seeking research intern

Connected to my role in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, I’m seeking a research intern. The intern would be responsible for:

Creating an annotated bibliography of all scholarly research related to the issues taken up by the Task Force (e.g., Internet sexual predators, bullying, identity theft, COPPA, etc.)
Creating an annotated list of scholars and institutes working in the field and reaching out to them to see if new research is about to be published
Writing the first draft of a literature review of the relevant research
Other things that might come up…

The ideal intern will have strong research skills, strong writing skills, and an interest in the topic. Timeliness is also crucial – much is needed to be done by mid-June. The ability to self-motivate/self-direct is also critical; I will be doing virtually no micromanagement and the deadline is not movable.

The intern would officially be an intern at the Harvard Berkman Center and will receive the standard Harvard intern wage; living in Cambridge is not a requirement – most interactions with me will take place through email/AIM. The intern must be a student at a university (either undergrad or graduate level) and have full library access. Preference will be given to those in social science fields who are familiar with and can evaluate quantitative methods. The most ideal candidate would probably be a pre-quals graduate student who is working in this area and would love to be paid to do the literature review they have to do anyhow, but I’m not sure that this person exists.

This position will start the moment I find the right person. It will definitely last through June and can last much longer depending on the person’s interest (there’s plenty of related work through December). Hours are flexible; all that matters is getting the job done.

To apply, send me an email to zephoria at zephoria dot org. Include your CV, the names and emails of 2 professors who can attest to your research skills, a sample piece of writing (class assignments are fine) and a cover letter that includes: why you are interested in this internship, some background on your research skills, and whatever else you think that I might want to know.

Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone you think might be interested.

Update: This position has been filled. To my shock and excitement, there was an absolute plethora of amazing candidates that I had to turn down. Of course, that makes it really hard. But thank you to everyone who applied!

If you are a scholar who is publishing in this area who is jumping up and down with excitement, feel free to add citations and names to the comments. I will do a proper call for biblio bits and researchers a bit down the road.

“From MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth” public forum

For the last three years, I’ve been a part of a digital youth research team. This team is funded by the MacArthur Foundation and consists of scholars at both Berkeley and USC (PIs: Peter Lyman, Mimi Ito, Michael Carter, Barrie Thorne). We’ve been doing large-scale ethnographic studies of U.S. youth, collectively examining different aspects of their lives. The project is almost over and we’re all in the process of writing up our findings. We’ve decided to put together a big public forum event in the Bay Area both to celebrate and showcase what we have found. This event is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required because of limited space. Register! Come!

….

From MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth

What: A public forum on how digital technologies and new media are changing the way that young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.

When: Wednesday April 23rd, 2008
Registration: 4.30pm
Panel Discussion: 5-7PM
Reception: 7.30-8.15PM

Where: Hewlett Teaching Center, Building 200, Stanford University, 370 Serra Mall

Register at CommonSense Media. Registration is free, open to the public, but the space is limited. Registration closes April 18th or when the space is full.

Registration Presentations:

danah boyd – “Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics”
Heather Horst – “Understanding New Media in the Home”
Dilan Mahendran – “Hip Hop Music and Meaning in the Digital Age”
Mimi Ito – “New Media From A Youth Perspective”

(More program information here)

If you can not attend this event in person, we will also be streaming it live to the web.

me in comic form

Marc Scheff, digital artist extraordinaire, penned this trippy comic version of me that I thought y’all would get a kick out of. ::giggle::

PS: Congrats to Marc and Chloe for their recent engagement! W00t!

from faux to real – the rise of kiddie phones

Standing in the toy section of a store in the Hong Kong airport, I was fascinated by the wide array of faux laptops made for children. These machines were designed to look like laptops, but their functionality was extremely limited to a learning-based program with the graphical capability of a Tamagotchi. Faux electronics for children have been around for a while, especially in the world of mobile phones. Lately, though, technology has become cheaper and what was once faux is now real. While children’s laptops are still more hype than reality, phones for children are appearing all over the place. These “kiddie” phones are often smaller, simpler, and more brightly colored.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported on the tide of concern in Europe over the rise in kiddie phones. On one hand, there are questions about the long-term health effects of mobile phones. On the other, there is a parenting concern about whether young children should have phones at all. One of the experts quoted draws a parallel between the mobile phone and tobacco industries. In other words, are companies acting maliciously by addicting kids to mobile phones at a young age? Luckily, since it’s Europe, the furor is prompting a bunch of research.

