New Literacies Scholar danah boyd

danah boyd by Kendall Whitehouse

In the decade since completing her PhD at UC Berkeley’s iSchool, danah boyd has devoted her career to examining “the intersection between technology and society.” (boyd).

While boyd (who does not capitalize her name) has broadened her scope in recent years, her early career was dominated by her study of teens and social media and how they live online. She spent a great deal of time between 2005 and 2012 hanging out with teens in a diverse range of communities and schools across the US. The result of that ethnographic research was a 2014 book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. That book and an author appearance at the Harvard Bookstore captivated me when it came out. She makes a case for the rise of social media teen culture being tied to teens having fewer opportunities for face-to-face peer interactions due to more structured schedules and parental fears of children moving around independently. It’s Complicated examines the rise of specific online cultures that teens have created online with their own sets of rules and issues of identity and privacy. Rather than being alarmist, as most books about teens on the Internet were and are, the book reported on specific ways that boyd observed teens building their online worlds and how they have created complex social environments and contexts. She is particularly sensitive to how kids navigate issues of race and class and inclusivity.

Sociocultural theories “see literacy, first and foremost, as a social practice always embedded within structures of power.” (Hammerberg, 2004, p. 649) Teens as individuals are quite powerless, but as a group they can start cultural movements or appeal to marketing by large companies. Teens “in the wild” online exhibit multiple identities in different spaces, create their own social cues and rules, and develop their own socio-cultural contexts. In her Harvard Bookstore appearance, boyd discusses how race and class influence teens’ choices about social media services and how the norms differ in how they interact.

More recently, boyd has “turned to focus on understanding how contemporary social inequities relate to technology and society more generally,” through the research institute Data & Society, which she founded in 2013. She is unafraid to poke at some of the most accepted current thinking in relation to media literacy. In a 2018 SXSW EDU keynote address, which was largely based on the text of her blog post, You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You?, boyd says, “I want to examine the instability of our current media ecosystem to then return to the question of: what kind of media literacy should we be working towards?” She suggests that use of language in the United States is an accepted cultural marker and differentiator: “People became elite by mastering the language marked as elite. Academics, journalists, corporate executives, traditional politicians: they all master the art of communication.” (boyd, 2018a) To boyd, social class and other determinants do not bestow power as much as power resides in the use of language. This is not dissimilar to the theories proposed by the Australian genre theorists, who associate “social power with mastery of genres” and believe that those “powerful genres and their social purposes can … be identified and taught explicitly.” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 19)

Despite holding progressive views herself, boyd cautions that our belief in media literacy and its processes risk leaving behind those with more conservative views. “There’s widespread sentiment that we can fact check and moderate our way out of this conundrum. This will fail. Don’t forget that for many people in this country, both education and the media are seen as the enemy — two institutions who are trying to have power over how people think. Two institutions that are trying to assert authority over epistemology.” (boyd, 2018a) While I am not quite persuaded by all of her arguments, I appreciate that she poses questions others may not about the efficacy of digital literacy and its instruction in our schools. She has at least a few practical suggestions, such as separating out the context from the content in order to create a “cognitive disconnect” for the purposes of analysis -- the opposite of what is often suggested when we look first at the context.

Boyd is currently a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Visiting Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the founder of Data & Society, a research institute. She recently received a 2019 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She has been published in journals like the SSRN and many other academic journals, but as a leader in new media and new literacies, she blogs regularly at apophenia and her Twitter feed @zephoria to disseminate information on her current research and writings. While boyd has a powerful academic CV, she has plenty of what might be termed “street cred” as well, with a deeper understanding of how our students inhabit the digital world than many researchers.

References

boyd, d. (2014, February 26). danah boyd: It’s complicated - The social lives of networked teens. Retrieved October 9, 2019, from YouTube website: https://youtu.be/2yCHI8WCbDY

boyd, d. (2018a, March 7). What hath we wrought? Retrieved October 8, 2019, from YouTube website: https://youtu.be/0I7FVyQCjNg
SXSW EDU Keynote address

boyd, d. (2018b, March 9). You think you want media literacy… do you? Retrieved October 8, 2019, from Medium website: https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2
The text on this page was the basis for danah boyd’s March 2018 SXSW Edu keynote address.

boyd, d. (n.d.). danah boyd. Retrieved October 8, 2019, from danah.org website: https://www.danah.org.

boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hammerberg, D. (2004). Comprehension instruction for socioculturally diverse classrooms: A review of what we know. The reading teacher, 57(7), 648–658. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20205412.Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2008). From ‘reading’ to ‘new’ literacies. In New literacies: Everyday practices and classroom learning. Berkshire, England: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education.