Danah Boyd
Biographic Data
| ID | 3620451 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Danah Boyd |
| GIVEN NAMES | Danah |
| FAMILY NAME | Boyd |
| SIGNATURE | BOYD D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Microsoft Research, USA |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2948 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Power of Inevitability: How OpenAI Configures the Future
This paper investigates the discursive strategies employed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, to position themselves as leading the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Through an examination of 44 texts, including OpenAI's corporate communications, media appearances, and journalistic coverage, this study reveals how OpenAI utilizes socio-political anxieties and Silicon Valley ideals to shape a discourse of inevitability about A…
Statistical Imaginaries, State Legitimacy: Grappling With the Arrangements Underpinning Quantification in the U.S. Census
Over the last century, the adoption of novel scientific methods for conducting the U.S. census has been met with wide-ranging receptions. Some were quietly embraced, while others sparked decades-long controversies. What accounts for these differences? We argue that controversies emerge from and reconfigure arrangements of statistical imaginaries , putting into tension divergent visions of the census. To analyze these dynamics, we compare reaction…
A sociology of dragons: Danah boyd on AI, Trump, and critique
The Structuring Work of Algorithms
Algorithms reflect how power is arranged within our society while also producing power dynamics themselves. Algorithmic systems configure power by engaging in network-making, thereby shaping society and entrenching existing logics into infrastructure. To understand the moral economy of high-tech modernism, we must explore how algorithmic systems contribute to ongoing social, political, and economic structuring. This essay reflects on the importan…
Stop the Presses? Moving From Strategic Silence to Strategic Amplification in a Networked Media Ecosystem
In a media ecosystem besieged with misinformation and polarizing rhetoric, what the news media chooses not to cover can be as significant as what they do cover. In this article, we examine the historical production of silence in journalism to better understand the role amplification plays in the editorial and content moderation practices of current news media and social media platforms. Through the lens of strategic silence (i.e., the use of edit…
Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media
Owning Ethics: Corporate Logics, Silicon Valley, and the Institutionalization of Ethics
Ethics is arguably the hottest product in Silicon Valley’s1 hype cycle today, even as headlines decrying a lack of ethics in technology companies accumulate. After years of largely fruitless outside pressure to consider the consequences of digital technology products, the very recent past has seen a spike in the assignment of corporate resources in Silicon Valley to ethics, including hiring staff for roles we identify here as “ethics owners.” In …
Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World
“Respectability politics” describes a self-presentation strategy historically adopted by African-American women to reject White stereotypes by promoting morality while de-emphasizing sexuality. While civil rights activists and feminists criticize respectability politics as reactionary, subordinated groups frequently use these tactics to gain upward mobility. This paper analyzes how upwardly mobile young people of low socio-economic status in New …
Isomorphism through algorithms: Institutional dependencies in the case of Facebook
Algorithms and data-driven technologies are increasingly being embraced by a variety of different sectors and institutions. This paper examines how algorithms and data-driven technologies, enacted by an organization like Facebook, can induce similarity across an industry. Using theories from organizational sociology and neoinstitutionalism, this paper traces the bureaucratic roots of Big Data and algorithms to examine the institutional dependenci…
Situating methods in the magic of Big Data and AI
Big Data" and "artificial intelligence" have captured the public imagination and are profoundly shaping social, economic, and political spheres. Through an interrogation of the histories, perceptions, and practices that shape these technologies, we problematize the myths that animate the supposed "magic" of these systems. In the face of an increasingly widespread blind faith in data-driven technologies, we argue for grounding machine learning-bas…
Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics
As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices-gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear …
Nobody Sees It, Nobody Gets Mad: Social Media, Privacy, and Personal Responsibility Among Low-SES Youth
While few studies examine the online privacy practices or attitudes of young people of low socio-economic status (SES), they are often at the most risk of and most susceptible to privacy violations. This participatory, collaborative study of 28 low-SES young adults in the New York City area investigates how they view online information sharing. Like most Americans, our participants viewed online privacy as an individual responsibility. We make tw…
Dreams of Accountability, Guaranteed Surveillance: The Promises and Costs of Body-Worn Cameras
Lifetime Prevalence Rates and Overlap of Physical, Psychological, and Sexual Dating Abuse Perpetration and Victimization in a National Sample of Youth
Am I a Blogger
The author reflects on the evolution of her blogging practice. After becoming a blogger "kinda by accident," increasing involvement in the blogging community led to a decision to live certain parts of her life in public, in a networked age where visibility can be both humanizing and de-humanizing. Studying teenagers and their relationship to social media leads to questions about what it means to be a blogger today, as traditional aspects of power…
