expert generalist

danah boyd. Photo by davemc500hats

danah boyd is a researcher extraordinaire who examines youth social media practices and other intersections between technology and society. She now works at Microsoft Research New England and is a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She recently got her PhD from the School of Information at UCBerkeley, and has made her dissertation available publicly:

Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics

For more than two years, boyd conducted an ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Her dissertation documents “the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices – self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society”. She describes social network sites as “networked publics” and stresses the “imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice.” According to boyd, networked publics, though similar in many ways to unmediated publics, contain structural differences that affect practices – including the properties of persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability; and the dynamics of invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private.

boyd describes how as teens navigate social network sites, they devise strategies for managing the complexities, and sometimes the awkwardness, of their structural dynamics. According to boyd, these 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.” Countering “technological determinism” — the notion that technology determines practice and social outcomes in a one-way fashion, and is inherently positive or negative, boyd’s research shows that teens are active participants in shaping that technology.

boyd feels that adult fears about teens’ safety on social networks are based on “fears of what could be rather than what is”, are similar to previous fears about malls and parking lots, and are a proxy for wanting to control them. An interesting footnote is that in Ghana, parents worry about their teens spending too much time in Internet cafes, but their issue is not safety, but discipline.

One example of the awkwardness that boyd describes on social networks is the Top Friend list on MySpace. This forces teens to make explicit the status of their friends in a way that does not need to be made explicit in unmediated spaces, which heightens the social stakes. Teens may stress out over who to put on that list, or they may subvert it by leaving the founder of MySpace as the default “top friend”, or by putting family members or bands there.

It will be interesting to see how navigation of social awkwardness will evolve as teens become adults. Currently, adults adapting to social media have their own awkward moments on sites such as Facebook. One example is relationship status. Often adults, without realizing they don’t need to make it public, stumble over what relationship status to display on Facebook or how to note changes to that status. Often, a change in status to “married” by a long-term married person is a result of figuring out how to display actual identity on a profile, though sometimes there could be other reasons for not displaying actual married status. This may explain the usual flurry of half-joking comments in a persons’ newsfeed after a message saying “Jane Smith is now married” – “About time!” and “The kids will be happy” and so on. On the other hand, occasionally a change from “married” to “single”, though at first seen to be a joke, represents an actual divorce, announced to the wider network of friends on Facebook.

Watching how teens continue to define and differentiate between their various contexts will help us understand what networked publics of the future will be like. Adults, often new to social networks, frequently make social context errors. For example, a businessperson may focus too heavily on push marketing instead of nurturing relationships. They may miss the subtle contexts that form networked communities. What happens when the contexts between personal and business get blurred through technology? Recently, a Ketchum exec gave a presentation about social marketing to the worldwide communications group at the FedEx headquarters in Memphis, but unfortunately had posted a tweet unfavorable to their beloved hometown that morning. This tweet was discovered, and the offended employees wrote an indignant letter to the Ketchum exec copying Fedex and Ketchum management.

It would be fascinating to study what networked publics are like for say, the small business community, and how they change the dynamics of business. If what spreads depends on social structure, how do business relationships change? As attention becomes a commodity, how do small businesses evolve to get attention? For example, does an accountant who is used to projecting a serious image in unmediated space now benefit by unleashing her inner comedian in mediated space, and posting amusing tax tips videos on YouTube?

For those of us designing new architectures of participation, we need to first ourselves imagine the imagined community that will inhabit the technology. We need to be aware of areas of social friction or validation that we may inadvertently build in to our technology, design for collective adoption of technology (designing not just for the “I” but also for the “we”), and give participants flexible tools to define their public and private spaces, to situate and identify themselves in a shared context that they can understand.

And lastly, we need to deeply understand the importance of context. As community strategist F. Randall Farmer so wisely advises, “Don’t cross the streams.” The idea of the importance of context is not new. The Sanskrit term “patra” means not only identity, but also situation and condition. In Bali, “desa-kala-patra” is a philosophy of living – place, time, situation – according to the context. I suggest that we embrace patra – identity and context blurring into one.