[CITASA] Microsoft Makes Key Hire in Researcher danah boyd (fwd)

[Barry Wellman]

This is from a newsreader, but from the hint danah gave me last week, I
assume it is true. (see below my sig).

PS: danah needs help in Wikipedia in getting them to accept her lower case
name usage. Go to the Danah Boyd article and see the Talk discussion.

 Barry Wellman
 _______________________________________________________________________

  S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC              NetLab Director
  Department of Sociology                        University of Toronto
  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388                  Toronto Canada M5S 2J4
  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman            fax:+1-416-978-3963

  Updating history:     http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php

 _______________________________________________________________________

via Google Reader: Microsoft Makes Key Hire in
Researcher Danah Boyd via ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick on
9/22/08
Microsoft Research has hired social network researcher danah boyd,
probably the most high profile academic in the world focused on the
emerging web and its social consequences.

Who is danah boyd? (She spells her own name with lower case letters.)
You may have seen her when she hit the international spotlight for
writing about the shift from MySpace to Facebook. She wrote that her
research leads her to conclude that "The goodie two shoes, jocks,
athletes, or other 'good' kids are now going to Facebook. ...MySpace is
still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant
teens, 'burnouts,' 'alternative kids,' 'art fags,' punks, emos, goths,
gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant
high school popularity paradigm."

That paper was very controversial and widely misunderstood. It also
argued what many people may were thinking quietly, though often not
within a context sympathetic with underprivileged youth.

None the less, that was only one of boyd's many writings on the subject
of youth and social networking. Youth and social networking is a nexus
point for one of the most significant cultural changes of our era and
as the leading expert on the topic, boyd's work warrants the attention
it gets. If Microsoft is going to be relevant to the next generation of
computer users, who better to pay attention to than the leading expert
on how the next generation is using social networks?

Boyd's new position will be at Microsoft Research's newest facility, in
Boston, which was just opened this summer. You can read boyd's
discussion of her new position in a blog post she wrote last night.
What Boyd Writes About
In addition to topics like socio-economic class and social networks,
boyd also writes, for example, about early social networks like
Friendster acting as "tools for scaling up social networks rooted in
proximate social relations and--equally significantly--for representing
this dynamic to the community in new ways."

Her recent work in general might best be described with these lines
from Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked
Publics in Teenage Social Life:
While particular systems may come and go, how youth engage through
social network sites today provides long-lasting insights into identity
formation, status negotiation, and peer-to-peer sociality...I argue
that social network sites are a type of networked public with four
properties that are not typically present in face-to-face public life:
persistence, searchability, exact copyability, and invisible audiences.
These properties fundamentally alter social dynamics, complicating the
ways in which people interact. I conclude by reflecting on the social
developments that have prompted youth to seek out networked publics,
and considering the changing role that publics have in young people's
lives. Boyd's Fascinating Gigs
Boyd is currently a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at
the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard
University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She's
also on the Board of Advisors of LiveJournal, along with Lawrence
Lessig and Esther Dyson.

Previously boyd worked as a researcher at Yahoo! and did a year long
internship at Google studying the ethnography of blogging at Blogger.

Now she'll join Microsoft Research New England in January. She says
she'll be directing her own research, publishing frequently and doing
pure, interdisciplinary science instead of focusing directly on the
Microsoft bottom line. We hope that Microsoft can prioritize long term
analysis and support more inspiring work by this trailblazing
researcher.

Cartoon of boyd by Marc Scheff


-------------- next part --------------
  Sent to you by Marcos via Google Reader: Microsoft Makes Key Hire in
Researcher Danah Boyd via ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick on
9/22/08
Microsoft Research has hired social network researcher danah boyd,
probably the most high profile academic in the world focused on the
emerging web and its social consequences.

Who is danah boyd? (She spells her own name with lower case letters.)
You may have seen her when she hit the international spotlight for
writing about the shift from MySpace to Facebook. She wrote that her
research leads her to conclude that "The goodie two shoes, jocks,
athletes, or other 'good' kids are now going to Facebook. ...MySpace is
still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant
teens, 'burnouts,' 'alternative kids,' 'art fags,' punks, emos, goths,
gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant
high school popularity paradigm."

That paper was very controversial and widely misunderstood. It also
argued what many people may were thinking quietly, though often not
within a context sympathetic with underprivileged youth.

None the less, that was only one of boyd's many writings on the subject
of youth and social networking. Youth and social networking is a nexus
point for one of the most significant cultural changes of our era and
as the leading expert on the topic, boyd's work warrants the attention
it gets. If Microsoft is going to be relevant to the next generation of
computer users, who better to pay attention to than the leading expert
on how the next generation is using social networks?

Boyd's new position will be at Microsoft Research's newest facility, in
Boston, which was just opened this summer. You can read boyd's
discussion of her new position in a blog post she wrote last night.
What Boyd Writes About
In addition to topics like socio-economic class and social networks,
boyd also writes, for example, about early social networks like
Friendster acting as "tools for scaling up social networks rooted in
proximate social relations and--equally significantly--for representing
this dynamic to the community in new ways."

Her recent work in general might best be described with these lines
from Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked
Publics in Teenage Social Life:
While particular systems may come and go, how youth engage through
social network sites today provides long-lasting insights into identity
formation, status negotiation, and peer-to-peer sociality...I argue
that social network sites are a type of networked public with four
properties that are not typically present in face-to-face public life:
persistence, searchability, exact copyability, and invisible audiences.
These properties fundamentally alter social dynamics, complicating the
ways in which people interact. I conclude by reflecting on the social
developments that have prompted youth to seek out networked publics,
and considering the changing role that publics have in young people's
lives. Boyd's Fascinating Gigs
Boyd is currently a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at
the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard
University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She's
also on the Board of Advisors of LiveJournal, along with Lawrence
Lessig and Esther Dyson.

Previously boyd worked as a researcher at Yahoo! and did a year long
internship at Google studying the ethnography of blogging at Blogger.

Now she'll join Microsoft Research New England in January. She says
she'll be directing her own research, publishing frequently and doing
pure, interdisciplinary science instead of focusing directly on the
Microsoft bottom line. We hope that Microsoft can prioritize long term
analysis and support more inspiring work by this trailblazing
researcher.

Cartoon of boyd by Marc Scheff
Discuss


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