Posts Tagged: social software

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6
Feb 06

Adopting Social-Technical Communication Behavior

danah boyd’s post How to Kill Email was remarkably prescient, and it struck me as a great topic to riff on. To sum, danah refers to the fact that email is solidly losing ground a primary communication means amongst youth – and she’s absolutely right.

Instant messenger, text messaging, blogs, social network services and the cell phone all compete with email, and they all serve different communication purposes. Unlike adults (and mid-twentysomethings, whatever we are) who grew up with dominant communication modes, today’s youth entered into their social adolescence with a wide range of communication options. Instead of choosing one and sticking with it, they adapted each of these options for a certain set of situations, and used it accordingly.

There are a number of different ways to categorize the uses of a young adult’s communication tools: synchrony vs. asynchrony is one, one-to-many vs. one-to-one is another. In each toolset, there are dominant uses and enterprising uses; by enterprising I mean cultural uses whose functionality was never on an engineering spec sheet. The fact that young adults move effortlessly between these tools, and have a native understanding of their situationally proper uses is remarkable, and attests to the importance of communication and our inherent sociality (it also says alot about pack mentality and learned behavior of virtual communities).

I think there’s an important point here, especially with regards to learned behaviors. As social individuals, we are incentivized to adopt the behavior of our peers. Since communication is such a vital part of our social framework, we are doubly incentivized to adopt our peer group’s standards. For a long time, those standards changed very slowly and incrementally; the internet and various advances are now causing sea changes every few years.

I’ve been thinking about why we pick up certain social-technological behavior, and I keep coming back to the magic number of 65 from my Facebook study. That number was the average number of friends added over the course of a semester by a freshman on the Facebook. Its a staggering number, especially for most of us who don’t meet 65 new people we’d consider friends every 13 weeks. Inside that number, however, is the key to social technology. As long as we desire or are compelled to expand our social networks, we will make efforts to learn the communication behavior of the pack. If you need proof of this, think of the adults who turned to computer dating a few years ago; our desires for social contact will drive our adoption and uses of new mediums.

To bring it back to the topic at hand, I think about information needs. An individual who is actively expanding his or her social network will always have an information need. Lots of times we talk about perfect information in terms of financial markets; I believe we can apply economics very easily to our friend-making behavior. The more information we can have about our friends, the better decisions we can make regarding our investment into the friendship.

Why does email fail to serve the needs of socially-motivated individual? I can think of a number of reasons, but I think the biggest two are that it is not a very responsive medium, and its uses have been culturally established in ways that prevent it being used socially (I’ll explain more in a minute).

First, responsiveness. We can also think of this as synchrony, more or less. Just as eye contact and facial expressions inform our face-to-face conversation, the responsiveness of an information system provides us hints in communication. How long a person lags before responding to a instant message and how that behavior compares to previous conversations is a good example. In the absence of facial expression, we’ve learned to pick up on numerous other hints, and our inherent pattern recognition ultimately allows us to take a lot of value away from these hints.

At the same time, we’ve realized that broadcast (one-to-many) communication is not exactly suitable over email at all times. When we post to a blog or leave an away message, we are publicly signaling; the rate at which we do this would never make sense with email. Since signaling is just as important a part of our friend making behavior (e.g. posting a cool new band on your MySpace profile), we’ve moved to other services for this purpose.

Friend-making decisions are economical; we seek more perfect information (through responsiveness and feedback) and we work to make ourselves more attractive (through signaling). Email supports these behaviors, but it is nowhere near as good as most of the social services that young adults pick up. It isn’t that email doesn’t matter, it is just that email has specific uses, and it is quickly being relegated to just another tool in the ever-expanding portfolio of tools socially-motivated individuals use.

The sea changes that dramatically shift a young adult’s communication behavior aren’t going to cease any time soon. Blogs, text messages and social network services will seem to be crude tools in a few years, just as MUD’s and Bulletin Board Services seem crude nowadays. Social software designers who understand the concept of information needs will think of new ways for us to interact and take value from the tools, and those socially motivated will use these tools. It does make me wonder, though – as my peer group ages, and we settle on the communication tools we adopted at critical times in our lives, will we ever adjust to a life of communication systems in constant flux?

