A journal article I recently wrote with Sonia Livingstone appeared early this month on “early view”. It’s in Children and Society (which is not, alas, an open access journal) but here’s the address and abstract to give you a flavour of it:

On the Rapid Rise of Social Networking Sites: New Findings and Policy Implications

Social networking sites have been rapidly adopted by children and, especially, teenagers and young people worldwide, enabling new opportunities for the presentation of the self, learning, construction of a wide circle of relationships, and the management of privacy and intimacy. On the other hand, there are also concerns that social networking increases the likelihood of new risks to the self, these centring on loss of privacy, bullying, harmful contacts and more. This article reviews recent findings regarding children and teenagers’ social networking practices in order to identify implications for future research and public policy. These focus on the interdependencies between opportunities and risks, the need for digital or media literacy education, the importance of building safety considerations into the design and management of social networking sites, the imperative for greater attention to ‘at risk’ children in particular, and the importance of a children’s rights framework in developing evidence-based policy in this area.

We encourage comment and queries…

The Media@LSE departmental research newsletter is now online in PDF form, featuring articles on Financial Journalism and Creative Commons & P2P in China, along with a summary of some of the work of our Early Career Researchers. If you want to keep up with the workings of the department you can also sign up to an email newsletter and if you want to be alerted by email whenever this blog is updated you can enter your email address below:

This department’s first Research Assessment Exercise results have arrived (indeed the first published formal ranking of the department since it was formed as far as I am aware) and we did pretty well - joint third place in the UK alongside Goldsmiths. Three quarters of our research was deemed ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’.

(More about what the RAE is here).

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

LSE Research Online has been substantially re-vamped since the last time I looked. You can browse a mix of full text and abstracts of work from our department here, and if you register you can make saved searches that email you when new material arrives or which you can subscribe to as RSS feeds. This link should be to an RSS feed of full text items from our department as they arrive (please comment if the link does not work).

Note: The repository is not even close to representing the entirety of the department’s output (it currently contains 195 items, 81 of which are available in full text) but hopefully it will become increasingly useful as staff and students learn about and use it.

I was tickled to learn in leafing through Ralkf Dahrendorf’s history of the LSE that one of the key early courses at the LSE was Railway Economics (not phased out until 1947). So there’s a sound historical precedent for the manner in which my own masters degree, New Media Information and Society links broad disciplines (sociology, media studies, information systems) and a particular topical focus.

David Brake

We invite contributions to the Media@lse Electronic Working Papers series.

This series is intended to:

• Present high quality research and writing (including research in-progress) to a wide audience of academics, policy-makers and commercial/media organizations.
• Set the agenda in the broad field of media and communication studies.
• Stimulate and inform debate and policy.

Please read the guidelines at the website before you submit a paper for consideration.

Please email your paper to Bart Cammaerts, Deputy Editor b.cammaerts [at] lse.ac.uk

Series Editor: Professor Robin Mansell

Series Deputy Editor: Dr. Bart Cammaerts

The Editorial Board is comprised of LSE academics and friends of Media@lse with a wide range of interests in information and communication technologies, the media and communications. They come from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including economics, geography, law, politics, sociology, politics and information systems, cultural, gender and development studies.

The Media@lse Electronic Working Papers series aims to achieve a quick turn-around of papers from submission to online publication. Rights are retained by the author.

We look forward to receiving a paper from you.

So far there are just four public lectures available (most on foreign affairs) but more are promised. See this page about podcasts.

PS While on the subject of podcasting I recently came across an extensive podcast archive of audio and video lectures from Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science.

Sonia Livingstone has asked me to pass this on. Please respond to her directly (as below) but it would be interesting if you could share your favourite new media papers here in the comments as well (and comment on my choices - at the bottom - if you wish):

My colleague Leah Lievrouw and I have been asked to develop and edit a major compilation of “classic” must-read articles in new media studies - a sort of “desert island” collection that will be published as a (rather hefty) four-volume reference.

Leah and I have made our own preliminary list. However, our experience with the Handbook of New Media has taught us that this field is a very big umbrella, covering everything from media law and regulation, to studies of communities and social networks, to education and the workplace, to digital arts and culture (and more). The challenge is to assemble a collection that fairly and comprehensively covers the field as we specialists understand it.

So, we are seeking your help! We’d love you to tell us about up to three nominations for journal or proceedings articles, key book chapters, or other publications of similar length that you would consider essential reads for anyone wanting to know what new media studies (broadly construed) is about.

These might be readings you always assign to students, items you consistently cite in your own work, or pieces that have made a difference in the way you think about and study new media yourself. We are particularly interested in items that have historical value, tend to be overlooked, or concisely capture a writer’s most important ideas. We’re also keen to make this an international list, since this is an international field. You may suggest your own publications, BUT we are more interested to know what or who has influenced you.

Leah and I will select the final list for the collection, but we will be happy to summarize and share everyone’s nominees after we get feedback, which itself should be a very interesting resource. We’d like your suggestions and ideas by October 1 if possible - we’re also eager to see if this exercise generates any discussion!

Thanks very much for your time and interest!

Sonia Livingstone - please reply to s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk

For myself (David Brake) I must admit I haven’t been as conscientious as I could be in keeping track of which papers and books I have found most useful or thought provoking but here are three that I thought were excellent and which others might not have run across:

Browne, K. D. and C. Hamilton-Giachritsis (2005) “The Influence of Violent Media on Children and Adolescents: A Public-Health Approach“, Lancet, 365 pp. 702-710.
A clear and concise overview of the extensive scientific debate on this contentious issue.
Bruckman, A. (2001) “Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet”. in Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiries, Lancaster, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html

Nuanced discussion of different ways of ethically treating people whose texts and other works appear online ranging from full disclosure of their identities to complete concealment.

Crawford, A. (2002) “The Myth of the Unmarked Speaker” in Critical Perspectives on the Internet, (Elmer, G. ed.) Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 89-104.
An excellent and thoughtful debunking of the notion that text-based Internet communication eliminates status differentials because of the lack of visual or verbal cues.

Roger Silverstone, head of this department, died suddenly and unexpectedly earlier this month at the untimely age of 61. His death is a tremendous loss to scholarship as he was at the peak of his form, but it was also a great blow to those of us who worked with him and benefited not just from his wisdom but also from his generosity of spirit and good humour. The department has now produced a memorial website which includes tributes from many of us and those who knew him from across the world (you can still add your own memories by emailing tributes@lse.ac.uk).