Who Owns the Pixels

We configure?

Richard Prince, an artist, downloaded pictures from peoples’ Instagram accounts, blew them up and printed them on canvas. He called it art and sold them off for up to $100K. The account owners were not asked in advance or informed afterward. He didn’t pay a thin dime to any of them.

Some analyzed it as an artistic endevour. Others were more critical and accuse Prince of naked greed.

At this point in history, the parts of ourselves we curate for sharing online, are an integrated part of our lives. The real world/virtual world dichotomy becomes less and less relevant as more of us capture large swaths of our lives and share them in text, pictures, video.

So what of Prince’s use of stranger’s Instagram pictures? Was it ethical? Was it theft? Should he have gotten permission? Can the subjects sue for a portion of the proceeds? If you are in a public place, such as a park, someone can take your picture because you have no expectation of privacy in a public place. But what about the Internet? Is it a public place? Are social network sites like modern day Agoras? If they are who owns your pictures and words?

Something to think about.

Gary Turk’s Look Up Might Make Chicken Little Proud

Look Up Exaggerates Damages of Social Media uses science to dismantle the claims in the viral video “Look Up” made by Gary  (aaaand no, I’m not linking to it).

They put claims such as ” We share frivolous bits of ourselves on social media, but leave out anything meaningful” up against current literature and find the claims ring as hollow as an empty keg. The sources they cite are diverse including: danah boyd, Kowert, Griffiths, and Oldmeadows article on “geek” stereotypes, the New York Times, Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, and Deters and Mehl’s article on how Facebook can make us feel less lonely. They wrap up by citing an article from Slate.com which not only recaps technohysteria of the 20th century  but also reminds the reader of the Douglas Adams comment that any new technology will be regarded with suspicion and trepidation by people 35 or older.

Le sigh.

My generation?  We embraced 24/7 MTV and the the Sony Walkman with gusto. However,the Nervous Nellies of my youth intoned that these communication advances would erode our morals and make us socially disconnected narcissists. And now I see so many of us spouting those same arguments about computer and/or mobile media. Has my generation become our our parents at their most hand wringingest?

(Well, some of us, your gentle blog writer refuses to succumb to that kind of thinking.)

This cyberhysteria is the latest incarnation of panic over technology. Marvin’s When Old Technology Was New (1988) is a good book that tackles this topic with full force. She spells out how in the 19th and 20th centuries, electricity, the telephone, telegraph. the radio and television were subject to the same fear and hysteria as computer and mobile media is today.

Our most advanced consumer technology serves at the whim of its owners. I’m not a utopianist but a realist, we control our technology and that means that we have the lion’s share of control over what it does to us, our families and our children. On its own technology isn’t not good or bad, it’s tool and like a hammer it can be used to build or destroy.

Take a deep breath Gary, now exhale. There, that’s better isn’t it?

 

Instagram Is The New MTV

Earlier today a friend of mine, Frank Bridges, posted a link to an article about a new Facebook app called Paper. He made a comparison between Facebook and Instagram and MTV and its subsidiary VH1, a damned good comparison that makes it a paragraph worth reading.[1]

If you go back to boyd & Ellison’s Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship (2008), they lay out the chronological history of the major social networking sites from SixDegrees.com (*sniffle*) to Facebook (which at the time it was published was had only been opened to the general public for less than a year).  What is clear is that the popularity of any given social networking site seems to follow a pattern. It builds, generally driven by a youthful tide, peaks, seems to collapse in on itself,  and as the popularity recedes, the “next big thing” comes crashing on-shore. (The additional part of that cycle I’ve noticed is that the big ones like Friendster and MySpace, seem to redefine themselves and come back as niche sites). Facebook came along in time to hop on the top of the mobile wave and have been able to ride it pretty steadily since about 2005, far longer than any other site.

To quote from an earlier blog post of mine:

Facebook benefited from 2 things that I think gave them a longer lifespan than their predecessors. First, it had a built in population of users by the time in opened to the general public in 2006. By coincidence or design (and probably a bit of both) the progression of their rollout populations was very smart. By the time they opened up to the general public, young people from about 14 to 25 were already acquainted and comfortable with the brand and usage expanded up and down from there. Its ascendancy also coincided with the dramatic uptick in the adoption of mobile technology. This meant that you could carry your entire social network in your pocket (well, at least the people that were also on Facebook).

I’ve always seen their growth strategy up to about 2009 as being very simple: “how do we make the site sticky eno

Facebook addressed this in 2010 by picking up the pace of the site’s investments in technologies and sites that allowed Facebook to enhance the services it provides to users at either end of the spectrum including the  2012 acquisitions of Lightbox and Instagram (Wikipedia, 2012; “Facebook Newsroom,” 2012, “Forbes,” n.d., “Inside Facebook,” n.d.;).  (They added other functions and sites to meet the needs of other site stakeholders but we’re not looking at that right now).ugh to retain the users and seductive enough to convert the non-users ”. I think some very prescient folks realized that Facebook would lose its cachet among teens and 20somethings as their parents and *grandparents* swelled its ranks. Really, who wants to go dancing at the same club their parents go to? The Pew Internet & American Life project told us that teens are “diversifying their social network portfolio” (Madden, 2013); keeping the Facebook account while using other sites they perceive of as having less drama and fewer adults.

Instagram is their attempt to retain the lion’s share of the youth audience; it’s MTV. I know a young man in junior high school who isn’t very interested in having a Facebook account but who thinks his Instagram account is awesome.  Paper, on the other hand, is VH1 an attempt to retain the late boomers/early gen Xers who are still ambivalent about growing role technology is playing in their ability to connect with their family and friends as well as to offer something fresh and new to their original core audience. Heck, they even include a guy using a manual typewriter in their promotional video!

Well played, Facebook, well played.

References

Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x

Contributors, M. (2012). Facebook, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Facebook Newsroom. (2012).

Forbes. (n.d.).

Inside Facebook. (n.d.). Retrieved February 03, 2014, from http://www.insidefacebook.com/

Madden, M. (2013). Teens Haven’t Abandoned Facebook (Yet). Washington, D.C. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/Commentary/2013/August/Teens-Havent-Abandoned-Facebook-Yet.aspx

---

[1] “Facebook is now the VH1 and Instagram is the MTV. Years ago I remember I was watching VH1 all the time and I wondered how the hell that happened since I had never watched the channel before. Then I realized that not only had I changed, but so did VH1 and that was a planned thing, because many of my generation had stopped watching MTV. Facebook is bleeding young people at the moment, because they are using Instagram more. They are communicating with images and hashtags. FB’s Paper is a way to keep us older folks who like to read tangible objects and write with tangible objects”.

Simple Answers to Simple Questions

I’ve been away from my beloved blog here for so long, I feel as though I should sing a chorus of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”.

But I’ll spare you.

My primary academic interest is examining the ways we create and recreate our lives in virtual spaces. I come from the point of view that technology like a hammer or saw;  fantastically useful tools that someone can decide to pick up and use as an implant of construction or destruction. It’s not the tool, its the end user.

