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LIT-1001: Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics

2 min read

Properties7
StatusActive — read in part 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1432, Skimmed) from the author's copy at danah.org (www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf), licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Appendix 3): Chapter 1 on networked publics, Chapter 4 on self-presentation and context, and Chapter 7 in full, with the passages on collapse elsewhere; Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6 were not read in full. This extends the reading of 2026-10-12 (NOTE-710). Worth reading for its account of collapsed contexts: distinct social contexts are kept apart by spatial, social and temporal boundaries, and networked media remove them, so audiences a person keeps apart are brought together, often without the person seeing it. Its examples, after Meyrowitz (1985), show contradictory self-presentations doing no harm while the audiences stay segmented, and trouble when they meet. Read it knowing that the evidence is ethnographic, with no comparison of conflict between segmented and collapsed audiences, and that the teens' documented collisions are mostly one presentation misread by an unintended audience.
Version2
Tagssocial-science, self, pragmatics
SupportsCLAIM-196 — A person's roles in contexts that do not meet cannot contradict one another: role conflict needs an overlap, which segregating audiences prevents and collapsed contexts create, CLAIM-317 — Self-presentations that differ by audience do no harm while the audiences are kept apart; people keep them apart and script the occasions where they must meet, and broadcast and networked media bring them together unchosen, which is when the presentations collide
ReportsCASE-052 — Stokely Carmichael's two speaking styles, kept apart by audience and collapsed by broadcast
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1432 — boyd — Taken Out of Context: networked publics and context collapse, NOTE-710 — boyd (2008), Taken Out of Context: collapsed contexts
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-406 — Self-presentations that differ by audience coexist without trouble while the audiences are kept apart by spatial, social and temporal boundaries, and collide when a medium removes the boundaries; networked publics make the collision frequent and often unseen by the person it happens to

Graph View

danah boyd (2008), PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley — danah.org

Key takeaways

Read in part; see NOTE-710 and the fuller reading NOTE-1432 (both Skimmed).

  • Collapsed contexts. “The lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts.”
  • Segmented presentations are fine until the audiences meet. After Meyrowitz (1985: 43): “Carmichael was able to maintain distinct styles as long as he was able to segment social groups, he ran into trouble when electronic media collapsed those social groups and with them, the distinct contexts in which they were embedded.”
  • Collisions were managed before networked media. “Events like weddings, in which context collisions are common, are frequently scripted to make everyone comfortable.”

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-12 as the outside evidence for CLAIM-196 (that evidence is now CLAIM-317): a person’s roles conflict only where their contexts overlap. social-science comes first, for the ethnography. self is for self-presentation, and pragmatics for audience design. Not held in the anthology. Goffman (1959) and Meyrowitz (1985), on whom it builds, are not filed and not read.

Read further on 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1432) for THEORY-406, whose promote_when asks for a comparative study of conflict with audiences kept apart and brought together. boyd supplies no such comparison, so the fuller reading strengthens the account’s illustration, not its test.

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