Initiating, Maintaining, and Cultivating Social Relationships via Social Media

Dr. Ellison will give an overview of her recent research focusing on the ways in which online tools enable individuals to initiate, maintain, and develop social relationships. Specifically, she will describe three recent papers. The first describes changes in the structure and social practices associated with social network sites since 2007 and proposes an alternative definition of SNSs. The second explores the relationship between Facebook use and social capital among a sample of adults. This work identifies specific ways in which individuals cultivate social capital on Facebook by investing in their network. Finally, she will present a brief overview of recent qualitative work that explores self-presentational patterns among online daters and investigates differences between acceptable and unacceptable profile discrepancies.
Bio
Nicole Ellison is an associate professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. Her research explores issues of self-presentation, relationship development, and identity in online environments such as online dating and social network sites. Nicole received her Ph.D in Communication Theory and Research from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in 1999. Currently she is exploring ad-hoc collaboration in social network sites, for a project funded by the National Science Foundation, and the potential for social media interventions to address college access issues, especially for low-income and first generation college students. Her previous research has examined the formation of virtual communities, self-presentation in online dating profiles, and the ways in which telecommuters use information and communication technologies to calibrate the permeability of their work/home boundaries, as explored in her 2004 book, Telework and Social Change. Her work has been published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Communication Research, and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Representative publications can be found here: https://www.msu.edu/~nellison/pubs.html.
All are very welcome.

Wednesday, 7th of December
14:00 – 15:30
IT University Room 4A22

Poster is available as a PDF

I have written more about this on my own blog, mainly with the focus of internet hoaxes.

This event is however ripe with other topics. There’s the online identity issue, the need to check your sources, both for journalists and for us regular readers, the very interesting concept “Münchausen by Internet” used to describe another hoax, and the gender and LGBT issues, just to mention a few.

In the public lecture “Agency, Citizenship and Technology” Andrew Feenberg addresses issues of public participation in technological development, design and policy, and raises questions about the possibilities and challenges of democratizing technology. Starting with a discussion of the relationship between technology and society from a philosophical perspective, he goes on to engage actual cases and strategies of public involvement in technical design and decision-making.

Andrew Feenberg is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication of Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Transforming Technology, Questioning Technology, Alternative Modernity, Heidegger and Marcuse, and Reason and Experience, co-author of When Poetry Ruled the Streets, and co-editor of Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, Modernity and Technology, and The Essential Marcuse. He has taught at Duke University, San Diego State University, the University of Paris, and the University of Tokyo.
more on Andrew Feenberg’s website

download poster

Hilde G. Corneliussen will present her forthcoming book, Gender-Technology Relations: Exploring Stability and Change (Palgrave Macmillan, Autumn 2011).

Norway scores high on international gender equality measures, but similar to the trend found in other western countries, also in Norway the number of women in computing is low. It has often been claimed that ‘nothing has changed’ for women in computing, ‘despite three decades of efforts to improve things’. Is it true that ‘nothing has changed’, or are there other ways of seeing the situation? Through a varied empirical material Corneliussen explores how perceptions of gender-technology relations have developed since the early 1980s until today.

Hilde G. Corneliussen is associate professor in Digital Culture at Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen. Her research interests include gender and technology, computer history, computer education and computer games. She is co-editor of Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader (MIT Press, 2008).

Corneliussen is visiting ITU as part of the Nordic Digital Culture Network for student and faculty exchange between Digital Culture programs in the Nordic countries.

http://www.nordicdigitalculture.net/

• public participation in technological development, design and policy;
• digital media technologies and civic engagement;
• digital media and citizenship in everyday life
• digital media and cultural institutions

The course is relevant to PhD students in the areas of communication, interaction design, digital media, social studies of technology, political communication, Internet studies.

You can find more information about the course on the IT University-website

http://itu.dk/networkculture/

Speakers will address topics, such as:
• Mobile communication and location awareness in everyday life practices;
• New urban spatialities developed with mobile gaming and locative social media;
• Privacy and surveillance issues as they relate to location-based social networks;
• Identity and spatial construction through locative media art / performance design;
• Civic engagement and political participation through mobile social media, new mapping practices and location-aware technologies.

