Author Archives: zephoria

“Teen Sexting and Its Impact on the Tech Industry” (my RWW talk)

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, especially when images or videos are involved, because it butts up against child pornography laws. Unfortunately, teens have been arrested on child pornography charges for taking or sharing images of themselves or their peers.

Teen sexting isn’t just an issue for parents, teens, and the law; it’s also a challenge for the tech industry. Because technology companies are required by law to work diligently to combat child pornography, sexting creates new challenges for them. In this talk for the Read Write Web 2WAY conference, I outline some of the challenges that the tech industry faces with respect to teen sexting. I also invite those in the tech industry to engage about this issue, either out of goodwill, monetary interest, or fear of legal liability.

“Teen Sexting and Its Impact on the Tech Industry”

“Networked Privacy” (my PDF talk)

Our contemporary ideas about privacy are often shaped by legal discourse that emphasizes the notion of “individual harm.” Furthermore, when we think about privacy in online contexts, the American neoliberal frame and the techno-libertarian frame once again force us to really think about the individual. In my talk at Personal Democracy Forum this year, I decided to address some of the issues of “networked privacy” precisely because I think that we need to start thinking about how privacy fits into a social context. Even with respect to the individual frame, what others say/do about us affects our privacy. And yet, more importantly, all of the issues of privacy end up having a broader set of social implications.

Anyhow, I’m very much at the beginning of thinking through these ideas, but in the meantime, I took a first pass at PDF. A crib of the talk that I gave at the conference is available here: “Networked Privacy”

Photo Credit: Collin Key

Publicity and the Culture of Celebritization

In this month’s “Rolling Stone,” the magazine published an article called “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire”. The article tells the story of a 14-year-old teen in Florida who used MySpace to create a digital persona that attracted a lot of attention. An insecure and awkward teenager, Kirsten used MySpace to perform a confident, sexy persona named Kiki, sharing artistic photos that reveal a lot of skin. Not surprisingly, her sexy digital persona attracts a lot of attention – good, bad, and ugly. On one hand, she loves the validation; on the other, the stalking and personal attacks get increasingly severe and scary. This article raises all sorts of issues, in addition to those concerning attention, including sexual victimization (by a mentally unstable 18-year-old that she was dating), parental engagement (her parents encouraged her online participation as a depression-reducing strategy), and exploitation (by websites who profit off of drama). The story itself is actually quite complex, messy, and peculiar. It’s also quite clear that there’s a whole lot more to the story than what the journalist is able to pack into an article. Before Rolling Stone shut down the comments, people who said that they knew Kiki were commenting about how Kiki was more a bully than a victim and the self-declared mother of her now-dead ex was saying some fairly inflammatory things about Kiki. But in some senses, the details matter less than the overarching messy portrait. There are many fascinating aspects of this story and the ways in which it complicates how we think about teens and digital activities, but I want to drill down into the social factors involved in celebritization.

Part 1: Everyday Participation in the Attention Economy

As information swirls all around us, we have begun to build an attention economy where the value of a piece of content is driven by how much attention it can attract and sustain. It’s all about eyeballs, especially when advertising is involved. Countless social media consultants are swarming around Web2.0, trying to help organizations increase their status and profitability in the attention economy. But the attention economy doesn’t just affect the monetization of web properties; it’s increasingly shaping how people interact with one another.

Teens’ desire for attention is not new. Teens have always looked for attention and validation from others – parents, peers, and high-status individuals. And just as many in business argue that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, there are plenty of teens who believe that there’s no such thing as bad attention. The notion of an “attention whore” predates the internet. Likewise, the notion that a child might “act out” is recognized as being a call for attention. And it’s important to highlight that the gendered aspects of these tropes are reinforced online.

So what happens when a teen who is predisposed to seeking attention gets access to the tools of the attention economy? Needless to say, we see both exciting and horrifying events play out. We see teens like Tavi Gevinson propel her interest in fashion into a full-blown career before the age of 14. And we see countless teens replicating the trainwreck activities of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and other celebrities. When teens leverage social media to propel themselves into the spotlight, they fully (and with reckless abandon) engage in a set of practices that Terri Senft and Alice Marwick talk about as micro-celebrity. They work to manage their impressions, cultivate attention, and interact in ways that will increase their fame and social status.

Like it or not, the culture that we live in is saturated with narratives of celebrity success and celebrity failure. It’s downright hard to avoid Charlie Sheen’s meltdown or Kate Middleton’s wedding. With the rise of reality TV and the unfolding of major social media, individuals have felt closer than ever to the possibilities of celebrity. Celebrity becomes a correlate to a perfect life- money, designer clothes, and adulthood. What being a ‘celebrity’ means is discarded; fame is an end to itself with the assumption that fame equals all things awesome despite all the copious examples to the contrary. So teens only hold on to the positive aspects, hoping for the benefits of becoming famous and ignoring the consequences.

