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The Rhetoric of MySpace vs. Facebook
From Eszter Hargittai's scholarship to more recent work by marketing analytics firms, we know that race and socio-economic status shape MySpace and Facebook usage. Yet, it is the rhetoric used by participants that highlights how these distinctions play out. In an upcoming paper entitled "White Flight in Networked Publics?" (to be published in Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White's upcoming anthology on Race and Digital Technology), I map out the language used by teenagers - and, to a lesser degree, adults - to explain the divisions between MySpace and Facebook.
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Social Media in South America: Orkut & Brazil
To start my participation here in DMLcentral, I want to write about social media outside the U.S., specifically in South America. Let's take the case of Orkut in Brazil, an interesting and relatively-unknown subject that I've researched and followed closely for years. Orkut is very much a cultural phenomenon in Brazil.… more
Sociality Is Learning
As adults, we take social skills for granted... until we encounter someone who lacks them. Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects. Yet, youth aren't done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children. Perhaps it's precisely their passion for learning sociality that devalues this as learning in the eyes of adults.… more
Social Games and Facebook in Brazil and Latin America
A recent post from Inside Facebook has shown that Facebook is growing fast in Latin America, and a large part of this growth is happening in Brazil (33 percent each month, according to the same set of data). Interestingly, other news pieces about research from institutes such as Ibope (link is in Portuguese) have also shown that social games are increasingly popular in the country, especially among young adults. One hypothesis researchers here have is that Facebook growth has spiked partially because of the burgeoning popularity of the social network’s apps, especially the games.… more
The Social Media Classroom
The Social Media Classroom, a browser-based, free and open source environment for teaching and learning, grew directly out of the first minutes I stepped into a physical classroom and began to realize that I needed to readjust my assumptions about students, classrooms, and educational media. Five years ago, when I began to teach at Stanford and UC Berkeley, two places where I had expected web-based media to have permeated the classrooms, I was surprised to see blank looks on so many faces when I announced that students should start their personal blogging and wiki collaborations.… more
Social Networks and Civic Mobilization in Latin America
Translation of the Tweet: "People with more than one thousand followers: RT (Retweet) is a good way to contribute with #projetoenchentes (flood relief in Brazil)."
Access to the Internet as well as social networking sites has been growing steadily and rapidly in Latin American countries, despite economic impediments. It is increasingly common to hear discussion of the growth of social network sites such as Facebook in Argentina. In one month, between October and November of 2009, the number of Facebook users in Argentina grew 10 percent, by 3.9 million users, to a total of 39.3 million, which is more than 17% of the country’s population. In Brazil, in one month, November 2009, Orkut had 20 million unique visitors, according to recent Ibope/Nielsen data. The adoption of these sites is having a strong, broad impact in these countries.… more
Public by Default, Private when Necessary
With Facebook systematically dismantling its revered privacy infrastructure, I think it's important to drill down on the issue of privacy as it relates to teens. There's an assumption that teens don't care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways. When teens argue that they produce content that is "public by default, private when necessary," they aren't arguing that privacy is disappearing. Instead, they are highlighting that both privacy AND publicity have value. Privacy is important in certain situations - to not offend, to share something intimate, or to exclude certain people. Yet, publicity can also be super useful. It's about being present in social situations, about chance encounters, about obtaining social status.… more
