My PhD Blog

I have been so busy that I haven’t had time to announce my participation in the forthcoming Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR) conference called “Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place” which will be held in October 2008 at the IT University of Copenhagen.

I am part of a panel focusing on the internet “At the Intersection: Public and Private, Global and Local, Design and Use, Virtual and Textual” together with Anne-Mette Albrechtslund, Anders Albrechtslund, Thomas Ryberg and Rikke Frank Jørengensen. In this panel we present different papers that analyse cases of internet intersections from a variety of disciplinary outsets.

Also, I am participating in a roundtable on social network sites and online communities called “Life on the move” chaired by Daniel Skog and Lewis Goodings and with participation from Amanda Lenhart, Jan Schmidt, Nancy Baym and Raquel Recuero - all of whom doing interesting work on youth and online social networking. Read more about the roundtable in this blog post from chair Daniel Skog.

Looking forward to yet another interesting AoiR conference

I am now home in Denmark after two lovely weeks with conferences in Canada. The latest in Vancouver was Association of Internet Researchers‘ annual conference entitled Internet Research 8.0: Let’s Play (which by the way will be held in Denmark next year at the IT University of Copenhagen - hooray). I really enjoyed the conference which was right up my alley with many of the sessions focusing on social networking. Especially, Facebook was a hot topic this year and many American researchers presented their work on Facebook’s entry among their students.

What is interesting (in a sort of meta way) is that Facebook now functions as academics’ business card. Instead of handing out our business cards when networking between sessions we would more often friend each other on Facebook. This, I find, has many advantages. I don’t have to keep track with a bunch of physical cards, all my contacts are stored in the same place, the site remembers them for me and the profile pictures make it easier to remember who is who.

By the way, it is interesting to see how Facebook is exploding in Denmark at the moment. As fellow researcher Lisbeth Klastrup has pointed out in a recent blog post more than 1500 Danes a day currently join Facebook.

Today I presented a paper at the 4S conference here in Montreal as part of the session called “Ways of Knowing Everything About Each Other: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 and Social Networking”. Unfortunately, there was no LCD projector in the room where the session was held (!!!) . As you can probably imagine, it makes little sense to give a presentation on social practice and central mediated actions on a social networking site without any visualization in form of slides with screen shot examples.

Therefore, I have uploaded my PowerPoint-slides - they can be found here (2,5 MB).

The slides are interactive in the sense that the links in the text are clickable (click on link to get to picture, click on picture to return).

Tomorrow I am going to Copenhagen where I will be giving a guest lecture at the IT University in a digital culture-course.

The day after that I will leave for Montreal where I am participating in the 4S conference. Here I am presenting a paper in a session called “Ways of Knowing Everything About Each Other: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 and Social Networking”. The conference ends at the 13th and a few days later I will head on to another conference, the AoIR conference in Vancouver, where I will be presenting as well.

My paper for both conferences is entitled “Understanding Social Networking: On Young People’s Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online”. An abstract can be found here and the paper is available for download here.

I hope I will have time to do some blogging during the conferences. I will be back in Aalborg October 22nd.