danah boyd wrote two really interesting posts this weekend that gave an interesting perspective on a couple of headlines I've seen in blogs and mainstream news. Her post on narcissism gave an interesting perspective on stories such as CNN's Study: Vanity on the rise among college students which had me curious for more details when I read it originally. The post on Twitter gives a practical perspective I hadn't considered or seen mentioned in all the blogosphere ravings about the service since the hype storm started after the SXSW conference.

Interesting excerpts from danah boyd's post entitled fame, narcissism and MySpace

For those who are into pop science coverage of academic work, i'd encourage you to start with Jake Halpern's "Fame Junkies" (tx Anastasia). For simplicity sake, let's list a few of the key findings that have emerged over the years concerning narcissism.

• While many personality traits stay stable across time, it appears as though levels of narcissism (as tested by the NPI) decrease as people grow older. In other words, while adolescents are more narcissistic than adults, you were also more narcissistic when you were younger than you are now.
• The scores of adolescents on the NPI continue to rise. In other words, it appears as though young people today are more narcissistic than older people were when they were younger.

...
My view is that we have trained our children to be narcissistic and that this is having all sorts of terrifying repercussions; to deal with this, we're blaming the manifestations instead of addressing the root causes and the mythmaking that we do to maintain social hierarchies. Let's unpack that for a moment.

American individualism (and self-esteem education) have allowed us to uphold a myth of meritocracy. We sell young people the idea that anyone can succeed, anyone can be president. We ignore the fact that working class kids get working class jobs. This, of course, has been exacerbated in recent years. There used to be meaningful working class labor that young people were excited to be a part of. It was primarily masculine labor and it was rewarded through set hierarchies and unions helped maintain that structure. The unions crumpled in the 1980s and by the time the 1987 recession hit, there was a teenage wasteland No longer were young people being socialized into meaningful working class labor; the only path out was the "lottery" (aka becoming a famous rock star, athlete, etc.).

Interesting excerpts from danah boyd's post entitled Tweet Tweet (some thoughts on Twitter)

Of course, the population whose social world is most like the tech geeks is the teens. This is why they have no problems with MySpace bulletins (which are quite similar to Twitter in many ways). The biggest challenge with teens is that they do not have all-you-can-eat phone plans. Over and over, the topic of number of text messages in one's plan comes up. And my favorite pissed off bullying act that teens do involves ganging up to collectively spam someone so that they'll go over their limit and get into trouble with their parents (phone companies don't seem to let you block texts from particular numbers and of course you have to pay 10c per text you receive). This is particularly common when a nasty breakup occurs and i was surprised when i found out that switching phone numbers is the only real solution to this. Because most teens are not permanently attached to a computer and because they typically share their computers with other members of the family, Twitterific-like apps wouldn't really work so well. And Twitter is not a strong enough app to replace IM time.

Read both posts, they are really good. And if you aren't subscribed to her blog, you should be.