Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Anita Blanchard, whose interest is in entitativity on Facebook: the feeling of the ‘groupiness’ of specific groups. Such entitativity emerges from the presence of clear group boundaries, internal homogeneity between members, social interaction in the group, a clear group structure, and shared common goals held by all members. Such entitativity is a necessary precursor to key group processes and outcomes, such as a common group identity.

So, what is the level of entitativity on Facebook? How groupy can it be? There are a range of obvious groupings …

Seattle.
The second presenter in this AoIR 2011 session is Mario Orefice, whose focus is on the political uses of Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms. There is a growing mistrust of political institutions and actors in western countries, due to a gradual loss of their representative and democratic mission, increased disruptive influence exerted by lobbyists, and the disappearance of traditional forms of identification and effective systems of representation between citizens and parties. This has led to a shift from dutiful citizenship (imposed by the state) to self-actualising citizenship (determined by personal goals).

Mario’s project examined the top ten most-liked …

Seattle.
OK, I walked in a little late to the first AoIR 2011 presentation this morning, by Michele Willson, whose focus is on information filtering. There are different approaches to such filtering: at the user or at the service end, initiated by users or by the system, cognitive or social filtering, and based on knowledge about the user’s interests which may be acquired through a range of different mechanisms.

Different stakeholders in the process, and in developing these processes, will have a range of different agendas and interests – developers have specific algorithms they may wish to explore, funding bodies …

Seattle.
After a brief visit to Taipei (more on that on Mapping Online Publics soon), I’ve now made it to Seattle for the 2011 Association of Internet Researchers conference. We start with the Ignite session of very short and fast papers:

Nick Proferes, whose talk is in Dr. Seuss style, examines the origins of research ethics; he studied the content of the AoIR mailing-list to examine qualitative trends in conversations on ethics (and considered the ethics of doing so as well, of course); email traffic peaked around 2006/2007, and ethics, IRBs, and permissions were amongst the key terms, especially …