apophenia

My name is danah boyd and I am a PhD candidate at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California (Berkeley) and a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. My research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, my dissertation examines how American teenagers socialize in networked publics like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. I am interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture.

My dissertation research is being funded as a part of the MacArthur Foundation's Initiative on New Media and Learning. My research is being supervised by a most astonishing committee: Mimi Ito, Annalee Saxenian, Cori Hayden, and Jenna Burrell.

Prior to my current project, I studied blogging, social network sites (e.g. Friendster, Tribe.net, Orkut...), tagging, and other forms of social media. I have written papers on a variety of different topics, from digital backchannels to social visualization design, sexing of internet interactions to creating artifacts for memory work.

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