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| Mmm, like, excuse me. This conversation is kinda like private. Like you wouldn't understand. |
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| OMG, I can't believe you'd talk to that fart-chicken, she is such a biznatch, like, I don't want you to talk to her anymore, or I will totally go ape$hit, I mean it! - Inhale, girl, inhale. |
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| Ahhh, I'm going all crazy! - Me, too! |
The practice of hiding in plain sight is not new. When ancient
Greeks wanted to send a message over great distances, they could not rely
on privacy. Messengers could easily be captured and encoded
messages deciphered.
The most secure way to send a "private" message was
to make sure that no one knew that the message existed in the first
place. Historical sources describe the extraordinary lengths to which
Greeks went, hiding messages within wax tablets or tattooing them on a
slave’s head and allowing the slave’s hair to grow out before sending
him or her out to meet the message’s recipient.
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| When I hold my fingers like this, in one of my mudras, it means Pat likes me!!! |
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| It was all snap googly and insta, man. - What? |
Although these messages
could be easily read by anyone who bothered to look, they became
visible only if the viewer knew to look for them in the first place.
Cryptographers describe this practice of hiding messages in plain sight
as steganography.
Children love to experiment with encoding messages. From pig latin
to invisible ink pens, children explore hidden messages when they’re
imagining themselves as spies and messengers.
And as children grow up, they
look for more sophisticated means of passing messages that elude the
watchful eyes of adults.
In watching teens navigate public networks, I
became enamored of how they were regularly encoding hidden meaning in
publicly available messages. They were engaged in a practice that Alice
Marwick and I called “social steganography,” or hiding messages in
plain sight by leveraging shared knowledge and cues embedded in
particular social contexts.
This uses countless linguistic and cultural tools --
including lyrics, in-jokes, and culturally specific references to encode
messages that are functionally accessible but simultaneously
meaningless.
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| Obama and the NSA may spy, but we... XOXO |
Some teens use pronouns while others refer to events, use
nicknames, and employ predetermined
code words to share gossip that
lurking adults cannot interpret. Many teens write in ways that will blend
in and be
invisible to or
misinterpreted by adults. Whole
conversations about school gossip, crushes...
More + AUDIO
Online, researcher says, teens do what they've ALWAYS done
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| Don't call me, just text, 'kay? - O.K. |
Researcher Danah Boyd is obsessed with how teenagers use the
Internet. For the legions of adults who are worried about them, that's a
good thing.
With a Ph.D. from UC
Berkeley, a Masters from MIT, and as a senior researcher at
Microsoft, Boyd is something of a star in the world of social media. For
her new book, It's Complicated, she spent about eight years
studying teenagers and how they interact online.
She says she wrote the
book in part to help parents, educators, and journalists relax. "The kids
are all right," she says.
Before Facebook, before Myspace, Boyd (who prefers to use lowercase for her first and last name like e.e. cummings) was an early
adopter of the Internet. She got hooked when she was a teenager in the
mid-1990s living with her family in a small town in Pennsylvania. It was
"inspiring and exciting" to suddenly have access "to people who were
more interesting than the people I went to school with," she says.
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| Yay, the kids are all right! (Danah Boyd/CDI) |
Today,
boyd is one of those people who seems to have memorized several maps of
the World Wide Web. She roams like the rest of us, but she also seems
to know exactly where to go and what to do when she gets there. She's
got a variety of different Twitter accounts.
"I have both my formal,
professional @zephoria account, but then I also have a personal account
-- which is me joking around with friends -- and then I have an even sillier
account which is me pretending to be my 7-month-old son," says boyd.
"Flickr," she says, "has been a home for a long time to share photos
with friends," and LinkedIn is where she spends professional time.
On the subject of
Facebook, boyd rolls her eyes. Yes, she's there, but she finds it a very hard space to manage.
More + LISTEN (5:30)
