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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

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danah boyd: Generation MySpace

By Nick Hodge | August 6, 2007

The fol­low­ing is a blog-best-effort tran­script of danah boyd in Bris­bane on the 6th August 2007. This is not a ver­batim tran­script.

This blog post, and Flickr images by Nick Hodge are licensed under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons License:

10:00am start. Rec’d tag, http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/feed/

new policies, 68yo PM use youtube.com to announce policies (nb: cheaper than full advert­ise­ments, but same com­ment­ary = cheap). Soft­ware alone doesn’t fix stuff. its about good teach­ers (true)

explos­ing of flickr,myspace,facebook,youtube: self pub­lish­ing: live work and learn?

Intro danah boyd: expert on social net­works. yahoo, tribe, google. online iden­tit­ies, com­munit­ies, how people rep­res­ent them­selves online and to each other.

Gen­er­a­tion MySpace

His­tory of social net­work­ing, why big, interesting

Why youth are using these sites

edu­ca­tion: think­ing about, how used and applied.

Social net­work site: 6degress: 1997, flittered away

Hun­dreds emerged for many

Net­worked pub­lics: pub­lics in a net­worked soci­ety. eg: parks, civic places. SNS online publics.

usenet first of the net­worked pub­lics; first hier­archy. geeky space. eg: comp.lang.perl. cre­ate net­worked pub­lics. interests out­side com­puter stuff.

social norms; in hier­archy, talk related. rec.pets.cats.  Rup­tured by spam, not geeks.

alt.tastless invade rec.pets.cats » attack; spoil­ers: Harry Pot­ter. ruin­ing social expect­a­tions of another group.

people fled usenet to mail­ing lists (yahoo! groups) mail­ing lists have mod­er­at­ors, kick people off. vouch­ing via email address. not as pub­lic as usenet. what are the rules?

web=? com­munity, con­ver­sa­tion, com­merce?? tech boom, crash. things got worked out.

rethink­ing through on blo­go­sphere based people, based on “friends” — who are you friends, audi­ence is. not on com­mon interest, about people.

dif­fer­ent nar­rat­ives on web2. com­pan­ies use as label. is it tech­no­logy? busi­ness? make us feel bet­ter of the crash.

web2 is about reor­gan­ising the web around people, friends.

friend­ster; earli­est days of web2. web geek make greater than match.com; bet­ter ver­sion. more purposeful.

3 key earlier adop­ter domains: self-describes geeks/freaks (eg: burn­ing man) / queers. They thought it was their site. 20–30 somethings, not work­ing, jobs click­ing on the web. nego­ti­ati­ing the nar­rat­ive of friends. concept of play.

tech­no­logy reflects the val­ues of the cre­at­ors: deep desire on friend­ster to get as many friends as pos­sible. someone become icons — burn­ing man, ali g (blog­ger cul­ture). friend­ing them to make them big­ger. more fake char­ac­ters. har­vard uni­ver­sity. jesus with a base­ball bat. artistic : salt and pep­per, love let­ters. people didn’t have jobs.

friend­ster: whack-a-mole, rid of pop­ular­ity game, fake char­ac­ters. kill the fun. tech­nical dif­fi­culties: out­side US, friend­ster still around.

myspace: people who friend­ster didn’t want. kicked off friend­ster, rock bands — onto myspace.com. no kick­ing off. fea­tures around music; indi rock music — appeals to young crowds. 21+ indi band fol­low­ers, down the ages. 18yo 16yo 14yo. ignore younger because they don’t SNS.

Cool in LA region, worked down. teen­agers where there as a place to hang out. If you are not on myspace you don’t exist (late 2005) every­where else in the world, mobile phone.

myspace US == mobile phone outside.

55% online us teens 12–17 have a pro­file; 70% girlds 15–17. using to hang out with friends they see every day.

social net­works,. not meet­ing people, its com­mu­nic­at­ing to your network.

pro­files: unique URLs, age/sex/location. made up as its fun.

friends list: pub­lic list of people I care about, and I hope care about me and listen to me.

wall/testimonial: con­ver­sa­tion to the (wall ==write all) friends

myspace: copy+paste, make it loud and obnox­ious. like the bed­room. same feel­ing, per­sonal expres­sion of self. who is the audi­ence. remix cul­ture, says who you are.

SNS where people hang out. shoot­ing the shit, deal­ing with status. done in dif­fer­ent envir­on­ments (park, malls) for many years. friends to gather in a lar­ger collection.

prop­er­ties online dif­fer­ent to phys­ical space. in 20s, the pub. hung out, came together. have import­ant values.

what prop­er­ties: 4 key

per­sist­ence: what you say sticks around. eph­er­meral pub­lics, vs. for ever.

search­ab­il­ity: where are the teen­ages. search­able. all sorts of audi­ences, par­ents, teach­ers, bosses.

