Second Life is guided by the "Second Life Community Standards", which are fairly obvious general behavioral standards. However, I suspect peer enforcement of these rules also depends on what piece of Second Life you are in. Kollock and Smith briefly brought up alt.flaming on Usenet: it had different standards than the rest of Usenet. I would guess there are places in Second Life where one can get away with insulting others as well - as long as it is part of that virtual area's culture. (For those of you who haven't ever been in Second Life, it's very big.)
These are abridged versions of the rules:
1. Intolerance - don't insult anyone's race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.
2. Harassment - don't threaten people or ask them for sex in inappropriate places/when they've said no
3. Assault - don't shoot/push/shove people or create scripts (program code that when activated makes a person or a thing perform an action) that assault them
4. Disclosure - don't give personal information out about someone if it's not listed in their profile
5. Indecency - no sex or violence unless in a place that is rated Mature
6. Don't disturb others' scheduled events
Second Life also has a abuse report form to fill out when a user suspects another user is breaking the rules. Then someone from Linden Labs investigates the issue. This is incredibly different from many of the other online communities I deal with, where the community is often a bulletin board system and moderated by users, but Second Life is huge.
Since Second Life is in real-time video rather than 2D and archived, it is difficult to find examples of rule-breaking unless they are aimed at you. Despite that Gossip Girl is a show that has a great deal of drama, sex and general meanness, I've found the virtual area to be populated by friendly people with a little bit of drama, but no rule breaking. I haven't run into any rule-breaking in my librarian persona either - I suppose griefers just do not find Infotainment that fascinating. So here, I have to rely on videos and discussion. Apologies.
Given the power of video-capturing tools and YouTube, I can find several examples of griefing such as violence, harassment, and of course a video showing the exploits of the Patriotic Nigras (warning: occasionally inappropriate) mentioned in Dibbell's article. The Patriotic Nigras' John Edwards SL campaign vandalism was also briefly covered by The Daily Show.
The (warning: foul language) Patriotic Nigras site on the 4chan-related Encyclopedia Dramatica relates that the Tigras were IP-banned from Second Life, but eventually they found something to mask their IP addresses and were able to return.
All this talk of harassment brings up a very important question: Is the Internet serious business? In one of the early sessions' readings Dibbell explored whether a cyberspace rape was actually a rape. When you're in Second Life the issue becomes even more muddled. In the days of MOOs, your interaction was all through text. Now it is through 3D representation - will troublemakers still be throwing around "the Internet is serious business" when we have real augmented and virtual reality, or, when the Internet increasingly becomes integrated with real life?
Somewhat embarrassingly, I'm familiar with a lot of the more specific mentions of this session including "the Internet is serious business" and 4chan. (I didn't link to it because 4chan is...well, if you google it and click on any one of the boards, do not be surprised if you are offended by an image or text.) It's difficult for me because I find some of what these sorts of groups do funny - who doesn't like LOLcats, which came out of 4chan - but the group is persistently filled with angry young males who between posting pictures with funny captions spew out sexist, racist, and otherwise offensive behavior. Again, the standards of behavior on 4chan and related sites are much less stringent than other sites and probably similar to alt.flaming.
The Gazan chapter presented an interesting idea - that we could cater to the needs of griefers by interpreting their personalities, and that adding the Web 2.0 functionalities to Answerbag actually mainstayed some persistent narcissistic traits of heavy users. It is difficult for me to see how we could appease Patriotic Nigras-type griefers, but then again I am not a continual reader of the DSM. ould it benefit online community promoters (the ones with the big bucks) to pull in real
psychologists to deal with appeasing griefers in other forms so they don't terrorize the other participants? Reed correctly identifies so many of the online personalities people take: we could assign a psychological profile to each one, and figure out what sorts of social community aspects would benefit each type.
Cosley et al discussed how low-quality contributions to a community can drive away the few people who come to make lots of contributions. If such troublemakers bother an individual on Second Life, they may not wish to return due to the emotional trauma. That's the serious part that transfers off the Internet.
Finally, I have a correction:
In the Dibbell article, he mentions that 4chan is a spinoff of Something Awful. It's not. It was started by a guy from Something Awful but the format is based off of 2channel, a super-popular Japanese BBS that works more or less the same way.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
identity in Second Life
I've been doing activities for a while now in Second Life as part of Dr. Nahl's 677 class, but they've all been library or HCI-related.
(PLUG: If you're interested, the 677 class is going to have an online career fair May 8 talking about jobs both in and out of Second Life. It would be a great time to see if you're interested in the platform. Feel free to add my regular SL avatar - Melanie Twine.)
So, as part of my studies of identity for my project in this class, I decided to start a new avatar that was going to only be vaguely related to the real me. (To pretend to be someone who's completely not me, and has no interests anywhere near me, would probably take a dissertation's worth of research and care.) I had originally said I was going to do social networking, but I'm fickle, and will probably do both.
Given that I decided to move away from my "first life" persona, I decided to start with gender, and made this new avatar male. His name is Binnea.
Here is my definition of online identity for Second Life:
An identity defined by a physical avatar (male, female, or nonhuman), sometimes voice, social interactions and group affiliations (through friends made and groups joined), that can but do not have to have anything to do with one's real life appearance or activities.
This is different from Twitter as explained in Honeycutt, which is very much a text-based identity (perhaps with a picture or two) and one where one may have "followers" that are not necessarily friends (Huberman). Also, from my personal experience, Twitterers tend to be associated with a real life person just like with social networks such as Facebook and Myspace, while many Second Life practicioners try to stay away from revealing a lot of personal details.
Also, different from the goths Hodkinson studied, Second Life is very much a free-for-all community type meeting space rather than one-to-many meeting space like a blog. People in Second Life tend to chat in communities (although IM is available), different from the goth blogs where:
1) one person would express their day-to-day life as in a diary
2) goths would use the contacts gained through their blogs to enhance their real life musical meet-ups, and vice-versa.
Second Life is somewhat standalone on the Internet; there are no blog meetups or "tweet-ups" as is popular in Twitter, although there are conventions. It is generally not intertwined with real life unless one is involved in professional activities. Ploderer's study of BodySpace was also heavily intertwined with real life, as the bodybuilders would post real pictures, stories, and fitness facts about themselves and in at least one case a bodybuilder found a real life friend through the site. Donath's study, involving Facebook and Myspace, was as well deeply rooted in the real world. Avatars in Second Life can get away with "risky" behavior that teens on MySpace cannot because they are not tied to a real person.
Truly, much of "Second Life" is about the ability to start a second life where one's appearance, thoughts, feelings, and behavior can be completely different from the way one is in real life. Speaking of the three theories about Internet and community as stated in Wellman et al's article, I feel like Second Life could end up supplanting community. But, for the artist in this New York Times article, Second Life ended up transforming his community by giving him new opportunities to sell art both online and offline.
Here are my informal use scenarios:
1) Getting clothes.
People in Second Life are always in need of clothing. Since I was in the beginning of my journey, I wanted to find free clothes. Being a librarian, I clicked on the "search" button at the bottom of the page, then the "places" tab (since places tend to have clothing) and typed in "free clothes". There were many, many results. Here I decide which place I want to go to, and click "teleport".
