Aleks Krotoski interview with Danah Boyd
danah boyd (@zephoria on Twitter) is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Boston, Massachusetts and a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School. She has been studying teens on social networks for almost a decade, first becoming the global expert on MySpace (see her PhD dissertation and other publications, including Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life, and more recently helping to contribute to a MacArthur-funded project that led to the report Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (for my notes on the first three chapters of this text, head here). I spoke with danah on Monday about the effects of web technologies on how kids “do” youth culture in a hyper-connected, networked public, and she offered her observations and advice. Here’s the unedited 14 minutes of the interview, which became part of a feature on this week’s Tech Weekly podcast for The Guardian.
Definitely worth your time.
30 Plays
I’m looking for different open-access journals that address social sciences and/or new media. So far, folks have sent me the following:
List Curated By danah boyd
![My day has been made!
I was asked to write a blog post for the Edelman Digital blog (Employer) about digital research. I used the post as an opportunity to call out the work of five digital researchers and ethnographers whose work I find valuable and insightful.
The post went live yesterday and I’ve been floored by the great feedback it has received. More importantly, I’ve been really touched by the humility of some of the researchers on the list. These people don’t have to acknowledge the list or even say thanks, but they did and it makes me respect them even more.
[Disclosure: boyd works at Microsoft’s research facility in Boston. Microsoft is an Edelman Client]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcwyjviJPm1qb9ouno1_500.png)
My day has been made!
I was asked to write a blog post for the Edelman Digital blog (Employer) about digital research. I used the post as an opportunity to call out the work of five digital researchers and ethnographers whose work I find valuable and insightful.
The post went live yesterday and I’ve been floored by the great feedback it has received. More importantly, I’ve been really touched by the humility of some of the researchers on the list. These people don’t have to acknowledge the list or even say thanks, but they did and it makes me respect them even more.
[Disclosure: boyd works at Microsoft’s research facility in Boston. Microsoft is an Edelman Client]
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People are sharing content left right and center as part of their daily sociable practices. They’re sharing as if the Internet is a social place, not a professional place. More accurately, they’re sharing in a setting where there’s no clear delineation of social and professional spheres. Since social media became popular, folks have continuously talked about how we need to teach people to not share what might cause them professional consternation. Those warnings haven’t worked. And for good reason. What’s professionally questionable to one may be perfectly appropriate to another. Or the social gain one sees might outweigh the professional risks. Or, more simply, people may just be naive.
I’m sick of hearing about how the onus should be entirely on the person doing the sharing. There are darn good reasons in which people share information and just because you can dig it up doesn’t mean that it’s ethical to use it. So I’m delighted by the German move, if for no other reason than to highlight that we need to rethink our regulatory approaches. I strongly believe that we need to spend more time talking about how information is being used and less time talking about how stupid people are for sharing it in the first place.
”Danah Boyd “Regulating the Use of Social Media Data”
Three cheers for Boyd’s allusion to identity performance online. It amazes me that people neglect to remember that how people choose to represent themselves online may NOT be the best indicator of who they are or what they think. Digital personas may in fact be an idealized sense of self, for better or worse.
A Quick Response to Danah Boyd’s Post “Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight”
In her recent post for UC Irvine’s Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, Danah Boyd discusses how teenagers communicate multiple messages through social media. Steganography is an ancient technique where individuals communicate hidden messages in “plain sight.” Tattoos, invisible ink are two examples of methods used to communicate those messages. The idea is that an individual crafts a message that is intended to be read differently by different audiences without changing the content of the message.
Boyd uses the example of a teenage girl who is Facebook friends with her mother. When the girl, Carmen, breaks up with her boyfriend, she creates ambiguous status updates that communicate to her mother that she is happy while communicating a different message to her friends:
When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.
Boyd’s argument is that through the use of social steganography, Carmen -or anyone else for that matter-is communicating her real (hidden) message in “plain sight” and in effect employing an old communication tactic for a new digital age:
Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults - namely their parents - for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing. Social steganography is one of the most common techniques that teens employ. They do this because they care about privacy, they care about misinterpretation, they care about segmented communications strategies.
Although I agree with Boyd’s analysis that some form of social steganography is happening, I’d like to raise another point that steganography may not always be about communicating multiple messages as much as it is a response to power. In other words, in one instance someone may be actively communicating a message because they choose to and in another instance someone may be using steganography because they have to. I admit the distinction between the two may be a subtle one.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault argues that discipline is necessary to cultivate docility, the quality needed in a population in order to be controlled. In order to create this kind of docility, individuals need to be observed and it’s the act of observation that acts as a form of control. Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham’s paradigm of the Panopticon, an institutional model for punishment that was never actually built. The Panopticon:
allowed for constant observation characterized by an “unequal gaze”; the constant possibility of observation. Perhaps the most important feature of the panopticon was that it was specifically designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether s/he was being observed. The unequal gaze caused the internalization of disciplinary individuality, and the docile body required of its inmates. This means one is less likely to break rules or laws if they believe they are being watched, even if they are not.
The processes of governing one’s self under the gaze of control constitutes Foucault’s notions of Governmentality. How an individual acts while being observed is a question at the heart of Governmentality. This is a simplified take on Foucault, but it’s this question that I would like to apply to Boyd’s comments about social steganography.
My argument is that there is a sort “unequal gaze” between online users and various political, social and economic institutions. Despite the discourse of transparency between users and various corporate and political institutions, users know they’re being watched-tracked-and are governing themselves accordingly. Social Steganograpy is just one way individuals govern their behavior online. But what if that self-control extends beyond status updates or Tweets?
What if every aspect of a person’s digital self is so regulated (e.g., profiles, photos, names, posts, etc) that nothing of their digital persona reflects their offline lives because of the Web’s “unequal gaze”? Are we going to get to a place where the Web’s publicness starts to destroy anything authentic about our digital selves? Will we end up regulating our behavior to such an extent that everything about our digital lives is all performance?
It’s a little too easy to venture down the Orwellian view of social media, so I won’t. And frankly, I’m a hopeful that some kind of middle ground can be found, something between self-awareness and authenticity. But I do think it’s important to be mindful of how one’s individual online and offline actions interact with larger systems of political and cultural power.
5 Social Media Articles Worth Reading
1. Our Biggest Brands Can No Longer Be Managed By Nerds
Via Advertising Age
- Key Takeaway: Replacing suit-wearing nerds with nerds in chuck taylors who tweet.
2. What Social Media Users Want [STATS]
Via Mashable
- Key Takeaway: Folks on Twitter, Digg and Facebook want news from those platforms. Myspace still sucks if you’re not a musician.
3. Analysis without Analysts
Via Harvard Business Review
- Key Takeaway: Not totally social media related but relevant. Also, emoticons should be used in analysis.
4. How Privacy Vanishes Online
Via NY Times
- Key Takeaway: You want a job, get online. Get online, maybe get jacked.
5. Danah Boyd: How Technology Makes A Mess Of Privacy and Publicity
Via Techcrunch
- Danah Boyd is still awesome.
Danah Boyd on Privacy, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg
“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. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. 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.”
Via Danah’s blog, Apophenia.
Her post was in response to this article about FB CEO’s claim that “The Age of Privacy is Over” in ReadWriteWeb.
I really appreciate Danah’s smart and simple definition of privacy. Both articles are worth the read.
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Modern & Im/material Things
I'm Christina Dennaoui. Sometimes I wax philosophical on culture in the digital age. I have an interest in social media, cultural studies, electronic music, critical theory, middle eastern politics, ethnographic research and digital anthropology. I make beats. I drink bourbon. I'm a nice lady, so you should talk to me.
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