UK summary: links and slides from a talk in Danish on social media, youth and storytelling, that I gave this week.

Onsdag og torsdag denne uge var jeg en af foredragsholderne på et spændende lille seminar afholdt af firmaet Lommefilm.dk, der producerer mobilfilmskonkurrencer for børn og unge i offentligt regi.  Jeg talte om digitale sociale medier, storytelling og de unge brugere for en god gruppe af tilhørere, bestående primært af bibliotekarer og skolelærere.

Her er mine slides fra torsdagens oplæg: Lommefilmsslides (lidt ændret fra onsdag, men stort set det samme)

Og her er links til de  af mine artikler, jeg lister på den sidste slide:
Telling and Sharing? Understanding mobile stories and the future of narrative (om bl.a. Getmoving.dk)
Digital formidling til børn i det sociale nets tidsalder” in Digital kulturformidling – børn og forskere har ordet. Kulturarvsstyrelsen, March 2007. ISBN 987-87-91298-29-5. Publikationen kan downloades her.
Mobity-survey (om danske unges sociale netværkssitebrug) kan downloades fra http://www,mobity.dk
Designværkstedet bor på http://design.emu.dk (her skulle min artikel om statusupdates på Facebook blive uploadet marts-april 2010)

UK summary: this blogpost is about the state of affairs in the Danish blogosphere so I have written in Danish. The main point is that in Denmark it does not look like “blogging” (in the old-fashioned way) is on the decline, contrary to the recent findings by Pew Internet Studies in the US, which shows that young people blog and read blogs less.

Jeg blev her til morgen interviewet på P1 i forbindelse med en undersøgelse fra det amerikanske forskningscenter Pew. Denne undersøgelse fra dem viser nemlig, at amerikanske teenagere og unge ikke læser blogs så meget som før, men i stigende grad bruger andre sociale medier.  Er det samme tilfældet i Danmark? Hvis man skal tro de få statistikker, vi har på den slags, er det faktisk ikke tilfældet (altså, at unge danskere brugere blogs mindre). Jeg skriver ikke så meget her i dag, for jeg har hovedet fuldt af snot, men tænkte, jeg lige ville dele denne tabel med jer.  Jeg har sammenlignet tallene fra Danmarks Statistisk de sidste to år (2008 og 2009) fordelt på aldersgrupper, og de viser at “blogaktivitet” både i form af læsning og skrivning af blogs er pænt stigende, ikke mindst i den yngste aldersgruppe. Det er dog også værd at bide mærke i, at spørgsmålet “skabe/skrive indhold til blogs” dækker over  personer, “der skriver indlæg eller uploader billede til personlig blog” (cf Danmarks Statistiks rapport Befolkningens brug af internettet 2009). Det er altså ikke kun “tekstblogs”, der er tale om.

* Det er først fra 2008 at Danmarks Statistik laver denne opdeling i læse og “skrive til” blogs. I 2007 spurgte de blot om folk “læste eller kommenterede på blogs” (altså et lidt andet spørgsmål), og her var svaret 36%(16-19 årige), 29% (20-39), 14% (40-59) og 7% (60-74). 

Jeg vil også gerne henvise til blogportalen www.overskrift.dk, der hvert år laver en fin graf over tilgangen af blogs m.v. på deres portal. Som man kan se af deres statistik for 2009, så kommer der stadig nye blogs og rss-feeds til, selvom væksten ikke er så eksplosiv, som den tidligere har været.

Endeligt så nævnte jeg en undersøgelse, lektor Gitte Stald og jeg har lavet i samarbejde med bl.a. DR, Telia og Unwire om unge danskeres brug af sociale netværkstjenester. Vores undersøgelse viste bl.a., at unge danskere mellem 13 og 24 år helst vil se billeder af deres venner, fremfor traditionelle (tekst) statusupdates. Du kan finde vores rapport her.

In the beginning of this year, Susana Tosca and I had an article published in the journal Virtual Worlds Research, presenting the results of small research project on the importance of fashion and clothing in World of Warcraft. ” ‘Because it just looks cool’ - Fashion as Character Performance: The Case of WoW.
Our results as well as an interview with me about the project has now been turned into a christmas-themed article on the Danish website videnskab.dk (Science.dk) which brings select stories about interesting research findings and research projects at Danish universities. The article is titled Nissehuer på mode i WoW (Christmas hats high fashion in WoW).

Those of you who come here after following the link from the article might find it interesting to take a look at Gizmopolitan, the World of Warcraft version of Cosmopolitan. It’s all about fashion (and not linked to from videnskab.dk). The Wow Fashion Guru blog is another fun site to check out (and they even write about our research too after the journalist at Videnskab.dk alerted them to the article).

