danah boyd’s 2014 book on the lives teens live on social networks
danah boyd boasts a slew of titles including Principle 
Researcher at Microsoft, visiting professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and faculty affiliate of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society so safe to say I knew going into this book boyd didn’t wake up one day and decide to research this topic. boyd has published many papers and essays on the subject of social media and how it affects society. boyd’s title, “It’s Complicated,” is a great way to sum up her research of how teens use social media and how it effects their personal relationships with one another.
boyd keeps a casual approach to what some would consider a dry topic. Rather than getting lost in psychological terminology or behavior, boyd writes of her experience and findings in a way that will keep you in tuned to the teens she interviews and their approach to social media and the lives they live on each network. I found this as a relief seeing as anytime I have been forced to read what I would refer to as a boring academic text has been difficult and unmemorable.
Along with giving the ages of the teens interviewed, boyd gives their race and their location as a means of showing the diversity of the individuals used in her years of research. Places such as Iowa, Michigan, Boston, Los Angeles and New York are visited and the different social media mentioned shows the evolution of teens and social media use. Myspace, Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook are among them. By distinguishing between the location, age and race of each teen, boyd gave her findings more strength and credibility because she didn’t focus on a sole group with a few outliers.
One of my favorite parts of the book could be used as an abstract and hits boyd’s point home:
“As teens struggle to make sense of different social contexts and present themselves appropriately, one thing becomes clear: the internet has not evolved into an idyllic zone in which people are free from the limitation of the embodied world. Teens are struggling to make sense of who they are and how they fit into society in an environment in which contexts are networked and collapsed, audiences are invisible, and anything they say or do can easily be taken out of context. They are grappling with battles that adults face, but they are doing do while under constant surveillance and without a firm grasp of who they are.”
Boyd’s strength is her organization of her research. Split into chapters such as privacy, bullying, addiction and inequality, each chapter gives the reader an in-depth look at how teens are effected and play a part of or create each subject.
One of the more distracting aspects of the book is the repetition. I believe boyd wrote each chapter with as much supporting evidence as she could and it gets to be redundant after so many pages of reading about a different teen with the same general conclusion. For example, in the chapter on privacy boyd starts off with a male 17-year-old from North Carolina referred to as “Waffles” about privacy and he responses, “Every teenager wants privacy. Every single last one of them, whether they tell you or not, wants privacy.” We are then moved to 17-year-old Bly Lauritano-Werner and her National Public Radio piece on her mother crossing boundaries of privacy by viewing Bly’s LiveJournal account, then we meet Alicia, Shamika, Carmen, Serena, Jenna, Mikalah, Kat and Christopher. It can be overwhelming keeping track of these teens within one chapter and their views on privacy.
“It’s Complicated” can be summed up by one of the sentences that stands out from the text, “In short, they’re [teens] navigating one heck of a cultural labyrinth.”
Emily J Ridener 