whether these self-made videos convey a message about uploaders' personality traits commonly linked to creative behavior. We found that independent observers are able to accurately predict the uploaders' actual openness to experience, a trait marked as the substrate of creativity. Next, we discuss our results in light of a pessimistic view of today's democratized culture. We show that uploaders appear to have a tacit knowledge of what kind of videos are interesting for what type of viewers. We conclude that, despite the lowered barriers to the production and dissemination of video, YouTube viewers are still able to identify variations in the personality trait most commonly associated to creativity.

This article focuses on teenage YouTube uploaders' networked public expectancies when posting a video. These expectancies allow uploaders to cope temporarily with the uncertainty of who exactly will view their video. The results indicate that teenage uploaders strongly expect viewers that are situated close to them in both geographic and socio-demographic terms. Furthermore, we discuss the uncertainty-reducing properties of online feedback. We propose that different types of online feedback are preferred to verify the prior networked public expectancies. An effect of the identified online public expectancy (viewers with a similar interest/activity) is found for the importance of feedback both on the platform (e.g., views, comments) and off the platform (e.g., interaction on a social-network site). The identified offline public expectancy (friends/family) affects the importance attributed to off-platform feedback. Surprisingly, no effect of the unidentified online public expectancy (the general public) was found on on-platform feedback. This finding, in conjunction with the low expectancy of this group, raises the question of whether teenagers either cannot conceive this ambiguous mass public, or, if their expectancies are accurate, whether they are aware of the fact that only a small fraction of the videos on YouTube reach notable popularity. Therefore, in a second study, we test the accuracy of the online networked public expectancies by testing their effects on the longitudinal growth of actual feedback (views, comments, and rates). The results provide modest evidence that teenage uploaders have accurate online public expectancies.