Kiki’s story is all about the celebritization of everyday life. She leveraged social media – and her image as a sexy young woman – to capture widespread attention. She turned herself into a commodity, and commoditized her popularity through her jewelry store. And the more attention she captured, the more she faced the benefits and costs of celebrity. Like her more famous peers – folks like Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato – Kiki attracted both fans and haters. But what’s different is that Lovato’s fame has come with a fortune and a whole lot of handlers; Kiki lacked the resources to handle the onslaught and never made it big enough to recoup the ground she lost to weather the fame.

To complicate matters more, Kiki is engaged in a set of attention-seeking practices that make most adults nervous. She’s not capturing massive attention through being a clean-cut geek, like Rebecca Black (of “Friday” fame). And she’s not the center of a controversy for violating social norms, like Alexandra Wallace (of “Asians in the Library” fame). Instead, she’s using her image and her creativity to express herself as a sexy young woman in a sex-saturated society that hypocritically loves sexualized imagery and deplores young women who engage in it. This leaves her in an awkward and tenuous position – she’s successful at attracting attention but, because it’s outside of the media machine and involves the tropes of underage sexuality, she’s also under attack and not defended.

Part 2: The Toxicity of Fame

In reading Kiki’s story, it’s hard not to wonder why she doesn’t just walk away from her digital persona. Sure, her digital business – which depends on her celebritization – would falter (and there are some interesting implications in this wrt her family’s limited resources). But if the cruelty is so psychologically harmful, is it really worth it?

For years, I worked for V-Day, an organization committed to ending violence against women and girls. I’ve met countless women who continually return to abusive relationships because the highs make the lows worth it. My own experiences required me to constantly push back against the voice in my head that said: “this time will be different, right?” Again, it comes down to attention. Being showered with love feels so good that it’s often easy to forget the bad days. There are countless reasons behind why those in abusive relationships stay in them, but one things clear: walking away from an abusive relationship is never easy.

Life in the spotlight can easily take the form of an abusive relationship. When the attention is good, it’s really good and it feels really good. And when the attention fades, people can feel lonely and anxious, desperate for more, even if it’s negative attention. But when the attention gets negative, things can easily spiral out of control. There are countless examples of celebrities for whom fame is a toxic substance. There’s always a cost to the attention. Herein lies a challenge… is the fame worth it?

Personally, I’ve always struggled with this. I have the great fortune of being highly visible and the rewards of my micro-fame have been tremendous. But I can’t say it’s been easy or that it’s always fun. It’s hard to stomach photoshopped images and cruel comments. And people aren’t always kind when they think that I don’t deserve the attention I’ve gotten. But, all things told, I have it pretty good. I’m confident in who I am; I have a successful career; and my haters aren’t that vicious. But I’ve managed to achieve enough attention to be wary of it and to appreciate how toxic and cruel a substance it can be. And there are certainly times when I find myself slipping into a pattern that I know so well, where I feel like my relationship with the internet has the same cycles of some of my more abusive relationships.

I’m not convinced that people of any age are well equipped to handle fame, let alone the cruel cycles that can come with it. Certainly, experience makes it easier to stomach, but Charlie Sheen’s meltdown should make it crystal clear that it’s not just teen girls who struggle with the spotlight. The thing about youth is that they often crave celebrity a lot more than adults. And their mental images of what it means are often distorted. So many teens that I interviewed over the years have talked about fame as freedom, failing to recognize the constraints that come with those golden handcuffs.

Kiki is living in a whirlwind of fame, attention, and commodification. She’s turned herself into someone to watch and those who are watching are asserting power over her in deeply problematic ways. She’s created a digital icon but her audience has objectified her, failing to recognize or value the person behind the icon. This puts her in a peculiar place with limited control. And that would be the precise location of celebrity.

I suspect we are going to see more and more stories of individuals who have wanted celebrity to more or lesser degrees and who are sucked into a tumultuous relationship with fame. And I suspect the public will swing between feeling sympathy for their plight and blaming them for putting themselves out there. This is certainly the case with respect to those brought into the public eye through reality TV and tabloid magazines, and even those who are fired from jobs or kicked out of school for what they post on Facebook or Twitter. But I fear that our collective objectification of very visible people is also going to get much worse as more individuals come to prominence online. And many of those for whom the worst vitriol is reserved are young women, especially those who transgress the social boundaries of what it means to be nice or sexually appropriate. Internet commenting makes it easy to spew venom towards those in the crosshairs of celebrity, but we should recognize this isn’t simply a position to be envied. Just because people benefit from being visible doesn’t mean that they have the wherewithal to stomach the attacks. At the same time, just because celebrity is an option doesn’t mean that it’s a healthy one.

Widespread celebritization is the flipside of the “attention economy” coin and I think that we have a lot of deep thinking to do about the implications of both of these. Both are already rattling society in unexpected ways and I’m not convinced that we have the social, psychological, or cultural infrastructure to manage what will unfold. Some people will become famous or rich. Others will commit suicide or drown attempting to swim in these rocky waves. This doesn’t mean that we should blockade the technologies that are emerging, but it’s high time that we start reflecting on the societal values that are getting magnified by them.

