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's research focuses especially on how American youth engage in networked publics like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc.—on how teens create and present themselves and negotiate socialization in these virtual environments with invisible audiences. She was one of the researchers in a major, recently published 3-year study of digital youth funded by the MacArthur Foundation, "Living and Learning with New Media".
She also studies blogging, tagging and social media more broadly.

danah boyd is a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

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 on the advisory board for LiveJournal, Technorati, Youth Media Exchange, O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, SXSW-Interactive, and Blogher.

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 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.

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.

danah is a contributing author of the recently published, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out, a collaborative effort by members of the digital youth project spearheaded by Mimi Ito and Peter Lyman.

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 on-line.
• 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., MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Media sharing platforms - e.g., YouTube, Flickr
• Blogging and online journaling
• Tagging and social bookmarking

Practices involved in networked social media include: tagging, user generated content, copy/paste code creation, and remix.

Credentials

• Researcher at Microsoft Research New England
• Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & 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
• 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
• 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
• Member of the Ad Council's Internet Safety Coalition
• Member of 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.