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Roundtable: Life on the move October 23, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Internet Research.
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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

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Internet Research.
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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.

At the intersection September 18, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Papers.
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In my last post I failed to mention that my AoIR paper presentation is part of an interesting panel called “At the Intersection: Public and Private, Global and Local, Design and Use, Virtual and Textual”, which features papers from some of my good friends and colleagues. In general, we all address some of the following issues:

If we regard the Internet as a place where the boundaries between online and offline identities and activities are increasingly blurred, we can also speak of that place as the space, where strands of otherwise relatively stable dichotomies meet and intersect. In this panel we offer critical perspectives on the above mentioned issues relating to the Internet as intersections and mixed spaces: How do we metaphorically and conceptually grasp mixed spaces? How do we study the mobility and intersecting of people, information and artifacts online? How do the various theoretical framings of mixed spaces influence Internet regulation and use? How can we reach an understanding of the users’ experience of their movements within these mixed spaces? When designing for mixed spaces, how can we integrate and involve the needs of intended users? These and other questions will be discussed, and we attempt to map future challenges in the field.

The presenters and papers are as follows:

Online social networking: From local experiences to global discourses September 11, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Social Networking, Youth Culture.
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As I am no longer on vacation, it must be time for an update from My PhD Blog.

As I wrote in my last post, I have been working on my paper for this year’s AoiR conference in Copenhagen. The paper is entitled “Online soical networking: From local experiences to global discourses”. It is based on the comprehensive national survey about Danish teenagers’ use of social network sites that I conducted together with The Media Council last year. In the paper I explore the different experiences that young people have through the use of social networking technologies. Those experiences are analysed in relation to the often one-sided public discourses surrounding the subject. Here is an extract from the abstract:

Often, young people do not have a voice in the public debate on internet safety and online social networking, but – as the paper will demonstrate – that does not mean that they do not have an opinion. By examining the responses of 2400 Danish young people to an online open-ended questionnaire dealing with their experiences on social network sites, I demonstrate how young people relate not only to a local context, but also a broader societal level when addressing the issues of online behaviour. In the paper I analyse how young Danes between the age of 12 and 18 – through their statements and responses in the survey – construct themselves as users of social network sites both in relation to very concrete and local online experiences from their everyday life and in relation to a more intangible global level of mediated discourses. Subsequently, I analyse how they construct themselves as ‘responsible young people’ by distancing themselves from the public and “grown up” discourse represented by e.g. their parents, teachers or the media.

I look forward to presenting my ideas about the “local experiences” and “global discourses”, which are based on Ron Scollon’s framework of Geographies of Discourse. Also, I look forward to the AoiR conference in general. The programme looks really interesting.

My paper can be downloaded here.

Internet Research 9.0 April 28, 2008

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Internet Research.
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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 🙂

AoIR: Facebook is the new business card October 24, 2007

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Facebook.
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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.

4S: Slides for today’s presentation October 11, 2007

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences.
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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).

Leaving for conferences in Canada October 8, 2007

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences.
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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.