social media

I was recently invited to speak at Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast. The organizers, Simon Chen, Rob Lane and Ryan Anderson, asked me specifically to bring a sociologist’s understanding to social media. Below is my presentation. For the full version, with the notes, visit the full slideshare version.
My essential argument for the presentation was that we [...]

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Categories: Blog · bourdieu · design · facebook · goffman · home · interaction design · market research · social capital · social media · social networks · sociology · technology design · user experience

Social media “gurus” abound these days. Which ones are worth listening to and which ones are bullshitters?
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt exposed bullshitters in his famous essay “On Bullshit.” The liar knows what the truth is and cares very much about concealing it. The bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t care what the truth is and has [...]

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Categories: Popular · Research Methods · bourdieu · class · culture · home · luxury goods · methods · social capital · social media · social networks

Data-driven social experience is an entirely new manner of social interaction, one that obscures our emotional connections to people. Data makes social relationships visible, knowable, and countable in unprecedented ways. But it does not — and cannot — convey the emotional experience of social interaction. I’ve already discussed how digital technologies transform text and time. [...]

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Categories: anthropology · ethnography · facebook · qualitative research · quantitative research · social media · social networks · sociology

The digital availability of social information has lead many to think it’s a crisis of privacy. It is not; it is a crisis of identity management. Designers of online profiles should think about privacy as the management of identity, which can be an easily damaged piece of social information. Users who can control access to [...]

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Categories: goffman · product design · social media

I’m currently forming research questions for an ethnography of Toronto-based technology and design workers. I am working through this question: is Twitter a “place”?
In her 2000 book Virtual Ethnography, Christine Hine argues that there are two analytic strategies to see “cyberspace.” First, one can view it as a “place,” where social norms emerge. Or second, [...]

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Categories: design · ethnography · product design · qualitative research · social media · technology design · user experience

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