Connected Action

    Summer Social Webshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation University of Maryland, College Park August 23-26, 2011 Eventful.  The 2011 Webshop at the University of Maryland was certainly that with both an earthquake and a hurricane to mark the start and end of the event.  We really moved heaven and earth at this workshop. In 4  days, 20 talks, [...]

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I will speak at Purdue University on September 22 and 23, 2011 about mapping social media networks. My host is Sorin Matei, professor of Communications, who has been researching the social structure of social media networks. I will also speak at Professor Matei’s class: COM 63200 On-line Interaction and Facilitation Here is an example map of [...]

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2011 ASA meetings are being held in Las Vega, Nevada.  Several sessions are related to the study of the social uses and effects of information technology are hosted by the Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA). These are the connections among the people who recently tweeted the term “ASA2011″ on 18 [...]

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Along with my colleague Eduarda Mendes-Rodriguez I will be speaking at the University of Porto next Friday, March 26th. Hands-on Workshop – Social Media Network Analysis in NodeXL This workshop provides an overview of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and its application to social media. The network or directed graph is a common structure in a wide range [...]

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After speaking at the Israel Internet Association conference February 22, I will speak at IBM Research in Haifa at an event co-sponsored by the University of Haifa Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the M.A. program in Sociology of Technology.  My hosts are Professor Gustavo Mesch from the university and Dr. Adam Perer from IBM [...]

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When the late Peter Kollock and I published Communities in Cyberspace with Routledge in 1999 there were few broadband connections, no iPhones, and little WiFi.  Today, there is an ebook version of the book and Amazon sells a version for the Kindle, a device it was hard to even imagine when the book was written.  [...]

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@      The 2009 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco, California, August 8-11. The ASA attracts thousands of sociologists, a subsection of whom have  a passion for the study of the Internet and its many forms of social impacts and uses.  The Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association [...]

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On August 7, 2009 at the American Sociological Association Group Processes meeting, a memorial for Professor Peter Kollock was held.  Several of Peter’s colleagues were in attendance and spoke about Peter’s life and work.  (Further below are some details about a conference call held on September 14th that focused on Peter’s work and impact.) Dr. [...]

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This year’s CITASA awards have been announced!  CITASA is the Communications and Information Technology section of the American Sociological Association.  It gathers together more than 300 sociologists interested in the ways groups of people make use of computation and networks. This year the line up is uniformly high quality scholarship about the nature of societies [...]

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Harry Brignull, a User Experience Consultant, recently mentioned this on the Anthrodesign email list: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GfOhFZkY8 This is one of the great works of empirical sociology: using a time lapse camera (and an analog clock) to study the flow of people over time through several spaces in New York City in the 1970s. The associated books, [...]

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I had an interesting discussion with Deborah Grove about the ways social media impacts the costs of computing and the efforts to “green” IT by making servers and networks more power efficient.  Social media is a growing segment of all the data stored and processed on earth.  But social media has different properties than previous [...]

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Increasingly, technical conferences are featuring topics that make them look like sociology conferences! The upcoming Conference on Information and Knowledge Management describes itself as targeted at the “database, information retrieval, and knowledge management communities. The purpose of the conference is to identify challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and information systems.” But the [...]

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Welcome to all those Interested in sociology, technology, social media, mobile social software, or any and all forms of online communication. This blog is intended as a repository for information about research on computer-mediated collective action from a sociological perspective. Many people, from marketing, research and development, engineering, academic research, to managers of e-business are [...]

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