danah boyd | apophenia

Over the last six weeks, I’ve posted various opportunities for students, academics, and other scholars that I’m co-directing/hosting, many of which have deadlines looming. I want to summarize them in one post for those who either missed them or wanted some synthesis: Microsoft Research Postdocs. Who: Newly minted/about-to-be-minted PhD students working on social media topics [...]

Networked technologies – including the internet, mobile phones, and social media – alter how information flows and how people communicate. There is little doubt that technology is increasingly playing a role in the practices and processes surrounding human trafficking: the illegal trade of people for commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, and other forms of modern-day [...]

The era of “Big Data” has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and many others 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 information from Twitter, Google, Verizon, 23andMe, [...]

In the fall, Alice Marwick and I went into the field to understand teens’ privacy attitudes and practices. We’ve blogged some of our thinking since then but we’re currently working on turning our thinking into a full-length article. We are lucky enough to be able to workshop our ideas at an upcoming scholarly meeting (PLSC), [...]

I’m just finishing up the first 10 days of my fall sprint at intensive fieldwork. I’m a long way from being about to synthesize what I’m seeing but I wanted to share a few things since many of you are curious about my observations. First off, Nashville is a great city to do fieldwork because [...]

I’m pleased to announce a rough draft of Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review for public feedback. This Literature Review was produced for Harvard Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, co-directed by John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and myself and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This Literature Review builds on [...]

I’m gearing up for a bunch of new on-the-ground fieldwork and intend to do a host of semi-structured interviews with American teenagers in different parts of the U.S. in the upcoming months. While I talk to teens regularly, new in-depth fieldwork allows me to really tease out core conceptual puzzles. My goal for this upcoming [...]

In today’s discussions about privacy, “youth don’t care about privacy” is an irritating but popular myth. Embedded in this rhetoric is the belief that youth are reckless risk-takers who don’t care about the consequences of their actions. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In my own work, I’ve found that teenagers care deeply about [...]

academia (n.): The academic world or community; scholastic life. academic (n.): 1) An ancient philosopher of the Academy. 2) A member of a college or university. 3) A member of a society for promoting art or science At every academic conference I attend, I hear a constant refrain: “How does it feel to have left [...]