danielskog.se

As a doctoral student I now spend 80% of my time on working with my thesis. The rest of the time I usually teach, but this semester I also participate in a project called Umeå Live (the formal project title is Innovation Cultures). Umeå Live is one out of five Living labs in Sweden receiving funding from VINNOVA (Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems). The purpose of all Living Labs is to promote user centered services and products in a collaborative process that involves both end users, companies and partners from academia.

Yesterday the site www.umealive.se was launched and on that site we will try to present everything that happens within the project. I will also have a new blog there (in Swedish) and I will probably update it more often than I update this one.

A while ago someone asked me to mention my top three books that had really influenced my work. Well, here is a list of five books that have had a great impact on my work and helped me frame the things I want to focus on in my research.

	Sherry Turkle, (1995), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
	Marc Smith and Peter Kollock (editors), (1999), Communities in Cyberspace, London: Routledge, 1999.
	Michael Heim (1993), The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
	Ray Oldenburg (1991), The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, New York: Paragon House, 1991.
	Christine Hine, (2000), Virtual Ethnography, London: SAGE.

The books above are displayed in the actual order of my readings. When I read the books by Turkle (1995) and Smith & Kollock (1999) I had just finished my undergraduate education and I was not familiar with Internet research at all. These books opened my eyes to the complex social dimensions of Internet and I found it fascinating. I still do btw.

Heim (1993) was also fascinating, but in a different way. I remember sometimes feeling completely dizzy when reading about Heim’s philosophical thoughts on the essence of cyberspace. I didn’t understand all of it – but I still loved it because it kind of made sense, somehow. I haven’t really used Heim that much in my work but when I look back I think the writings by Heim boosted my curiosity about technology and its “true” character.

My interest in online communities gradually evolved in the years that followed and when reading The Great Good Place by Oldenburg (1991) I felt that I was on to something, both professionally and personally. Until this day, the image of a thriving third place has been almost like an inner vision to me and helped me to value the everyday places where I live my life. Life should perhaps not be so much about chasing extreme experiences but about finding the beauty in the mundane and enjoying everyday life. In my studies of online communities, the notion of third places online has also been a great help when trying to understand how people find their stay online meaningful and worthwhile.

Finally, Hine (2000) has been really important for my PhD project and helped me to develop a methodological approach that makes sense to me. For a while I felt kind of lost and didn’t know how to capture the things I wanted to study using conventional qualitative methods. Then I read about virtual ethnography and was presented a methodological approach that I could build my work on.

Of course there are other books that also have been important to my work. But these five are among the most important and they probably still influence me more than I am aware of.