In the States, kiddie phones have had a different tenor. Here, the safety concern revolves around access to porn and other “harmful” content as well as the potential for dangerous contact from strangers. (Research is not encouraged.) When kiddie phones are available, their uniqueness is less about look and feel than it is about parent-child specific features. For example, the branded kiddie cell phone service offered by Disney was a glorified parent tracking device for parents. Last fall, Disney cancelled the service, citing challenges breaking through the carrier stranglehold.

All of this makes me wonder… What is the appropriate age for children to first get phones? What should be the purpose of those phones? What regulation is necessary? What are the responsibilities of parents?

(This was originally posted at Shift 6. Leave comments there.)

limited email March 16-25

I’m headed to Hong Kong with my partner for Eastover (what happens when Passover needs to be celebrated during Easter because that’s when people have vacation). I will be checking my email sporadically, but don’t expect much in the way of communication – In addition to family time, I’m also using this time to focus on some writing without the internet nearby. ::smoooch::

curing the ills of sociology

I was reading some background bits on Erving Goffman when I came across this passage, commenting on the state of sociology. Having sat through painful discussions of “what is an information school?” and been grilled about my own disciplinary affiliations, I read this and burst out laughing. I always love reading scholars’ takes on disciplinary squabbles, especially when they can step back and see the absurdity in it all. I figured the academics who read my blog might get a kick out of this too.

“I have no universal cure for the ills of sociology. A multitude of myopias limit the glimpse we get of our subject matter. To define one source of blindness and bias as central is engagingly optimistic. Whatever our substantive focus and whatever our methodological persuasion, all we can do I believe is to keep faith with the spirit of natural science, and lurch along, seriously kidding ourselves that our rut has a forward direction. We have not been given the credence and weight that economists lately have acquired, but we can almost match them when it comes to the failure of rigorously calculated predictions. Certainly our systematic theories are every bit as vacuous as theirs: we manage to ignore almost as many critical variables as they do. We do not have the esprit that anthropologists have, but our subject matter at least has not been obliterated by the spread of the world economy. So we have an undiminished opportunity to overlook the relevant facts with our very own eyes. We can’t get graduate students who score as high as those who go into Psychology, and at its best the training the latter get seems more professional and more thorough than what we provide. So we haven’t managed to produce in our students the high level of trained incompetence that psychologists have achieved in theirs, although, God knows, we’re working on it.”

— Erving Goffman in “The Interaction Order” (1983) reproduced in The Goffman Reader (p. xvii)

how youth find privacy in interstitial spaces

The NYTimes ran a piece today called Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK). (Note: the article is very American-centric – in the States, older folks tend to be texting illiterate.) The article begins with an anecdote of a parent shuttling around his daughter and her friend. They are talking and dad butts in and they roll their eyes. And then there is silence. When dad comments to his daughter that she’s being rude for texting on her phone rather than talking to her friend, the daughter replies: “But, Dad, we’re texting each other. I don’t want you to hear what I’m saying.”

First and foremost, the notion of “privacy” is about having a sense of control over how and when information flows to who. Given the structures of their lives, teens have often had very little control over their social context. In school, at home, at church… there are always adults listening in. Forever more, there have been pressures to find interstitial spaces to assert control over communications. Note passing, whispering, putting notes in lockers, arranging simultaneous bathroom visits, pig latin, neighbor to neighbor string communication… all of these have been about trying to find ways to communicate outside of the watchful eyes of adults, an attempt to assert privacy while stuck in a fundamentally public context. The mobile phone is the next in line of a long line of efforts to communicate in the spaces between.

At the same time, the mobile phone changes the rules. Texting allows people to communicate even when they aren’t at arms length or can’t arrange simultaneous interactions. Because texting happens silently, it’s far more effective as a backchannel mechanism than whispering. Codes are not necessarily about hiding from adults as much as efficiency; deleting sent/received messages is far more effective than codes.

