Social Network Sites, Social Media
Since the late 1990s, I've studied a range of digital tools that help people communicate, connect, and share. This includes Usenet, blogging, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, etc.
Last Updated: June 4, 2026
Social Network Sites, Social Media
Animating Questions
  • What is social media?  Definitions, affordances, narratives.
  • What role does social media play in everyday life? Practices, norms.
  • How do practices and platforms (co-)evolve? Institutional logics, interactions.
A Few Notable Publications
boyd, danah. 2026. “Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media.” Social Media + Society 12 (2): 20563051261437487. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261437487.
 
Caplan, Robyn, and danah boyd. 2018. “Isomorphism through Algorithms: Institutional Dependencies in the Case of Facebook.” Big Data & Society 5 (1): 205395171875725. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718757253.
 
Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13 (1): 114–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313.
 
boyd, danah. 2008. “Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14 (1): 13–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856507084416.
 
boyd, danah m., and Nicole B. Ellison. 2007. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (1): 210–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x.
 
boyd, danah. 2006. “Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites.” First Monday 11 (12). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v11i12.1418.
 
See publications for many more articles on social media and social network sites. 
 
Collaborators