Invited Speakers:
• Mimi Sheller (Drexel University, USA), KEYNOTE
• Christian Licoppe (Telecom Paristech, France)
• Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa (Pontificial Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil)
• Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Australia)

IT University of Copenhage, Auditorium 1
Rued Langgaards Vej 7
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
Denmark

The event is free.
Registration required as seating is limited.
RSVP to net-cultures@itu.dk with name and affiliation.

1– 2 September 2011
University of Westminster
London, UK

Sponsored by the COST project,
Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies

Proposals and registration

• Panels will normally consist of three presentations of 15 minutes (maximum), each followed by at least five minutes of discussion.
• Abstracts should highlight the original theoretical or empirical contribution.
• Proposals for panels or alternative formats should include a 300 word overview as well as individual abstracts following the guidelines above.

All proposals should be sent by 21 April 2011 to TA3@westminster.ac.uk. Electronic submissions only.

Presented in association with the Audience and Reception Studies section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA), and the Audience Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR)

The previous Transforming Audiences conferences, in 2007 and 2009, have seen this event become Europe’s major recurring international conference for audience/user studies, bringing together researchers from all over the world. Now we are pleased to announce that Transforming Audiences 3 will take place in central London in September 2011.

After decades preoccupied with what people do when sitting down, media studies is suddenly on its feet. The rise of computers in our pockets – still called ‘phones’, but used more for accessing a world of online communication, information and entertainment than for making telephone calls – coincides with the growth of DIY culture and people making their own media. Video games are now about actually running and jumping, rather than just doing it on screen, and ‘augmented reality’ enables a hands-on engagement with real things to be combined with digital technologies. Social media and YouTube indicate a real change in everyday media practices. But sit-down media is still an important dimension of people’s lives, and its relationship with newer developments requires further exploration.

Transforming Audiences 3 – organised by the Audiences and Users Group at the University of Westminster Communications and Media Research Institute, and run in association with ICA, IAMCR, and ECREA – will present a rich set of analyses of the current situation and raise important questions about the future. We strongly encourage papers from new scholars as well as more established researchers.

Keynote speakers include:
— Nancy Baym, author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age;
— Jean Burgess, co-author of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture;
— Adriana de Souza e Silva, co-author of Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces and Net Locality;
— Patricia G. Lange, co-author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out;
— David Gauntlett, author of Making is Connecting.

Transforming Audiences 3 will also cover general themes of interest to audience/user researchers, including:

Audiences, identities and popular culture
Citizen media and new political communication
Transnational audiences and diasporas
Audiences and users around the world
DIY media, ‘we media’, ‘user generated content’, and dispersed creativity
The economics and business of contemporary media audiences
New methodologies in audience studies
Changing audience/producer relations
Philosophical and theoretical paradigms, and ethical concerns

Keynote speakers
•Professor Susan Schreibman, Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO), the Royal Irish, Academy, Dublin.
•Professor Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg.
•IT-journalist Mark Malseed, author of The Google Story.
•Dr. Linda Bree, Commissioning Editor, Cambridge University Press.
•Professor Peter Naur, Computer Scientist and winner of the Turing Prize.
The Conference
The conference is a three-day event, comprising the presentation of papers, keynote speeches and panel discussions.

The conference will discuss a broad range of issues all concerning the interactions between research and study in the humanities and so-called web-based knowledge. We are seeking speakers who are interested in the production of knowledge and how this production has been affected by the development of the internet. Specifically, the areas we wish to explore involve e-text copyrights, new web-based learning techniques and pod-casting. In examining these subjects, however, our focus is not solely on what is new in the sense of technological developments, but how the new renovates the old. Therefore, another focus of the conference is on the history of knowledge as an idea that can be disseminated by way of such early media as the book, the class room and the library.

We encourage anyone who is interested in this conference to submit a proposal for a paper or a panel. Participants can be from the ‘traditional’ humanities, those with ‘hands-on’ experiences of digitization of text or images, people involved in the maintenance of databases, IT studies experts, or private software developers.

