Author Archives: zephoria

Seeking: Research Assistant/Intern for Online Safety Literature Review

The Youth Policy Working Group at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is looking for a research assistant intern to help update the Literature Review produced by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. This project builds off of the Berkman Center’s work studying how youth interact with digital media and specifically seeks to draft policy prescriptions in three areas: privacy, safety, and content creation.

The ideal candidate would be a graduate student (or individual working towards entering a graduate program) who is fluent in quantitative methodologies and can interpret and evaluate statistical findings. The RA/intern would be working to extend the Lit Review from the ISTTF report to include international studies, new studies in the last year, and studies that cover a wider set of topics with respect to online safety. The products of this internship will be an updated Literature Review and a shorter white paper of the high points. Other smaller tasks may be required. This project should take 10-15 hours per week and will last at least the fall semester.

The RA/intern will work directly with Dr. danah boyd and will be a part of a broader team trying to build resources for understanding issues relating to online safety. The candidate should have solid research skills and feel confident reading scholarly research in a wide array of fields. The candidate must have library access through their own university. Before applying, the candidate should read the Literature Review and be confident that this is work that s/he could do.

Preference will be given to candidates in the Boston area, but other U.S. candidates may be considered if their skills and knowledge make them particularly ideal for this job. Unfortunately, we are unable to hire non-U.S. individuals for this job.

To apply, please send a copy of your resume and a cover letter to Catherine Bracy and danah boyd.

(See also: hiring Technical Research Assistant for Adhoc Tasks at MSR)

accessible speaking events for the fall

This fall is chock full of me blabbing on and on so I wanted to share some events that are publicly accessible. They’re intended for different audiences and in different cities so you might find one that works for you. I always love having friends in the audience so if you’re nearby, please do come by!

The spring is equally exciting, including SXSW (where I’m the opening act) and WWW (where I’m keynoting). More announcements still to come!

sometimes I feel like a bitch

For the most part, I’m a fuzzy lovable energetic creature (or at least I like to think so). But new technologies combined with information overload sometimes bring out the inner bitch in me. And then I feel guilty.

I am drowning in information overload. I cannot read everything that I want to, engage in conversations with everyone I’d like to, let alone deal with high-bandwidith content like video. Over the last decade, I’ve developed a set of coping mechanisms for dealing with online conversations. Ways of keeping myself sane amidst the onslaught. The problem is that each new genre of communication and consumption brings new challenges and forces me to adjust. And just when I think that I’ve got a grip on what’s going on, the genre gains mainstream adoption and I’m forced to get all rigid on people. And I hate that.

Let me be a little more concrete. And self-involved. I get hundreds of emails per day that I have to directly respond to. (Hundreds more get filtered into the “will read one day” folders that get very little attention.) I do a huge amount of my responding offline (on airplanes, public transit, cafes, etc.). Thus, messages with links take much longer to get my attention than messages without links. But there’s something nice about turning an INBOX into something manageable before people have the chance to respond. The problem with Web2.0 technologies is that each one wants to replace the INBOX (or at least be an additional channel). For example, there are private messages and comments on social network sites, direct messages and @replies on Twitter. There are blog comments. And RSS feeds. And then there are all of the online communities and bulletin boards and chat spaces that have evolved from those developed in olden days. For me, it’s too much. Too much I tell you. And we haven’t even gotten to voicemail, text messages. Let alone all that’s coming.

The onslaught of places to check makes me want to crumple. And, for better or worse, it’s simply 100% not manageable if I want to keep up my research and stay sane. So I’ve developed my own quirky habits to cope and rather than be flexible for others, I’ve become demanding. I check voicemail sporadically (so please don’t leave a message – send a text). I refuse to even check the private messages on social network sites (so if you’ve sent something there, I’ve never seen it). Because of how @replies are overloaded with retweets and references, I’m simply incapable of keeping up with the stream of directed @replies with requests to respond. And I almost never check online communities or bulletin boards and have bowed out from all collaborative projects that require that kind of engagement.

