A Culture of Connectivity

When I first saw that the reading for this week was instead a video and that it was almost an hour in length, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to focus on it all the way through.  However, when I saw it was a talk given by danah boyd I knew I would have no problem paying attention.  As part of my undergraduate degree, I was required to take Media Theory.  For the class I ended up writing a term paper on identity and the Facebook profile and used several of danah boyd's papers as sources.  it was interesting to listen to the talk and remember some of the things I had remembered reading about and had discussed in my paper.  Overall I found many of boyd's discussion points interesting and have decided it was easiest to list the ones that resonated with me most.

• Social networking sites are a new type of public space
• Teens are now more searchable than ever and they are becoming aware of that as they approach the years where they will be applying for college and searching for potential jobs
• The idea of negotiating invisible audiences
• Collapsed contexts - What are the boundaries and social norms in this new public space?
• There is the issue of what is public versus what is private... The only way to achieve privacy is through agency and control
• I enjoyed the discussion on Wikipedia and the controversy it constantly causes
• Judging people for their Facebook page, is this not their whole world, just a piece of them

On a side note, after watching the video I browsed boyd's website and was amazed by how many papers and articles she had published since I last read her work in the Spring of 2009.