Social Media Lab (@SMLabTO) Welcomes Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Prof. Barry Wellman (@barrywellman)

We are pleased to welcome Prof. Barry Wellman to the  Social Media Lab at Ted Rogers School of Management as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar for the 2017-2018 school year.

Prof. Barry Wellman is a long-time research collaborator with the Social Media Lab. He was the inaugural Keynote speaker at the first International Conference on Social Media and Society in 2010. He has co-authored numerous journal articles and reports with members of the lab including, Imagining Twitter as an imagined community and Geography of Twitter networks. Prof. Wellman studies networks: community, communication, computer, and social. His research examines social support, virtual community, the virtual workplace, community, kinship, friendship, and social network theory and methods.

He is the co-author of the prize-winning Networked: The New Social Operating System (with Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project), published by MIT Press in Spring 2012. The book analyzes the social nature of networked individualism, growing out of the Social Network Revolution, the Internet Revolution, and the Mobile Revolution. He has more than 500 publications—which have been co-authored with more than 100 scholars (including many former students)—and he is the (co-)editor of more than 20 books and book-like special journal issues.

Prof. Wellman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the Chair-Emeritus of both the Community and Information Technologies section and the Community and Urban Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. Prof. Wellman has been a Fellow of IBM’s Institute of Knowledge Management, a consultant with Mitel Networks, a member of Advanced Micro Devices’ Global Consumer Advisory Board, and Intel’s People and Practices research unit. He has been a keynoter at conferences ranging from computer science to theology, and a committee member of the Social Science Research Council’s (and Ford Foundation’s) Program on Information Technology, International Cooperation and Global Security. At the University of Toronto, he has been the S.D. Clark Professor at the Department of Sociology and a member of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies.

During his time in residence at the Lab, Prof. Wellman will be collaborating with the Social Media Lab’s Director of Research, Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd on a project examining the tensions between privacy and self-disclosure on social media networks. This project is part of a larger Canada Research Chairs’ funded project called, Social Media Data Stewardship now underway at the Social Media Lab.