Putting Social Media in Context

Via Daniel Tunkelang’s outstanding blog The Noisy Channel:

Just a heads up that Danah Boyd has published her PhD dissertation entitled “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics“. Danah is a rock star in the social networking research community; you might have noticed that I cite her Master’s Thesis from time to time. I’m looking forward to reading her latest work, and to welcoming her to the Boston area, where she’ll be joining Microsoft Research New England.

Though it does read like a dissertation, it’s worthwhile for anyone interested in the implications of social media. A sample:

Just as many of the properties of networked media extend those of broadcast media, many of the dynamics that play out in networked publics are an amplification of those [Joshua] Meyrowitz astutely recognized resulting from broadcast media: 

• Invisible audiences: not all audiences are visible when a person is contributing online, nor are they necessarily co-present. 

• Collapsed contexts: the lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts. 

• The blurring of public and private: without control over context, public and private become meaningless binaries, are scaled in new ways, and are difficult to maintain as distinct. 

In unmediated spaces, it is common to have a sense for who is present and can witness a particular performance. Through persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability, networked publics introduce the possibility of audiences that are, for all intents and purposes, invisible. It may not be possible to see who is actually present at that moment, because either they are lurking and not showing themselves or because the technology does not make their presence visible. Furthermore, because audiences often perceive performances asynchronously, the audience may not be present at the time of the performance. When performing in networked publics, people are forced to contend with invisible audiences and engage in acts of impression management even when they have no idea how their performances are being perceived.

Great work Danah, and thanks Daniel.