Introduction

Social networking has changed many people's everyday lives, and in an extraordinarily short time. Children and young people, especially, are adopting social networking as a part of their social relationships, learning, consumption and creative practices. What defines children and young people as social beings is happening more and more often in social networking sites (SNS), which are online spaces where people can communicate, play, watch video clips, look at photographs and share their feelings and thoughts with others. They are manifestations of ‘public culture’, the term that Appadurai and Breckenbridge (1995) suggest as an alternative to ‘popular culture’ or ‘mass culture’. Public culture links engagement in popular culture to the practices of participation in the public sphere. Ito and colleagues (2010, p 19) understand public culture as indicating a change from audiences purely consuming media to the ‘active participation of a distributed social network in the production and circulation of culture and knowledge’. They refer to ‘networked publics’, which facilitate the development of public identities and friendship-driven practices on the internet.

As previous research points out, SNS offer a range of possibilities for children to perform, express identity, create and communicate with others (boyd and Ellison, 2007; Green and Hannon, 2007; boyd, 2008; Notley, 2009; Sharples et al, 2009). Young people, in particular, are adapting easily to the new digital cultures, and are eagerly exploring online worlds that appear strange to many adults. However, SNS also involve risks, which are of concern to parents and educators (Livingstone and Helsper, 2007; Ybarra et al, 2007; Staksrud and Livingstone, 2009). Public profiles on SNS and open sharing of materials on the internet can lead to misuse of personal information.

Concerns have been expressed that children and young people do not have a sense of privacy, nor do they understand the dangers of personal data being misused or the risks involved in meeting strangers online. These concerns are illustrative of the blurring of the boundaries between public and private that occurs when SNS connect the private sphere of home to global media and youth culture (see Morley, 2000). It is argued that online worlds create media spaces that overlay the physical locations in which media users live, such as their homes or even their bedrooms (Scannel, 1996; Couldry, 2003).