Danah Boyd – Social Media & Network Technologies

Web 2.0
Shift in development and deployment
Users effect the technology cycle
User generated content
Flows tech bubble & means hope
Reshape the way people see interact and use technology
Reshaping of public spaces online
Rise of social network sites
Key characteristics of
- profile – digital body, way of making yourself known in a particular context
- public articulation of friends – weirdness of “are you my friend yes/no?”
Different patterns of friends and how people choose to collect them
- Wall/comments section – form of social grooming, not much real exchange, public performance
Status updates (microblogging) becoming a critical feature
creates a culture of peripheral awareness

List has become the social gathering place because kids aren’t allowed to be outside and roaming around, lack of mobility, fear

Not quite the same as physical public spaces

Properties of these spaces
Persistence – things stick around even though people meant them to be ephemeral
Replicablity – can’t tell copy from original
Scalability – potential to reach millions reality of reaching noone, what spreads and what doesn’t
Searchability – not searchable on physical space
when you participate on the internet you become searchable
many reasons why you don’t want to be searchable

Invisible audiences – don’t know who the audience is
Collapsed contexts – space typically delineate contexts, don’t have the walls online, public and private are no longer bounded by space

Radical change in the information ecologies

People’s understanding of organizing information dramatically different

Need to teach people about how knowledge is produced

“there is nothing neutral about history”

Breakdown of traditional forms of authorship
Mashups remixes
People are engaging with text to produce new text and content

How do we deal with an ecology where everything is about attention?

4 points of regulation – Lessig
Law
Social norms
Technology
Market

Law
Net neutrality
DRM – locking down the ability to consume and produce, what does fair use mean in the digital world, different form of terror online

Things are about to get much more mobile!!!

Web 2.0 enters the mobile space

Cluster effects are key here
People on difference devices and networks need to be able to do the same things use the same technologies

Delocatability – take my friends and stuff with me and put physical world stuff into virtual space