Ms. Danah Boyd is one of the rarities on the social media scene: She knows what she's talking about and she's smart. She isn't just an observer, she's a participant. And she's been a participant for Quite Some Time. And, she knows how to back up and see the big picture.
Case in point: In December, Ms. Boyd spoke at Le Web and SuperNova and her topic was all about visibility. Here are a couple of aspects that, I think, prove my point:
Your sense of what people do with social media is highly dependent on what you consume, how you consume it, and why you're there in the first place. So is mine. The world you live in online looks different than the world I live in. And it looks different than the world that an average teen lives in. And it looks different than the world Lady Gaga lives in. And it looks different than the world that people from different cultural backgrounds experience. Our worlds are different, even if the interface gives us the impression that they're the same.What social media does is allow us to look in on these people's lives. Or, more accurately, see the traces of one aspect of their life. Public genres of social media give us the ability to access worlds that are different than ours. Regardless of where we are in the world, we can see the experiences of people who are different than us. But are we even looking?...Not everyone shares our values and, perhaps we should accept this. But I would argue that we should be informed so that we can make change that we want to see in this world. We have the power to build these systems. Rather than being shaped by our imagination of what we think will be, we can be informed about how the world is. And use that to drive the creation of systems in order to make change, in order to help create a world that we want to live in.
So we think about the digital society that we are creating, I invite you to think about visibility. What can you see that you couldn't before? How does this make you feel? And what are you going to do about it? Perhaps its time that we embrace visibility and take a moment to look. Take a moment to see. And, most importantly, take a moment to act.
Here's a link to her entire speech.
*By the way, just in case you didn't "get" the headline, there's an expression I've heard in Texas countless times. When referring to someone who has the truck, jeans and the shirt with the pearl snaps and the Resistol hat, but doesn't have any cows, someone might comment that, "He's all hat and no cattle."
