Poke 1.0

On Thursday last week I attended the Poke 1.0 symposium organised by the London Knowledge lab. This has been credited as the first real attempt to focus on one SNS in particular and explore a range of methodological and epistemological claims. The first two presentations where in complete contrast - but actually this worked really well for the nature of the symposium. The first presentation from the Human Capital group used Neilson net ratings to dispel a number of myths about the basic demographics of FB users. This was then followed by Sonia Livingstone's work that used a qualitative analysis of interviews of young FB users. I really enjoyed Sonia's presentation, particularly the notion of 'identity in transition', which she uses to describe the older teenagers adapting their identity into more sophisticated norms to construct their identity as mature in comparison to the Myspace equivalent. These ideas were broadly informed by the work of Mead and Giddens.

In the afternoon session, a team from Cambridge University explored the student and staff perspectives of FB. I was really impressed by a new technology they have developed that incorporates their version of blackboard into a facebook application. Although, I can already see the criticism that blurring work and play in this way will only cause negative responses from many academics. The final session of the day was dedicated to an open discussion around the ethical constraints of studying FB. The question that was raised in this debate that has most relevance to my work was:

Technical and perceived privacy: If a site is public, but the people use it as if it is private - should we study it as private?

This is a very complicated question - but my initial reaction would be that most people are well aware of privacy controls now. If they are 'treating' (which in itself would be a very difficult thing to define) they are probably doing it for some reason outside the lack of recognising privacy issues. For example, this could be to appear secretive or shy to a fellow user.

I was also intrigued to hear alternative attempts to gather IRB (a.k.a ethical committee) consent. I had assumed that everyone had to go through this procedure now. I was shocked to here that there are still some research students that are not checking their ethical stance against any official board before conducting their research.

Really productive day, looking forward to poke 2.0.