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« November 2007 | Main | January 2008 » December 29, 2007Pew on teen social media practices (with interesting bits on class)While I was off struggling with Leopard and pants, Pew put out another great report: Teens and Social Media. This report fleshes out what I noticed earlier - teens are much more protective of the content they post online than adults are. Yet, this report is sooo much more than that. Here are some of the new findings to whet your appetite:
Note: The bits on social network sites in the report are using data collected in late 2005/early 2006. Much of those findings were reported in an earlier Pew Report. I strongly believe that SNS use is up since then and that 55% is extremely low. The whole report is extremely interesting (and I strongly encourage you to read it), but I want to take a moment to talk about the two statements that I bolded in the list above. What Pew's data shows is that online participation correlates with offline participation. They are not able to show causality (and they do not try to claim that they can), but such a correlation still contradicts the ever-present myth that online activities cause a decline in offline activities. Of course, don't misread this correlation in the opposite direction either. In other words, you cannot say that if you get a group of teens involved online, they will also get involved offline. Meshing these findings with my own qualitative observations, I have a sneaking suspicion that what Pew's data is pointing to is that the hyper-motivated and/or overly scheduled teens from middle/upper class communities are extremely engaged offline and use online technologies to socialize with their friends in the interstitial times and that this cohort's content creation is primarily to support friendships rather than create for creation sake. This also makes sense because teens who have more free time tend to have less restrictions and tend to prefer offline encounters with friends to online ones. I wasn't surprised by most of their findings, but one of them did make me raise my eyebrows: Teens from lower-income are more likely to blog. Because of how Pew collects data, it cannot answer the question "why?" when it finds such correlations, but I figured that my qualitative data might provide some insight and so I went back through my data. When asked about blogging, most of my MySpace-dominant users would immediately talk about the blogs that they kept on MySpace while my Facebook-dominant teens would talk about how Xanga was "so middle school" and that "everyone stopped" because "it just felt really weird writing about my day to people that I didn't even care about." And then it clicked. As I pointed out last summer and Eszter saw in her survey, the MySpace/Facebook split is correlated with socio-economic status. Because MySpace supports blogging and Facebook does not and because many of the teens who were once on Xanga are now using one of the SNSs, it makes sense that teens from lower-income households are more likely to blog now. They are blogging on MySpace. Now, that outta be interesting when these kids hit college where blogging is used as an educational tool. Category: web2.0 Tags: youth teen socialmedia blogging
Posted by zephoria at 4:40 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0) December 28, 2007All I need is a pair of pants.Dear Clothing Designers, I am disappointed in your lack of understanding of the diversity of women's bodies. I traipsed down Broadway, into Soho, and out to the malls in search of a pair of pants that fit. I was willing to spend a decent amount of money on said pants so I visited everything from high end designers to department and chain stores. I tried on over 150 pairs and came up empty handed. I tried on pants ranging from sizes 6-12, petites, regulars, and "short." I was even willing to get the bottoms hemmed if only I could find a pair that fit up top. I even tried on the ugly pants. The relationship between my waist, hips, ass, and thighs appears to be completely alien to you, for none of you seem to make a pair of pants that fit all of these dimensions (let alone length). Why? Am I _that_ different? Or would you simply prefer that I conform to your body aesthetics? Like many other women, I do not belong on a hanger. I am not shaped like a model nor do I have any interest in resorting to anorexia to try to fit into your skinny clothes. I am curvy and I like my curves. I am a confident woman, but shopping demoralizes me. Your industry sells a standard of beauty, demanding women to conform and ostracizing them when they do not. I know that I am not alone in not fitting into your clothing. Have you ever considered the impact that you have on young women's sense of self? How hard would it be to diversify your clothing dimensions? I long for the day when I can submit my dimensions and order personalized clothes. I know it's coming, but I desperately want it NOW. Particularly since the only thing that is "in" seems to be tight and tighter. Why oh why can't we personalize our clothes yet? In the meantime, dear clothing designers, please bring back phat pants. I don't care if they're not "in style" but at least they fit. I desperately need new clothes for all of the ones that I bought when phat pants and flowy yoga pants were the in thing are falling apart. I have upcoming engagements and I desperately need pants. Please, I beg you, do something. Thank you. PS: For all of you men who think that my flowy clothing is my "style," please realize that it is simply because nothing else ever fits. Welcome to the hell of women's shopping. Category: gender & sexuality Tags: clothing fashion shopping
Posted by zephoria at 11:28 AM | Comments (39) | TrackBack (0) December 21, 2007do NOT upgrade to Leopard (why I'm offline)I foolishly decided to upgrade to Leopard five days ago, at the beginning of my trip east for the holidays. This was the worst idea ever so for everyone waiting for me to respond to anything, please be patient... I won't really be online until I can get back to LA and wipe my machine and start over. For the geeks, here's what's going on with Leopard:
