Danah Boyd

danah boyd, a leading social media researcher who has sparked important conversations about data and privacy in our increasingly interconnected world, will speak on technology and society in a talk titled “Living in a Culture of Algorithms” at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 30, in Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall.

CHICAGO — danah boyd will be the keynote speaker at the President’s Program hosted by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) at the upcoming ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco, California.

It’s not uncommon for parents to find something their child posted online that seems completely out of place. But danah boyd, social media scholar and author of “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens,” says Facebook and Twitter are just the newest outlets for teenagers to experiment with who they want to be.

Unlike most adults, danah boyd understands the way teens use social media. That’s because she’s spent the past eight years traveling around the United States interviewing and observing teens to learn that what they do online is not only “complicated” but not what many people think.

Activist and scholar danah boyd is a widely respected technology researcher whose work focuses on social media — particularly with respect to youth culture ...