Expert on online social network sites.
Interdisciplinary research related to technology, communication, identity and social behavior.

Highlights

danah boyd is an internationally recognized authority on the ways people use networked social media as a context for social interaction—who inhabits the world of online social network sites, what they do there, and why. She has been called the "high priestess" of online social network sites by the Financial Times.

danah researches how social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is integrated into people's daily practices. Much of her work focuses on American youth practices, popular social network sites, and sociality. She was one of the researchers in a major 3-year study of digital youth funded by the MacArthur Foundation, resulting in the publication of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media.

She also studies blogging, tagging and social media more broadly.

danah boyd is a Social Scientist at Microsoft Research, a Research Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an Associate Fellow at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society.

She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google and Yahoo!

She has advised and consulted for dozens of other companies.

She is a Director on the board of the New Media Consortium, a non-profit consortium of learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. She is on the program committees of major academic and industry conferences, including the Digital Media & Learning Conference and SXSW-Interactive.

At the Berkman Center, danah co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, formed by the U.S. Attorney's General and MySpace and organized by the Berkman Center to identify potential technical solutions for keeping children safe online. She is currently co-directing the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

danah maintains a blog on social media called Apophenia, a valuable resource for anyone interested in social media.

She also regularly writes academic publications and mainstream essays, published in a range of venues. danah was named by Fast Company to their list of the Most Influential Women in Technology. She was also named the smartest academic in tech by Fortune Magazine. She won CITASA's Public Sociology Award.

danah has given more than 100 invited talks.

Sociable Media

The technologies that enable sociable media are changing how we interact, get information and do business. danah boyd studies how society and identity work in this new networked world:

• How we perceive other people online.
• What a virtual crowd looks like.
• How social conventions develop in the networked world.

She’s developed experimental interfaces and installations that allow people to better control their profiles in these environments.

She also spent five years creating and managing a large-scale online community for V-Day, a non- profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide.

Networked social media:

Definition: mediated environments where people can use their computer or mobile phone to connect with friends, share information, and generate content. Example tools include:

• Social network sites — e.g., Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn
• Media sharing platforms - e.g., YouTube, Flickr
• Blogging and online journaling - e.g., Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter
• Tagging and social bookmarking - e.g., Delicious Practices involved in networked social media include: tagging, user generated content, copy/paste code creation, and remix.

Credentials

• Social scientist at Microsoft Research
• Research Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• Associate Fellow at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society
• Funded by the MacArthur Foundation
• Formerly a researcher for: Yahoo!, Google, Tribe.net, Intel.
• Intel Fellow, 2000-2002
• One of the Most Influential Women in Technology, Fast Company
• Smartest Academic in Tech, Fortune Magazine
• CITASA Public Sociology Award
• MIT Presidential Fellow
• Member, Sociable Media Group, Masters in Sociable Media, MIT MediaLab
• Bachelors in Computer Science, Brown University; Masters degree in sociable media, MIT Media Lab
• PhD, School of Information, University of California-Berkeley
• Former Advisory Board for LiveJournal, Blyk, Technorati, Youth Media Exchange, O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, SXSW-Interactive, and Blogher
• Co-director of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force and the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative
• Member of the Ad Council's Internet Safety Coalition
• Commissioner on the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy Profiled in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, and Financial Times

Academic creds

Her dissertation focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics like MySpace, YouTube, etc. This work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning.

She earned her masters degree at MIT studying how internet users represent themselves to each other. She was part of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT MediaLab.

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