danah boy's talk on MySpace

I recently attended the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, held here in Boulder. While much of the focus was on fairly esoteric analyses of users' activities online and metrics for judging the influence and sentiment of blogs and bloggers, (you can view the papers on the conference Web site at www.icwsm.org/program.html and click on each presenter's name), danah boyd (yes, her name is written in all lower case) presented a provocative overview of how teens use social media, and MySpace in particular.

I wrote up an info-pro-slanted article for the April issue of Information Advisor; following are my more random notes. If you have a chance to hear danah, do. She's a lively, accessible and knowledgable speaker.

According to a January 2007 Pew Internet & American Life Project report, Social Networking Websites and Teens, (55% of Americans aged 12 to 19 who are online use social networking sites, and 70% of girls from 15 to 17 years old have created online profiles in these sites.

It is important to remember that teens use email only to communicate with adults; they use MySpace and other social networks to communicate with their friends. In fact, 90% of online teens say they use social network sites to stay in touch with friends they see regularly.

The feature of "top friends" creates a big social drama nightmare. You say"this is my best friend" by placing that person's link in the top left corner of your friends list. That's your real, bestest best friend, or your SO. There are unspoken rules on who gets on the upper left corner.

As a kid, you used your birthday party guest list as leverage on the playground. "I won't invite you to my party if you're not nice to me." Then, as you grew up and got your own phone, it was all about someone being on your speed dial, Today, it's being in someone's myspace top 8. It's the dangling carrot for gaining superficial acceptance. Taking someone off your Top 8 is your new passive aggressive power play when someone pisses you off.

The word "friend" has several meanings within social networks. On MySpace, for example, someone may have 9,000 "friends" – people they are linked to – and these people are essentially the person's audience. Since they cannot know exactly who is reading their MySpace page, they use their "friends" as the audience to play to. And a "friend" in a social site isn't necessarily a real-life friend. You will often hear comments such as "we're MySpace friends but we're not friends." Teens don't want to define their relationships, and they value the fuzziness that social network sites permit. A "friend" is any member of their broader public – neighbors, a musical band, the cute girl at school, and so on. The only real marker to a significant friendship is to be listed at the top of one's gallery of "friends"; there are hints about real-life friendship by who comments on whose profile.

Interestingly, boyd found that teens very seldom search the web; their primary use of search engines is to identify a specific site. As a result, they are usually unaware of the porn that their parents fear is behind every mouse click. Teens are primarily concerned about their friends; they spend much of their time online checking messages and comments on MySpace profiles, going through their top friends' profiles and deciding whose to comment on, and generally hanging out with their self-contained world of friends.

This brings up an interesting question of what constitutes a "public" presence. Teens want their virtual space to be public to all their friends but not to their parents. As one 17-year-old told boyd, "my mom always uses the excuse about the internet being 'public' when she defends herself for monitoring me. It's not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. I do online journals so I can communicate with my friends, not so my mother can catch up on the latest gossip of my life."

Teens expect to see ads everywhere online. If they see ads, that simply signifies that the web site won't be charging anything. They just want the ads to be relevant.  Teens are huge consumers. The only places they can hang out IRL are consumer spaces, such as the mall. They window-shop. They know what the cool phone is – this is dictated entirely by class. Gadgets last about 3 months for teens, and then they get broken.

boyd also mentioned Lawrence Lessig's laws of cyberspace: behavior in cyberspace is regulated by norms, law, architecture and market. (See his essay, written back in 1998 -- The Laws of Cyberspace.)

What I found most thought-provoking about boyd's talk was realizing that in 5 or 10 years, the workplace is going to be filled with people whose expectations regarding information discovery are completely different than those of us old codgers. They've been immersed in digital information since they could type. How will the role and function of info pro change? [Watch this space for more... I'm mulling it over and will probably be developing some talks on this.]

Comments

[ERIKA]

i realy want to talk with you.i want to have you as a friend