March, 2008

Noticed / Thoughts — 5 Comments
11
Mar 08

Unit Structures Speaking in SF, March 13

This Thursday, I have the great honor of guest lecturing to David Silver’s fantastic, innovative class on Digital Literacy. This semester, David’s been bringing in a wide range of experts to meet with his class – a small group of honors students at the University of San Francisco. I’m very excited to meet this exceptional group and their prof; they’re in a very special learning environment this semester.

I’ll be talking about my research on social networks and my work with ClaimID, among other things. The talk will be informal, which is a relief after the three talks I gave at the iConference last week (note to self, 3 is too many). My goal is to leave my audience with new questions and perspectives on social networks; this is actually a significant challenge because David’s class is made up of undergraduates.

As I move towards my dissertation proposal, my interests are focusing on the role online social networks play in relational processes; how they help people make new friends, and how they help people maintain friends at distance. I’m most interested in in-transition populations – students leaving high school to attend college, or college students moving to their first job. These individuals have unique social-informational needs – think about how many friends a first-year college student makes…information overload! – and I’m interested in studying the role social networks play in aiding them. Interestingly enough, this topic – the thing that may one day be my dissertation, grew out of this blog post (these posts were also pretty influential).

My talk weaves together a number of these themes: social network use and adoption behavior, privacy and disclosure, cultural acquisition, identity formation. What I hope to get across is why social networks are so great that I get out of bed each morning to study them. If I can’t make that argument I’m in trouble!

As David notes, this talk is open to the public, so I’d like to invite you to attend. Details can be found at the USF page or the Upcoming page. The talk will be at 6:30PM on Thursday, in Fromm Hall on the USF Campus.

Noticed — 3 Comments
6
Mar 08

No Adbusting in Facebook?

From Nancy Baym, a curious Facebook story:

I wrote a few weeks ago about Nick, who has been on a satiric effort to subvert the Facebook Fan concept by friending any and all big brands he can find. He’d collected about 150 brands. But last night all but a few miraculously disappeared. He’s left with only 8 or 9 versions of Starbucks to adore and a smattering of other brands.

I’m not going to jump to conclusions quite yet because I imagine there’s a backstory (and I’m interested in hearing it). Facebook couldn’t be so post-ironic that it didn’t expect subversion of a system that encourages the befriending of multinational corporations, right? My guess is they’ve purged brands created by people who are not associated with the brand’s network; the fact that anyone could create a page for Union Carbide was too simply too sublime to last.

Noticed — 2 Comments
5
Mar 08

News and Notes

A couple quick dispatches:

The Berkman Center has posted a video of Clay Shirky’s talk from his new book, Here Comes Everybody. I’ve seen Clay speak a few places and he’s fiercely intelligent – I really look forward to reading the book.

Browsing Clay’s talk, I noticed that the Berkman site also featured a discussion with my friend Zack Exley. All of us in NC miss Zack and Elizabeth as they work on great projects throughout the country.

I’m proud to announce that I’ll be joining the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition as a consultant. In this role I’ll be brainstorming and implementing methods to encourage cross-talk between the winners of the competition, among many other things. This is particularly exciting as the role fits my skills and interests so well. I’ll certainly be posting updates as this work progresses – I’m very excited to take on this project.

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