In her ethnographic study titled “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life“, Danah Boyd, also known as Danah Michele Boyd, discusses the forced evolution of “the public” caused by the Internet and how teens are attempting to navigate this new online society.  Boyd suggests that the notion “the public” is beginning to alter itself because of the inclusion of such sites as MySpace and Facebook.  These sites, she argues, present teens with an ability to interact with an enormous, abstract group of peers through the Internet.  Because of this, teens lives today are far more transparent and prone to critic than in the past.

Boyd suggests that the phenomena of social networking has forced teens to include four new categories of social interactions; Persistence, Searchability,  Replicability, and the Invisible Audience.  These interactions, conducted solely on the Internet, are the causes for this increased transparency in teens lives in society today.  Boyd goes on to suggest that these sites are then becoming a new sort of “online public” and that the social interactions previously stated are characteristics of the interactions that occur in these new public domains.  Because humans define themselves by how they interact with others, these social networks are becoming online societies in which users are creating identities for themselves.

Boyd doesn’t suggest that she can extrapolate the ramifications of this new form of social interaction on teens today, but she does state that to try and regulate these new public spaces will effectively ostracize these younger generations from the older.  In her conclusion, Boyd calls for adults to, instead of attempting to police these sites, rather act as guides to the younger generations of users who are interacting with them.  The reason being that this technology is not going away anytime in the near future, so we need to be able to begin coexisting with it now.

“Danah Michele Boyd is an American social media researcher known for her public commentary on the use of social media sites by youth.”