[iDC] How does social media educate?
danah boyd
zephoria at zephoria.org
Thu Feb 8 22:43:08 EST 2007
There are a lot of good reasons to problematize the terms "social
media" and "social software", but i do think that there's a shift
that's happened that people aren't good at labeling. I don't think
that the shift is about becoming social - there's no doubt that
Usenet, MUDs/MOOs, email, IM, etc. enabled sociality. What i think
changed has more to do with social organization in networked public
life.
Early tools for public socialization (like Usenet) were organized by
interest. Tools like email were either 1-1/1-small n or were mailing
lists organized by interests. Sure, there were intranet CSCW tools in
enterprises, but in terms of consumer culture, it was primarily
interest. Blogs were the first tool that sort of shifted this.
People were mostly talking to people they knew in the witness of
strangers. Why those strangers were interested in them might have to
do with topics or perhaps fandom. Social network sites (like
MySpace) upped the ante. Now, the primary tools for public
socialization are organized around one's "friends." People create
egocentric networks, articulating others that they believe should be
in their audience. They use this imagined audience to provide
context so that they can behave in the way they think is appropriate
for that environment. There's a general ethos that brethren are
welcome, but if you're a hater, just move on. (Note: this plays
nicely into contemporary Reality TV, you-as-person-of-the-year ego
mania.) This shift has engaged a lot more people. For example, most
of teens that i hang out with wouldn't know where to begin in an
interest-based site, but they know how to hang out with their friends
and talk shit. Now they do that on MySpace.
There are some interesting complications to this framing because most
systems designers are really interested in supporting networking
(people meeting people). They push friend-of-friend, collective
action, etc. Sites like Digg or Del.icio.us end up being an odd
combination of interests and networks. Of course, the funny thing
about those sites is that most people who participate right now come
from the same ilk so cultural maintenance isn't so hard. Things get
tricky as sites scale. For example, Craigslist attracted all sorts
of disasters when the primary users were not friends of friends of
friends of Craig.
There's still a lot that goes on in private that is sociable, but i
get the sense that folks like Trebor are interested in ethics of
networked publics primarily. And for good reason. The fundamental
architecture of social life changes in networked publics. I
typically harp on and on about four key properties: persistence,
searchability, replicability, invisible audiences. To save your
eyes, i won't go into detail about this (but ping me if you want a
preprint). But let's for a moment just take invisible audiences. In
mediated public society, we have to speak to invisible audiences. I
don't know who all is on this mailing list. I make assumptions about
the context based on previous conversations and then i write this
braindump and send it off to you. What if you don't get the
references that i'm making? What if you're running a faculty search
and will forever dismiss me for using curse words in public? What if
my post could be taken out of context to somehow make me look
asinine? And i'm being bloody cautious in this post! Why? Because
i think of it as a professional context where i should try to act
like a lady. Sorta. But what about contexts where i'm hanging out
with my friends joking around? What about all of those Flickr photos
of me enjoying SXSW, alcohol in hand? Those are probably more likely
to get me into trouble with faculty search committees than this
post. Yet, the relevant audience doesn't include them. And that's
where things get tricky.
In unmediated spaces, there are walls that allow us to separately
contextualize different situations without dealing with the
ramifications of those collisions. Online, no such walls. This is a
new architecture. So, people have two choices: go into hyper
paranoid mode and constantly try to think about what it means to be
seen by all people across all time OR live your life in the context
you think it should be and hope that you can convince others of this
later. (This can be called the ostrich solution.) The problem is
that living your life in a pristine manner imagining yourself on the
path to presidency (or at least a good behavior patch) is no fun.
It's especially no fun for teenagers who are trapped at home and want
to hang out with their peers and their only hang out place is online.
There are two populations that complicate the lives of teens: those
who hold power over them (parents, teachers, future employers) and
those who want to prey on them (primarily marketers). How do you
teach people how to behave with such mixed audiences? Historically,
situations like that have social scripts. Think: wedding. We've
made many a good movie about the awkwardness of lovers coming home to
dinner and whatnot. Why? Because it's weird and uncomfortable and
there's no good solution.
Frankly, i think it's going to get far worse before it gets better
because i think we're dealing with a fundamental shift in the
organizing structures of social life. Most of the making sense
taking place right now is happening among teenagers. And their
confusion is going to leak to other generations. I can't wait until
teens' surreptitious videos of their professional parents fighting
start appearing on YouTube...
So i guess what i'm saying is that i'm all down for education but
what are we educating towards? Old architectures and old social
norms or collectively building a new set of social norms that takes
into consideration new architectures? For the most part, we seem to
be doing the former and it's not working out so well.
danah
(PS: i've been lurking for a while... sorry i haven't popped up and
said a proper hello. I'm danah and this conversation is relevant to
my dissertation; i'm a phd student at Berkeley and a fellow at USC
Annenberg Center.)
- - - - - - - - - - d a n a h ( d o t ) o r g - - - - - - - - - -
"taken out of context i must seem so strange"
musings :: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts
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