danah_boyd - Will Richardson on Diigo

01 Dec 09

apophenia: Sociality Is Learning

"As adults, we take social skills for granted... until we encounter someone who lacks them. Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects. Yet, youth aren't done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children. Perhaps its precisely their passion for learning sociality that devalues this as learning in the eyes of adults. For, if youth LIKE the subject matter, it must not be educational. Unfortunately, I fear that we are doing a disservice to youth by not acknowledging the social learning that takes place during this period. Worse, what if our efforts to curtail social interactions out of a preference for "real" learning have professional costs?"

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kids social_skills adolescence danah_boyd middle_school

But the key to "surviving" middle school is learning how to navigate these muddy waters with an intact self-esteem. It's not that jealousy and other social dramas disappear after middle school; it's that they get much more nuanced as people's skills improve. But for people to improve their skills, they must learn how to manage unpredictable and uncomfortable social situations. These aren't skills learned in abstract; they're learned through practice.
Over the last three decades, youth lives have gotten increasingly structured. Many youth spend little to no time in unstructured social settings, otherwise known as "hanging out." The practice of hanging out is consistently demonized by educationally-minded folks as a waste of time. Yet, it is in that space where youth learn to navigate social situations, make sense of impression management, and develop the social skills necessary to be productive adults.
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- The flirting, gossiping, and joking around that takes place is not proof that social media is useless, but proof that it's extremely valuable.
- Rather than demonizing social media or dismissing its educational value, I believe that we need to embrace the environments that youth are using to gather and help them learn to navigate the murky waters of sociality.
  - This is a key part. - on 2009-12-01
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10 May 09

boyd: Taking the Pulse of Social Networks - Microsoft Research

These are frequently discussed as social networking sites, as though the primary activity of these sites is to meet new people and interact with strangers. In fact, young people are using this to socialize with the people they already know, their pre-existing social network. They’re communicating with their friends, people they know from church, from summer camp, from baseball. We have this belief that kids are just addicted to social network sites. If anything, they’re addicted to their friends.

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- See notes below. - on 2009-05-10
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These are frequently discussed as social networking sites, as though the primary activity of these sites is to meet new people and interact with strangers. In fact, young people are using this to socialize with the people they already know, their pre-existing social network. They’re communicating with their friends, people they know from church, from summer camp, from baseball. We have this belief that kids are just addicted to social network sites. If anything, they’re addicted to their friends.
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- Young people desperately want to connect with the people around them, and often they don’t have the ability to do so face-to-face. In the upper socioeconomic levels, it’s often connected to the tendency by adults to overstructure teens’ lives: tons of activities they’re involved in, lots of homework, living where there’s no public transportation, everybody being afraid that if kids go outside they might be harmed, having to rely on parents to drive them places—a variety of factors that make it difficult to get together with your friends.
- How do you present yourself online? How do you make certain that the impression that you give is what you intend to give? Peer management, questions of popularity and status—the technology inflects all these dynamics in specific ways. You have to deal with properties and dynamics that are not part of what we assume to be everyday life.
- You’ve got persistence: What you say sticks around. You’ve got replicability: You can copy and paste something from one place to another. The conversation can quickly move across space. You have searchability: You can find things and grab them at any different point. And the scale is so different. You write something embarrassing, and, like wildfire, it goes across the entire school.
- The other critical thing that comes out of my research is that while there are some things that are changing, some things are very much staying the same. Social media mirrors and magnifies a lot of inequalities in our society. We still have these great dreams that the Internet will be the great equalizer, that it will be the democratizer, it will solve all of our major problems. One of the heartbreaking things that we see, especially through my work on social network sites, is that the same divisions that divide us as part of everyday society are also dividing us online. What’s been scary to watch online is to see those divisions reproduced, to face the very explicit ways in which things are very unequal, and to realize that we’re not comfortable in dealing with it.
  This is part of a general downside of my research. The Internet makes visible things we are most comfortable not thinking about. What we are trying to do, which is ironic on so many levels, is make the technology make the visibility go away—“Let’s put it back in the box, pretend it doesn’t exist, and we’ll feel better about everything.”—rather than realizing that this is an amazing moment when we are being forced to deal with societal ills and that we’d be best off not trying to blame the technology, but trying to focus on the underlying problems.
- Social network sites and the practice of bringing your community with you into the online world, bridging the online and offline and making it part of a seamless experience are here to stay.
  - Quoteable - on 2009-05-10
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- The place where this is all obviously going is around location independence. What does it mean that you aren’t just tethered to a computer to be able to leverage your social network? You’re going to see a ton of new technologies emerge to “go mobile.” There has been unbelievable research in this area, and we’re starting to see some of it hit the pipeline.
  - Future - on 2009-05-10
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- Network effects are everything. Social media means I don’t just need one other person; I need a high density of the people that I’m socializing with to all be able to do the same thing. So many of the technologies that we’re seeing in this space have not been about some great technological leap, they’ve been about figuring out these social dynamics.
- How can I build a story of what’s going on and what we understand about human life and sociality?

16 Feb 09

What's the Matter With Teen Sexting? | The American Prospect

But sex and predatory adults are not the biggest dangers kids face as they travel the Net. Garden-variety kid-on-kid meanness, enhanced by technology, is. "Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline," the report found.

Just as almost all physical and sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone a child knows intimately -- the adult who eats dinner or goes to church with her -- victims of cyber-bullying usually know their tormenters: other students who might sit beside them in homeroom or chemistry. Social-networking sites may be the places where kids are likely to hurt each other these days, but those sites, like the bullying, "reinforce pre-existing social relations," according to the report.

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Seranko and other authorities argue that such pictures may find their way to the Internet and from there to pedophiles and other exploiters. "It's very dangerous," he opined.

19 Jan 09

apophenia: Taken Out of Context -- my PhD dissertation

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

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research danah_boyd social_network

22 Aug 08

What Adults Should Know About Kids' Online Networking | | AlterNet

Most of what's happening is they're building relationships, they're engaging socially, they're seeking validation, they're seeking negotiation of status, and this is happening both on and offline in a very fluid way. My generation was much more about "goi

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network_literacy social_network danah_boyd

08 Apr 08