Roundtable: Social Networking Sites

Saturday morning I went to the roundtable on social networking sites. More and more I’m finding that the distinction between blogs and social networking is unclear, so I was quite sure that this would be an interesting discussion and relevant to what I’m doing. The panelists were Daniel Skog, danah boyd, Amanda Lenhart, Jan Schmidt (who has blogged his responses to the pre-posed questions here), Nicole Ellison, Nancy Baym, and Jeff Hammerbacher.

The format that the session took makes it hard to do a coherent write-up… so mostly I’m going to transcribe my notes.

Session: Carl Couch Awards

On Friday I also went to the Carl Couch Awards session.  This is an award from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research for student papers analyzing the Internet from a symbolic interactionist perspective.  I won second place in the 2003 competition with my paper on (re)embodying the virtual space of text-based chat rooms, and I figured I would go hear what this year’s winners were doing.  As in my year, the first and second place winners were there.

Session: Vlogs and Visual Media

Friday was my day of going to stuff that sounds cool and is fun to think about but isn’t necessarily directly related to my research. In this session we saw a film presentation from Richard Hall on video bloggers, from Elizabeth Losh on blogspats and “visual arguments”, from Erika Pearson on Fanips, and from Lori Kendall on multi-media conversations.