Cameron Neylon

I have a distinct tendency to see everything through the lens of what it
means for research communities. I have just finally read [Danah
Boyd](http://www.danah.org "Danah boyd"){.zem_slink target="_blank"
rel="homepage"}â€™s *[Itâ€™s
Complicated](http://www.danah.org/itscomplicated/ "It's Complicated [Blu-ray]"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="amazon"}*Â a book that focuses on how and why U.S.
teenagers interact with and through social media. The book is well worth
reading for the study itself, but I would argue it is more worth reading
for the way it challenges many of the assumptions we make about how
social interactions online and how they are mediated by technology.

The main thrust of Boydâ€™s argument is that the teenagers she studied
are engaged in a process of figuring out what their place is amongst
various publics and communities. Alongside this she diagnoses a long
standing trend of reducing the availability of the unstructured social
interactions through which teens explore and find their place.

A consistent theme is that teens go online not to escape the real world,
or because of some attraction to the technology but because it is the
place where they can interact with their communities, test boundaries
and act out in spaces where they feel in control of the process. She
makes the point that through these interactions teens are learning how
to be public and also how to be in public.

So the interactions and the needs they surface are not new, but the fact
that they occur in online spaces where those interactions are more
persistent, visible, spreadable and searchable changes the way in which
adults view and interact with them. The activities going on are the same
as in the past: negotiating social status, sharing resources, seeking to
understand what sharing grants status, pushing the boundaries, claiming
precedence and seeking control of their situation.

Boyd is talking about U.S. teenagers but I was consistently struck by
the parallels with the research community and its online and offline
behavior. The wide prevalence of [imposter
syndrome](http://occamstypewriter.org/athenedonald/2012/01/29/what-am-i-doing-here/)
amongst researchers is becoming better known -- showing how strongly the
navigation and understanding of your place in the research community
effects even senior researchers. Prestige in the research community
arises from two places, existing connections (where you came from, who
you know) and the sharing of resources (primarily research papers).
Negotiating status, whether offline or on, remains at the core of
researcher behavior throughout careers. In a very real sense we never
grow up.

People generally believe that social media tools are designed to connect
people in new ways. In practice, Boyd points out, mainstream tools
effectively strengthen existing connections. My view has been that
â€œFacebooks for Scienceâ€? fail because researchers have no desire to
be social as researchers in the same way the do as people â€" but that
[they socialize through research
objects](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/why-the-web-of-data-needs-to-be-social/).
What Boydâ€™s book leads me to wonder is whether in fact the issue is
more that the existing tools do little to help researchers negotiate the
â€œnetworked publicsâ€? of research.

Teens are learning and navigating forms of power, prestige and control
that are highly visible. The often do this through sharing objects that
are easily intepretable, text and images (although see the chapter on
privacy for how this can be manipulated). The research community buries
those issues because we would like to think we are a transparent
meritocracy.

Where systems have attempted to surface prestige or reputation in a
research context through point systems they have never really succeeded.
Partly this is because those points are not fungible â€" they donâ€™t
apply in the â€œrealâ€? world
([StackExchange](http://stackexchange.com/ "Stack Exchange Network"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="homepage"} wins in part precisely because those
points did cross over rapidly into real world prestige). Is it perhaps
precisely our pretence that this sense-making and assignment of power
and prestige is supposed to be hidden that makes it difficult to build
social technologies for research that actually work?

*An Aside: I got [a PDF
copy](http://www.danah.org/books/ItsComplicated.pdf){target="_blank"} of
the book from Danah Boyd's website because a) I don't need a paper copy
and b) I didn't want to buy the ebook from Amazon. What I'd really like
to do is buy a copy from an independent bookstore and have it sent
somewhere where it will be read, a public or school library perhaps. Is
there an easy way to do that?*


I have a distinct tendency to see everything through the lens of what it means for research communities. I have just finally read Danah Boydâ€™s
<em>
 Itâ€™s Complicated
</em>
Â a book that focuses on how and why U.S. teenagers interact with and through social media.

Messages de Rogue Scholar

Researcher as Teenager: Parsing Danah Boydâ€™s Itâ€™s Complicated