danah boyd | apophenia

At the ASTD TechKnowledge conference, I was asked to reflect on networked learning and how tomorrow’s workers will challenge today’s organizations. I did some reflecting on this topic and decided to draw on two strands of my research over the last decade – startup culture and youth culture – to talk about how those outside of traditional [...]

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is pleased to announce the publication of eight new of papers in The Kinder & Braver World Project: Research Series (danah boyd, John Palfrey, and Dena Sacco, editors) as part of its collaboration with the Born This Way Foundation (BTWF), and generously supported by the John D. [...]

This post was originally written for A Platform For Good.org, a new site dedicated to creating opportunities for young people and adults to engage with technology in a healthy way. Parenting is hard. Many parents find parenting in an era of social media to be confusing, in part because they must advise their children to [...]

Scholars, researchers, & academics – we need your help!  Below is a “Call for Papers” on issues that many of you know about. We’re looking for your help in translating some of the amazing scholarly work out into a format that can be shared with advocates, activists, organizers, and other change-makers.  If you’re working on [...]

To many people unfamiliar with Invisible Children, the Kony 2012 campaign looked like a brilliant example of “viral” media spread. The center of the campaign is a compelling 30-minute film where a father talks to his son about the evil practices of the Ugandan war lord Joseph Kony. The father makes it clear that his [...]

Yesterday, Cynthia Germanotta and her daughter Lady Gaga launched their new initiative to empower youth: the Born This Way Foundation. The Foundation wants to create a kinder, braver world so that youth can be the change-agents that we all need them to be. For youth to be empowered, the Foundation recognizes that 1) youth need [...]

Over the last couple of years, I’ve laid awake at night asking myself uncomfortable questions about bullying and teen suicide. I don’t have answers to most of the questions that I have, but I’m choosing to voice my questions, fears, and doubts because I’m not confident that our war on bullying is taking us down [...]

We all know that teen bullying – both online and offline – has devastating consequences. Jamey Rodemeyer’s suicide is a tragedy. He was tormented for being gay. He knew he was being bullied and he regularly talked about the fact that he was being bullied. Online, he even wrote: “I always say how bullied I [...]

Developmental psychologists love to remind us that the frontal lobe isn’t fully developed until humans are in their mid-20s. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for our ability to assess the consequences of our decisions, our ability to understand how what we do will play out into the future. This is often used to explain why [...]

In a cultural context where Congressman Anthony Weiner foolishly published salacious content on Twitter, it’s hard to ignore sexting as a cultural phenomenon. Countless adults send sexually explicit content to one another, either as acts of flirtation or more explicit sex acts. And yet, when teenagers do so, new issues emerge. Teen sexting gets complicated, [...]