Hello World! I am the Karl E. Weick Collegiate Professor of Information in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. If you are looking for papers, please see my Publications page for links to some of my publications; everything else should be captured on Google Scholar. If there is something you'd like to see that isn't linked, just email me and I'd be happy to send! I don't update this page regularly enough to list current projects, but some recent and/or favorite projects include:
- My recent piece in JCMC on 'the non-click" captures some of my recent thinking about visible (and non-visible) traces of relationship/interaction activities on social media. This is part of a broader focus on well-being and technology use. Currently I am thinking about more productive ways of thinking about use, moving beyond the active/passive dichotomy.
- With funding from the Gates Foundation, I've examined the potential for social media to help low-income and first-generation college students.
My work in the area of social media and college access can be found here:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~enicole/collegeaccess.html
- Although I am not currently writing anything on the topic, I remain fascinated by issues around self-presentation in online dating environments. My favorite paper is probably "Profile as Promise" with Jeff Hancock & Catalina Toma.
- danah boyd and I wrote a chapter examining social network sites for the Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies edited by Bill Dutton, with a special focus on how they have adapted since our 2007 overview of SNSs (history, definitional issues, scholarship overview). The updated version captures our more recent thinking about the defining qualities of social network sites and for that reason is a better reference than the 2007 piece. The chapter is available here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~enicole/Ellisonboyd_sociality2013.pdf
- A long time ago Cliff Lampe and I received funding from the National Science Foundation to study ad-hoc collaborative processes, such as question-asking, in social network sites. Our focus has been mobilization requests in Facebook - instances in which users post requests to their network for help via the status update. I like this work because it shifts away from generic measures of use to exploring a specific slice of behavior that, for various social and technical reasons, supports individuals' ability to give and get social support from their networks.
- We've developed a lot of measures over the past few years, but we've also spent a lot of time refining our approaches. Information about the Facebook Intensity Scale (FBI) and other scales is available here -- but please note that our conceptualizations and approaches have evolved a lot since 2007 so please see more recent work for updated measures. In general I would now advocate for moving away from self-reported measures of time spent on platform (see Ernala et al., 2020 on this) and also focusing on specific online activities and practices.
- I get a lot of requests for permission to use measures. As long as proper attribution practices are used, no explicit permission is needed. If you are a student who is being asked for this: I give permission for FBI and other measures I've helped developed to be used in future work, assuming original source is cited. Good luck with your projects!
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