Cracking teens' online codes

With her coordinated zebra-striped scarf, tights and arm warmers (arm warmers?), spiky out-to-there hat and pierced tongue, 34-year-old Danah Boyd provides an electric Gen Y contrast to the staid gray lobby of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Mass., which she enters in a flurry of animated conversation, Elmo-decorated iPhone in hand. In a juxtaposition that causes her no end of mischievous delight, her laptop bears a sticker of Snow White, whose outstretched arm gently cradles the Apple logo.

But Boyd — a senior researcher at Microsoft, an assistant professor at New York University and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard — is a widely respected figure in social media research. With a number of influential scholarly papers under her name, she travels relentlessly, tweets under the handle Zephoria and has fans trailing her at TED conferences, at South by Southwest and elsewhere on the high-tech speaking circuit.

She is also a kind of rock star emissary from the online and offline world of teenagers. The young subjects of her research become her friends on Facebook and subscribe to her Twitter feed.

"The single most important thing about Danah is that she's the first anthropologist we've got who comes from the tribe she's studying," said Clay Shirky, a professor in the interactive telecommun-ications program at NYU and a fellow at the Berkman Center.

There's no shortage of grown-up distress over the dangers young people face online. Parents, teachers and schools worry about teenagers posting their lives (romantic indiscretions, depressing poetry and all), leaking passwords and generally flouting social conventions as predators, bullies and unsavory marketers lurk.

Endless back-and-forthing over how to respond effectively — shutting Web sites, regulating online access and otherwise tempering the world of social media for children — dominates the PTA and the halls of policymakers.

But as Boyd sees it, adults are worrying about the wrong things. Children today, she said, are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place offline.

"Children's ability to roam has basically been destroyed," Boyd said in her office at Microsoft, where a view of the Boston skyline is echoed in the towers of books on her shelves, desk and floor. "Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now, even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today."

Children naturally congregate on social media sites for the relatively unsupervised conversations, flirtations, immature humor and social exchanges that are the normal stuff of teenage hanging-out, she said.

"We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them," she added. "What scares me is that we don't want to look at the things that make us uncomfortable. So rather than see what teenagers are showing us online about bullying and suicide and the problems they're dealing with and using that information to help them, we're making ourselves blind to it."

These are issues that Boyd has lived with and knows well.

"At the age of 16, I thought I'd be dead by 21," she said. "I lost 13 classmates to drug overdoses, suicides, accidents and a murder."

Her parents divorced when she was 5 and her father largely disappeared. She was raised by her mother, sometimes in straitened circumstances, in Lancaster, Pa. Bored at school, she rebelled — challenging teachers, lashing out at her mother, hanging out with hackers and languishing in school.