Week 9 S09

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Week 9

Contents

[edit] Video


[edit] Week 9

  • Notes
    • Outline/Bibliography Due 4/13
      • Email to me
      • .doc, .pdf, and .rtf accepted. No .docx
      • Expectations
    • Final projects presentation on 4/27
      • Final deliverable due 5/1

[edit] Noticed/News


[edit] Final Projects Update

  • 2 minutes on your project
    • What are you doing for your final project?
    • What are you going to be turning in?
    • Why are you interested in it, how does it fit in to your plans, etc.


[edit] Name generator

On a sheet of paper, list 3 people (First name, Last initial) who match the following criteria:

  • Your best friends
  • Your best online friends (frequency/quality of communication)
  • People you've met offline, and continued the relationship online
  • People who you've met online, taking the friendship offline
  • People you keep up with who you wouldn't without technology

Interconnections:

  • Where is the overlap?
    • What accounts for the overlap?
  • What technologies are key in the management of scenarios 3, 4 and 5?

[edit] Social Capital Experiment

How many of your real life friends/contacts could you:

  • Crash overnight on the couch - if you were passing through town?
  • Borrow their car for a few hours?

How many of your real life friends/contact would:

  • Tell you about an interesting job opening?
  • Give you a restaurant recommendation?

How many of your online friends/contact could you:

  • Borrow 75 dollars?
  • Visit overnight on short notice (for example, if you were on a business trip)?

How many of your online friends/contacts would:

  • Tell you about an interesting job opening?
  • Give you a restaurant recommendation?

Interconnections:

  • Do your online friends support bridging or bonding capital?
  • What types of friends provide the most utility?

[edit] Social Networks and Social Capital

  • Exploring the role networks play in our personal relationships and our societies.
  • Big ideas
    • Wellman: The role network technologies play in creating new place, and the quality of interaction these places afford.
    • Castells: The enormous shifts introduced by the network society, and the new forms of culture, politics and economy created by the network society.

[edit] Personal networks and personalized networking

  • Ponder: Is it still important to be near your friends?
  • Primer: social networks as support structures
    • Social capital (Ellison, Putnam, Resnick)
    • Social support (boyd's Network Publics, etc)
  • Relevant societal shifts
    • Early community: door-to-door
      • Small communities
      • Highly localized relationships
      • Limited means and/or necessity for travel
    • Place-to-place
      • Technological advances enable deonctextualized place-to-place movement
      • Social structures become wide ranging
      • The social life requires coordination
    • Person-to-person
      • We now carry our networks with us
      • Mobile phones, social networks
  • Question: Is it still important to be near your friends?
    • For what purpose(s)?
    • Because we can now choose our F2F interaction, how does this affect social interaction?

Wellman's questions

  1. Are community ties - community networks - viable online?
  2. Is the offline-online dichotomy overdone?
  3. Are good online relationships equivalent to good offline relationships?
  4. Will CMC become more transparent as people become more experienced with it?
  5. Can online relationships be good enough? Can people emotionally and cognitively respond to online relationships in the same way as they respond to F2F?
  6. Are relationships based on online communication authentic?
  7. Will the internet promote two-person interactions at the expense of groups or social network contexts?
  8. As community becomes person-to-person, will people continue to feel responsible for their strong relationships but not for strangers and acquaintances?
  9. To maintain anonymity and freedom, will people not want to be always-connected?
  10. Does the shift to person-to-person networked connectivity mean that people can live anywhere - we no longer need physical "place"
  11. Will less-developed countries suffer a divide
  • Role-to-role
    • The context question - as we present one of our "fronts" to most community, are we really even person-to-person anymore?
    • As networks become more personalized, role-based networking becomes more important.
      • Who cares about the whole person anymore?
      • Is role-based networking ultimately tenable?
  • Questions
    • Could technology be to blame for our decline in close contacts? (Does the Bowling Alone thesis hold?)
    • How do we find diversity in SNS? (SNS's and other groups may be vehicles of homophily: ethnic, educational, and cognitive)


[edit] The Network Society

  • The network society: Spaces of flows
    • The role technology-enhanced networks play in society
    • How these networks are changing society at large: Work, Power, Culture
      • Relationships of Production
        • The network economy
      • Relationships of consumption
        • Network culture, global culture
      • Relationships of power
        • Power moves from the organization to the network
        • Power transcends the network (ATT, TIA)
    • Networks reshaping social structures at many levels.
    • However, as these networks coexist at different levels and temporalities, Castells sees them as spaces of flow.


  • Questions
    • Where does Facebook (or other SNS) fit into the network society?
    • Which has the larger impact, Facebook or Wikipedia?
    • As a network society participant, What are you missing? And can you participate forever?


[edit] Presentations

  • None

[edit] Quick Links