facebook

Names that spring immediately to mind are Danah Boyd, Lori Kendall

and Terri Senft, and I hope they'll post some favorite references of

theirs on the topic as well... hint hint.

Nancy (whose undergrads are seriously into facebook)

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I just received this from a student about the facebook at Northwestern
University:

Begin forwarded message:

speaking of electronic forms of communication... I'm not sure if you heard about it at all, but last weekend an RA in one of the
residential halls up north killed himself. I didn't know him, but I
found it really interesting how people responded to his death in the
online world. People were using his facebook profile as a site for
eulogizing him. The sentiments seemed sincere, but to me it seemed
trite. I wasn't sure how you felt about. A friend of mine who knew
him because she was an RA also made an interesting comment. She
mentioned to me over lunch that she and her other RA friends had
decided he was officially dead when he got signed off of AIM. I don't
mean to bring so dire a piece of news, but I wasn't sure how to react.
The FB brought me closer to him, and showed me explicitly who our
mutual friends were, but I never knew him. I'm not too affected by it
now, and I meant to email you about it earlier (they've since taken
his profile off of FB).

Thought it was an interesting use of online space, have you
encountered anything like that in your research?

Jillana

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Alessandro Acquisti from the Dept of IS & Public Policy @ Carnegie
Mellon is doing work on "Privacy and Rationality in Online Social
Networks" which includes a good case study of Facebook usage.
http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/

Michael Zimmer