[This post wouldn’t have been possible without the help Alice Marwick, Mary Gray, and Mike Ananny.]

How Teens Understand Privacy

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), but we also wanted to share our work-in-progress with the public since we both know that there are all sorts of folks out there who have a lot of knowledge about this domain but with whom we don’t have the privilege of regularly interacting.

“Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies”
by danah boyd and Alice Marwick

Please understand that this is an unfinished work-in-progress article, complete with all sorts of bugs that we will need to address before we submit it for publication. But… we would certainly love feedback, critiques, and suggestions for how to improve it. Given the highly interdisciplinary nature of this kind of research, it’s also quite likely that we’re missing out on all sorts of prior work that was done in this space so we’d love to also hear about any articles that we should’ve read by now. Or any thoughts you might have that might advance/complicate our thinking.

Regardless, hopefully you’ll enjoy the piece!

A Customer Service Nightmare: Resolving Trademark and Personal Reputation in a Limited Name Space

Yesterday, I threw a public hissy fit when I found out that Tumblr’s customer service had acted on a trademark request from a company called Zephoria who had written them to ask that they release my account to them. (Tumblr has since apologized and given me my identity back.) In some ways, I feel really badly for Tumblr – and all other small social media companies – because brokering these issues is not easy. In fact, it’s a PITA. Who has the legitimate right to a particular identity or account name? What happens when the account is inactive? Or when the person who has the account is squatting? Or when there are conflicting parties who both have legitimate interests in an account name? Or when the account owner has died?

This is actually not a new issue. Battles over domain names (as in URLs) raged in the 1990s. People have spent millions of dollars buying domains from squatters and there have been countless lawsuits over who has legitimacy in these situations. Before there was Register.com, there was Jon Postel who was the benevolent dictator of domain names. Knowing this was too much for one person to manage, he went on to help found ICANN. (For a great accounting of these battles, I strongly recommend Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu’s “Who Controls the Internet.”) These issues also came up when email services and instant messenger services had to disseminate accounts (which is why you got stuck with carebear42). Whenever you’re dealing with a limited domain space where the name or “handle” needs to be a unique identifier, you run into this. There can be a million Joe Smith’s in the world, but there can only be one joesmith.com.

Unfortunately, social media has thrown a new wrench into this age-old problem. While homepages were certainly identifiers of people, there were only so many of us geeks who were obsessed with getting a personal domain name back in the day, our digital vanity plate if you will. Blogs, social network sites, and Twitter took the identity battle to an entirely new scale. Not only are handles important as unique identifiers, they’re constantly referenced in all sorts of ways in social media. Blogging created an ecosystem where people became known for their blog identities. Social network sites (initially MySpace and eventually Facebook) brought the homepage unique name culture to the mainstream via the Facebook landgrab (albeit in a walled garden environment). And then Twitter took the culture of IRC into the mainstream, turning digital handles into referents not just for the technology but for addressing one another (through @replies).

In the early days of Web2.0, the technology stalwarts and traditional companies rolled their eyes at the millions of consumers using social media to babble on about their lives. The New York Times dismissed bloggers as “amateur diarists” and few took the cultural practices playing out particularly seriously. And then blogs started screwing with pagerank. And companies started realizing that if bloggers talked shit about them, it would ripple across the web. By the time that Twitter got big, companies realized that they needed to jump on the bandwagon and create a presence in these newfangled spaces. And all of a sudden, companies and individuals started competing for the precious unique identifiers on countless services across the web.

Facebook capitalized this, revealing their own interests. Facebook announced that at midnight on June 12, 2009, it would open the doors for a identifier land grab. What the public didn’t know was that Facebook had already chosen to reserve countless identifiers for its (potential) customers. All sorts of companies were given handles representing their names and they didn’t have to compete with the masses to do so. This two-tiered system revealed who got priority in a Facebook world.

Of course, there’s an irony to all of this, an irony that was best articulated by Todd Sieling in a comment left on my blog:

“It’s kind of funny how individuals have been encouraged for years to take on the costuming of corporations by building personal brands, but that part of the outcome from that shift has been to dissolve the identity line and leave individuals on an uneven playing field with established and much more powerful brands. In other words, we kind of got tricked into becoming small fish in a pool with much bigger ones.”

All sorts of folks have staked their reputations on their name or pseudonym. Some of us are old skool geeks. Others are emergent pop icons. Our reputations have become linked to what can be understood as a “personal brand” (see Alice Marwick’s dissertation for a fantastic analysis of this). In a neoliberal environment, individuals have become corporatized just as corporations have become people. The lines are getting increasingly fuzzy.

To the best that I can understand (note: I’m not a lawyer even if I happen to be at Harvard Law School), trademarks were established as a way for corporations (or individuals) to be able to uniquely identify themselves and clearly mark their products. Of course, trademark law is a complete mess, differs by jurisdiction, and reveals how complicated dealing with boundary issues around identity can be (cuz law isn’t that different than code…). Once an entity has a trademark, they work hard to protect it so that customers don’t confuse their competitors with them, especially when they’ve worked so darn hard to build up their brand. As with most things law-related, trademark law is complicated and gnarly, impenetrable for the average person who often lacks the financial resources – or incentives – to go out of their way to protect their image with such a formalized method.

