Roundtable: Life on the move October 23, 2008

I really enjoyed last week’s Association of Internet Researches conference, ”Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place”, which was very well organised. Besides presenting a paper I participated in a roundtable discussion called “Life on the move” chaired by Daniel Skog (Umeå University, Sweden) and Lewis Goodings (Loughborough University, UK) and with participation from Raquel Recuero (Catholic University of Pelotas, Brazil), Nancy Baym (University of Kansas, US), Jan Schmidt (Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, Germany) and Amanda Lenhart (Pew Project on the Internet and American Life, US).

All of us are doing research on online social networking or online communities and in the roundtable we sat out to discuss how we as researchers can analyse the online practices of people when they move between many different sites, both online and offline. With more than 100 people in the audience I think we managed to have a good and interesting discussion.

Thanks to Thies Willem Böttcher the roundtable was recorded and you can download it in MP3 format here.

Also, see the blog posts about the roundtable from Lewis, Daniel and Nancy.

IR 9.0 October 15, 2008

For the next three days I will be attending the conference ”Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place” at the IT University in Copenhagen. It is the annual Association of Internet Researchers‘ conference which is held in Denmark this year. More than 420 researchers from all over the world will be participating in the conference.

The theme this year addresses some important issues in relation to internet research: How do we understand ‘community’ in the age of online connectedness? How do we study communities when they move across different sites? And how do we address the blurring of boundaries between online and offline practices and places?

See the confrence programme here.