more than "academia" or "discipline" being mocked - my concern is that an up and coming young scholar has unfairly been highlighted and immaturely positioned as a target of older academics before her work has had a chance to hit center stage properly. This to me shows that the reporter was being very irresponsible in writing up the story and used mostly hearsay. I too like Dana and her blogging on social networking daily lives is very useful to me and my students as we try to understand these practices. I know her a bit (mostly through social networking sites actually:)) and I hardly think she would go around telling reporters she has had "death threats"... r Radhika Gajjala Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator School of Communication Studies 302 West Hall Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH 43402 http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik http://www.cyberdiva.org/blog

Is the "death threats" part really not what she said? She's quoted as such. danah? as for hearsay, the article attributes all but one quote from a fully-disclosed source. Overall the article is lite, but not really irresponsible, and while it may not represent the field in the way that the field wants to be represented, I think Nancy's father's quote: "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." is the most useful framing of the situation. Making gross generalizations about journalists and their motives, speculating as to how the story was constructed, is to commit the same mistake that this reporter is being accused of with regards to academia. After all, there are many journalists who are brilliant. Seymour Hersh for one). What if, instead of bashing the Post, aoir strategized how to portray itself to the public? -robert On 12/16/07, Radhika Gajjala <radhika@cyberdiva.org> wrote:

more than "academia" or "discipline" being mocked - my concern is that an up and coming young scholar has unfairly been highlighted and immaturely positioned as a target of older academics before her work has had a chance to hit center stage properly.

This to me shows that the reporter was being very irresponsible in writing up the story and used mostly hearsay. I too like Dana and her blogging on social networking daily lives is very useful to me and my students as we try to understand these practices. I know her a bit (mostly through social networking sites actually:)) and I hardly think she would go around telling reporters she has had "death threats"...

r

Radhika Gajjala Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator School of Communication Studies 302 West Hall Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH 43402 http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik

http://www.cyberdiva.org/blog

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

I guess the juicy "young scholar resented by sheeplike professors who cite one another and use big words unnecessarily" angle was too juicy to resist. But it is a shame that this vibrant area of research is presented as just the flavor of the month.

... and the senior folks doing work on networks... well, none of them are exactly sheep. :-) [f.e., Barry Wellman, Ron Breiger, Tom Snijder, Stan Wasserman, ad infinitum...] --elijah

Hey Danah, Don't beat yourself up mate. So much of this was out of your control. paul emerson teusner -----Original Message----- From: danah boyd [mailto:aoir.z3z@danah.org] Sent: Monday, 17 December 2007 13:26 To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] snide, cute, ignorant, surprising ::hands over face in horror:: I'm sooooo sorry for whatever role that I played in the creation of the article. I have to admit that I spent the bulk of the day wavering between being pissed off and being downright depressed. I'm sure it won't surprise any of you that much of this was taken out of context (and another chunk is outright wrong). I was particularly horrified by how she framed my deceased advisor as a fool. But I'm also sorry to everyone here who implicitly got framed poorly. Yuck yuck yuck. As for receiving threats, yes, I received multiple after my essay this summer, although none from academics (that I know of). This (along with the folks who photoshopped me as a cutter) was documented in my response to my essay this summer: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ResponseToClassDivisions.html I'm also annoyed with the implicit comment about my blog being my scholarship. Just in case it wasn't clear, I don't by any means consider my blog scholarship. At most, it's fieldnotes and musings. After the mess this summer, I considered taking it down, but the fact is that writing musings and getting feedback really helps me think through things. I just never thought that they would ever be assumed to be final publications, but conversation starters. Also, as Nancy has said, I do *not* take credit for creating this field (or internet anthropology or many other things that press folks claim). The odd thing is that she tried to force me into claiming that I invented this field and was the reason for the creation of social computing at RIT and UMich and I was like oh god no. It seems as though she put things in my mouth even when I explicitly rejected them. There are so many other issues with that article... I'm not even sure where to begin. But I'm super sorry and ashamed. I'm trying to do my research and make it public because I think that's important (and it's in my activist nature), not because I want to pick fights with fellow academics or make anyone look bad. One of the reasons that I wanted to put together that JCMC issue with Nicole was to highlight others' work in a collected way, not to send negativity their way. (And, incidentally, not all articles on SNSs cite my work.) If there are indeed folks out there who feel "seething resentment," please let me know how I can help. Cuz omg is this not something that I want to make people feel and I'm so sorry if I do. I feel terrible. I'm so sorry. danah _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

ditto! But also agree that we are not flawless, as has been suggested earlier. Danah is an active researcher and I as well as a number of friends with similar interests like her work, as much as wee enjoy and benefit from the discussions in this list. The recent JCMC issue was valuable and we enjoyed it in Susan Herring's CMC class. Perhaps the case is simply that Baym's father's words about journalists are perfectly right, and just reminiscent of some of these journalists' early accounts for CMC communities, language, etc. Keep up the good work Danah, and everybody! Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Dept. of Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA Radhika Gajjala <radhika@cyberdiva.org> wrote: ditto! r On Dec 16, 2007, at 9:43 PM, Paul Emerson Teusner wrote:

Hey Danah,

Don't beat yourself up mate. So much of this was out of your control.

paul emerson teusner

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ --------------------------------- Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.

It certainly is an interesting paradox of popularity killing off things. This is an example of, among other things, the tragedy of the commons. For instance, good, free highways between dense areas get filled up because they are well, free, and they link dense areas, until everyone suffers the freeway-as-parking-lot-syndrome (those living around Los Angeles, or most anywhere between Boston and Washington DC, around Tampa, etc., know this feeling). These material commons, as well as some kinds of information-based commons, can suffer this fate when there are limited alternatives. That was certainly the case with CB, because there were only a limited number of fixed frequencies. A study of desktop videoconference I did with Kraut, Fish and Cool showed that one form of social influence was just this kind of limiting the value of a new technology as one version finally superseded and extinguished the alternative in the organization (because critical mass and network externalities must favor one over the other, especially those with larger initial clusters of salient users (see my 1990 article on online critical mass and online network data approaches) - reflecting what has been recently called the "power law" of blog links) but then, due to all the other users coming on to the one system, pushing up against the bandwidth limits. Cell phone technology has pretty much avoided that because it keeps creating more powerful local cells, so that a given region can support more and more low-range frequencies. Internet discussion lists, support groups, etc., can also avoid this problem as people can just create offshoots, and packet-switching helps (but does not prevent) clogging up of the network arteries. So, for instance, my dissertation research (1982, and 1985 - yes, some folks were studying online networks before Facebook and blogs) showed that not only do people within online groups (as opposed to discussion lists) have to provide some minimum level of interaction and response to messages, but also don't have the time and energy resources to maintain too high a level (that is, we each have our own, varying, bandwidth constraints, except seemingly Barry Wellman), so the participants who maintained an above average flow of communication exchanges had to converge into that window of above minimum but below maximum amounts of interaction. Sudweeks et al.'s book also includes some great studies on the factors influencing the growth, competition, and decline of online groups. Linton Freeman, and Partick Doreian, among many others, have also studied the evolution of and competition between online group networks. Some of these principles may also apply to individual Facebook participants, and, until college-level Facebook systems were opened up to outsiders, there was a tension between local clusters, minimum and maximum levels, and bandwidth limits. Relating both to the NYT and WP articles, and much of the discussion about these and other entries on the AoIR list, there is a lot of prior work on online networks from a lot of people, before the era of blog essays. Barnett, G. & Rice, R. E. (1985). Longitudinal non-euclidean networks: Applying Galileo. Social Networks, 7(4), 287-322. Kraut, R., Rice, R. E., Cool, C., & Fish, R. (1998). Varieties of social influence: The role of utility and norms in the success of a new communication medium. Organization Science, 9(4), 437-453. Rice, R. E. (1982). Communication networking in computer-conferencing systems: A longitudinal study of group roles and system structure. In M. Burgoon (Ed.), Communication yearbook, 6 (pp. 925-944). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Rice, R. E. (1990). Computer-mediated communication system network data: Theoretical concerns and empirical examples. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 32(6), 627-647. Sudweeks, F., McLaughlin, M., & Rafaeli, S. (Eds.) (1988). Network & netplay: Virtual groups on the Internet. Cambridge, MA: AIII Press/MIT Press. ======================================================= Ronald E. Rice Arthur N. Rupe Chair in the Social Effects of Mass Communication Co-Director, Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media President of the International Communication Association 2006-2007 Dept. of Communication, 4840 Ellison Hall University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020 Ph: 805-893-8696; Fax: 805-893-7102 rrice@comm.ucsb.edu http://www.comm.ucsb.edu/rice_flash.htm http://www.cftnm.ucsb.edu/ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alex Randall" <Alex@islands.vi> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007 8:31 AM Subject: [Air-L] Musing on the Rise and fall of Social Networking - the CBradio example

Yes. I just used the CMC issue as cannon fodder for my CMC class. despite the snarky article, We are on a hot topic.

I reviewed the article that Barry Wellman raised ... ::"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... ::

I am struck with a thought and wonder if anyone has examined this...

Will Social networking suddenly fall out of favor...? Is it a fad that will soon clog up and be useless...

I had to ask if there is a parallel phenomena from the past that might shed light on the eventual demise of Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. And the clogging up of the channel reminded e of the rise and fall of CB radio

Back in the 1980's (aye, I am old enough to remember) there was a short lived enthusiasm for CB radio. A set of converging events led to a burst of use and then as sudden a decline.

NB: This is pre-cell phones, pre-computers, pre-wireless era. There was a fuel crisis that jacked up the price of gasoline virtually overnight... meanwhile the FCC liberalized the process of getting a CB license, the units became less expensive and there was a surge of enthusiasm, the fuel shortages of that era contributed because as drivers worked collectively to avoid speed traps so they could beat the 55 MPH limits...

It started with truck drivers and the pop culture of truckers spread the phenom to non-truckers and pretty soon millions of ordinary drivers had installed CB radios. In this pre-Cell Phone era, having a way to communicate from a car was perceived as useful and tens of thousands of the CB radios were installed each month for a few short years. A surge in pop culture around CB radio was entwined with the growth of its use... hit songs, hit movies with CB radio themes and many people memorized the "Ten's Code" with rhyming phrases cropping up in pop culture... "10-4 Back door" "What's Yer 10-20 good buddy" Popular magazines carried stores and TV shows came into mainstream with CB themes. In short, a convergence of events led to a surge of use and enthusiasm for a communication tool that captured widespread enthusiasm.

The phenom sputtered just as quickly as it started. Too many people all using the same channels clogged it up and in short order the utility of the CB radio diminished by dint of overuse. It was hard to get a clear channel, the upsurge of use meant many users were clumsy and did not follow the etiquette and the channels became unusable. truckers switched to other radio forms and within a few years all the CB radios seemed to be gone. In the 90's they were garage sale items (though I admit I am nowhere near an Interstate and can't see if cars still carry CB antennas or if there is a cluster of ardent users still on the roads.)

There is a lesson here: "Too dense a population all using the same channel makes that channel unusable." A Clog principle I wonder if social networking will suffer from this kind of Clog phenomena. Will is suddenly fade when too many people have too many friends to manage anymore?

I wonder if Social Networking will parallel this course. Are we soon to find that so many people have so many friends that the lists are unmanageable? The density of use makes the whole channel clogged with chatter. More and more flow with less and less content?

Related: "If everyone is bogging, who is left to read any of it? "

Musing

Alex Randall Professor of Communication University of the Virgin Islands.

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

Dear all, We have a short extension for our special issue on Matchmaking methods in the 21st century. http://www.ntu.ac.uk/soc/school_and_staff/psychology/56844gp.html You can email submissions to my email address: monica.whitty@ntu.ac.uk Thanks to those who have already submitted. We intend to get back to you shortly you with reviews. Kind Regards, Monica Whitty & Tom Buchanan Dr. Monica Whitty Division of Psychology Room 622 York House Mansfield Rd Nottingham NG1 3JA Ph: +44 (0)1158485523 Email: monica.whitty@ntu.ac.uk Details of Special Issue for Interpersona: http://www.ntu.ac.uk/soc/school_and_staff/psychology/56844gp.html the time... good and bad, half of what you read about Wikipedia stories is deeply confused. *hug* to danah, I am very sympathetic here. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org <http://aoir.org/> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ This email is intended solely for the addressee. It may contain private and confidential information. If you are not the intended addressee, please take no action based on it nor show a copy to anyone. In this case, please reply to this email to highlight the error. Opinions and information in this email that do not relate to the official business of Nottingham Trent University shall be understood as neither given nor endorsed by the University. Nottingham Trent University has taken steps to ensure that this email and any attachments are virus-free, but we do advise that the recipient should check that the email and its attachments are actually virus free. This is in keeping with good computing practice.

thats interesting I also note snide wit in that article but much less. I also see that article covers the topic of research ethics really. Speaking of which in my legal studies I was allowed access to a US legal database that can snoop on Americans, a similar service for legal research by the same company but for Canadian law can not search out Canadians by sin number or driver's license. Now we were told there were rules as to what we could access but that if we had a reason we could snoop. Now my question for cross border scholars are the research ethics much different based on the privacy laws in Canada, the USA, Europe or Asia? Of course I am more interested in privacy law differences than the actual ethics. But I am curious if there is an effect from the laws on the ethics? On 17-Dec-07, at 1:16 AM, Nicole B Ellison wrote:

Hi,

The New York Times has a nice write-up of academic research being done on Facebook: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/style/17facebook.html? _r=1&oref=slogin

It takes a different approach than the WP one.

