Source
danah boyd (2008), Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, LIT-1001, read in part: §1.5, §4.4 and selected passages in NOTE-710, and Chapters 1, 4 and 7 in full in NOTE-1432; the methods chapter and Chapters 5–6 are unread. The account of collapsed contexts is Meyrowitz’s (1985) account of broadcast media, extended to everyday people; Meyrowitz is not held. This account rests on a skim.
What was actually shown
The dynamic (p. 34). “Collapsed contexts: the lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts.”
The paradigm case (pp. 36–37, after Meyrowitz 1985: 43). Carmichael used “very different rhetorical styles when speaking to blacks and whites”. He “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”. Broadcast left “no neutral speaking style”.
Collisions before networked media (p. 38). Weddings, “in which context collisions are common, are frequently scripted to make everyone comfortable”. Meeting one’s boss while out with friends is awkward, but both parties see the collision and adjust. Online, “the performer is unaware of audiences from different contexts, magnifying the awkwardness and making adjustments impossible.”
Teenagers (pp. 145–146, 225). Teens “feel more pressure when they are forced to contend simultaneously with different audiences, such as peers and parents”, and manage it structurally (privacy settings, false details) and socially. MySpace’s Top Friends forced friends “from different contexts … into a single spot for comparison.”
Distinct contexts are not deception (p. 37). Context helps people “properly locate their performances”, as bilingual speakers choose a language by setting.
What this does not say
- That the effect is measured. No count compares conflict with and without segregated audiences. The evidence is ethnographic.
- That differing presentations are harmless in themselves. The claim is conditional on segregation holding; it says nothing about presentations that differ for reasons other than audience.
- That collapse began with social media. Broadcast collapsed contexts for public figures first (Meyrowitz), and scripted occasions show people managing collisions long before either.
- Anything beyond US teenagers of 2004–2008, except through the Carmichael case, which the record has only at second hand.
- That the documented collisions are of differing presentations. In the teens’ cases boyd documents (pp. 165–166), the trouble is mostly one presentation, often co-written by friends, read by an unintended audience without its context: a quiz result taken for drug use, joking insults taken for meanness. Carmichael is the case of presentations that differ by audience, and the record has it only at second hand. The teens’ remedy is to control the audience, not to unify the presentation (p. 163).
Connections
- CLAIM-317 states this observation as the record’s own empirical claim, with CASE-064 as a documented collapse, and CLAIM-196 builds on it a claim that role conflict needs an overlap of contexts. This THEORY is the reading those claims ground in.
- Goffman’s dramaturgy (1959) is the frame boyd names as “at the core” of her account of identity (p. 125). It is not held.
Note of 2026-10-30: what holds it back
Its promote_when, a study comparing conflict between differing presentations when the audiences are kept apart and when a channel brings them together, is unmet: boyd’s Chapters 1, 4 and 7, now read in full (NOTE-1432), make no such comparison, and her evidence is the interviews and cases the promote_when says cannot settle it. boyd is still read only in part, so it cannot be promoted on one source read in full either.