On Wednesday, May 20th I’ll be appearing on WUNC’s excellent radio show “The State of Things.” As I listen to TSOT almost every day, it is pretty exciting to get a chance to do the show. We’ll be talking about social networking and its recent growth in popularity. If you’re local, tune in at noon tomorrow – or stream the show online at WUNC’s website.
Posts Tagged: media
6
Apr 09
NY Mag asks “Does Facebook Own You?”
New York Magazine leads with an interesting piece on data ownership and online social networks by Vanessa Grigoriadis. I’ve got a quote in there, which builds on some writing I did last month.
This is part of who I am now—somebody who knows that her nursery-school tormentor wasn’t a bully without a heart. It will get logged into my profile, and that profile will become part of the “social graph,” which is a map of every known human relationship in the universe. Filling it in is Facebook’s big vision, a typically modest one for Silicon Valley. It’s too complex for a computer scientist to build. Just as our free calls to GOOG-411 helped Google build its voice-recognition technology, we are creating the graph for Facebook, and I’m not sure that we can take ourselves out once we’ve put ourselves on there. We have changed the nature of the graph by our very presence, which facilitates connections between our disparate groups of friends, who now know each other. “If you leave Facebook, you can remove data objects, like photographs, but it’s a complete impossibility that you can control all of your data,” says Fred Stutzman, a teaching fellow studying social networks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Facebook can’t promise it, and no one can promise it. You can’t remove yourself from the site because the site has, essentially, been shaped by you.”
3
Apr 09
CIO Magazine on privacy in social networks
C.G. Lynch of CIO magazine examines the business implications of the shifting nature of privacy in social networks. He draws on research that Jacob Kramer-Duffield and I ran last fall:
But it turns out some users have fiddled with those privacy settings, after all. In research conducted by the UNC School of Information and Library Science this past fall, more than 70 percent of 495 college students surveyed claimed to have altered their Facebook privacy settings in some way. Around half of the students also said they limited access to their profile to “friends only.”
The research also indicates that their attention to privacy controls increases with their time on the service. During their first six months on Facebook, only 40 percent of students said they modified their privacy settings. After one year, that number jumped to nearly 80 percent.
It is a great article – I’ve spoken with Chris a few times and he’s an astute analyst of social networks. The article has good quotes from Chris Kelly, Facebook’s smart Chief Privacy Officer.
As I mentioned in a post last week, Jacob and I are currrently writing this study up for publication. We presented initial results at the ASIST Annual Meeting, but we hope to get this into journal form so we can share the results more broadly.
31
Mar 09
Freedom featured in Salon
Rebecca Traister of Salon has posted a great meditation on Freedom:
Yes, Freedom. Like the word Mel Gibson’s William Wallace shouts just as he’s being disemboweled by a British executioner in “Braveheart.” Freedom, like the thing that people around the world yearn for, fight for, die for. Freedom riders, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of expression. Freedom like “chimes of.”
That’s just like what I downloaded, except in my case, the Freedom I was seeking was meant not to liberate me from the oppressive bonds of an unjust regime. No, my Freedom was designed to bind and restrict me, to prevent me from e-mailing, surfing, browsing and playing online games. Ah … sweet, sweet Freedom.
Traister continues:
I’d need to take a breath and dive in for more. And that’s when I wrote this sentence. And this one. All of the sentences so far, actually. Except for the few minutes during which I did call the bank to check on getting my money back from that guy who was using my credit card for gas. But that was actually kind of important, too. The kind of thing that might have been put off for another hour, or another day, if I had Webs to surf, words to unscramble.
It’s been about a week with Freedom, and I like it, I really do, even if I’m a bit ashamed that I need it. I still use it mostly for about 15- or 30-minute periods.
It is inspiring to read commentary like this – even if it is a little tongue-in-cheek (and appropriately so), it is pretty cool to know that you’ve developed softare that has helped people.
One note, in the article the writer includes a verbatim quote about what I do with donations to Freedom. I use the money Freedom generates to 1) pay for shareware (I’ve now paid for most of the shareware I use) and 2) purchase software I need for research. Freedom has allowed me to purchase DevonThink Pro Office, which is completely revolutionizing my research process. I didn’t start out with a plan for what to do with donation money, it just sort of worked out (and felt right) that it be passed on through the software economy in a virtuous cycle.
12
Mar 09
Media Cloud
Via the Chronicle Wired Campus blog and the Berkman Blog:
Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon.
Here’s a media cloud I made for the term Facebook across the WaPo, NYT and BBC. I’m a little baffled by the top return at the WaPo, but I see the correlations in a number of these other terms. I’m looking forward to future iterations of Media Cloud – especially embeddable charts!
Check out Media Cloud.
9
Mar 09
NY Times Botches SNS Privacy
Via Michael Zimmer, an embarrasing NY Times story from Randall Stross on privacy in social networks. Stross writes:
As the scope of sharing personal information expands from a few friends to many sundry individuals grouped together under the Facebook label of “friends,” disclosure becomes the norm and privacy becomes a quaint anachronism.