Anyhow, if anyone has any clue, I'd be happy to provide more details and try whatever. But I can't balance this and family and holiday shopping and hotels and keeping sane, so I'm just going offline until I get home. Plus, I need to do a proper backup before I can feel comfortable turning this thing over to anyone else. Le sigh. Update: Thanks everyone for your comments! I ended up re-installing my machine and it's a much happier camper. I realized that I've been through 7 machines and 4 OSes without ever cleaning anything out - all I do is firewire to the next one. So far, so good. But damn is email overflow daunting. Category: techno doom Tags: leopard
Posted by zephoria at 11:44 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0) December 16, 2007adults' views on privacy (new PEW report)PEW has a new report out on adults and privacy: Digital Footprints. It's a solid report on the state of adults' perception of privacy wrt the internet. Of course, what amuses me is that adults are saying one thing and doing another. Adults are more likely than teens to have public profiles on SNSs. 60% of adults are not worried about how much information is available about them online. (Of course, young adults are more likely than older adults to believe it would be "very difficult" for someone to locate or contact them.) 61% of adults do not bother to limit the amount of information that can be found about them (including many who are purportedly worried). In other words, adults (and presumably there are parents in this group) are telling teens to be careful online and restrict what information they put up there while they themselves are doing little to protect their own data. This reminds me of adults who tell their kids never to meet strangers online under any circumstances and then proceed to use online dating sites and, rather than meet in public places, choose to go to the stranger's private residence. Adults need to think about safety too - it's not a story of binaries. The safe and practical approach is somewhere between abstinence and uber risky behavior. Both adults and children need to learn how to negotiate safety and privacy in a meaningful and nuanced way. Adults need to socialize young people into conscientious participation online, both wrt to privacy and safety. You cannot simply wait until teens are 18 and then flip the switch and say GO! This has dreadful and dangerous consequences. Anyhow, I'm not doing justice to the PEW report. Read it yourself. It's quite interesting and there's great data and it's well situated. Category: privacy Tags: pew
Posted by zephoria at 7:30 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0) December 14, 2007valuing inefficiencies and unreliabilityTwo deeply embedded values in the world of technology development are efficiency and reliability. Companies pride themselves in maximizing efficiency and reliability and, for the most part, consumers agree. We like when our search engines produce results quickly and reliably. Yet, when it comes to social technologies, I suspect that efficiency and reliability are not the ideal metrics. Let's start with reliability. In some senses, we want our social technologies to be reliable - we want to know that our phones will work when we need them and that our email will get to us. While we want perfect reliability for our own needs, we also want there to be failures in the system so that we can blame technology when we don't want to admit to our own weaknesses. In other words, we want plausible deniability. We want to be able to blame our spam filters when we failed to respond to an email that someone sent that we didn't feel like answering. We want to blame cell phone reception when we've had enough of a conversation and "accidentally" hang up. The more reliable technology gets, the more we have to find new ways for blaming the technology so that we don't have to do the socially rude thing. This is one of the reasons that LinkedIn is painful. Instead of blaming the technology, we have to blame our friends and colleagues when we don't hear from the contacts we're trying to reach. YUCK. So, what about efficiency? Think about Facebook Causes. Think about how easy it is to efficiently spam everyone you know to join the Cause. Hell, the technology will spam your friends even when you don't try. Does this actually build social capital or convince your friends to participate in that cause that you love? Probably not. Likewise, an evite is less inviting than a personalized email trying to convince you personally to come. This is also the case when it comes to trying to convince your Congresspeople of something. Thanks to email, you can efficiently spam your congresspeople with little effort. But that there is the problem - with little effort. The more efficient a means of communication is, the less it is valued. This is why politicians take personal letter (particularly written ones) more seriously than email or forms that people can quickly fill out. (Of course, if you *really* want to be taken seriously, try sending your Congresswoman a bouquet of flowers. Not only did that take effort, it actually cost something too.) Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. One of the things that I've found to be consistently true with teens of rich and powerful parents is that they'd give up many of the material goods in their world to actually get some time and attention from their overly scheduled parents. Time and attention are rare commodities in modern life. Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care. When I talk with teens about MySpace bulletins versus comments, they consistently tell me that they value comments more than bulletins. Why? Because "it takes effort" to write a comment. Bulletins are seen as too easy and it's not surprising that teens have employed this medium to beg their friends to spend time and write a comment on their page. Teens' views on Facebook Apps reflect this same attitude. While they think they're fun at first, they begin to loathe them after a while because they're seen as spam that your friends send you. It's simply too efficient to spam your friends, even if you can only send 10 a day. In the physical world, architects and city planners often build inefficiencies into the system for a reason. I remember a talk by Manuel Castells where he spoke of forcing people to stand on line at regular intervals in public places, even when the activity could be made more efficient through technology. He viewed these kinds of inefficiencies as critical to the well-being of society because they provided a context for people to interact with strangers and, thus, build connections that glued the city together. This worked especially well when people could collectively complain about the people in charge - it provided a reason for social solidarity. (Think about the social solidarity built in NY when there's a brownout or a transit strike.) Physical architects must constantly struggle with maximizing efficiency versus providing room for inefficiencies because of the social good that comes from them. I have a sneaking suspicion that tech architects never even think about the possibility of creating inefficiencies to enhance social good, but I'm not sure. Since many of you mysterious readers are passionate about social technology, let me ask you. What examples of intentional (or unintentional) inefficiencies do you see in social tech? How do users respond to these? Category: digitalness Tags: efficiency reliability
