When cultures collide: LiveJournal, Facebook and the privacy chasm

So.  A few days ago, the blogging site LiveJournal announced a shiny new feature: the ability to cross-post journal entries and comments directly to Twitter and Facebook.   From the tone of the post, LJ staff were clearly expecting to be showered with gratitude. For those of you who squander spend time on those other social [...]

Backstage peformances

I’ve been re-reading Erving Goffman, who wrote a seminal wee book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which Goffman wrote about our daily life as a series of performances – and indeed, a constant shifting between formal performances on the big stage, and informal ‘backstage’ chitchat. I’ve been working on a social [...]

Wisdom of Mobs: the feedback loop

It’s that eerily calm pause between Christmas and New Year frenzy.  There’s a number of half-formed posts in my head, but we’ll go with a swirling scarcely-formed one about crowds, audiences and mobs. Desirable audiences and undesirable ones. Thought one: the way that the internet has caused unknown mass audiences to become active participants.  I’m [...]

Early days in online communities: access and social presence

This is a model of research community socialisation that I developed in a white paper for Virtual Surveys a couple of years ago.   I was inspired by two sources: first, the ‘forming, storming, norming, performing’ model of focus group dynamics that all qualitative researchers have drilled into them; and a similar five-step model developed by [...]

Adding beauty to market research

I’ve been reading various posts about market research and social media, which tend to focus on the usual self-hating stuff about the market research industry’s vulnerability.  I agree, pretty much:  some of the space that research took up is now being eaten away by other specialisms (data mining,  search engine optimisation, and web analytics), while [...]

Understanding online cultures: Motrin moms and international online motherhood

As a Brit, I hadn’t come across the controversy about the Motrin Moms TV advertising, although I’ve seen it referenced in lots of social media blogs. I’m confused at some of the coverage which seems to focus on the corporate response rather than the terrifying lack of imagination involved in creating the advertising itself. i [...]

Are we allowed to talk about downloading?

A few months ago I ran some groups with the usual warm-up of discussing mobile and internet use.  The one difference between this and normal practice was that for this project, we rang up the attendees a few days before the groups and had a short conversation with them. The intention was merely to check [...]