Television & New Media 13(2) 177–185 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1527476411428626 http://tvnm.sagepub.com 428626TVN 13 2 10.1177/152747641 1428626TurnerTelevision & New Media 1 Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Corresponding Author: Fred Turner, Department of Communication, Stanford University, Rm. 436 McClatchy Hall (office hours), Stanford, CA 94305–2004 Email: fturner@stanford.edu A Conversation with danah boyd, Microsoft Research Fred Turner 1 Abstract On July 7, 2011, new media historian Fred Turner interviewed Microsoft Research Senior Researcher danah boyd about her research on teens and new media, queer identities, and the role of the media researcher as a public intellectual in the United States. Keywords Microsoft, new media, queer identity, public intellectual, teenagers Turner: So I have two goals for our conversation. One is to ask you about your work so that people understand what you’ve learned about teens. Two is to talk about how you do your work, why you do what you do, and what it means to be the kind of intellectual that you are at this particular moment. boyd: I should back up and sort of give you some context. I was a teen who grew up online. My mother bought a computer for my brother and I thought it was the dumb- est thing on the planet. I was like, “Why do I want to have anything to do with this? I have a typewriter. It’s fine.” My brother picked it up immediately. At some point when I was in middle school, I was very angry because he was using the phone and it was making bee bee bee dee sounds. And so I marched into his room and asked, “What is this? What are you doing?” It didn’t take long until I was online. This was somewhere around 1993, so it was early state bulletin boards (BBSes) and pre-Mosaic. It was fan- tastic. I was doing all these things. Meanwhile at school I was bored out of my mind. When I went to college, I got super involved in computer science. I was going to build all of the systems I was obsessed with. Over time I realized that I was more interested in the people than in the systems I was building. And then I met [Stanford anthropologist–turned–Intel ethnographer] Genevieve Bell, who basically took me on by guest on June 23, 2016 tvn.sagepub.com Downloaded from