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What we’re reading: August edition

Posted In News - By On Monday, August 19th, 2013 With 0 Comments

As of last Friday, the Social Media Research Group has started a monthly reading group – kind of like a journal club helping us all to keep up-to-date with the literature, and most importantly a welcome chance to take time out from thesis writing, data crunching, grant proposals, meetings, and emails to discuss scholarly matters with our colleagues.

The format is a quick round of catch-ups and show-and-tell where each person discusses one thing they have read in the previous month, followed by a more in-depth discussion of a shared reading that has been assigned, read and critiqued by the group in advance. I thought it’d be nice to share these in a blog post each month – so this will be the first in a series.

Our shared reading this week was suggested by our new Professor of Digital Media, Ben Light:

Johnson, D.G. (1997). Ethics online. Communications of the ACM  40(1): 60-65 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=242875

It prompted some interesting reflections on how our ideas about privacy and anonymity, norms and regulation have changed since the mid 1990s, alongside the shifting technological, economic and cultural landscape of the web.

And here’s an aggregated list of what the rest of us have been reading, responding and reacting to. As you’ll see, the group’s interests combine theoretical and applied research, and range across journalism, media, communication and cultural studies, informatics, law and business (with a bit of evolutionary biology thrown in every now and then, just to confuse people).

A bunch of links (in English for the benefit of our readers) relating to Mídia NINJA: an alternative journalism phenomenon that emerged from the protests in Brazil

And finally, apparently, people use Facebook more when they’re lonely. Who’d have thought it? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23709009

Next month, at my suggestion we’re reading this new piece from Jose van Dijck and Thomas Poell – see you then!

van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14. http://www.librelloph.com/ojs/index.php/mediaandcommunication

 

 post image from emilysfilms

 

 

About the Author

- Jean Burgess (@jeanburgess) is a Professor of Digital Media at Queensland University of Technology, where she is also the Director of the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) - see http://qut.edu.au/research/dmrc. Her research focuses on the cultures, politics, and methods for studying social and mobile media platforms. Her books include YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Polity Press, 2009), Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (Routledge, 2012), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), and Twitter and Society (Peter Lang, 2014).

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