It’s official. I am presenting some of my craigslist research this Spring at the Space, Place and the Imagination conference at the University of Rhode Island. “Intimately tied to our understanding of ourselves and others, our environment(s), and our institutions, space and place shape who we are and how we understand the world in which we live.”

My presentation will focus on message production and content regulation in a space absent of persistent identities. Read the abstract after the jump.

craigslist Missed Connections: Social Regulation in the Non-Persistent Web

The recent proliferation of social networking websites has allowed users to develop persistent identities and presence on the internet. There are many digital spaces, however, that do not functionally allow persistent identities, despite their sociable aspects. This is particularly apparent on anonymous systems that don’t provide user accounts.

This research examines social aspects of craigslist Missed Connections, an online equivalent to “I saw you” personal advertisements. While posts made to Missed Connections are anonymous outside of the message co

ntent, they are still intrinsically social. Analyzing these posts through both a Foucauldian reading and a social scientific approach to schema theory, I intend to demonstrate the ways in which authors and readers have collaboratively constructed a digital space that is heavily reliant on social internet practices and real world contexts.

Posts to Missed Connections are unique as they bridge real and digital space. They are the digital byproduct of a non-digital experience, but whose primary objective is to return to the non-digital world. With this in mind, what real world and digital factors are involved when users author a post? How do users construct temporary digital identities, and how are these identities evaluated by readers? Comprised only of anonymous posts, craigslist lacks much of the structure present in other social parts of the web. Instead, craigslist Missed Connections has evolved a reader based self-regulating community that imposes its own regulations.