Yesterday FOSI and Microsoft hosted a breakfast panel discussion about “Kids, Privacy and Online Drama.” danah boyd and Alice Marwick of Microsoft discussed how teens view their online privacy. What they discovered is that most teens value their online privacy but the way that they define privacy is much different from how adults define it. Most adults question why teens share so much personal information on social media sites. For teens, it’s more about fitting in and maintaining a certain persona or stature; telling people what you have, what you did and who you did it with. “You’re expected to be on Facebook,” according to one teen in the report. The problem is that there’s a fine line between updating your “friends” on a status and sharing too much information. The full study can be downloaded here. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1925128 Amanda Lenhart of Pew Internet & American Life Project shared interesting data about parents and teens’ Internet experience. The chart below shows just how similar adults and their teens are when it comes to social media. The most popular social media site for both groups is Facebook. When it comes to social media in general, adults and teens aren’t much different from each other. 
Another interesting finding from Pew Internet is that cyberbullying may not be occurring as often as we think. Despite the traumatic stories we hear every day about cyberbullying, the research from Pew Internet shows that during a 12 month period, most social media users (adults and teens) reported that they had not been bullied. Only 15% of teens and 13% of adults reported that someone had been mean or cruel to them while on a social media site (see the chart below). While this study did not cover all online activity, it does cover a large majority of online activity which is usually done through social networking. 
You can view the full report here. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Teens-and-social-media/Part-1/Teens-vs-adults.aspx
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