Over the years, parenting has become more and more about surveillance. In this mindset, good parents are those who stalk their kids. Parents complain that their children ignore them when they’re in the same space, preferring their friends. When was this not the case? What’s different now is that there are fewer siblings/cousins running around to team up with. There’s less free time to just “hang out.” There’s no openness to go out after school and “be home by dark” (a practice that used to start in early childhood). With activities and scheduling and this and that, I’m always amazed that children don’t demand more time for friend time.

There’s an arms race going on: parental surveillance vs. technology to assert privacy. We aren’t seeing the radical OMG technology ruins everything stage. We’re seeing the next in line of a long progression. And it’s just the beginning. The arms race is heating up. As parents implement keyboard tracking, kids go to texting. How long until parents demand that companies send them transcripts of everything? What will come next? We are in the midst of the privacy wars and it’s not so clean as “where’s my privacy” vs. “kids these days are so public.” The very nature of publicity and privacy are getting disrupted. As kids work to be invisible to people who hold direct power over them (parents, teachers, etc.), they happily expose themselves to audiences of peers. And they expose themselves to corporations. They know that the company can see everything they send through their servers/service, but who cares? Until these companies show clear allegiance with their parents, they’re happy to assume that the companies are on their side and can do them no harm.

Generation gap and technology ruining everything stories will be forever more. These do sell and they are fun to read. Yet, for parents and teachers and other concerned folks wanting to get a clear perspective of what’s going on, it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, the intentions and desires aren’t changing… it’s just the architecture that makes the practices possible that is. The refraction of light is changing because the medium through which it is channeled is changing, but the light itself stays the same and to guide our children, we need to remember to pay attention to the light, not the refraction or the medium that’s causing the refraction.

cultural sustainability

Since Davos, I’ve been thinking about cultural sustainability. This isn’t a term that I heard there, but one that I wish that I had.

These days, when people in business talk about sustainability, they mean environmental sustainability. Traditionally, the environment was an externality that was ignored. More and more, with the conversations of “carbon neutral,” people are starting to think about what it means to environmentally sustainable. At the same time, a company can be environmentally sound and completely destroy local economies and other aspects of culture through their moves.

To me, the idea of “cultural sustainability” is about companies whose actions offset the consequences of their presence (or disappearance). For example, when large companies abandon cities that they’ve been in for years and where the entire city revolves around them, their move has a HUGE culturally destructive force. How do they offset this in a functional way? How does this get considered to be an externality that needs to be factored in? (It used to be through layoff benefits and pensions that kept going no matter what… this is no longer viewed as critical.) Large companies who come into a town and put out of business a variety of different local merchants have another kind of culturally destructive practices. This is why the conversations around Wal-Mart get so heated: capitalism vs. cultural sustainability.

When companies were smaller and local, there were pressures put upon them to be good local citizens. They invested in the towns where they were present and operated as key actors in creating culturally sustainable systems. It was normal for a company to help out with a local school event because education made sense for the company because it meant better employees. As companies get bigger and bigger (and “globalized”), there’s less pressure to be invested in the culture. Even if there was, what culture should they invest in when they’re so big? Mostly, big companies give back to communities for PR purposes.

There are numerous points of pressure placed on companies right now to be environmentally sustainable, but this is not the only kind of sustainability that matters. That said, there are lessons to be learned. For a long time, the conversation tended to devolve into capitalism vs. environmental sustainability. More and more, folks are saying BOTH and finding ways to make that work. How do we do this with cultural sustainability? What pressure points need to be put into place where culture is evaluated as an externality in the models that economists draw up?

enough already!

Last night, I turned off NPR in a state of complete disgust. It wasn’t just the ongoing hellish pledge drive that drives me away from NPR for months at a time. (I _want_ to give to NPR, but the pledge drives tend to make me turn my back on NPR instead.) No, it was the framing of the election results. It was the way the story has been and continues to be framed. And it wasn’t just NPR, but Fox News, CNN, and NYTimes have all made me blazingly angry this week. And it wasn’t just about winners or losers, but about how the story is framed dramatically to get people to tune in.