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29
Nov 05

When the gates to the walled garden are thrown open

There is safety in numbers. I think we all believe that. When we’re in a group, we adopt herd mentality; things we wouldn’t do before become personally acceptable if the crowd so dictates. One person wouldn’t think of storming a football field; when the stadium empties on to the field, the dynamic of what is acceptable in the eyes of group members changes. Not only does the unacceptable become acceptable, but the unacceptable can become the dominant mode. Of course, not all crowd-incited actions involve the changing of one’s personal ethics – a crowd can gather to lift a car off an accident victim, where one person might not. When we are challenged by the ethics of crowd actions, it is generally the curious, outlier actions they take that stick in our mind.

This brings me to a rash of news stories I’ve seen in the past few weeks, where university administrators have entered the “walled garden” of the Facebook, and delivered sanctions to students who have posted pictures of alcohol consumption. A big hat tip is due to my colleagues in the UNC Social Software Working Group, who came up with the idea of monitoring the news for interesting stories regarding the intersection of campus authorities and students regarding Facebook content. I’ve been doing just this for some time, and you can follow my work at del.icio.us/fstutzman/uncsswg – 158 stories and counting. The pathbreaking event involved student at North Carolina State University, and was quickly followed by an event at Northern Kentucky University. What sparked this post, however, was a event I discovered this morning, where the University of Missouri’s newspaper ran the story of BM* front and center.

M, the vice-president elect of the Missouri Students Association was singled out for a picture she shared on her Facebook profile; that picture was then reposted to print, and to the web. In the picture, the alleged Ms. M is drinking a beer while duct taped in a chair. It’s a funny picture. It’s a really funny picture. And it probably would horrify anyone who is happily in denial about campus life.

That brings us back to my reflections on our actions in crowds. The Facebook is a living, organic crowd in which students actively, and exhaustively, participate. The Facebook is a crowd mediated through the virtual sense, but in no sense of the word is the Facebook ‘virtual’ to students. It is a practical augmentation of their existing networks, and their participation effectively carries the weight of real-world actions in their crowd. Just as one might might act differently in a country club compared to a dive bar, the Facebook allows a comfortable “space” for a semi-public, semi-virtual existence.

I assume Ms. M, the NC State students, and the Northern Kentucy University students were all acting under the same assumptions when they posted their pictures; it is the same assumption hundreds of thousands of other college students share when they post similar pictures. While they knew these pictures were public, they were not identended to be public; as they were crowd participants, their actions were justifiable as crowd behavior. This is not to say that when posting drinking pictures, the students even cognize they are doing something “wrong” – the “me too” nature of participation on SNC’s, particularly the Facebook, almost forces this sort of behavior. At the same time, scandalous picture posting may be a risk students are willing to take to gain recognition and reputation inside the SNC – which in the Facebook almost flows transparently from the virtual to the real.

If you think back five, ten, fifteen (and so on) years, before digital photography was everywhere, before SNC’s, and you remember the (print, egad) pictures students would post in their dorms, what were they? Were they the sanitized, censored pictures of healthy student activities we seem to think ever *exsisted*? No, they were zany party pictures, almost all involving a ton of students hugging in front of the camera, some clutching cups. They were embarrasing shots of the roommate passed out. They were pictures of drinking at the pre-game tailgait. In essence, they were pictures of the things students thought were fun and interesting, but they also spoke to the identity of the student at the same time. Fast-forwarding from the past to now, we can clearly see that nothing has changed. The print pictures are still up on the dorm room walls, but the original digital copies are posted to the Facebook.

The case of Ms. M is so interesting to me because it is one of the first times I’ve seen a student’s private SNC identity so harshly leave the “walled garden” of the Facebook. As if one student had repeated a private conversation to a reporter, we the public are thrust into Ms. M’s life, and her life is undoubtedly changed as a result. I don’t take issue with the fact this happened – rules are rules, regardless – but it does make me wonder about where we go from here. There is something very special about a community like Facebook, but the potential reprecussions of one’s “crowd” existence becoming a public existence are worrisome.

