danielskog.se

Every year the Association for Internet Researchers (AoIR) organize an Internet Research conference, and this year the conference (IR 9.0) will be held in Copenhagen, October 16-18. I’ve been attending the IR conference three times before and I am really looking forward to go there again.

This year I will chair a roundtable on social network sites and online communities together with Lewis Goodings. Other panelists include Nancy Baym, Malene Charlotte Larsen, Amanda Lenhart, Raquel Recuero and Jan Schmidt. I am happy that we have been able to gather these great people and hope for an interesting discussion during the roundtable session.

Here is an extract from the roundtable description:

Life On The Move: Social network sites and online communities

Social network sites (SNSs) like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are rapidly becoming a popular area of research investigating online ‘communities’. This immediately raises the question of how new SNSs can be understood as a descendent of the ‘virtual community’ that was popularized in the 1980’s (Rheingold, 1993). [...] The purpose of this roundtable is to further discussions on the present shapes of online communities in light of the current trajectory of social network popularity. In particular, to what extent are online communities tied to a particular site? And consequently, how can we rethink notions of community in line with recent trends in SNSs?

[…] The underlying premise is that ‘life on the move’ produces a certain problem for academic researchers as to how we locate the individual (or the community) in such a dispersed social landscape. Therefore, how can we understand community involvement when users are members of a number of different community sites and SNSs and move regularly from one site to another? A further problem here is how we as researchers resist the mundane assumption that inherently complex online communities are only recognisable in terms of the users movement in and out of them, surely there is much more to it than that.