An article from this weekend’s Financial Times covers it all: Internet addiction, WiFi hotspots, location-awareness, mobile phones, information overload, flash mobs, network individualism… and the kitchen sink. Probably the broadest news article I have ever read on the impact of new media on society, it includes references and quotes from some of my favorite sociologists, including Manuel Castells, Barry Wellman, and Mizuko Ito. Despite the ambitious attempt at breadth, it brings together some really interesting concepts and does a nice job of providing an overview of some of the most relevant research questions currently under study. In particular I want to pint out references to Mizuko Ito’s new edited book Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. I have been waiting for this book for some time. Ito\’s anthropological studies of mobile phone use amongst Japanese children are very revealing and contain numerous new and important observations. In particular, the use of mobile phones in maintaining a type of “full-time intimacy” or persistent social contacts, the obligations of cell phone use, and the role of text messaging in signaling availability for other forms of exchange.
Fred Turner of the Department of Communication at Stanford has just published one of the most interesting articles on a virtual community that I have read in a long time. \”Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community\” is interesting because it reveals the role of offline relationships in the origins and maintenance of one of the earliest online communities, the WELL (made famous in Howard Rheingold\’s The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier). Fred not only provides a detailed account of the origins of the WELL, but explores its roots in the counterculture of the 1960s. Fred\’s account is a great examples of the overlap between online and offline relationships using one of the earliest examples of a virtual community. The above link to the paper will only work if your library is an institutional subscriber, you may want to contact Fred Turner directly for a copy.
I am increasingly troubled within my own work about the imprecise nature of time use questions in surveys. We know that broad questions like \”how much time did you spend using email in a typical week\” are inherently unreliable. Time-use diaries are the gold standard, but they are difficult to analyze and very demanding of participants. I am starting to explore ways to use new technologies to automate the collection of both social network data, the use of media, and exposure to different media content. This article from the Globe and Mail recently came to my attention. It is about a pager size device that picks up inaudible sounds transmitted as part of radio and TV broadcasts to record exposure to different media. Of course it only gets exposure, not attention. Now if only we could find something similar to accurately record time spent using other media, such as email and Internet use, in context with participant\’s location and what they were doing online (reading CNN vs playing games).