TakenOutOfContext.pdf (application/pdf Object)
http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf

Impact des réseaux sociaux sur les ados américains...

teens in networked social spaces. danah boyds dissertation.

"While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself."

Dr danah boyd's newly-minted PhD from UC Berkeley was awarded based on her fantastic thesis project, "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics." danah's ground-breaking research on how kids (especially marginal kids) use the Internet has been featured here a lot -- she was one of the contributors to Mimi Ito's gigantic Digital Youth Project, and the attorneys general's report on the relative absence of pedophiles online.

save

Good piece on network effects and history of social network sites by Danah Boyd.

Social media is not new. Media has been leveraged for sociable purposes since the caveman's walls. Even in the realm of the Internet, some of the first applications were framed around communication and sharing. For decades, we've watched the development of new genres of social media - MUDs/MOOs, instant messaging, chatrooms, bulletin boards, etc.

Feb. 28, 2009 paper on Social Media to Microsoft.

Great overview (sampling plate) about 'social media'

Interesante estudio

"Living and Learning with Social Media" danah boyd Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology Penn State: State College, PA 18 April 2009 [This is a rough unedited crib of the actual talk] Citation: boyd, danah. 2009. "Living and Learning with Social Media." Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. State College, PA: April 18.

Unedited crib of talk from Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. State College, PA: April 18.

danah boyd

Discussion of the migration of myspace users to facebook, explores the way class, race, and social lines are distributed across social networking sites

fascinating look at social networks and class structure

social networking

"...increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation 'choice' leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions."

Studies suggest that users of Facebook and MySpace are breaking down along class and racial lines.

"Is the social media revolution bringing us together? Or is it perpetuating divisions by race and class?" (NYT)

Alimentan las redes sociales las divisiones del mundo real? Articulo en el Nwe York Times, basado en la investigacion de Danah Boyd, investigadora del Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society

(2009, NYTimes) Article about recent research suggesting there is classism in the use of social media. The quality of the reporting is very weak - hard to say if I agree with the conclusions.

looks like an interesting categorization

danah maps three models of social networks: 1. Sociological "personal" networks 2. Behavioral social networks 3. Publicly articulated social networks

Yesterday, Mashable reported Nielsen's latest Twitter numbers with the headline Stats Confirm It: Teens Don't Tweet. This gained traction on Twitter turning into the trending topic "teens don't tweet" which was primarily kept in play all day yesterday with teens responding to the TT by saying "I'm a teen" or the equivalent of "you're all idiots... what am I, mashed potatoes?" I want to unpack some of what played out because I'm astonished by the misinterpretations in every which direction. We have a methodology and interpretation problem. As Fred Stutzman has pointed out, there are reasons to question Nielsen's methodology and, thus, their findings. Furthermore, the way that they present the data is misleading. If we were to assume an even distribution of Twitter use over the entire U.S. population, it would be completely normal to expect that 16% of Twitter users are young adults. So, really, what Nielsen is saying is, "Everyone expects social media to be used primarily by the young

Teens Don't Tweet... Or Do They?

"Everyone expects social media to be used primarily by the young but OMG OMG

analysis of neilsen article

This pov (Twitter as social grooming) makes a lot of sense to me. But I would also dispute the term "pointless babble" itself: the two examples of "phatic" (non-information-conveying) expressions given here, "hi", and "thank you", actually can convey quite a lot of information, depending on context.

Spirited and spot on defence of the cod analysis of Twitter that some commentators engage in as a form of denial...

Now, turn all of your utterances over to an analytics firm so that they can code everything that you've said. I think that you'll be lucky if only 40% of what you say constitutes "pointless babble" to a third party ear.

Refreshing perspective on twitter. Makes me want to tweet. (Aside: this shines some light on things I've been trying to figure out about IM lately too. It might as well be re-titled "why IM should never be logged".)

danah boyd discusses the differences in Twitter and Facebook status updates in relation to the social graph.

Some in the room might immediately think, "Ah, but it's a meritocracy. People will give their attention to what is best!" This too is mistaken logic. What people give their attention to depends on a whole set of factors that have nothing to do with what's best. At the most simplistic level, consider the role of language. People will pay attention to content that is in their language, even if they can get access to content in any language. This means Chinese language content will soon get more attention than English content, let alone Dutch content or Hebrew content.

In his seminal pop-book, Csikszentmihalyi argued that people are happiest when they can reach a state of "flow." He talks about performers and athletes who are in the height of their profession, the experience they feel as time passes by and everything just clicks. People reach a state where attention appears focused and, simultaneously, not in need of focus at the same time. The world is aligned and it just feels right.

As we continue to move from a broadcast model of information to a networked one, we will continue to see reworkings of the information landscape. Some of what is unfolding is exciting, some is terrifying. The key is not be all utopian or dystopian about it, but to recognize what changes and what stays the same. The future of Web2.0 is about information flow and if you want to help people, help them reach that state. Y'all are setting the tone of the future of information.

