It's Complicated, by Danah BoydThis is the second in a series of posts reviewing “It’s Complicated” by Danah Boyd.

It’s obvious when pointed out, but the way a physical space is designed dictates to a large extent how it will be used. It may be obvious when pointed out, but it often isn’t during everyday life because it’s like the air we breathe, it’s all around us to such an extent we don’t notice it. And it’s the same for networked spaces in cyberspace, the design affects our behaviour in subtle and less subtle ways.

Technically the characteristics of any environment are understood as affordances “because they make possible – and, in some cases, are used to encourage – certain types of practices, even if they do not determine what practices will unfold”. It’s the affordances in networked spaces that help determine people’s behaviours. As Boyd illustrates through the book, seemingly irrational behaviour on the part of teens may well be caused by them having to try to get round online network (or offline social) affordances in pursuit of goals that most of us would relate to (more later as this is a key insight in the book for me).

The affordances of technology are different to those in physical spaces and are to a large extent what cause the challenges, but also offer up new opportunities. Online content is:

  1. Persistent No-one can find the musings of the 13 year old me on a Facebook timeline. By the time I started musing I was already pretty well formed as a human being, this is not true for our children;
  2. Visible When I did muse as a 13 year old it was with a small group of friends. They might make fun of me, and even talk about it to others not present, but it wasn’t easy to find for the many;
  3. Spreadable This is a key characteristic. Anything stupid I did as a young person needed word of mouth to take it from person to person. Now it is simple to take an image or comment and instantly share with 1,000s; and
  4. Searchable It’s now trivial to type an individual’s name into Google and find most of their online presence easily as part of a job search, for example.

These things are not necessarily bad. Persistence, for example, is a good thing if you want to have a conversation with a friend or family member who is on the other side of the world. It means you can carry out the conversation asynchronously while the other party is sleeping.

These affordances have implications for teenagers

A theme through the early part of the book is the need for teenagers to learn how to interact socially. While she doesn’t directly say it, a key element of this is the ‘drama’ that teenagers create in order to build a sense of their own self and their place within the network.

Drama has always been a feature of teenagers’ lives, but the affordances outlined above can make for consequences with far more impact. It’s one thing to have a group of friends in school laughing about an outfit you wore; it’s quite another to have photos of it spread far and wide on networks you can’t control and don’t actually know.

It’s this sort of stuff that parents are (rightly) worried about.

There are six posts in all in this series of posts reviewing It’s Complicated. In order the posts are: