What Adults Should Know About Kids' Online Networking

By Kate Sheppard, WireTap. Posted January 24, 2007.

Social researcher danah boyd (who generally chooses not to capitalize her name) has made a name for herself as an expert on young people and online social networks. A Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a graduate fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center, boyd has also worked as a social media researcher at Yahoo, Google, and Tribe.net. Recently, she appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, where she enlightened Bill about Myspace and the "dopey kids" it attracts. At 29, boyd has become the go-to woman for "adults" trying to figure out what "kids" do online all day, and one look at her blog, Apophenia, offers insight into her exhausting speaking/interview schedule.

We caught up with boyd recently to talk about social networks, kids these days, and the intersection of technology and political organizing.

Kate Sheppard: How did you start researching "digital publics"?

danah boyd: I first went online when I was about 14. My brother was a hardcore geek and I thought what he was doing was really lame, and I wanted nothing to do with it. Then I realized there were people in there, and it wasn't just about coding. And I started talking to people online and participating in all sorts of social interaction, and found it fascinating. So when I went to college, I decided I was going to study computer science, in part based on those experiences.

Needless to say, computer science degrees are not meant to engage with the web in any socially relevant way. So I ended up getting involved with a lot of computer graphics, which was awesome. When I entered college, I started blogging, so I was also having this whole web experience.

My research has gotten more and more related to youth over the years [and to] identity, and performance in online environments, which in many ways are online public environments.

KS: What sort of relationships are young people forming online? Who are they connecting with?

db: 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 "going online" and it being this separate universe, in many ways a totally separate social world with social rules and scripts and what not. But for a lot of young people, it is a fluid environment that moves between their offline and online worlds. The technology doesn't act as a separator.

And what you end up having is two different clusters of kids. You have kids who are getting all they need in terms of validation and status, and everything else from school, peers in the physical world, peers from church, summer camp, activities, school, those kinds of obvious physical environments. They are just replicating their networks and their community online, using all the online tools -- IM, email, blogs, Myspace, that kind of thing -- to talk to the people that they already have networks formulated around.

You still also have the marginalized and ostracized kids who are actually actively seeking out a community of peers online because they don't have one offline. This is who I was growing up. The assumption from the earlier days of the Internet was that this latter [behavior] is all that the kids were doing, and actually that's become the less common practice.

KS: What are some the differences between online and offline networks?

db: There are sort of four properties and one key practice that are fundamentally different online. The key practice is that you have to write yourself into being. To a certain degree we do this offline as well, whereby you have a body that you're working with that you then accessorize to hell. Online you don't have a body, you don't have a presence, you don't have anything that sort of marks your existence.

There are four functions that are sort of the key architecture of online publics and key structures of mediated environments that are generally not part of the offline world. And those are persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Persistence -- what you say sticks around. Searchability -- my mother would have loved the ability to sort of magically scream into the ether to figure out where I was when I'd gone off to hang out with my friends. She couldn?t, thank God. But today when kids are hanging out online because they've written [themselves] into being online, they become very searchable. Replicability -- you have a conversation with your friends, and this can be copied and pasted into your Live Journal and you get into a tiff. That creates an amazing amount of "uh ohs" when you add it to persistence. And finally, invisible audiences. In unmediated environment, you can look around and have an understanding of who can possibly overhear you. You adjust what you're saying to the reactions of those people. You figure out what is appropriate to say, you understand the social context. But when we're dealing with mediated environments, we have no way of gauging who might hear or see us, not only because we can't tell whose presence is lurking at the moment, but because of persistence and searchability.

KS: How does online or digital identity differ from one's day-to-day life presentation?

db: It's a performance, right? In that performance there are things that are magnified. Think of it this way. My favorite thing about online dating is that 80 percent of women are above average looking, according to their marker, and 80 percent of men make above average in salary. Is this true? Of course not. But our self-perceptions are often very distorted. We want to be seen in the best light. This is why we sit home with a shitload of makeup and try to construct a "Don?t we look suave" sort of appearance. The same thing happens online, but instead of using expensive paints for our faces, we're using digital ones. But we're still trying to put what we think is our best foot forward for the social context at hand.

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Kate Sheppard spent three years as an editor for Buzzsaw Haircut, Ithaca College's award-winning student magazine. She is now an editorial intern at Grist Magazine in Seattle, a contributor for WireTap, and a freelance writer.

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