Social Media: A Phenomenon to be Analyzed
The phenomenon of 'social media' has more to do with its cultural positioning than its technological affordances. Rooted in the broader 'Web 2.0' landscape, social media helped engineers, entrepreneurs, and everyday people reimagine the role that technology could play in information dissemination, community development, and communication. While the technologies invoked by the phrase social media have a long history, what unfolded in the 2000s rec…
Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media
While much attention is given to young people’s online privacy practices on sites like Facebook, current theories of privacy fail to account for the ways in which social media alter practices of information-sharing and visibility. Traditional models of privacy are individualistic, but the realities of privacy reflect the location of individuals in contexts and networks. The affordances of social technologies, which enable people to share informat…
It's just drama’: Teen perspectives on conflict and aggression in a networked era
Contemporary youth conflict often plays out through social media like Facebook and Twitter. ‘Drama’ is an emergent concept describing performative, interpersonal conflict that takes place in front of an active, engaged audience, often on social media. Using ethnographic data, this paper examines how American teenagers conceptualize the term drama; the relationship between drama and social media; and the implications drama has for understanding co…
Networked trafficking: Reflections on technology and the anti-trafficking movement
In this essay, we offer field notes from our ongoing ethnographic research on sex trafficking in the United States. Recent efforts to regulate websites such as Craigslist and Backpage have illuminated activist concerns regarding the role of networked technologies in the trafficking of persons and images for the purposes of sexual exploitation. We frame our understanding of trafficking and technology through a network studies approach, by describi…
Defining and Measuring Cyberbullying Within the Larger Context of Bullying Victimization
Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction
Social media complicate the very nature of public life. In this article, we consider how technology reconfigures publicness, blurs 'audiences' and publics, and alters what it means to engage in public life. The nature of publicness online is shaped by the architecture and affordances of social media, but also by people's social contexts, identities, and practices. Navigating socially mediated publicness requires new mechanisms of control and new …
The Social Media Reader
The first collection to address the collective transformation happening in response to the rise of social media With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transform…
Networked Privacy
Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon
The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, governme…
Dear Voyeur, Meet Flâneur… Sincerely, Social Media
A Response to Colin Bennett's 'In Defence of Privacy'
Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon
The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, governme…
I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience
Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This article investigates how content producers navigate 'imagined audiences' on Twitter. We talked with participants who have different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting different audiences, concealing su…
To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter
Social media technologies let people connect by creating and sharing content. We examine the use of Twitter by famous people to conceptualize celebrity as a practice. On Twitter, celebrity is practiced through the appearance and performance of 'backstage' access. Celebrity practitioners reveal what appears to be personal information to create a sense of intimacy between participant and follower, publicly acknowledge fans, and use language and cul…
Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media
While much attention is given to young people’s online privacy practices on sites like Facebook, current theories of privacy fail to account for the ways in which social media alter practices of information-sharing and visibility. Traditional models of privacy are individualistic, but the realities of privacy reflect the location of individuals in contexts and networks. The affordances of social technologies, which enable people to share informat…
Situating methods in the magic of Big Data and AI
Big Data" and "artificial intelligence" have captured the public imagination and are profoundly shaping social, economic, and political spheres. Through an interrogation of the histories, perceptions, and practices that shape these technologies, we problematize the myths that animate the supposed "magic" of these systems. In the face of an increasingly widespread blind faith in data-driven technologies, we argue for grounding machine learning-bas…
Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics
As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices-gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear …
Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World
“Respectability politics” describes a self-presentation strategy historically adopted by African-American women to reject White stereotypes by promoting morality while de-emphasizing sexuality. While civil rights activists and feminists criticize respectability politics as reactionary, subordinated groups frequently use these tactics to gain upward mobility. This paper analyzes how upwardly mobile young people of low socio-economic status in New …
It's just drama’: Teen perspectives on conflict and aggression in a networked era
