This photo by Ross Mayfield was taken at a different event, but it portrays danah, Mimi, and Justin evocatively:

At the November 14 DIY Media seminar, danah boyd (who presented in tandem with Justin Hall), spoke about “Creating Culture Through Collective Identity Performance.” boyd is a Graduate Student Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication, a PhD Candidate in School of Information at University of California-Berkeley, and a Social Media Researcher at Yahoo!

boyd pointed out that the personal profiles in social networking services provide “moments of representation of identity and digital body.” What makes SNSs unique, boyd asserted, are features around friends and networks of friendship that articulate and make visible aspects of interpersonal relationships and social networks that have always existed, but not so visibly. The SNS feature enabling participants to create, display, and edit lists of friends online (e.g., “Top 8″ in MySpace, friends lists in Facebook, Friendster, et. al.) presents young people with an opportunity to present their networks of social connections visibly to the world. “In MySpace,” boyd noted, “”top 8″ is like a high school drama — who you tell the world your best friend is will get you in horrible trouble offline or online. Who do I put in the top left slot”? MySpace management realized that this feature attracted attention, so they sold as a premium what had been a misfeature in their original design, charging to have more than 8 friends.

Comments on Friendster evolved beyond Friendster-like testimonials. “It became a way of speaking to and about someone and about yourself in the process. Making sure everyone else knows that they are in your list of friends solicits reciprocity. ”

This identity-play and social experimentation is a form of DIY media, boyd pointed out, because in social network services, social rituals and norms are signalled by online representations like graphical backgrounds and friend lists, displays of cultural consumption (playlists and fashions) and cultural production (photos, photostreams, and videos).

As has been the case with previous media that young people appropriated for their own uses (SMS, notably), groups of people in the early days of MySpace figured out that they could put html on their MySpace pages; other people used the ability to view html source code for a page to initiate a copy and paste culture. The people who were pimping out their profiles cared that they could modify pages, not about code.

“When you join, you see your friends’ profiles — those profiles teach you the norms of representation,” boyd explained. The norms of a group became networked, creating a visible context that informs the group about acceptable ways to behave and express themselves. “You get socialized into a culture by learning how to behave in different social situations” so viewing the social source code by inspecting your friends’ profiles is an analog to the creation of pages by copying and pasting html source.

“Networked publics have four important characteristics that non-mediated social networks — the face-to-face kind — don’t have: persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Until the Web, only celebrities had to deal with persistence and invisible audiences, ” and nobody dealt with replicability and searchability the way digital networks have made possible.

As an example of the way different media can change the ability to represent oneself, sometimes causing conflicts, boyd used the case of civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, who gave speeches to different publics in the 1960s, and addressed white politicians differently than he did black congregations. “But in 1968, he had to take his speeches to television and radio. He had to make a decision about how to represent himself. Youth are faced with a similar situation. Networked publics make youth norms visible.”

danah was called by a college admissions officer who knew she had been studying SNSs. The admissions officer was puzzled by the gang references on the MySpace page of a scholastically outstanding applicant. danah explained that this young man had to face his peers everyday in school. Contexts and how you behave in them can be vitally important.

MySpace banned YouTube, but the community reacted so fiercely that Tom — everybody’s friend — apologized for banning it. People put their YouTube videos up on MySpace. This mixing of sites is consistent with the social norms of digitally-literate youth: “copypaste culture makes many old boundaries irrelevant.”

boyd’s article on “Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites” has been published by First Monday.