The following are two paragraphs from NBC's Dateline's report on MySpace:

"It’s a cyber secret teenagers keep from tech-challenged parents who are not as savvy as Margaret. It’s a world where the kids next door can play any role they want. They may not realize everyone with Internet access, including sexual predators, may see the pictures and personal information they post.

When “Dateline” surfed MySpace, we found scenes of binge drinking, apparent drug use, teens posing in underwear, and other members simulating sex, and in some cases even having it. We also found less provocative pages like Shannon’s was, but potentially even more dangerous. Teens listed not only their names, and addresses, but even cell phone numbers and after school schedules. "

The language they use in this report is indicative of a lot of reportage on the online social networking growth. I'm going to highlight a few key points from the above paragraphs.

To begin, note the use of the word "cyber," the word is used in a damning manner, drawing on the fearful implications from earlier days of Internet-based interaction. In a previous post I demonstrated the decreased prevalence of the word "cyberspace" and I don't think it is much of a stretch to assume that "cyber" has followed a similar path. So in choosing to use "cyber" Dateline is making reference to earlier conceptions of the Internet. And one can't ignore the origins of "cyber" being in Gibson's novels. With this in mind "cyber" conjures the images of lawlessness, vigilantism, sexuality, and violence that Gibson associated with the term.

Second is the use of "world" to describe the MySpace social network. The intended implication of this word is an uncontrollable, boundless space: a space where parents cannot influence the actions of their children. And with the assumption that the piece was written for parents, is supposed to make the reader think of releasing their child into a "world" that is not the home. The issue of control is certainly one to be concerned about, but the implications of "world" exaggerate the negative aspects of the perceived lack of control, which, in a piece with a different ideological outlook might well be called freedom.

Furthering the contrast between the safe home versus the uncontrollable world, the sentence continues with "...a world where the kids next door can play any role they want." Dateline is now, without a doubt, constructing the image of a neighborhood. Specifically they construct an image of a neighborhood consisting of safe homes that have been infiltrated by the uncontrollable world. Children playing next door and the cyber world where anything can happen are suddenly combined in Dateline's language.

Then there's this sentence: "They may not realize everyone with Internet access, including sexual predators, may see the pictures and personal information they post." First of all this is equivalent to saying that anyone with a car, including drunks, can run you over. Yet, we still leave our houses. Second, I doubt there are many people, even children, that create profiles without recognizing that they are making it for an audience. In fact, that is the very purpose of these networks, the very reason why people join: to make their information known to anyone who wants to access it. Children should certainly be made aware that anyone can access this information if they aren't already, but the process of conveying this information is one that the user has a great amount of control over. In fact the degree of control over how identity is projected over these networks is exemplified by the very fact that pedophiles are able to trick children into trusting them. I don't want to be understood as in anyway defending anything that would promote the actions of pedophiles, but the existence of, and participation in, social networking sites does not inherently lead to pedophilia. There is a greater degree of control over the projection of identity that Dateline portrays.

The first sentence of the second paragraph begins with: "When Dateline surfed MySpace..." It is clear from this that the reader of this piece is meant to trust Dateline with the ability to surf these dangerous, lawless, uncontrollable networks. While the previous paragraph set up the image of the invasive and corrupting social networking sites, this second paragraph has already provided a solution for the reader. Their only hope in combatting this new terror is to rely on television to investigate and set things straight.

This seems to come across as a new versus old media feud at first glance. Dateline against MySpace. But really it may come down to old versus old given Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace. Nevertheless, the language used in this article typifies the fearful view of social networking sites. It is chosen to make innocent users seem powerless and predators all-powerful, a reversal of readers' perceptions of their offline lives. And in the midst of this constructed crisis of control, Dateline positions itself as decent people's last hope. Pedophiles can't get your children through Dateline after all, and who would want to enter such a dangerous unpredictable world when you have the safety of NBC.

Posted by Nathan at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Matt McAlister posted a piece called "Lightweight social interactions in a loosely coupled offline world." In it he expresses his desire to be able to tag his acquaintances, and other offline aspects of our lives, as a form of lightweight interaction. While the data that would result from such a system (assuming a flawless offline social interaction tagging system) would surely come in handy and possibly create improved political discourse as McAlister notes, we have to be aware/wary of the implications. The ability to freely tag individuals (I'm imagining a sort of del.icio.us for people) takes Foucault's concept of disciplinary individuality through institutional labelling and observance to a new extreme. An extreme that makes the swarm-the collective action of society-an all-encompassing disciplinary institution. Individuals would become their tags, become as they have been tagged, as they tag themselves.