An additional option would be going to a typical gathering place in Second Life and asking where there is a good place to get free clothes (an interpersonal interaction).
I ended up going to Sarah Nerd's Freebie Paradise, a place with free men's and women's hair and clothes. There, I found some new hair and some new clothes. You can customize just about everything, including eye shape and skin, but I will work with that in the future.
Then there's putting on the clothing, which is a whole other box of worms that I won't get into. In the end, I had some clothes that didn't look too bad - at least I didn't look quite like a noob anymore.
2) Going places.
Since my Second Life experience so far had been mediated through a librarian's perspective, I realized that I needed interaction - but how? First I had to decide what this new persona liked, because that's how you find things to do in Second Life and I decided on adventure, science fiction and fantasy. I'm a reader of fantasy so this wasn't so far off from my real self.
Here I started to have problems. I searched for science fiction and fantasy groups, but there were so many I didn't know where to start. Then I decided to click on "Showcase", Linden Lab's pick of popular and/or interesting sites. I figured that since they were featured, there were likely to be a lot of people there and so I could meet some people. The real me might have been interested in checking out IEEE Island, but no! I picked Neemrana spring, "a place where you could find hidden treasure".
Then, you hit "teleport" and Second Life transports you to where you need to go.
Neemrana was a beautiful, Asia-inspired place that was fun to fly around and look at. I talked with a couple of avatars as well.
I discussed a little of this previously, but to thoroughly answer the question "How are online identities shaped and expressed through online interactions in this community?", here is an overview of identity in SL:
1) Groups
Groups are how like-minded people communicate with one another in Second Life and show their affiliations. If you join a particular group, and it is a large and active group, there will be "group notices" that give you notices and teleport locations to particular meetings. Depending on the group, these meetings could be to talk, to dance, or to listen to a particular person speak.
I joined a group called "Science Fiction and Fantasy".
2) Appearance
Clothing and appearance is an INCREDIBLY important part of your self-representation in Second Life. There are many freebie clothes available, but if you own clothes that are only available with a purchase by Linden (the currency in Second Life), you have more social capital due to your perceived investment in the entire Second Life environment.
You can control how tall or thin you are, your skin, hair, and eye color, and of course what you are wearing.
3) Hangouts
Hangouts tend to be related to what group a specific avatar is in, but not always. Different hangouts give you different people who tend to be interested in a topic. (There are even a group of people who like to hang around the big virtual reference desk in Second Life who are not librarians themselves.)
I am a fan of the show Gossip Girl, and decided my character was too (hey, all things are possible - there's actually a SL group for guy fans of Gossip Girl). The Gossip Girl section of SL is enormous, with its own quick start guide for new users (indicating that it pulls many new users in). I talked to some other new users there and helped one with some clothing issues. What a stereotypical librarian I am.
Will Binnea get some better clothes? Please stay tuned.
(PLUG: If you're interested, the 677 class is going to have an online career fair May 8 talking about jobs both in and out of Second Life. It would be a great time to see if you're interested in the platform. Feel free to add my regular SL avatar - Melanie Twine.)
So, as part of my studies of identity for my project in this class, I decided to start a new avatar that was going to only be vaguely related to the real me. (To pretend to be someone who's completely not me, and has no interests anywhere near me, would probably take a dissertation's worth of research and care.) I had originally said I was going to do social networking, but I'm fickle, and will probably do both.
Given that I decided to move away from my "first life" persona, I decided to start with gender, and made this new avatar male. His name is Binnea.
Here is my definition of online identity for Second Life:
An identity defined by a physical avatar (male, female, or nonhuman), sometimes voice, social interactions and group affiliations (through friends made and groups joined), that can but do not have to have anything to do with one's real life appearance or activities.
This is different from Twitter as explained in Honeycutt, which is very much a text-based identity (perhaps with a picture or two) and one where one may have "followers" that are not necessarily friends (Huberman). Also, from my personal experience, Twitterers tend to be associated with a real life person just like with social networks such as Facebook and Myspace, while many Second Life practicioners try to stay away from revealing a lot of personal details.
Also, different from the goths Hodkinson studied, Second Life is very much a free-for-all community type meeting space rather than one-to-many meeting space like a blog. People in Second Life tend to chat in communities (although IM is available), different from the goth blogs where:
1) one person would express their day-to-day life as in a diary
2) goths would use the contacts gained through their blogs to enhance their real life musical meet-ups, and vice-versa.
Second Life is somewhat standalone on the Internet; there are no blog meetups or "tweet-ups" as is popular in Twitter, although there are conventions. It is generally not intertwined with real life unless one is involved in professional activities. Ploderer's study of BodySpace was also heavily intertwined with real life, as the bodybuilders would post real pictures, stories, and fitness facts about themselves and in at least one case a bodybuilder found a real life friend through the site. Donath's study, involving Facebook and Myspace, was as well deeply rooted in the real world. Avatars in Second Life can get away with "risky" behavior that teens on MySpace cannot because they are not tied to a real person.
Truly, much of "Second Life" is about the ability to start a second life where one's appearance, thoughts, feelings, and behavior can be completely different from the way one is in real life. Speaking of the three theories about Internet and community as stated in Wellman et al's article, I feel like Second Life could end up supplanting community. But, for the artist in this New York Times article, Second Life ended up transforming his community by giving him new opportunities to sell art both online and offline.
Here are my informal use scenarios:
1) Getting clothes.
People in Second Life are always in need of clothing. Since I was in the beginning of my journey, I wanted to find free clothes. Being a librarian, I clicked on the "search" button at the bottom of the page, then the "places" tab (since places tend to have clothing) and typed in "free clothes". There were many, many results. Here I decide which place I want to go to, and click "teleport".
An additional option would be going to a typical gathering place in Second Life and asking where there is a good place to get free clothes (an interpersonal interaction).
I ended up going to Sarah Nerd's Freebie Paradise, a place with free men's and women's hair and clothes. There, I found some new hair and some new clothes. You can customize just about everything, including eye shape and skin, but I will work with that in the future.
Then there's putting on the clothing, which is a whole other box of worms that I won't get into. In the end, I had some clothes that didn't look too bad - at least I didn't look quite like a noob anymore.
2) Going places.
Since my Second Life experience so far had been mediated through a librarian's perspective, I realized that I needed interaction - but how? First I had to decide what this new persona liked, because that's how you find things to do in Second Life and I decided on adventure, science fiction and fantasy. I'm a reader of fantasy so this wasn't so far off from my real self.
Here I started to have problems. I searched for science fiction and fantasy groups, but there were so many I didn't know where to start. Then I decided to click on "Showcase", Linden Lab's pick of popular and/or interesting sites. I figured that since they were featured, there were likely to be a lot of people there and so I could meet some people. The real me might have been interested in checking out IEEE Island, but no! I picked Neemrana spring, "a place where you could find hidden treasure".
Then, you hit "teleport" and Second Life transports you to where you need to go.