Nicole

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

Hi Peter, Charles, it seems one crucial issue is whether the law system has both privacy laws and laws governing the protection of research, and how these relate to each other - generally and in court decisions. Best --u At 9:32 Uhr +0100 17.12.2007, Charles Ess wrote:

...

Now my question for cross border scholars are the research ethics much different based on the privacy laws in Canada, the USA, Europe or Asia? yes!

Of course I am more interested in privacy law differences than the actual ethics. But I am curious if there is an effect from the laws on the ethics? yes!

A starting point, actually, is the AoIR ethical guidelines for Internet research (2002 - from the website) which, among other things, paid careful attention to the relationship between diverse cultural expectations re. privacy, data privacy protection laws, and research ethics.

Roughly, the E.U. has the most stringent data privacy protection laws - but, until recently at least, nothing like the U.S. IRBs. Research ethics, at the risk of a wildly wholesale and overgeneralized statement, at least in the northern countries, are learned and enforced more informally than formally. (Especially in Germany and Scandinavia, there is a prevailing trust that people will do the right thing - and if they don't, the error can be corrected more effectively through informal rather than formal channels.)

In Japan, China and Thailand, there is a nascent attention to Internet research ethics - but shaded, as one might expect, by very different traditions regarding the understanding of "privacy" (generally more negative than in a West shaped by modernity and industrialization since the 1700s, and, when positive, more collective-familiar than individual). Comparatively limited data privacy protections exist - but the situation is changing, in part as cultures, and thereby values/assumptions/beliefs re. privacy, etc. hybridize (in part through the influence of our beloved Internet ...)

Clearly, all of this is work very much in progress. We heard from scholars and researchers from around the globe at this year's AoIR panel on research ethics, chaired by Elizabeth Buchanan (the chair of the AoIR ethics working group). Notes from that session should be online soon - and I would look for more to come from the forthcoming _International Journal on Information Research Ethics_ (the first issue will be online soon). Interestingly, a highlight for me was to learn from our European colleagues that U.S.-like IRBs were becoming more and more the norm for them as well.

In the meantime, the best single article I know of recently on cross-cultural comparisons of this sort is Dan Burk's Privacy and Property in the Global Datasphere, in S. Hongladarom and C. Ess (eds.), _Information Technology Ethics: Global Perspectives_, 94-107. (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2007.)

there's a ton more out there (including some of my own articles in _Ethics and Information Technology_) - but I hope this is a helpful start!

What would be even better would be for our colleagues in different parts of the world to report / comment on this - Elizabeth and I will take careful notes!

On that happy thought,

cheers, - c.

Distinguished Research Professor, Global Studies Center <http://www.drury.edu/gp21> Drury University Springfield, MO 65802 USA

Guest Professor (fall, 2007) Department of Media Studies IT Park Helsingforsgade 14 8200 Aarhus N Denmark Office: (45) 8942 9219 Mobile: (45) 2986 8967

President, Association of Internet Researchers <www.aoir.org> Co-Editor, International Journal of Internet Research Ethics http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/cipr/ijire.html Co-chair, CATaC conferences <www.catacconference.org> Professor II, Globalization and Applied Ethics Programmes <http://www.anvendtetikk.ntnu.no/pres/bridgingcultures.php>

Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

No Charles your previous email seem generous and gave me some leads to follow up on and showed that I had some grasp of a relevant topic. I have browsed your past work too but you offered some new leads. so me thanking you actually. remember that both email and computers generally show the fallibility of language. Peter, who is preparing for work today at Statistics Canada in this snow storm. On 17-Dec-07, at 4:10 AM, Charles Ess wrote:

Very sorry, Peter, if my previous note seemed too abrupt - too much email this morning ... (so what's different?)

Let me at least now include: thanks very much for making the observation, contributing your own experience (Elizabeth Buchanan and I would _love_ to talk with you about that!), and raising what for many of us is an increasingly urgent question.

Again, any additional comments, insights, etc. that you - and/or other AoIR-ists can offer from your own experiences would be greatly appreciated!

with all best wishes, -c.

...