This can be extended to much of the discussion of attention data, with the idea of attention as a form of self-tagging. It's necessary to explore the darker, less optimistic, sides of folksonomy and tagging. These systems are, without a doubt, useful, dynamic, and soon to be unavoidable, but there's always more to the story.

Posted by Nathan at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

The much talked about Wired piece about the death of the word "cyberspace" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 to cite a few) is nothing if not late, but ties in very neatly with the graph I posted a couple days ago. The problem is that people are 'looking for' a new word, one to replace "cyberspace," that will encapsulate everything that this word signifies, but also all that has failed to signify with adapting cultural reactions to new-media networks. No such word will come to be the central point, and metaphorical umbrella, that "cyberspace" was, rather a host of words are arising to take its place as the graph begins to hint at.

"Social network," "Web 2.0," "social software," "blog," and, doubtless, many others together are forming the new image, the new encompassing linguistic point to which we can look. This new distributed formation is all too appropriate for the phenomenon it describes. In fact, how could we expect anything other than a network of associated terms to win out over a single (dare I say hierarchical) word like cyberspace?

Posted by Nathan at 06:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's the graph I came up with the other day after searching for the appearance of certain words in The New York Times between 1996 and 2005.

What this demonstrates above all is the extension of the "Web 2.0" terminology into old media. There is a very clear moment in the Times when "blog" and "blogger" appeared: with a single article in 2001. For many, old media sources, like The New York Times acted as the initial gatekeeper for new media networks so it is critical to look at the interaction between the two rather than isolate them.

Posted by Nathan at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 posted a piece about standards in blogging and responses to comments on his earlier writing on gatekeepers. The comments in this post turned more toward gaining attention in the blogging world. These two topics are very much related. If it is the goal of a blogger to move up the rankings, get more hits, get more links, s/he is best served by creating a connection a well connected node. The A-list bloggers serve the function of hubs within the network. Readers are fed from these well connected centers to outlying blogs. In other words, there is great value for a reasonably un-connected blogger to create a connection to a very well connected one. The problem is that these links are bi-directional. A link from the unconnected blogger (through a blogroll, comment, trackback, anything that asserts their presence to some degree) to the well connected one is worth very little unless the latter reciprocates in some way.

Where this links to the quality of writing is through the ego-driven quality of most blogs. Surely one of the best ways to get a blogger to respond to a link (thereby linking to you) is to put them in a position where they feel they have to defend their ego (as represented by their own bloggings). What this sets up is an environment ripe for loud, raucous writing (attacking or praising, though doubtless the former would be more successful) rather than carefully thought-out exchanges of ideas. This is not to say this is all that happens, or that there is no possibility for a serious, respectful debate, but it is easy to slip into the unproductive, ego-driven state.

My own writing on this blog is an example. A week or two ago I wrote about folksonomies and linked to a post by Thomas Vander Wal. I both praised and criticized his writing and he responded in a comment. This is one of the few posts I have made that actually received comments and I don't doubt that it is due to the personal references I made. The brief exchange that took place was not heated or insulting, but it was predicated by my criticism of one of his ideas. My linking to other relevant posts and blogs serves the purpose of showing visitors what I have been reading and influenced by, but it also increases the chances that the highly-connected blogs will reciprocate a link and lead readers here.

So here I have linked to Scott Karp's post and a trackback will be sent. In comparison to me, he is a highly connected node. Will he notice? Furthermore, will he respond? If he doesn't, is it because I have not made such harsh criticism of his writing as he has received in the comments on his own blog? Or is it because what I have written is not worthy of response?

Posted by Nathan at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been working on charting the changing frequency of certain words as published in the NYTimes. Hopefully what I come up with will provide some larger-picture perspective on the shifting old-media perception of new media. Graphs will be posted tomorrow.

In the meantime, Susan Crawford has been thinking along similar lines as I have lately.