And here’s where the internet makes everything messy. There are all sorts of people roaming around the internet, building their reputations and associating them with nicknames, handles, and pseudonyms. They aren’t necessarily building businesses or engaging in commercial acts, but they are building a public reputation no less. And there are also all sorts of companies out there operating as individuals to give their consumers a sense that they are “authentic.” And these two practices are colliding online. When is a Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook/YouTube account an individual? When is it a company? When is it an individual at a company? They’re all meshed into one TYPE: account. So then who has precedence?

For the most part, websites have doled out names based on a first-come-first-serve approach. Early adopters get the most valued names and latecomers are left with the dregs. But it’s not that easy. Companies with trademarks have a legitimate claim to make when individuals use account names to deceive the public into believing that they are that company. And there’s a serious tactical issue at play when the most valued names are “squatted” by folks hoping to make a buck off of convincing McDonalds or whoever to pay them for the account. This is especially challenging for social media sites who don’t want to have all sorts of deadzones on their service (not to mention the fact that there’s a question of fairness over who gets the right to monetize early adopter-ness). Different issues emerge when two entities both have a legitimate right to the name, as was the case with the name “zephoria” on Tumblr. Does trademark trump? Does early adopter-ness trump? How do you resolve reputation and trademark differences in a digital era?

Let me take a moment to offer some more context about my own experiences with this. I’ve used zephoria for sociable purposes since around 1998. I didn’t mean to build a brand around it (outside of Burning Man where I liked using it as a playa name), but it happened. When blogging got popular, I found myself signing blog posts (on my blog and elsewhere) as zephoria. I created countless accounts as zephoria, but I’m not zephoria on every websites. On sites like LiveJournal where I wanted to be even more anonymous, I chose a different name. On MySpace, I was lazy about grabbing the name and a small band beat me to it. I’ve always accepted this because first-come-first serve seems perfectly fair to me. Facebook was the first situation where I was thwarted through what I believe to be an unfair advantage; I was online with all of my friends at midnight and they all got their handles but I didn’t get mine because it had been reserved without me having a say at all. And then Tumblr took it to a new level – I was the first to arrive but a customer service person felt like someone else had more legitimacy because they had a trademark.

Now, I don’t post that much on Tumblr and while I surf Tumblr pages fairly often, I only use the site enough to make sure that I understand the site. I respect and value Tumblr, but it’s not really my thing. I have plenty of digital presences and I’m much more wedded to my personal blog and Twitter. But I still like Tumblr and I love seeing what teens do with it. If a hipster band came to me and begged me to have that account for some legitimate reason, I probably would’ve given it up. But I don’t believe that the consulting company wanted the account for anything other than an opportunity to try to downgrade my pagerank. They haven’t updated their corporate blog in years; they haven’t updated their Twitter account in over a year; and they have no content (and no likes) on Facebook. They may have the trademark, but in social media land, they’re squatters. And they’re probably pissed that they’re a search engine optimization company who has failed at the SEO game because, without any explicit effort to do so, I’ve managed to be a more relevant result in search engines than they are. All because I’m actually a legitimate person who doesn’t have to pretend to be authentic to gather an audience.

So now let’s go back to reputation, identity, and trademark. I’ve inadvertently built a reputation linked to zephoria. All sorts of people call me zephoria. And all of my weird quirks (fuzzy hats, lower-case name, etc.) are interpreted as part of my self-brand even though their roots have nothing to do with marketing, but are rather the product of me being a proud freak. Because of my work, I’ve built a pretty powerful reputation. This gives me a shitload of privilege (and is most likely the reason why companies are willing to call me when I bitch loudly online). But I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t try to use that privilege to challenge the status quo. I recognize that most people don’t have the privilege to protect their reputations when more powerful institutions go after them. And since posting about this yesterday, I’ve received countless emails from individuals who have been screwed over by every social media site you can name and struggled to assert their rights (e.g. girlgeeks). This is a problem that is bigger than me. So what can we do about it?

I believe that any company that doles out unique identifiers needs to have strong policies in place, not simply to protect trademark owners, but to balance the interests of all relevant parties. Trademark is not the solution, unless it’s clear that the account holder is trying to deceive the public. I also believe that said companies should be very public about what their processes are in trying to deal with these tensions. I also believe that there should be a series of stages involved that go beyond “tried to contact.” What I’d suggest is the following:

  1. Try to contact the account holder via email, private message, on their dashboard, or by any other direct means available… and give them reasonable time to respond.
  2. Before moving or deleting the account, post a message on the account indicating that the ownership of the account has been challenged, asking the viewers of the page to ask the owner to contact the service ASAP to resolve this. This will prompt the user’s friends to get them to act.
  3. Explicitly ask both parties for comments. Perhaps even consider asking the broader userbase to weigh in. Treat the identity space as a commons because that’s what it is.
  4. Deal with each case on an individual basis, weighing first-come, trademark, personal reputation, web presence history, activity on the service, etc. Don’t simply reinforce existing power by assuming that the company is more legitimate than the individual.
  5. Finally, publicly explain the decision-making process so that the public understands the issues. Think of this as a court record. Cuz it kills me when social media companies scream about the importance of open-source and governmental transparency but refuse to make their own customer service processes transparent. (Government is one big customer service organization!)

