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If there's one cliché(陈词滥调) that really annoys Danah Boyd, a specialist researcher who has made a career from studying the way teenagers use the web, it's that of the digital native. "Today the world has computer-mediated communications. Thus, in order to learn about their social world around them, teenagers are learning about those things too. And they're using that to work out the stuff that kids have always worked out: peer(同龄人) sociality, status, etc.," she says.

It's no surprise Boyd takes exception, really: as one of the first digital anthropologists to dig into the way teenagers use social networking sites, she gained insights into the social web by taking a closer look at what was going on.

Lately, her work has been about explaining new ways of interpreting the behavior we see online. She outlined some examples at a recent conference in San Francisco, including the case of a young man from one of the poorest districts of Los Angeles who was applying for a top American college. The applicant said he wanted to escape the influence of violence, but the admissions officer was shocked when he discovered that the boy's MySpace page was covered with precisely the violent language he claimed to hate. "Why was he lying about his motivations?" asked the university. "He wasn't," said Boyd. "In his world, showing the right images online was a key part of surviving daily life."

Understanding what's happening online is especially important, for today's teenagers have a vastly different approach to privacy from their parents. She says, "Adults think of the home as a very private space. That's often not the case for teenagers because they have little or no control over who has access to it, or under what conditions. As a result, the online world can feel more private because it feels like there's more control."

The concept of control is central to Boyd's work, and it applies to pointing out the true facts about teenage behavior. Boyd suggests control remains in the same places as it always did. "Technologists all go for the idea of 'techno-utopia(乌托邦)', the web as great democratizer(民主化)," she says. "But we're not actually democratizing the whole system; we're just shifting the way in which we discriminate."

It's a call to arms that most academic researchers would tend to sidestep, but then Boyd admits to treading a fine line between academics and activists. "The questions I continue to want to ask are the things that are challenging to me: having to sit down and be forced to think about uncomfortable social stuff, and it's really hard to get my head around it, which means it's exactly what I should dive in and deal with," she says.