Just stumbled across the research of Danah Boyd. She’s a PhD candidate over at Berkeley (and, somehow also a graduate fellow at USC– not quite sure how that works)– her research involves “how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts.” She also works at Yahoo as a social media researcher (gotta love the job title).
There’s a video of a recent talk she gave at ibiblio.
She has all sorts of papers and presentations available online in PDF/html/powerpoint format– with titles ranging from Sexing the Internet to Public displays of connection to Dating on Friendster.
And, of course, she also has a blog.
