LeWeb’09: danah boyd — Climb to the Stars. What you see online is not what others see online.
It’s mediated through your friends. How do we get a sense of our norms? Not through our audience, but through the people we follow. What we see gives us our sense of going on, rather than who sees us. We’re not on the same internet as the average teen. We have the ability to look in on people’s lives, a very powerful thing about the web. Funny things that danah does is searching Twitter for “the” or random words to see what comes up. Three case studies about visibility and what we see. MySpace, early on, college admissions officer calls danah about this young man who wrote a beautiful essay about wanting to leave the gang world, but his MySpace seemed to tell a different story. MySpace girl invited her dad to be her friend, but dad saw she took a test “what drug are you?” Young woman in Colorado murders her mother. Just because it’s visible doesn’t mean people will see it or do anything about it. Lots of kids crying out for help online. Le Web: danah boyd on Social Network Visibility - One Man and Hi.
Your experience of the social web is not the same as everyone else's.
Your experience of the web is shaped by the people you chose to follow, and those who choose to follow others will have vastly different experiences. So, danah, as a sociologist, actively strives to looks at environments beyond her own. She gives the example of a student who applied to an Ivy League in the US, who submitted a great application, but his MySpace page was that of a typical gang member. He is trying to survive where he is, but aspiring to be elsewhere - and the admissions tutor struggled to accept that dichotomy and assumed he was lying. Another example: a father who say his daughter's social network profile, and on it was a quiz. Jane Jacob's idea of "eyes on the street" - community watchfulness.
"As I wonder the web looking at what's going on, I see kids calling out, begging for help". Some parents believe that the internet has created a new level of bullying - but it hasn't. Hypios: #leweb danah Boyd searches... Danah Boyd: 'People looked at me like I was an alien. From "technology-baffled grannies" to "pale-skinned gaming addicts", there are so many stereotypes pinging around the internet that sometimes it can feel like an amphetamine-fuelled game of Pong.
But there's one cliche in particular that annoys Danah Boyd: the "digital native". "There's nothing native about young people's engagement with technology," she says, adamantly. The Microsoft researcher, who has made a career from studying the way younger people use the web, doesn't think much of the widely held assumption that children are innately better at coping with the web or negotiating the hurdles of digital life. Instead, she suggests, they're pretty much like everyone else. "Young people are learning, they're learning about the social world around them," she says. Digging down "The big joke with anthropologists is that we consistently make ourselves irrelevant by what we jokingly call the 'like, duh' factor," she says. Debunking myths.