Dear blog, sorry I’ve been neglecting you. Be back soon. Love, Vitak

Between the break I (more than) earned after completing my thesis and the subsequent arrival of my Wii (along with four new games to beat!), I have had little time or motivation to feed my blog beast. So I apologize to my *massive* viewing audience (cough cough), who hangs on my every word. I hope you haven’t been on a hunger strike since my last post.

Efforts are being renewed to make this a happier and busier blog soon. I promise! At least until I leave for Michigan in August. Who knows what’ll happen when I enter that desolate ice field. Do they even have Internet access that far north?

New blog post on Pew Internet Project site

My latest post is up on the Pew Internet website. This one considers my master’s thesis research in light of the Project’s recent report on the impact of technology on teens’ writing havits, which I have previously blogged about here. Check it out.

For my master’s thesis at Georgetown University, I was interested in how 21st century communication technologies are changing the ways in which people interact with members of their social networks. Specifically, I focused my research on how Facebook is altering the methods users employ to build and maintain a network of friends. This research was facilitated by a survey of 644 Georgetown undergraduates on their uses of various communication technologies, and especially the internet, in keeping connected with others.

I recently began thinking of my research in light of Pew’s recent Writing, Technology and Teens report, and saw several interesting connections between the two. Both studies focus on digital natives, or those users who have had access to many of these newer communication technologies since a young age: Pew’s report looks at 12-17 year olds, while my research was limited to college undergraduates ages 18-25. Furthermore, both studies consider the implications of technology on communication. Therefore, the question that arose in my mind was, do the trends we found in our Pew report among younger teens also apply to young adults? [More...]

Quantify your Twitter addiction! (aka yet another to waste time when you probably should be doing real work)

While I’ve been on Twitter for the last six months or so, I’ve only really come around in the past six weeks and realized that I actually do love this quirky little service. Last week I blogged about my coming to terms with the fact that I am addicted to Twitter — I leave a tab open nearly all day. I hit refresh every few minutes. It’s not like I have a lot of followers (12) or even follow a lot of people (18), but I am a complete sucker for the instantaneous information updates the site provides (assuming it is actually up and working).

Well now there’s a way to check out your addiction across time of day and day of the week. The Twitter Chart from Xefer asks for your Twitter user id and voila, charts generate showing you your posting history across month, day and hour. Pretty sweet, eh? Apparently I’ve had a few 3am tweets going on — that’s not a good sign! But since I’m becoming a drunk-blogging/drunk-tweeting aficionado as of late, I’m not too concerned.

Here’s a chart of my meager 109 tweets: the x-axis is time, the y-axis is day of the week.

[Thanks for the tip, Somewhat Frank!]

Take that, master’s thesis, I totally kicked your ass

I have received the official Grad School signoff on my master’s thesis, which can mean only one thing: I am done! Done done DONE! Well, at least I’m done until August, when I begin my PhD studies at Michigan State.

Six long months of research; checking and rechecking out books from the library; creating, disseminating, collecting and coding 600+ surveys; and writing up a 140-page document all by my lonesome are OVER. Yay!

As soon as the Grad School posts a link to my thesis online, I will post it to the blog. However, if you are curious about my topic, here is the title and abstract:

Facebook “Friends”: How Online Identities Impact Offline Relationships

Abstract: We live in an increasingly networked world. We are connected to each other through numerous types of ties, with social networking sites offering one of the most popular methods people currently employ to link themselves together. But do “old-fashioned” ways of developing and maintaining relationships suffer from the evolution of computer-mediated communication? Have we become too reliant on the instantaneous, answer-producing quality of the internet that can reveal others’ most intimate personal details before we even introduce ourselves?

This thesis examines social relationships online to see how they differ from traditional offline relationships, focusing on how people create an online identity and how that identity affects the formation and maintenance of “friendships” in the digital world. The thesis will then consider how the social networking site Facebook impacts relationships in the real world. This analysis will be based on a survey of 644 Georgetown University undergraduates regarding their uses of various technologies to interact with different members of their social networks, and especially their use of Facebook to form and maintain relationships.

This summer, I’ll be repackaging the thesis to submit to journals, and hopefully getting some mileage out of my research on the tech blogs.