danah boyd

"So 'stranger danger' seems like it's been around since it became mainstream for minors to use the internet"

Yes, but when was that? There is a dramatic change in scale between 1995 and 2005, regarding how many people had easy access to the Internet.

When she writes of the moral panic, she is not referring to moments when individual parents expressed concern about what their children were doing online, but rather, she is writing about when the media focused on this story. I agree the media emphasized reasons to be afraid of the Internet ever since the Internet emerged in the 90s, but there was an exaggerated emphasis in the mid 00s when it became the easiest way for lazy journalists to frame a story about the Internet.

I'm under the impression boyd is also talking about the period of time when youth in the USA faced increasing restrictions regarding their physical movement, and increased supervision from parents. Consider what boyd writes here:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=w092y1Y6ut4C&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=danah+boyd+moral+panic&ots=FCpJMtCNLJ&sig=DGsr53BqPJUI10iH54P_S1IQbnA#v=onepage&q&f=false

She also wrote the following (several paragraphs) about MySpace in 2006:

MySpace is in a different position, one far more harrowing. MySpace has grown so large that the needs, values and practices of its users are slamming into each other. It's facing the archetypical clashing of cultures. Yet, interestingly, most users are not that concerned - they're trying to figure…

There's an essay in the book The Best Software Writing I (edited by Joel Spolsky) that talks about how social networking represents an inherently poor model of real human social networks. Here's an online link: http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html

It's from 2004, so it lacks the perspective of having seen how virtually all of the history of social networking unfolded. And it flogs on negative stereotypes around both programmers and people with autism in a way that really grates. So I can't recommend the essay generally. But it does have some interesting observations.

One is the jarring crudeness of simplifying the infinitely complex and nuanced texture of real webs of social connections down to a simple 1-bit flag: "Are you my friend? Yes or no." Facebook has subsequently made the graph bitartite, so now you can "friend" people and "follow" companies, but that's barely an improvement.

I'm no longer a Facebook user, but their recent "X is not your friends" ad campaign got me thinking about that fact again. The campaign seems to be trying to imply that they really do understand my social life, and they are going to get in line with it. But the jarring simplicity of the message just reminded me how much they don't. My social network is not just a list of people I happen to associate with. It's the guy I talk philosophy with, it's the people I went to college with, with whom I still get together to catch up while our kids (all about the same age) run feral in the…

Here are some rules of thumb that may help guide your approach.

In my experience, you need to divide up your problem into two different issues to solve: design and branding. Design for functionality and smoothness of user experience. Brand so that your audience relates well to your product.

A lot's been written about good design. Yes, teens definitely respond to it. If a site's hard to use, they have the attention span of hummingbirds and if you cause an engagement failure because of poor usability, they'll be gone and won't return. Above all else, focus on making your site easy to use and the user experience seamless.

Branding depends on your audience's demographic. Most teens have developed a strong enough, though flexible, identity to be attracted to some things and repelled by others based on their perceived sense of who they are in their greater and lesser social ecosystems. You might be interested in reading everything danah boyd (intentionally lowercase) ever wrote, most especially "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace" here:
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

In general, people, no matter what their age group, adapt to symbolic systems they're immersed in. Kids in gradeschool can glance at a page in a textbook and from the fonts, point size, layout, graphics, tell you precisely whether it's a third grade book or a fourth grade book, and therefore whether it's for them or not. (The same goes for someone looking at a…

Orality & Literacy by Walter Ong: read it in grad school, opened my eyes to how writing and technology in general feed back into societies and can change them. Influenced my work in the early web in the 1990s.

A variety of books and essays by Mark Poster [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Poster]. Fairly left on the political spectrum. Marxist analyses of technology and information technology specifically and how they can both benefit as well as oppress.

danah boyd [https://www.danah.org/] I enjoy her analysis & criticism of technology from a sociological perspective. She gave a great talk at one of the O'Reilly etech or web 2.0 conferences around 2009–2010 about how we were all building these great social media services with zero grasp of sociological implications. Like. By 2010 there was ~20-25 years of people being shitty online to one another in one form or another across The Source, Compuserve, AOL, Usenet, Fidonet, etc before everything shifted to the web. There were, and are, basic considerations to take into account when building an online "community" and yet time after time people are shocked, shocked to learn that people can be terrible online and that the services we build can amplify these behaviors massively.

I didn't find McLuhan nearly as useful as I was taught he'd be as the online world evolved into the web world. Prescient, yes, but I think moreso in a cheerleader for how great and wonderful the new world would be.

Danah Boyd has made a compelling alternative case (from 2007):

When Facebook opened to everyone last September, it became relatively easy for any high school student to join (and then they simply had to get permission to join their high school network). This meant that many more high school teens did join, much to the chagrin and horror of college students who had already begun writing about their lack of interest in having HS students on "their" site. Still, even with the rise of high school students, Facebook was framed as being about college. This was what was in the press. This was what college students said. Facebook is what the college kids did. Not surprisingly, college-bound high schoolers desperately wanted in.

In addition to the college framing, the press coverage of MySpace as dangerous and sketchy alienated "good" kids. Facebook seemed to provide an ideal alternative. Parents weren't nearly as terrified of Facebook because it seemed "safe" thanks to the network-driven structure. (Of course, I've seen more half-naked, drink-carrying high school students on Facebook than on MySpace, but we won't go there.)

As this past school year progressed, the division around usage became clearer. In trying to look at it, I realized that it was primarily about class.

<http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html>

Since I am not researching the subject, I really don't want to bother her. But since that thesis has been around for quite a while now, surely she has published some papers somewhere?

It is just that I remember the original "article", which was just a blog entry (was it mnths ago, or years already?). But the press loved it and eventually what just was some musings in a blog became "scientific research" in the media - that is what I mean by linkbaity, it is just the kind of think newspapers love to write about. That is not Boyd's fault of course - it's just that after all that time, I would have expected to really see the blog article be turned into something more solid.

If she can make a living that way, also I don't have anything against it. I just felt it lacked substance for Hacker News.

Edit: these are her papers http://www.danah.org/papers/ - I tried one that sounded like it might contain numbers, but I didn't find many. Some words on methodology, though (for Friendster, but still). Anyway, her kind of research just is not my taste (too much talking).