Neemrana was a beautiful, Asia-inspired place that was fun to fly around and look at. I talked with a couple of avatars as well.
I discussed a little of this previously, but to thoroughly answer the question "How are online identities shaped and expressed through online interactions in this community?", here is an overview of identity in SL:
1) Groups
Groups are how like-minded people communicate with one another in Second Life and show their affiliations. If you join a particular group, and it is a large and active group, there will be "group notices" that give you notices and teleport locations to particular meetings. Depending on the group, these meetings could be to talk, to dance, or to listen to a particular person speak.
I joined a group called "Science Fiction and Fantasy".
2) Appearance
Clothing and appearance is an INCREDIBLY important part of your self-representation in Second Life. There are many freebie clothes available, but if you own clothes that are only available with a purchase by Linden (the currency in Second Life), you have more social capital due to your perceived investment in the entire Second Life environment.
You can control how tall or thin you are, your skin, hair, and eye color, and of course what you are wearing.
3) Hangouts
Hangouts tend to be related to what group a specific avatar is in, but not always. Different hangouts give you different people who tend to be interested in a topic. (There are even a group of people who like to hang around the big virtual reference desk in Second Life who are not librarians themselves.)
I am a fan of the show Gossip Girl, and decided my character was too (hey, all things are possible - there's actually a SL group for guy fans of Gossip Girl). The Gossip Girl section of SL is enormous, with its own quick start guide for new users (indicating that it pulls many new users in). I talked to some other new users there and helped one with some clothing issues. What a stereotypical librarian I am.
Will Binnea get some better clothes? Please stay tuned.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Social Q&A vs. libraries
Basically, I am discussing the "mass information" vs "filtered-by-authority" battle that has been going on in librarianship in one form or another for a while. Social Q&A is the "mass information", the information given by the masses who may or may not be experts, and reference service at libraries is the filtered-by-authority version. (Your mileage may vary with a specific librarian, but let's take the benefit of the doubt and say for this case that 99.9% of librarians are good at filtering the best information for anyone that asks.) The ease and convenience of sites like Answerbag and Yahoo! Answers make it easy for Student X, who has procrastinated, to jump on the Internet and ask any old question about his/her homework.
I found this question on Answerbag: "What is the highest count recorded by a bacterial pure culture in LB medium" on 11:34 PM, December 22. Now, this could be a question someone asked for their own curiosity or for an argument, but it sounds like a homework question. The fact that it was posted at 11:34 PM, too, sounds like someone was in the middle of doing homework.
Could someone call up their local (academic or public) library at 11:34 PM and receive help for this question? No. Even if the local academic library is open, which increasingly it might be, the librarians and/or library students aren't paid anywhere near enough to be up at odd hours and circulation staff isn't going to be able to help you. Students in New York could theoretically call Hamilton Library at 11:34PM NY time and get reference service, but no student is going to think of that. Their only option, if their school offers it, is to use a chat system.
UH-Manoa offers a 24/7 not very well marketed chat system that has "over 100 participating libraries". However, it advises "For in-depth help, you may wish to contact your subject specialist." As someone who's done general reference, I'm not sure I would be able to find an answer to the Answerbag question above. So not only would you have to find the chat reference link, which is perhaps buried on your library's website, you would have to feel comfortable chatting to a complete stranger who might not even be able to give you the best reference because they might not be a specialist.
Then, this student may head to the web and to a Social Q&A site. I won't elaborate too much on the structure of these sites since we all were on Answerbag, but like Leibenluft says, people tend to get credit for simply posting an answer on Social Q&A sites and the answer isn't necessarily correct. I think we all saw a few snippy or funny but not qualitative answers get huge numbers of points on Answerbag. It is possible for a student to get a correct answer from an expert who is browsing the site, but not always.
Leibenluft favors Wikipedia over a Social Q&A site because Wikipedia entries are edited. But besides the traditional information literacy arguments against the online encyclopedia, Duguid pulls down Wikipedia's usefulness by illustrating how one detail can throw off the coherency of an entire article. Either way, I cannot think of a substantial way for libraries to use non-internal wikis, so I will move on to Social Q&A once more.
Here are the problems I see with reference service in the current library system, and where (sometimes) Social Q&A has libraries at an advantage:
1) Library websites are not equipped for mobile technologies, as discussed in Dempsey. (Most social Q&A sites aren't either.) iPhones can load regular websites, but it requires moving the screen's focus to see the entire page which I found tiresome. A text-only mobile friendly page with the most frequently needed pages, including a "Text a librarian/chat with a librarian now!" function would help.
2) No personalization of reference:
Students like asking for help from librarians they are already familiar with (Dempsey, again). For the librarians' health it is probably better that they are not available 24/7, but in an ideal world subject specialist librarians would be accessible by some sort of message board system and by text message (school-provided number).
The student-librarian relationship could be encouraged further by a personalized login page. When a student logs in, the system would link the classes that student is taking to the broader subject and, along with providing related resources, could give the name and contact information of that subject librarian.
3) People like the "bulletin board" format of the Social Q&A.
Dempsey discusses the decisions libraries have to make about social networking technologies: does the library build its own software, wait for tech companies that make software for libraries to make the software, or jump on someone else's software? In the most dramatic course of action, libraries could pair with Social Q&A sites to have a "Expert Answers" section - where only librarians could post answers, and they would get paid to do this. Libraries would then cross-link their site to the Social Q&A site, and make the librarians answering have visible profiles (but not too specific, so not to raise privacy concerns) so that they can become familiar to the students. In a less dramatic version, libraries could implement their own bulletin-board type Q&A with the institution's own librarians answering anonymous or profiled questions.
This solution takes the "Social" out of "Social Q&A", and does leave the task of getting the information up to the authority. Individuals have a real need for specific, accurate information - like the question about bacteria up there - and due to a number of issues, including personalization and bulletin board formats, the only online reference service libraries offer (chat) is not pulling in many of the users with serious information needs. Then, they go to Social Q&A sites or Wikipedia, and receive information that may be correct, but probably isn't.
I wrote this post as pertaining to libraries, since that is my specialty, but you can see what libraries have on Social Q&A sites - authority, sometimes specialty, and often years of experience searching the web/books/databases for The Right Answer.
I found this question on Answerbag: "What is the highest count recorded by a bacterial pure culture in LB medium" on 11:34 PM, December 22. Now, this could be a question someone asked for their own curiosity or for an argument, but it sounds like a homework question. The fact that it was posted at 11:34 PM, too, sounds like someone was in the middle of doing homework.
Could someone call up their local (academic or public) library at 11:34 PM and receive help for this question? No. Even if the local academic library is open, which increasingly it might be, the librarians and/or library students aren't paid anywhere near enough to be up at odd hours and circulation staff isn't going to be able to help you. Students in New York could theoretically call Hamilton Library at 11:34PM NY time and get reference service, but no student is going to think of that. Their only option, if their school offers it, is to use a chat system.