Now my question for cross border scholars are the research ethics much different based on the privacy laws in Canada, the USA, Europe or Asia?

Of course I am more interested in privacy law differences than the actual ethics. But I am curious if there is an effect from the laws on the ethics?

Distinguished Research Professor, Global Studies Center <http://www.drury.edu/gp21> Drury University Springfield, MO 65802 USA

Guest Professor (fall, 2007) Department of Media Studies IT Park Helsingforsgade 14 8200 Aarhus N Denmark Office: (45) 8942 9219 Mobile: (45) 2986 8967

President, Association of Internet Researchers <www.aoir.org> Co-Editor, International Journal of Internet Research Ethics http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/cipr/ijire.html Co-chair, CATaC conferences <www.catacconference.org> Professor II, Globalization and Applied Ethics Programmes <http://www.anvendtetikk.ntnu.no/pres/bridgingcultures.php>

Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

All, There are (IMO) are two aspects that I find the most disappointing: 1. That something like SNS (BTW- not my area) that are fundamentally changing media models and multi-billion dollar industries and attracts tens of millions of users is too silly to research and a "fad." This is, however, typical of the MSM approach to new technology. Actually, those who study computer gaming should be "feeling it" on this one. 2. And most importantly, is the position danah has been put in as a graduate student. Her success and impact in this area at this stage of her career is really amazing and deserves POSITIVE acknowledgment both in and outside academe. However, the reality is that academe is very hierarchical and grad students are at the bottom no matter what they have accomplished. Granted, AoIR is very egalitarian in this regard (which s why I love it). This type of attention places danah in a weird position within her own program and her discipline in general (although interesting Hesse did not mention danah was in the Information School). The comment by the unnamed academic source appears to be evidence of this. As someone who is working to finish a diss, the graduate experience is at its best a stress-fest and (it seems to me) that this treatment is certainly not helping danah in this regard. danah, while I can't say anything to make it suck less, at least you know you have the support of your peers here. -TED Ted M. Coopman Department of Communication University of Washington On Sun, 16 Dec 2007, danah boyd wrote:

::hands over face in horror::

I'm sooooo sorry for whatever role that I played in the creation of the article. I have to admit that I spent the bulk of the day wavering between being pissed off and being downright depressed. I'm sure it won't surprise any of you that much of this was taken out of context (and another chunk is outright wrong). I was particularly horrified by how she framed my deceased advisor as a fool. But I'm also sorry to everyone here who implicitly got framed poorly. Yuck yuck yuck.

As for receiving threats, yes, I received multiple after my essay this summer, although none from academics (that I know of). This (along with the folks who photoshopped me as a cutter) was documented in my response to my essay this summer: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ResponseToClassDivisions.html

I'm also annoyed with the implicit comment about my blog being my scholarship. Just in case it wasn't clear, I don't by any means consider my blog scholarship. At most, it's fieldnotes and musings. After the mess this summer, I considered taking it down, but the fact is that writing musings and getting feedback really helps me think through things. I just never thought that they would ever be assumed to be final publications, but conversation starters.

Also, as Nancy has said, I do *not* take credit for creating this field (or internet anthropology or many other things that press folks claim). The odd thing is that she tried to force me into claiming that I invented this field and was the reason for the creation of social computing at RIT and UMich and I was like oh god no. It seems as though she put things in my mouth even when I explicitly rejected them.

There are so many other issues with that article... I'm not even sure where to begin. But I'm super sorry and ashamed. I'm trying to do my research and make it public because I think that's important (and it's in my activist nature), not because I want to pick fights with fellow academics or make anyone look bad. One of the reasons that I wanted to put together that JCMC issue with Nicole was to highlight others' work in a collected way, not to send negativity their way. (And, incidentally, not all articles on SNSs cite my work.)

If there are indeed folks out there who feel "seething resentment," please let me know how I can help. Cuz omg is this not something that I want to make people feel and I'm so sorry if I do. I feel terrible. I'm so sorry.

