Transcript Day 17

Social Information Spaces
::social networking::social software::context collapse::web 2.0::
Review
• Designing Politics - landscape of control (counterole: access to copies) and
freedom (frei: movement through connections)
• Political Intervention - how do we shift the political landscape? ie. the
distribution of resources and data?
• Creative commons & copyright. How do Open Source and Copy Left protect
and build communities of shared creativity and shared resources?
• Narrative. Shared narrative, networked narratives, narrative and database,
narrative and game. What kinds of stories do we tell about ourselves? How do
we tell them?
• Social Networks :: How can we push our social networks beyond the
commons and into new realms of trust, and creative problem solving?
Social Networking
• history
• science
• pop culture
• art
• business
Social Networking History
• Stanley Milgram, The Small World Problem. 1967.
• Chose individuals in a variety of cities in the US as starting points, and
one individual in Boston, Mass. as the end point.
• The instruction was to send given letter to a person that was thought to
be likely to know the end-point person .
• Average path length is 6 hops. “6 degrees of separation”
• conclusion: human society is based on short length networks, small
world.
• Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties, 1973.
• Weak ties are important, and come about from being at the end point of
strong ties. Weak ties can be important edges in the flow of information for instance, when looking for a job....
• See Stephen Johnson, excerpt from Emergence...
Social Networking Science
• Equivalence
• nodes are structurally equivalent when they are connected to same
nodes (equivalent positions in the network).
• Bridges
• an edge that increases number of connected components.
• Centrality
• how well a node connects the network.
• Node - connecting point
• Edge - line: links, or relationships
• Recall Distributed, Decentralized, and Centralized networks....
Social Networking Popular Culture
• Michael Wesch, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube
• Context Collapse: “an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon
one another into that single moment of recording. The images,
actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be
transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer
must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway
to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible
contexts – in upon itself.” (from mediatedcultures.net)
• Facebook, mySpace, YouTube, P2P
Social Networking Popular Culture
• Consider the user and the architect:
• The user often repurposes a technology to suit their needs, while the architect
is shaping the conditions of use, hence what is “acceptable,” what are the
norms. Recall: control and freedom....
Social Networking Popular Culture
Social Networking “Spaces”
• danah boyd: “White Flight in Networked Publics” forthcoming
• Observing the move from MySpace to Facebook circa 2007:
• “The people who use MySpace again, not in a racist way but are usually
more like the ghetto and hip hop rap lovers group.” –Kat
• spatial and taste markers that have racial overtones
• Just as physical spaces and tastes are organized around and
shaped by race and class, so too are digital environments
• Consider this language:MySpace has “bling,” Facebook has clean
elegance.
• Network structures of teen friendships shaped by race and class
Social Networking Popular Culture
Social Networking “Spaces”
• danah boyd: “White Flight in Networked Publics” forthcoming
• the digital move from MySpace to Facebook reflects white flight - the
physical move from urban areas to suburban ones by white middleupperclass people during various points in the 20th-c.
• social network site adoption and the perceptions teens and adults have
about these sites and their users reflect broader narratives of race and
class in American society
• MySpace associated with bands, late night culture. Kids often join due
to an older sibling who was on the site already.
• Media fed into this conception of MySpace
Social Networking Popular Culture
Social Networking “Spaces”
• danah boyd: “White Flight in Networked Publics” forthcoming
• Facebook launched originally for college students only. -- And
then slowly to highschool students with a validation process that
privileged students from wealthier schools.
• In both MySpace and Facebook, norms stemmed from the early
adoptors, and thus the cultural ideas about these sites.
• Subculturally identified teens: MySpace, Mainstream: Facebook
• Less privileged backgrounds: MySpace. Elite Universities:
Facebook
Social Networking Popular Culture
Social Networking “Spaces”
• danah boyd: “White Flight in Networked Publics” forthcoming
• Black and Latino tend towards MySpace
• White and Asian Teens tend toward Facebook.
• Safety – or rather the perception of safety – also emerged as a central
factor in teen preference. While teens believed Facebook was safer,
they struggled to explain why. Tara, a Vietnamese–American 16 year
old from Michigan said, “[Facebook] kind of seemed safer, but I don t
know like what would make it safer, like what main thing. But like, I don’t
know, it just seems like everything that people say, it seems safer.” –
Tara
• Teens’ fear of MySpace as ‘unsafe’ undoubtedly stems from the image
portrayed by the media, but it also suggests a fear of the ‘other.’
Social Networking Art
• Mark Lombardi: Global Networks
• above title is name of Curated show
• sociograms (graphical representation of social links)
• each node or edge is drawn from a reputable news story
• called them “Narrative Structures”
• Josh On, They Rule
• Cory Archangel, Friendster Suicide
• Waren Sack, Conversation Map
• a
browser thatetc.
maps large-scale conversations. for email lists,
newsgroups,
• who is talking to whom, what they are talking about, and the central
terms of the conversation.
• zefrank, small world (2004)
Social Networking Business
What is Web 2.0? From What is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly
• Web 2.0 emerged from the burst dot com bubble in the early 2000s
• Just when pundits were about to write off the Web as being inconseqential a
new bundle of technological wizardry, visual design and business practices
emerged.
Social Networking Business
What is Web 2.0? From What is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly
• Long Tail. Narrow niches make up Web 2.0
• Harness collective intelligence (reputations systems, recommendations, etc.)
• Database Management (“SQL becomes the new HTML)
• Software is a service and is maintained daily - is dynamic. As such, users are
treated as co-developers..
• Lightweight programming models. Successful apps become simple and
elegant. Loose coupling. Hackability. Remixability.
• Software above the level of the single device: multi-platform use.
• Rich user experience. Rich GUI, developed interactivity. AJAX facilitates this.
Social Networking Business
What is Web 2.0? From What is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly
Social Networking BusinessWhat is Web 2.0? From
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What
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Tim O’Reilly
• AJAX:
• Several technologies acting together for rich interactivity.
• Javascript, XHTML, CSS,
• use of the Document Object Model
• XML, etc.
• usually interfaces with database
Media Ownership Media Sovereignty
• FCC
• Net Neutrality
• Indigenous Media