Posted by Nathan at 05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently discovered David Weinberger's essay on web metaphysics. I'm about five years late on this discovery, but one section in particular struck me. His discussion of "web selves" touches on the same concept of selective identity projection I find myself circling around. A lot of what he mentions in the section is being expressed lately in the focus on attention data. The idea that I'll create multiple relatively static identities for the purpose of interacting within different networks, and that these identities have an inherent value, seems to be the dominant concept over older ideas of anonymity. The process of interacting in new media social networks, is this process of identity construction and subsequent projection. The manner of projection, and materials for construction, depend not only on the structure of the network but also on the individual's response to the collective, emergent identity of the network (feedback).

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Also, an interesting interview with Weinberger.

Posted by Nathan at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are a couple articles out there worth linking to:

Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?
This is a pretty thorough look at folksonomies and touches on a lot of the issues I have written about before. The authors take the stand that folksonomies will benefit from greater regulation in the tagging process and general uniformity in tagging, but they also recognize that there is often a trade-off between the optimizing the global effect and optimizing inidividual interaction. As I wrote about yesterday, a non-invasive way to implement some sort of regulation into a folksonomic system would be to enable a certain amount of feedback. This avoid the problem of a central/centralizing entity telling people how to tag and allows for individuals to tag how they please but with influence from the system as a whole.
An interesting read nonetheless.

Objects that Blog
jbleeker at Networked Publics writes about objects that could blog as the future of content. He uses the example of a little league scoreboard. It's an interesting idea especially given the otherwise personality driven nature of blogs.

Posted by Nathan at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alex Wright has an excellent post entitled Probability, Superstition and Ideology in which he uses the fasces - the ancient Roman term for a bundle of sticks that symbolized the strength gained by the collective when the comparatively weak individuals are bound together - as a parallel to emergent technology. This works on a basic level, but also draws a line between fascism and this type of behavior: a bleak comparison for what is most often seen as the democratization of media and technology.

Wright is writing in response to Chris Anderson's argument that instances individual inconvenience in the creation and function of an emergent system matters little when compared to the operation as a whole. What interests me in his, and other similar writing, is this interaction between the individual and the global, the feedback. I touched on this in an earlier post in which I argued that an individual participating in a system like that of del.icio.us cannot avoid inlfuence from the global behavior. In this case it is on a structural level in that del.icio.us suggests certain tags for when the user is classifying an item. Yet in other systems, feedback seems to play a vital role in creating regulation of individual action in an environment otherwise lacking, or with minimal centralized regulation.

This requires the individual to be aware of the global effect s/he is participating in, but the result is a more static global result. Obviously, there is a range of possible action. The global action of system with no possibility for feedback would be able to shift rapidly in response to the interactions of its participants; the global action of a system with no possibility for action other than feedback (if such a system were even possible in the first place) would be completely static, the participants would be unable to react except as the global level dictates - making the impossible for a global action to exist at all.

For many, the ideal system with emergent properties would be one without feedback. Here I'm thinking of Thomasl Vander Wal's comment on the earlier post mentioned before. Yet having some level of feedback acts as a non-invasive and adaptable form of control. The likely result is a more stable global action which, in many cases, would be more useful than an unstable one.

To speak of specifics we could look at the folksonomic properties of del.icio.us or Flickr. Both these systems provide a certain level of feedback on a very basic level by making the participants aware of the global effect stemming from their inter/actions. The result is that the global action becomes a participant in its own making. If I see that most del.icio.us users who have tagged Page X have tagged it with "weblog", I will be more likely to use that tag than something like "blog". The global action has influenced the individual inter/action.

In Six Degrees, Duncan Watts explains that this phenomenon is a demonstration of a system that exhibits "local order":

"As long as A 'knowing' B and A knowing C implies that B and C are, in turn, more likely to know each other than two elements picked at random, then we have local order."

Posted by Nathan at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bud on The Community Engine Blog posted a while ago about all blogging being local. I agree with his sentiments but he seems to imply that the concept of the "Long Tail" passes a certain judgement on those blogs inhabiting it. The small, personal, and often intimate blogs make up a majority of weblogs out there and, as a group, present some of the most interesting territory for analysis.

I think Danah Boyd at apophenia's post about "sloppy speech" is related to this. She notes a shift in speech when a blogger moved from Blogger to MovableType, from a platform viewed as more the territory of the long-tailers to a platform that would like to take itself more seriously. There seems to be a linguistic shift, as well as a shift in projected identity, from big-to-midrange bloggers (or those trying to be) to the long-tailers.

As soon as I find the time (this week has seen burglary and illness) expect a longer post about these issues.

