Taken out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics

Over the last few years, networked publics like MySpace and Facebook have become key hangout spaces for American teenagers. For a diverse array of reasons, today's teens have limited access to the types of public hangout spaces with which most adults grew up. As a substitute for inaccessible publics, networked publics have emerged to support teen sociality.

What takes place in networked publics resembles what takes place whenever teens gather with their friends and peers, including a wide variety of everyday practices from gossiping and flirting to joking around and sharing personal reflections. Woven through this is tremendous identity work, friendship maintenance, and negotiation of systems of power.

While networked publics support critical forms of sociality, the architecture of networked publics is fundamentally different than the physical architecture that we take for granted in unmediated life. Persistence, searchability, replicability, invisible audiences, and scalability are all properties that today's teens must navigate to participate in public life. Through engagement with networked publics, teens develop powerful skills for interacting with those around them.

In this talk, I will present results from a three year ethnographic study of American teen engagement with networked publics. I will discuss why teens are invested in networked publics, how they engage with them, and how such engagement alters their participation in contemporary culture.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Her research focuses on how American youth use networked publics for sociable purposes. Recently, danah has focused on the role that social network sites like MySpace and Facebook play in everyday teen interactions and relations. She is interested in how these environments alter the structural conditions in which teens operate, forcing them to manage complex dynamics like interacting before invisible audiences, managing context collisions, and negotiating the convergence of public and private life. This work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning.
At the Berkman Center, danah is co-directing the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to work with companies and non-profits to identify potential technical solutions for keeping children safe online. This Task Force was formed by the U.S. Attorneys General and MySpace and is being organized by the Berkman Center.
danah maintains a blog on social media called Apophenia - http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/