Virtually every new communication technology from the alphabet (Thank you Nancy Baym for that great quote from Plato!)* to the airplane (because you do realize that transportation is a type of communication tool, right?) to the Internet has been decried as that thing that will make our society dystopic, make our society utopic, make us smarter, make us dumber, foster connections between people, drive us farther apart. And someone will always proclaim that it somehow makes us less human and our youths sex mad, .

Poppycock and Balderdash.

This is why I disagree with authors like Robert Putnam and Sherry Turkel. Yes I think society has changed, but I think it was and is still doing just that: changing.  Every age has its affordances and constraints from its technology, but technology is just the tool, not the determiner of the world we live in.

That is completely up to us.

Anyway, for the uninitiated among you, xkcd is a thrice weekly web comic written by Randall Munroe.  It is funny, highly geeky, and at times head scratchy. A few days ago, he absolutely nailed how ridiculous the moral ( and every other) panic associated with technology is.

(BTW: if you are not familiar with the comic, I suggest checking it out. It’s great!)

* In her book, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Nancy Baym quotes Socrates’ warning‘, by way of Plato,  that the creation of an alphabet that allowed people to write instead of extemporaneously orate would make us all dullards. Makes me chuckle every time. 

(Link to this comic: http://xkcd.com/1289/)

A Chatter of Cell Phones

According to a September 18, 2013 report from The Pew Internet and American Life Project, Joanna Brenner wrote that as of May 2013 “91% of American adults have a cell phone”. According to their historical data tracking adult cell phone ownership, in 2006 that number was only 73% (Brenner, 2013).

That means that in seven years, cell phone ownership grew almost 18% in 7 years and now more than 90% of American adults own a cell phone. Up until this point in time, IIRC, television was the technology that was adopted in most quickly by Americans households. According to Karl Hartig’s 1998 chart in the Wall Street Journal, Classroom Edition,  television ownership reached approximately 75% around 1957 it did not reach approximately 95% penetration until about 1970, a period of about 13 years. Not even electricity or personal computers match that rapid rate of adoption (Hartig, Tuning in: Communications technologies historically have had broad appeal for consumers). It seems though, that cell phones have.

I’m sure that some of these figures are driven by the fact that the purchase of a television took a much bigger immediate bite out of a household budget in the 1950s through the 1970s than a cell phone does today. Another factor that I think comes into play, especially early on, is that television, despite the dystopian view of it killing intra- and inter-family communication, could be a highly social media. A family that owned a television could invite family, friends, and neighbors to watch TV with them. You didn’t have to own a television in order to share in a special event such as the final game of the World Series or popular TV shows such as “I Love Lucy” or “Gunsmoke”.

However telephones are, generally speaking, not a technology that can be enjoyed communally.

For example, think about a social network of six households each with two adults and three children. It was possible in the mid-50s that only two of those six households would own a television and the other households might visit to socialize and watch TV. If we fast-forward to the turn of the 21st century and look at a network of six households, again each with two adults and three children, you would likely see the adults and possibly one or more of the children, each having their own cell phone. It would stand to reason that a physically large (remember the first TV sets were essentially the size of a piece of furniture), expensive, and mom essential item would be adopted at a slower pace than something smaller and cheaper that offered more immediately obvious professional and personal affordances. The thing that amazes me is that TV was so rapidly adopted despite its relative cost.

(I feel that I should apologize at this point for not researching statistics on what percentage of a family’s budget a new television would cost versus the percent of a family’s budget a cell phone would cost. Despite not having numbers I am comfortable in stating that the purchase of a television in the mid-1950s through 1970s would’ve consumed a larger part of a household budget versus the cell phone purchased between the turn of the 21st century and 2013.)

So a chatter of cellphones populates our public spaces, replaces our home phones and, for the 50+% of us who use smartphones provides, information and entertainment almost any place at almost any time. Scholars such as Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton study the effects of our perpetual connectedness via mobile media technology. It looks like they will have a lot to study for some time to come.

References

Brenner, J. Pew Research Center, (2013). Pew internet: Mobile. Retrieved from Pew Internet & American Life Project website: http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/February/Pew-Internet-Mobile.aspx

Hartig, K. (Designer). (1998). Tuning in: Communications technologies historically have had broad appeal for consumers [Web Graphic]. Retrieved from http://www.karlhartig.com/chart/techhouse.pdf

Like a Kid in a Social Networking Candy Shop

In boyd and Ellison’s foundational article, Social Networking Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship, they define a social networking site thusly:

…[W]eb-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system (Boyd & Ellison, 2008, p. 211).

A Social Media Agency is a UK based PR firm that firm that designs marketing exclusively for social media. It’s natural then that they would maintain a directory of social networking sites. And they do. They maintain a list of almost 250 social networking sites. They range from general use sites like Facebook and Twitter to niche sites for booklovers, vampire enthusiasts and more. That list could easily swell if they added alternative reality sites such as Second Life, blogging platforms such as LiveJournal and WordPress, massively multiplayer online role-playing games  (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft (do folks still play that?) and dating sites such OKCupid and EHarmony, that have appended social media like elements  to their interface. It seems as though there are enough sites for everybody including the dog.

No, I’m serious about that dog part.

But, if the all the world’s a stage, how many parts do we play today? How many parts can we reasonably sustain? Sociologist Erving Goffman used the theatrical metaphor of the “performance” to describe our interaction with other people. He didn’t mean it in a way that implies people act falsely in front of others, but that we comport ourselves differently for different “audiences” or groups of people. For example, when we are at work we behave in a way appropriate to the workplace. When we are with a bunch of friends watching football our demeanor and behavior is most likely different even if there is an overlap in the two groups (Goffman, 1959).

In their study of identity and interaction online, Bullingham and Vasconcelos, found that, “[t]he key finding from interview data is that participants often attempt to re-create their offline selves online, rather than actively engaging with persona adoption”(Bullingham & Vasconcelos, 2013, p. 109) But they only looked at a very small population and asked each person about their activity on one particular site. It’s not a leap to believe that in the same way our concrete world work and social selves differ according to the setting, that our Facebook and LinkedIn selves will differ in a Goffmanian way as well. After all, even if there is an overlap in the people we are linked to on the two sites, we are there for different purposes.

So many social networking sites; so many interesting opportunities.

References

Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. (D. M. Boyd & N. B. Ellison, Eds.)Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x

Bullingham, L., & Vasconcelos, a. C. (2013). “The presentation of self in the online world”: Goffman and the study of online identities. Journal of Information Science, 39(1), 101–112. doi:10.1177/0165551512470051

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. (E. University Of, Ed.)Teacher (Vol. 21, p. 259). Doubleday. doi:10.2307/2089106

Every Generation Does Its Own Dance and Sings Its Own Song

I’m not talking about technology today.  Today I’m talking about social history, triggered by something I read that made me angry. This is personal and anecdotal but it’s a topic that I’ve give some thought to over the years.

Today, the Washington Post posted an opinion piece by Dana Milbank called “The Weakest Generation?”  Please some time to read it, it’s worth taking in his point of view.  In it he talks about his parents attending the Great March on Washington and he quotes his father as saying, “’ When people talk about Martin Luther King, that’s my connection. It’s a small connection — no handshake or anything — but I’m proud to have been there.’”

This piece is the conceit of the most privileged of the baby boom generation filtered through one who embraced their self rewarding worldview.

