Danah Quotes & Sayings

If a self-organizing system becomes too static, it runs down; if it becomes too chaotic, it breaks apart. — Danah Zohar

[I am a co - creator], an active agent in this universe who makes things happen. If I want the world to change, I have to change it. — Danah Zohar

Listening to teens talk about social media addiction reveals an interest not in features of their computers, smartphones, or even particular social media sites but in each other. — Danah Boyd

Building new connections is a critical part of building a new economy. The American education system, as flawed as it is, is great for the creative class because of the way it mixes up networks. — Danah Boyd

High SQ demands the most intense personal integrity. It demands that we stand open to experience, that we recapture our ability to see life and others afresh, as though through the eyes of a child, to learn how to tap into our intuition and visualization, as a powerful means of using our inner knowing to "make a difference." It demands that we cease to seek refuge in what we know and constantly explore and learn from what we do not know. It demands that we live the questions rather than the answers. — Danah Zohar

LinkedIn is very good for browsing relationships and hooking into your contacts' networks. It re-connected me with high-level execs I hadn't talked to for some time, who then helped me close various deals. — Danah Boyd

Business culture operates differently in different cities around the world. But I don't think it's possible to design one system that incorporates all social norms for networking. Human beings are just too diverse. — Danah Boyd

In a world where information is easily available, strong personal networks and access to helpful people often matter more than access to the information itself.30 — Danah Boyd

Along with planes, running water, electricity, and motorized transportation, the internet is now a fundamental fact of modern life. — Danah Boyd

Incantations for Muggles:
The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life — Danah Boyd

For higher-level execs with greater public visibility, social networks need to become as good at filtering as they are at connecting. — Danah Boyd

Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context. — Danah Boyd

I love librarians. They always make me feel like the world's gonna be AOK. — Danah Boyd

Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. — Danah Boyd

And I think that's a lot of the reason why when you start to fragment your audience, you start to think about what you're looking for, you'll go to different spaces, and it parallels what we do as adults. You go to different bars when you're in the mood for different things. You see different people when you want to go listen to music or when you just want to have a quiet drink with a couple of friends. — Danah Boyd

I want to support the view that the foundation of reality itself is a unified, indeterminate maze of possibilities. — Danah Zohar

The things that make us safest from others make us least from ourselves. — Danah Boyd

Social networks are like grease - in some cases, gasoline - for our personal business networking machines. If you aren't plugged in, you will be out-done by better-connected, hyper-networked colleagues and competitors. — Danah Boyd

Most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other. — Danah Boyd

Long before the internet, critical media literacy has never been considered essential in schools or communities. Instead, — Danah Boyd

We are all inspired by the incredible stories of handicapped people who write novels with their toes, cancer victims who run marathons for cancer research, bereaved parents who set up memorial funds for their lost children. How much easier is it for most of us to be small heroes simply by taking responsibility for our daily lives and transcending our ordinary obstacles? — Danah Zohar

Rather than focusing on coarse generational categories, it makes more sense to focus on the skills and knowledge that are necessary to make sense of a mediated world. Both youth and adults have a lot to learn. — Danah Boyd

for the teens that I interviewed, privacy isn't necessarily something that they have; rather it is something they are actively and continuously trying to achieve in spite of structural or social barriers that make it difficult to do so. Achieving privacy requires more than simply having the levers to control information, access, or visibility. Instead, achieving privacy requires the ability to control the social situation by navigating complex contextual cues, technical affordances, and social dynamics. Achieving privacy is an ongoing process because social situations are never static. — Danah Boyd

There's nothing native about young people's engagement with technology, — Danah Boyd

Teens' use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background [boyd, danah , "An Old Fogey's Analysis of a Teenager's View on Social Media," Medium, January 12, 2015]. — Danah Boyd

What happens online is you are constantly dealing with invisible audiences. — Danah Boyd

Just because teens can and do manipulate social media to attract attention and increase visibility does not mean that they are equally experienced at doing so or that they automatically have the skills to navigate what unfolds. It simply means that teens are generally more comfortable with - and tend to be less skeptical of - social media than adults. They don't try to analyze how things are different because of technology; they simply try to relate to a public world in which technology is a given. — Danah Boyd

One of the best ways to understand how filters shape our individual experience is to think in terms of our information diet. As sociologist danah boyd said in a speech at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo: Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they're rare in nature ... In the same way, we're biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we're not careful, we're going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We'll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole. — Eli Pariser

We're so obsessed with [big] data, we forget how to interpret it. — Danah Boyd

In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about "people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet." Intending to parody society's obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: "I don't think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error. — Danah Boyd

Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both. — Danah Boyd

Teens are desperate to have access to and make sense of public life; understanding the technologies that enable publics is just par for the course. — Danah Boyd

The way you can understand all of the Social Media is as the creation of a new kind of public space. — Danah Boyd

More often than not, what people put up online using social media is widely accessible because most systems are designed such that sharing with broader or more public audiences is the default. Many popular systems require users to take active steps to limit the visibility of any particular piece of shared content. This is quite different from physical spaces, where people must make a concerted effort to make content visible to sizable audiences.8 In networked publics, interactions are often public by default, private through effort. — Danah Boyd