It’s terrible you see. It’s not that I *like* email (cuz goddess knows it’s been a long time since “you’ve got mail” made me do anything other than cringe). But I know how to manage it. Too many years of Getting Things Done training has taught me to manage it as a glorious ToDo list that can get resolved. But I don’t know how to meaningfully manage streams of content. And I don’t have the structures in place to deal with content in the cloud that requires connectivity. And I don’t like having to deal with Yet Another Walled Garden’s attempt to replicate email. For my own sanity, I need one pile of ToDo. So at the end of the day, the only channel that actually works for me is email. And if you need me to respond to something, don’t message me elsewhere; send me an email.

This is exactly the kind of issue that Bernie Hogan deals with in his dissertation. The complexities of multiple channels and people’s individual preferences. And there are huge issues here – should someone be flexible to others’ preferences or demand that others work around them? And here’s where I feel like a bitch. I’m asking people to work around me. Because I can’t cope with the alternative. And that makes me feel guilty and selfish. And I don’t know what to do about this. Le sigh. So please forgive me.

This article has been translated. En francais. Thanks Ulysse!

Vacation, Vacation, Vaaaay-kaaaay-shun! (offline till Sep 8)

This is the time when all of the crazy people run off to the desert to “survive” with tons of art, fake fur, and countless supplies. Burning Man of course. Normally, I’d be playa-bound, but I’m rebelling and inverting the whole thing. Today, I leave for Iceland where I will make friends with lagoons, greenery, and puffins. Oh am I excited about the puffins! Thanks to my favorite cereal, I’ve been staring at a puffin every day since college. Now it’s time to see them up close and personal. OK, maybe not that close.

I’m not bouncing email on this trip but I’m not checking it either. I will be offline so don’t expect a response until after I start digging out post-September 8. Or perhaps just resist the urge to contact me in the meantime. It is after all Burning Man time! Go offline, have an adventure! (I’m not commenting on the presence of cell towers on the playa. Hrmfpt.)

Anyhow, so long, farewell, auf weidersehen, goodbye!

am I an academic?

academia (n.): The academic world or community; scholastic life.

academic (n.): 1) An ancient philosopher of the Academy.
2) A member of a college or university.
3) A member of a society for promoting art or science

At every academic conference I attend, I hear a constant refrain: “How does it feel to have left academia?” The tone changes dependent on who is doing the asking. Sometimes, it’s pure curiosity or puzzlement, fascination at my choice. At other times, there’s a hint of condescension, as though the question is actually: “Couldn’t make it in academia, eh? Stuck in industry, eh?” I try not to bristle at this but I do find myself getting defensive and trying to explain my position at Microsoft Research over and over again. So I couldn’t help but think that maybe it’s time to write it down.

Microsoft Research is an industrial research lab in the old skool sense. In the world of computer science, the industrial research lab is well understood; it has a long history of success in producing valuable, field-changing research. Like AT&T Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, the halls of MSR are filled with scientists of the highest caliber. People who invented things that you take for granted. MSR grew out of this tradition. It’s primarily filled with computer scientists (and engineers, physicists, mathematicians). Researchers are encouraged to pursue research questions that they feel are important and they are evaluated based on their publication record, contributions to the scholarly community, and innovative research that produces “tech transfer.”

Being a social scientist in one of these labs is peculiar, but not new. I have long admired the anthropological contributions Lucy Suchman made to research while at PARC. Being a social scientist at an industrial research lab can be a tricky balance. There are plenty of anthropologists and other social scientists who do applied work at Microsoft, focused on specific product needs. This is extremely important work, but it’s different than scholarly research. It’s also tricky to say what constitutes “tech transfer” as a social scientist. I don’t really produce IP in the traditional sense, but my work contributes to the company in other ways.

Yet, tech transfer is only a fraction of what I do. The vast majority of my time is spent doing the same type of research that I’ve been doing for years. I follow topics that interest me and dive head first in, regardless of whether or not it involves Microsoft’s current or future products. I publish articles without seeking approval from anyone. I blog about my research without vetting it through Microsoft. I attend academic conferences, review papers, and contribute to scholarly discourse. It looks a whole lot like academia to me. Yet, I hear all sorts of remarks that indicate that folks don’t believe that what I do is akin to academia. I feel the need to account for these and offer a different perspective.