rep­lic­ab­il­ity: copy-paste, original/modified? teen­age break­ups online. gets out of he said/she said game. eg: IM text into blog. who got the final say. delete someone as friend. not being in con­trol. bul­ly­ing. 3 way call­ing, bul­ly­ing example

invis­ible audi­ences: assump­tions, edu­ca­tion, con­text: vis­ible audi­ence. no idea who is record­ing, and where it will go. con­text: adjust what we are say­ing based on con­text. soci­ety instructs us. to break the rules, we’ve got to know them. medi­ated envir­on­ments con­trol how we converse.

teen­agers: invis­ible audi­ences, social scripts. how to speak to the unknowns. gen­er­a­tion grow­ing up and deal­ing with stuff that only celebrit­ies and fam­ous people had to deal with. every­one is fam­ous for 15 people. myspace. Top 8 passive/aggressive social acceptance.

per­form­ing to people you know, this is how it will effect you.

high schools: age segreg­a­tion from 1930s. deeply cul­tur­ally embed­ded in the US. ment­ors friends 2 yrs around their age. No good reason to inter­act with people older than you.

US, other eng­lish speak­ing world: age segregation.

US, chil­dren are locked in doors. hyper­con­trolled. few places to chill. fear of abduc­tion. com­munit­ies don’t exist in sub­ur­bia. no places to hang out. primary social­isa­tion, at homes. par­ents reg­u­late; par­ents are respons­ible. ten­sion between teen­ages and adults. kids locked down.

“mum doesn’t let me out, so I am on myspace” — hang out on myspace

sexual pred­at­ors: evid­ence shows not a real issue; teen­agers: want to go some­where their par­ents are not. (ref danah’s site)

teen­agers: decep­tion so not search­able. tech­no­logy put in place to be really easy searched. comp.lang.perl vs alt.sex.bondage

pri­vacy: hav­ing con­trol over who has access to your data. those of have con­trol of teen­agers, leech­ers etc.

pre­tend like it doesn’t exist doesn’t work. How do we deal these kinds of publics.

edu­ca­tion of youth: not how they learn about maths and his­tory. how to deal with social works. they have a pub­lic life; with con­fid­ence, will­ing­ness to make mistakes.

mis­take: ban these sites in eng­lish speak­ing. they are evil. we don’t under­stand them, so they are wrong. broad data doesn’t reflect this.

how do we rethink this. they are pub­lics, dif­fer­ent archi­tec­tures. request to teach­ers: learn from the stu­dents. they can teach you unbe­liev­able things. youth populated.

why is this important.

we want our youth to be civically engaged. to be civically engaged, need to be public.

US: civic life, age segreg­ated: not a part of civic and polit­ical life.

must be social­ised in the pub­lic life; not tran­di­tional civic lec­ture, what is hap­pen­ing now. nego­ti­at­ing pub­lics. only school/after school activ­it­ies. why do people out­side their school matter.

US young people writ­ten out of immig­ra­tion protest: teen based a few days later, March 2006. walk to civic space. IM/phones. 15000 LAX alone. Adults covered: “skip­ping school”.

Must engage: they under­stood that their par­ents were going to get kicked out of the country.

Sep2006: news­feed in face­book. in-SNS out-rage 700,000 col­lege kids joined a group to make a state­ment; com­pany 72 hours to imple­ment a fea­ture. Users say its unac­cept­able. news­feeds stayed, by pri­vacy added. polit­ical activ­ity (ignored)

public/private: pri­vacy doesn’t look the same any­more. edu­ca­tion around this: rather than say­ing they are bad because they are pub­lic. one assumed youth had no pub­lic face/no pub­lic life. now they need to know what is public/private

com­pan­ies ques­tion­ing how we deal with this new public.

pro­pos­als: pro­file, how would you feel if? situ­ational role play­ing on pro­files. there is no write/wrong/easy/hard answer. what is the con­sequence of what you are doing (editor: I like this)

visual lit­er­acy to under­stand degrees

every­day space mirrored and mag­ni­fied. some good/some bad. off­line prob­lems, online prob­lems. a reflection.

digital street out­reach. why are we look­ing online only for tagging/grafitti get kids into trouble?

why are we not help­ing kids in their online streets?

SNS are not good tools for edu­cat­ing. Politi­cians. not even doing a good jobs. not engaging.

Not used in the classroom; edu­ca­tion around them.

Blog­ging good tools. public/private ten­sions. essay that every­one in class can see. how about every­one in the world. edu­ca­tion paradigm. what is your audience.

Wiki­pe­dia. US/AU ban it. its ter­rible. its bad. teens told its bad, but they using it? why are we not using this in schools for pub­lic knowledge.

Israeli/Palestinian con­flict; wiki­pe­dia; think­ing about dif­fer­ent views and voices. Talk: page, his­tory. who is inves­ted in this pro­cess. Edu­cat­ors under­stand­ing these technologies.

edu­ca­tion stu­dents on who know­ledge is pro­duced. I am not hte only voice on this matter?

rethink what pub­lic life is about.

one is inform­a­tion, inform­a­tion access.

its about com­munity and communciation.

social­ising teens into adult life; edu­ca­tion is more than what is a stand­ard model.

Topics: danahboyd, eduausem2007, technology | 6 Comments »