Posted by zephoria at 7:49 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0) December 12, 2007MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning (it's live!)I am very very very pleased to announce that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning is now out in the world and ready for your affection. The purpose of the series is to "examine the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect a person's sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically." The series is published by MIT Press and contains six books:
(Btw: I linked to the paperbacks. If you like hardcovers, go here.) Each book has 8-10 peer-reviewed articles plus an intro and foreword. The articles are academic in nature, but written for a public audience and meant to be accessible and relevant to public discourse. While I encourage everyone to purchase the books (they're cheap!), individual articles are also available for download here thanks to MacArthur and MIT Press. My article "Why Youth Heart Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life" is part of the "Youth, Identity, and Digital Media" book. I'm super excited about this series and I hope you are too. Also, for those who don't know, MacArthur is doing unbelievable work in building a community for those invested in digital media and learning. To learn more, check out the website or the Spotlight blog. MIT Press is also launching The International Journal of Learning and Media to collect and publish research in this area. Category: fun links Tags: macarthur articles bookseries mitpress
Posted by zephoria at 2:22 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) December 11, 2007Facebook's "opt-out" precedent
MoveOn started a petition, bloggers cried foul, and the media did a 180, going from calling Facebook the privacy savior to the privacy destroyer. Amidst the outrage, Facebook was also declared Grinch when unassuming users failed to opt-out and had their gifts broadcast to the recipients, thereby ruining Christmas. Privacy scholar Michael Zimmer also pointed out that the feature was peculiarly named because beacons give warning when danger is about to take place. Not surprisingly, the company was forced to adjust. Zuckerberg apologized and additional features were provided to let people manage Beacon. While this appeases some, not all are satiated. StopBadware argues that Facebook does not go far enough and New York Law School Professor James Grimmelmann argues that Beacon is illegal under the Video Privacy Protection Act. For all of the repentance by Facebook, what really bugs me is that this is the third time that Facebook has violated people's sense of privacy in a problematic way. I documented the first incident - the introduction of the News Feeds - in an essay called "Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck." In this incident, there were no privacy adjustments until public outcry. The second incident went primarily unnoticed. Back in September, Facebook quietly began making public search listings available to search engines. This means that users' primary photos are cached alongside their name and networks on Google. Once again, it was an opt-out structure, although finding the opt-out is tricky. Under privacy settings, under search, there is a question of "Which Facebook users can find me in search?" If you choose "everyone," that includes search engines, not just Facebook users. The third incident is Beacon. In each incident, Facebook pushed the boundaries of privacy a bit further and, when public outcry took place, retreated just a wee bit to make people feel more comfortable. In other words, this is "slippery slope" software development. Given what I've learned from interviewing teens and college students over the years, they have *no* idea that these changes are taking place (until an incident occurs). Most don't even realize that adding the geographic network makes them visible to thousands if not millions. They don't know how to navigate the privacy settings and they don't understand the implications. In other words, defaults are EVERYTHING. Like most companies, Facebook probably chose the "opt-out" path instead of the "opt-in" path because they knew that most users would not opt in. Even if they thought the feature was purrrfect, most wouldn't opt-in because they would never know of the feature. Who reads the fine print of a website notice? This is exactly why opt-out approaches are dangerous. People don't know what they've by default opted-in to. They trust companies and once they trust those companies, they are at their mercy. Most lofty bloggers and technologists argue that if people are given the choice, that's good enough. The argument is that people should inform themselves and suffer the consequences if they don't. In other words, no sympathy for "dumb kids." I object to this line of reasoning. Most people do not have the time or inclination to follow the fine print of every institution and website that they participate in, nor do I think that they should be required to. This is not simply a matter of contracts that they sign, but normative social infrastructure. Companies should be required to do their best to maintain the normative sense of privacy and require that users opt-in to changes that alter that normative sense. In other words, what is the reasonable expectation for privacy on the site and does this new feature change that? Of course, I also understand that this would piss companies off because