Week 2
From INLS 490
Week 2
Contents |
[edit] Video
Online Identity by Staticfuror
danah boyd lecture (On your own time)
[edit] Week 2
- Administrative
- Introductions
- Quesions?
- Link to INLS490 Facebook Group - Request to join
- For your calendars: 2/12, term paper proposals
- Noted
- Frontline: Growing Up Online Tonight at 9PM
- This Week's Del.icio.us links
[edit] Surveying the Field of Online Social Networks
- Some questions to begin..
- What can we learn from online social networks?
- What can we learn about interpersonal interaction?
- What can we learn about changing privacy and disclosure norms?
- What can we learn about the role of the computer in our social lives?
- What is changing as a result of online social technologies?
- Pew's stats: Surprising?
- 55% of teens use OSN's (What about the other 45%?)
- Gender differences
- 39% of teens create content online (blog, video, etc)
- What can we learn from online social networks?
[edit] boyd, boyd and Ellison
Definition of a SNS
- Profile construction
- Articulate a friends list
- Traverse the friends list
- Q: Why is it important to define/articulate a definition of SNS?
- Q: What is missing from this list, and why?
- Q: Are we not "networking" all the time on SNS?
- SNS are unique not because of relationships, networking, but because of revealed (latent) ties
- We aren't meeting new people in SNS...or are we?
- Hargittai's notion of structural separation
Themes in SNS research
- Impression management/friendship performance
- Network/network structure
- Offline/online connection
- Privacy
Other issues
- Relationship management
- Cultural processes
- SNS in context: Business/Practice
- What else?
boyd's four properties of networked public
- Persistence
- Searchability
- Replicability
- Invisible Audiences
What is a "Public"
- Habermasian notion of the bourgeois public sphere
- Public spehere consisted of 'origins of information and political debate' - newspapers, journals, political clubs, pubs and coffee shops
- Private interests were overcome to allow the discovery of common interests and consensus
- Individuals could shape public opinion and influence practice
- Challenges of a unary public spehere
- Media and language subvert public spheres; embedded in power in social systems, ultimately serve hegemonic interests
- We become spectators of the discourse
- Multiple public speheres
- New public speres provide accessible spaces for discourse
- Networked public spheres - a reaction to spaces of controlled discourse (teens - malls, parks, etc)
Other key concepts
- Non participants. boyd cits disenfranchised teens and conscientious objectors
- Q: What is the makeup of NP's?
- Network segmentation. Who can we see, who can see us, why?
- Communication behaviors. SNS are unique as they facilitate public-private communication
- Q: What pct of your SNS communication is public?
- Profiles as places for interaction
- Goffman's notions of impression managment
- Profile building as venue for socialization, acculturation, etc.
[edit] Turkle
The Subjective Computer
- Constructions of identity in simulated spaces
- Identity play/Changing contexts/How are we creating and exploring identity in SNS?
- Subjective/Objective computer, how we search for meaning in the screen
- Poststructuralist approaches - what does Turkle mean?
Why read Turkle in Week 1?
- We've become accustomed to opaque technology (we're no longer interacting with machines, per se)
- We've learned to take things as interface value (an artifact of computing culture only?)
- We've used our relationships with technology to inflect on the person
- We've sought out the "subjective computer" (we seek the intervention of computer in our lives)
As science attempts to reveal a programmed self, Turkle sees the computer as a device that allows, even encourages, identity play.
[edit] Questions
- Is true identity play dead on the social web? Can we still experiment with identity, or is this simply an artifact of a less-technical age?
- Are large-scale social networks tenable? Will we naturally segment by interest or group?
- Where does the parent/child technical arms race lead? As teens naturally seek spaces for interaction, how will they continue to avoid the helicopter parents?
- What are the challenges and risks of contextual identity? What are the risks in constructing a digital identity?
- What is the subtext of identity? What are we saying when we leave items out of a profile?
[edit] Group Exercise
Four groups, discuss the following three questions:
- In the age of SNS, can we have multiple identities, or are all of our identity facets findable?
- What challenges/threats does online identity pose in our various social "realms" - personal, business, academic?
- Do these tools make your life better? Are they a burden or an aid?
