Special Theme: Social Network Sites

danah boyd and Nicole Ellison are the guest editors of a special issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication exploring issues in social computing and networking. The articles explore the feature sets of social networking sites, their audiences, the cultures and sub-cultures, and issues that occur in both the sites and their study. Not surprisingly, the field turns out to be quite a rich one for study.

Here's a table of contents for the eight articles found in this special section:

danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

Judith Donath, Signals in Social Supernets

Hugo Liu, Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances

Eszter Hargittai, Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites

Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun, Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site

Dara N. Byrne, Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com

Lee Humphreys, Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball

Patricia Lange, Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube

URL: Special Theme: Social Network Sites, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Volume 13, Issue 1, October 2007. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/index.html

Image: A cybercafe from the JCMC page.