I was really excited about this election. A variety of factors in my life motivated me to get really engaged, to research candidates, to persuade other people into engaging. I started reading and watching MSM again rather than waiting for it to be filtered through Stewart/Colbert or the blogosphere. But in doing so, I watched an ugly pattern emerge. The moment that one candidate was seen as pulling ahead, MSM started dredging up crap on them… or creating stories from nothing. My favorite story was the one the NYTimes wrote on how they couldn’t find anyone to prove for certain that Obama did drugs. They published this the night before Virginia/Maryland/DC. The last two weeks, the NYTimes has done some of the worst reporting possible. The whole McCain story made me really sympathize with him personally (even though, politically, he scares the shit out of me). And then this week, they started reporting on how people are saying Clinton should step down if Obama wins in Texas and Ohio. Both of these articles seemed set up to do one thing: keep the election cycle going by amplifying the competition by any means necessary, but primarily by making the front-runner look dreadful.

I’m disgusted. In the back of my mind, I’ve always known that MSM is all about creating drama to sell more papers. As an infrastructure, MSM are not really partisan (although individuals are)… it’s that the infrastructure of MSM feeds off of people being engaged. And there’s nothing more emotionally engaging (and exhausting) than conflict and fear mongering. The MSM doesn’t create an accurate picture of what’s going on because the Corporation behind the MSM doesn’t feel a responsibility to, even if individual reporters are well-intentioned. Journalists, by and large, are extremely well-intentioned but they’re caught up in a system. They are pressured to write stories that create conflict and while senior folks can step back and take a higher stance, they can’t become senior if they don’t meet the needs of the Corporation for a while. Uphold hegemony and then maybe you get some wiggle room… but by then, you are the institution. Besides, even if you want to speak truth to power, good luck – your article is not likely to sell well or be widely read.

Many journalists are idealists. But they aren’t independent and what’s “newsworthy” is inevitably what’s dramatic. Whatever stance they take on those dramatic incidents, their small part of the pie feeds into a much larger structure whose incentives are to keep the wheels turning.

I’ve been avoiding reporters a lot lately. They always tell me that I should talk to them “to tell the other side.” But we both know that’s not what really happens. They use me to tell the story that they need to tell but they have to at least give nods to “the other side” for appearances. There’s no story in reality. Reality is boring. It’s not made for 24/7 news. Fear sells. Conflict sells. Making someone else’s life miserable sells. Reality doesn’t. The incentives are all screwed up and it’s just downright disgusting.

People always ask me what it will take to get teens to listen to news. Why should they? What do they gain by being sent on an information roller-coaster for the news industry to turn a buck? Does consuming news really make you more informed or ready to engage? Have you watched MSM on TV lately?

The more I try to engage, the more my passion and desire to make change is destroyed. Years ago, after a different egregious move by the NYTimes, I cancelled my subscription. I can’t cancel it again, but I would if I could. More than anything, what I’m realizing is that I need to check out of the news again. It doesn’t make me more well-informed; it simply makes me more angry and depressed. It’s good timing… one less thing I can do while procrastinating writing.

As for the election, I’ve become pretty apathetic once again. At this point, I don’t care. No matter what, I don’t think that it will be fair or representative or in the best interests of the people. Everyone likes to complain about how the candidates don’t give real opinions, but we all know the reason why they don’t: the media would destroy them. Paying attention to their efforts to dance cautiously with the media gets me nowhere. There’s no way to know the candidates, no way to actually get a sense of how they will navigate the nasty waters of the media, industry lobbyists, political pressures, and really complicated decisions. It’s all guess work so all we do is vote on charisma and guesswork about who will handle which parts of the puzzle best. I still believe in Obama, but I’ve lost faith in the system. All I know is that come November, I will vote against the Republican party. McCain is only one small fraction of that party and actually the least of my concerns. I want that whole corrupting, demeaning, destructive party out of control now. I wish I could say that I would be voting for the Democrats, but I’m not sure that’s true. I just don’t think that they’ll screw it up as badly. And the fact that at the end of the day I resort to that logic is depressing.

I wish I could find the energy to care, but I’ve completely lost it once again. I really had hope. I was so excited to see so many people energized and believing that they could make change by engaging. I was really excited to see conversations occur that were not previously occurring. But things have gone stale and at the end of the day, I realize that the media and other powerful people are once again controlling the election. And it’s hard to sustain hope when that’s what plays out.

In the meantime, I wonder if it’s possible to change the incentive structure around MSM? (And no, I don’t think that bloggers are the answer.)

danah boyd | apophenia

making connections where none previously existed