Blog #21: Dana Boyd's Video

Today we watched Dana Boyd’s video titled, “Handheld Learning Conference 2008). The video was hosted by Blip TV, another video hosting platform like YouTube.

According to Boyd, key features of social network sites include friending, maintaining social ties, and the use of them as virtual spaces to hang out. Some people ask, “Why don’t teenagers go out and meet people the way my generation did?” The most common response is, “My mom doesn’t let me out of the house.” A good illustration of this is research from the National Society for the Protection of Birds. One of their projects looks at 4 generations of people (as they apply the changing migration habits of birds) and consider how their roaming for social networking has changed. Most often, kids aren’t able to go out as often as previous generations; sometimes this is based on fear, but mostly if is based on over scheduling in a mobile society.

According to Boyd, there are dynamics related to socializing that affect us today. Ultimately she identifies 4 properties and 3 dynamics at play.

The first property is persistence. Persistence describes the phenomenon that what you say on line sticks around forever which is great for asynchronous conversations but problematic for coming up later. In previous generations, only reporters or writers had to deal with persistence, but today we have to deal with it always.

The second property is replicability. Conversations and emails can be copy and posted into other situations. Young people unfortunately bully one another by doing this, but I also know some older people who do this as well.

The third property is scalability. This refers to how blogs have the potential to reach millions of people. Potential is the key word, but the average is 6 readers. You never know how many people will read your posts due to unknown scalability (also referred to by Mike Wesch as audience collapse).

The fourth property is searchability. Young people are extremely searchable by those who hold power over them. This was not a common problem for earlier generations; our parents couldn’t find us before. Sometimes this is good; a person could become famous by what he or she has said. Sometimes this is bad. People can find you at the bar doing stupid things.

Dynamics are also important to understand. The first dynamic is the invisible audience and learning to prepare for it. The second dynamic is the collapsed context. Earlier generations are used to having a context distinguished by time and place, and when they know that a context might collapse, scripts are created to cope with unexpected situations (like weddings where people don’t know or like each other). The final dynamic is the convergence of public and private. Unexpectedly, many young people identify their home as a public space because they have no control over it. Whereas, this same group of people identify their online world as private due to the control they can exercise over it. That is, until parents began joining FaceBook.

Ultimately, Boyd says there is no computer literacy or reading literacy, there is only the literacy of the world. As teachers, we need to help student learn how to make sense of the world around them and how to understand the fundamental structures of the world so that they can understand it.