Posted by Nathan at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In preparation for something a bit longer soon to come, here are some point that I've been thinking about concerning identity projection.

-Participating in a social network requires the selective projection of identity.
-What is projected depends on the perceived value within the network.
-This value seems to be determined both by the structure and collective character of the network.
-The most basic message at the heart of any projection is "I am here."

There are a couple posts that deal with related issues:
Fading Waypoints - Tag Along
EconoMeta - Is Attention the Opposite of Anonymity?

Posted by Nathan at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since I posted the entry On Folksonomy, Feedback, and Polysemy, there have been some interesting comments added:

Thomas Vander Wal writes:

"The polysemy problem is with tagging and not with folksonomy (if Wikipedia had a proper definition of folksonomy it would be clear). The folksonomy actually provides a solutions to the problem as people are less likely to reuse the same tag for differing items than the whole of a community. But when the individual does use the tag for more than one definition the other tags they apply to the object normally make it very easy to discern the tag's definition.

This is one major value to people using their own terms in tags, rather than relying on what others call them. But the main reason I find it important for people to tag with terms in their own vocabulary is for their own refindability of the object. When people use the terms of others the refindability drops off quite a bit as it is not the terminology that is most used by them and not familiar enough to use it as a search term for their own items.

The emergent values are also essential, but the prime value is for the tools to work as a tool for recalling their own objects of interest. There has to be inherent value for the people themselves using any social tool for them to continue use of it."

"Thomas, I believe you're making an assumption about the type of apps that use folksonomies (where folksonomies grow?). Yes, Delicious.com was designed primarily to aid individual memory, but it's entirely possible that other apps might be designed to make online resources more findable by others. E.g., a knowledge management well might want to add tagging primarily as a way of making individual discoveries available to an entire organization. In such a case, the folksonomy that organization needs is helped by showing taggers the popular tags as they are in the act of tagging precisely so they won't fall into the "trap" of using tags that are meaningful and memorable to them but not to others.

It seems to me that either type of tagging system can be useful, depending, of course, on the aims of its users."

There are two types of folksonomy being discussed here: one that emerges from blind mass individual action, while not necessarily being the intended goal of the system, and one which emerges as the intended goal of mass individual action/interaction. In the case of del.icio.us I think it would be difficult to say that it is purely a tool for individual use as this would imply that the emergent folksonomy is merely a handy side-effect. The social/public aspect of the site suggests that the intent of the tagging is, partially, to influence the actions of other users in the system. Additionally, the emergent folksonomy is an explicit goal of the system, making it difficult for a user to remain uninfluenced by it.

Personal refindability is certainly a major part of a social bookmarking site but shares the stage with the social aspects which allow for the emergent properties.

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Some recent, related links:
Social Networking Gets Traction
Tag Along

Posted by Nathan at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I've been browsing various sites for posts and articles dealing with the intersection of attention and the utopian/dystopian illusion of anonymity. Here are some good links before I hit the non-web texts that may illuminate a thing or two: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Posted by Nathan at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After reading Clay Shriky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, following Chris Anderson's site for a bit, and reading Social Percolators and Self Organized Criticality (Gerard Weisbuch, Sorin Solomon, Dietrich Stauffer), I've wanted to put some thoughts in writing about the idea of the "long tail" and power laws.

A key point of Shirky's essay is the observation that one of the most basic forms of interaction is imitation, here as seen in blogrolls:

"Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past."

What leads to this type of imitative interaction, though? Weisbuch & co. explain the phenomenon by making the very logical observation that agents in a social network will consume a product if they receive information from neighbors who made a positive choice and if the perceived quality of the product meets or exceeds the preferences of the agent. In the case of weblogs, blogrolls and linking serve the function of transmitting this information. The quality of Bob's blog meets Alice's preferences, she links to it. Carmen reads Alice's blog and then wants to visit Bob's, perceiving its quality to be similar to Alice's: she has received the positive information that Weisbuch & co. require.

This, then, explains the Instapundits out there who have achieved superstar status in the blogging world. Yet as Shirky points out, when a blog reaches this point of popularity, they have, in effect, become a mainstream media outlet. They are unable to participate as fully in the inidividual reader interactions that are essential in the blogging process:

"The transformation here is simple - as a blogger's audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can't link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can't answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it."