His thesis is both wrong and insulting. How can he say of his, of *my*, “[w]e grew up soft: unthreatened, unchallenged and uninspired. We lacked a cause greater than self.” Isn’t that the same charge leveled at his parents’ generation by *their* parents. He’s internalized Boomer bullshit and regurgitated in this editorial.

Curating and passing on history has always been the dominion of the elite and the Boomer generation is no exception. Those who tell the tales Milbank takes as truth were able to go to college and had the free time to attend events like the Great March on Washington.  When they got out of college they went into positions that afforded them to freedom to write about their experiences as though they were nearly universal and to filter the experiences of others through their lens.

Like all older generations, they would have us believe that they made a lasting, positive difference in the world.  Well, that’s true for every generation. Whether it is a World War, Civil War, assassinations, financial upheaval, or fights for voting rights, every generation has had those historical movements and moments that marked its soul and shaped its legacy.

Let me put this into perspective for you: Boomers had a good time at Woodstock, my generation had a good time at Live Aid and contributed to a serious cause.  (And, for the record, his father is no more connected to Martin Luther King, Jr than I am to Madonna just because I was in JFK stadium that blazing hot day.)

They had the BC pill freeing them to enjoy a level of sexual freedom and be open and public about it. When most of us were beginning our sexual lives, AIDS was the ugly specter peering over our shoulder.

Boomers were raised, for the most part, in an age of prosperity and relative financial security. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, you were much more likely to have had 2 working parents, or divorced parents, or live in blended families. or live through periods where a parent was laid off from their job.

When we were kids, having enough gas to power our cars became a serious, tangible issue.

After September 11, 2001, we may have been told to go shopping, but I also remember in the weeks after, men of all ages *volunteering* to go into the military. I remember all of the people who volunteered to help rebuild New Orleans and those who showed up to assist at my beloved Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy.

No, Mr. Milbank, is mistaken if he thinks our generation is untested by trial…[and] squandering American greatness by turning routine give-and-take into warfare”. As every other generation, we have our challenges and we, like any every other generation, have risen to those challenges. Sometimes only partially, often imperfectly, but we rise and will continue to do so.

And you know something, so will the Millennials, who are coming right up behind us, and their children and grandchildren and every successive generation.

Shame on Dana Milbank, shame on him for foisting his weak, biased version of social history off on us.

Hannah Anderson’s Q&A (Part I)

When crisis survivors[1] of begin to face the public, often they appear on the TV interview circuit: Anderson Cooper, The Today Show, Good Morning America, etc.  Every host asks the same half dozen questions and every interview is punctuated by the same news footage; the only thing that changes is the set and who was asking the questions. Hannah Anderson[2] threw broadcast journalism into a bit of a tizzy last week because she (unintentionally) flipped the script.

Prior to her kidnapping Anderson maintained an account on the website Ask.fm.[3] As soon as she got home, she took to that site and answered questions from anyone who asked directly and with no filter. She also made a point to tell those identifying themselves as journalists that she would not answer their questions and that they should leave her family alone.

Why Hannah went to that site only she can answer, maybe she wanted to do something mindless, maybe this was an effort to get back to normal, maybe she wanted to see if people had questions for her. What we do know is that the questions and comments ran the gamut from flirtatious to sympathetic to prurient. At times her answers were blunt:

“[q] Why didn’t you tell your parents he creeped you out?

[a] In part, he was my dad’s best friend and I didn’t want to ruin anything between them….

[q] Are you glad he’s dead?

[a] Absolutely”(Wian, 2013).

Almost right away, news organizations began hitting up every psychologist, social worker and social media “expert” they could find to comment on this. Some handwringing sob sisters took to the airwaves and Internet questioning why she did this and about how inappropriate it was for her father to allow her access to social media. Others recognized that as a child of the Electronic Social Media Age, Anderson’s actions were not surprising and in fact, could even be considered healthy.  Others still just published screen caps of her account and wrote scant commentary around it. (I’m not including a bunch of citations here as the online commentary is easily googled).

This was different and I’m not sure that the media knew what to do. With her blunt talk, selfies and shots of her new manicure, Anderson didn’t fit the model of “what a victim does”. Was some of the the traditional press squawking at the thought of being pointedly and publicly, cut out of the picture? It is certain that Matt Lauer wouldn’t ask some of those questions that she answered.

According to Baym and boyd, “[P]eople… use the public and quasi-public qualities of social media to carve out safe identities for themselves in the face of legal troubles, create public memorials for the dead, [and] narrate their own stories….(Baym & boyd, 2012). Isn’t that just what Anderson did? In immediately taking to social media, Anderson (quite unknowingly I’m sure) did just that. She put her unedited narrative out there without the help of a broadcast media outlet. If you asked her why she did it, her answer might not be the same as Baym and boyd’s in letter but I bet it would match the spirit.

References

Baym, N. K., & Boyd, D. (2012). Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 320–329. doi:10.1080/08838151.2012.705200

Wian, C. (2013). Friend: Hannah Anderson discusses kidnapping on social media. CNN.com. Retrieved August 18, 2013, from http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/14/us/hannah-anderson-social-media

---

[1] I use the term survivor with great intention. I refuse to call anyone who gets through something like this a victim. Increasingly I find that term diminishes the individual by casting them in the role of the captive, the sufferer. The word “survivor” looks towards their future. You are only a victim until it is over.

[2] In August, 2013, Hannah Anderson was kidnapped by a family friend who killed her mother, brother and dog. After an Amber Alert and multi state search, the two were found about a week later and she was rescued. Her kidnapper was killed after firing a gun at police.

[3] Ask.Fm is a European based site where users, who can choose to remain anonymous, can ask other users questions about pretty much anything. The answers to every question appears on the user’s home screen in the form of an extended Q&A

The Evolution of the Web

This graceful looking infographic has two panes. One shows the history of the introduction of browsers and the web technologies that made the internet colorful, interactive and dynamic. the other shows the growth of number of users as well as the monthly traffic over time. You can see the growth of the Internet as it maps to the tools that made it so attractive and useful to people.

It still boggles my mind that when I first went online there were only about 10 million people online. Today almost a third of the entire world’s population is online keeping me company.

Click on the picture to see this beautiful piece. It was originally published by The Washington Post’s The Switch and tweeted by The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project which is how I came upon it.

So what year did you first get online?

Who is Sherry Turkle and Why Do I Disagree With Her? (Pt I)

I arrived in Indiana on July 31, ready to move into my new place and onto this next part of my life. The first two days couple of days were spent all of the “I need this today to function” items. Day three though, I was hit by a wave of homesickness.  I wanted nothing more than to kick back with a tasty pork roll sandwich on a poppy seed hard roll.

I went to my computer and logged into I ❤ Radio and spent the morning listening to a couple of my favorite radio stations. I was able to hear the DJs whose voices I recognize talk about the stores and events I was familiar with. The traffic report told me that the same old roads that get backed up every morning were backed up again.

