As interest grows among academics and parents in youth's participation in virtual societies, Danah Boyd, a USC Annenberg Center graduate fellow and expert on the topic, spoke on "Virtual Publics: Youth's Lives in Emergent Social Worlds" at AAAS 2007.
Boyd presented in "Virtual Worlds Seminar Part I: Education, Learning, and Public Diplomacy."
An important issue she wanted to address in this year's presentation is the blurring of boundaries between online and offline worlds -- a trend that continues to grow.
"'Virtual' is a problematic concept because most people are not separating the digital from the physical," says Boyd. "MySpace is primarily a public articulation of offline social networks. It is complementary to the offline, not separate from it. Thus, when we fetishize purely online stuff, we do ourselves a disservice. This is not where the majority of people are going."
###
Boyd is a social media researcher at Yahoo!, a graduate student fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication of the University of Southern California, and a PhD candidate in the School of Information at University of California-Berkeley. She is an expert on youth culture, digital publics, identity negotiation, ethnography, blogging, and social media including MySpace and Friendster. Her current doctoral dissertation is titled "Why American Youth/MySpace: Identity Production and Socialization in Digital Publics."
Contact: Bryan Schneider
University of Southern California
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment