Location

de Rothschild Room (E15-283)

Description

Social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace have become increasingly important Internet destinations. Their reliance on the concept of "friend" has raised questions about what that term really means in this context. This talk offers an overview of the emerging research on the interpersonal dynamics of social networking sites and focuses in particular on a survey study of friendship in Last.fm, an international site focused on music listening. This work seeks to identify how developed these relationships are, how Last.fm fits into the communication patterns of these partners, the role of musical taste in predicting closeness, and the range of motivations and connections reflected by these relationships.

Biographies

Nancy Baym is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. With Annette Markham, she is co-editor of Internet Inquiry: Conversation about Method (2009, Sage). Her book Personal Connections in a Digital Age, about digitally mediated language, community, relationships and social networks (Polity) will be published in 2010. She pioneered the study of online community in the early 1990s, work synthesized in her book Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage, 2000). She was a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and served as its president. She is also a consulting researcher with MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium.

Host/Chair: (Unpublished) Andres Monroy-Hernandez