I’m attending a PhD course on “Social Media: Analysing Identity, Sociality and Creativity in Online Networked Environments“. Some of us are twittering using the hashtag #PhDsmc. Feel free to follow

Next week Nancy Baym, University of Kansas, will be visiting Aalborg University to give a summer lecture on ”Qualitative Internet Research: New Media and Methodology”. Nancy is coming to Denmark in connection with the PhD course on Social Media I have been involved in planning, and luckily she agreed to come by Aalborg first to talk about her research and how she deals with methodological issues in social media studies.

The abstract of Nancy’s talk is:

Nancy Baym will be discussing the methodological issues she’s encountered in her recent qualitative and quantitative research online. Her research on friendship in the music-based social networking site, Last.fm, for example, combines quantitative and qualitative survey questions and raised several challenges in recruiting appropriate participants as well as integrating the two kinds of responses. Her work on independent Scandinavian music and its online fans involved multiple forms of online interviewing including email, chat and skype (audio and video), and she will discuss the variation in interviews that resulted.

The guest lecture takes place Monday 22nd at 10. Read more about it here and feel free to attend or pass on the invitation.

After the lecture Nancy will join the local researchers for a lunch seminar and an informal discussion on “The new shape of online communities“.

I recently read an article from Switched reporting on a new study from University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center. The study deals with data collected from an sample of American law enforcement agencies about crimes by online sex predators during two 12-month periods, in respectively 2000 and 2006.

Here are some of their conclusions based on the study:

• Arrests of online predators in 2006 constituted about 1 percent of all arrests for sex crimes committed against children and youth.
• Arrests of online predators increased between 2000 and 2006. Most arrests and the majority of the increase involved offenders who solicited undercover investigators, not actual youth.
• The internet is not more dangerous than other environments that children and adolescents frequent.
• Social networking sites are not necessarily dangerous environments (predators are more likely to use online chat rather than SNSs to initiate contact to possible victims).

Read more about the study and the measurements here.

Be aware that the numbers represented may not reflect the full number of crimes committed by online predators, as “many sex crimes against minors never come to the attention of law enforcement”. However, it is safe to say that children are still “most likely to be exploited by acquaintances and family members, rather than strangers on the Internet”, as pointed out in the article from Switched.

During the past few weeks I have been giving a couple of public talks at different conferences in Denmark, all focusing on youth and digital media. Even though my talks usually don’t include many perspectives on online safety and focus more on communicating my research results and giving a general introduction to how Danish youth use social network sites, I know that many of the participants (often teachers, social educators, parents, librarians etc.) are interested in knowing how to teach kids about safety issues.

In this regard I recently read an interesting post from the NetFamilyNews blog. Here, Anne Collier offers three perspectives on online safety and internet literacy:

• Physical safety – the one we have focused on the most, freedom from physical harm by predators and bullies
• Psychological safety – freedom from cruelty, flaming, and other forms of harassment and cyberbullying involving ex-friends, mean kids, bullies, colleagues, etc. [...]
• Reputational and legal safety – these can overlap with the psychological kind, where, for example, online defamation can harm someone’s reputation; they provide for freedom from restriction or repercussion as a result of online communication or production by one’s self or others [...].

She argues that US kids “have practically tuned out the term online safety” because of a strong focus in US society on the first perspective. The term “can’t really help them deal with the complexities of their online/offline social lives, it’s in danger of becoming irrelevant to them”, she writes. I agree very much with Collier and her point is quite similar to what I was trying to argue in this article on Nettendenser in December. I think it is important to focus not only on the threats and risks (and thereby treating children and young people as victims) in order to get them to listen to advice on online safety.

Read the post from NetFamilyNews here (which also includes many relevant links) .

As regular readers of this blog might know I have a huge body of data in my PhD project. Among the data are 2400 answers to an open-ended questionnaire dealing with the experiences of youth on social network sites. At the moment I am looking at some of the questions that I have not explored so far. (I am using the research software NVivo to code the data along with using SurveyXact for cross tabulation.)

One of the questions deals with how young people feel about the comments they receive on the photos they upload on social network sites . The respondents (12-18 year-old SNS-users) were asked to provide an example of the most recent comment they had gotten on one of their pictures (which is normally a picture of themselves – and the comments most often say that the person looks lovely, hot, beautiful etc. ). As a follow up question the respondents should state who the comment came from (their boy- or girlfriend, their best friend, another friend/acquaintance or someone they didn’t know). After that they were asked what they thought of the comment.

As a preliminary finding the respondents’ answers suggest that there are some gendered differences in how the young people experience the photo comments. It seems that girls are taking much more interest in the comments than boys (or perhaps they are just more articulate when it comes to explaining what the comments mean to them). Typical responses from girls are that they really appreciate when someone comments on their looks in a positive or acknowledging manner. Boys, on the other hand, seem to be slightly more indifferent about the comments they get on their looks.

Based on my other empirical data, I would say that both genders seek the acknowledgement they get from having their looks commented on, but the questionnaire data suggest that  girls are more preoccupied with what kind of comments they get and who they come from. In general, it is very important that the comments come from friends and people they know, rather then strangers. This indicates (and confirms my hypothesis) that photo comments are not just about having ones outer looks valued and acknowledged (identity construction), but also about practising and maintaining friendships.

