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80 danah boydBy providing tools for mediated interactions, social media allow teens toextend their interactions beyond physical boundaries. Conversations andinteractions that begin in person do not end when friends are separated.Youth complement private communication through messaging and mobilephones with social media that support broader peer publics.In the 1980s, the mall served as a key site for teen sociability in theUnited States (Ortiz 1994) because it was often the only accessiblepublic space where teens could go to hang out (Lewis 1990). Teens areincreasingly monitored, though, and many have been pressured out ofpublic spaces such as streets, parks, malls, and libraries (Buckingham 2000).More recently, networked publics have become the contemporary stompingground for many U.S. teens. Just as teens flocked to the malls becauseof societal restrictions, many of today’s teens are choosing to gather withfriends online because of a variety of social and cultural limitations (boyd2007). While the site teens go to gather at has changed over time, manyof the core practices have stayed the same. The changes we are seeing todayare a variant of these core practices, inflected in distinctive ways as youthmobilize social media.During the course of our study, we watched as a new genre of socialmedia—social network sites (SNSs) 2 —gained traction among U.S. teenagers.While teenagers have many choices of media with which to interactwith one another, two large social network sites—MySpace and Facebook—captured the imaginations of millions of U.S. teenagers while we weredoing fieldwork in the years 2004 through 2007. Not all teens frequentthese sites (Lenhart and Madden 2007), but social network sites becamecentral to many teens’ practices. This form of networked public allowedbroad peer groups to socialize together while other social media suchas instant messaging (IM) and mobile phones allowed teens to interactone-to-one or in small groups. All these tools can be used for a wide varietyof purposes, but what we witnessed during our study was that the dominantpractices for most youth were friendship-driven and exhibited thegenre of participation that we have described in chapter 1 as “hangingout.”This chapter documents how social media are incorporated into teenfriendship practices in the context of their everyday peer groups. Weemphasize the practices that take place on social network sites because theyemerged and took hold during our study as a central gathering spot for