"Sometimes I feel like my job is Captain Obvious," says danah boyd, sitting cross-legged and shoeless in a neon-green chair at Microsoft Research's office overlooking a frozen Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. Her snow boots kicked off, the petite 33-year-old expert on the Internet and youth is wearing a loose tan sweater, dangly silver jewelry and a trademark fuzzy hat that resembles the ears of a white Pomeranian puppy.
That lower-case spelling of her name? Not a typo. She had it legally changed after graduating with a computer science degree from Brown in 2000, because of "political irritation at the importance of capitalization."
Roll your eyes and LOL, but boyd is a highly sought-after ethnographer--Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is an instant message buddy--who has helped tech companies shape online products and privacy policies aimed at youth. Her résumé includes stints at Friendster, Google, Yahoo and Intel. Each year she spends a few months "in the field," playing Margaret Mead to America's youth by studying how they use technology. In 2009 boyd was the first to reveal how educated whites and Asians were fleeing the social media site MySpace in favor of Facebook.
She doesn't buy the conventional view that the Internet is a dramatic cultural game-changer; we're simply finding digital ways to replicate offline behavior. "The issues we have with technology are rarely about the technologies themselves," she says. At the moment she's finishing a book for publication in 2012 that debunks myths about teens and social media. (Myth number five: Kids don't care about privacy.) Mark Zuckerberg might want to pick up a copy. "He's whip-smart, but we fundamentally disagree on certain philosophical ideas about the world," says boyd--namely, privacy. (Zuckerberg declined to comment.)
"Her name is always brought up, almost reverentially, in tech circles," says Sarahjane Sacchetti, communications head at question-and-answer site Formspring. "Because of her teen focus groups, she understands how young people use the Internet and talks about it in a thoughtful, reasonable way."
Boyd, who has a doctorate in information studies from Berkeley, gained attention early in her career when she took on Sherry Turkle, the noted MIT psychologist and Internet social guru. Turkle viewed the Internet as a great equalizer, where users could reconstruct their gender and identity to suit their fancy. Boyd responded that race and class come in digital versions, too.
Turkle turned dystopian with her new book, Alone Together, which decries machines' disrupting human relationships. Boyd takes issue again. "Technology simply mirrors and magnifies all sorts of things we see in everyday life--and that's good, bad and ugly," she says, pointing to the societal obsession with cyberbullying. "Bullying's not worse today. Technology just makes it more visible, leaving evidence."
That's not to say that everything is obvious with youth online. When teenagers were being cyberbullied anonymously on Formspring--"Don't you hate Kristen?" or "Why are you such a slut?"--boyd took a look. She determined from Formspring sign-in data that some of the vicious questions were written by the teen under attack. Boyd speculated that it was a cry for attention and a way to get friends to rally to her defense. She called the practice "digital self-harm."
Boyd's job at Microsoft Research is similar to an academic's. She gets bonuses based on the visibility of her writings or through winning awards. She can pursue what she likes, and for one month every year she takes an e-mail sabbatical, during which she not only ignores all e-mail but also deletes it.
If you want to see boyd angry, mention Zuckerberg's statement that "privacy is no longer a social norm." The two have been on each other's instant message chat lists since 2004, when Zuckerberg took her out for coffee for her insights from studying Friendster's users. People go to great lengths to protect their privacy, she says, pointing to a teen she met who, instead of logging out of Facebook after a session, deactivates her account.
Boyd believes online privacy needs attention from Congress--"Facebook is a social utility; utilities get regulated"--but that it requires subtlety. A law to protect privacy of children under 13, for example, has failed because kids just lie about their ages.
"People are responding to structural conditions on the Internet in very reasonable, rational ways," says boyd. "My job is to uncover it and make sense of it in a way that makes you go, ‘Duh.'"
