Week 2 S09
From INLS 490
Week 2
Contents |
[edit] Video
Social Networking in Plain English by Sachi and Lee LeFever, CommonCraft
[edit] Week 2
- Notes
- Hand out syllabus (will go over with Topics/Goals)
- Questions, any problems with website/email?
- Baby update/strategy
- Technical issues with Facebook group (any more problems?)
- Sign up for presentation slots during break
- Introductions
[edit] Class Topics and Goals
- Syllabus
[edit] Topics
design, dynamics, privacy, language, business_models, communication, privacy, security, identity, social_interaction, viral_marketing, gaming, privacy, economics, business, privacy, mobile_networks, social_causes, fundraising, ethics, intellectual_property, generational_issues, management, friending, privacy, differences, research, youth_adoption, safety, security, privacy, responsibility, business, marketing, privacy, identity, community, privacy, security
[edit] Goals
OSN overview
- OSN trends
- Understanding of OSN
- OSN tools and development
OSN research
- OSN theory
- OSN Research/Research methods
OSN and society
- OSN and social interaction
- OSN and social support/cooperation
OSN and practice
- OSN in organizations
- OSN in education
- OSN in business and marketing
- OSN in LIS
[edit] Noticed/News
- More Adults Than Ever on Social Networks via http://delicious.com/tracyboyer and http://delicious.com/trust_fan
- The share of adult internet users who are involved in social networking online has more than quadrupled in the past four years in the U.S. In 2005, only 8% of adults had a social network profile. As of December 2008, that number was 35%.
- The Future Of Social Networks via http://delicious.com/drhammond
- The Future Of Social Networks: Where We Are Today Charlene Li Altimeter Group January 22, 2008
- Everyone else is on Facebook. Why aren't you? via http://delicious.com/tarheelcoxn
- If you're reading this article, there's a good chance you already belong to Facebook. There's a good chance everyone you know is on Facebook, too. Indeed, there's a good chance you're no longer reading this article because you just switched over to check Facebook. That's fineāthis piece is not for you. Instead I'd like to address those readers who aren't on Facebook, especially those of you who've consciously decided to stay away.
- Rest of this Week's Del.icio.us links
[edit] Surveying the Field of Online Social Networks
[edit] Questions
- The role of the "CSS Loophole" in Myspace's popularity
- Why didn't Myspace close the loophole?
- The importance of an "ugly" profile in an individual's identity
- How can adults provide guidance on SNS while adults are the ones primarily challenged by the new features and interactions of OSN's?
- No analogs in adult life - media socialization in the workspace, etc.
- Private vs. public messaging
- Why do people converse in public? (Public Displays, Self-promotion)
- Do you have rules about wall-to-wall conversations?
- Differing friending practice
- Different expectations between geographies, individuals?
- How do you deal with "friends" who violate your friending rules?
[edit] boyd, Why youth heart...
Questions (pg. 120)
- Why do teens use these sites?
- What are they expressing on them?
- How do the sites fit into their lives?
- What are they learning from participation?
- Are these online activities like face-to-face friendships or are they different, or complementary?
Users of SNS (121)
- 55 percent of teens 12-17 have created a profile
- 64 percent of teens age 15-17 (Lenhart & Madden, 2007)
Nonparticipants (121)
- Disenfranchised teens: those without internet access, those whose parents succeed in barring them from participation, teens who primarily access the internet through schools and other public venues where OSN are banned.
- Conscientious objectors: teens who protest site ownership, teens who comply with parental guidelines, marginalized teens, teens who are "too cool" for the sites.
- Race and social class play little role in terms of access
- For more on non-participants, see (Hargittai, 2007). Hargittai finds a limited significant difference for non-use by gender and parents educational attainment, but not by race. Study was a survey of a single campus, therefore of limited power.
History of OSN (121-122)
- The "Big Three"
- Friendster: Started in 2002, Friendster was modeled as a dating site, popular among the twenty/thirties urban professional crowd.
- Myspace: Started in 2003 and competitor to Friendster, targeted at music (and other niche) markets.
- Facebook: Started in 2004, focused on college networks.
- Other networks
- Literally thousands of other SNS
- Hi5, Orkut, Cyworld, Xing, LinkedIn..
- Today's networks - Twitter? Tumblr? Ning?
- Literally thousands of other SNS
OSN Profiles (123)
- Key element to SNS is the creation of a profile. See (Boyd & Ellison, 2007) for more.