UH-Manoa offers a 24/7 not very well marketed chat system that has "over 100 participating libraries". However, it advises "For in-depth help, you may wish to contact your subject specialist." As someone who's done general reference, I'm not sure I would be able to find an answer to the Answerbag question above. So not only would you have to find the chat reference link, which is perhaps buried on your library's website, you would have to feel comfortable chatting to a complete stranger who might not even be able to give you the best reference because they might not be a specialist.
Then, this student may head to the web and to a Social Q&A site. I won't elaborate too much on the structure of these sites since we all were on Answerbag, but like Leibenluft says, people tend to get credit for simply posting an answer on Social Q&A sites and the answer isn't necessarily correct. I think we all saw a few snippy or funny but not qualitative answers get huge numbers of points on Answerbag. It is possible for a student to get a correct answer from an expert who is browsing the site, but not always.
Leibenluft favors Wikipedia over a Social Q&A site because Wikipedia entries are edited. But besides the traditional information literacy arguments against the online encyclopedia, Duguid pulls down Wikipedia's usefulness by illustrating how one detail can throw off the coherency of an entire article. Either way, I cannot think of a substantial way for libraries to use non-internal wikis, so I will move on to Social Q&A once more.
Here are the problems I see with reference service in the current library system, and where (sometimes) Social Q&A has libraries at an advantage:
1) Library websites are not equipped for mobile technologies, as discussed in Dempsey. (Most social Q&A sites aren't either.) iPhones can load regular websites, but it requires moving the screen's focus to see the entire page which I found tiresome. A text-only mobile friendly page with the most frequently needed pages, including a "Text a librarian/chat with a librarian now!" function would help.
2) No personalization of reference:
Students like asking for help from librarians they are already familiar with (Dempsey, again). For the librarians' health it is probably better that they are not available 24/7, but in an ideal world subject specialist librarians would be accessible by some sort of message board system and by text message (school-provided number).
The student-librarian relationship could be encouraged further by a personalized login page. When a student logs in, the system would link the classes that student is taking to the broader subject and, along with providing related resources, could give the name and contact information of that subject librarian.
3) People like the "bulletin board" format of the Social Q&A.
Dempsey discusses the decisions libraries have to make about social networking technologies: does the library build its own software, wait for tech companies that make software for libraries to make the software, or jump on someone else's software? In the most dramatic course of action, libraries could pair with Social Q&A sites to have a "Expert Answers" section - where only librarians could post answers, and they would get paid to do this. Libraries would then cross-link their site to the Social Q&A site, and make the librarians answering have visible profiles (but not too specific, so not to raise privacy concerns) so that they can become familiar to the students. In a less dramatic version, libraries could implement their own bulletin-board type Q&A with the institution's own librarians answering anonymous or profiled questions.
This solution takes the "Social" out of "Social Q&A", and does leave the task of getting the information up to the authority. Individuals have a real need for specific, accurate information - like the question about bacteria up there - and due to a number of issues, including personalization and bulletin board formats, the only online reference service libraries offer (chat) is not pulling in many of the users with serious information needs. Then, they go to Social Q&A sites or Wikipedia, and receive information that may be correct, but probably isn't.
I wrote this post as pertaining to libraries, since that is my specialty, but you can see what libraries have on Social Q&A sites - authority, sometimes specialty, and often years of experience searching the web/books/databases for The Right Answer.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Social Capital
Both sites I chose to explore this week fall under Massa's category of "Opinion and Activity Sharing Sites", although they couldn't be more different.
My first site is Poupee Girl, a Japan-based (but also mostly available in English) site where you upload pictures of your clothes and in return receive items that you can use to dress up a doll and ribbons that you can use to "buy" other items to dress up your doll. Other users can comment or give "cute points" to your items, friend you, or send you messages.
Social capital seems to come from two places:
1) Top Ten Cute Rankings
If you receive the highest number of cute points in a specific amount of time, you will be placed on this list. My guess is people who have high numbers of friends and are already trusted as fashion authorities make this list.
For someone to make this list, they also must be following the extensive Poupee Girl rules list, which declares among other rules that you are not allowed to post pictures that show your face, or pictures that you did not take yourself. Users trust that others will follow these rules and when they do not, they tend to get reported and banned.
2) Number of Friends
(Some parts of the site are yet untranslated from Japanese; the message title says "A message from a new Poupee fan.") I was friended by this user who simply said "Hi! Friends?" Your home page tracks the latest posted items of your friends and then you can easily click and give them cute points or comments, so those with more friends are likely to end up on the Top Ten Cute Rankings and gain even more friends and social capital.
The focus in the site is strongly on fashion. Ellison et al says that "Online SNSs support both the maintenance of existing social ties and the formation of new connections," but it seems that in Poupee Girl, like in my previous exploration of last.fm, there is a lot of random friending that goes on based on whether someone likes the contents of someone else's closet - even if one user is in Machida and the other is in the middle of the Midwest. When I posted pictures of items in my wardrobe many random users stopped by and left cute points, leading me to conclude from my small amount of time that many contacts in this social network are made only online.
Does Poupee Girl give the same sort of bridging social capital that Ellison et al discusses? Yes, to a small extent. Those who participate in the site may love fashion and have a career interest in it, and may make contacts and friends from various walks of life and in various places.
The second site I explored was StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has friending, private messaging, and groups, but the main idea of the site is to "stumble upon" sites on the web that you think are interesting and add them to the StumbleUpon database by pressing an "I like it" button. Then, others rate and review the site you just posted.
Users gain social capital by:
1) Stumbling upon and rating items that receive good reviews.
This is similar to the system for Slashdot that Massa discusses - recently popular Stumbles end up on the top of each category page.
2) Having other users subscribe to your favorites.
Users subscribing to your favorites indicate that they like and trust your taste in links. Here, for example, is someone else's subscriber information:
3) Having other users leave you a positive testimonial.
Testimonials are reviews of a user's stumbleupon choices - similar to having someone subscribe to your favorites, simply more qualitative.
Even though I reviewed a few items on StumbleUpon, I did not receive any feedback or friend requests. It seems this site requires more time to get "settled in" and earn social capital than Poupee Girl, where other users are quick to give you a few cute points.
Gleave et al's article about different social roles is difficult to apply to either of my chosen sites because both have a central authority. Poupee Girl's, the Japanese blog giant Ameba, seems to control most aspects of the site and there is little self-regulation (although you can report an illegal user). StumbleUpon seemed like it could have several roles, such as those who tend to rate and comment, and those who tend to subscribe to others' feeds. Both sites do have aspects of the decentralization that Allen discusses simply because there is user-generated content, but there is not quite the level of self-policing that goes on in, say, Wikipedia.
Erilymaz's article was even more difficult to apply since my sites dealt with fashion and cool things on the internet - not, say, an emergency response system for firefighters. Trust in an incident reporting system is way more important than trust in a fashion social networking site, and somewhere in the middle is trust for buyers and sellers in selling sites like eBay.
In terms of the final project, I am thinking of exploring the issue of fake
identity creation on the Internet, perhaps comparing the creation of fake identities on Facebook or Myspace versus in other venues where the focus is less on an individual and more on a hobby. All of our readings this week were about trust, and I started wondering about trust on social networking sites where you feel you are talking to a specific person, but it may not be who you think you are talking to at all.
