Danah boyd

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Social media opinion-leader danah boyd

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Introduction

See also Clay Shirky, Social media landscape and Social media opinion-leaders

danah boyd (November 24th, 1977 - ) is a social media ethnographer and researcher known for her insight into social networking sites for youth. Her blog Apophenia has gained considerable worldwide attention for many years as she tackled controversial issues and completed a PhD at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research examines social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society.

She is currently working at Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

her name

" ...it's my name and i should be able to frame it as i see fit, as my adjective, not someone else's. Why must it follow some New York Times standard guide for naming?" ~ danah boyd

danah michele boyd (also danah michele mattas) grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Manheim Township High School. Her name was "spelled all funky because my mother loved typographical balance". In college, she changed to her maternal grandfather's surname, boyd, eventually settling on danah boyd "to reflect my mother's original balancing and to satisfy my own political irritation at the importance of capitalization." By styling herself danah boyd, one recalls other media celebrities who have used similar lowercase orthographies such as k.d. lang and e.e. cummings.

education / research

boyd completed her master's degree at the MIT Media Lab's Sociable Media Group with Judith Donath (supervised by Henry Jenkins and Genevieve Bell). Her thesis focused on how people manage self-presentation in social and online contexts. She studied computer science at Brown University, advised by Andy van Dam, and looked at how prioritization of depth cues is dependent on levels of sex hormones and how this might affect engagement with virtual reality.boyd's dissertation looked at how American teenagers socialize in MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. She examined how architectural differences between unmediated and mediated spaces affect identity and culture. Her research was funded in part by MacArthur Foundation's Initiative on New Media and Learning.

More recently, boyd has studied Twitter, blogging, social network sites (e.g. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook...) tagging, and other forms of social media. She has written about digital backchannels, visualization design, sexing of internet interactions and creating artifacts for memory work. With other members of the MacArthur Foundation-funded project on digital media and learning, she co-authored Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. She blogs at Apophenia and tweets at Zephoria on a wide variety of topics.