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Identity Management in Online Communities

This project studies how users create identities in online communities and how these identities are maintained across various online communities/social networking sites. The goal is to understand how the context of an online community affects the way its members create and manage their identities within that community. How these identities are managed within different contexts may also give insight into how using aggregators (such as Netvibes, Trillian, Meebo, etc.) affect the management of a person's identities across the various applications being aggregated. I conducted audio-taped, semi-structured interviews with twelve members of online communities. I asked these participants specifically about their usage of social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook in particular. I also interviewed the participants about their usage of other online communities such as Flickr, blog services, and IM clients. I then analyzed the data from my interviews, using the grounded theory method for qualitative data. I presented my work at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Social Software Symposium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (December 8-9, 2006). Amy Bruckman is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She and her students in the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) research group do research on online communities and education. Amy received her PhD from the MIT Media Lab's Epistemology and Learning group in 1997, and her AB in Physics from Harvard in 1987.