My first site is Poupee Girl, a Japan-based (but also mostly available in English) site where you upload pictures of your clothes and in return receive items that you can use to dress up a doll and ribbons that you can use to "buy" other items to dress up your doll. Other users can comment or give "cute points" to your items, friend you, or send you messages.
Social capital seems to come from two places:
1) Top Ten Cute Rankings
If you receive the highest number of cute points in a specific amount of time, you will be placed on this list. My guess is people who have high numbers of friends and are already trusted as fashion authorities make this list.
For someone to make this list, they also must be following the extensive Poupee Girl rules list, which declares among other rules that you are not allowed to post pictures that show your face, or pictures that you did not take yourself. Users trust that others will follow these rules and when they do not, they tend to get reported and banned.
2) Number of Friends
(Some parts of the site are yet untranslated from Japanese; the message title says "A message from a new Poupee fan.") I was friended by this user who simply said "Hi! Friends?" Your home page tracks the latest posted items of your friends and then you can easily click and give them cute points or comments, so those with more friends are likely to end up on the Top Ten Cute Rankings and gain even more friends and social capital.
The focus in the site is strongly on fashion. Ellison et al says that "Online SNSs support both the maintenance of existing social ties and the formation of new connections," but it seems that in Poupee Girl, like in my previous exploration of last.fm, there is a lot of random friending that goes on based on whether someone likes the contents of someone else's closet - even if one user is in Machida and the other is in the middle of the Midwest. When I posted pictures of items in my wardrobe many random users stopped by and left cute points, leading me to conclude from my small amount of time that many contacts in this social network are made only online.
Does Poupee Girl give the same sort of bridging social capital that Ellison et al discusses? Yes, to a small extent. Those who participate in the site may love fashion and have a career interest in it, and may make contacts and friends from various walks of life and in various places.
The second site I explored was StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has friending, private messaging, and groups, but the main idea of the site is to "stumble upon" sites on the web that you think are interesting and add them to the StumbleUpon database by pressing an "I like it" button. Then, others rate and review the site you just posted.
Users gain social capital by:
1) Stumbling upon and rating items that receive good reviews.
This is similar to the system for Slashdot that Massa discusses - recently popular Stumbles end up on the top of each category page.
2) Having other users subscribe to your favorites.
Users subscribing to your favorites indicate that they like and trust your taste in links. Here, for example, is someone else's subscriber information:
3) Having other users leave you a positive testimonial.
Testimonials are reviews of a user's stumbleupon choices - similar to having someone subscribe to your favorites, simply more qualitative.
Even though I reviewed a few items on StumbleUpon, I did not receive any feedback or friend requests. It seems this site requires more time to get "settled in" and earn social capital than Poupee Girl, where other users are quick to give you a few cute points.
Gleave et al's article about different social roles is difficult to apply to either of my chosen sites because both have a central authority. Poupee Girl's, the Japanese blog giant Ameba, seems to control most aspects of the site and there is little self-regulation (although you can report an illegal user). StumbleUpon seemed like it could have several roles, such as those who tend to rate and comment, and those who tend to subscribe to others' feeds. Both sites do have aspects of the decentralization that Allen discusses simply because there is user-generated content, but there is not quite the level of self-policing that goes on in, say, Wikipedia.
Erilymaz's article was even more difficult to apply since my sites dealt with fashion and cool things on the internet - not, say, an emergency response system for firefighters. Trust in an incident reporting system is way more important than trust in a fashion social networking site, and somewhere in the middle is trust for buyers and sellers in selling sites like eBay.
In terms of the final project, I am thinking of exploring the issue of fake
identity creation on the Internet, perhaps comparing the creation of fake identities on Facebook or Myspace versus in other venues where the focus is less on an individual and more on a hobby. All of our readings this week were about trust, and I started wondering about trust on social networking sites where you feel you are talking to a specific person, but it may not be who you think you are talking to at all.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Answerbag
Note: I interpreted the instructions as "get the required amount of points by Sunday" and "write your blog by Tuesday"??? I interpreted that as needing one blog, then read it again today and was confused. >_<
This is me.
From lurking the site I figured that the questions that garner the most interest in points and comments are:
1) about sex and relationships or;
2) very general ("Did your parents teach you to cook?")
It makes sense that more people would be interested in more general questions, since more people can answer those and be interested in them. My problem is that I'm generally interested in niche or helpful answers (a current issue is "how do I get these black marks out of my white counter?"). So I began by answering and asking questions about fashion and cosmetics and Japan and Hawaii and garnered a few points, but not really enough.
Then I started giving relationship advice. Since I tend to read relationship advice for fun, I know the most common tenets of that and manage to sound like I know what I'm talking about so I got even more points there. But it still wasn't good enough; I started feeling frustrated.
Surprisingly, the answer that gained me over 40 points was an annoyed one-off to someone who clearly doesn't want to give the new President a chance at all. I guess this surprised me because it wasn't a "helpful" answer to the question, but the way Answerbag is in practice it doesn't seem that the answer has to answer the question - it just has to be a response that people like.
Finally, I changed my strategy to start asking generic questions. My next best result was the question "Have you ever obsessed over something silly?", which gained 7 answers (one short, I know). This was one of my attempts at a more general question and didn't get as much activity as I had hoped for but at least got a little response.
I found the assignment very difficult, as I'm generally interested in niche or easy answers and those are the sort of questions that might get answered but won't have a lot of activity. It almost felt like I was in high school again and competing in some sort of popularity contest that I wasn't going to win, so I was overall surprised that one of my comments managed to get the required number of points.
Relating Answerbag to the readings:
In terms of Tedjamulia et al's article, Answerbag is a direct knowledge-sharing site where people ask questions and give answers about anything. So, unless there are other issues involving usability, marketing, or community relations, the site would have a difficult time not being a successful community. Forums based around questions of a single topic would have a more difficult time simply because they had less material to work with.
It is likely that Answerbag's community extends far outside the number of registered users, as one does not have to be registered to browse the site. Tedjamulia et al says that 80-90% of a community population are lurkers. We all were in that category as we studied the community and prepared for the assignment. It also made me ponder how many times I've been a silent member of a community as I looked up information on the web. Google took me to many places and communities I've never joined - Yahoo Answers, music forums, and blogs, among others.
It seems that many frequent users of Answerbag use it as a source of entertainment for themselves, which explains most of the outside the bag category. Answerbag encourages users to stay on the site by doing what Tedjamulia et al described: setting goals. On every member's profile page is a reminder of their level and how many points they have left to go before they reach a new level, as well as their number of points and comments. Basically, moving up a level is both a goal and a reward. And, users get institutional recognition when they reach level 100.
I ran across an example of Ling et al's paper in a comparison of my question "Why is "feminist" such a bad word in a lot of circles?" and my answer that garnered a lot of points. Ling et al's paper finds that there are far fewer comments when members have similar opinions (in this case about movies) than when members have different opinions. Of course I was tempted to argue with the people who gave inflammatory responses to my feminism response, and did, and they argued back. It seemed the vast majority of people just agreed with my response to the question "How [many] people who voted for Obama wish they could take their vote back?", and gave points rather than leave an agreeing opinion because they couldn't add anything to my answer.
