[Air-l] social network migration

[Jean Burgess]

David Brake said:

> 
> While thinking about SNSes I wonder how long it will take for senior
> academics to take to SNSes and which one they will pick - Facebook is
> an obvious possibility but I suspect the difficulty of having to
> project one image for one's students and another for fellow academics
> will be too hard to overcome. LinkedIn seems too corporate-focused to
> me. Has anyone seen any signs of academic-focused social networking
> sites that might take off?

I don't know about 'senior' academics, but there are increasing numbers of
PhD students and early- mid-career academics on facebook, as far as I can
tell. Or is that just projecting? ;)

It has certainly taken off in my network of colleagues (which admittedly
consists of a lot of new media scholars), more so since it was made
available to non-US universities. In fact I have the feeling more of those
colleagues are on Facebook than were ever on MySpace. (and many of the
facebook members are also linked-in members).

I think the introduction of applications has been a big attraction recently,
creating the right kind of 'buzz' around the scholarly digerati.

I'd be interested to know if there's less take-up in the UK?

Also, Facebook has much more powerful privacy controls than anything else
I've personally used, amounting to 4 privacy levels: a 'public' view, a view
for members of your networks who are not your friends, a level for friends
only, and the ability to set up a 'restricted' view and to select which
friends see the full view, and which ones see only the restricted one.

And within that, there is the ability to tweak which elements of your user
profile are visible or invisible within each of those levels.

Cheers
Jean


-- 
Jean Burgess
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (cci)
Queensland University of Technology

Blogs:
http://creativitymachine.net
http://propagatingmedia.com