Facebook’s younger members — high school or college students, and recent graduates who came of age as Facebook got its start on campuses — appear comfortable with sharing just about anything. It’s the older members — those who could join only after it opened membership in 2006 to workplace networks, then to anyone — who are adjusting to a new value system that prizes self-expression over reticence.
Stross simply has this one wrong. Instead of misguided intuition, let’s look at the numbers. In the Summer/Fall of 2008, Jacob Kramer-Duffield and I ran a survey of undergraduate Facebook users. We employed a list-based simple random sample, with 494 respondents. When asked the question Have you changed the default Facebook privacy settings to give yourself enhanced privacy in Facebook?, 72.47% responded “Yes.” To the question Based on your Facebook privacy settings choices, who do you allow to see your Facebook profile?, 50% answered “Only my Facebook friends.” (1)
Stross would also benefit from looking at Lampe et al., 2008, a longitudinal analysis of Facebook use by a cohort of undergraduate students at Michigan State University. The authors note “In 2006, 64% of users had the default settings for privacy. In 2007, this number dropped to 45% of users who had the default settings, and by users maintained the default privacy settings.” (p. 726) Williams (2008), employing a SRS at Texas Tech, found that “In regard to public access to their Facebook profile, (50.6%) allowed only their friends to access their page, while (71.0%) stated that the primary target of their communication were friends.” (p. 52) Williams writes (in her very interesting thesis) “Perhaps this is an indication that Facebook users, in particular at this institution, have greater concerns for invasions of privacy or a greater need to protect their disclosures from the general Facebook audience.”
I could go on. Strauss, who theoretically has access to a research library, could have skimmed Lewis et al., 2008, Tufekci, 2008 or any of the recent studies put out by the Pew Internet and American Life Project for context. Since he didn’t, he actually gets the issue backward. I’ve written about this before, but the basic idea is this: Young people didn’t simply decide to give up privacy. Rather, the studies show that social network sites, in their early iterations, created a very meaningful sense of close community. Young people disclosed not because attitudes about privacy instantly and simultaneously changed, but because they felt very comfortable with their audience. Zimmer continues:
Stross likely doesn’t realize it, but he’s right that sites like Facebook have “[dissolved] the line that separates the private from the public.” In few realms of our lives can we truly identify a strict dichotomy between public and private information. Instead, everything is contextual. And, yes, that’s what makes thinking about privacy difficult, but that doesn’t mean we throw in the towel. Instead, we accept the challenge and work to create policies and build technologies for the sharing of information that properly reflect a contextual notion of privacy, rather than a binary one.
The conclusion that Stross draws – that adults are now going to massively change their disclosure behavior because of young people – is as flawed as his “privacy as anachronism” point. The real story is that adults are grappling with and establishing norms of privacy in a manner very similar to young people. This is my summer research topic, so watch this space for more along these lines. A final point – the 20% statistic. First, Facebook defaults have changed over the years, so a default now may have been a modification in the past. Second, Facebook’s audience is increasingly international, so we must remember that norms will vary significantly across nations and cultures. Third, privacy is not in Facebook’s business interests. Less privacy = more content, so it may not be in Facebook’s interest to craft a privacy statistic that reflects current norms.
Notes:
(1) This survey was initially presented at the 2008 ASIST Annual Meeting. We are currently writing it up for publication.
References:
Lampe, C., Ellison, N. B., and Steinfield, C. (2008). Changes in use and perception of facebook. In CSCW ‘08: Proceedings of the ACM 2008 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, New York, NY, USA, 2008 (pp. 721-730). ACM.
Williams, I. M. (2008). The Effects of Anticipated Future Interaction and Self Disclosure on Facebook. Masters thesis, Texas Tech University.
Lewis, K., Kaufman, J., and Christakis, N. (2008). The Taste for Privacy: An Analysis of College Student Privacy Settings in an Online Social Network. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(1), 79-100.
Tufekci, Z. (2008). Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure Regulation in Online Social Network Sites. Bulletin of Science Technology and Society, 28(1), 20-36. http://bst.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/1/20
3
Feb 09
The DTH visits Online Social Networks
The Daily Tar Heel visited my class last evening:
Instead of using Facebook to avoid studying, students in Fred Stutzman’s “Online Social Networks” course are making it the basis of their class.
Stutzman, a Ph.D. student in the School of Information and Library Science, is studying social technology and writing his dissertation on programs such as Facebook.
Now he is sharing that knowledge with a diverse group of about 15 students, including undergraduates, international students and older adults returning to college.
His dissertation covers how people who are transitioning between stages of life use social networks to get personal support, expand friendships and incorporate those connections into daily life.
Very cool! In other news, I’ll be uploading slides from this course to Slideshare. Feel free to follow along.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