Java et al's article I felt was really focused on twitter and didn't have much that was applicable to Answerbag. The question that article brought up in reference to user intention though was fascinating. It seems that Answerbag does have a place for idle chatter, as personified by the "Outside the Bag" category, but mostly the site's purpose is for information seeking. The user's information need could be about relationships, the best place to hike on Oahu, etcetera, etcetera.
I felt like I didn't have enough psychological background to understand what Schrock et al was discussing, but I agreed that any/all/the information is going to be freed in the de-massification, and it certainly is on sites like Answerbag where anyone can be your expert. (Standard disclaimer about validity of information that "expert" gives applies.) We've seen information in the form of mp3s and videos become free - whether you agree with it or not - and I think one could argue that through social networking our personalities, or representations of them, have become massified. And pseudonymously, there is no such thing as too much information on the internet, so even the parts of us that are normally private have become public. Look at the number of people posting questions about sex on Answerbag.
Finally, harkening back to my last paragraph in the first section, I completely disagree with Ridings and Gefen saying that using the internet for computer mediated discussion is like watching television. Television is a much more passive activity - the television is not going to give my question points. The television is not going to argue with me. Most of all, I've been involved in several online communities and the time one must spend to become a trusted voice if everyone is under pseudonyms is usually enormous. I linked earlier to Dr. Gazan's post congratulating a user for reaching level 100, and the first thing I could think of when I saw that was "How long did THAT take?" Online communities, if you participate actively in them, involve much time and energy, as they are inherently social. Not television at all.
This is me.
From lurking the site I figured that the questions that garner the most interest in points and comments are:
1) about sex and relationships or;
2) very general ("Did your parents teach you to cook?")
It makes sense that more people would be interested in more general questions, since more people can answer those and be interested in them. My problem is that I'm generally interested in niche or helpful answers (a current issue is "how do I get these black marks out of my white counter?"). So I began by answering and asking questions about fashion and cosmetics and Japan and Hawaii and garnered a few points, but not really enough.
Then I started giving relationship advice. Since I tend to read relationship advice for fun, I know the most common tenets of that and manage to sound like I know what I'm talking about so I got even more points there. But it still wasn't good enough; I started feeling frustrated.
Surprisingly, the answer that gained me over 40 points was an annoyed one-off to someone who clearly doesn't want to give the new President a chance at all. I guess this surprised me because it wasn't a "helpful" answer to the question, but the way Answerbag is in practice it doesn't seem that the answer has to answer the question - it just has to be a response that people like.
Finally, I changed my strategy to start asking generic questions. My next best result was the question "Have you ever obsessed over something silly?", which gained 7 answers (one short, I know). This was one of my attempts at a more general question and didn't get as much activity as I had hoped for but at least got a little response.
I found the assignment very difficult, as I'm generally interested in niche or easy answers and those are the sort of questions that might get answered but won't have a lot of activity. It almost felt like I was in high school again and competing in some sort of popularity contest that I wasn't going to win, so I was overall surprised that one of my comments managed to get the required number of points.
Relating Answerbag to the readings:
In terms of Tedjamulia et al's article, Answerbag is a direct knowledge-sharing site where people ask questions and give answers about anything. So, unless there are other issues involving usability, marketing, or community relations, the site would have a difficult time not being a successful community. Forums based around questions of a single topic would have a more difficult time simply because they had less material to work with.
It is likely that Answerbag's community extends far outside the number of registered users, as one does not have to be registered to browse the site. Tedjamulia et al says that 80-90% of a community population are lurkers. We all were in that category as we studied the community and prepared for the assignment. It also made me ponder how many times I've been a silent member of a community as I looked up information on the web. Google took me to many places and communities I've never joined - Yahoo Answers, music forums, and blogs, among others.
It seems that many frequent users of Answerbag use it as a source of entertainment for themselves, which explains most of the outside the bag category. Answerbag encourages users to stay on the site by doing what Tedjamulia et al described: setting goals. On every member's profile page is a reminder of their level and how many points they have left to go before they reach a new level, as well as their number of points and comments. Basically, moving up a level is both a goal and a reward. And, users get institutional recognition when they reach level 100.
I ran across an example of Ling et al's paper in a comparison of my question "Why is "feminist" such a bad word in a lot of circles?" and my answer that garnered a lot of points. Ling et al's paper finds that there are far fewer comments when members have similar opinions (in this case about movies) than when members have different opinions. Of course I was tempted to argue with the people who gave inflammatory responses to my feminism response, and did, and they argued back. It seemed the vast majority of people just agreed with my response to the question "How [many] people who voted for Obama wish they could take their vote back?", and gave points rather than leave an agreeing opinion because they couldn't add anything to my answer.
Java et al's article I felt was really focused on twitter and didn't have much that was applicable to Answerbag. The question that article brought up in reference to user intention though was fascinating. It seems that Answerbag does have a place for idle chatter, as personified by the "Outside the Bag" category, but mostly the site's purpose is for information seeking. The user's information need could be about relationships, the best place to hike on Oahu, etcetera, etcetera.
I felt like I didn't have enough psychological background to understand what Schrock et al was discussing, but I agreed that any/all/the information is going to be freed in the de-massification, and it certainly is on sites like Answerbag where anyone can be your expert. (Standard disclaimer about validity of information that "expert" gives applies.) We've seen information in the form of mp3s and videos become free - whether you agree with it or not - and I think one could argue that through social networking our personalities, or representations of them, have become massified. And pseudonymously, there is no such thing as too much information on the internet, so even the parts of us that are normally private have become public. Look at the number of people posting questions about sex on Answerbag.
Finally, harkening back to my last paragraph in the first section, I completely disagree with Ridings and Gefen saying that using the internet for computer mediated discussion is like watching television. Television is a much more passive activity - the television is not going to give my question points. The television is not going to argue with me. Most of all, I've been involved in several online communities and the time one must spend to become a trusted voice if everyone is under pseudonyms is usually enormous. I linked earlier to Dr. Gazan's post congratulating a user for reaching level 100, and the first thing I could think of when I saw that was "How long did THAT take?" Online communities, if you participate actively in them, involve much time and energy, as they are inherently social. Not television at all.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
hobby-based social networking sites
On the Readings
I believe the Twitter disaster in the NPR article by Weeks reflects the dichotomy between "the often conflicting desires for autonomy and connection" that Galston mentions. The mother in the Weeks article wanted to have some sort of connection to others during her trials of motherhood, so she used Twitter, but she also wanted to have enough autonomy that a non-serious remark made in a fit of anger wouldn't send the police to her door. This is also an example of the surveillance Albrechtslund speaks of, although the majority of what he discusses involves positive forms of surveillance that let you know what your friends are doing without those long, reviled Christmas cards.
