Gender and blogging Why is food blogging so dominated by women? I don't have exact results on this question back yet so I cannot tell you precisely how female-dominated the food blogs are, but I would confidently bet that 85% or more are written by women. So that got me thinking: are blogs in general …
Continue reading Blog reading and writing by gender, 2000-2010
Developmental psychologists love to remind us that the frontal lobe isn't fully developed until humans are in their mid-20s. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for our ability to assess the consequences of our decisions, our ability to understand how what we do will play out into the future. This is often used to explain why …
What new norms are we evolving via the use of social media? Way back in 1967 sociologist Harold Garfinkel proposed that the social world was filled with hidden rules for behavior that were so taken for granted it could be very difficult to notice them even if you tried to. To make this point he …
Continue reading The Oversharer (and Other Social Media Experiments)
I have a potentially unhealthy obsession with information graphics. It took me a good chunk of the day to make the graphics in this post and while part of the motivation behind making them was to have something visual to post on this blog (which could have been accomplished in *much* less time), there was …
The title of this post is presumptuous, because I haven't written it yet. I have a book contract for my dissertation. Yay! Cheers! What every graduate student dreams of while slaving away over their hot word processor, eyes glazed over as they attempt to wrangle the methods section into submission for the umpteenth time. And …
I'd like to introduce myself as a new RA at Microsoft Research's Social Media Collective. I'll be around for the next year, and hopefully interesting posts and updates will accompany that. I've also added a link to my *new* blog in the sidebar (no posts yet but stay tuned!). Hopefully I'll be using that space …
As part of the Social Media Collective this summer, I've been working on a couple of projects involving location-based social media, Foursquare in particular. For one of these projects I've been interviewing a range of Foursquare participants, as well as a variety of Boston area vendors who utilize Foursquare for their respective businesses. I've been …
Dear SMC readers: I work at the intersections of queer studies, digital media, and ethnography. Sometimes I like to dip deeply into the disciplinary wells of one area and serve it up to the other audiences I hope I engage with my research. The review below highlights some of the best work coming out of …
Social Media Collective 