they make lots of money by manipulating and altering everyday users' naiveté and sense of norms. Still, I think that the default should be "opt-in" and "opt-out" should only be used in situations that would protect users (i.e., a feature that would limit users' visibility). I kinda suspect that Facebook loses very little when there is public outrage. They gain a lot of free press and by taking a step back after taking 10 steps forward, they end up looking like the good guy, even when nine steps forward is still a dreadful end result. This is how "slippery slopes" work and why they are so effective in political circles. Most people will never realize how much of their data has been exposed to so many different companies and people. They will still believe that Facebook is far more private than other social network sites (even though this is patently untrue). And, unless there is a large lawsuit or new legislation introduced, I suspect that Facebook will continue to push the edges when it comes to user privacy. Lots of companies are looking at Facebook's success and trying to figure out how to duplicate it. Bigger companies are watching to see what they can get away with so that they too can take that path. Issues of privacy are going to get ickier and ickier, especially once we're talking about mobile phones and location-based information. As Alison wrote in her previous post on respecting digital privacy, users are likely to act incautiously by default. Thus, what does it mean that we're solidifying the precedent that "opt-out" is AOK? Tags: privacy optout slipperyslope
Posted by zephoria at 8:39 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0) December 10, 2007giving backAs those who have followed this blog for a long time know, December is the month where I contribute 10% of my salary to worthwhile charities and encourage you to do the same. This is my modification of the traditional tithing practice, but I prefer to give to the charities of my choice instead of to the church. This year, I chose to give to a wide variety of organizations based on advice from my friends, but I would like to highlight a few that mean something to me personally in case you're looking for a good cause to support. My personal emphasis this year is on women's issues and education.
In addition to these great women's rights and education organizations, don't forget EFF, Creative Commons, and ACLU - three worthy groups trying to project our freedoms online and off. Finally, if you are like me, you detest receiving snail mail from organizations after you've donated. For this reason, I'm a big fan of donating anonymously through Network for Good - it's a good way to make certain you never receive mail of any kind while still giving you the tax credit. Category: reflections & rants
Posted by zephoria at 12:04 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) December 8, 2007hiking in LA (and The Golden Compass)Having not left the house or gotten out of my PJs all week (except for one short scavenging of food a few blocks away), G decided that I needed a change of scenery before embarking on another week of head-down data analysis. After breakfast on the beach, we went up to Topanga for a nice hike. One of my favorite things about LA is that there is so much hiking really close by. At the same time, I kinda suspect that I don't know all of the good spots. What are other good trails in LA and the neighboring counties? Oh, and post-hike, we decided to go see The Golden Compass which was surprisingly good. (I was terrified of the potential for a dreadful adaptation.) I wanted to make sure that I saw it opening weekend since the Catholic church is urging people to boycott it. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Pullman's Dark Materials series. I love the fact that the protagonist is a young girl and I love that the whole series questions the relationship between science in religion (which is, of course, the reason that the Catholic church hates it). Having grown up on loads of super-Christian texts (Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Wrinkle In Time, etc.), I'm stoked to see young reader's texts that have a more critical view of religion. Category: reflections & rants Tags: hiking losangeles goldencompass darkmaterials pullman
Posted by zephoria at 10:34 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0) December 5, 2007Overprotective parenting and bullying: Who is to blame for the suicide of Megan Meier?
For those who are not familiar with the Megan Meier story, let me create a brief overview of what has been commonly covered in the press. Megan (13, St. Louis) had a MySpace profile when a cute boy "Josh" (16) begins courting her. All is well until Josh breaks up with her online by sending cruel messages about how she hurts her friends, is fat and a slut, and "the world would be a better place without you." Shortly after reading this, Megan commits suicide. Josh turns out to be a fake profile created by Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan's former friends. Police investigate, no charges are filed. Because the story taps into every parent's worst fear and the paranoia over the internet, the press have been saying all sorts of things. Yet, never was there a response from the woman who admitted to creating Josh, most likely because she was forbidden from speaking out as police work out whether charges are to be filed. Then, this morning, I learned that someone who identifies as Lori Drew posted an explanation on a blog called "megan had it coming". Given the title of the blog, I had serious doubts that this was legitimate but upon reading the post, I think it actually might be. (Update: Lori Drew's lawyers have said that Drew is not the writer of the blog. Thus, what follows is an interpretation of what an unknown person purporting to be Lori Drew said and should be taken with a grain of salt. The broader discussion of parenting today is still relevant.) What we learn is that Lori viewed her acts as protective of her child who she believed was the victim of Megan's dark side. She thought she was teaching Megan a lesson and never imagined the consequences of her efforts to give Megan a taste of her own medicine. Because of earlier incidents involving her daughter, she had no love for Megan and no respect for Megan's parents who she felt were unable to see the dark side of their