danah boyd

danah boyd
boyd in 2008
Born	(1977-11-24) November 24, 1977 Altoona, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Fields	Social media
Institutions	Microsoft Research Harvard University New York University
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley, MIT Media Lab, Brown University
Thesis	Taken out of context: American teen sociality in networked publics (2008)
Doctoral advisor	Peter Lyman Mizuko Ito
Known for	Commentary on sociality, identity, and culture among youth on social networks[1]
Notable awards	Technology Review TR35 Young Innovators 2010[2]
Website www.danah.org twitter.com/zephoria

danah boyd (styled lowercase, born November 24, 1977 as danah michele mattas)^[3] is a social media scholar,^{[4][5][6][7][8]} youth researcher, and advocate working at Microsoft Research, New York University Media Culture & Communication and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Early life

Boyd grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Altoona, Pennsylvania,^[9] and attended Manheim Township High School from 1992–1996. According to her website, she was born "danah michele mattas" as "spelled all funky because my mother loved typographical balance."^[3] Once she reached college, she chose to change to her maternal grandfather's name, "Boyd" as her own last name, and eventually she settled on giving her name as lowercase "danah boyd" so as "to reflect my mother's original balancing and to satisfy my own political irritation at the importance of capitalization."^[9][10] After her parents' divorce, in 1982, she moved to York, Pennsylvania, with her mother and her brother. Her mother married again during Dana's third grade and the family moved to Lancaster. She used online discussions forums to escape from high school. She called Lancaster a "religious and conservative" city. Thanks to some online discussions, she discovered herself as a queer (persons who do not want to be defined by their sexual orientation or their own sex).^[11]

A few years later, her brother taught her how to use IRC and Usenet. As she was discovering the Internet, she noticed that some relationships were created between the different users and she began to speak about a few subjects (fears of teenagers as sex or identity) with anonymous users.^[12]

She had a very difficult time when she was in middle school. She assigns her survival to her mother, Internet and one of her friends who were her support during this period. Internet became an open-door to multiple possibilities: it allowed her to meet her colleagues and find some ideas. Strangers helped her have a better knowledge of the world and herself.^[12]

Her initial ambition was to become an astronaut but after an injury, she became more interested in the internet.^[9]

Education

She initially studied computer science at Brown University where she worked with Andries van Dam, and wrote an undergraduate thesis on how "3-D computer systems used cues that were inherently sexist."^[9] She then pursued her master's degree in sociable media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. She worked for the New York-based V-Day, first as a volunteer (starting in 2004) and then as paid staff (2007–2009). She eventually moved to San Francisco, where she met the individuals involved in creating the new Friendster service. She documented what she was observing via her blog, and this grew into a career.^[13]

In 2008, boyd earned a PhD at the UC Berkeley School of Information,^[14] advised by Peter Lyman (1940–2007) and Mizuko Ito (aka Mimi Ito). Her dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, focused on the use of large social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace by U.S. teenagers,^[15] and was blogged on Boing Boing.^[16][17]

During the 2006–07 academic year, boyd was a fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. She has been a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University since 2007, where she co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force,^[18] and then served on the Youth and Media Policy Working Group.^[19]

Career

In January 2009, boyd joined Microsoft Research New England, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a Social Media Researcher.^[20] She was also involved with a three-year ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation and led by Mimi Ito; the project examined youths' use of technologies through interviews, focus groups, observations, and document analysis.^[21][22] Her publications included an article in the "MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume" called Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.^[23] The article focuses on social networks' implications for youth identity. The project culminated with a co-authored book "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media."^[24] In addition to blogging on her own site, she addresses issues of youth and technology use on the DMLcentral blog. Boyd has written academic papers and op-ed pieces on online culture.^[25]

As of today, boyd has been working for Harvard University (since 2007), Microsoft Research (since 2009) and New York University (since 2011). She's also the founder of the Data & Society Research Institute (since 2013)^[26] and the director of Crisis Text Line (since 2012).^[27]

She begins to look into social media in the early 2000 when she was still at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. She has a major interest in youth's uses of social medias as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook.

Her career as a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology starts in 2007. She published an untraditional research on youth using Facebook and MySpace the same year. She demonstrated that Facebook was at the time, more used by white and well-offs kids and on the other hand, MySpace members were mostly lower class and black teenagers. A lot of medias translated and relayed her research.^[11]

In early 2014, boyd published her book It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens at Yale University Press.^[28]

She was interviewed in the 2015 web documentary about internet privacy, Do Not Track.^[29]

Honors and awards

In 2009 Fast Company named boyd one of the most influential women in technology.^[30] In May 2010, she received the Award for Public Sociology from the American Sociological Association's Communication and Information Technologies (CITASA) section.^[31] Also in 2010, Fortune named her the smartest academic in the technology field^[32] and "the reigning expert on how young people use the Internet."^[33] In 2010, boyd was included on the TR35 list of top innovators under the age of 35.^[34]

Boyd has spoken at many academic conferences, including SIGIR, SIGGRAPH, CHI, Etechm Personal Democracy Forum and the AAAS annual meeting. She gave the keynote addresses at SXSWi 2010 and WWW 2010, discussing privacy, publicity and big data.^[35][36][37] She also appeared in the 2008 PBS Frontline documentary Growing Up Online providing commentary on youth and technology.^[38]

Foreign Policy named boyd one of its 2012 Top 100 Global Thinkers "for showing us that Big Data isn't necessarily better data".^[39]

Personal life

She has an "attraction to people of different genders," but as stated on her website, identifies as queer rather than lesbian or bi. "I very much attribute my comfortableness with my sexuality to the long nights in high school discussing the topic in IRC."^[3] With her partner Gilad Lotan, a male Israeli computer scientist, she has two children.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to danah boyd.

• A Discussion with danah boyd, Ibiblio Speaker Series, 2006
• An interview with danah boyd, Women of Web 2.0 Show, 2008
• danah boyd Interview at YouTube
• Friending Your Child by Lawrence Goodman, Brown Alumni Magazine, 2012