Are those steps foolproof? Of course not. But they’re a step in the right direction. (Assuming that you want to prioritize creating a community over turning a profit… which may not actually be true for some social media services…) Public accountability and discussion is a critical component of creating a digital environment where people are treated fairly. Trademark on the internet isn’t a black-and-white solution. And we have the opportunity to set the standards, to tease out how we resolve personal reputations and institutional authority. And we have a responsibility to do so because we are creating digital spaces in which reputations are made and broken. It’s time that we recognize that with great power to control the attention economy comes great responsibility to create a world that we want to live in. And that means that we have to think about fairness, not just legality.

Recommended Reading:

Tumblr disappeared me…

Update: Tumblr called me, apologized, and restored my account. More details below.

People wonder why I have control issues. I refuse to use third party email services because I’m terrified of being locked out of my account (as I was when Yahoo! thought I was a part of a terrorist organization because I was working with Afghani women in 2001). I maintain a blog on my own server because I’m terrified of it all just disappearing. So I shouldn’t be surprised when it actually happens but it doesn’t stop me from being shocked, outraged, and disappointed.

I’m not the most active Tumblr user but I’ve had an account on the service for quite some time because teens are pretty active there. I even used the service to post an ongoing list of different open-access journals which was regularly visited by academics. I also had a list of interesting books and other such collections. It now seems to be gone. And the URLs are now broken (although some are still available in Google’s cache). [Update: I learned that it was all moved to a new location, again, without them telling me.]

What happened? I don’t know. I don’t know how to get in touch with anyone at Tumblr (although hopefully this blog post will help that happen). All I know is that my posts are gone. [Update: All are moved to a new URL, breaking everyone’s links to content that I had on the site and giving me no choice in this process.] And a company who also uses the name zephoria is now posting at that Tumblr page (and seems to have been for the last two days). Tumblr did not notify me. And while their ToS says that they will, it also says that Tumblr “reserves the right to remove any Subscriber Content from the Site, suspend or terminate Subscriber’s right to use the Services at any time…”

My guess is that they removed it because a company out there declared they had the right because of trademark. This kills me. I’ve been using the handle “zephoria” online since around 1998 when I started signing messages with that handle while still at Brown. It’s actually a funny blurring of two things: zephyr and euphoria. Zephyr was the name of the instant messaging service at Brown and the name of the dog that I lived with in 1997, two things that I loved dearly. And talking about euphoria was a personal joke between me and a friend. I registered the domain name zephoria.org to create a private blog that would be separate from what was at danah.org. I chose .org because I liked to see myself as an organization, not a commercial entity.

A few years ago, I learned that there is a technology consulting company called Zephoria.com. And apparently, they’ve become a social media consulting company. In recent years, I’ve found that they work hard to block me from using the handle of zephoria on various social media sites. Even before the midnite land grab on Facebook, they squatted the name zephoria, probably through some payment to the company. But this is a new low… Now they’re STEALING my accounts online!?!?!? WTF?!?!?!

I’m also pissed at Tumblr. Why is it acceptable for them to just delete my content without notifying me? For them to break the web by killing off links to my posts? For them to not leave room to negotiate? Let’s assume that this is about trademark issues… The whole point of trademark is to not allow people to confuse customers. I’m not doing anything to confuse customers. I’ve been using the handle publicly longer than they have and my name is deeply connected to that handle all across the web. But I don’t have the financial resources or incentive to challenge their trademark even though I was using the handle before they trademarked it.

Battles over domain names and account names are not new, but social media makes them much messier because all sorts of people are creating accounts with handles that have meaning to them personally. People are building public reputations connected to identities without trademarking them. And social media services have the power to instantly disappear people without notifications. Of course, most business folks fully understand that these aren’t public spaces; they are commercial ones. And the commercial entities get to do as they please. And my life isn’t destroyed by this. But what really pisses me off is that it’s simply not fair or just. And I’m seriously disappointed in Tumblr. I also can’t help but wonder how many other people get screwed because individuals are never given the same social status as corporations in this digital environment. Le sigh.

Updates:

1:13PM: Apparently, I’m not alone. Gawker has an article, beautifully titled Tumblr Screws Hipster Underclass to Appease Hipster Overlords at Pitchfork.

3:07PM: John Maloney, the President of Tumblr, wrote to me, confirming that the issue was indeed one of trademark. He sent a screenshot of the customer service request, indicating that they had tried to email me but that I did not respond. They apparently emailed me on Passover and turned over the account 72 hours later. I responded that I did not believe that this protocol was appropriate. I argued that they were in the business of brokering reputation and that trademark isn’t an acceptable justification for allowing a company to overtake an individual who isn’t trying to pretend to be the company. I volunteered to help them think through their processes around these situations but I also said unequivocally that I wanted my account back.