Contemporary youth conflict often plays out through social media like Facebook and Twitter. ‘Drama’ is an emergent concept describing performative, interpersonal conflict that takes place in front of an active, engaged audience, often on social media. Using ethnographic data, this paper examines how American teenagers conceptualize the term drama; the relationship between drama and social media; and the implications drama has for understanding co…
Isomorphism through algorithms: Institutional dependencies in the case of Facebook
Algorithms and data-driven technologies are increasingly being embraced by a variety of different sectors and institutions. This paper examines how algorithms and data-driven technologies, enacted by an organization like Facebook, can induce similarity across an industry. Using theories from organizational sociology and neoinstitutionalism, this paper traces the bureaucratic roots of Big Data and algorithms to examine the institutional dependenci…
Owning Ethics: Corporate Logics, Silicon Valley, and the Institutionalization of Ethics
Ethics is arguably the hottest product in Silicon Valley’s1 hype cycle today, even as headlines decrying a lack of ethics in technology companies accumulate. After years of largely fruitless outside pressure to consider the consequences of digital technology products, the very recent past has seen a spike in the assignment of corporate resources in Silicon Valley to ethics, including hiring staff for roles we identify here as “ethics owners.” In …
Lifetime Prevalence Rates and Overlap of Physical, Psychological, and Sexual Dating Abuse Perpetration and Victimization in a National Sample of Youth
Dreams of Accountability, Guaranteed Surveillance: The Promises and Costs of Body-Worn Cameras
Stop the Presses? Moving From Strategic Silence to Strategic Amplification in a Networked Media Ecosystem
In a media ecosystem besieged with misinformation and polarizing rhetoric, what the news media chooses not to cover can be as significant as what they do cover. In this article, we examine the historical production of silence in journalism to better understand the role amplification plays in the editorial and content moderation practices of current news media and social media platforms. Through the lens of strategic silence (i.e., the use of edit…
Social Media: A Phenomenon to be Analyzed
The phenomenon of 'social media' has more to do with its cultural positioning than its technological affordances. Rooted in the broader 'Web 2.0' landscape, social media helped engineers, entrepreneurs, and everyday people reimagine the role that technology could play in information dissemination, community development, and communication. While the technologies invoked by the phrase social media have a long history, what unfolded in the 2000s rec…
Networked Privacy
Nobody Sees It, Nobody Gets Mad: Social Media, Privacy, and Personal Responsibility Among Low-SES Youth
While few studies examine the online privacy practices or attitudes of young people of low socio-economic status (SES), they are often at the most risk of and most susceptible to privacy violations. This participatory, collaborative study of 28 low-SES young adults in the New York City area investigates how they view online information sharing. Like most Americans, our participants viewed online privacy as an individual responsibility. We make tw…
Statistical Imaginaries, State Legitimacy: Grappling With the Arrangements Underpinning Quantification in the U.S. Census
Over the last century, the adoption of novel scientific methods for conducting the U.S. census has been met with wide-ranging receptions. Some were quietly embraced, while others sparked decades-long controversies. What accounts for these differences? We argue that controversies emerge from and reconfigure arrangements of statistical imaginaries , putting into tension divergent visions of the census. To analyze these dynamics, we compare reaction…
The Structuring Work of Algorithms
Algorithms reflect how power is arranged within our society while also producing power dynamics themselves. Algorithmic systems configure power by engaging in network-making, thereby shaping society and entrenching existing logics into infrastructure. To understand the moral economy of high-tech modernism, we must explore how algorithmic systems contribute to ongoing social, political, and economic structuring. This essay reflects on the importan…
Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites
“Are you my friend? Yes or no?” This question, while fundamentally odd, is a key component of social network sites. Participants must select who on the system they deem to be ‘Friends.’ Their choice is publicly displayed for all to see and becomes the backbone for networked participation. By examining what different participants groups do on social network sites, this paper investigates what Friendship means and how Friendship affects the culture…
Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence
Not all Facebook users appreciated the September 2006 launch of the `News Feeds' feature. Concerned about privacy implications, thousands of users vocalized their discontent through the site itself, forcing the company to implement privacy tools. This essay examines the privacy concerns voiced following these events. Because the data made easily visible were already accessible with effort, what disturbed people was primarily the sense of exposure…
Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project
The Conundrum of Visibility: Youth safety and the Internet
The complexities of the Internet continue to be a source of consternation for parents, educators, and policy makers. Some embrace the Internet, evangelizing about its tremendous potential. Others f
Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project
Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-ex…
Featureimplications of user choice: The cultural logic of "MySpace or Facebook?"