At any rate, there’s no reason to think that this particular phenomenon will stop – but sooner or later, it will fall out of the news, and just become another facet of living lives augmented by SNC’s. Students are extremely resourceful, and they will find ways to deal with this and other challenges. With a hat tip to TC, though, 16 members of UNC’s police have Facebook profiles – and if you need any more proof that the virtual is the real, there it is.

Update – As it turns out, there’s a back story to this particular event.

Update Two – The day this story was released, someone on Missou’s campus stole over 1,500 copies of The Maneater, the campus paper that published Ms. M’s picture. A criminal investigation is ongoing.

Update Three – Names have been removed from this post. See the original story for names.

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2
Mar 05

Campus Darknets

I’ve been thinking about darknets recently – self organized networks (affinity and otherwise) that pop up inside larger networks, using the structural support of the larger network, but generally operating without the intervention of decision-makers for the larger networks. Darknets exist all around us; the reason we call them darknets is that as long as we are not part of this “insider” group, we generally aren’t aware of their existence.

This is not to say that there isn’t interaction between darknets and larger networks. Let’s think about this in the context of insider and outsider information groups. Participants in darknets are inherently insiders in an information community, to a certain extent we are all participants in darknets of one form or another.

The campus is an exceptionally fertile place for darknets. I’d argue that darknets require two things: an information community of a size that requires sectioning and specialization for effective communities, and methods for the creation of these groups. Social software is the methods, or glue, for darknets on the modern campus. If you’re not familiar with social software, its only because you probably haven’t heard the word before. Chat, fora, filesharing, blogs (yes, like this one) and messaging (email and otherwise) are all provide the glue for the creation of darknets.

Darknets arise from a social and information need. On a campus, complete transparency in information is an untenable situation; there are too many information producers for us to comprehend all the information being produced on our network. Therefore, sectioning and specialization are necessary, which is pretty much just common-sense. Outside of this functional requirement, there is an inherently social component fostering the growth of darknets. We understand that once we start sectioning ourselves into darknets, boundaries are established that set up insider/outsider dichotomy.

From this perspective, we can begin to understand campus darknets. Specialization of information has forced the creation of darknets; how “dark” we want these nets to be is the question that interests me. If you examine successful social software, we see a strong network component (a framework that allows the visualization of social network – be they in blogrolls, buddy lists, or friend mappings), but we see a weak boundary component. In essence, our darknets are insider networks only in the sense that we need to discover they exist.

I tend to believe that participants in social software-enabled darknets want network transparency. The information I publish on this blog is not “insider” information, though you might have to do some work to discover my network. The question I would like to answer is to what extent these darknets have penetrated our larger campus network, and to what extent participants in these networks understand the visibility of their networks to the larger community.

Two things lead me here today. The first is the upcoming conference on Social Software in the Academy, a conference to which I’d like to submit a paper attempting to answer my two previous questions. However, since papers are due in a month, I don’t think it is going to happen. The second reason is today’s op-ed in the Daily Tar Heel (the campus newspaper) dealt with the exposure of a darknet to the campus community in general.

In the op-ed, the writer chose a student who wrote offensive things on his Livejournal. Using this anecdotal evidence, the writer made the assumption that the sentiments stated in the LiveJournal reflect the worst of the campus Conservative community. Indeed, the comments reflect some terrible and bigoted statements, but what do they really represent?

I wonder to what extent the LiveJournal blogger understood that while acting inside a darknet, there would be a level of transparency that ultimately could get his comments posted in the newspaper? Or did the writer assume that since he existed inside the darknet, his comments would stay inside the darknet? I think the assumption we can make is that while darknet participants understand transparency in some areas, they assume protection in others. The LiveJournal blogger may want people to read his comments and understand his viewpoint, but he hides in the darknet to protect his identity.

I have to admit I am fascinated by two things about this matter. First, I want to understand the penetration of social-software darknets on the campus. Even more interesting to me, though, is an understanding the influence of these social-software darknets. Could it be possible that the opinions presented in the darknet are so influential that a participant had no choice but to address them in a public forum? The prospect of a darknet possessing such information influence is fascinating in its possibilities.

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