Teenagers who are Living and Learning with Social Media (Danah Boyd, )

2009 Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology
Link

Take Aways

• Four properties: persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability
• Three dynamics:  invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private. 
1. Message can't be adjusted for the audience.  A video can be understood differently in another context, it can be remixed into something different.
2. Impact on TV/Radio:  Stokely Carmichael civil rights activist in 1960s.  Used a very educated proper posh "white" way of speaking to DC politicians, but a rolling  style of speech in talking with others of his own race. Television and radio changed this, there was no neutral voice and he could no longer change voice to suit the audience.  Both, simultaneously, were his audience.   He chose the "black" style of speaking and subsequently that alienated white society.  The collapsed context no longer allowed him to communicate effectively with both since it was simultaneous.
• For adults, home is the quintessential private...but home is one of a teens most public space, their behavior is often constantly monitored and corrected.
• Learning to learn
1. "Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease tell me why pre-calculus is important to me..." (A, 16, CA) 
2. "...You're not learning this stuff because you need it every day as an adult...The reson is studying these things (precalculus, Shakespear, ...whatever) helps you get good at learning how to learn. And that, you will definitely have to do for the rest of your life.  That's practically all we do as adults...." 
3. Personal note:  I will always remain thankful for Mrs. Clikeman, who encouraged  me to learn how to teach myself so that I "would never be totally dependent on the teaching ability of others." 
• MySpace vs Facebook - "The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook.  It was more cultured, and less cheesy.   The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace.  Any high school student who has Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious.  Like Peet's is more cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop, and like Macs are more cultured than PC's, Facebook is of a cooler caliber than MySpace.  (Craig, 17, California).
  
• Peripheral awareness of people around you.
  
• Average age of people on twitter is 31.
  
• Issues of faculty  friending students and forcing them to friend each other just because they have a similar class.  Now that we have children attending college classes, this becomes a greater issue as well.
  
• Copy of dissertation is available.
  

It is easy to forget that TV and radio weren't always so common, and the change they brought equally difficult in some ways.  I did like her comments about the teens knowing how to adapt the technology to their uses, but not understanding anything about how it came to be or works.  Also, that unlike adults, teens don't have the critical thinking skills surrounding their use, the looking at why and how.