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Twitter vs. the Facebook status update

by Danah Boyd, October 27, 2009 | Comments

Differences and use cases for the Tweet or Facebook status update

The functional act of constructing a tweet or a status update is very similar. Produce text in roughly 140 characters or less inside a single line text box and click a button. Voila! Even the stream based ways in which the text gets consumed look awfully similar. Yet, the more I talk with people engaged in practices around Twitter and ...

Twitter - Is it pointless babble?

by Danah Boyd, September 10, 2009 | Comments

Or is it peripheral awareness and social grooming?

Studies like this one by Pear Analytics drive me batty. They concluded that 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have "pass along value"; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news. I challenge each and every one of you to record every utterance that comes out of your mouth ...

Teens don't tweet... or do they?

by Danah Boyd, August 12, 2009 | Comments

Contrary to published reports, they actually do

Yesterday, Mashable reported Nielsen's latest Twitter numbers with the headline Stats Confirm It: Teens Don't Tweet. This gained traction on Twitter turning into the trending topic "teens don't tweet" which was primarily kept in play all day yesterday with teens responding to the TT by saying "I'm a teen" or the equivalent of "you're all idiots... what am I, mashed ...

Gender gap in perception of computer science

by Danah Boyd, June 11, 2009 | Comments

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Computer science is still dominated by men

"New Image for Computing" recently released a report in their first wave to understand the image of computing among youth. Funded by WGBH and ACM, this report examines both race/ethnicity and sex-based differences in perceptions of computing. What they found was that there is little race/ethnicity-based differences in how youth perceive CS but there are HUGE gender based differences in ...

Is Facebook for old people?

by Danah Boyd, May 28, 2009 | Comments

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A healthy environment is one in which teens and trusted adults interact seamlessly

In Atlanta, I met a shy quiet 14-year-old girl that I'll call Kaitlyn. She wasn't particularly interested in talking to me, but she answered my questions diligently. She said that she was on both MySpace and Facebook, but quickly started talking about MySpace as the place where she gathered with her friends. At some point, I asked her if her ...

Living and learning with social media

by Danah Boyd, May 1, 2009 | Comments

Many American youth are embracing a wide array of social media as part of their everyday lives.

(Note: This article is the transcript of a talk given at Penn State)Good afternoon! My talk today is based on research that I have been doing for the last four years concerning youth and social media. This talk is an implications talk, not a research talk. So for the scholars in the room, I should warn you that I won't ...

Social media is here to stay... Now what?

by Danah Boyd, March 16, 2009 | Comments (2)

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Network effects; youth vs adults; reshaping publics

Social media is not new. Media has been leveraged for sociable purposes since the caveman's walls. Even in the realm of the Internet, some of the first applications were framed around communication and sharing. For decades, we've watched the development of new genres of social media - MUDs/MOOs, instant messaging, chatrooms, bulletin boards, etc. Social media is the latest buzzword ...

Living and learning with new media

by Danah Boyd, November 21, 2008 | Comments

Findings from a 3-year ethnographic study of digital youth

For the last three years, I've been a part of a team of researchers at Berkeley and USC focused on digital youth practices. This project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, brought together 28 different researchers (led by Mimi Ito and my now deceased advisor Peter Lyman) to examine different aspects of American youth life. As many of you know, I ...

I want my Olympics 2.0-style

by Danah Boyd, August 22, 2008 | Comments (1)

Come to think of it, everything about how NBC has covered the Olympics has been abysmal

Last night, I went to bed watching girls' gymnastics. I found myself very irritated. There were 24 girls in the finals, but NBC focused only on those that they thought would medal. The result is that there was tremendous downtime that the announcers filled with speculation, gossip, and historical reminiscing. I was quite irritated because what I wanted was to ...

Danah Boyd

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