- OSN profile contains:
- A description of the individual (text, images, videos)
- Public list of connections
- Running public/semi-public threads/interactions between individual and friends
- OSN profile contains:
Friendships (123-124)
- "Friendship" vs. friendship
- Friends are an articulated contact in the OSN
- Privacy, security and interaction measures may key on friendship status
- Friends serve as an indicator, an anchor, and a reference point for other contacts
Comments/Communication (124)
- Friends can publicly comment on one another's profile
- Wall messages
- Picture tagging
- Applications/games
- Newsfeed elements/conversation
- Comments generate conversation, leading to a semi-public interaction between members of the site (and building social capital, strengthening relationships, creating obligations)
Networked Publics (125-126)
- Publics are places of interaction and discourse, a vital element of society
- boyd's networked publics have four characteristics:
- Persistence: Networked publics are "recorded for posterity"
- Searchability: Social networks are flattened, we can find one another with the click of a mouse
- Replicability: Our recorded actions can be copied/pasted
- Invisible audiences: In certain configurations, we are unaware of those observing us.
Profile Creation (127)
- Often, the profile creation process is collaborative (i.e. one individual directly passing practice to one another). This is often the case in terms of teen-centric networks.
- The Myspace "CSS Bug" was a boon for this collaborative practice. Teens sat down with one another to share techniques for profile manipuation.
- This initiation is part of larger social and cultural ritual.
Identity Performance (127-128)
- Key element of OSN use is the management of one's identity - this can be very challenging.
- Goffman (1959) describes stages, impressions given and impressions given off. In OSN all of our activities serve the purpose of writing ourselves into being (Sunden's nice phrase, via boyd).
- Learning the management of impressions in OSN a critical practice and ritual - signals competence, control and belonging.
Writing Identity and Community into Being (129-131)
- The profile is the representation of identity; the practice of identity signals belonging.
- We appropriate code and special language to signal inclusion (i.e. ironic statements, Fakesters)
- Profile is created to the "imagined identity" - the concept of the invisible audience used as a guideline for framing the presentation.
Privacy in public (131-132)
- Are we really living in public? As boyd finds, teens engage in intricate strategies to protect their "privacy" (from strangers and parents). Techniques include:
- Fabricated data (A/S/L, name, other)
- Privacy settings (Friends only)
- Mirror networks (i.e. the sanitized profile)
Social networks are refuge (134-138)
- The decline of teenage publics and the police-state nature of parenting drive teenage socialization online (among other reasons - teenagers are also intensely social and the friend network is as much a family as the nuclear family).
- Changes in society have shifted treatment of youth (Hine, 1999). The concept of the teenager is new and ever evolving.
- Social networks provide places for teens to sort out their issues, experiment with identity production - good things, but at what cost (considering the "problems" of networked publics).
[edit] boyd and Ellison - Social Network Sites...
Definition of a SNS
- Individual can construct a public of semi-public profile within a bounded system
- Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection
- View or traverse a list of connections within the system
- What else might we add to this definition? Communication within the system? Interaction within the system?
- What sites would be eligible under this definition? Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Tumblr?
Social Network Sites (or Online Social Networks)
- OSN's are unique in they allow individuals to articulate their real world networks
- These connections can discover or activate "latent ties"
- OSN's often afford the creation of a profile, identity construction, enhancement of the self
- There is a high degree of variation in affordance and audiences of OSN's.
History of OSN
- Early years
- Sixdegrees, AIM, ICQ, Classmates.com
- LJ, BlackPlanet, Ryze, Tribe.net
- Middle era
- LinkedIn, OpenBC, Friendster, Fotolog, Cyworld
- Modern Era
- MySpace, Facebook, Dog/Catster, Twitter
- Content trajectory of OSN
- Object-centric and Ego-centric sites
- Niche networks, limited-time networks
Previous Scholarship/Angles of study
- Identity and Impression Formation
- How do people create impressions in OSN, how are those impressions received
- What are the strategies of impression formation, how does that affect the culture of a site
- Networks and Network Structure
- What are the dynamics of a particular network
- How can the network be analyzed and how can those analytics be employed.
- Online/Offline Networks
- Effects on social interaction and social capital
- Social networks in the workplace, organizations
- Privacy
- How much/what are individuals sharing, why?
- Conceptions/models of privacy in online social interaction
[edit] boyd, Social Network Sites...
The Challenge
- Privacy is not a dichotomy between public and private
- Social networks here to stay - educators must embrace change
Social Network Sites
- See supra
Mediated Publics
- See supra
Supporting Youth Interaction
- Recognize that youth want to hang out with their friends in youth space
- Social network sites provide a location for social learning
- The internet mirrors and magnifies all aspects of social life
- Social networks can be a place of outreach and engagement for troubled youth
- There are more questions than answers
An Educators Role
- Create a profile
- Keep it responsible and intersting
- Respect student privacy
- The more present you are, the more you can influence the norms
- Do we agree with these guidelines?
[edit] Networks Exercise
[edit] References
Boyd, D. (2007). Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What? The Knowledge Tree.
Boyd, D. (2007). Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. In Buckingham, D. (Ed.), The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (pp. 119-142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Boyd, D. and Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Hargittai, E. (2007). Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/hargittai.html
Hine, T. (1999). The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager. New York: Bard.
Lenhart, A. and Madden, M. (April 18, 2007). Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks: How teens manage their online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved March 9, 2008 from http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/211/report_display.asp.