I went on Facebook and updated my status to say the following:

I’ve been okay up to now but this morning I woke up very homesick 
Thanks to the Internet, I’m able to listen to NJ101.5 and WMGQ, that’s made me feel better. I think once school starts for me on Monday I’ll be too darned busy to be homesick, lol.
I’ll try to post more pics of my place later since a lot of the boxes are gone. —feeling alone 😦

In less than an hour I had messages from people from all the different parts of my life: former classmates, people I grew up with and people I used to work with as well as friends and family. Some made me laugh, another told me she would utter an expletive in my honor on a particularly expletive worthy highway. A couple of others reminded me of the adventure that lie ahead  but my mother (a new Facebook user at the tender age of 70*cough*) had the final word,

“Just read your blog. hon, you’re not alone tho. You’ve gone thru a lot in your life, and survived my dear…. You’ve stood up to the challenge. I think you’ll do it.” (by “blog” she means my FB status update.)

I took a class with Keith N Hampton when I was at Rutgers and a couple of times ( I think in part to help me rein in my gleeful techo-utopian attitude) he reminded us that a message on a screen doesn’t take the place of a hug.  He’s absolutely right, they don’t and both academic and popular literature gives us evidence of that.[1] However, my being able to almost instantly access the radio and people from back home was a great mood picker upper.

My FB friends and I were not  alone together in the sense of the title of Turkle’s book;  in the physical presence of others yet using technology to isolate us from each other. Instead that morning SNSs allowed us to be alone, yet together. Alone in our homes, cars and workplaces yet able to simulate a togetherness in spirit and heart.

Not necessarily as good as a warm hug but pretty darned good at doing the job nonetheless.

---

[1] One extreme example of this is the horror of Romanian orphanages under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s. One of the reasons the children were in such desperately poor physical condition was that they had little or no affectionate physical contact from their “caretakers”.

Jug A Who?

This is why it’s dangerous for me to look at any cultural subgroup.

While my academic interest in online connections and communities, what I study is naturally an extension of the study of how people connect with each other and form communities based on common interest as opposed to geography or blood.

I was so fascinated with this documentary I watched it twice. I think this is in no small part due to my own perceptions, preconceptions and prejudices of the denizens of Juggaloville.

 

When I put all of my baggage around Juggalo culture aside, the jargon is different, the drag[1] is different, the cultural icons and touchstones are different; however; this could just as easily have been a gather of battle re-enactors, furries, Pennsic attendees, LARPers, extreme athletes or any other societal micro-subgroup.

Some of the commonalities I saw include,

• The expressions of their collective outsiderness and the idea of being misunderstood by society at large
• The sharing (and passing along of) common cultural touchstones with the documentarians
• The situating of oneself in the history of the ad hoc community  (see 2:40-2:53)
• Discussing use of the word family and the like to describe the fandom

McMillan and Chavis define community as “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (D. W. McMillan & Chavis, 1986; p. 9) .  The operationalized by breaking it down into four factors:

• Needs fulfillment (a perception that members’ needs will be met by the community)
• Group membership (a feeling of belonging or a sense of interpersonal relatedness)
• Influence (a sense that one matters, or can make a difference, in a community and that the community matters to its members)
• Emotional connection (a feeling of attachment or bonding rooted in members’ shared history, place or experience)

I can see each of these played out in this short documentary.

It took me about 20 minutes to go from, “Gee, there folks seem odd” to “wow, look how universal their creating a sense of identity and community is”. And that is why I do what I do.

 

References

Drag (clothing). (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved August 10, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(clothing)

McMillan, D. (1996). Sense of community. Journal of community psychology. Retrieved from http://history.furman.edu/benson/hst321/McMillan_Sense_of_Community_1996.pdf

McMillan, D. W., & Chavis, D. M. (1986). Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory. Journal of Community Psychology, 14(January), 6–23.

Validation of a brief sense of community scale: Confirmation of the principal theory of sense of community. (2008). Journal of Community  …. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/doi/10.1002/jcop.20217/abstract

 

---

[1] In this case I am using the word “drag” as in “clothing carrying symbolic significance” (“Drag (clothing),” n.d.)I used the word “costume” at first but I didn’t like the association of that word with artifice.

This is more than just something these folks put on. In fact, for those with tattoos or non-traditional piercings on their face or neck, this is part of how the present themselves every day.  But I wanted to capture that how they dress at this event, whether it’s an element that is visible or invisible to the “straight” world isn’t quite  uniform, but is a distinct way of identifying themselves as part of the Juggalo family.

Welcome Back To Me

This has been a busy summer. I’ve had some big things in the works that have kept me away from my beloved blog here but I’m going to remedy that. For the time being I will be using this blog to make shorter posts, maybe even Twitter sized, as a way of capturing ideas that I may not have the time to write an expanded essay on but want to return to at a later time.

My biggest news is that I am going to Purdue University 

Beering Hall, Home of the Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue University.

for my PhD.  I’m thrilled to work with the fantastic faculty and the other students I’ve connected with have been friendly and engaging. I know I will be challenged and stimulated. I am preparing to leave New Jersey early next week and this next part of my life in The Academy begins in mid August.

My new email academic address is  pjeter@purdue.edu

While I will miss my friends and colleagues at Rutgers University, the nice thing about being an academic is that those connections are never really broken. They are now my collaborators and fellow alumni. It’s not the end but a rite of passage, a transformation,  and that excites me a great deal.

Along those lines,  I will be co-presenting two papers at the National Communication Association 99th Annual Conference in Washington DC in November. If you are going, please  look for me, I’d love to grab some coffee with you. (OK, I love coffee period but I’d love to connect with  anyone who reads my blog). I’ll discuss those papers a *tiny* bit more in a later blog. I’m not giving too much away, though, I want you to come see the presentations!

Keep watching this space; my adventure continues.

The Real World of Life Online

The dichotomy of the virtual world versus the real world is a lie.

Now that I have your attention, let me explain.

There are no longer two separate spheres of existence. Activity online has become more ubiquitous, commonplace. There is only one real world and online interactions are just one of the many stages we perform upon within it. It has become another venue in the same way we in habit other spaces such as out home or the bowling alley or school.

Nancy Baym, Microsoft Research principal researcher and author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age is an active tweeter. Recently, she tweeted a link to an article about by Paul Miller about what happened when he decided to unplug from the Internet for a year.

Talk about unexpected consequences.

The second sentence in his essay is, “One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was “corrupting my soul.” This statement isn’t shocking, we’ve heard people say variations of this before. What is more telling is his first sentence,

“I was wrong”.

Why his experience didn’t work out the way he thought it would is played out in this passage, “I drew her [his young niece] a picture of what the internet is. It was computers and phones and televisions, with little lines connecting them. Those lines are the internet. I showed her my computer, drew a line to it, and erased that line.”

He made a mistake that all but doomed his experience to end with a feeling of desolate isolation as opposed to the  feeling of freedom he was thinking. When he illustrated the Internet for his niece, he showed it the way an IT person might, a network of various bits of electronica connected by cords and cables.

But the Internet is far more than that. A more accurate depiction would have been a network of all of the family, friends, and acquaintances in his life linked together by lines of varying thicknesses. Some lines might be doubled or tripled, and maybe even different colors.

