Boyd discusses social media, online privacy and Internet ethics

Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, spoke on conceptions of online privacy, intergenerational interactions and the sometimes surprising interpretation of Internet content in a lecture on Monday night at Dodds Auditorium.

The lecture was titled “Privacy, Ethics and Social Media: Understanding What You Think You See,” and was part of the Wilson School’s 2012-13 “Technology and Public Policy” thematic lecture series.

Boyd, who holds appointments at New York University and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, works to understand the way young people use the Internet in social relationships, with a particular focus on social media.

“I’m an ethnographer — I spend most of my time trying to understand everyday practices and how to map what is going on in our lives” Boyd explained.

A large part of Boyd’s lecture focused on competing conceptions of technological privacy in what she characterized as “a culture of public by default, private by effort.” She said that young people often conceive of privacy as “the control of a social situation.” Referring to her interactions with students who had said they were shocked by their parents’ and teachers’ entry into their “online social space,” Boyd explained that young people abide by different social norms on online social spaces such as Facebook.

However, these social spaces are shared not just by children and adults, but also by different social groups, which can be especially frustrating to individuals who navigate different groups. Boyd cited the example of a young man named Hunter, with whom she had worked in Washington, D.C. Boyd said Hunter, who was the first member of his family to become a U.S. citizen, has been very successful academically while his sister and cousins were less focused on academics.

Boyd said that Hunter hates it when people he is not addressing comment on his Facebook statuses. She explained that he thinks of privacy not as controling content, but as the separation of the two worlds — those of school and those of home — in which he lives.

Boyd explored the way that various users attain their ideals of privacy. One of the most interesting is the way that youth and political dissidents alike often use a type of social steganography, or hiding messages in plain sight, to deal with power and authority.

“Rather than restricting access to content, the focus shifted to restricting access to meaning,” Boyd said. She noted that this is a potential pitfall not just for other users, but also for companies that focus on big data and algorithms to target consumers.

She recalled an experience on a panel in which she sat beside a representative from Coca-Cola who was explaining the company’s explosive presence on social networks. The representative highlighted the number of times Coke was mentioned in comments and posts, far more than other brands. Boyd said she started laughing on the panel, and when the moderator turned to her, Boyd responded that all those hits “were not necessarily about that type of coke.”

“We are living in a world of data,” Boyd said, “but how do we make sense of what we see, and then how do we deal with that data?”

Boyd emphasized the importance of intergenerational dialogue in homes, with families continuing conversations in person and parents not relying on the Internet to know what is going on in children’s lives. She also debunked the common myth that bullying is on the rise because of the Internet.

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“Bullying is worse face to face, happens more frequently and has greater consequences,” Boyd explained. “If your child came home with a black eye, you know something happened. If he comes home grouchy, you don’t necessarily know what’s happening.”