danah

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

Nicole: My read on this article, as a person who works in electronic media on the corporate side now and formerly worked the news and advertising side, any publicity is good publicity when it is written up in The Post. I live in the Washington area and there are a lot of major institutions and historic ones too, and these folks know the real value of AOIR. Anyone with a little bit of curiosity will do their own checking on the web and find out what we are really all about as a group. By the way, I like Danah's work too and social networking was part of my dissertation and continues to be part of my ongoing research that I also utilize when I am creating content, blogs, and video productions. I am sure that you are aware that some of the old school versus new school thing will always be an issue in academia. We don't have to worry about folks who are probably a little jealous of us. What we need to do is to continue to support one another like we almost always do! I hate to sound like a producer, but many of us often say ... "Reporters always put a slant on stuff!, And actors are always trying to interpret when I just gave them direction!" LOL! -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Nicole B Ellison Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 7:24 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] snide, cute, ignorant, surprising Hi, Having spoken with Monica I was also very disappointed by the snarky tone of the article. I was actually excited by the topic - social network studies as an academic discipline - but the points that were pulled out of our interview were nowhere near the most interesting ones (in my mind at least). Namely, that this field is one that is particularly important to study from a variety of different disciplinary lenses and methodologies. My point about AOIR (which didn't make it into the article) was that it was particularly vital for this reason - that it helps to prevent situations where scholars in different disciplines are saying the same thing but not citing one another. That's what I value about this organization. I guess the juicy "young scholar resented by sheeplike professors who cite one another and use big words unnecessarily" angle was too juicy to resist. But it is a shame that this vibrant area of research is presented as just the flavor of the month. Nicole _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

The Washington Post article should be read with the following in mind: First, the sample of the Post article was simply neither adequate nor representative. It was based on a convenience sample and as such not much could be made to generalize to the whole field under discussion. This practice is obvisously similar to that of many researchers who choose to look at a few cases and then make a large claim that is often not warranted. The knowledge claim has nothing to do with qualitative or quantitative research. It is a matter of the validity of that claim. Second, interpretation of the Post's observation of the field through selective interviews and readings of the publications involved is bound to be problematic and unconvincing precisely because that observation was partial and framed from a journalistic point of view. The outer frame often determines how much one may see. Third, the Post article did raise a challenging question to all researchers who claim to be doing some sort of ground-breaking work: So what? If neither new knowledge nor penetrating insight is produced, what is the point? Tsan-Kuo Chang Professor School of Journalism and Mass Communication University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Sorry to interrupt the discussion of juicy post articles But I am wondering if anyone can point me to a biblio - or a list or just books and articles they've encountered that narrate the story of the dot.com bubble burst from various perspectives (disciplines and ideologies)? thanks, r Radhika Gajjala Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator School of Communication Studies 302 West Hall Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH 43402 http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik http://www.cyberdiva.org/blog

I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. The author of the Post article observes that scholars demonstrate a land-rush mentality when a new area of inquiry opens and substantial funds for its researching become available. They demonstrate this by hurriedly staking claims in the new area with supposedly academic observations that are merely the most obvious ones dressed in academic terminology. And they do so because the group of people who get repeatedly cited in the new area quickly narrows, along with the opportunity for acquiring the lucrative research grants. That fact is reflected in the resentment of the "sooners" expressed by scholars who feel they've been beaten to the punch. As I see it, these observations are pretty accurate, and predictably so given all the available research on academia as a social institution. --Christian On Dec 16, 2007, at 7:40 PM, Alexis Turner wrote:

Circle the wagons, boys!

She didn't seem surprised *or* ignorant to me. She seemed right on the money. I read nothing in the article that was inaccurate about the general state of academia. Do we really want to suggest that telling the public the truth about how fucking ugly, insular, and petty the ivory tower is is "irresponsible" (a word several respondents have thus far used)? Is telling the truth irresponsible, or is telling the truth about only yourself irresponsible?

That is not to say academia doesn't do good work. But it isn't an all or nothing endeavor. We can put out good work while still being incorrigable fuckups and human beings, filled with all the same ridiculous cliques, backbiting, and foibles that other humans are subject to. Pointing that out is hardly inaccurate.

I would LOVE to give most of the academy the "atomic wedgie" Hesse suggesests because the shit she quotes is *precisely* what makes the academy's work meaningless to the very people it should be speaking to - the public. If you don't like the picture being painted, change the landscape. -Alexis

On Sun, 16 Dec 2007, Barry Wellman wrote:

::Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:47:41 -0500 ::From: Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> ::Reply-To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org ::To: aoir list <air-l@aoir.org> ::Subject: [Air-L] snide, cute, ignorant, surprising :: ::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/ AR2007082400481.html :: :: 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 :: ______________________________________________________________________ _ :: :: ::_______________________________________________ ::The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list ::is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http:// aoir.org ::Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org :: ::Join the Association of Internet Researchers: ::http://www.aoir.org/ ::

+ -------- redheadedstepchild.org ------- + _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

Nancy wrote:

I haven't seen the evidence of a landrush mentality in which disciplines are pitted against one another in internet studies or the study of social network sites and the WP article didn't provide any to support that claim.

and:

What I generally observed in a decade of working to move internet studies forward as a solid and legitimate field of study is people in every field feeling like internet studies was/is on the margins of their own discipline and therefore seeking connection across borders.