The Internet isn’t about computers and smartphone and tablets; it’s about people and how we connect with each other. It’s about the myriad types of relationships we can initiate and maintain with keystrokes, images and sound. It’s about who we contact and why we contact them

At the end of the day, the Internet is about people and their process of using the technology to connect, not that machines that facilitate the act of connecting. This is true whether you are talking about the alphabet, train travel or email.and  how often; it’s about how close we are to them and what methods we use to contact them

Miller’s experiment ties back to a tweet that Baym posted later on, “So important to study old media because otherwise we think everything is new and we are historically special. That’s me talking.”

In the same way that living without a phone is hard for most of us in the First and Second worlds to imagine, it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine life without connection through the internet: email, social networking sites, message boards, etc. While Miller initially enjoyed things he felt he was missing, he ultimately found that he was engaging in the same behaviors he blamed on the Internet. He stopped leaving the house and would passively watch TV all day. Without tools such as Skype, email and Twitter, he began to feel the social disconnect that would occur for many of us if our Internet access was cut off.

The lesson learned is that while the hardware is new, the attitudes and behaviors are the same. From the alphabet to television people expressed concerns about how a particular communication technology was going to degrade the quality of our relationships and civilization  itself.

What Paul Miller discovered is that once a new technology becomes integrated into society it becomes enmeshed in the fabric of our relationships. It is the rejection of new communication technologies that can have a negative impact on our ability to be fully present in the lives of those we know and love, not new technologies.

Memes

Although my main interest in in social interactions and identity online, I am also enamored by pop culture and memes are one of the foremost manifestations of modern pop culture. In his book, The Selfish Gene (1989) Richard Dawkins coined the word meme to describe a unit of cultural transmission. He adapted it from the word gene which is a unit of physical attributes that are passed on from generation to generation.[1] The idea is that like genes and viruses, memes move from person to person through social contact.[2]

Radio had its Hindenburg disaster, Welles, “War of the Worlds” and coverage of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. TV had its “Lucy Ricardo Has a Baby”, “Who Shot JR?”, and The Superbowl.[3] This infographic is an amusing amble through the Internet’s contribution to our collective social memory.

The radio and TV events I mentioned look dated to us was struck by how old fashioned the early memes look today, a scant 20 years later. . Consider how dated The Dancing Baby looks to people who were born in 1994. I remember how state of the art it seemed at the time, a lot of older computers couldn’t even run it at full speed. [4]  It was (by the standards of the day) memory intensive and pushed the graphic capabilities of many computers.  Today, in an age where video games look almost as lifelike as movies, the 3-D rendering of The Dancing baby looks rough and unsophisticated.

Enjoy the infographic (If it’s tough to read, you can click on it to make it larger).

---

[1] While things such as intellectual or musical ability may at first blush not seem to be physical traits, your genes only carry the potential for the physical capability of a person’s brain or body to be predisposed to perform a certain function better than others. Once can carry a gene that gives them the potential to be a world class swimmer.  If they don’t nurture that talent through practice and competition, that gene is still there and available to be passed on even if the carrier didn’t take advantage of it.

[2] And yes, I am including union of ovum and sperm as a type of social contact. I recognize that under some circumstances, the people contributing the genetic material have no direct social contact. I do consider the contact they have to be mediated by the medical personnel and technology that fosters fertilization.

[3] Like we really believed that she and Ricky slept in double beds. Oh 1950s TV you were so full of the lulz!

[4] You can view The Dancing Baby here-à http://www.dancing-baby.net/Babygif.htm  Go here to see The Hamster Dance à http://www.findmyhosting.com/web-hamster/

The Digital Native?

In 2001 Marc Prensky coined the term Digital Native. He defined this as young people (since this was written in 2001 he was referring to people born from roughly 1985 after). Who, “spent their entire lives surrounded… all the other toys and tools of the digital age” (Prensky, 2001).

I think he made a good point, children born in the last two decades of the 20^th century were born into a technological environment that was very unique. While this could be said about any generation, this group’s technological experience was colored by significant cultural changes that shaped the century.  The United States Census Bureau issued a report that stated that 1961 17% of mothers returned to work within the first 12 months of giving birth, by 2007 that figure was 64% (United States Census Bureau, pp. 13-14).

Children born in 1961 had a few ways of interacting with others, primarily telephone and US mail. National broadcasting was something that was confined to a few large media institutions. You had to be selected by one of them to be seen in a broadcast produced by others. Television and movies consumed by children and youth in 1961 were constrained in the topics that could be discussed, the use of profanity and the images that could be shown. Compared to children in 2001, the scope of their world was smaller and more closely controlled by their community (familial and geographical) and options for interaction were more limited as well as more easily supervised.

Children born 30 years later grew up in a very different cultural landscape.  They had more options for one on one interaction, along with that they had the chore of deciding which tool they would use to communicate with various members of their social network (ie. mailing a grandparent a thank you note for a present  versus emailing a parent on a business trip).  They were able to directly broadcast their thoughts and actions to national and even international audiences without an intermediary controlling the broadcast. They were using technologies that were not always completely understood by their parents and other adults. At the same time that Prensky was writing about children and youths as digital natives, Bovill and Livingstone (2001) described children in First World countries as inhabiting a “bedroom culture”. They described homes in Western societies it is taken for granted that most of the children had their own bedrooms that are filled with electronics such as radios, TVs, computers, iPods, etc.

My issue with the term Digital Native is that they aren’t natives.

In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, these are the first 6 definitions of the word native:

1: inborn, innate <native talents>

2: belonging to a particular place by birth

3 archaic: closely related

4: belonging to or associated with one by birth

5: natural, normal

6 a : grown, produced, or originating in a particular place or in the vicinity : local

b : living or growing naturally in a particular region : indigenous

All of these definitions carry with them the notion of a place where someone is born and/or bred or something that is intrinsic to who they are[1]. No one is born digital or as a resident of The Internet; living the digital life is something learned; humans need to become literate with it. This is not an odd or new concept. We are not born knowing how to use a telephone, little children may imitate their parents’ behavior and body language while chattering into a phone (and I’m looking at you my beloved nephew) but they have to be taught how to make a phone call. Children may sit in front of a TV but they need to be taught how to change the channel (Ok, show of hands, how many of you used to think that the people on TV lived inside the cable or TV itself?)

If you read the entire article by Prensky, he was specifically referring to education, K through college (Prensky 2000) but even in that case I don’t like that phrase. Aside from these phrases feeling disrespectful to immigrants, his paper seems to suggest that people who were born before the digital are will always have a handicap, he calls it and accent, navigating through digital culture and that people born in it “They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work” (Prensky, 2001).  He implies that using technology is something that is fundamental to post digital people. I would say that, like reading, navigating and being able to vet information online is a learned skill. While it’s use is something assumptive and a necessity in today’s business world, it’s not a fundamental skill because becoming digital involves “old fashioned” skills such as reading, logic, communicating clearly, etc.

A big thing I see is missing completely is while the amount and form of media has exploded, how the human brain perceives and retains information has not. Also, sound instructional design is sound instructional design regardless of the media used to convey the message. An adjunct to that idea is that in a classroom situation, a good instructor can work with the group they are given. Look, it was so-called Digital Immigrants who designed much of the “Digital”, it’s not a foreign land but a land they designed and built.  I think these phrases just serves to create generation gap that I’m not really sure exists to the extent that he portrays.

