I spent the majority of last week in Milwaukee, WI attending the 10th annual Association of Internet Researchers conference. This was my first time attending AOIR, and it was a great experience. As an interdisciplinary researcher, I enjoyed seeing the diversity of methods and theories being applied to internet research. Congratulations to the organizers for running an excellent conference. IR11 will be in Sweden, and IR12 will be in Seattle, WA – hosted by UW’s iSchool.
I was busy at AOIR, attending the doctoral colloquium (my last as a student), and giving two talks. The first talk was a paper, entitled “Boundary Regulation in Social Media.” This is work Woody Hartzog and I collaborated on, in which we interviewed people who maintain multiple, separate profiles on social network sites. We were interested in learning about how these folks use multiple profiles as a boundary regulation strategy. This research highlights a number of issues many of us are experiencing with context merging – as our friends, family members, coworkers and past friends merge into a single social network. I’ve posted the slides below:
The second talk was out of some research-in-progress exploring the adoption of social networks by older users. Over the past year, the largest growth sector in social networking has been the 35+ demograpic. In our research, we talked to people in their 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s about their use of social network sites. This was fascinating research, and learning about some of the challenges of reconnection via SNS after 30, 40 or even 50 years was particularly interesting. As I mentioned, this is research in progress – which I’m conducting with Cheryl Thompson and Valeda Stull – and it involves a mix of methods and components. Our next step is to implement a survey that builds on our findings. You can see the slides below:
As for general themes for the conference, I admit I stuck pretty close to the social media/networking/privacy talks, but some general observations: First, context is big. Lots of researchers are looking at the effect of context on disclosure behavior. Context has big practical implications for social networking sites, and both of my qualitative studies reveal that the big sites have lots of work to do to address these needs.
Second, mass reconnection is an interesting byproduct of the “democratization” of social networks (as Amanda Lenhart described.) Reconnection was absolutely driving the use of social networks among the older users we interviewed. Before SNS, reconnection was a costly and inefficient process; I think we can argue that the particular affordances of SNS (search, articulated networks) facilitate reconnection, and that reconnection is going to drive use of SNS for some time. Of course, we must remember that the SNS is just the medium for reconnection, and that the “infrastructure” of reconnection relies on increasing broadband adoption, cheaper computers, and increasing technical literacy.
This goes without saying, but Twitter was a hot topic at AOIR. I particularly enjoyed the work of danah boyd and Alice Marwick, who conducted a series of studies on Twitter this summer at Microsoft Research. Alice’s talk was focused on the production of celebrity and microcelebrity in Twitter, and was just fascinating. danah expanded this research, expanding how “teens are Twittering.” Indeed, teens are a marginal segment of Twitter, with sparse networks, but what was particularly interesting is how they were using celebrity to create vectors for conversation, bridging networks and building relationships. Very impressive research from both.
Of course, there were lots of great presentations at AOIR, too many to mention here. I would like to particularly thank Heather Attig, Amanda Lenhart and Sarita Yardi, who were my co-panelists on the Late Adopters panel. I really liked how this panel came together, bridging a variety of research questions and methods to provide insight into this phenomenon. I’ll leave you with the slides from Amanda’s presentation, which provide some brand new topline data on Adult SNS use (47%).
Oh yes, if you want copies of the papers, I’ll be happy to email them to you. I’m not posting them right now because some are either under review, or being revised for journal submission. Just drop me a line.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