daughter. Step into this mother's shoes and it's easy to understand her logic and why, from her POV, she took the steps that she did. At the same time, her perspective signals some absolute failures in American society, our ability to rationally communicate, and Lori's inability to imagine potential costs of her decisions. Much to my dismay, parenting today seems to require absolute belief that you're child is the best child ever. Many parents think that their child can do no wrong and, thus, are unable to hear critiques of their own children. In some ways, it's not surprising... people have fewer kids (who are mostly wanted thanks to birth control), inhabit single family homes, and live in a nurture-centric world where their children reflect on them at every level. Doubting one's child means doubting oneself. The result of our child obsession is that parents are overprotective. They want to cushion their children from every scratch and get involved in every incident that makes their children feel emotional or physical pain. This is precisely what causes parents to call schools when their child gets a B or ring up other parents when something mean is said on the schoolyard or other symptoms of "helicopter parenting." Children are not encouraged to struggle through the feelings of pain and hurt and find a solution; instead, parents are expected to get involved and fix it and most enter the ring voluntarily. In these environments, there's no social solidarity amongst parents and parents are unable to hear criticism about their child. Instead, such critiques are viewed as attacks and are used as weapons when parents want others to control their children their way. Reading between the lines, I get the sense that Megan was emotionally all over the place (for whatever reasons - an actual issue or just plain puberty). She was struggling to negotiate friendships and she had a mean streak when she was depressed. She wasn't the cool kid and she was struggling to fit in and made poor judgments about how to handle friendships. She wanted someone to love her and make her feel cool and important. Frankly, it seems like pretty normal middle school tumultuousness, but we live in a culture that can't accept rough edges. Maybe meds would've stabilized her, maybe her self esteem would've improved without the braces, or maybe and most importantly, it was just a matter of time. But as anyone who was not that cool in school can tell you, middle school sucked. It's ground zero for learning how to negotiate social interactions and many mistakes are made. This is when bullying and boy/girl-dynamics and other dramas really come to the forefront. It's awful, it's hell. Yet, the responsibility of a parent of a tween is not to try to fix all painful situations, but to teach their child how to negotiate them responsibly. This is much harder than fixing things and it's challenging for Type A parents who desperately want their kids to turn out OK. But no good comes of kids not learning coping mechanisms and relying on parents to fix every social issue. While I understand Lori's desire to protect her child and her feeling of helplessness for not being able to do anything, it's not clear to me from her story that she focused on giving her daughter much agency. Instead, she felt as though she was responsible for fixing it. Here is where I think she made a mistake. Deceiving children is problematic to begin with, but doing so by tapping into their emotional weaknesses is outright deadly. At a gut level, Lori knew that she could capture Megan's attention by creating a male character that showed interest. In other words, Lori knew how to manipulate Megan's attention and emotions. She capitalized on that knowledge, self-justifying it as responsible parenting. She knew how to have the "perfect" relationship with Megan, to gain her trust. This is knowledge that adults have because we've had our mistakes and learned how to negotiate social interactions. The reason that Megan's relationships were so fraught was probably not because she was evil but because she and her peers were struggling with how to appropriately interact with one another. It's clear from Megan's reaction to Josh that she was fully capable of positive interactions in a social context not strife with miscommunication and the confusion of school status. If she were truly as messed up as Lori assumed her to be, she would not be capable of this. In my opinion, by choosing to "teach her a lesson," Lori acted in a manner that was both ethically and morally inappropriate. Revenge is foolish in every context, but adults should never take revenge on children, regardless of how much those children upset them. This is an abuse of power. Furthermore, it signals to Lori's daughter that revenge is an OK response to being hurt. Whatever happened to "turn the other cheek"? For a Christian society, we don't do a good job of upholding basic Christian values. While Lori believes that her act of verbal maliciousness is equivalent to Megan's meanness to other kids, she's wrong. Kids can definitely be cruel and it definitely hurts, but it's embedded in a larger context about the struggles for status and popularity, the social context of the broader peer group, and, generally, reciprocal bad treatment. As much as parents want to believe that other kids are mean to their child but their child is innocent, this is rarely the case. There is usually build up and a lot of back and forth before an incident that we'd call "bullying" takes place. Bullying rarely happens out of the blue - it's situated in a larger context of social drama and hurt. By pretending to be a love interest when sexuality is burgeoning and having a significant other is a valued status marker, Lori was not simply operating as another peer. Furthermore, by building her trust, Lori consciously made Megan vulnerable. Even if she did not realize it, the trust built in such a context far exceeds the trust between most peers at that stage, and thus made Megan more vulnerable to Josh than Lori's daughter was to Megan. Capitalizing on that trust and swiftly and cruelly rupturing that bond was a truly horrible act of abuse. I'm glad that Lori is sharing her perspective and I hope that parents read it because I imagine that many can see themselves in her shoes. Yet, I hope that parents can also see why Lori's decisions are flawed and dangerous. The critical