The conference language is English.

The conference committee welcomes contributions on the following example topics:

1.Hands-on digitization of ancient manuscripts and other similar documents.

2.Web-based based edited works (e.g. Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac or national treasures of smaller language areas).

3.The legal aspects of producing and consuming web-based texts and images.

4.The history of knowledge as it has transitioned from what we might term ‘book-based’ platforms to web-based platforms.

5.Innovations in web-design and the establishment of databases.

6.The study of the humanities in the age of Google: how have the cultural aspects of the university changed and how have these changes transformed the older notions of studying the humanities.

7.The immateriality of the text: how has the transition to web-based reading altered our understanding of book history and interpretation of text and tradition?
Traditional and Digital Format
In the spirit of the conference’s aim, we seek to combine the traditional elements of an academic conference and those elements of video conference and ‘streaming’. This allows participants to choose between whether they wish to physically attend the conference at the University of Copenhagen or merely wish to attend online. Should a participant opts to participant online, as the support structures for the conference develop over the next couple of months, materials will be available on line so that this participant can attend over the net. It is our hope that this will enable participants from developing countries, as well as milieus in which travel budgets may be low, to enhance our discussion with their insights.

Paper Submission
Authors are invited to submit abstracts of approx. 300-500 words of their suggested papers. The abstract must give a clear indication of the contents and key points of the coming paper.

All submissions will be handled electronically.

Panel Submission
We also invite suggestion for panels that examine innovative, controversial, or otherwise interesting issues.

Proposal Submission Form
Please fill in the proposal submission form for suggestions to paper or panel submissions.

Process of Selection
The programme committee will evaluate papers and panels based on quality and relevance. All submissions are held in confidentiality prior to publication in the proceedings.

Submissions received after the deadline will not be considered unless an extension has been granted by the committee chairs.

Accepted papers will be presented by their author(s) and will be published in the conference proceedings. The papers will be published in book form.

Deadline: January 15, 2010.

Questions
If you have questions about the submission process, don’t hesitate to send them to clickonknowledge@hum.ku.dk, thus reaching the programme committee chairs:

Programme Committee Chairs
•Assistant Professor, Robert Jensen-Rix, University of Aalborg.
•Dr. Andrew Miller, University of Copenhagen.
•Professor Charles Lock, University of Copenhagen.
•Dr. Simon Frost, University of Southern Denmark.
•Petra Söderlund, Swedish Society for Belles Lettres, c/o Svenska Akademiens Nobelbibliotek, Stockholm.
•IT-Consultant to the committee, Uwe Wollin, Head of IT Media Studies, University of Copenhagen.

Mobilities in Motion: New Approaches to Emergent and Future Mobilities

Call for Papers

From March 21st-23rd, 2011, the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University in Philadelphia will be hosting a joint international conference of the Pan-American Mobilities Network and the Cosmobilities Network. We invite abstracts (800 words) to be submitted to mimi.sheller@drexel.edu by October 30th, 2010, for papers addressing the following themes.

Keynote Speakers include:
• Caren Kaplan (University of California, Davis)
• Deborah Cowen (University of Toronto)
• Adriana de Souza e Silva (IT University of Copenhagen / North Carolina State University)

Also featuring: LoVid (artists Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus)

In the early 21st century people, images, information, goods and even our bodies are moving differently than they did in the past, often in more dynamic, complex and trackable ways than ever before. Technological, social and cultural developments in transportation, border control, mobile communication, ‘intelligent’ infrastructure, surveillance and global positioning are rapidly changing the conditions of possibility for all forms of mobility and accessibility. While for some this means moving ever faster, farther and more frequently, for others it may bring turbulence, friction, slower speeds, and limited access. Furthermore, in the near future the carbon-based mobilities of the 20th century will likely be replaced by alternative transport systems and fuels, and perhaps less mobile societies.

