Journalists are notorious for reducing complexity to a misleading lead sentence or sound bite, and for that reason many persons with anything to say avoid such 'communicators' like the plague. Occasionally more space is provided and the interviewee has opportunity to express with subtlety and nuance the topic of concern. Discover magazine recently provided danah boyd with a full 14 minutes to talk about young people and social networking sites. The setting was a bar in Brooklyn and the format was conversational, except that there was only one person conversing – boyd; the interviewer's interventions were limited to a few introductory queries and nods of his head at strategic moments. In that span of time, though, boyd provides a panorama of the development of social networking sites in the U.S. and the place they seem to have in the lives of young people, integrated seamlessly into a style of communicating and networking that is forever in flux. The interview is a good 'trailer' for the extensive research she has done on Friendster and other SNSs; see her list of publications. After the Brooklyn bar introduction, perhaps a good place to continue the conversation in a more scholarly venue is at the site of JCMC, starting with her co-authored introduction to a theme issue on SNSs published last year. We'll be attending to some of this literature later in the semester, but for now there is no better entry point than this conversational bar-setting interview with danah boyd.
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