Prensky is now talking about something called “Digital Wisdom” which means finding the best combination of mind and technology. He talks about technology as enhancing human beings. I liked this idea when Vannevar Bush wrote about Memex as a form of brain extension in As We May Think back in 1945.

References

Bovill, M., & Livingstone, S. (2001). Bedroom culture and the privatization of media use.

Children reporting online: The cultural politics of the computer lab. (2004). Television & New Media, 5(2), 87-107. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=13081297&site=ehost-live

United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2012). Employment characterisitcs of families summary. (Economic Release No. USDL-12-0771). Washington, DC: United States Department of Labor

---

[1] While one might argue that language is not something inborn or intrinsic, I would say that language falls under definition #4. Even though a child may not be able to speak until 18 months or so, they are developing language skill from the beginning. I once read somewhere (and I can’t remember where so I’m not able to verify this) that by the time a baby is four or five months old, the noises they make are the noises they need to speak the language(s) of the people their caretakers.

Have You Missed Me?

It has been far too long since I updated this blog and for anyone who has been following it, I apologize. Life has been very busy this semester and I have not had the time to revise the blog posts I’m writing for my class to a point that I felt they were ready to be posted. The wait will be over soon, though. I’m working on a post that I’ll be uploading something over the next week.

I  hope you’ll find it as interesting as I do and hope to get back to posting more regularly after the holidays.

 

I guess I got a bit bogged down this semester

 

Power: The Real Strength of Weak Ties

If You Want to Test a Man’s Character, give him power–Abraham Lincoln.

This week’s readings made me realize a basic fact of the study of social networks, it’s all about power: access to it, maintaining it, struggling to get it and gatekeeping newcomers to the power circle.

In the beginning, there was Grannovetter’s Strength of Weak Ties (1973). He said that the social network ties that joined people are strong or weak. Strong ties form a dense network. Ron Burt would say these networks are full of redundant information because if A has strong ties to B and C it is likely that B and C share a tie as well; the information would just roll around those three actors. He went on to describe a situation where A might also have a tie to Z who isn’t connected to B or C and is situated within their own network. Granovetter called this a weak tie and likened it  to a bridge. Whereas a cluster of strong ties share similar information among their network, the weak tie serves as a conduit for information and innovation that might be otherwise unavailable. He illustrates this point by demonstrating that political power of community groups attempting to preserve their neighborhood. While networks of strong ties imply high levels of trust, weak ties carry a level of trust which is earned over time by the sharing of timely and helpful information (Burt 1993). It is the networks that had weak ties to others outside of the community that received and shared the information necessary to seize power, mobilize and take action. Those without those ties had insufficient information to form powerful coalitions, were hampered and lost their fight.

In 1993 Burt expanded on this with the concept of structural holes in an article about the social structure of completion. Competition for what?  Power, which can take the form of information, resources or finances. He connected the concept of tie strength to economic power by positioning it as an element of structural holes. Structural holes look at the superstructure, the junction where networks connect.  Structural hole theory says that where there is a hole, two networks that have no connection to each other, there is an opportunity for someone to position themselves as an intermediary between the two networks and serve as a bridge to that chasm. The person who bridges that structural hole also positions themselves to enhance their personal social capital. Lin’s definition of social capital reinforces the power dynamic of social networks: investment in social relations with expected return” (p.6). Later he cites Coleman’s definition, of social capital being the resources embedded in a social structure which are accessed and /or mobilized in purposive actions. Social capital is mutual and dynamic, both parties bring something to the table. The social capital of the individual nodes, enhance the social capital of the group.

Social Capital. What is it? What does it do? The 4 elements to explain the need for social capital are completely about retention, enhancement and control of societal power:

• Facilitating the flow of information that can aid in finding opportunities and choices not usually available
• Exerting influence (putting in a good word for someone lower on the social scale)
• The certification of social credentials
• The reinforcement of identity and recognition

Lin provides an understanding of social capital by beginning with definitions of capital put forth by economic theorists such as Marx and sociologists such as Bourdieu who discuss capital as a tool of the dominant class to incent and control the working classes. (Whereas Marx saw it solely as an oppressive tool, Bourdieu conceded that the working class might adopt and become invested in meanings of the symbols used by the dominant class for their own benefit.) According to Lin, Marx presented capital as being about antagonistic class struggle and neocapitialists presented it as a layered series of discourses.

So how do weak ties, social capital and structural holes all come together?

Weak ties provide the basic structure that spans structural holes in a network. The motivated individual can cultivate a weak tie in a disconnected network and by sharing information that is timely and relevant to the interests of his or her weak tie’s network, build individual social capital that adds to the social capital of the group. The weak ties close the structural hole. In closing that hole social capital is built.[1]

That this becomes about power is evident in Cote and Erickson (2009) where they look at the role of social capital in how Canadian ethnic minorities are viewed. One of the findings was that people with more education and people in higher socio-economic strata were more tolerant of minorities. One of their comments is that the tolerance among these groups is that racial minorities pose no threat to their societal, political or economic power. I would add that another element of power is the ability of these groups (which carry a great deal of overlap) is the power to determine which individual members of a given minority group can “cross over” to more powerful strata through actions including college admissions, the distribution of scholarships and grant money, promotions, letters of recommendation, etc. These actions serve to enhance the social capital of the individual who is a member of the dominant culture by bringing new blood into the dominant network and in the dominated culture by positioning them as a friend and ally of the group.

---

[1] I suspect the Ron Burt would take issue with my use of the phrase “close the structural hole” but that is very much how I see it. The hole exists because of the absence of a weak tie. Let’s say you have two networks that share no connections. They are like two islands. The person who steps in to bridge that gap between the two is closing that gap (and putting him or herself in a position of power. They can control the content, flow and direction of information.

Only Connect

Wellman asked the Community Question: How does the nature of a given community affect and are affected by the the community at large” How does the macro structure affect the composition, structure and contents of interpersonal ties and how does the constellation of social ties that form a network affect larger social structures (1999,p. 2). He, I think rightly, refers to Granovetter’s findings on the functions of weak ties vs strong ties[1]. In the Wellman quote I see Fischer nodding his head in agreement when describes the interpersonal bonds as creating society interaction. Everything, from getting advice to gossiping to falling in love, is another building block that forms (or hinders the formation of) network ties. Our interlocked network ties are what form the fabric of what we find community. This reminds me of Fairhurst and Putnam’s article on how discourse forms community (2004). And while they use the term “organization” this can just as easily reflect a community structure. In finding work in the community with people he knows and getting married and building his family in that same community, Mr N is at once being shaped by as well as helping to shape the community. Being shaped by in the manner in which the community serves as a template for his life and shaping it in his and his wife’s addition to the existing social structure, reinforcing its behaviors and attitudes towards things such as government agencies, for example.

