The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the winners of this year's Pioneer Award (rechristened the "Barlow" in honor of EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow: sf writer William Gibson, anthropologist danah boyd, and activists Oakland Privacy.

Back in 2017, I started writing about the "epistemological crisis" ("we're not living through a crisis about what is true, we're living through a crisis about how we know whether something is true. We're not disagreeing about facts, we're disagreeing about epistemology"); danah boyd picked up on that theme later that year, making the connection between "media literacy" education and the crisis ("If we're not careful, 'media literacy' and 'critical thinking' will simply be deployed as an assertion of authority over epistemology").

"The conversation is constructed as being about student privacy, but it's really about who has the right to monitor which youth".

One year ago today

Gawker reporter claims to have seen video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack: Gawker's John Cook was contacted by a tipster who offered to sell him a video of Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack for more than $40K. — Read the rest

danah boyd has posted a free PDF of the full text of her must-read book It's Complicated, the best book about young people and the Internet I've read to date. boyd hopes you'll enjoy the book and then support her and her publisher by buying a copy, sending a signal "that this book is important, that the message in the book is valuable."

Sociologist danah boyd has posted her responses to a Wall Street Journal debate on privacy that included Stewart Baker, Jeff Jarvis, and Chris Soghoian. Boyd's responses are nuanced, evidence-based, and humane, and get well past the "privacy is dead" and "kids don't care about privacy, or they wouldn't be using Facebook" simplifications. — Read the rest

Snip from a thought-provoking post by danah boyd:

You're a 16-year-old Muslim kid in America. Say your name is Mohammad Abdullah. Your schoolmates are convinced that you're a terrorist. They keep typing in Google queries likes "is Mohammad Abdullah a terrorist?"

Many years ago, danah boyd taught me her fool-proof method for an email-free holiday — a procedure for switching off your email while on vacation, without offending your co-workers, friends, and correspondents. I've used danah's method ever since, and I swear by it: being able to go on holiday from my email and knowing that I won't be clobbered by a mountain of backlog when I return is literally life-changing. — Read the rest

In a Huffington Post op-ed, danah boyd argues that pressure to censor Craigslist, which recently resulted in the company's removal of its "adult services" section for users in the United States, actually "helps pimps, child traffickers and other abusive scumbags." — Read the rest

"What intrigues me the most about the anti-Vaseline discourse is that it seems to be Americans telling the global south (which is mostly in the northern hemisphere) that they're being oppressed by American companies. The narrative is that Vaseline is selling whitening products to perpetuate colonial ideals of beauty. — Read the rest

danah boyd has published a thoughtful and extensive rant about Facebook's slow-mo implosion of user trust, data privacy, and UI transparency:

A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends.

Teen net-researcher danah boyd (@zephoria) has been taking parental questions about teens' use of the net on Twitter and here are her responses:

@mirroredpool: What borders to teens place of social networking sites and education? How would they react to using an SNS to do class work?

Astute social media researcher danah boyd — now running her own lab at Microsoft Research — has published the notes from an internal company talk she gave called "Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?" It's a good condensation of the material in her dissertation, full of punchy insights into how social media evolved and what it's meant to society. — Read the rest

Dr danah boyd's newly-minted PhD from UC Berkeley was awarded based on her fantastic thesis project, "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics." danah's ground-breaking research on how kids (especially marginal kids) use the Internet has been featured here a lot — she was one of the contributors to Mimi Ito's gigantic Digital Youth Project, and the attorneys general's report on the relative absence of pedophiles online. — Read the rest

Danah boyd's morning keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference was called "Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life." Danah started with the premise that we treat techies as the people who understand technology best, but that maybe it's the naifs — kids, disenfranchised people, techno have-nots — who have the best insight into how technology should work. — Read the rest

Ken sez, "danah boyd, the latest speaker in the ibiblio.org speaker series, is up on the ibiblio.org web site. In this talk, she gives an awesome, in depth talk on social networks and why people are using them. She touches on the history of social networks, how the online communities came into being, and some of the forces working on them today." — Read the rest

danah boyd has an interesting essay analyzing Facebook's recent privacy cock-up.

In the tech world, we have a bad tendency to view the concept of "private" as a single bit that is either 0 or 1. Either it's exposed or not.

Hacker/social scientist danah boyd has published some amazing research on Friendster, work that is generalizable to most articulated social networking services. Danah's research has turned up all kinds of fascinating and useful truths about social networking services, and now she's grouped all her papers together with summaries in one place: great reading. — Read the rest

At Apophenia, danah boyd tells this great story about a recent renegade party:

Last night, i attended a renegade party buried in San Francisco. We could see the road from our location, but the road could not see us. When we saw cop car after cop car drive by, we knew it was over.

Tom Usher went to a flat earth conference in Birmingham, England; he met an array of people who believe that the Earth is flat, because they believe that powerful people have conspired to control the information they receive in order to secure benefits for the elite, and this belief (which has a wealth of evidence to support it!) — Read the rest