In March I wrote a blog about this in relation to the safety of Facebook verses Myspace. Here is a blurb:

“I was playing with this “eyes on the street” idea and the Facebook news feed. This feed continuously updates you on every activity of your friends on Facebook. I wonder if the same principles of “eyes on the street” applies to behavior on Facebook and the news feed.

If everyone can see a negative comment you post on someone else’s site, then would that person think twice about actually posting? If more eyes are watching our every move on Facebook, would we behave more inline with social norms?”

As in, do the changes in social cost affect or correspond to changes in value of the the wall post (or taking the time to actually send a bday card, instead of the wall post, or in addition to it)?

But do they? They’re simultaneously present in equivalent form (that is, both being equally “friends” in the context of the SNS) to you, but I think the equivalence ends there. Friends you have from the same social context consider themselves (more or less) equally your friends, but I don’t think they consider your friends from other social contexts particularly much – unless there are multiple bridge figures between the contexts.

You do address an aspect of this in saying that online connections reinforce existing bonds, but I think it’s also worth noting more explicitly the non-equivalence of seemingly equivalent relationships.

If we were to follow Jacobs model, we’d have to ask ourselves, what are we giving up in these virtual cities? What is being lost? You begin to suggest what these costs might be: e.g., the ease of these relationships making them relatively trivial. I’d be curious to see you explore these costs.

On another note, one of the potentially negative aspects of web cities is their sheer size. They are so big, in fact, that they transcend human scale. Unlike a real neighborhood, you never quite get around them entirely. It struck me that Kohlhass’s “Largeness” essay might be another instructive viewpoint.

In any case, very thought-provoking. Keep up the good work.
sk

“This suggests that students use Facebook primarily to maintain existing offline relationships or to solidify what would otherwise be ephemeral, temporary acquaintanceships. There was a slight tendency for newer students to use Facebook to meet new people more than for juniors and seniors to do so (see Figure 3) . . . “

From here:

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html

They can only commit to “slight”, but I think it’s growing rapidly (long tail of exponential curves and what not). They believe, like you, that the dominance of maintenance interactions was built into the network design of facebook. Which makes sense to me, but the new classes of freshmen are jumping the fence, so to speak.

It’s not much researched yet (that I’ve seen) but anecdotally, I heard non-stop conversations at the 10 or so orientations I was around about students who have been chatting for months before school starts.

Maybe those friends stay or not – certainly the offline clique seems to overpower the Facebook group clique, but they are still meeting folks. I just think that trend has been building since the Michigan study.

I put up a post about one of the funny ramifications on the Student Activites blog:

http://swiftkick.typepad.com/activities_affairs/2007/09/the-strange-pow.html

My one suggestion is to be a bit more direct in the use of Jacobs’ framework when talking about the online space. Since there are four characteristics to a vibrant city, it would be great if you explicitly mapped those to the online space. Although you do this in a subtle manner, the framework gets a bit lost and its not clear if all the four points were addressed. Just a thought :)

Great job though! Am looking forward to seeing you in Seattle :)

From my personal experience … I see myself making more friends either in the offline or real world and enriching the boards in social networking sites like playing a game of scrabble or doing fun stuff.

However, I make more chance exploration kind of encounters in communities like Flickr and Flickr communities and special niche communities for like minded topics. When we have meetups – I like the interaction and then choose to go online hoping to find them online.

However, I have never come across party like behaviour in the online space. And yes, I haven’t tried second life – as the bandwidth is very less in India. Feel frustrated about that once I moved back from the Bay Area.

However, there is one thing you should consider – the influence of the mobile and information convergence it bring on! It was also very interesting to see Steve Jobs showcasing facebook’s beta iPhone site :-)

What happens as a next step as your social internet sphere moves with you on the go. What happens in countries like India and other where majority of population in a year or two is going to experience SNS primarily through the mobile??

I’m surprised by your assessment that Virtual space induce more closed ties: only one study, not necessary compelling, with a lacking definition for “ties” and no statistic to measure how “closed” are networks: homophily, centrality, clustering coefficient still lead to contradictions—promising, but so much work is ahead. I’ll have to take a closer look at their paper before I draft something.

However, I really fancy your city analogy (made a not so compelling one myself recently) The reason I can’t leave the city I live in is because you can walk to so many different places… Having anything a click away on-line feels similarly blissful; thank you for helping me connect two of my passions.

Regarding that closer circle, my non-representative, un-scientific, personal experience is that people tend to meet new people through on-line relations: it’s more obvious though blogging. A very interesting way to explain it is through lack of context: (according to my advisor’s latest book, Internet Economics) on-line ties cary less implicit information, so all I know about people I meet on-line makes them worth talking to. Five years ago, I couldn’t imagine to have any interest in someone with the dresscode and the personal life of danah: being deprived of her appearance, and able to focus on her work, having the other aspect of her drip from her sayings instead of jump at me at the first second of her physical presence. To resume to your comparison, it means on-line neighborhoods don’t have to make sense: a not-so-shinny area can be so close to the posh quarter.

What you describe as odd moments are more experiments in manipulating what used to be blatant, but is now an artifact. Couldn’t you have you colleagues on LinkedIn, College friends on Facebook and gangsta’s on MySpace? You have less awkward feelings in having two irrelevant websites on your screen then carrying the wrong magazine or the wrong outfit. I confess, in this vision, I anticipate Facebook implementing context the way Google Calendar already has made me able to do. (How do you deter your advisor from asking you to meet him the morning after a party night?) The reason of these awkward moments is more because the sophisticated framings each one of us tries to integrate don’t match on-line then because you can’t hide things with privacy features.

Because I can comment and receive an answer without revealing anything more about my identity, I can be part of that movement — while having people connect the dots, judge me not from a too informed perspective or a not-informed enough, but a point-of-view I do not control, that would deter me.

If you have to find a urban comparison with that new control we own over our information revelation, I’d go with a city where you can always wear something appropriate. Maybe look for the dream lives depicted in Woman magazines, with unlimited shopping, amazing social role with little burden: that would be more a reason to make new friends then having short blocks induce you into having few.

I think Jacobs’ density concept would fit well in there too, taken purely as density of participants (in addition to the shared/varied resources aspect). Second Life, for example, has lots of stuff, but I can’t count the number of times people have said “…I wandered around for a while but I didn’t see anyone else”. Pretty and diverse, interesting, but not vibrant.