But you’re working for a corporation! Since when are universities not corporations? Best that I can tell, most universities are fundamentally real estate barons who gain public credibility by offering higher education. The difference is that Microsoft’s products are very visible and related to the types of research that they seek to support. Both Microsoft and the university invest in research in the hopes that it will benefit the corporation as a whole, directly through the production (and protection) of IP or indirectly by creating an atmosphere where productive work can take place. The outcomes may look different, but both Microsoft and the university are large corporations with a fiscal mindset.

But a company makes you focus on the company’s bottom line! There is no doubt that Microsoft would love to have research that benefits it financially, but the dynamic is far more symbiotic than parasitic. We’re welcome to do the research we’re most passionate about, but we get financial bonuses for creating patents or for producing quality research that benefits the company. It’s an incentives system. On the contrary, I would argue that the university model is predominantly parasitic. Researchers at universities must run around begging external agencies for money so that they can do the research they love to do. When they finally succeed in getting a grant, how does the university respond? It takes 30-60% for “overhead.” And when they don’t get funding, they’re punished with lack of research resources and students. Furthermore, most university researchers don’t get to do as they please – they do what they (think they) can get funding for. I suspect I have far more freedom in terms of my research agenda than most university scholars.

Still, you have to spend time helping the company directly! Yes, I spend time working with product groups. But I like to think of it as my teaching duty. Rather than teaching Soc 101 to hung-over 18-year-olds who didn’t bother doing the reading, I teach an interactive form of Soc 101 to engineers who are filled with questions that start with “but why?” and “but how?” I have a hard time imagining that my engagement with product groups takes up more of my time than teaching, office hours, and prep. And it’s often quite fun and thought-provoking.

Well, there’s no tenure! What exactly is tenure? The promise that the university will promise you a salary in return for perpetual grant begging? Tenure guarantees a job, but it doesn’t guarantee an enjoyable one. There’s no promise of a pay raise or good classes to teach. Microsoft Research does have the right to fire me but, from what I can see, it’s more common for people to leave when they don’t gel well (just like in universities). The bigger threat is whether or not Microsoft will be around in N years (arguably, also true with many universities). I suspect that my job is just as solid as it would be in most university environments. The difference really comes down to bonuses. At the university, there are no performance-based bonuses. At Microsoft Research, a large chunk of my salary is linked to performance. Thus, I have an incentive to do well. There are also promotions that parallel university levels; Researcher = Assistant Professor, Senior Researcher = Associate Professor, Principle Researcher = Full Professor. This may not offer the on-paper guarantee of tenure, but it is pretty darn equivalent.

It’s not like you have students! Most professors love having students because of the collaboration potential. (Some enjoy the empire building but that’s not my bent.) Of course, this varies by field. Some scholars feel as though they need students to complete their work; in other fields, students are more an opportunity to mentor. My approach to students is more of collaboration and mentorship rather than slave labor. It’s true that I don’t have students, but I have the fortune of being able to take a handful of interns each year for 12 weeks each. These interns are primarily post-quals PhD students who have the skills and passion for collaboratively working on a constrained research project. No, it is not the same as 7-year students that you get to watch grow, but it’s not like I’m not engaged with younger scholars. My time with them is just more constrained and focused. There are also postdocs who come for 1-2 years. And when I’m craving collaboration, I can bring in visiting researchers to work with me. So it’s a bit more hodge-podge, but there’s still tremendous opportunities for engagement with scholars at all levels.

Whatever… it’s not real research. This is what it always comes down to… “Real” research comes from the university, suggesting that what comes out of industrial research labs is “fake.” I’m never quite sure how to best respond to this except to commit to proving folks wrong.

I feel very fortunate to have a position at Microsoft Research, even if lots of folks don’t seem to get why it’s a good deal. In many ways, this environment is far more academic than what I witnessed at MIT’s Media Lab or Berkeley’s iSchool. The biggest downside is that it’s not helping with my disciplinary identity crisis. If I had joined a specific disciplinary department, I might have had a clearer sense of the “top” journals, relevant conferences, and whether or not publishing a book is a must to succeed. Perhaps not, but I like to think so. Instead, I’m as confused as ever about where to publish and how to best disseminate my research in a manner that is generally useful. Thus, instead of becoming a proper -ist, I’m continuing to pave a strange path that may or may not bite me in the ass in the future. Of course, this identity crisis is pure academia. And one of the clearest reminders that I’m still an academic through-and-through.