As someone who was heavily involved in popular music studies and belonged to the International Association for the Study of Popular Music for many years and loved those conferences and conversations, I see real parallels between the two interdisciplines (for lack of a better word) of internet studies and popular music studies. (And I think others who have been involved with both areas and even organizations might agree.) Both areas include a variety of interesting people from different fields and backgrounds who feel most comfortable in their interdisciplinary home, where other people "get" what they do, and much interesting and supportive discussion takes place. I have never seen people in these kinds of groups scurrying to be the big important people studying the most sexy topic, although I imagine that happens from time to time. Mostly I find people becoming interested in what people are doing in other areas of the interdiscipline and making connections with those people. Organizations like AoIR and, at least when I was involved, IASPM, strike me as more inclusive and supportive, and not as cutthroat as many disciplinary groups. I like to think that we're a group of semi-outsiders who find great camaraderie in our annual gathering, on our email lists, and so on as we continue to work in our -- we hope -- overlapping, expansive, and academically, socially, and culturally relevant and important areas of interest. Holly -- Holly Kruse Faculty of Communication The University of Tulsa 600 S. College Ave. Tulsa, OK 74104 918-631-3845 holly-kruse@utulsa.edu or holly.kruse@gmail.com (holly@aoir.org for air-l questions or problems http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~holly-kruse

Interestingly, there has been a parallel thread on the SOCNET list in the last week or so... in which people who do study social networks (of the non-Internet sort) express some concern that the "study of social networking websites" variety of research (and the media's complete inability to see that there is more interesting work under the sun than just Facebook, MySpace, and the occasional Orkut article...) will do more to damage than promote the work of scholars who study the more general phenomenon. All-o-these-things-belong-together... kinda the same... made for each other... etc. </sesame street> --elijah On Mon, 17 Dec 2007, Christian Nelson wrote:

Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:38:18 -0500 From: Christian Nelson <xianknelson@mac.com> Reply-To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Landrushes and Interdisciplinarity

My comments were about individual scholars, not disciplines. And, though I wasn't clear about this, they weren't about all scholars. I'm sure some of the earliest to investigate social networks (e.g., danah boyd) just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right interests and background. But the land rush mentality is still present. Once people see that there's gold in them thar hills, they rush for it and resent those who've gotten there sooner, hence the pettiness and even violence that's been directed at danah. --Christian Nelson

On Dec 17, 2007, at 6:02 AM, Nancy Baym wrote:

...

I haven't seen the evidence of a landrush mentality in which disciplines are pitted against one another in internet studies or the study of social network sites and the WP article didn't provide any to support that claim.

I would have thought that being so deeply invested and watching it from its gestation, I would be attuned to tensions between, say, sociology, communication and information studies, over who ought to "own" the field. I haven't seen it. To the contrary, I've seen people in all three of those fields realizing how much the perspectives of other 2 have to offer.

What I generally observed in a decade of working to move internet studies forward as a solid and legitimate field of study is people in every field feeling like internet studies was/is on the margins of their own discipline and therefore seeking connection across borders. If people were cloistering to try to keep it to their own field, AoIR wouldn't do as well as it does. Unless, I guess, we're just a big spyfest where we take the gems back to our own camps for polishing.

There may be landrush in the sense of all disciplines wanting a piece of the topic, but if the disciplines are after one another to own the field so they can corner the grants, it's news to me. The big grants I see getting funded generally involve people from multiple disciplines working together. All disciplines SHOULD be rushing to internet research because the internet does impact them all. It's the charge of disciplinary *competition* with which I disagree.

I have seen poor observations "dressed up in academic terminology" and don't challenge that there's some lame internet research (and I must point out that the WP writer did note after teasing everyone that there are good ideas in the work she mocked). I'd wager there's not a paper written, no matter how deep its insights, that has no lines than cannot be pulled from their context and inserted into another stream of discourse to look vacuous or dressed up in, shock horror, a language style more appropriate to its original genre.

Nancy

...