research-article Share on FEATUREImplications of user choice: the cultural logic of "MySpace or Facebook?" Author: danah boyd Microsoft Research New England Microsoft Research New EnglandView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 16Issue 6November + December 2009 pp 33–36https://doi.org/10.1145/1620693.1620701Online:01 November 2009Publication History 3citation869DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads869Last 12 Months125Last 6…
Detecting spam in a Twitter network
Spam becomes a problem as soon as an online communication medium becomes popular. Twitter’s behavioral and structural properties make it a fertile breeding ground for spammers to proliferate. In this article we examine spam around a one-time Twitter meme—“robotpickuplines”. We show the existence of structural network differences between spam accounts and legitimate users. We conclude by highlighting challenges in disambiguating spammers from legi…
Dynamic Debates: An Analysis of Group Polarization Over Time on Twitter
The principle of homophily says that people associate with other groups of people who are mostly like themselves. Many online communities are structured around groups of socially similar individuals. On Twitter, however, people are exposed to multiple, diverse points of view through the public timeline. The authors captured 30,000 tweets about the shooting of George Tiller, a late-term abortion doctor, and the subsequent conversations among pro-l…
Facebook privacy settings: Who cares
With over 500 million users, the decisions that Facebook makes about its privacy settings have the potential to influence many people. While its changes in this domain have often prompted privacy advocates and news media to critique the company, Facebook has continued to attract more users to its service. This raises a question about whether or not Facebook's changes in privacy approaches matter and, if so, to whom. This paper examines the attitu…
I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience
Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This article investigates how content producers navigate 'imagined audiences' on Twitter. We talked with participants who have different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting different audiences, concealing su…
Dear Voyeur, Meet Flâneur… Sincerely, Social Media
A Response to Colin Bennett's 'In Defence of Privacy'
Why parents help their children lie to Facebook about age: Unintended consequences of the ‘Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act’
Facebook, like many communication services and social media sites, uses its Terms of Service (ToS) to forbid children under the age of 13 from creating an account. Such prohibitions are not uncommon in response to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which seeks to empower parents by requiring commercial Web site operators to obtain parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Given economic costs, social conce…
To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter
Social media technologies let people connect by creating and sharing content. We examine the use of Twitter by famous people to conceptualize celebrity as a practice. On Twitter, celebrity is practiced through the appearance and performance of 'backstage' access. Celebrity practitioners reveal what appears to be personal information to create a sense of intimacy between participant and follower, publicly acknowledge fans, and use language and cul…
Defining and Measuring Cyberbullying Within the Larger Context of Bullying Victimization
Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction
Social media complicate the very nature of public life. In this article, we consider how technology reconfigures publicness, blurs 'audiences' and publics, and alters what it means to engage in public life. The nature of publicness online is shaped by the architecture and affordances of social media, but also by people's social contexts, identities, and practices. Navigating socially mediated publicness requires new mechanisms of control and new …
The Social Media Reader
The first collection to address the collective transformation happening in response to the rise of social media With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transform…
Networked Privacy
Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon
The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, governme…
Networked trafficking: Reflections on technology and the anti-trafficking movement
In this essay, we offer field notes from our ongoing ethnographic research on sex trafficking in the United States. Recent efforts to regulate websites such as Craigslist and Backpage have illuminated activist concerns regarding the role of networked technologies in the trafficking of persons and images for the purposes of sexual exploitation. We frame our understanding of trafficking and technology through a network studies approach, by describi…
Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media
While much attention is given to young people’s online privacy practices on sites like Facebook, current theories of privacy fail to account for the ways in which social media alter practices of information-sharing and visibility. Traditional models of privacy are individualistic, but the realities of privacy reflect the location of individuals in contexts and networks. The affordances of social technologies, which enable people to share informat…
It's just drama’: Teen perspectives on conflict and aggression in a networked era
Contemporary youth conflict often plays out through social media like Facebook and Twitter. ‘Drama’ is an emergent concept describing performative, interpersonal conflict that takes place in front of an active, engaged audience, often on social media. Using ethnographic data, this paper examines how American teenagers conceptualize the term drama; the relationship between drama and social media; and the implications drama has for understanding co…
Am I a Blogger
The author reflects on the evolution of her blogging practice. After becoming a blogger "kinda by accident," increasing involvement in the blogging community led to a decision to live certain parts of her life in public, in a networked age where visibility can be both humanizing and de-humanizing. Studying teenagers and their relationship to social media leads to questions about what it means to be a blogger today, as traditional aspects of power…
Social Media: A Phenomenon to be Analyzed
The phenomenon of 'social media' has more to do with its cultural positioning than its technological affordances. Rooted in the broader 'Web 2.0' landscape, social media helped engineers, entrepreneurs, and everyday people reimagine the role that technology could play in information dissemination, community development, and communication. While the technologies invoked by the phrase social media have a long history, what unfolded in the 2000s rec…
Dreams of Accountability, Guaranteed Surveillance: The Promises and Costs of Body-Worn Cameras
Lifetime Prevalence Rates and Overlap of Physical, Psychological, and Sexual Dating Abuse Perpetration and Victimization in a National Sample of Youth
Computer Science (25 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Political science (17 works) · Social Media and Politics (16 works) · Social media (14 works) · Internet privacy (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Impact of Technology on Adolescents (9 works) · World Wide Web (9 works)