Boyd, Danah

American social media researcher danah boyd (1977–) is an activist and scholar and one of the first to study youths' everyday practices with social media and the various interactions between technology and society. She is also a researcher at Microsoft Research New England, a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an Associate Fellow at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society. She combines theory and ethnography in her in-depth study of young people's use of social media networks and practices like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, tagging and blogging. Fortune magazine has dubbed boyd one of the “50 Smartest People in Tech,” as well as the “Smartest Academic” in technology, while the Financial Times has described her as the “High Priestess of Internet Friendship.”

Born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, boyd graduated in 2000 from Brown University with a degree in computer science. While studying at Brown, she focused on hypertext and gender studies and became interested in women's issues. She completed a master's degree in media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002. Her master's thesis at MIT, supervised by Judith Donath, focused on faceted identity and self-presentation in online environments.

While completing work on her master's degree, boyd began working at V-Day, a nonprofit organization that aims to end violence against women and girls across the globe. She worked at V-Day for five years and continues to volunteer there, where she has helped create an online global activist support community. She has also worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for other nonprofit organizations and corporations, including Google, Yahoo! and http://Tribe.net.

In 2003, boyd moved to San Francisco, California, where she began to blog about her observations on the social media network Friendster. These blog posts helped turn boyd into an expert on the cultural dynamics of social media networks. Between 2003 and 2008, she worked on her Ph.D. at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, examined American teenagers' use of social network sites such as Facebook and Myspace in daily interactions and social relations. She was specifically interested in how mediated environments impact structural conditions within which teens interact, forcing them to deal with complex dynamics such as invisible audiences, the convergence of public and private life, and context collisions.

danah boyd spoke during the opening keynote of the 2010 ROFLCon II convention, boyd is a social media researcher who gained attention for her commentary on the use of social networking sites by young people.

(Wiki media)

The MacArthur Foundation funded boyd's dissertation as part of a larger grant on digital youth [Page 29]and informal learning. boyd worked with other members of the MacArthur Foundation grant on the 2009 book Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. The book examines the outcomes of a three-year ethnographic study on how teens use social media for learning and living in various settings such as the home, after-school programs, and online groups. This collaborative work on youth and social media integrates 23 case studies that include music sharing, Harry Potter podcasting, and online romantic breakups.

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