If the "hits" become something other than blogs, what this leaves us with is "the long tail" of the "flops." These are the blogs with a moderate number of participants (consumers/readers/commenters), far fewer than the superstars but more than the two or three readers of a typical LiveJournaler.

A question I had concerning Shirky's piece and Weisbuch & co. (as applied to the blogging world) was what is the effect of something like Technorati's practice of sorting search results by time as opposed to link-popularity? I would think that, to a small extent, this would work against the long tailing effect. If everyone were to use a time organized weblog-search engine to discover individual posts, instead of blogrolls, wouldn't the traffic to superstar bloggers diminish while the long tail inhabitants would see a rise? Yet the effect, if any, is surely small. The blogging world is fixated on ranking and lists.

Some related links:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Posted by Nathan at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Web 2.0 is a veritable nebula of neologisms and clever phrasing:

End of Cyberspace
InfoCloud
Disinfotainment
tvPod

(these are also good posts)

Posted by Nathan at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Howard Rheingold has posted an interesting response to Jeff Jarvis's equally interesting post about the relationship between "enablers" of peer production networks, users, and businesses in what seems to be a developing economic model.
The potential (and existing) exploitation of for-profit organizations of these potentially emergent systems is certainly troubling. The developments over the next few years, if not months, will determine a considerable amount.

Jarvis and Rheingold respectively:
"There are so many ways we can screw it up. Spam, hate, stupidity, and control can do that. But if everyone behaves the right way, then we create great whole larger than the sums of their parts; every capitalized entity above proves that. But we’re still trying to figure out what the rules are, what “the right way” means."

"The 'enablers' that organize themselves around economic models that depend on central 'enabler' ownership of 'IP'created by it's users are going to struggle to keep people and content within their fortress walls, and under their rules. They will eventually and inevitably be largely abandoned for systems where the "individual", the 'collective' and the 'enablers' are one and the same."

Posted by Nathan at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There has been some debate and discussion over the buzz word “folksonomy.” A quick definition is that a folksonomy is an organizational system reliant on multiple individuals applying personalized tags (labeling terms) to the categorized item. These tags, as more and more of them are added, are then used as the organizing elements for the system of objects. Thomas Vander Wal has given the best explanation I've been able to find, including differentiating between broad and narrow folksonomies (ex: del.icio.us and Flickr respectively). Such a system encourages distributed relationships between specific words, objects, and individuals. Functionally this network is decentralized, with each node—be it a tag, individual, or object—able to connect to another within the system. What arises, when enacted on a large enough scale, is rhizomatic: multiple points of entry for multiple participants—via one of the three main types of node—which expand, ideally (that is, if individuals tag objects in a highly personalized manner as Vander Wal seems to require), without interference from a central or centralizing entity. The primary advantage to such a system is that categorization becomes malleable to an individual or group's specific vocabulary, developing greater ability for one node to connect to another.

Where Vander Wal's description falls short is the assumption that individuals have the ability to tag without influence from the tagging system itself. When tagging a new item on del.icio.us, for instance, one sees suggested and popular tags. Furthermore, a key component of a folksonomy-based network, such as del.icio.us, is social interaction; users will inevitably be influenced by the choices made by one another. Vander Wal wants to exclude this type of influence from the tagging process under the assumption that it would distort the potential emergent tags (about emergent tags: 1 2). This systemic feedback, however, is unavoidable and unproblematic for a folksonomy. Emergent systems are reliant on both individual interaction and feedback from the larger system to the individuals. The fact that del.icio.us User A decides to use similar tags as User B or a “popular” tag does not make the contribution of User A to the system any less valuable. User A's individual interaction is dependent on the intersection of the multiple environments surrounding his tagging decisions, making it impossible to isolate a single environment as adversely interfering with the process. Any tags used will inevitably be a result of a combination of surrounding interferences.

The Wikipedia article on folksonomy notes polysemy as a problem with folksonomies. This is an understandable immediate reaction: a tag with multiple meanings will lead to multiple, thus on some level inaccurate, results. Yet rather than polysemy posing a problem for a folksonomy, I would suggest that folksonomy poses an insight into polysemy. A developed folksonomy would have many objects linked to many different tags by many individuals. To see the objects linked to a particular polyseme, as well as concurrent tags used by individuals, would not only provide a demonstration of dominant meanings but also the relationship between the different meanings of the original tag and other tags. What arises from this is a mapping of the separate networks surrounding, individually, the multiple meanings of the polyseme.

