Propositions 1-8 at link below

9. Many of the smartest sociologists are moving in the direction of other disciplines, because these other disciplines allow them to think more clearly (among other reasons). Our discipline makes us stupid, rather than smart. This fact is caused by our not having a distinctive and well connected set of ideas. A consequence of the movement away from sociology by our smart people is a further decrease in our ability to talk to one another, which makes us more stupid. As our most important ideas become more and more integrated into other disciplines, we lose the centrality of our ideas, and thus our disciplinary identity.

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~mcphersn/outrage.html

I know this is old post but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently and I’d like to make sure I understand your Cobot reference.

Did you highlight Cobot to demonstrate that the researchers mistook users interactions/behavior with respect to Cobot as being more meaningful than it was? Was your point that although Cobot was one of the most talked to/talked about “personalities” on LambdaMoo it in no way indicated that Cobot was influential, popular or important to the systems users? Or was your point simply that Cobot somehow got the researchers in literal trouble?

I ask to ensure I am not misunderstanding the context/point of the reference.

Siddiq

It occurs to me that these definitions of social networks are going to be useful to most people personally as our social networks become augmented by online interactions. It can help when we ask “what *is* a friend” (as Euan did the other day, http://www.euansemple.com/theobvious/2009/7/26/friendship.html) to be able to think which kinds of networks different relationships fit into.

I agree that there are so many types of social networks at play, and just because you’re facebooks ‘friends’ with someone doesnt mean you’re even more than acquaintance with them in ‘real life’. I would say that a great percentage of the people i am ‘friends’ with on facebook (mostly old school peers) I would not even consider talking to in real life and from what I’ve seen on their facebook profiles they would not want to talk let alone be ‘friends’ with me. I am a collected item for them, one in a set. It is like the trophy cabinet, who can have the most high school ‘friends’ (read peers) as their facebook ‘friends’ on their site. These people dont even say anything, they just add you because they remember your name. I dont know if its actually they have some friendly outreach, maybe we couldnt have been friends in highschool but they are trying now… One example, my partner (we went to the same school) is ‘friends’ with a girl who i never really had anything to do with (we were in the same class) because she was ‘cool’ and i was a ‘nerd’. she starts chatting (the IM feature) to him asking about us and saying that she always really liked me. He recalls to me that she always asked about me in school. Now, she is my ‘friend’ on facebook and has never posted anyhting on my wall and i havent on hers. We have literally never talked on facebook nor since highschool (does ‘hi’ count?). Boggles the mind yes? Not really.

We are better off looking at underlying dynamics that might lead a network to ‘flourish’.

And we need to distinguish social capital/power from flourishing. A heavy weight executive can be like a bomb- inert until it goes off – that is with power but not flourishing. A youngester riding the Tube for the first time is a light weight but flourishing in that they are going some where.

The work on happiness and phase states is where I am going with this – Frederickson and Losada 2005, Am Psychologist.

Why not turn the problem around? Why not approach the analysis from a ground of the nature of relationships that create emergent, autopoietic social structures, rather than the other way around? I’m finding that this way allows one to create a whole lot of clarity in what previously were pretty complicated issues.

(Hi, Bernie! [waves])

One of the reasons the term “consequential strangers” (coined by my academic collaborator Karen Fingerman as a way to describe peripheral relationships) piqued my interest is that it gave a name to relationships that had been given little coverage in the press. People can’t value something they can’t name. While sociologists have long known the value of weak ties, lay people have not. This project began in 2006. Three and a half years later–light years in Internet time–it’s clear that no matter which type of network you look at, it is filled mostly with consequential strangers! I have no idea whether reearchers or lay people will adopt the term in everyday parlance. But the important point of both my book and your essay is that we need to think about the broader social landscape in more nuanced terms.