I may not be a professor, but I’m still a scholar and, arguably, an academic. The title of “Researcher” may not seem very impressive or academic in social science realms, but practically speaking, it’s akin to “Assistant Professor” (and that’s even how people discuss it internally). What I do looks a lot like what any university researcher does, but with fewer restrictions. I don’t have to beg for grants. I don’t have to battle onerous IRBs (note: dealing directly with lawyers is MUCH easier than dealing with academics who are worrying about the legal repercussions of research). I can travel when I need to for research. I can do research that I think is important. I can collaborate with whomever I please. In return, I make certain that my research (and that of others) is translated into language that product people can understand. Personally, I think it’s a pretty amazing trade-off.

some thoughts on technophilia

The New Media Consortium is hosting a Symposium for the Future October 27-29. I was asked to write a few thoughts that might provoke conversation in preparation for the event. This is a re-posting of my Ideas for Thought. If you are an educator or involved in the world of learning, consider attending the symposium. Regardless, if these topics interest you, consider reading the other idea pieces by Gardner Campbell and Holly Willis.

It is easy to fall in love with technology. It is equally easy to fear it. In a setting like this Symposium, many of us fall in the passionate lovers camp, dreamily accounting for all of the wonderful things we’ve experienced through and because of technology. All too often, our conversations center on the need to get technology into the hands of learners, as though the gaps that we’re seeing can be explained away by issues of access. Push comes to shove, most of us know that there are problems with this model, but in a world filled with dichotomous rhetoric, it’s easy to get into the habit of being the proselytizer in the face of fear-mongering.

I want to push back against our utopian habits because I think that they’re doing us a disservice. Technology does not determine practice. How people embrace technology has less to do with the technology itself than with the social setting in which they are embedded. Those who are immersed in a techno-savvy, technophilic community are far more likely to embrace technology than those whose social world is shaped by other patterns of consumption and communication. People’s practices are also shaped by those around them. There are cluster effects to socio-technical engagement. In other words, people do what their friends do.

Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations. It’s really easy to get in the habit of seeing a new shiny piece of technology and just assume that we can dump it into an educational setting and !voila! miracles will happen. Yet, we also know that the field of dreams is merely that, a dream. Dumping laptops into a classroom does no good if a teacher doesn’t know how to leverage the technology for educational purposes. Building virtual worlds serves no educational purpose without curricula that connects a lesson plan with the affordances of the technology. Without educators, technology in the classroom is useless.

There are also no such things as “digital natives.” Just because many of today’s youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don’t. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There’s an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it’s also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like “digital natives” obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.

Along the same lines, keep in mind that the technology that you adore may hold no interest for your students. They don’t use del.icio.us or Second Life or Ning or Twitter as a part of their everyday practices. And the ways that they use Facebook and MySpace and YouTube are quite different than the ways in which you do. We each approach technology based on our own needs and desires and we leverage it to do our bidding. In this way, we actively repurpose technology as a part of engagement such that rarely does one technology fit all. Yet, when we introduce technology in an educational setting, we often mistakenly assume that students will embrace the technology in the same way that we do. This never works out and can cause unexpected strife. Take social network sites as an example. You use this for professional networking; teens use it to socialize with their peers. Putting Facebook or MySpace into the classroom can create a severe cognitive collision as teens try to work out the shift in contexts. Most problematically, when teens are forced to navigate Friending in an educational setting, painful dramas occur because who you’re polite to in school may be very different than who you socialize with at home. Using technology that ruptures social norms in the classroom can be socially and educationally harmful.

As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense.

Twitter: “pointless babble” or peripheral awareness + social grooming?

Studies like this one by Pear Analytics drive me batty. They concluded that 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have “pass along value”; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news.

I challenge each and every one of you to record every utterance that comes out of your mouth (and that of everyone you interact with) for an entire day. And then record every facial expression and gesture. You will most likely find what communications scholars found long ago – people are social creatures and a whole lot of what they express is phatic communication. (Phatic expressions do social work rather than conveying information… think “Hi” or “Thank you”.)

