The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC) has announced a call for papers for a special theme issue on Social Network Sites: People, Practice, and Culture. The guest editors are Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison.
Potential questions that submissions might address include, but are not limited to:
- What strategies do individuals use to craft an online presentation of self in a profile, and for what audiences?
- What privacy or other concerns emerge from use of these sites? What kinds of policy decisions and educational practices might ameliorate these concerns?
- Can we predict social, psychological, or other outcomes from profile and network analysis?
- How can “friends” networks most usefully be visualized? What can we learn from network visualizations?
- How does the network structure differ among sites, and what are the social and cultural implications of these differences? How does the structure of networks in these sites compare to the networks of other communities?
- What are the patterns of relationship development in these spaces? Do individuals use these sites to meet new people or to maintain pre-existing, offline connections?
- What role do race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation play in social network sites?
While all social network sites allow participants to create a profile and publicly articulate their social connections within the system, the line between social network sites and dating sites, MMOGs, media sharing sites, blogging tools, and other social community sites can be blurry. Rather than enforcing a strict definition of what constitutes a social network site, we ask authors to explain how their site of study fits into a rubric of social network sites.
Here are some dates to remember:
- Abstracts due: November 28, 2006
- Decisions on abstracts: December 8, 2006
- Full papers due: February 28, 2007
- Anticipated publication: October 2007 / January 2008