10:39PM: I just got off the phone with John Maloney. We had a lovely conversation which began with him apologizing for what he described as a human error in customer service and saying that he looked into the issue and has reinstated my account. He explicitly stated that they are working hard to have strong customer service processes where things like this don’t happen and that he feels terrible that it did happen. He said that Tumblr has only had four issues like this in the past and that they are committed to making certain that legitimate active users do not face these issues. He did say that they work hard to not allow squatting (and he argued that the Pitchfork case was one of squatting, not active use by the individual).

We then talked about different customer service strategies that could be taken and why cases like this are actually challenging. I explained that I know that companies are struggling to deal with these issues across the board and that many customer service agents are in a pickle; they don’t understand the law and lawyers are using customer service to make threats and demands to serve their clients at the expense of people (i.e., DMCA abuses). I explained that one of the reasons that I am talking loudly about this issue is because I have in the fortunate position of being able to use my own experiences to highlight issues that others face but lack the status to vocalize.

I am going to get some sleep, give a talk at Guardian’s Activate, and then blog in more detail about what I’ve been thinking and have learned in this process tomorrow. But I’m really grateful for Tumblr’s willingness to take this seriously and restore my account as well as my respect for them as a company. And I’m deeply grateful to all of you who have sent me fantastic feedback and commentary and suggestions about what else I should read as I’m thinking about these issues. So thank you!

April 28: I have written a longer post outlining how I believe that we should think about the tensions between personal reputation and trademark as well as the actions that customer service should take when they encounter these issues.

How Can We Help Miguel?

[Written for DML Central. More comments there.]

One of the hardest parts of doing fieldwork is hearing difficult, nuanced stories that break my heart. The more complicated the story, the harder it is to tell, but I feel a responsibility to at least try. Given how many educational reformists read this blog, I want to provide a portrait of some of the teens that I’ve met who are currently being failed by the system. My goal in doing so is to ask a hard question: how do we help these specific teens? Let me start with Miguel.

Miguel is 17 and in the 10th grade. His parents, both from Mexico, never finished high school and speak very little English. They are very religious and came to the US to try to provide a life for Miguel and his brother. When Miguel arrived first arrived in Nashville, he spoke very little English himself, but a local gang immediately adopted him and taught him English with heavy street slang. Given his initial friends, he was immediately labeled as a gangbanger by adults. He struggles with this label and it shapes his relationship to school and influences how adults treat him.

danah: Is school boring?
Miguel: Sometimes. Like, my algebra II, that class is like, I don’t get what she is saying. I tell her to slow down and she won’t slow down. She act like a computer. I sometimes am taking notes and she’ll be erasing them. That’s when I get mad and I tell her. She says she don’t care.
danah: Why doesn’t she care?
Miguel: Because she say I never pay attention.
danah: How does that make you feel?
Miguel: It makes me feel bad because I know that I pay attention and I try, but that’s her.

Miguel has long struggled to dissociate himself with gangs, looking up to people who are making their life work through the traditional tracks of school. “When I see people who are doing good in school I be like, oh, I want to be like that. It makes me be a better person and give me, what’s it called, feel better in my mind, my studies and everything.” But he faces insurmountable odds. As an undocumented / “illegal” (in his words) immigrant, he believes that he won’t be going to college. He’s particularly angry about this because his brother is doing quite well in school and there appears to be no hope for him to go to college either. (Note: I’m not sure about the legal barriers, but Miguel is convinced that there’s no way that he or his brother could go to college.)

In addition to feeling as though there’s no educational future for him, he struggles with issues about loyalty, feeling like he should be supporting his friends who supported him when he first arrived. But then a friend of his was killed; this scared him. “It makes me feel like I don’t want to be in that position anymore. I prefer to stay at home or going to the movies without knowing I’m going to get shot.” Fights are all around him and he regularly struggles to stay disengaged.

Miguel: I make decisions now by more of the– to feel myself better and safe, because one day we were fighting and this dude pulled out a knife and he started trying to kill someone. And since then, I was like, “I don’t like that.” And then, one day, it was before the knife, after the knife my friend got into a fight and everyone wasn’t there. This dude pull up a gun and he tried to shoot you. He shoot the gun, but we start running. So that’s why I prefer to stay bored in school and be safe than be doing something bad. Not doing nothing in school is more safe than to be doing something that is bad for me.

Miguel says that most of his friends stay involved with the gangs because “they don’t want leave out of the life. They want to stay in that life.” When the TV show Gangland did a special on Nashville, his friends were ecstatic that they were on TV, that they were now “famous.” This TV show, while showing the underbelly of gang culture, served as a recruiting technique for local gangs. Although Miguel wants out, there are pressures to stay in. He no longer goes to the lunchroom because he’s expected to sit with the gang. He works hard to come up with activities that will give him excuses for not showing up at fights. And while he’s got support outside of school – at church, through a counselor – even his teachers have written him off as a gangbanger.