Now, turn all of your utterances over to an analytics firm so that they can code everything that you’ve said. I think that you’ll be lucky if only 40% of what you say constitutes “pointless babble” to a third party ear.

Twitter – like many emergent genres of social media – is structured around networks of people interacting with people they know or find interesting. Those who are truly performing to broad audiences (e.g., “celebs”, corporations, news entities, and high-profile blogger types) are consciously crafting consumable content that doesn’t require actually having an intimate engagement with the person to appreciate. Yet, the vast majority of Twitter users are there to maintain social relations, keep up with friends and acquaintances, follow high-profile users, and otherwise connect. It’s all about shared intimacy that is of no value to a third-party ear who doesn’t know the person babbling. Of course, as Alice Marwick has argued, some celebs are also very invested in giving off a performance of intimacy and access; this is part of the appeal. This is why you can read what they ate for breakfast.

Far too many tech junkies and marketers are obsessed with Twitter becoming the next news outlet source. As a result, the press are doing what they did with blogging: hyping Twitter us as this amazing source of current events and dismissing it as pointless babble. Haven’t we been there, done that? Scott Rosenberg even wrote the book on it!

I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It’s good for society. And what they’re doing online is fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable. They want to share their state of mind and status so that others who care about them feel connected. It’s a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn’t look down at it from outter space. Of course it looks alien. Walk into any typical social encounter between people you don’t know and it’s bound to look a wee bit alien, especially if those people are demographically different than you.

Conversation is also more than the explicit back and forth between individuals asking questions and directly referencing one another. It’s about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It’s about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what’s happening in space. We take the implicit nature of this for granted in physical environments yet, online, we have to perform each and every aspect of our interactions. What comes out may look valueless, but, often, it’s embedded in this broader ecology of social connectivity. What’s so wrong about that?

Now, I began this rant by noting that these kinds of studies drive me batty. Truthfully, I also have a sick and twisted appreciation for them. They let frustration build up inside me so that I can spout off on my blog and on Twitter, providing commentary that some might find useful and others might code as pointless babble.

(Tx Lior for giving me something to get worked up about this morning.)

Teens Don’t Tweet… Or Do They?

Yesterday, Mashable reported Nielsen’s latest Twitter numbers with the headline Stats Confirm It: Teens Don’t Tweet. This gained traction on Twitter turning into the trending topic “teens don’t tweet” which was primarily kept in play all day yesterday with teens responding to the TT by saying “I’m a teen” or the equivalent of “you’re all idiots… what am I, mashed potatoes?”

I want to unpack some of what played out because I’m astonished by the misinterpretations in every which direction.

We have a methodology and interpretation problem. As Fred Stutzman has pointed out, there are reasons to question Nielsen’s methodology and, thus, their findings. Furthermore, the way that they present the data is misleading. If we were to assume an even distribution of Twitter use over the entire U.S. population, it would be completely normal to expect that 16% of Twitter users are young adults. So, really, what Nielsen is saying is, “Everyone expects social media to be used primarily by the young but OMG OMG OMG old farts are just as likely to be using Twitter as young folks! Like OMG.”

We have a presentation problem. Mashable presented this report completely inaccurately. First off, Nielsen is measuring 2-24. My guess is that there are a lot more 24-year-olds on Twitter than 2-year-olds. Unless Sockington counts. (And she’s probably older than 2 anyhow.) Regardless, the Nielsen data tells us nothing about teens. We don’t know if young adults (20-24) are all of those numbers or not. If all 16% of those under 24 on Twitter were teens, teens would be WAY over-represented in proportion to their demographic size.

We have a representation problem. The majority of people are not on Twitter, regardless of how old they are. Those who use Twitter are not a representative percentage of the population. Geeks are WAY over-represented on Twitter. Celebs and celeb-lovers are WAY over-represented on Twitter. Newshounds are WAY over-represented on Twitter. And while Joe the Plumber has an account on Twitter, I doubt it’s him. Age is not the right marker here.

We have an interpretation problem. Saying that 16% of Twitter users are 24 and under is NOT the same as saying that 16% of teens are on Twitter. We don’t know what percentage of youth (or adults) are on Twitter. If you want to compare across the ages, you need to know what percentage of a particular demographic is using the technology.