LaRose et al concluded that the internet can provide information and connection through emails that can help depression, but issues like computer malfunctions can make it worse. They do not mention issues like cyberbullying, which could make depression worse.
As an arts education advocate, the Hague blog struck a chord with me. We, as a society, are so obsessed with meaningful (= monetary) production that we barely give ourselves time to rest, myself included.
Investigative Question
My main investigative question comes from Bigge and Rosen's discussions - are hobby-based social networking sites purely devoted to narcissism and market (business) surveillance? I picked last.fm to explore, but there are others, such fashion-based sites PoupeeGirl and Chictopia.
I've been a member of last.fm for a long time, but I've been mostly a lurker other than the software's silent tracking of every track I listen to in iTunes and an unknown person friending me every once in a while. Last.fm itself claims to be a "music service that learns what [music] you love", but the fact that it allows you to friend other users and join groups, some personalization, and playlist creation among other features leads me to put it under the "social computing" umbrella. I would call it a music-based social networking site.
Screenshot of my last.fm homepage
So after looking interacting with the site a little more, do I find it a place of market surveillance and a reflection of individual narcissism?
Sometimes, but mostly not. Like most activities both online and off, you can take the narcissism aspect of membership in a social networking site to the extent that you want to. I've seen flame wars on other message boards about someone tagging a new track incorrectly. (This is important because last.fm recognizes tracks automatically and the first metadata placed on a new track sticks.)
Recently, I put a note on a wiki page indicating that the artist information for this live track was incorrect.
Last.fm has a friending mechanism, but is not quite the center of existence as in Facebook or MySpace - the music is. Rosen's article claims that today's social networking sites organize themselves around the person, but I would disagree, as the home and start pages of last.fm both are about music.
Screenshot of the last.fm main page
There is a community aspect, however, and last.fm certainly is committed to Rosen's "self-exposure", with every intricacy of your music listening exposed. (You can delete tracks you're embarrassed about, if you're really concerned.) With every other user's page that you visit, you get a "compatibility rating" based on the music that both you and the other person have listened to.
Example of compatibility rating
This could allow you to make new friends, as well as joining groups with others. There is undoubtedly Albrechtslund's kind of surveillance, where you can see what your friends are listening to. You can also see what kind of music people you've never met before like, and recommend new music to them.
The site advertises itself as a place to "stream free music", and there certainly is a good amount of free streaming music available from various record labels - both public and private. There is also the commercial presence that Bigge discusses, with links to purchase tracks and albums from Amazon and iTunes and announcements of nearby concerts. These could be helpful, however, depending on how one looks at the issue. Many independent bands offer their music for streaming through last.fm along with the major labels.
The potential relaxing creative factor in hobby-based social networking sites such as last.fm is that they are not "something everyone does" like MySpace and Facebook and do not require the "forced volunteerism" that Bigge mentions - they are something a user participates in because the user is an aficionado. Last.fm, and other hobby based social networking sites, seem to be isolated from the real world as sites like MySpace and Facebook are not, since they do not require the use of one's real name (Facebook and MySpace do not technically require this, but it is expected) and may therefore not attract levels of narcissism and surveillance that "pure" social networking sites have.
I believe the Twitter disaster in the NPR article by Weeks reflects the dichotomy between "the often conflicting desires for autonomy and connection" that Galston mentions. The mother in the Weeks article wanted to have some sort of connection to others during her trials of motherhood, so she used Twitter, but she also wanted to have enough autonomy that a non-serious remark made in a fit of anger wouldn't send the police to her door. This is also an example of the surveillance Albrechtslund speaks of, although the majority of what he discusses involves positive forms of surveillance that let you know what your friends are doing without those long, reviled Christmas cards.
LaRose et al concluded that the internet can provide information and connection through emails that can help depression, but issues like computer malfunctions can make it worse. They do not mention issues like cyberbullying, which could make depression worse.
As an arts education advocate, the Hague blog struck a chord with me. We, as a society, are so obsessed with meaningful (= monetary) production that we barely give ourselves time to rest, myself included.
Investigative Question
My main investigative question comes from Bigge and Rosen's discussions - are hobby-based social networking sites purely devoted to narcissism and market (business) surveillance? I picked last.fm to explore, but there are others, such fashion-based sites PoupeeGirl and Chictopia.
I've been a member of last.fm for a long time, but I've been mostly a lurker other than the software's silent tracking of every track I listen to in iTunes and an unknown person friending me every once in a while. Last.fm itself claims to be a "music service that learns what [music] you love", but the fact that it allows you to friend other users and join groups, some personalization, and playlist creation among other features leads me to put it under the "social computing" umbrella. I would call it a music-based social networking site.
Screenshot of my last.fm homepage
So after looking interacting with the site a little more, do I find it a place of market surveillance and a reflection of individual narcissism?
Sometimes, but mostly not. Like most activities both online and off, you can take the narcissism aspect of membership in a social networking site to the extent that you want to. I've seen flame wars on other message boards about someone tagging a new track incorrectly. (This is important because last.fm recognizes tracks automatically and the first metadata placed on a new track sticks.)
Recently, I put a note on a wiki page indicating that the artist information for this live track was incorrect.
Last.fm has a friending mechanism, but is not quite the center of existence as in Facebook or MySpace - the music is. Rosen's article claims that today's social networking sites organize themselves around the person, but I would disagree, as the home and start pages of last.fm both are about music.
Screenshot of the last.fm main page
There is a community aspect, however, and last.fm certainly is committed to Rosen's "self-exposure", with every intricacy of your music listening exposed. (You can delete tracks you're embarrassed about, if you're really concerned.) With every other user's page that you visit, you get a "compatibility rating" based on the music that both you and the other person have listened to.
Example of compatibility rating
This could allow you to make new friends, as well as joining groups with others. There is undoubtedly Albrechtslund's kind of surveillance, where you can see what your friends are listening to. You can also see what kind of music people you've never met before like, and recommend new music to them.
The site advertises itself as a place to "stream free music", and there certainly is a good amount of free streaming music available from various record labels - both public and private. There is also the commercial presence that Bigge discusses, with links to purchase tracks and albums from Amazon and iTunes and announcements of nearby concerts. These could be helpful, however, depending on how one looks at the issue. Many independent bands offer their music for streaming through last.fm along with the major labels.
The potential relaxing creative factor in hobby-based social networking sites such as last.fm is that they are not "something everyone does" like MySpace and Facebook and do not require the "forced volunteerism" that Bigge mentions - they are something a user participates in because the user is an aficionado. Last.fm, and other hobby based social networking sites, seem to be isolated from the real world as sites like MySpace and Facebook are not, since they do not require the use of one's real name (Facebook and MySpace do not technically require this, but it is expected) and may therefore not attract levels of narcissism and surveillance that "pure" social networking sites have.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
on social computing
Social computing is an umbrella term for technologies and virtual spaces that allow users to create, describe and share content, and for the communities that arise around them.