lesson here is not about the internet, it's about parents responsibilities in raising their children. As tempting as it is to get involved and as easily as it is to do so online through deception, parents usually need to stay out of such situations. They need to advise their children, teach them how to cope, and support them through the tumultuous times. Of course, there are examples when things go too far over the line and parents need to get involved, but it seems as though that line has been erased. Helicopter parenting is dangerous and, frankly, I don't think that we're going to see the full damage of it for another 10 years as this cohort enters the workforce (although Twenge argues that the narcissism part is already affecting the workplace). The biggest problem is that this needs to be done en masse. It doesn't help to have some parents disengage while the majority of a peer group's parents are calling the school and demanding fairness and getting involved in every childhood squabble. Parenting is hard, seeing your child hurting is hard, thinking you can fix it and choosing not to is hard, wanting your child to get every opportunity possible and yet choosing not to manipulate the system is hard. I totally understand why parents want to get involved and fix it, but such engagement can be harmful to children long-term and result in a more problematic culture more broadly. Category: culture Tags: parenting bullying MeganMeier suicide deception
Posted by zephoria at 11:17 AM | Comments (27) | TrackBack (0) December 4, 2007musing about online social normsSince the earliest days of Usenet and email, people have complained about how much easier it is to be mean online than offline. If you spend enough time on public forums, it's hard not to run into mean-spirited rhetoric: defamation, hate speech, flaming, etc. The latest story of helicopter parenting turning deadly highlights how easy it is to deceive to be cruel. Discussions of using mediating technologies for the purpose of bullying often rely on arguments about how technology aids and embeds malicious acts by reducing the consequences of breaking social norms. Governments often seek to ban technologies because of mean-spirited interactions that take place. Of course, what's at stake is fundamentally a philosophical question, the precise one that got me kicked out of my 9th grade English classroom: is "man" basically good or evil? (I argued that man was basically evil, but apparently this was the incorrect answer and I wouldn't back down.) There are all sorts of forces that limit social behavior in everyday life: fear of legal consequences, fear of social consequences, fear of damage to our bodies, lack of functional capability, whether potential gains outweigh costs, etc. Our legal system takes these forces into consideration and this is where punishments like jail (or the death penalty) operate at disincentives. Likewise, we often try to regulate structures so that it is functionally impossible to commit an act that is perceived to be collectively "wrong" (legal or social). Yet, in truth, we rely primarily on the things that are essential to humanness: desire not to face physical harm and desire to fit in socially. Mediated environment throw these forces for a loop. I can say anything I want here and you can't punch me. At least not while you're sitting on your computer reading this. And I have a reasonable expectation that your potential anger will dissipate before you see me again. Furthermore, this fear of bodily harm is very ephemeral - we are much worse about evaluating whether or not an act will result in _future_ bodily harm than determining if it will result in immediate harm. The lack of immediate harm is key here. The bigger issue has to do with social consequences. I have no way of determining if you're nodding along or scrunching your face in disgust and violent disagreement. I have to imagine your reaction as I write this (and I'm imagining the nods). I have no way of adjusting the next paragraph according to your implicit responses while reading this paragraph, both because I can't see you and because you're reading this in a time-shifted manner. Furthermore, unless you explicitly provide feedback (like comments), I have no real understanding that you're out there let alone what you thought of my post. The lack of social feedback sucks, but the lack of immediate social consequences can be far more dangerous. Impression management is a core process of human participation in social situations. I try to present myself in the way that I want to be received and based on your feedback, I adjust my presentation. This is not easily learned and teenagers often struggle with this (thus, an "identity crisis" is when one's imagined self doesn't mesh well with how one is perceived) but adults are by no means perfect at this. We all learn through experience which is why social interaction is crucial. Yet, in mediated environments, impression management is stilted. There's no implicit feedback and explicit feedback is minimal at best ("nice picture" isn't really informative). The immediate social consequences are also not there because there's no way of knowing if someone just walked away. As a result, social norms aren't really enforced online and without this re-inforcement, it's easy to break them without even knowing it. This gets even trickier when you remember that networked publics bring together people from all sorts of environments with fundamentally different sets of social norms and expectations. Many imagine a melting pot where a new set of collective norms evolves, but because it's hard to provide social feedback, that doesn't happen. It's more like a rotting salad bowl. Now, add in the fact that people regularly seek attention (even negative attention) in public situations and that public forums notoriously draw in those who are lonely, bored, desperate, angry, depressed, and otherwise not in best form. Mix this with the lack of social feedback and you've got a recipe for disaster. There are few consequences for negative behaviors, but they generate a whole lot of attention. The question remains: is this the fault of the environment? In some sense, yes because the architectural underpinnings of these environments don't allow for social feedback or meaningful social (or bodily) consequences. This is where legal folks get into a tizzy because they