I have not tested this last suggestion. Results and methods of any such test will be posted here.

Posted by Nathan at 08:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (3)

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has posted an amusing article about how to get to to the top of the del.icio.us social bookmarking network. His post hints at the deeper workings of the system: more on this later, likely.

"While I haven’t done an in depth study into del.icio.us - it is interesting to note the type of links that consistently get to the top of the del.icio.us popular page."

Posted by Nathan at 01:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The fear of increasing exposure on the Internet contrasts with the increasing number of people blogging. We are simultaneously afraid of being watched and becoming more exhibitionist.

"'Data mining' of all that information and communication is at the heart of the furor over the recent disclosure of government snooping. U.S. President George W. Bush and his aides have said his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to monitoring international phone and e-mail communications linked to people with connections to al-Qaeda. What has not been acknowledged, according to the Times, is that NSA technicians combed large amounts of phone and Internet traffic seeking patterns pointing to terrorism suspects."

Posted by Nathan at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have often been wary of the blindly optimistic celebratory cries of "citizen" or "democratized" journalism, but it is undeniable that significant movement has been made in that direction. Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis posted this article about "citizen" journalism, which they wrote for the Nieman Reports in late December. They present a thorough and well thought-through look at the developing relationship between increasingly consumer-driven media and the hierarchical forms ofmainstream media (though at what point, if it hasn't come already, do we consider weblogs "mainstream"?).

"Media companies and those starting citizen journalism endeavors need to understand that media is becoming more of a social entity. As in any social environment, there are participants who serve different roles in the creation, consumption, sharing and transformation. This is giving rise to information ecosystems, such as the blogosphere, which we are just starting to recognize and understand."

Posted by Nathan at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David Weinberger links to an article of his at JOHO (the blog) about the recent debates over the accuracy of Wikipedia (it's from December 29th, so I'm a little behind things here). He brings up some interesting points and, I think, has put out a strong response to a lot of the criticism in mainstream media.

"...the mainstream media misunderstood this story because they have a cognitive problem when it comes to anonymity and accountability."

Posted by Nathan at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Drawing from the actor-network theory applied by Engestrom to online social networks, I think it is critical to analyze the connection between the user and the online social-network personal profile. Users seem to recognize the separation between "real-world" identity and the profile judging from the common language on the topic: you find a friend's profile on MySpace not the friend; the construction of a profile is seen as a creative act. This is a recognition that the tie between user and profile is not a direct correlation, but is rather a selective projection of identity. The presence of sub-networks of "fake" profiles (examples: 1 2) shows that there isn't even necessarily a logical correlation between the user and the projected identity. Though as this LiveJournal discussion shows, often some connection is still assumed.

What is the effect, then, of this projected identity, existing as a semi-autonomous counterpart to the real-world entity? One aspect to keep in mind is the dual function of social-networking sites: creating connections to strangers via their profiles and creating connections between people already connected in the non-web world, again via profiles. The link between user and profile acts as the link between two distinct networks: the non-web relationship/object-centered network and the network of social-networking site profiles. The connection between them lies in the act of creation: a one-to-one interaction between profile and user, each representing the other, to varying degrees, in the two parallel networks. It is necessary to draw the distinction between these two networks since profile and user can not be viewed in the singular. The two networks operate in very different modes, having separate sets of etiquette and interactive norms. Because of this, the link from user to profile can be as much a process of translation as it is of projection.

Anatomical terminology, the profile as sensory organ, almost seems appropriate for this relationship. Stimuli are received and translated from the profile to the user much in the same way the eye receives and translates stimuli to the brain. The user, like the brain in this comparison, is otherwise blind to the system which the eye/profile translates. Additionally, the profile differentiates itself from a tool, such as a phone, which may also translate stimuli: the individual connection between user and profile (through specific login-names, passwords, as well as the perceived likelihood of personal connection through projection) creates a relationship more akin to eye-brain than to phone-ear in that we all have a certain amount of (perceived and actual) exclusive access to our eyes that we do not have to a phone.

Posted by Nathan at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jyri Engeström's weblog has many interesting posts; this one, from April 2005, about social networks brings up particularly relevant approaches to analysis of the topic. He uses the concept of "object-centered sociality" as well as actor-network theory to look at the development, and potential for demise, of social networks.

"...the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group."

Posted by Nathan at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)