Not sure if this is really ‘action research’ although that is what some people are calling it, but it is definitely participant observation.
A SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, Danah Boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others.So says Friendster.com, whose millions of members have transformed it from a dating site into a free-for-all of connectedness where new social rules are born of necessity. A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Boyd studies Friendster, hovering above the fray with a Web log called Connected Selves (www .zephoria.org/snt) and interviewing Friendster users. Her irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.
From the NYT profile of Dana Boyd
It is funny I’ve ignored the friendster thing because I just don’t see the point—-but it turns out to be a huge tech cross-over event. This seems to happen often.
Posted by james at November 27, 2003 01:18 PM | TrackBack