Commentary on Danah Boyd’s Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life

Posted on by

It is very well known that social networking sites have become an integral part of many young adults’ daily routine.  Danah Boyd begins her essay saying that, “during 2005, online social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook became common destinations for young people. Danah Boyd is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her main research efforts are focused on examining social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society.

In this paper, Boyd investigates the social commitment and involvement within online social networks such as facebook and MySpace. Her goal is to find the intrigue for youths to practice “participant observation” meaning young adults, integrating themselves in the online world in a more open environment, but what issues come out of this type of participation in two competing social networking sites: Facebook and MySpace. While Boyd’s focus is primarily on MySpace, it can be argued, with statistical evidence that the switch from MySpace to facebook has rapidly increased and continues to grow forcing MySpace to concentrate their marketing efforts in a different direction with their most updated introduction, “Myspace is the leading social entertainment destination powered by the passion of fans. Music, movies, celebs, TV, and games made social.” Whereas Facebook’s introduction on the google search page is, “Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.”

MySpace has become a music sharing site and Facebook more so to connect to friends. Nevertheless though, both sites are faced with some of the same issues such as class distinction on social networking sites which directly brings into the issues of the digital world and the haves and the have-nots. To dive deeper, there are young adults who may not have the opportunity to maintain or constantly participate on social networking sites such as those that are wealthier and can afford internet access 24/7. Another interesting topic that Boyd brings up are the four properties that fundamentally separate unmediated publics from networked publics :

1. Persistence: Unlike the ephemeral quality of speech in unmediated publics, networked communications are recorded for posterity.  This enables asynchronous communication but it also extends the period of existence of any speech act.

2. Searchability: Because expressions are recorded and identity is established through text, search and discovery tools help people find like minds.  While people cannot currently acquire the geographical coordinates of any person in unmediated spaces, finding one’s digital body online is just a matter of keystrokes.

3. Replicability: Hearsay can be deflected as misinterpretation, but networked public expressions can be copied from one place to another verbatim such that there is no way to distinguish the “original” from the “copy.”

4. Invisible audiences: While we can visually detect most people who can overhear our speech in unmediated spaces, it is virtually impossible to ascertain all those who might run across our expressions in networked publics.  This is further complicated by the other three properties, since our expression may be heard at a different time and place from when and where we originally spoke.

 A personal response to Boyd’s observations is a cautionary response. I say cautionary, because as I am soon to enter to my next stage of life, the working world, my past can easily be traced digitally, for good and for bad. Today, an individual’s presence on the internet is not only determined by his or herself. The advantage and disadvantage for young adults like myself is that I can now promote myself how I would like to and reach out to an even greater audience than my parents would have been able to. But with lack of knowledge, impulse or simply forgetting the internet’s capabilities, especially social networking sites, as public domains, I can easily write, post, click on something that can change my image or profile to something changed for the worse. In a society and a generation that has grown-up in a digital sharing era, we must really understand what Boyd calls “identity performance.” The public plays a important role in the development of an individual. And even more so than before, the balance between one’s social identity being defined by his or herself as well as being defined by others, is crucial. Public life now has an unimaginably wide possibility of publicity and the next step for young adults and the generations above us is to familiarize ourselves with issues that are to come in this digitally open society. Issues are already present, but I doubt there are even a handful of internet users that are effected by them. Unfortunately I feel that we will all have to come across situations of too much publicity on the internet in the near future.

Here is the Link to Danah Boyd’s Paper:

http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf

Citation:  boyd, danah. (2007)  “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.”  MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *