danah boyd | apophenia

In the days that followed Andrew Watts’ “A Teenager’s View on Social Media written by an actual teen” post, dozens of people sent me a link. I found myself getting uncomfortable and angry by the folks who are pointing me to this. I feel the need to offer my perspective as someone who is not […]

(I wrote the following piece for Psychology Today under the title “Sexual Predators: The Imagined and the Real.”) If you’re a parent, you’ve probably seen the creepy portraits of online sexual predators constructed by media: The twisted older man, lurking online, ready to abduct a naive and innocent child and do horrible things. If you’re like most […]

(This piece was written for the LA Times, where it was published as an op-ed on April 11, 2014.) If you’re like most middle-class parents, you’ve probably gotten annoyed with your daughter for constantly checking her Instagram feed or with your son for his two-thumbed texting at the dinner table. But before you rage against […]

Most people who encounter a link to this post will never read beyond this paragraph. Heck, most people who encountered a link to this post didn’t click on the link to begin with. They simply saw the headline, took note that someone over 30 thinks that maybe Snapchat is important, and moved onto the next […]

Today is the official publication date of “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens”. While many folks have received their pre-orders already, this is the date in which all U.S. book stores that promised to carry the book at launch should have a copy. It’s also the day in which I officially start my […]

In less than a month, my new book – “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” – will be published.  This is the product of ten years worth of research into how social media has inflected American teen life.  If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ve seen me talk about these issues over […]

Yesterday, Pew Internet and American Life Project (in collaboration with Berkman) unveiled a brilliant report about “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy.” As a researcher who’s been in the trenches on these topics for a long time now, none of their finding surprised me but it still gives me absolute delight when our data is so […]