Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

Abstract

In 2008, when we released the results of the Digital Youth Study (Ito et al. 2008), Barack Obama won what was called the “Facebook election,” the iPhone was one year old, and Minecraft was in development. Rewind a bit more to 2006, when we were in the midst of our fieldwork, and MySpace was the dominant social media platform, niche groups congregated on LiveJournal, and YouTube was an upstart. Adults struggled to understand the appeal of social and mobile media. The new millennium was just beginning to usher in sweeping transformations in how people communicate, organize, and express themselves. The teens in our research, now known as millennials, continue to be the poster children for these changes.