Teen Privacy Strategies in Networked Publics | danah boyd

[00:00:05]um we're going to now uh transition to Dana Boyd from um who's as I think doesn't require any introduction to this group but uh who's at Microsoft research and uh uh an extraordinarily prominent figure in terms of analysis and uh the study of social media and Dana will be speaking on teen privacy strategy good morning thank you guys so much for coming out today so for those don't know me I'm an ethnographer I spend most of my time running around talking to young people about their lives and about their use of technology in different ways and the talk I want to talk about today is actually how young people think about privacy and how they think about publicness there's a big myth out there that young people don't care about privacy and that is about as inaccurate as you can get and of course anybody who's a parent knows that your kids actually care about privacy when it relates to you um so part of it is that we have to sort of sit there and resolve what does it mean that young people care about privacy and what does it mean that they participate in these very public places places like Facebook places like Twitter Etc and the argument that I think is really important to keep in mind is that just because young people want to participate in a public doesn't mean that they want to be public and that distinction is actually really important because participation in a public doesn't necessarily mean publicity it doesn't necessarily mean making everything public for all people across all space and all time and so what you see is young people are really trying to work through how that looks conceptually one of the things you know which was brought up in the earlier session this morning is is that we can think of what emerges as publ and I'm very much am using the Michael Warner sense of this term which builds off of the hab masian sense of this term but what we can think about it is is that young people are participating in network Publix and those Network publics are simultaneously a space constructed through technology and through networks and a collection of people that are networked to con to constitute a public and one of the funny things about networked Publix is that they look and feel certain ways very much like publ that we recognize and that we are familiar with but in other ways they're not and I've written a lot about different kinds of properties and and dynamics that have played out but there's one I want to focus on which again John totally stole my thunder this morning um is the notion that in everyday interactions our interactions are private by default and public with effort if I have a conversation with you in the hallway we're talking having a casual conversation you might remember some of it but the process by which to make it public actually takes effort on your part you have to go out of your way to try to remember it or play the Linda trip game and record it without me knowing right and do these processes to actually consciously make it public when you're participating in online spaces the Dynamics and affordances that are part of those online spaces means that your interactions online are in many ways public by default private through effort and when young people are navigating and thinking about strategies for dealing with public and private they're regularly trying to think about the strategies where they assume that content is public by default and so I actually really find it delightful to see when young people sort of push back against old people in all sorts of ways and I'm going to be using different quotes from young people just to give you a sense and Alicia talks about how I just think that technology is redefining what's acceptable for people to put out about themselves I've grown up with technology so I know how it was before this boom of social network working um but it just seems like instead of spending all of our time talking to other individual people and sharing things that would seem private we spend all of our time putting on on one module of communication where people can go and just access it if they want to and she talks about this idea that her her participation in these publics is about putting things up for people to get access to and then you start to wonder well how do they think about who's getting access and part of the ways that they deal with this is they're thinking about different audiences and different moments of access so I'm really sort of enamored by the kinds of strategies that young people take to try to manage these issues right and they deal with them at multiple levels one of the most common ways that young people deal with as a strategy is to try to assert a form of social norms right which is effectively the same as the keep out of my bedroom story right I'm going to tell you what the social Norm is and it's not about actually creating technical boundaries but by telling you that this is the way that you should behave and unfortunately what young people quick learn is that they lack one of the key um elements necessary to be able to assert uh these kinds of uh social norms which is that they lack agency they lack agency AC um in relation to people who hold power over them which is constantly their Battleground and one of the ways we can think about privacy is as a combination of two things one is the ability to control a social situation and two is the ability to have agency to assert control over that social situation and what you see is that young people are constantly struggling with it so then they turn to other means so Hunter is was one of my favorite teens to talk to um uh young uh young black man living in um uh DC who for all intents and purposes really looks like a living walking version of Steve Urkel um complete with the broken glasses and he is um from a community his his um his mother is in the country is an undocumented um uh person and he's going to a magnet school a very Posh part of town where he does not live his mother and he live in an environment that is very very different and he talks about his family as being really ghetto um and that's his language for it and so one of the things that he said as he was starting to try to deal with things is that when I'm talking to my friends on Facebook or I put up a status something I hate is when people I'm not addressing in my statuses comment on them in my old school people used to always call me nerdy and that I was the least black black person they've ever met some people say that and I say on Facebook should I take offense that somebody put up a ringtone white and nerdy as for me you know I guess I was talking about school and my sister comes out of nowhere and like oh baby bro and I'm like no don't say that