Youth engage with others to work out boundaries, to understand norms. This is how they learn power and authority, how they learn the networked architecture of everyday life. It's easy to eschew this, to argue that this is irrelevant, but most people spend a decent amount of their time working through social issues as a part of being an adult in this society. We talk about it as "politics" usually but it's about people. And teen years are where this is worked out.

Since we're using social network sites as a case study, let me point out one of the places where they FAIL miserably. On social network sites, you have to publicly list your Friends and you have to have the functioning network to leverage it. What happens if you're an outcast at school? Does bringing it into the classroom make it worse? What happens if you're forced to Friend someone who torments you because you share a class? And then you have to face that person in your "private" space online as well? Bringing social network sites into the classroom can be very very tricky because you have to contend with social factors that you, as a teacher, may not be aware of.

It's critical to realize that just because young folks pick up a technology before you do doesn't inherently mean that they understand it better than you do. Or that they have a way of putting it into context. What they're doing is not inherently more sophisticated – it's simply different. They're coming of age in a culture where these structures are just a given. They take them for granted. And they repurpose them to meet their needs. But they don't necessarily think about them.

Educators have a critical role when it comes to helping youth navigate social media. You can help them understand how to make sense of what they're seeing. We can call this "media literacy" or "digital literacy" or simply learning to live in a modern society. Youth need to know more than just how to use the tools - they need to understand the structures around them.

Amara’s Law (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara">backstory</a>) states that “<em>we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.</em>”

<h2>11. Metcalfe’s Law</h2> <p>This was the original conception of network effects, whereby the potential value of a network grows exponentially according to its size.</p>

The fundamental definition of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect">network effect</a> is “<em>when a product or service has more value the more that other people have it too.</em>”

In fact, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort">Principle of Least Effort</a> notes that they will tend to use the most convenient method, in the least exacting way available, with interaction stopping as soon as minimally acceptable results are achieved. As a result, well-known social scientist <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/buzzwatch/2008/05/05/wisdom-on-crowds-what-ceos-need-to-know-about-the-social-web/">Clay Shirky notes</a> that the most “brutally simple” social model often is the most successful one (using Twitter as an example.)

<h2>Reed’s Law</h2> <p>Researcher David Reed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%27s_law">discovered that</a> the network effect of social systems is much higher than would otherwise be expected, helping to explain the sudden rise of social systems in the latter half of this decade. While adding a social architecture to a piece of software for no specific reason isn’t helpful either, it turns out that in general, software (and indeed, any networked system) is better the more social it is.</p>

Reflexivity asserts that social actions can and do in fact influence the fundamental behavior of a social system and that these newly-influenced set of fundamentals can then proceed to change expectations, thus influencing new behavior. The process continues in a self-reinforcing pattern.