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Popular media often characterize youths’ use of social media as overwhelmingly negative, reporting that teens engage in reckless, unsafe behaviors with little thought to their online privacy or safety. Typically, these popular media accounts are based on adults’ prescriptive views of youths’ attitudes and behaviors. Using qualitative methods including background questionnaires and focus groups, we gathered older teens’ attitudes about online privacy and safety to provide a more complete narrative from a teen perspective. Findings suggest that older teens are concerned with their online privacy and feel discomfort with unintended audiences seeing their personal information, yet most feel tension to share personal information with friends. They are less concerned about safety, tending to feel safe online and to employ protective measures, but viewing older and younger generations as less knowledgeable about online safety. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for teaching teens about online privacy and safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a brief overview of research relating to teens, libraries, and social media. It also summarizes a recent multimethod study of how public and school libraries fit into U.S. teens’ increasingly online information lives. The study results debunk five popular myths about teens and social media and reveal many positive ways that teens are using social media to connect with peers and adults and to seek and share information. The article concludes with a discussion of the role that libraries can play in designing services and programs to encourage teens to engage in positive social media use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The issue of how teens choose social networks and information communication technologies ( ICT's) for personal communication is complex. This study focused on describing how U. S. teens from a highly technological suburban high school select ICT's for personal communication purposes. Two research questions guided the study: (a) What factors influence high school seniors' selection of online social networks and other ICT's for everyday communication? (b) How can social network theory ( SNT) help to explain how teens select online social networks and other ICT's for everyday communication purposes? Using focus groups, a purposive sample of 45 teens were asked to discuss (a) their preferred methods for communicating with friends and family and why, (b) the reasons why they chose to engage (or not to engage) in online social networking, (c) how they selected ICT's for social networking and other communication purposes, and (d) how they decided whom to accept as online 'friends.' Findings indicated that many factors influenced participants' ICT selection practices including six major categories of selection factors: relationship factors, information/communication factors, social factors, systems factors, self-protection factors, and recipient factors. SNT was also helpful in explaining how 'friendship' was a major determining factor in their communication media and platform choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]