To illustrate my point, here is one of the typical answers from the questionnaire (translated from Danish):

”Ohh baby<333 you are so beautiful :’D<33 I love you with all of my heart and you are someone really special<333”

[Comment on a picture of a 15 year old girl, who uses Arto and NationX, from a friend].
The 15 year old girl writes:

”I was really pleased and a little bit flattered, because it was a picture of myself … It is nice when people write these kind of things to you – it means almost as much as if they would say it to you directly.”

I have nine months left of my PhD scholarship, which means nine months to finish the nine chapters, that my dissertation is composed of. As anyone who has ever tried it can probably testify, writing a 300 pages dissertation is a bumpy ride with many ups and downs.

On a weekly basis I enjoy the comics from PHD Comics – and I could especially relate to this one, as I often ask myself “how, when and why”

Btw, I feel sorry for not being so active when it comes to blogging – but now you know why.

I am reading Nancy Baym and Annette Markham’s edited book Internet Inquiry at the moment and I am enjoying it very much. It is composed of six sections with six different questions, each of them answered by a main author and two responding authors. The book is “based on the premise that there is no recipe to getting it right, instead there are smart ways of thinking through key questions“, as Baym writes about the book on her blog.

Especially, I was intrigued by Lori Kendall’s rather personal discussion of gender, sexuality and power relations in ethnographic studies in chapter four. Based on personal experiences, Kendall points out that “both gender and sexuality affect and are affected by our sense of self and our experience of fieldwork. These aspects of identity also interact and jointly affect people’s relationships with each other, including relationships between researchers and the people they study” (p. 116). I think this is an important point in relation to the (perceived) role of the researcher in the field and it made me think about some of my own experiences during my ethnography of Arto in 2005:

Some boys sent me ‘dirty messages’, called for webcam sex or commented on my looks. I also received some of those rather offensive sexual comments that the female users of Arto get from time to time. [...] I found my gender to play a role in the ethnographic investigation and I agree with Lindlof and Shatzer that embodiment is a big part of an ethnography and one must content with ones body and looks being part of the investigation. Drawing on Warren (1988) the authors point out the fact that also in computer mediated communication the bodies of woman ethnographers affect the way they are perceived in the field and the roles and motives that are attributed to them (Lindlof and Shatzer 1998). In most cases my role and motive was  perceived as the one of a researcher, but for some I was a future good online friend, a big sister, a possible girlfriend or flirt (some boys actually stated that they liked ‘older women’) or  simply as an adult who would listen to them. (Larsen, 2007)

I also really enjoyed Malin Sveningsson Elm’s thoughts on research ethics in her answer to the third question about how notions of privacy influence research choices. In her section Elm stresses the fact that public/private should not be seen as a dichotomy, but rather as a continuum. She proposes that we look at  different online environments as:

• public (like open chat rooms)
• semi-public (like social network sites)
• semi-private (like intranets) or
• private (like online photo albums or private chat rooms)
  (p. 75).

when deciding to study them with or without getting informed consent. (But she does point out that some online environments (such as social network sites) do not fit neatly into just one category!) Elm goes on to discuss the imposing difficulty of dealing with ethical issues in practice and her text certainly gave me ideas for the discussion of research ethics in my PhD dissertation.

By the way, let me take this opportunity to announce that Malin Sveningsson Elm will be a keynote speaker at the PhD course on Social Media that I am involved in planning.

The National Consumer Agency of Denmark has just launched an online debate forum for “parents of online children” (called “Forældre til Onlinebørn” in Danish).

I think this is a really interesting initiative and a potential empirical goldmine for me.

On the site, parents are debating how to approach various issues regarding their children’s internet use – both in relation to social network sites, online gaming, gambling and virtual worlds.

You can have a look at the site here. I will definitely keep an eye on the forum.

In Denmark, Facebook has become so mainstream that you can expect all kinds of people at all ages to have a profile on the site. Apparently, Denmark is the second largest Facebook country measured in profiles per citizens (even though the large number of profiles probably does not equal the actual amount of users).

Today I received a message on Facebook from an 80 year old man who told me that he uses Facebook to keep in touch with his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And he is not alone. Many grown up’s are now communicating with their children on Facebook (which I have recently been giving some interviews on). Also those children and young people who normally use Arto, Skum, NationX or other Danish social network sites that are targeted particularity at young people. At the moment I am receiving many friendship requests on FB from my 12-16 year old informants. At least it is safe to say that several generations are now represented on the same site.

And this has made me think: Are the moral panics over? Have social network sites become so naturalised in society that the previous moral panics concerning e.g. Arto in Denmark or MySpace in the US have faded out?  It has been a while since journalists have focused on the fears and dangers of young peoples’ use of social network sites, and when I am being interviewed they certainly ask different questions than they did a couple of years ago. Also, parents ask me radically different questions when I am giving talks at schools. And politicians are eagerly embracing social network sites and social media in general.

Perhaps we are over the worst moral panics when it comes to youth and online social networking? At least I find it interesting if I through my research into this area during the past four of five years have witness this transition.

Creating or joining a Facebook group in order to publicly state your opinion about something is the most easy thing in the world. In Denmark, whenever specific court cases are heavily mentioned in the news, people start creating Facebook groups discussing the sentencing (which they almost always think is too low).

Yesterday several groups (for instance this one) were created about the sentecing in a child abouse case. I was asked to comments on the groups in the news on Danish TV2. You can see my interviews here and here (but only in Danish).

Basically, I say that I think the news media are partly to blame for the groups being created, because they report so much on the specific cases in the first place. And of course, it is self-perpetuating when the news media then report on the groups themselves.

See my other television apperances here.