And if you are wondering if we are doing more research in this area, I can reveal that Tosca and I have since done a study of Lord of the Rings Online massive multiplayer game, examining the importance of the aesthetics and story of Lord of the Rings on the experience and engagement with this particular gameworld.  It has nothing to do with fashion, but like the fashion project this study also looks more closely at some of the aesthetic and cultural elements (beyond those of the game and game mechanics) that attract people to online worlds. This paper has been presented at the DIGRA 2009 conference and will also be included in a forthcoming anthology.  The DIGRA paper: “MMOGs and the Ecology of Fiction: Understanding LOTRO as Transmedial World” is available here.

UK: this post relates to a feature in a Danish magasine on research politics and a blogpost related to Danish research politics, which is why the post is in Danish.

I denne måneds nummer af Forskerforum er der et lille portræt af mig og min forskning. Du kan se hele nummeret her (pdf-format, se s 22). De har især fokus på min forskning i de sociale medier, men skriver også lidt omkring mit syn på forskningsfrihed, som jeg tidligere har luftet her på bloggen. For de læsere, der eventuelt måtte finde frem til min blog via dette portræt, er der her et link til  den blogpost, hvor jeg diskuterer forskningsfrihed i forlængelse af en paneldebat på ITU i foråret 2009.  

My website has been down for a week +, because of an evil hack affecting several websites hosted by my ISP, but now, as you can see, the blog and more is back.

I had actually planned to “pre-post” that I was going to the Internet Research 10.0 conference, the annual conference for all researchers engaged in researching the cultural, communicative, social and political aspects of internet use. Now I can tell you, that I went and it was, as always, a real nice conference - add to this the enjoyment of being there as a regular participant, not as local chair (which was my role last year). This year, the quality of papers were real high if not the best papers I have experienced at this conference series so far; and this time it was not the least the papers on social media that caught my attention.  You can check the abstracts here (look for Social Media in the long list of themes on the linked page). Below is a few notes on some of the social media papers, that I really liked or know I should be looking at:

Notably I found Gordon Fletcher’s paper “Thananetworking - the social networks of death” quite interesting (abstract here), because it is one of the few papers I have come across that examines how and why people use websites commemorating the dead, in the case he talked about, mostly dead celebrities and people violently murdered. Gordon mentioned Margaret Gibson as another researcher, that has looked into the field of death culture online, her work also looks highly interesting.

A session, that I in general enjoyed much, was the panel on Last.fm, Axel Bruns (as always) did a very solid write-up of that (and all other papers he heard), check out f.i. Nancy Baym’s talk on types of friends (6 types, divided between people you only know from the network and people you know from elsewhere online and offline). Another paper, that caught my attention, was Uwe Mazat’s paper “Disentangling social purposes of online applications”: in it, he and his co-author gives a very impressive overview on the research into various social media forms online, pointing out that the social uses and the social ressources they give access to, are very different, a finding which their own survey of the matter seem to confirm (abstract here). As a highly interesting example of the usefullness of studying social media use in a local culture context,  my ITU colleague Irina Shklovski ,in the paper “Cultural Meanings of Personal Networks”, presented her first findings on the uses of social media in Russia and Kazakstan, an insightful study in how in this cultural context, personal networks also matter a lot in everyday life and online use of networks also mirrors this (abstract). How ever her research also reveals that social media use in terms of purpose and motivation seem similar to what US and Western Europe social media research has shown.   

I didn’t hear it myself, but several people  mentioned Stutzman and Hartzog’s paper on “Boundary Regulation in Social Media through Multiple Profile Maintenance” as being very good, and I know Stutzman has access to massive amounts of data on the early use of Facebook, so I will have to look at that paper too. This and other papers in the session on social media and privacy was intensely discussed on the Twitter backchannel for the conference, #ir10, so I will also have to check out Rachel McClean and Marie Griffith’s paper on “Washing the Dirty Linen - Exploring the increasing publication of private lives through new social media”, presented in the same session (abstract).

This time around, there was also an entire panel on Twitter and Twitter use. In it, Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet and American Life project, presented some new hot and still secret numbers  and findings regarding Twitter use in the US (user numbers quickly rising); and Alice Marwick (and Danay Boyd) talked about the difference between writing for an imagined broadcast audienced and for an actively present “networked audience”. Raquel Recuero presented a study of Twitter use in Brazil, which also pointed to the importance of visibility and celebrity status in Twitter culture, and the “metadata” aspects of Twitter-information: that when you follow people, it is not mainly to get access to the information they share, but to gain access to their opinion on this information. You can find references and short summary of the individual papers in the abstract for the panel.

I myself presented a paper on Facebook and status updates: Facebook stories - Status Updates as Social Narratives.  Matt Allen, aka Netcritic, blogged a nice write-up of the paper and the other papers in the session in which it was presented. I haven’t uploaded the paper draft yet, but you can find the slides here soon.