Danah Boyd defines herself as an ethnographer. Most of us do not think of current day ethnographers existing (and if they did, how they would pay their mortgage?). Danah is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She is in a unique position to research how youth use and view social media. I heard Danah speak at the 2010 Symposium on Youth and Social Media sponsored by the OSU Moritz College of Law.
Much of what Dana relayed was not a surprise but her depth of the issues was enlightening. For example, she discussed “replicability” of online information. We are all aware of how information online can be forwarded around but Dana relayed how, within the world of teenagers, the replicability makes it hard to determine what the original record is, for example it common for youth to forward an instant message, AFTER they change key words.
We are told to “know your audience” but when communicating online it is very difficult to speak to a specific population because we do not always know who our audience is. Dana defines this as collapsed contexts – The lack of spatial, social and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts. We used to be able to change how we speak to different audiences. When online our social contexts collide. Danah commented how a collapsed context usually only occurs offline when alcohol is involved.
This is a fascinating issue. Social media folks often talk about being genuine, being yourself. Are all of us exactly the same, always? Or do we change our behavior (sometimes slightly, sometimes intensely) depending upon to whom we are speaking?
Danah told a story of how a teenager said MySpace was for the black kids and Facebook was for the white kids. Danah was so stunned with the information that she rushed out to blog about it. She said she dealt with the information in a messy way, “which is how bloggers deal with it, not how academics do”. Would she have phrased her response as such if she were talking to a room full of bloggers instead of a room full of academics? How many times have any of us felt the need to explain ourselves because a comment was misunderstood due to the listener not knowing the context of the comment?
Back to the content of her blog post, further research found the distinction between MySpace and Facebook to be less racially based and more class based. She noted the original creation of MySpace occured in LA while Facebook was created at Harvard. It makes sense that when Facebook opened up to teenagers, those first to head over would be those who know college students using the application.
Danah Boyd was incredibly impressive. Her research has gone beyond traditional surveys. She goes out and talks to kids about social media. She goes to the source. Impressive? Oh, yes! Am I jealous? Oh, yes!
