March 30, 2009
danah boyd on teens and social technology
danah boyd, a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has been researching youth and social networks since Friendster was cool. The most recent member of Microsoft Research New England, boyd (no caps) was interviewed on the company blog last week and made some reblog-worthy points about social networks, privacy, and mobile technology.
On the misconceptions about Facebook and MySpace:
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.
This "addiction" to friends is precisely what makes social networks are so important, especially for tweens, who are more limited in their socializing options (until they can drive). There’s school, extracurriculars and the movie theater on the weekends, but with social networking they can be sure not to miss a single OMG moment.
boyd articulates that social networking makes friendships very public. Before, information spread through whispers in the hallway, but eventually people would forget and move on to the next drama. On these sites, what’s communicated is both public and permanent. But unlike what you'll here on the evening news or from Chris Hansen, teens are handling it quite well.
All these things are constantly changing, and one of the things I highlight in my research is how young people are negotiating it. How do they sit there and say, “I have to publicly articulate my friends”? That’s the most awkward thing ever, but young people are doing it. They’re coming up with rules, and they’re learning new skills to deal with it.
Social networks, the bridges between online and offline, are here to stay. Look for these connections to be made increasingly seamless through mobile, she says.
Technology will continue to evolve. 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. That said, we’re waiting for the infrastructure and the business side of things to catch up. If I’ve got one handheld and you’ve got another, platform independence isn’t really there. We have different mobile carriers. We have no standards, so we’re not getting network effects.
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.
But, as boyd points out, no amount of lab testing can prepare you for what happens when something becomes a social phenomenon. This is why she'll continue to study technologies "out in the wild"--and why we'll continue to follow her work.