At the same time, new mobile social media, locative social networks, and digital arts are handling movement and connectivity in new ways, creating new kinds of hybrid public spaces. And, most importantly, new alternative cultures of mobility are also emerging, as people enact, perform, and combine mobility and stillness in new ways. Innovative ways of dwelling, communicating, and moving (as well as policing, surveilling, and excluding) are already emerging in relation not only to the challenges of environmental pressures, fuel security, and economic turbulence, but also to novel possibilities brought about through creative innovation. This is a time of mobility challenges that will demand all kinds of different solutions, new thinking, experimentation and living differently.

In order to grasp these trends, ‘mobility’ has become a keyword in the social sciences, delineating a new domain of concepts, approaches, and methodologies that seek to better understand the character and quality of mobilities and immobilities, their inter-relation, and their contested futures. This conference seeks to advance the field of mobilities research, bringing together both established and new researchers from across the Americas and Europe to present up-to-date research on a wide range of transdisciplinary topics that address some of the most compelling issues that we face in the world today.

How can we break away from routinized practices that reproduce existing systems of transportation, urban planning, and dwelling? How can the search for new openings, possibilities, or ways of leading life propel us towards alternative mobility futures? How can transdiciplinary exchanges across the arts, social science and technology help us generate new approaches to mobilities in motion?

We invite papers that address these themes or related topics:
• Aeromobilities, air travel, and aerial vision
• Alternative mobilities and slow movements
• Borders, surveillance, and securitization
• Critical geographies of logistics
• Embodied performance and affective mobility
• Friction, turbulence and rhythms of movement
• (Im)mobilities over the lifecourse
• Mobile communication and new urban spatialities
• Mobile gaming and locative social media
• New methodologies for mobilities research
• Planning, policy and design for future mobilities
• Tourism, imaginary travel, and virtual travel
• Transitions toward sustainable mobilities
• Qualities, materialities, and feelings of being in motion

Disciplines represented at the conference may include (but are not exclusive to): Anthropology, Architecture and Design, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Communication, Criminology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Media and Visual Arts, Politics and International Relations, Public Policy, Sociology, Theater and Performance Studies, Tourism Research, Transport Research, and Urban Studies.

Conference registration: There will be a registration fee of $225 (discounted to $150 for students, and for those coming from the Latin American or Caribbean countries), which will include a conference dinner, coffee breaks, lunch, and snacks during the conference, as well as a special reception. Discounted rates on local hotel bookings will be available to conference participants.

Organizing Committee:
Malene Freudendal-Pedersen
Jennie Germann-Molz
Ole B. Jensen
Paola Jiron
Sven Kesselring
Adriana de Souza e Silva
Phillip Vannini

We look forward to receiving your abstracts and welcoming you in Philadelphia.

Deadline for abstracts: 15 October 2010
Length: 800 words (including references)
Notification of acceptance: 15 December 2010
Registration deadline: 30 January 2011

Conference Dates: 21-23 March 2011

Please send your abstract to: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu

A publication based on the conference is planned for 2012. Best papers will be selected and the authors will be invited to submit a full paper by September 2011.

Conference location:
Behrakis Grand Hall and University Conference Center,
Macalister Hall, Drexel University
33rd & Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA

Updates and a conference web page will be posted at:

http://mcenterdrexel.wordpress.com/

Please take a look at the interesting material sent out by Richard Heeks.

Rich L.

Worldwide mobile, Internet and broadband data for 1998-2009 is now available online at: http://ict4dblog.wordpress.com/tag/ict4d-statistics/

Based on ITU data, this provides a compiled and cleaned-up spreadsheet of data; charts comparing technology penetration levels in countries grouped by income; ‘digital gap’ charts comparing richest vs. poorest countries; and ‘digital lag’ data showing how many years behind the richest countries are the poorest countries.

Other items available at – http://ict4dblog.wordpress.com/tag/ict4d-statistics/ – include Google motion chart visualisations of mobile and broadband data over time, and data on worldwide ICT4D expenditure and the Indian IT sector.

To subscribe to the blog, visit: http://ict4dblog.wordpress.com/feed/

For source data, visit: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ICTEYE/Indicators/Indicators.aspx

Richard Heeks
Director, Centre for Development Informatics
University of Manchester, UK

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/cdi