Here’s a teen who wants to learn, who is painfully far behind and frustrated, who speaks broken English and is clearly lacking in many educational basics, who is unable to see a future for himself outside of doing menial labor and working hard to avoid being picked up by INS. He doesn’t see college as an option nor does he see any path to becoming legal. How can we help a teen like Miguel?

The Politics of Queering Anything

Sitting at an academic conference years ago, I was struck by the marginalization of various voices under the guise of inclusion. There were queer panels and race panels and gender panels. In sampling those panels and various other panels, I started to see a trend in the audiences. In short, the audiences attracted to those panels identified as a member of that particular identity group or were allies. And I realized that panels that were not identity-marked tended to not have theories of gender/race/sexuality woven into them. When panels are marked through identity issues, people choose whether or not they should attend based on their identity politics, failing to recognize how critical analyses of race/gender/sexuality are broadly relevant. Thus, in marking panels through identity, this conference fundamentally marginalized the population it was theoretically including.

A few weeks ago, I helped organize a conference; I was one of the program committee members and coordinated three invited sessions. In the wind, I heard that a few folks were disappointed that there were no LGBT-specific panels. The assumption was that queer issues were forgotten. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only did all of the panels that I coordinated have queer-identified panelists on them but they all integrated queer theory into their arguments, whether explicitly or implicitly. I purposely left these issues unmarked in my description of the panels because my goal was to make sure that these issues were integrated seamlessly into a conversation without making identity politics the organizing theme of any of the panels.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m a huge fan of creating safe space to have serious conversations about identity politics, but I’m also determined to bring the lessons from queer theory (and race studies and feminism) into broader conversations. Sure – I’d love to call out these frameworks explicitly and have everyone who should hear the concepts come to the room. But, at the end of the day, I prioritize strategy. So I’ve gone out of my way to integrate these frameworks into my own work without ever calling them out explicitly, specifically so that those who are constitutionally incapable of listening to any argument that involves identity politics will accidentally listen to the underlying theories without realizing it, will incorporate the tenets of queer theory into their understanding of the world without realizing that this is where the roots of those frameworks come from.

At the root of queer theory is a very simple practice: questioning what is “normal” or normative, complicating any simple framework by asking critical questions about who is excluded and what is assumed. Anyone who has studied queer theory immediately gets how this framework is useful beyond analyses of sexuality, yet those who haven’t been trained as such see two scary words: queer and theory. Depending on the audience, either word can prompt a serious phobia. But that framework does more than answer questions about sexuality; it allows us to interrogate any supposedly stable system.

My favorite book in the world is Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. It’s a work of fiction – a novel – that lays out all of the core tenets of queer theory without ever telling the reader that that’s what’s going on. It’s a distinctly queer book, but it’s meant to help those who have theory phobia understand theory without realizing that they’re reading theory. Candy-coated vitamins if you will. One of the lessons I took from reading that book is that, if you want to get a message across, it’s important to recognize people’s anxieties and discomforts at face value and try to present information to them in a way that’s palatable and embraceable. Let them understand through a set of language that they can recognize instead of alienating them with language that terrifies them.

This form of “selling out” is bound to piss off anyone who believes that failing to mark queerness is a sign of weakness, a form of re-closeting, a way of undermining queer experiences, etc. I can totally hear and respect that. But I’m a pragmatist. And I’m more than willing to “sell out” if it means that I can get more people to understand why the core tenets of queer theory can help them understand structural inequality and systematic marginalization. I’m willing to let that go unmarked if doing so helps.

I integrate all sorts of queer theory into my arguments without signaling explicitly that that’s what I’m doing. And I often include queer theory references as “in-jokes” in ways that don’t make them visible to the untrained eye. I recognize that my path has strengths and weaknesses, but I’m also curious how others balance these issues. How do you integrate complex or potentially alienating frameworks into your work so that people can consume them? Or do you refuse to make things palatable? And if so, why? Are you horribly offended by the choices I’ve made?

Tweeting teens can handle public life

Alice Marwick and I co-authored this piece for The Guardian.

The Press Complaints Commission in the UK has now ruled that there is no “reasonable expectation” of privacy on Twitter. With this decision and the fact that teenagers are flocking to Twitter in a big way, frustrated adults are asking the same questions of teen Twitter feeds as they did of MySpace and Facebook: don’t young people know this stuff is public? Why do they put personal things online? Why don’t teens care about privacy?

First, let’s get something straight: not all teens use Twitter, and those who do don’t all use it in the same way. The sense of what’s appropriate on Twitter varies wildly by social group and locale – is it OK to break up with someone on Twitter? To tweet a hundred times a day? Similarly, young people use Twitter in different ways. Some primarily follow celebrities, enjoying the glimpses into their lives, sending @replies to their favourites in the hope of a response and chatting with other fans. Others like getting coupons and freebies from Twitter-savvy brands. Still other teens use Twitter to play hashtag games, like #lessambitiousmovies (think “The Devil Wears Payless” and “The Above Average Four”), where their bon mots can be retweeted or commented on by thousands they may not know. There are also countless teens who use Twitter primarily to engage with people they know from school, summer camp or after-school activities. Who teens imagine reading their tweets very much shapes their style of participation.