Via Jon Stahl - very interesting stuff

essay

spectacle at Web2.0 Expo... from my perspective

Backchannel gone bad

But in return, please come with some respect. Please treat me like a person, not an object. Come to talk with me, not about me. I'm ready and willing to listen, but I need you to be as well.

My colleagues aren't that much older than me but they come from a different set of traditions. They aren't used to speaking to a room full of blue-glow faces. And they think it's utterly fascinating that I poll my twitterverse about constructs of fairness while hearing a speaker talk about game theory. Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning and thinking and engaging. I'm 31 years old. I've been online since I was a teen. I've grown up with this medium and I embrace each new device that brings me closer to being a cyborg. I want information at my fingertips now and always. There's no doubt that I'm not mainstream. But I also feel really badly for the info-driven teens and college students out there being told that learning can only happen when they pay attention to an audio-driven lecture in a classroom setting. I read books during my classroom (blatantly not paying attention).

None of my colleagues brings a laptop. I do. And occasionally my interns do (although they often feel like they're misbehaving when they do so they often don't... I'm more stubborn than they are). My colleagues interrupt the talk with questions. (One admits that he asks questions because he's more interested in talking to the speaker than listening... he also asks questions to stay awake.) I find the interruptions to the speaker to be weirdly inappropriate. I much much prefer to ask questions to Twitter, Wikipedia, and IRC/IM. Let the speaker do her/his thing... let me talk with the audience who is present and those who are not but might have thoughtful feedback. When I'm inspired, I ask questions. When I'm not, I zone out, computer or not.

"danah boyd is a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She recently completed her PhD in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley."

What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement.

Danah Boyd on the discussion of using a notebook in a conference (or lecture)

"I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process. I have become a "bad student." I can no longer wander an art museum without asking a bazillion questions that the docent doesn't know or won't answer or desperately wanting access to information that goes beyond what's on the brochure (like did you know that Rafael died from having too much sex!?!?!). I can't pay attention in a lecture without looking up relevant content. And, in my world, every meeting and talk is enhanced through a backchannel of communication."

Danah blogs about who "began his question by highlight that, unlike most of the audience who seemed more invested in the internet than scholarly conversations, HE had been paying attention. It's not very often that I feel like I've been publicly bitchslapped but boy did that sting. .... Of course, I haven't become that much of an adult because here I am blogging the details of said encounter. There's no doubt that I barely understood what the speaker was talking about. But during the talk, I had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers' papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.

Had multiple conversations about iPhones / laptops in meetings last week. Agree that it's helpful to be connected during a meeting / presentation, but I wonder sometimes if we could cut meeting time in half if everyone was paying attention for the entire thing. Half of the onus is on the presenters IMHO: get better at presentations.

"If we're building a public stage, we need to give people the ability to protect themselves, the ability to face the consequences honestly. We cannot hide behind rhetoric of how everyone is public just because everyone we know in our privileged circles is walking confidently into the public sphere and assuming no risk. And we can't justify our decisions as being simply about changing norms when the economic incentives are all around. I'm with Marshall on this one: Facebook's decision is an economic one, not a social norms one. And that scares the bejesus out of me. People care deeply about privacy, especially those who are most at risk of the consequences of losing it. Let us not forget about them. It kills me when the bottom line justifies social oppression. Is that really what the social media industry is about?"

When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

Danah Boyd : “Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control."

There isn't some radical shift in norms taking place. What's changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn't mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn't mean that folks who live their lives in public don't value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.

dannah boyd keynote notes from sxsw2010 via monstro

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury.

Interesting insight from female scholar

Must read: Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant) by researcher Danah Boyd http://j.mp/9EjHul – Jean-Luc Raymond (jeanlucr) http://twitter.com/jeanlucr/statuses/14000875802

presentation script by danah boyd

Big data, the currency that users pay Facebook and other social media companies for the right to use 'free' services

They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. The mindset is deeply familiar to me and it doesn’t surprise me when I learn that old hacker types get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about 4chan even if trolls and griefers annoy the hell out of them. In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture. Cuz, really, at the end of the day, many old skool hackers weren’t entirely thrilled to realize that mainstreamification of net culture meant that mainstream culture would dominate net culture.

From day one, Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become a social utility. He succeeded. Facebook is now a utility for many. The problem with utilities is that they get regulated

Brilliant insight. RT @jangles: More on Facebook: reading @zephoria 's thought-provoking "Facebook is a utility" http://is.gd/cb5ij [from http://twitter.com/PaulSweeney/statuses/14083869118]

"Facebook speaks of itself as a utility while also telling people they have a choice. But there’s a conflict here. We know this conflict deeply in the United States. When it comes to utilities like water, power, sewage, Internet, etc., I am constantly told that I have a choice. But like hell I’d choose Comcast if I had a choice. Still, I subscribe to Comcast. Begrudgingly. Because the “choice” I have is Internet or no Internet. I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

"I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

Facebook & Radical Transparency http://bit.ly/9eVJMe, a rant by @zephoria, with a follow-up http://bit.ly/b69GjU [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/14075940793]