Socio-Technical Systems

It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

danah boyd uses more than a decade of fieldwork and interviews to show that teenagers’ use of social media is nuanced and purposeful, shaped by social needs for identity, community, privacy, and expression. She argues that many adult fears — about addiction, privacy loss, danger, and bullying — are exaggerated or misunderstood and that teens’ networked lives reflect adaptive social behavior, not pathology.

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How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things

How Artifacts Afford updates affordance theory by shifting the focus from what technologies afford to how, for whom, and under what circumstances they afford actions, foregrounding the power and politics encoded in sociotechnical artifacts. Davis introduces a mechanisms and conditions framework that offers a precise, critical vocabulary for analyzing how technological features shape social behavior and outcomes.

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Social Media and the Struggle for Society

Baym argues that social media are not a neutral social good but part of a socio‑technical and economic system in which communication practices are commodified, with platforms harvesting social interaction as data for profit. She critiques how the term “social media” obscures issues of ownership, power, and inequality, and calls for approaches to media that support societal well‑being rather than monetizing users’ sociality.

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