Danah Boyd - Danah Boyd is a doctoral candidate at the School of Information at the University of California - Berkeley and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how young people navigate networked publics (i.e. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) for sociable purposes.
Boyd has studied many different aspects of social media, including blogging, computer-mediated communication, tagging, backchanneling, etc. Her earlier work includes visualization of social interaction, artifacts for memory maintenance, and an analysis of how men and women see depth differently in 3D virtual reality systems.
For five years, she worked at V-Day, an organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She also worked as a researcher at Intel, Tribe.net, Google, and Yahoo! She has been featured in major press, including profiles in the Financial Times, San Francisco Magazine, and the New York Times. She has been blogging for 10 years.
Anthropologist of the online community Danah Boyd discusses ways young people use social network sites to connect with their friends and present themselves online.
Boyd compares social networks like MySpace to immersive environments like Second Life. She also discusses mobile portability.