Talks at 12 with danah boyd

Please join us for our next Talks at Twelve – Thursday, December 4 at Noon with danah boyd. 

From the early days of online communities, many pundits envisioned a world where people could be more connected around the globe thanks to new technology. And yet, this is not the world that social media brought forth. After years of struggling with misinformation, political polarization, and rampant distrust in institutions, many have begun to wonder if social media might be fundamentally malevolent. This has prompted policymakers to focus on regulating kids’ access to social media.

In this talk, Dr. Boyd will discuss her current work on how youth mental health intersects with technology – and why many of the necessary interventions don’t start with public policy or even technology. The good news is that there’s a lot that we can do right now.

danah boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and society, with an eye towards how structural inequities shape and are shaped by technologies. She is currently conducting a multi-year ethnographic study of the US census to understand how data are made legitimate. She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University, a master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Ph.D in Information from the University of California, Berkeley.

Register for the in-person and Zoom event here: https://bctr.cornell.edu/event/what-to-do-when-the-kids-are-not-ok/