Bott’s (1957) examination of the effect of spousal relationships on the social network they form and the networks those ties comprise. Succinctly, the greater the separation of the masculine and feminine domains was in the family, the denser, and more localized the strong ties were. This was also was also predictive of a higher degree of multiplexity, something that Haythornethwaite (2005) would point to as an indicator of greater tie strength. One of the things I extrapolated from her discussion of the N’s was that while weak ties can be helpful in getting employment, those weaker ties weren’t as important for employment in these network. I would put forth that because Mr N’s network was formed by men he had long standing ties to, when a young man looked for his first job (1957 being the age where one got a job and stayed with that company until retirement), he automatically followed his longtime friends (and probably elder men in his geographically close family) to the same factory or trade where they worked. While the strong tie didn’t necessarily pass on information to get the job, it did create an environment where a man wouldn’t have to give much thought to,” what do I want to be when I grow up?”[2]

References

Bott, Elizabeth. (1955). Urban Families: Conjugal Roles and Social Networks. Human Relations 8:345-83.

Fischer, Claude. (1982). To Dwell Among Friends. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Ch. 1, 7-10]

Kalmijn, M. (2003). Shared Friendship Networks and the Life Course. Social Networks, 25, 231-249.

Klofstad, C., Sokhey, A,. & McClurg S. (in press). Disagreeing About Disagreement: How Conflict in Social Networks Affects Political Behavior. American Journal of Political Science.

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Brashears, M. E. (2006). Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades. American Sociological Review, 71, 353-375.

Price-Spratlen, T. (2008). Urban Destination Selection among African Americans during the 1950s Great Migration. Social Science History, 32(3), 437-469. doi:10.1215/01455532-2008-005

Sides, J. A. (2000, January). Working Away: African American Migration and Community in Los Angeles from the Great Depression to 1954. Dissertation Abstracts International, 2652.

Wellman, Barry, and Scot Wortley. (1990). Different Strokes from Different Folks: Community Ties and Social Support. American Journal of Sociology 96(3):558-88.

---

[1] I would identify this paper as the one that triggered my intense interest in social network ties. I found his basic theory an elegant way of explaining the different role played by the connections we have with the various people in our lives. I think so much of what has been written since then is a refinement or criticism of this initial work. I want to add to this by exploring how it is situated within the age of Computer Mediated Communication age, including email, message boards, blogs, and any other format that facilitates online communities.

[2] I see so much of my parents’ neighborhood experiences in the story of the N family.

My mother grew up in a small town where her family had lived for many generations. Her grandfather ran the produce store and the town’s only taxi. They were working class people and my mother’s generation almost all grew up and lived their lives within a few miles of their home town. As a child I don’t think we ever had to drive more than 15 minutes in any direction to get to almost any family member’s home. The story of the tightly interwoven social network where people depended on family (because in this community almost everyone was related, however distantly) to each other was their story. Gender roles were proscribed and this is no more evident than in my grandmother’s advice to her daughters to, “marry a man who has a pension”. There was no thought that the women would have a job of any significance, it was up to the man to provide for the family from marriage until his death (because it was always assumed that they man would die first) and having a pension to supplement Social Security was one of the important ways of doing it.

My father’s family was part of the Second Great Migration of Blacks (roughly 1940 into the late 60s) when people moved out of the primarily still agrarian South to the Western states which were where the industry (especially for the aerospace industry) was booming. They relocated from New Orleans to the Bay Area of California in 1950 and my aunt tells the story of being a little girl and coming over the bridge for the first time (unfortunately, I’m not sure which bridge).  It was a structure far bigger than anything she had ever seen; something awesome. However, within this vast metropolis, the working class families that moved west, instead of adopting the behavior of the upwardly mobile families in Bott, moved into neighborhoods where people they already knew from their neighborhoods back home already lived. Often the move was prompted by a letter that said, “There are plenty of good paying jobs and I know where you can find a place to live. My aunt says that each street or two was peopled by people who knew each other from , “back home”.  In recreating the neighborhood, the roles and behaviors of the community were reinforced, as opposed to weaked, by the move.

By contrast, my generation of the family, (with my sister and I being the youngest of the group) is populated with people who, even if they live in a more wirking class environment, have a more egalitarian division of labor. We are better traveled and more open to different ideas and ways of comporting our families.  (And on a non-academic note, every time I use that moniker, I realize that Bott had *no* idea of the significance referring to people by the initial “N” would have today).

Facebook: Looking Behind to Look Ahead

Is Facebook Doomed? is the kind of article that irks me.

It quotes a financial analyst named Eric Jackson who said, “In five to eight years they  [Facebook] are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappered [sic]”. Anyone who makes the  grand pronouncement that by 2020 FB will have gone the way of Yahoo is stating the obvious. Of course it will and the most junior of students of social media can tell you that.

It’s what Nicole Ellison and danah boyd told us back in 2008. In their article “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship”, the “History” part tells the story of social networking sites (SNS). From 6 Degrees to Friendster to MySpace to Facebook, all of these sites grow, dominate their landscape for a few years (except for 6 Degrees which *created* the landscape the subsequent SNS inhabited), and then sharply contract as their users migrate elsewhere. However, they don’t disappear; instead, after a period of dormancy and realignment, they reinvent themselves. Friendster did it, MySpace has done it and there were rumors a few years ago that 6 Degrees was trying to reboot itself (but the new “invite only” iteration seems to have sunk beneath the waves).[1]

It has been 6 years since Facebook opened up to the general public. It’s already been at the top of the SNS game twice as long as MySpace was. All social media sites have a lifespan, they end up declining either because they don’t have a critical mass of users to support they become so big that they implode as new users flock to the next big thing.

Facebook benefited from 2 things that I think gave them a longer lifespan than their predecessors. First, it had a built in population of users by the time in opened to the general public in 2006. By coincidence or design (and probably a bit of both) the progression of their rollout populations was very smart. By the time they opened up to the general public, young people from about 14 to 25 were already acquainted and comfortable with the brand and usage expanded up and down from there. Its ascendency also coincided with the dramatic uptick in the adoption of mobile technology. This meant that you could carry your entire social network in your pocket (well, at least the people that were also on Facebook).

TPTB[2] might revoke my “Like” button, but I’m predicting that the innovation that supersedes Facebook will be here within the next 3-5 years.

I don’t know exactly what it will be but it will come from an industry outsider (Sorry Google but I’m channeling Granovetter here, innovation comes into a network from without and you’re too strongly tied to the rest of big tech, you are an insider).  I also predict that when it happens the remaining users will not be young people, but people 30 and older. This is because their weakest connections are the more sentimental ones from their past and Facebook facilitates a high level of ease in maintaining those ties. I predict that older users will be less likely to move to a different platform when so much of their history, people as well as artifacts, is already embedded within the site.

Finally, I think that whatever succeeds Facebook will have a highly customizable user interface but a very stable base. Right now, Facebook seems to tweak a notable feature every 6-12 months, it changes the layout and the usual outcome is the people complain for a while until they become acclimated. I’m predicting that the successive technology will have a user interface that is modular (you can swap elements in and out as you desire), but the basic screen will remain fairly consistent. This will enable the site to add new modules for users to plug into their personal interface if they so choose. The process of changing up the interface will be WYSIWYG[3].

Aaaand I think I just described a smartphone, lol.

References

boyd, d. m., Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), Article 11.

Dimmel, Brandon. (2012) Is Facebook doomed: analyst predicts site irrelevant by 2020.  http://www.manolith.com/2012/06/05/is-facebook-doomed-analyst-predicts-site-irrelevant-by-2020/ Retrieved September 23, 2012.

Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. The American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), pp. 1360-1380.