We have an impression management problem. There are teens on Twitter. Thousands of them. Saying “Teens Don’t Tweet” gives the wrong impression because there are plenty of teens who do tweet (as they so kindly vocalized on Mashable and on Twitter). Still, just because they suddenly became vocal doesn’t mean that those who are there are representative of teens as a whole. Furthermore, the presence of teens on Twitter doesn’t mean that Twitter is a mainstream tool amongst teens. It’s not.

Given all of these problems, I immediately dismissed the Nielsen report and the Mashable post as irrelevant and meaningless. Then it became a Trending Topic. So while I had a million things to do yesterday, I spent 6+ hours reading the messages of the people who added content to the trending topic, reading their posts about other things, going to their profiles on other sites, and simply trying to get a visceral understanding of what youth were engaged enough on Twitter to respond to the trending topic. What I found fascinated me. I’m still coding the data so you won’t get any quantitative data just yet, but I want to give you a sense of my impression.

Teens On Twitter

The majority of teens who responded to the Trending Topic simply responded to the statement “Teens Don’t Tweet” by noting that they were a teen and they tweeted. Others just noted that the trending topic was dumb. Many didn’t know why the term had become a trending topic, were unaware of the Mashable article or Nielsen study, and thought that Twitter chose the trending topics. (I was in awe of how many teens commented that Twitter was stupid for making such a lie a trending topic. Some thought it was Twitter’s attempts to tell them they didn’t belong. One did ask if it was a trap to get teens to come out of the closet about their real age.)

Many of the teens who responded to the TT were not American or Canadian. I saw bunches of Brazilian teens, some Indonesian teens, and a smattering of teens from Europe, China, and Mexico. Many of their Twitter streams mixed English and the local language of their country. English dominated the responses but I did see non-English responses to the English trending topic.

About half of the teens included a link to a non-Twitter page in their bio. The pages were really mixed. Among the SNSes, MySpace dominated, but there were some Facebook links and links to Piczo and Multiply. There were also links to YouTube, Blogspot, LiveJournal, Deviant Art, and personal homepages.

Very few of the teens put their age in their bio, although quite a few made their age available in the content or through links. Teens posted messages like “I’m 16 and I’m on Twitter.” And birthdays are a big enough deal that I was seeing things like, “I can’t wait until I’m 16 and can get a car. Only 3 months to go!” And of course there’s MySpace.

Most of the teens on Twitter followed on the order of 40-70 other people (with fewer followers). Who they followed included a smattering of other teens and a collection of big names – celebs, bloggers, geeks. There wasn’t much discussion on their feeds about the number of people following them but they frequently highlighted how many tweets they had. I was surprised by how many of them would write a tweet saying nothing more than “this is my 1207th tweet!” Their content is primarily phatic in nature with an eye for updating as often as possible.

The most salient visceral reaction that I got when looking at the teens’ Twitter streams was that teens on Twitter seemed to fit into three categories: 1) geeky teens, tech teens, fandom teens, machinema teens; 2) teens who are in love with the Jonas Brothers/Miley Cyrus, musicians, or another category of celebs; 3) multi-lingual foreign teens with friends/followers around the world who seemed to participate in lots of online communities.

While I can’t make any meaningful conclusions until I spend more time with the data, it seems to me that the teens on Twitter – or at least the teens responding to the trending topic – are not representative of teens as a whole. That’s not a bad thing. They’re geeks and passionate creators and trendsetters and pop culture addicts. I don’t get the sense that they’re dragging their friends into Twitter, but rather, focusing on using Twitter to engage with other people who share their interests or people that they admire.

Anyhow, I’m continuing to track this but I thought I should just report out what I’m seeing in case it’s of use to anyone but me.

Be warned: This blog post was written in brain-dump style to get some general impressions out there while I analyze the data. My goal is to give you a sense of what I’m seeing, assuming that you aren’t staring at thousands and thousands of tweets by teens. Please don’t interpret it as a “report” or a “study” or anything other than what it is: a blog post.

help me find innovative practitioners who address online safety issues

I need your help. One of our central conclusions in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force Report was that many of the online safety issues require the collective engagement of a whole variety of different groups, including educators, social workers, psychologists, mental health experts, law enforcement, etc. Through my work on online safety, I’ve met a lot of consultants, activists, and online safety experts. Through my work as a researcher, I’ve met a lot of practitioners who are trying to engage youth about these issues through outright fear that isn’t grounded in anything other than myth.

