The notion that teenagers have an extended intimate sociality involving an always-on mode of communication emerges strongly from a major US study of the role of digital media and online communication in the lives of youth.34 Social network sites, online games, video sharing, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones have become fixtures of youth culture and enable youth to connect with peers in innovative ways. While many parents and teachers interviewed for the study describe young people’s hanging out with their friends online as “a waste of time,” the authors argue that teenagers integrate new media ways of being together with the informal hanging out practice that have always characterized youth culture.
Notably, most of the direct personal communication that teenagers engage in through private messages, instant messaging, and mobile phone communication involves exchange with close friends and romantic partners, rather than the broader peer group with whom they have more passive access. Teenagers have a “full-time intimate community” with whom they communicate in an always-on temporal mode via mobiles and instant messaging. They use social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter to extend, enhance, and hang out with people they already know in their ofline lives. Just as in the Norwegian study, the vast majority of teenagers use new media to reach out to their friends, casually connecting with them in private communication that is free from parental monitoring. While the expression of these peer social networks via mobiles varies among young people, cross-national comparisons reinforce a sense that in many parts of the world teenagers and children use mobile phones in broadly similar ways across cultures and countries and in broadly diferent ways as compared to adults.35
To summarize, ICTs do not impinge upon or steal private time in any straightforward way. Instead, they extend and reconfigure the time frames of those spaces, making possible new kinds of emotional proximity that are less anchored in shared time and geography. For young people, the so-called digital natives, omnipresent communication devices and social media stream seamlessly into the natural rhythms of daily life.
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