---

[1] The stated goal of 6 Degrees was to connect with Friends of Friends (of friends of friends and so on up to 6 nodes away) for informational and/or recreational purposes. They even showed you a diagram that would look very familiar to social network analysts where you were the central node, people you knew were connected to you by a line and were at the center of their own network systems.

I found the idea of 6 Degrees making a return tantalizing though because that was the first SNS that I used. While anyone looking at the interface would recognize it as an SNS the way we are used to today, its downfall is that there just weren’t enough Internet users who used the site to sustain it.

Only about 23%of US adults had Internet access in 1996, the year 6 Degrees rolled out. Internet users were still relatively elite group technologically, socio-economically, as well as by race and gender. (Suffice to say, my sister and I were oddities in the online world.) First, they had the financial resources to purchase a computer that would have been fast enough get you on and around the Internet in the first place. Then you needed a modem (which was generally purchased separately from your computer) and the money to pay the monthly Internet access charges. They also needed the technical know-how to set up their modem (do they even still have those master and slave switches inside a computer anymore, lol).

I also wonder if a large portion of people who might have used 6 Degrees were already networking through sites like Usenet, Prodigy and local online communities like The Well.

[2] The Powers That Be

[3] What You See Is What You Get

The Networks, They Are a Changin’

In high school I remember being taught that some of the hallmarks of science are that it systematic and employed logic and rationality to organize ideas and concepts that can be tested and compared against each other. This week’s readings demonstrated that by its introduction not only the mechanics of social network analysis (SNA) but how it challenges the schools of thought about community and how it is applied in our day to day lives (albeit through a humorous lens as in Freeman, 2000).

The Borgatti, Mehra, Brass, & Labianca article sets the tone when it pegs SNA to one of the questions at the heart of social sciences like Sociology, Anthropology and Communications: how do autonomous individuals combine to create enduring, functioning societies? (Borgatti, et.al., 2009, p. 892). Wellman explains that as a tool, SNA provides scholars a way to measure aspects of social networks such as interrelationships among a given group, the roles individuals (or organizations if that is what’s being studied) play within the network (Wellman, 1999). Who are the central points who control the flow of information between members of the group: who connects the group to other groups and who is connected by a single tie? Monge and Contractor delve into this deeply by listing various key social network measures identified by Daniel Brass, 30 measures covering the measure of individual actors, network ties and the whole network itself (2003, pp.3-5).

That this is scientific is shown in part in that these measures can be extended by measuring the same group over time or by looking at similar or dissimilar groups to assess how widespread behaviors, actions and attitudes are among similar or dissimilar groups. An example of this is Grannovetter’s comparison of neighborhood reaction in Boston to the dismantling of a neighborhood. The network analysis showed that dense networks with few or no external ties were less successful then neighborhoods that had weak ties to others who had access to different information and resources. As described by Borgatti, et.al, social networks look at the person or group at the center of the network situated within its native context as opposed to an isolated entity, an actor without the influence of those tightly and loosely attached to them.

To get personal, I am a big fan of movies from the 20s through the mid 50s and Marin and Wellman’s example of the “Kevin Bacon Effect” is a perfect example of the influence social networks can have on the individual (2012). Dramatic movies made prior to 1951’s Streetcar Names Desire (think of Mildred Pierce), can seem affected and melodramatic to modern movie goers. This is because most of us are used to actors demonstrating emotions as you see them in everyday life. This is a direct result of Marlon Brando having studied acting with Lee Strasberg who trained many actors that we associate with that more naturalistic form of acting. His network of students went on to act, direct and teach other. This network exerted influence on all of the artists within in it (as well as, it can be argued, the mega network of American moviegoers).

Wellman brings this all together in “The Network Community” (1999). I was particularly interested in this reading because he articulates a couple of key ideas that I have always believed on a heuristic level and addressed in a couple of papers that I’ve written:

• The “Good Old Days” probably didn’t exist like you think it did. Tönnies concept of Gemeinschafte is based on a whimsical idea of “the good old days”. While Sociology foundational scholars such as Weber and Simmel saw some benefit to the industrialized way of life, they were also concerned that the urbanized life was eroding community and the strong ties that went with them. Reinforcing the idea of SNA as a powerful tool for social scientists, Wellman pointed out that study of groups disparate as early 20^th century American immigrants, Eastern European medieval villages and the early 19^th century milieu of the English upper classes, evidenced regular movement over wide cultural and geographical distances  often tied to work and marriage(1999, pp. 12-13). This brings us back to Granovetter and the function of weak versus strong ties. Wellman cites the fact that the adults in a 19^th century village had small kith and kin networks, the strong ties that provide emotional (and usually other significant types of ) support. However, soldiers, newlyweds, and religious (monks, priests and nuns), brought information, new ideas and innovations to sometimes far flung locations. A historical example Wellman doesn’t site is the Protestant Reformation. Doctrinal conflict with the  Church of Rome began with Wycliffe in the 14^th century. Took root in the early 16^th century by Martin Luther, spread westward across Northern Europe, finally reaching England by the end of the 16^th century. Those ideas were not carried by close knit communities (which would have reinforced community religious ideologies) but by individuals passing literature and information to other social networks through weak ties.
• Community is an evolutionary process. While there was more fluidity in social networks then some thinkers would have you believe, there were obvious limitations. Whereas it took The Reformation the better part of a decade to change the religious life of Northern Europe, cultural messages as whimsical as LOLcats and serious as political uprisings can be transmitted internationally in a matter of minutes. Modern technology allows a relatively unskilled individual to record a video and post it online for public consumption in minutes. I liked Wellman’s statement that social networks are about the people, not the location. Changes such as the suburbanization of the west, the temporal compression of communication and travel, and the ability to connect with strangers over common interests online; have changed the way our social networks are configured. In the case of online communities, a person can have weak ties that they have never met face to face, something that would have been rare as recently as 20 years ago. While I bristled at his linking of gender to the idea of network types, I understand the imagery. The home (and by extension, the marketplace and church) was generally a woman’s domain and men generally had public spaces for example, the workplace, many bars, and public commuter spaces like trains. Community has not decayed first it transitioned from the agrarian society as people moved into urban centers, then the Jet Age changed it again as people moved to the suburbs. Today we are living through another change as portions of our communication and relationships move online.

References

• Borgatti, S. P., Mehra, A., Brass, D. J., & Labianca, G. (2009). Network Analysis in the Social Sciences. Science, 323(5916), 892-895
• Marin, Alexandra, and Barry Wellman (2010). Social Network Analysis: An Introduction. Pp. 11-25 in Handbook of Social Network Analysis, edited by Peter Carrington and John Scott: Sage.
• Monge, Peter and Noshir Contractor. (2003). Theories of Communication Networks. Oxford: Oxford University Press (pp 29-45).
• Wellman, Barry. (1999). The Network Community: An Introduction. Pp. 1-48 in Networks in the Global Village, edited by Barry Wellman. Boulder: Westview Press.
• Freeman, L. C. (2000). See you in the Funny Papers: Cartoons and Social Networks. Connections, 23(1), 32-42.

(This post is the first in a series of blog posts adapted from a class blog I will be posting to during the Fall, 2012 semester)