danah boyd’s curiosity for technology and the internet began in the early stages of social media and networking through sites such as MySpace and Friendster.
After she entered college and the first phases of her career, that curiosity grew into research studying the ways in which people were interacting with others online. Part of this research looked at how activity online could shape nations and polarize societies.
boyd, founder of the Data & Society Research Institute and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University, presented on the topic “Why Democracy Depends on a Healthy Social Fabric” at the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation’s symposium titled “Addressing the Impact of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence on Democracy” on April 1 at the University of Mississippi.
Boyd is also the author of “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” and a partner researcher at Microsoft Research. Her work examines the intersection between technology and society.
“When you start to fracture relationships, within a country or within a society, you start to create polarization, and that has huge consequences,” she said in an interview before her symposium presentation.
Boyd emphasized that a healthy social fabric within societies is the key to peace and trust among citizens, and she explained how journalism fits into this fabric.
“We’ve had dreams that journalism would help connect people, and that’s proving to be true. But without a healthy fabric, no amount of news in journalism can repair it,” Boyd warned.
Boyd acknowledged that even though consumption of journalism peaked in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the amount of information that is available to people today is unprecedented and that putting together the pieces of news and media literacy has become increasingly challenging.
For students interested in entering the field of journalism or communications, Boyd offered advice that she once heard from a colleague at Microsoft.
“He argued that the work of professional communication is not simply to message out what your organization wants the world to hear,” she said. “There is a huge challenge and vulnerability when your internal understanding of your company differs from the external perception. The work of professional communication is to constantly bridge and connect them and get them as close as possible.”
Turning her focus away from the intersection of technology and the social fabric, Boyd’s current research focuses on the U.S. Census and the way the data is collected and sometimes manipulated. It’s this data, she explained, that shapes the democracy of our country.
“There are all these technical systems that go into it, and so the book (she is working on) is about what it means to make data — that data is not found, it’s made. And in that process of making, there’s a lot of politics, especially in the census data, because census data make politics.”
Speaking to the next generation of journalists and communicators, Boyd posed a question.
“What does it mean to reimagine what news and journalism can and should be, both as an art and as a business?” she asked. “As art I mean the ability to actually inform and connect people, and it may take a form that is nothing like what we’ve seen.”
