Schmaltz on wry

Danah Boyd’s talk at RMIT - Privacy in Networked Publics

My notes from danah boyd’s talk at RMIT University in Melbourne, 09/02/2012 - “Privacy in Networked Publics”

Now, these are my personal notes. Note-taking habits like FB meaning Facebook are pretty easy to decode, but there may be other things you have questions about - in which case, please ask me.

Three asterisks mean that point is particularly relevant to me and my studies. YMMV.

If this is the first you’re hearing about boyd, check her out at @zephoria and www.danah.org.

• “if you’re not participating, you have to have a really good reason”
• “they go to the places which appear to them to be free” (since they don’t have access to public spaces)
• “friendship maintenance” - older friendships
• “friendships get formed in very social places” “social grooming … this is how friendships get formed”
• “social media, because this is where they have access to”
• “young people’s right to roam has been radically decreased over three generations”
• “very much constrained, very locally, into their house”
• “Networked Publics” - “recreate or reunderstand our public space” ”publics that are restructured by networked technologies. as such, they simultaneously are (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined commuity that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice”
• “even though you can scale to big audiences, doesn’t mean you’re going to reach big audiences”
• “collapsed contexts: lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts” - part of networked publics
• “an environment that is simultaneously being derived by the idea of peer norms, and what is regulated by adults”
• ability to have agency can be undermined - figures of authority, changes in environment [e.g. FB privacy controls]
• “public by default, private by effort” online - so it looks like young people are giving up privacy online, because they’re going default. “if it’s relevant to some of my friends, i may as well share it generally, and THEY can filter it out”
• “it’s not that they want to be public … it’s that they want to participate in a public”
• “they’re there to socialise … connect … build relationships”
• “It made me feel safer just because someone was there to help me out and stuff.” (Meixing, 17, TN, re sharing password with boyfriend) [came from parents demanding access as trustworthy adults]
• “just because it’s publicly accessible doesn’t mean it was meant for you”
• “using structural settings” - e.g. FB privacy settings
• “structurally achieving some kind of boundary work” - using technology to create boundaries for context
• then there are social ways to achieve this:
• “hiding in plain sight” - because parents are already on your FB
• ***”they make their content publicly accessible, but the meaning isn’t publicly accessible”
• ***you can still be private in FB - adults don’t know how to decode so they don’t know what’s going on
• bullying = “drama” in teen speak
• concept of the flaneur - participating in public sphere to get something back - not exhibitionist, not voyeur, somewhere in between
• “they’re going out there, they’re looking, they’re watching, they’re trying to make sense of, they’re sharing in order to be seen”
• “you’re rendered invisible unless you share”
• ***”you’re not there unless you participate”
• “they’re learning to expect surveillance”
• “they’re learning privacy in the context of surveillance”
• privacy still important
• ***”trying to be in a public” not “trying to be public”

• 4chan: “hacking the attention economy”
• religion as key reason for opting out of internet [family decision]
• sports scholarship as reason for choosing not to participate in FB
• already so marginalised in school society, choose to opt out of FB because it’ll just marginalise them further
• starting to see “emotional exhaustion” wrt FB
• young people & twitter, 3 main reasons: celebrities, gaming trending topics, protected accounts - private for small group of friends, used as well as FB - Twitter binary privacy & access, FB hard to know for sure [privacy controls keep changing]
• no longer safe spaces for GLBT youth online - fear of sexual predators, don’t speak to people IRL - where do they speak??? who do they speak to? not getting support online like they were 2001 and before. it gets better campaign - youth make videos, reach out, find that there’s no-one there for them - suicides.
• dominant activity now definitely is still existing friendships being recreated online
• ***but too much fear mongering has turned kids off the idea of meeting strangers with the same interest
• “they self regulate and they don’t meet strangers in the way they did previously”
• meeting new people - dominant is “jockeying for attention of opposite sex in friends of friends”

• sites like tumblr making opportunities - kids can just push content out, but not so much with the personal - but can be a way to gauge what support is out there.
• mmorpgs are sites where personal communication can be a safe side activity, divert attention