The term "computing" in social computing is problematic because it indicates that the users are only using computers, which they may not be. The introduction of the iPhone in US has brought a "do-it-all" phone trend that started much earlier in Asia; individuals can upload photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube or type replies to blogs using their phones or other personal digital assistants. While yes, these objects technically are computers or the vague "technologies" of the definition, the term "social computing" itself is misleading as our computers get smaller and smaller, and fall into the "phone" category.
Speaking of the social in social computing - just who are the "users"? Tenopir expresses fear over an anarchist information world, where we never know who we're talking to or what their expertise really is. Dibbell confirms the problem in the tale of Mr. Bungle: the Lambda MOO thinks there is one person behind that keyboard, but it is truly a number of undergraduates, turning serious online community matters into offline fun in their character's behavior. Users tend to behave with a semblance of how they behave in real life on Facebook and MySpace if they use their real name, whereas on other Web 2.0 applications they may act differently or engage in activities they would not tell their real life contacts about under a pseudonym.
We think that just because a blog or a content sharing site can be social, that it is social. Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht found that most informants used their blogs to keep in touch with family, friends, fellow academics or the odd visitor, but a few had half-private or all private blogs. Herring's data indicates that most blogs do not receive comments, marking a lack of social interactivity and making it very much like the radio analogy mentioned in Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht, where a few dictate the information and a very select few are able to respond. Today LiveJournal - which I count as a hybrid blogging-social networking service, even if Herring does not - has a "private" function - you can make your entire blog only accessible by you if you wish. You can add games, notes, and photos on Facebook that are only accessible by you as well.
In terms of other phrases that may be conflated with social computing - Web 2.0, social software, social networks, and social computing all share aspects in common. Beer and Burrows defines Web 2.0 as a "cluster of new applications and related online cultures". The term tends to define web applications that rose during and after the more popular social networks. Social networks where people post profiles of themselves and friend other people (example: Facebook). Social networking is relatively new, and as boyd and Ellison point out has an offline component as friending generally occurs between users who already know each other offline. Social networking shares other aspects of Web 2.0 as lately, at least Facebook and MySpace have added video and/or photo sharing components and MySpace allows aspiring musicians to stream their songs. Boyd and Ellison claim that last.fm, YouTube, and flickr have become social network sites due to their friending capabilities, but I would disagree as the three of the sites' primary capabilities are still related to content (music, videos, and photos), not friending or profiles, and are instead a hybrid content-presentation/social networking site. Second Life is often included inside the Web 2.0 umbrella, although it is a standalone program and not browser-based at all other than links to places in Second Life.
Social software, a new term to me, seems to be analogous to social computing and indicates a place where users exchange or create any sort of information, including social networking. It includes Massively Online Multiplayer RPGs, or MMORPGS, such as World of Warcraft and many others.
Social computing and social software are a somewhat older phenomenon than Web 2.0, as pre-Web 2.0 users were already chatting on message boards, over IRC, over AIM, downloading content over Napster and Audiogalaxy, roleplaying on MOOs and MUDs and creating personal webpages before that. Certainly, the group of new contenders such as YouTube and Facebook have thrown Web 2.0 into real life, with such examples as Barack Obama's change.gov with videos, and forums and the online Rickrolling phenomenon reversing with a live surprise Rick Astley at the Macy's Day parade. Truly, of all these terms, social computing is the umbrella term - but its name exclusion of mobile phones and other small digital assistants is troubling, as that seems to be an area where social computing is expanding.
My revised definition of social computing would therefore be:
Social computing is a term for technologies (including mobile devices) and virtual spaces that allow users to create, describe and/or share content, and for the communities that sometimes arise or already exist around such content.
The term "computing" in social computing is problematic because it indicates that the users are only using computers, which they may not be. The introduction of the iPhone in US has brought a "do-it-all" phone trend that started much earlier in Asia; individuals can upload photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube or type replies to blogs using their phones or other personal digital assistants. While yes, these objects technically are computers or the vague "technologies" of the definition, the term "social computing" itself is misleading as our computers get smaller and smaller, and fall into the "phone" category.
Speaking of the social in social computing - just who are the "users"? Tenopir expresses fear over an anarchist information world, where we never know who we're talking to or what their expertise really is. Dibbell confirms the problem in the tale of Mr. Bungle: the Lambda MOO thinks there is one person behind that keyboard, but it is truly a number of undergraduates, turning serious online community matters into offline fun in their character's behavior. Users tend to behave with a semblance of how they behave in real life on Facebook and MySpace if they use their real name, whereas on other Web 2.0 applications they may act differently or engage in activities they would not tell their real life contacts about under a pseudonym.
We think that just because a blog or a content sharing site can be social, that it is social. Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht found that most informants used their blogs to keep in touch with family, friends, fellow academics or the odd visitor, but a few had half-private or all private blogs. Herring's data indicates that most blogs do not receive comments, marking a lack of social interactivity and making it very much like the radio analogy mentioned in Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht, where a few dictate the information and a very select few are able to respond. Today LiveJournal - which I count as a hybrid blogging-social networking service, even if Herring does not - has a "private" function - you can make your entire blog only accessible by you if you wish. You can add games, notes, and photos on Facebook that are only accessible by you as well.
In terms of other phrases that may be conflated with social computing - Web 2.0, social software, social networks, and social computing all share aspects in common. Beer and Burrows defines Web 2.0 as a "cluster of new applications and related online cultures". The term tends to define web applications that rose during and after the more popular social networks. Social networks where people post profiles of themselves and friend other people (example: Facebook). Social networking is relatively new, and as boyd and Ellison point out has an offline component as friending generally occurs between users who already know each other offline. Social networking shares other aspects of Web 2.0 as lately, at least Facebook and MySpace have added video and/or photo sharing components and MySpace allows aspiring musicians to stream their songs. Boyd and Ellison claim that last.fm, YouTube, and flickr have become social network sites due to their friending capabilities, but I would disagree as the three of the sites' primary capabilities are still related to content (music, videos, and photos), not friending or profiles, and are instead a hybrid content-presentation/social networking site. Second Life is often included inside the Web 2.0 umbrella, although it is a standalone program and not browser-based at all other than links to places in Second Life.
Social software, a new term to me, seems to be analogous to social computing and indicates a place where users exchange or create any sort of information, including social networking. It includes Massively Online Multiplayer RPGs, or MMORPGS, such as World of Warcraft and many others.
Social computing and social software are a somewhat older phenomenon than Web 2.0, as pre-Web 2.0 users were already chatting on message boards, over IRC, over AIM, downloading content over Napster and Audiogalaxy, roleplaying on MOOs and MUDs and creating personal webpages before that. Certainly, the group of new contenders such as YouTube and Facebook have thrown Web 2.0 into real life, with such examples as Barack Obama's change.gov with videos, and forums and the online Rickrolling phenomenon reversing with a live surprise Rick Astley at the Macy's Day parade. Truly, of all these terms, social computing is the umbrella term - but its name exclusion of mobile phones and other small digital assistants is troubling, as that seems to be an area where social computing is expanding.
My revised definition of social computing would therefore be:
Social computing is a term for technologies (including mobile devices) and virtual spaces that allow users to create, describe and/or share content, and for the communities that sometimes arise or already exist around such content.
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