Twitter gives its users two settings: make tweets readable to all, or only to a selected group. A surprising number of teens choose the latter, culling a carefully chosen collection of real-life friends and family members. Even for teens who keep their tweets public – like the overwhelming majority of adult users – Twitter seems smaller and more intimate than Facebook. In an age where virtually every young person has a Facebook account, many teens are “friends” with hundreds of classmates, as there’s heavy social pressure to accept friend requests from people they know. Twitter’s more casual approach to “following” means teens can choose to follow only their friends without too much recrimination. In North Carolina, 17-year-old Manu summarises this sentiment: “I guess Facebook is like yelling it out to a crowd, and then Twitter is just like talking in a room.”

To teens, Twitter and Facebook have different purposes. Matthew, another 17-year-old from North Carolina, told us: “On Facebook, if someone writes their emotions every five minutes, it’s just obnoxious.” Since it’s normal to have 600 friends, if one of them posts constant status updates, it potentially drowns out more important or interesting messages. Matthew and his friends call this “blowing up your news feed” and it’s looked down upon. But on Twitter, it’s perfectly OK to talk about the meal you just ate, or the moment-to-moment sadness you feel, because the site encourages such minutia – and you can always unfollow someone if they tweet too much.

It’s also important to remember that just because a tweet can theoretically be accessed doesn’t mean it will be, nor does it mean the underlying sentiment will be understandable to an outside audience. Plenty of teens – and adults – use aliases and nicknames for their Twitter account, since unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t require a real name. Twitter also allows more playfulness; among the most popular Twitter accounts are a cat and several fictional characters.

But even when teens aren’t hiding behind monikers, what they post may not make sense to an outsider. Access to content is not the same as access to interpretation. Teens regularly post in-jokes and use song lyrics or cryptic references to speak to a narrower audience than might be accessing their tweets. Some tweets are clearly difficult to decode, making the reader aware that a message is being hidden; others can be understood as “social steganography” where the message is hidden in “plain sight”. While their classmates, parents or potential employers may be able to see these tweets, they don’t necessarily understand them. Although there’s nothing fundamentally new about these practices, their application to Twitter makes it clear that teens are aware of speaking in public and using strategies to manage it.

What all this means is that “public or private” is more complicated than it seems. Twitter and its ilk aren’t going away, and the answer to responsible use isn’t to shut teens out of public life. Many teens are indeed more visible today than ever before, but, through experience, they’re also developing skills to manage privacy in public. What matters is not whether or not teens are speaking in public, but how we support them as they try to learn how to responsibly navigate the networked public spaces that are central to contemporary life.

More comments can be found on the thread at The Guardian.

why I’m mostly offline

Y’know how when you’re really really tired and your eyes refuse to focus unless you force them to? And if you force them to, you’re inviting a searing headache? Much to my dismay, that’s been my reality since I returned from India. In a cruel twist of fate, my relaxing vacation relaxed my eyes a bit too much. And now they don’t want to play along.

I’m currently working with doctors to try to figure out why this is happening and what I can do to fix it. In the meantime, I’m trying to be a good patient. I’m currently spending very little time in front of the computer (although thank goodness for text-to-speech’s strange rendition of email), focused primarily on functional tasks and trying not to get distracted by Twitter or Quora or the collection of Betaworks projects that I desperately want to beta test. I’m learning to appreciate how my Kindle talks and, more importantly, LOVING authors who make real books-on-“tape” available (although “reading” Amy Chua’s controversial self-narrated book at double speed is rather intense).

The downside of all of this is that I need to stay put, both to see doctors and to attempt to maintain as consistent of a schedule as possible and focus on getting better. And, while Microsoft has the bestest health insurance ever, I’ve been advised that leaving the country would be a very stupid move right now. Boo to not being invincible.

Much to my chagrin, this means that I had to write Natasha at Webstock and tell her that I wouldn’t be able to join her this year. I can’t tell you how much this kills me. Webstock is this awesome conference in New Zealand organized by really smart design-tech-minded Kiwis, many of whom I met when I was in New Zealand a few years ago. I’ve been dying to go for years and I was really really really looking forward to attending this year. And now I can’t. Sad panda. So you should go for me. Cuz Natasha (and Webstock) are le awesome. Oh, and if you go, you should try to convince Tom Coates to do the talk on ballerinas that he originally proposed. He had even promised a performance!

Anyhow, I am not sure how long I’ll be slower than normal but I’m trying to take it easy and focus on my health. I’d much rather pretend to be a brain-on-a-stick but every once in a while, I’m forced to attend to my body. I’m not so good at being (a) patient but I’m trying. Please forgive me for being out of touch and not nearly as interactive as I pride myself on being. Hopefully I’ll be back with regularly scheduled entertainment in the near future.

{{hug}}