Danah boyd

Danah boyd (stylized in lowercase, born November 24, 1977, as Danah Michele Mattas) is a technology and social media scholar.

She is a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder of Data & Society Research Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University.

Boyd grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Altoona, Pennsylvania.

According to her website, she was born Danah Michele Mattas.

After her parents' divorce, in 1982, she moved to York, Pennsylvania, with her mother and her brother.

Her mother married again during danah's third grade and the family moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

She attended Manheim Township High School from 1992 to 1996.

She used online discussions forums to escape from high school.

She called Lancaster a "religious and conservative" city.

Having had online discussions on the topic, she began to identify as queer.

A few years later, her brother taught her how to use IRC and Usenet.

Even though she thought computers were "lame" at the time, the possibilities for connecting with others intrigued her.

She became an avid participant on Usenet and IRC in her junior year in high school, spending a lot of time browsing, creating content, and conversing with strangers.

Though active in many extra-curricular activities and excelling academically, boyd had a difficult time socially in high school.

She assigns "her survival to her mother, the Internet, and a classmate whose misogynistic comments inspired her to excel."

Once she reached college, she chose to take her maternal grandfather's name, Boyd, as her own last name.

She decided to spell her name in lowercase so as "to reflect my mother's original balancing and to satisfy my own political irritation at the importance of capitalization."

Her initial ambition was to become an astronaut but after an injury, she became more interested in the Internet.

Boyd initially studied computer science at Brown University, where she worked with Andries van Dam and wrote an undergraduate thesis about how visual depth cues in a virtual 3D environment affect depth perception.

She pursued her master's degree in social media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab's Sociable Media Group.

She worked for the New York-based activist organization V-Day, first as a volunteer (starting in 2004) and then as paid staff (2007–2009).

She eventually moved to San Francisco, where she met the individuals involved in creating the new Friendster service.

She documented what she was observing via her blog, and this grew into a career.

During the 2006–07 academic year, boyd was a fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California.

She was a long-time fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where she co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, and then served on the Youth and Media Policy Working Group.

While in graduate school, she was involved with a three-year ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation and led by Mimi Ito; the project examined youths' use of technologies through interviews, focus groups, observations, and document analysis.

Her publications included an article in the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume called "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life."

The article focuses on social networks' implications for youth identity.

The project culminated with a co-authored book "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media."

In 2007, she published research on youth using Facebook and MySpace in Race After the Internet.

She demonstrated that most young users of Facebook were white and middle-to-upper class, while MySpace users tended to be lower-class black teenagers.

She argued that people tend to connect with like-minded individuals, also known as homophily, which perpetuates these enduring social hierarchies.

Boyd focused on the concept of white flight by connecting the analogy to how white, privileged teens were forced to leave MySpace by their parents.

Fueled by fear that MySpace was a "digital ghetto", parents of these teens were more welcoming of Facebook's network effects.

Over time, these differences were exacerbated and led to the social reputation of these social media platforms.

Her work has been translated and relayed to major media.

In addition to blogging on her own site, she addresses issues of youth and technology use on the DMLcentral blog.

Boyd has written academic papers and op-ed pieces on online culture.

In 2008, boyd earned a Ph.D. at the UC Berkeley School of Information, advised by Peter Lyman (1940–2007) and Mizuko Ito.

Her dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, focused on the use of large social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace by U.S. teenagers, and was blogged on Boing Boing.