“Choose Your Own Ethnography: In Search of (Un)Mediated Life”
by danah boyd
The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Conference
October 13, 2007

THE BLEEDING EDGE

For as far back as I can remember, I was intrigued by edges. It was always a love-hate relationship. A certain amount of healthy fear of heights kept me a safe distance from the most daunting cliffs, but I couldn’t help but wonder what was on the other side of a given edge. As I began my career as a researcher, I couldn’t help but chase after the carrots presented by the bleeding edges of technology.

Having grown up online and began my career as a computer scientist, I’ve always had a healthy skepticism of new technology and found joy in unpacking reality from hype. Nothing gives me more pleasure than understanding the differences between how a technology is conceptualized by its creators versus its users. I love weaving in and out and between circles of developers and users. But this position destroys the magic of supposed bleeding edge. The blood of venture capitalists and the edge manifested as media hype are not nearly as delectable as I had originally imagined. Yet, realizing that the bleeding edge is nothing more than a Neal Stephenson-esque dream gave me the perspective I needed to really focus on people and their interactions using mediating technologies.

My predilection or shall we say my compulsion to shatter utopic mirrors has prompted and shaped many of my research projects. I’ve tried numerous methodologies to help make sense of the interplay of people and technology. I began by building psych experiments to understand depth perception prioritization in order to show that 3D immersive virtual reality systems have hormone-based biases. I built interactive visualizations of social data to highlight how we all hold more data about each other than we realize. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with trying to make sense of how networked publics are incorporated into the lives of American teenagers. To get at this question, I embarked on a two year ethnographic study of how American youth are using social technologies as a part of their practices of everyday life. The easy way to say this is that I’ve been studying MySpace (read more).