think that legal consequences will solve everything. For this reason, they often argue against anonymity, viewing it as a barrier to regulating social behavior online. Unfortunately, this argument is flawed. While legal consequences certainly limit some people from some acts, they certainly do not limit everything. If they did, we wouldn't need jails and murder would be a thing of the past. More problematically, most of what needs regulated in social environments online is not a rupture of law but a rupture of social decorum. "He's being mean" is not something that the law really wants to involve itself with. So then how do we fix it? Is it a matter of design? Do we need to bake in social feedback loops and consequences into the core of our technologies? If so, how? Alternatively, is there a way to socialize people into an environment where they do "what's right" simply because it's right? Of course, this question extends beyond the internet. I fear that as a society, we are relying more on legal regulation and less on social regulation and I can't work out why. But, perhaps the problem is not the internet but a general lack of collectively understood everyday norms. Older people certainly spend enough time bitching about "kids these days," but there are all sorts of contributing factors for building and maintaining collective social norms is hard: age segregation, class segregation, homophily more broadly. We can blame overworked adults, cars, lack of public spaces, single family social units, and other such bits on contributing to homophily and the lack of collective social norms. But here's where I think that there's an interesting sociological puzzle. What network structures result in strong collective norms? What forces are needed to create those kinds of social network? (This is a classic question of tolerance... we know fairly well that diverse networks have higher levels of tolerance, not surprisingly.) Given that universal unitedness isn't really going to happen, what are the structural changes that increase norm maintenance? As for the internet, mass media hype aside, I bet that the internet is statistically nicer than it was when I was growing up. While many public forums and community sites like Slashdot are still bogged down with crud, most people are going online to interact with people that they know. There's only so much you can get away with when you're going to see the person the next day. Time delay might not be ideal for social feedback, but it certainly helps. Category: digitalness Tags: norms regulation trolls flamewars socialization
Posted by zephoria at 3:17 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0) December 3, 2007"Information Access in a Networked World"Last month, I participated on a panel at Pearson Publishing along with three others from MacArthur's digital learning initiatives. I gave a talk there about the future of information access and I wanted to make the crib available for all who might find it of interest: In the talk, I outline three mechanisms of information access: push, pull, and osmosis. I then talk about how teens are engaging with information through these different processes, touching on educational learning, politics, Wikipedia, and social currency. I have a feeling folks might find it interesting, especially the educator and policy maker and parent types. Oh, and of course the information access people. (Oh, and embedded in there is a sneak preview of one of my upcoming projects re: Wikipedia.) Category: web2.0 Tags: information learning networks wikipedia
Posted by zephoria at 8:23 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?
A few years back, I asked this question to someone who worked in the world of web ads and I received a snarky (and condescending) answer: middle America. Over the years, I've read all sorts of speculations about search engine ads suggesting that people click on ads:
Over the summer, Dave Morgan (AOL Global Advertising Strategy) blogged about a study that they did to investigate who clicks on ads: What did we learn? A lot. We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large. Social media services like social network sites are not designed around the audience that Morgan suggests is the core of clickers, yet these too rely on advertising. I have a sneaking suspicion that a tiny percentage of MySpace/Facebook/etc. users make up the bulk of the revenue of these sites, just as with the sites that Morgan addresses. I cannot find any research on who clicks on social network site ads (does anyone know of any???), but based on what I've seen qualitatively, my hypothesis would be that heavy ad clickers are:
In other words, much to my chagrin, I suspect that heavy ad clickers in social network sites and other social media are more likely to trend lower in both economic and social capital than the average user. Unfortunately, I don't have the data to test these hypotheses at all. (Does anyone? Are there any studies on class dynamics and ad clicking?) Of course, while the ad world is obsessed with clicks because they can measure those, ad receptivity is more than just clicks. While people dream of adding clicks to TV, TV ads have been tremendously successful without the clicking option. Brand recognition, for example, is an acceptable outcome from the POV of many marketers. But the web lets us measure clicks so advertisers tend to care about clicks. I am not an advertiser and I'm not invested in making better ads. Instead, by raising this topic, I'm curious whether or not web marketing is capitalizing on a niche group and, if so, what the societal implications of this might be? If my hypothesis were true, what would it mean if marketing is profiting primarily off of those who are economically and socially struggling? How do we feel about this philosophically, ethically, and professionally? Would we feel proud of living off of a business model that targets the poor? Of course, my hypothesis may be wrong. Advertisers have historically flocked to the sites that draw richer, more educated, more urban populations. (As has media coverage.) They have to be doing this for a reason, right? Websites have historically tried to demonstrate that their users are such "ideal" consumers. Yet, I can't help but wonder if these "ideal" consumers are really the people who buy most of the goods being advertised. (I've always been fascinated by how