The article author's notion that we are in disciplinary camps, divided, and eager to get to the Land of Social Networking, put up our disciplinary flag, and claim it for our own before the others do does not reflect what I see in AoIR, which is much more attention to learning from each other than competing with each other. I also have to say that going for the danah angle was lazy. I love danah, I cite and teach her work, she's got a piece in a book Annette Markham and I just finished editing, and I admire her success as a public intellectual, but the "danah boyd invents social networking research" story has been written many times (Hesse even nabs a moniker directly from one of those articles) and, as danah will be the first to say, it's still silly. There are considerably more interesting tales to be told about the study of social network sites in academia. But as my father likes to say: "whenever journalists write about other people's fields they get it exactly right, but whenever they write about your own field, they get it exactly wrong." Nancy
The tone of Monica Hesse's Washington Post story is somewhat snide.
Although I did enjoy some of her word-play: "celebrademic" danah "uncapping" herself (altho note that the Post copyeditor re-capped her at the start of a para.) Frankly, "danah" uncapped has made proofreading PITAs for me for years.
What is ignorant is Ms Hesse being surprised that small circles cite each other. This is true in many fields. There is a whole area of bibliometrics devoted to this. Check out the work of Howard White or Loet Leyesdorff, for example. Or, as usual, I have co-authored a paper on the subject -- its on my website. "Does Citation Reflect Social Structure? Longitudinal Evidence from the 'Globenet' Interdisciplinary Reserach Group" JASIST, 1/04.
What is surprising is that I was interviewed and quoted by Ms Hesse and it was a much straighter piece of reporting:
"An Unmanageable Circle of Friends: Social-Network Sites Inundate Us with Connections, and that can be Alienating." Washington Post, August 26, 2007, p. M10. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/24/AR2007082400...
Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________
S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Room 418 Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-7162 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php Elvis wouldn't be singing "Return to Sender" these days _______________________________________________________________________
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