danah boyd‘s most recent book is It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.

Here are three papers that she has co-written that are freely available.

Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies by danah boyd & Alice E. Marwick

This paper examines how teens understand privacy in highly public networked environments like Facebook and Twitter. We describe both teens’ practices, their privacy strategies, and the structural conditions in which they are embedded, highlighting the ways in which privacy, as it plays out in everyday life, is related more to agency and the ability to control a social situation than particular properties of information. Finally, we discuss the implications of teens’ practices and strategies, revealing the importance of social norms as a regulatory force.

The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics by Alice E. Marwick & danah boyd

While teenage conflict is nothing new, today’s gossip, jokes, and arguments often play out through social media like Formspring, Twitter, and Facebook. Although adults often refer to these practices with the language of “bullying,” teens are more likely to refer to the resultant skirmishes and their digital traces as “drama.” Drama is a performative set of actions distinct from bullying, gossip, and relational aggression, incorporating elements of them but also operating quite distinctly. While drama is not particularly new, networked dynamics reconfigure how drama plays out and what it means to teens in new ways. In this paper, we examine how American teens conceptualize drama, its key components, participant motivations for engaging in it, and its relationship to networked technologies. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork, we examine what drama means to teenagers and its relationship to visibility and privacy. We argue that the emic use of “drama” allows teens to distance themselves from practices which adults may conceptualize as bullying. As such, they can retain agency – and save face – rather than positioning themselves in a victim narrative. Drama is a gendered process that perpetrates conventional gender norms. It also reflects discourses of celebrity, particularly the mundane interpersonal conflict found on soap operas and reality television. For teens, sites like Facebook allow for similar performances in front of engaged audiences. Understanding how “drama” operates is necessary to recognize teens’ own defenses against the realities of aggression, gossip, and bullying in networked publics.

Six Provocations for Big Data by danah boyd & Kate Crawford

The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and many others are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing information from Twitter, Google, Verizon, 23andMe, Facebook, Wikipedia, and every space where large groups of people leave digital traces and deposit data. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale analysis of DNA help cure diseases? Or will it usher in a new wave of medical inequality? Will data analytics help make people’s access to information more efficient and effective? Or will it be used to track protesters in the streets of major cities? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Some or all of the above?

This essay offers six provocations that we hope can spark conversations about the issues of Big Data. Given the rise of Big Data as both a phenomenon and a methodological persuasion, we believe that it is time to start critically interrogating this phenomenon, its assumptions, and its biases.

Pope Francis’s Eco-Manifesto Looks Like a Game-Changer in the U.S. by John L. Allen Jr.

Now that Pope Francis finally has released his long-awaited encyclical letter on the environment, blaming “unfettered greed” for mounting pollution, global warming, and climate change, and framing strong limits on fossil fuels and greenhouse gases as a clear moral imperative, the question becomes: So what?

Despite a remarkable degree of hype in the run-up to Thursday’s presentation of Laudato Si’, the title of the pontiff’s 184-page ecological manifesto — which, among other things, caused the Vatican website to crash in response to massive demand to read the text — it’s still reasonable to wonder whether the pope’s exhortations will have any real-world impact.

After all, other moral authorities have weighed in on the same issues for some time, and it’s not as if the planet is notably cooler or cleaner as a result.

At least in the United States, however, there are three arenas where Laudato Si’ seems likely to have an immediate echo: the 2016 presidential race, the pope’s trip to the country in September, and the management of Catholic facilities all across America.

You can read Pope Francis’s ecological encyclical Laudato Si’ in its entirety online in English from the Vatican website. The official English title is “ENCYCLICAL LETTER LAUDATO SI’ OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME”.

The title Laudato Si’ comes from a song written by St. Francis; here’s an English translation of the first lines: “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.”

The English Journal, published by the National Council of Teachers of English, has made available for free an article from the May 2015 issue called Teaching Writing with Radio by Sarah Levine and Johanna (Jones) Franzel.

This article makes a case for using radio as a framework to teach writing in school. Teachers with no radio experience can help their students draw on “real world” radio standards to write strong, specific, and effective pieces, and then use everyday technology to share students’ stories with the world.

Noet publishes a weekly webcomic on classical themes.