Danah Boyd - Education

Education

She initially studied computer science at Brown University where she worked with Andries van Dam, and wrote an undergraduate thesis on how "3-D computer systems used cues that were inherently sexist." She then pursued her master's degree in sociable media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. She worked for the New York-based V-Day (movement), first as a volunteer (starting in 2004) and then as paid staff (2007–2009). She eventually moved to San Francisco, where she met the individuals involved in creating the new Friendster service. She documented what she was observing via her blog, and this grew into a career.

boyd earned a PhD in 2008 at the UC Berkeley School of Information, advised by Peter Lyman (1940–2007) and Mizuko Ito (aka Mimi Ito). Her dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, focused on the use of large social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace by U.S. teenagers, and was blogged on Boing Boing.

During the 2006–07 academic year, boyd was a fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. She has been a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University since 2007, where she co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, and then served on the Youth and Media Policy Working Group.