poorer American families tend to have immense amounts of stuff while rich American families pride themselves on minimizing quantity and maximizing quality of material goods.) I should note that consumer culture has historically capitalized on poorer populations, long before the web. Studies of consumer culture have shown how American identity has been constructed through consumption over the last century and how, not surprisingly, those who have a stronger need/desire to prove their American identity buy into the consumer culture. While studies of consumer culture go back decades, I'm having a hard time surfacing what is known about the culture of web advertising. Who is being targeted? Who is responding? Why are they responding? What are the implications? You might be wondering why am I raising such a web-centric issue on the Shift6 blog. Mobile advertising is primarily growing out of the web culture. It may not be about clicks, but the idea of user responses builds on that. As advertising becomes central to every interactive technology in our lives, I think it's important to step back and question who is being targeted, how, and with what consequence. Thus, as we are thinking about what it might mean to live in a world where mobile phone advertising is accepted, we must also concern ourselves with the implications of this. (Note: it's easy to read this from an anti-capitalist POV, but this should instead be read from the POV of a conscientious capitalist.) Category: shift6 Tags: advertising
Posted by zephoria at 2:43 AM | Comments (45) | TrackBack (0) December 2, 2007Six Apart sells LiveJournal. Baroo??In 2005, I penned an article in Salon ("Turmoil in blogland") to address my concerns over Six Apart's acquisition of LiveJournal. When Six Apart bought LiveJournal, it did not simply purchase a tool -- it bought a culture. LJ challenges a lot of assumptions about blogging, and its users have different needs. They typically value communication and identity development over publishing and reaching mass audiences. The culture is a vast array of intimate groups, many of whom want that intimacy preserved. LiveJournal is not a lowbrow version of blogging; it is a practice with different values and needs, focused far more on social solidarity, cultural work and support than the typical blog. It is heavily female, young and resistant. There is no doubt that Six Apart values this, and it should. But at the same time, the act of purchasing someone's house does require responsibility if you want to do right by the tenants, even when those tenants look nothing like any other tenants you have ever seen. Over the last 2.5 years, Six Apart has had regular collisions with the LiveJournal community, most notably this spring when their decision to delete 500 LJs sparked serious conversations (and a revolt) over censorship, copyright, freedom of speech, and sexuality. In an effort to balance user desire with legal statute, Six Apart ruffled the feathers of the LJ fan community and other geeks and freaks who live their lives on LJ. Sadly, this created a severe rupture of trust between the users and Six Apart. Today, Six Apart announced that it is selling LiveJournal to a Moscow-based company called SUP. I can't make heads or tails of what this might mean. Based on the press release, it seems as though SUP has a rich understanding of the Russian community, but I don't get the sense that they have the first clue about the various English and Japanese speaking subcultures that are active on LJ. For those who aren't aware, the second largest community on LJ is the Russian community. Historically, this subgroup was primarily comprised of Russian academics, but LJ's popularity spread in Russia through word-of-mouth to other Russian groups, including activists. While Russian participation is extremely vibrant on LJ, Russian users are completely disconnected from English-speaking users (see Language Networks on LiveJournal for an interesting analysis of language/network patterns). Furthermore, because the base network was Russian academics, the Russian patterns are quite different from the subcultures that grew out of the camgirl and fandom communities. Even the activists are different. On one hand, I'm stoked that one of the sub-communities on LJ is going to be well-cared for, but I don't know what this means for the sub-communities that I know and love. [LiveJournal is still the only SNS that I'm personally (not just professionally) passionate about.] The optimist in me hopes that this is indeed a "reset" that will allow the subcultural communities to flourish again; the pessimist in me fears that the cultural disconnect between the freaks and geeks and SUP will be even greater than was with Six Apart. But I don't know... I don't know SUP and I don't know what their intentions are. I do know that the emotions on LJ are already running wild - a mix of confusion, hope, and sheer panic. It's never fun to get a new landlord. Anyhow, I'll come back to this topic when I know more. In the meantime, if anyone has a better sense of SUP, please let me know. Category: LiveJournal Tags: sixapart livejournal sale fandom community
Posted by zephoria at 10:50 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0) boyd's law of social network sites::giggle:: While I was off the grid, Cory Doctorow created a law of social network sites and named it after me: boyd's law: "Adding more users to a social network [site] increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." This comes from a brilliant column that he wrote for InformationWeek about how the Facebook communication technology (combined with their not-so-open platform strategy) resemble AOL's old segregation/segmentation approach to users. (Remember the days when AOL users couldn't email anyone who didn't have an AOL account?) Embedded in this discussion is a concern for how social network sites are extremely socially awkward. My favorite quote: "It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system." Anyhow, I super appreciate the creation of "boyd's law," especially because I think that it applies to both social networks and social network sites. (I have to imagine that many folks are having a field day thinking about who all should and shouldn't be invited to holiday parties right about now.) Category: yasns Tags: socialnetworksites
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