17 Facts About Danah boyd

Danah boyd is a technology and social media scholar.

Danah boyd's mother married again during danah's third grade and the family moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Danah boyd used online discussions forums to escape from high school.

Danah boyd became an avid participant on Usenet and IRC in her junior year in high school, spending a lot of time browsing, creating content, and conversing with strangers.

Danah boyd pursued her master's degree in social media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab's Sociable Media Group.

Danah boyd worked for the New York-based activist organization V-Day, first as a volunteer and then as paid staff.

Danah boyd eventually moved to San Francisco, where she met the individuals involved in creating the new Friendster service.

Danah boyd documented what she was observing via her blog, and this grew into a career.

Danah boyd's dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, focused on the use of large social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace by US teenagers, and was blogged on Boing Boing.

Danah boyd demonstrated that most young users of Facebook were white and middle-to-upper class, while MySpace users tended to be lower-class black teenagers.

Danah boyd argued that people tend to connect with like-minded individuals, known as homophily, which perpetuates these enduring social hierarchies.

Danah boyd's work has been translated and relayed to major media.

In January 2009, Danah boyd joined Microsoft Research New England, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a Social Media Researcher.

Danah boyd serves on the board of directors of Crisis Text Line, as a Trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, on the board of the Social Science Research Council, and on the advisory board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Danah boyd was a 2011 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

Danah boyd gave the keynote addresses at SXSWi 2010 and WWW 2010, discussing privacy, publicity and big data.

Danah boyd appeared in the 2008 PBS Frontline documentary Growing Up Online, providing commentary on youth and technology.