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Introduction 11Our work has focused on those practices that are “new” at this momentand that are most clearly associated with youth culture and voice, such asengagement with social network sites, media fandom, and gaming. Incontrast to sites such as Linked In and match.com or much of the bloggingworld, sites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and LiveJournal andonline gaming have a high degree of youth participation, and youth havedefined certain genres of participation within these sites that are keyed toa generational identity. We can also see this cultural distinction at play inthe difference between email and instant messaging as preferred communicationtools, where the older generation is more tightly identified withthe former. The ways in which age identity works in these sites is somewhatdifferent from how more traditional media have segmented youth as adistinct market with particular cultural styles and products associated withit. Instead, the youth focus stems from patterns of adoption, the fit withthe particular social and communicative needs of youth, and how theytake up these tools to produce their own “content” as well as traffic incommercial popular culture. In these sites, it is not only youth consumptionthat is driving the success of new Internet ventures but also theirparticipation (or “traffic”) and production of “user-generated content.” Indescribing these as youth-centric sites and communication tools, we meanthat they are culturally identified with youth, but they can be engagedwith by people of all ages. We are examining the cultural valences ofcertain new media tools and practices in how they align with age-basedidentities, but this does not mean that we believe that youth have amonopoly on innovative new media uses or that youth-centric sites do nothave a large number of adult participants.New media researchers differ in the degree to which they see contemporarynew media practices as attached to a particular life stage or moreclosely tied to a generational cohort identity. For example, in looking atmobile phone use, Rich Ling and Brigitte Yttri (2006) have argued thatcommunicative patterns are tied to the particular developmental needs ofadolescents who are engaged in negotiations over social identity andbelonging. Naomi Baron (2008) also examines the relation between onlinecommunication and changes to reading and writing conventions. Shesees youth uptake of more informal forms of online writing as part of abroader set of social and cultural shifts in the status of printed and writtencommunication. Ultimately, the ways in which current communication