I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. The author of the Post article observes that scholars demonstrate a land-rush mentality when a new area of inquiry opens and substantial funds for its researching become available. They demonstrate this by hurriedly staking claims in the new area with supposedly academic observations that are merely the most obvious ones dressed in academic terminology. And they do so because the group of people who get repeatedly cited in the new area quickly narrows, along with the opportunity for acquiring the lucrative research grants. That fact is reflected in the resentment of the "sooners" expressed by scholars who feel they've been beaten to the punch. As I see it, these observations are pretty accurate, and predictably so given all the available research on academia as a social institution. --Christian

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

Peter: We had an ongoing thread a while ago about this issue. Lessig (2002, 2004) vividly discusses the history of how each new technological is always greeted with fear and loathing by the established mediums and their surrogates. One of the best examples of this can be found in the late (yet great MPAA leader for other reasons - like fighting censorship) Jack Valenti referred to the vcr as the tool of the devil to paraphrase him in the Sony Betamax (1984) case. Social networking may not be accepted by many old line types; however, I have discovered that it will be accepted as serious research provided it provides citations to real links, uses standard language whenever possible (sometimes one cannot explain things in standard language because of the impact of convergence and publishing times) and the fact that printing times have been used reflection time on an issue. I am sorry to say that I believe that those days are coming to an end rapidly. I have found that social networking has brought together disciplines in a way that has not been done since the days of ancient Egypt, classic Greece, Alexandria, the early days of the trivium and the quadrivium, and the early to mid-twentieth century. What no one wants to discuss is the looming presence of money and how it has systematically caused academia to divide along disciplinary lines which was counter to the Egyptian and Babylonian model, the Academy model in Greece, the Hellenistic model in Alexandria or the medieval/renaissance model(2006). The reason is because industry has cleverly tied financing to graduates for industry, and yet it does not receive mainstream attention. Why? Advertising! I wrote a traditional dissertation, but I also utilized digital video, iPod audio, still photography, Internet interviews, phone interviews, live video/audio interviews, follow-up phone interviews for clarifications and Internet verification of all interviews. This can be done with web tools and posted with blogs. I believe in the open sourced and collaborative approaches advocated by Anderson (2006), Gee (2004,2005); Jenkins (2006), Prensky (2001,2006); Tapscott & Williams (2006) and Willinsky (2006) and others including McLuhan (1967,1968) who advocated the use of electronic media. I believe that if our goal is to spread scholarly knowledge then we must be prepared to take our message to the masses in both scholarly language and non-standard language. If we want people to love knowledge as we purport that we do, we must be prepared to meet people where they are, so that we can assist them in taking that curious academic journey to formal learning. At the end of the day, knowledge is free, yet expensive; and each of us must understand that all education begins with communication (Heidelberg, 2007). This has been true from the beginning of civilization and continues to be the case today (Pollard & Reid, 2006), so we as scholars have to stay true to our roots and still communicate with the tools of convergence. -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Peter Timusk Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 10:49 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] snide, cute, ignorant, surprising I just read the article and note that youth use the internet for different things. Sure kids in school can and will gladly play a simple game like most friends. A mature student like myself may get out R and make some histograms of fiends of friends sizes. How can you engage students using facebook? Ok I have my lesson planned for the next time I teach statistics and R. I also note and this is true of a weekend piece ( in the Ottawa Citizen) by a journalist writing about her retirement. She of course slams Internet writing. She is a professional journalist she reasons the Internet is hacks. Now Professor Wellman you focus on social networks but I for one would say still focus on computer crime or labour issues in computing and the fact that newspapers do not like the Internet has to be exposed. While you see what you see in this article I see the common Internet is bad message in the newspapers. I note newsprint companies are down on the stock market at least one big Quebec company is way down for a few years now. Paper is on the way out apparently. Unless a newspaper is selling me the latest gadget they are negative on the Internet because they feel they compete (IMHO). This is also why some newspapers are so off with their web sites and have not got it right. I have not seen a lot of articles in my daily paper about open source for instance. just some thoughts sorry for the poor email etiquette but I will now read other replies. Peter Timusk On 16-Dec-07, at 4:47 PM, Barry Wellman wrote:

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/ AR2007082400481.html

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

______________________________________________________________________ _

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

Peter Timusk B.Math(2002) BA (2006) Tel: 001-613-729-8328 Community Informatics Practitioner Email: ptimusk@sympatico.ca Yahoo ID: crystal_computing Skype ID: peter.timusk ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Nothing I write is intended to be representative of my employer, or our clients. Nor do I alone speak for my unions. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Feel free to learn more about me at www.crystalcomputing.net Computer ethics studies at www.webpagex.org blogs http://logbook.crystalcomputing.net <- computers http://notebook.webpagex.org <- school work _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/