I wasn't talking to you right and this is a moment where he feels as though by signaling the kinds of information he puts out there he's signaling the social norms and his sister should understand it and of course she doesn't and he's constantly struggling with this and so one of the things that Hunter started to do was he started to actually use very explicit structures to deal with this is another example of Hunter and social norms he started to deal with very explicit structures to deal with this in particular one of the the boundary issues that he ran into was that um his cousins again from the same Community uh had an idea of what was a cool game um and it was primarily first-person shooters whereas Hunter was really into Pokemon and Legends of Zelda and these were not cool in his community and so he actually started making a lists making using lists within Facebook specifically to separate people would not give him any form of crap for talking about Legends of Zelda or talking about Pokemon and it was not because he didn't want people to know that he was interested in this but he knew that the way that the comments played out under it really shaped it and his cousins and his family were always the first to to comment um all right so Hunter is not alone one of the things that we see is all sorts of different kinds of structural strategies uh to try to achieve different kinds of privacy another form of structural strategy that I think is interesting is coming from shmika and shimika um deals with all sorts of social drama within her school and she finds that the social drama has to do with the past that the past always comes back to haunt her so the thing is she likes participating on Facebook is extremely important to her but what she does is that she logs in um every day and she deletes any comments that people have left for her after she's read them and then she had written comments on other people's walls and she goes over and deletes them the next day you know and I asked her said well you know this stuff you know it can stick around you know people could copy and paste it or or the company could hold on to it and she's like yes but that would take too much effort for my friends to actually bring it back into the present my goal is to very from her perspective was very much to make it harder and that anybody who went through that effort was just plain creepy right and it was a really interesting way of of seeing the structure and trying to make it work for her now there's another sort of key form of strategy that we tend to see which is sort of uh more fun which is all these forms of social strategies one of the things I love about Carmen is that Carmen deals with her mother um on uh Facebook all the time because she likes her mother but her mother has a tendency to overreact so one day Carmen uh broke up with her boyfriend and she really wanted to communicate to all of her friends that she was feeling really sad but she knew that if she wrote a sappy song put a sappy song lyric up on Facebook her mother would overreact and think she was suicidal to cope with this um she decided to put up a song lyric from always look on the bright side of life now for those of you who don't know the Monti python reference here is from Life of Brian and it's sung during a time in which Brian is about to be executed her mother not having any cultural sensemaking of of Monte python for which she knew um immediately saw it read the lyrics literally and said it looks like you're doing really well right her friends of course realizing what was really go on called her and texted her is like are you doing okay right this is a practice that we can understand as social steganography it's about hiding in plain sight it's about a way of actually recognizing that you're putting information out there but it's not necessarily to be interpreted um now this this plays out in different ways sometimes it's meant to be seen um that you're actually doing this so for Carmen she wants to actually make it not really visible what what work is going on but I also run into a lot of young people who actually want to make it seem want to perform whether you're in the no or whether you're not perform the in joke or perform the reference that you can't tell and my favorite of this is talking to a group of young women in in uh North Carolina I went through their Facebooks and I came across this I'm sick getting tired of this of all this posted by one person liked by 32 people she's such a liked by 50 people right here's a moment where everybody in the Stream and certainly all the people liking know what fight is going on and boy did I get a rundown of the details of the fight right but the teachers who are looking in the parents who are looking in they don't know and they're not sure they're allowed to ask right and that's actually an interesting barrier because it's the moment of whether you realize you're allowed to ask or not of course as a research I get to ask and I get the drama but I know full well that the young women I talk to were not going to tell um the teachers what was going on right and this is a way of using references by the way the use of pronouns is extraordinary on these sites because what we see is that rather than controlling access to content young people are controlling access to meaning and that is a really radical strategy for actually achieving a form of privacy in a very public place of course we've done this all the time young people have done this all the time but the fact that they're using these extremely public places to do this is very important because what they're saying is is that they're trying to make sense of public life they're trying to deal with different actors sometimes the technological strategies will get us where we want to sometimes it requires entirely new social strategies and here's where we go back to leig right and I heart leig and I specifically heart Le Les's idea that there are four points of Regulation to keep in mind at any form of social change one there is there is the market right there's what industry is interested in what there's what makes money two there is the law there's what we normally talk about as regulation three there is architecture or code or fundamentally the technology that we care about and four there are social norms and one of the things to keep in mind is what we look at what young people are doing is that they're actually trying to remind us that social norms matter and that all of our understandings about public and private need to account for social norms and we need to look at when the technology or the law or the market tries to override those social norms and really think back about what it would means to actually Empower people thank you very much [Applause]