In this talk, I’ll describe the defining properties of social network sites – a subset of social media – and consider how these key affordances relate to social and interpersonal processes. In addition to discussing how these sites have evolved over time, I will summarize some of my own and others’ research in key areas such as relationship development, social capital, and self-presentation, with a specific focus on Facebook.

In the earliest days of experimental and survey research, scholars were understandably fascinated by their new tools and that appears to be the case currently with the big data brouhaha. But let’s step back from admiring how nicely the word zettabyte rolls off the tongue and think about how big data can optimally be used to test and refine theory and how it structurally complements surveys and the experimental method.

Twitter is one of the most heavily researched topics in computing research. Facilitated by the openness of the Twitter platform, many of these studies take a “big data” approach that analyzes large scale patterns of participation on Twitter. The drawback of this approach is that it collapses people into nodes in a network. I present a case study in which I describe expressions of aggression online from Gakirah Barnes, a female African American gang member from Chicago who was recently murdered and went by the Twitter handle Tyquanassassin. Currently we know very little about the online identities of urban youth and what we do know is often poorly understood within the research community today. Social Scientists have conducted in-depth ethnographic research about the lived experiences of urban youth for decades. This research explores how chronic exposure to violence and trauma may influence aggressive communications online.

Are you in control of your own media use? Can you resist your iPhone or are you its slave? Habits are nonconscious, automatic patterns of thinking and behaving that account for a great deal of media behavior and that pose both challenges and opportunities to further understanding of the impact of the media on ourselves and our society. Together we will explore recent research on media habits from the annals of media and information systems research and revisit the theories that guide our understanding of the psychology of media, old and new.

Social media sites are immensely popular, allowing us to connect with others, create and share content, and deepen friendships. At the same time, stories abound of people being arrested, fired, or disciplined for content posted to Facebook or Instagram, from photos of alcohol consumption to complaints about teachers and bosses. Often, the proposed solution is to simply avoid posting, assuming that by carefully editing one’s own content, slips or mistakes can be avoided. In this talk I examine the phenomenon of networked privacy. Both on and offline, other people spread information about us. On social media, where social networks are often public and visible, and content is algorithmically processed and linked to profiles and usernames, it is not enough to simply avoid posting: we must instead attempt to manage the information provision of friends and family. The difficulties this presents are illustrated through examples taken from a large-scale study of American teenagers, who are both enthusiastic users of social media and under strict scrutiny from parents and teachers. Facebook is used to show that our current legal and technical models of privacy are out of date in a networked world.

How are we connected to the spaces in which we live and work? How do our living rooms, bedrooms, offices, music collections, and Facebook profiles reflect what we are like and, more fundamentally, who we are? We are so tightly bound to our living and work spaces that many of the connections linking people and places go unnoticed. But these environments are rich with information about our values, attitudes, preferences, and personality. This talk will present the result of a decade’s worth of research unraveling the links between people and places and figuring out what they mean. Some clues—the Martin Luther King poster on the office wall or the high-brow books left casually lying on the coffee table—are deliberate (but not always disingenuous) signals directed towards others about how we would like to be seen. Other clues—the music on your iPod or the disarray in the office-desk drawer—are inadvertent reflections of our styles of feeling and thinking and of our history of behavior. Together, these studies of physical, aural, and virtual environments illuminate the intimate bonds between people the worlds they craft around themselves.

In the United States many of the issues related to technology, equity, and diversity remain viable. However, by the close of the first decade of the new millennium the contours of the digital divide had shifted in noticeable ways. Much of the early reporting on the digital divide focused on household access to computers and the Internet (U.S. Department of Commerce 1995). Since 2000 the media environment of black and Latino youth, like that of young people in general, has evolved as a result of social, economic, cultural, and technological change. In its first national study of young people’s media environment, the Kaiser Family Foundation (Roberts et al. 1999) found that white youth were significantly more likely than black or Latino youth to live in households that owned computers with Internet access. Among youth 8–18 years old, 57% of white youth, 34% of black youth, and 25% of Latino youth lived in homes with Internet access. Consequently, black and Latino youth were less likely than their white counterparts to experience computer-mediated forms of communication, play, and learning from home. A decade later, the Kaiser Family Foundation (Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts 2010) revealed a dramatically different media ecology in the making.

Data from social media sites provide exceptional opportunities as well as incredible risks for researchers. They provide a window into peoples’ everyday lives, are untainted by researcher intervention, and provide a depth of data that allows new sorts of analyses for research. At the same time, however, we know little about where social media data come from, both in terms of the set of users who are posting and the social and psychological processes underlying the generation of the data. In this talk, I discuss an ongoing project to understand what the mass of data researchers receive implies about the processes that lead to data generation and work through some of the benefits and perils of various techniques for social media data analysis.