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Publicity and the culture of celebritization

by Danah Boyd, June 26, 2011 | Comments

Widespread celebritization is the flipside of the “attention economy” coin

In this month’s “Rolling Stone,” the magazine published an article called “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire”. The article tells the story of a 14-year-old teen in Florida who used MySpace to create a digital persona that attracted a lot of attention. An insecure and awkward teenager, Kirsten used MySpace to perform a confident, sexy persona named ...

Risk-reduction strategies on Facebook

by Danah Boyd, December 2, 2010 | Comments

Facebook is another street where you have to watch your back

Sometimes, when I’m in the field, I find teens who have strategies for managing their online presence that are odd at first blush but make complete sense when you understand the context in which they operate. These teens use innovative approaches to leverage the technology to meet personal goals. Let me explain two that caught my attention this week. Mikalah ...

Exogenous Twitter trending topic: 'Pep rally'

by Danah Boyd, October 14, 2010 | Comments

There are two types of trending topics on Twitter: endogenous and exogenous

Logging onto Twitter to check out a few things quickly before running off to a homecoming football game, I couldn’t help but notice something important: “Pep Rally” was trending as a US trending topic. I immediately clicked on through and found countless teens commenting on their school pep rallies. These teens were posting about pep rallies that were happening at ...

Regulating the use of social media data

by Danah Boyd, September 5, 2010 | Comments (1)

Should employers have the right to discriminate against you because of your Facebook profile?

If you were to walk into my office, I’d have a pretty decent sense of your gender, your age, your race, and other identity markers. My knowledge wouldn’t be perfect, but it would give me plenty of information that I could use to discriminate against you if I felt like it. The law doesn’t prohibit me for “collecting” this information ...

Vaseline's controversial Facebook ad

by Danah Boyd, August 9, 2010 | Comments (1)

	Skin whitening and tanning and cultural collisions Growing up as a white girl in Pennsylvania, I was taught that being tan was beautiful. My wealthier classmates would go on vacations to Florida in the winter, coming back with the most glorious tans. And the moment that it started getting warm, everyone would spend excessive amounts of time outside in an effort to get as dark as possible. ...
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Facebook panic button

by Danah Boyd, July 20, 2010 | Comments (1)

Who's panicking and who's listening?

First, I commend Facebook for taking child safety seriously. When I was working with them as part of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, I was always impressed by their concern. I think that there’s a mistaken belief that Facebook doesn’t care about child safety. This was the message that many propagated when Facebook balked at implementing the “Panic Button” ...

Quitting Facebook is pointless

by Danah Boyd, May 28, 2010 | Comments

	Challenging them to do better is not I’ve been critiquing moves made by Facebook for a long time and I’m pretty used to them being misinterpreted. When I lamented the development of the News Feed, many people believed that I thought that the technology was a failure and that it wouldn’t be popular. This was patently untrue. I was bothered by it precisely because I knew that ...
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Facebook is trying to be a utility

by Danah Boyd, May 23, 2010 | Comments

... Utilities get regulated, whether the tech industry likes it or not

From day one, Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become a social utility. He succeeded. Facebook is now a utility for many. The problem with utilities is that they get regulated. Yesterday, I ranted about Facebook and “radical transparency.” Lots of people wrote to thank me for saying what I said. And so I looked many of them up. Most were ...

A critique of Facebook's approach to privacy

by Danah Boyd, May 4, 2010 | Comments

Privacy and publicity in the context of "Big Data"

(Editor's note: Danah recently gave the opening keynote at the WWW Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.) My talk was about methodological and ethical issues involved in the study of Big Data, focusing heavily on privacy issues in light of public data. The first third focuses on four important arguments: 1) Bigger Data are Not Always Better Data; 2) Not All Data ...

ChatRoulette, from my perspective

by Danah Boyd, March 1, 2010 | Comments

Simultaneously amused and depressed by the service

I’ve been following ChatRoulette for a while now. But I haven’t been comfortable talking about it publicly. For one, it’s a hugely controversial site, one that is prompting yet-another moral panic about youth engagement online. And I hate having the role of respondent to public uproar. (I know, I know…) More importantly though, I find it difficult to respond to ...

Public by default, private when necessary

by Danah Boyd, January 28, 2010 | Comments

Once upon a time on Facebook, participants had to be a member of a community to have an account...

With Facebook systematically dismantling its revered privacy infrastructure, I think it's important to drill down on the issue of privacy as it relates to teens. There's an assumption that teens don't care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy ...

Facebook's move and privacy norms

by Danah Boyd, January 25, 2010 | Comments

It's in Facebook's interest to force people into being public

When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that 'the age of privacy is over' (read: ReadWriteWeb), I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am. The logic goes something like this: People I knew didn't used to like to be public. Now "everyone" is being public. Ergo, privacy is dead. This isn't new. This is the exact same ...

Race and social network sites

by Danah Boyd, January 4, 2010 | Comments

	Putting Facebook's data in context A few weeks ago, Facebook's data team released a set of data addressing a simple but complex question: How Diverse is Facebook? Given my own work over the last two years concerning the intersection of race/ethnicity/class and social network sites, I feel the need to respond. And, with pleasure, I'm going to respond by sharing a draft of a new ...
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Sociality is learning

by Danah Boyd, December 12, 2009 | Comments

Social media should be embraced as a way for youth to learn social skills

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 ...

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 ...

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