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Introduction 21gaming friends who do not overlap with the friends they hang out within school. Although our study does not enable us to identify whether thebalance is shifting in terms of how kids participate in different publics, wehave identified that there is an expanded palette of opportunity for kidsto participate in different kinds of publics because of the growth of thenetworked variety.Peer-Based LearningSociocultural approaches to learning have recognized that kids gain mostof their knowledge and competencies in contexts that do not involveformal instruction. A growing body of ethnographic work documents howlearning happens in informal settings, as a side effect of everyday life andsocial activity, rather than in an explicit instructional agenda. For example,in describing learning in relation to simulation games, James Paul Gee(2008, 19) suggests that kids pick up academic content and skills as partof their play. “These things, which are in the foreground at school, comefor free, that is, develop naturally as the learner solves problems andachieves goals.” In School’s Out!, an edited collection of essays documentinglearning in home, after-school, and community settings, Glynda Hull andKatherine Schultz (2002a, 2) ask, “Why, we have wanted to know, doesliteracy so often flourish out of school?” They describe the accumulatingevidence documenting how people pick up literacy in the contexts ofinformal, everyday contexts, and it is often difficult to reproduce thosesame literacies in the more formalized contexts of schooling and testing.We see our focus on youth learning in contexts of peer sociability andrecreational learning as part of this research tradition. Our interest, morespecifically, is in documenting instances of learning that are centered onyouth peer-based interaction, in which the agenda is not defined by parentsand teachers.Our focus on youth perspectives, as well as the high level of youthengagement in social and recreational activities online, determined ourfocus on the more informal and loosely organized contexts of peer-basedlearning. We discuss the implications for learning institutions in the conclusionof this book, but the body of the book describes learning outsideof school, primarily in settings of peer-based interaction. As ethnographiesof children and youth have documented, kids learn from their peers. Whileadults often view the influence of peers negatively, as characterized bythe term “peer pressure,” we approach these informal spaces for peer