This link has been bookmarked by 41 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Oct 2007, by Jeremy Price.
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05 Jun 18
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those who understand that the world is networked, that cultures exist beyond geographical coordinates, and that mediating technologies allow cultures to flourish in new ways
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using technology as an artifact that allows them to negotiate culture
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23 Feb 13
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13 Feb 12
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hnographic study of how American youth are using social technologies as a part of their practices of everyday life. The easy way to say this is that I've been studying MySpace.
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it's about diving into a particular culture and working to understand that culture on its own terms, interpreting signals to understand underlying signs.
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geographies of social life are shifting because of mediating technologies
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they communicate with people through mediating technologies, even when they share geographical proximity
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Geography is not the only meaningful delimiter or framer of culture, although it is not completely absent either. It just requires re-examination. Culture is still made up of people, artifacts, symbolism, etc. It's just that the underlying architecture that we've taken for granted has changed.
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While I groan whenever the buzzword "digital native" is jockeyed about, I also know that there is salience to this term. It is not a term that demarcates a generation, but a state of experience.
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mediating technologies allow cultures to flourish in new ways.
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In other words, a "digital native" understands that there is no such thing as "going online" but rather, what is important is the way in which people move between geographically-organized interactions and network-organized interactions.
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How can you follow interactions when they occur seamlessly between mediums?
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How do you conceptualize spatiality when statements like "I talked to him" are used to reference in-person conversations, phone conversations, semi-synchronous IM or SMS messages, and asynchronous email interactions?
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How do you build trust with informants when your presence is barely visible? And what does it mean to be a visible researcher?
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Having a MySpace or Facebook profile does not make me native. I will never use MySpace like teenagers do, nor should I.
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It's not about the technology or the artifact, but about the culture in which those technologies and artifacts are embedded.
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It's not about them and the machine. It's about them and their friends interacting through the machine.
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having a profile did me absolutely no good. I needed to have friends who would interact with me so that I would get what it was like to experience the technology as a mediating force.
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I needed to feel the social awkwardness, the consequences of power relations, the gulp factor when a comment was taken out of context, and the uh-ohs involved in expressing information in a persistent and searchable manner in the face of broad audiences.
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I do not believe it is possible really study the role of a technology in social life if you fetishize the tool. Pushing past that is critical and it takes time and innovative forms, something that we all need to think through.
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Seeing a teen's life through the lens of MySpace is akin to seeing their life through their time in school. It does get you part way there and it is important, but since I wanted to understand how social technologies fit into teens' lives, I knew I needed to go further.
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To do this, I sought to observe teens online and offline and interview them. Luckily, I've always had a fascination with the U.S. I've spent time in 48 states, driven horizontally across the country 13 times, vertically four times and made uncountable other interstate trips. Whenever I do, I hang out in all sorts of community and public spaces from parks and malls to VFW diners and movie theaters. I love talking to locals and observing the dynamic that take place.
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I spent a ridiculous amount of time on MySpace, LiveJournal, and Xanga. I surfed at least 100 profiles or blogs a day just to get a sense of the patterns and norms. In all, I analyzed 10,000 random profiles. In other words, I had no life.
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there's a huge weakness to this approach. I was not able to truly move between the spaces with teens. I couldn't follow an individual teen from morning to night, going to school, activities, home, etc. with them because of different structural limitations (think schools, laws and IRBs). My views of teen life were necessarily staccato, not seamless. And I found this deeply frustrating.
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I was not in school and I was bored so I began interviewing employees, venture capitalists, and users, documenting what I learned on my blog. Because people were curious about this phenomenon, my blog gained traction. People began sending me their own stories, sharing news coverage, providing inside views into what was happening. My blog became a central repository for coverage of Friendster.
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, he was concerned that I had tainted my own research by documenting what I was learning along the way. He was also concerned that my role in the media was contributing to the hype that prompted new users to sign up. We made a deal. I would not blog about MySpace until it was clear that I could not influence its growth.
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Of course, it made sense... bloggers are a wee-bit self-involved and we have a bad tendency to blog about the things that we do rather than the things that others do
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And off I went to blog. Little did I know that a moral panic was about to explode and that I would be in the middle of it by having data about what it was that youth were actually doing on the site and by feeling the need to defend youth as the moral panic swept through the U.S.
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Like many anthropologists in the past, I couldn't stand by and not engage.
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It's easy to argue that I biased the phenomenon and, probably I did. But what surprised me is the ways in which this also opened the doors to greater access to data.
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Most interestingly, researchers began contacting me with data they had that backed the observation that I tried to document.
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I have been accused of being a part of a MySpace conspiracy by a father who blamed me for his son's suicide
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To be honest, it's a lot easier to laugh off the malicious trolls and lunatic death threats than it is to stomach the cruelty of academics and the limitations of academic institutions.
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getting letters of usage patterns like the one from a Southern teen who used MySpace for missionary work or the rural pro-NRA teen who told me that I was cool even if I was a liberal was priceless.
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In short, being visible made me feel like I was truly a part of the culture.
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"There is an Indian story - at least I heard it as an Indian story - about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.'" (Geertz 1973)
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Yet, what I found in my own ethnographic work was a different topological map. Trying to locate myself and my questions in a fast-moving (if not exploding) phenomenon full of people moving between digital and physical spaces, shifting geography and time proved challenging.
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Doing participant/observation in a networked culture requires the ethnographer to be a node, a position that may fundamentally alters the culture being studied. Without this engagement, it does not seem possible to really be present in the networked environment.
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17 Jul 10
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madalena santoso paper de uma comunicação de Danah Boyd sobre etnografia na web.
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20 Feb 09
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28 Oct 07
Julia LesageDanah Boyd analyzes her methodology, using her position to advocate for youth publicly and defend MySpace. This led to her having greater access to youth, who contacted her to tell her their stories in detail.
academic danahboyd identity Internet research teen culturalstudies culture digitalculture usability users space socialnetworking
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27 Oct 07
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26 Oct 07
Howard Rheingoldparticipant/observation in networked culture requires the ethnographer to be a node, a position that may fundamentally alters the culture being studied. Without this engagement, it does not seem possible to really be present in the networked environment.
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Doing participant/observation in a networked culture requires the ethnographer to be a node, a position that may fundamentally alters the culture being studied. Without this engagement, it does not seem possible to really be present in the networked environment.
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Gary Ritzenthaler"For this year's Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) conference, I put together a paper reflecting on my methodological choices in pursuing an understanding of how youth engage with networked publics. In it, I try to lay out my decisions, my su
2006 danahboyd ethnography research academic facebook identity mmc3260
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