Unfortunately, I haven’t met a lot of people who are on the ground with youth dealing with the messiness of addressing online safety issues from a realistic point of view. I don’t know a lot of practitioners who are developing innovative ways of educating and supporting at-risk youth because they have to in their practices. I need your help to identify these people.

  • I want to know teachers. Who are the teachers who are trying to integrate online safety issues into their classroom by using a realistic model of youth risk?
  • I want to know school administrators. Who are the school administrators who are trying to build school policy that addresses online safety issues from a non-fear-driven approach?
  • I want to know law enforcement officers. Who are the law enforcement officers who are directly dealing with the crimes that occur?
  • I want to know people from social services. Who are the people in social services (like social workers) who are directly working with at-risk youth who engage in risky behavior online?
  • I want to know mental health practitioners. Who are the psychologists and mental health practitioners who are trying to help youth who engage in risky practices online? Or who help youth involved in self-harm deal with their engagement with self-harm websites?
  • I want to know youth ministers. Who are the youth pastors and ministers who are trying to help at-risk youth navigate risky situations?
  • I want to know other youth-focused practitioners. Who else is out there working with youth who is incorporating online safety issues into their practice?

I know that there are a lot of people out there who are speaking about what these partitioners should do, who are advising these practitioners, or who are trying to build curricula/tools to support these practitioners, but I want to learn more about the innovative practitioners themselves.

Please… who’s incorporating sensible online safety approaches into their daily practice with youth in the classrooms, in therapy, in social work, in religious advising, etc.? Who’s out there trying to wade through the myths, get a realistic portrait, and approach youth from a grounded point of view in order to directly help them, not as a safety expert but as someone who works with youth because of their professional role? Who do I need to know?

(Feel free to leave a comment or email me at zephoria [at] zephoria [dot] org.)

Would the real social network please stand up?

This ideas in this post are based on conversations with Bernie Hogan and should be interpreted as the production of our co-thinking.

All too frequently, someone makes a comment about how a large number of Facebook Friends must mean a high degree of social capital. Or how we can determine who is closest to who by measuring their email messages. Or that the Dunbar number can explain the average number of Facebook friends. These are just three examples of how people mistakenly assume that 1) any social network that can be boiled down to a graph can be compared and 2) any theory of social networks is transitive to any graph representing connections between people. Such mistaken views result in broad misinterpretations of social networks and social network sites. Yet, time and time again, I hear problematic assumptions so let me start with some claims:

  1. Not all social networks are the same.
  2. You cannot assume network transitivity.
  3. You cannot assume that properties that hold for one network apply to other networks.

To address this, I want to begin by mapping out three distinct ways of modeling a social network. These are not the only ways of modeling a social network, but they are three common ways that are often collapsed in public discourse.

Sociological “personal” networks. Sociologists have been working hard to measure people’s personal networks and much of the theory of social networks stems from analysis done on these networks. Different scholars have taken different approaches to measuring personal networks, but, most stereotypically, this takes the form of a clipboard and pencil as a young grad student queries an individual to recall who they talked to yesterday and indicate who they would lend money to or call when they are having an emotional breakdown. On classic measurement survey is an appendix in the back of Claude Fischer’s “To Dwell Among Friends.”

Most sociological theory stems from analyses of these personal networks. Social capital, weak ties, homophily, … all of those theories you’ve heard about are based on personal networks. Given that these are typically measured by eliciting people’s understandings of certain categories (e.g., “friend”), there’s a strong overlap between everyday language around social networks and the categories being measured.

If you’re a sociologist talking to anyone other than sociologists, you would probably speak of personal networks as the golden standard, the baseline truth. Of course, if you were being honest with yourself or your colleagues, you will note that these measurements have their methodological flaws and biases which is why the scales for measuring personal networks haven’t stabilized and why scholars still struggle with the best ways to elicit meaningful information from people being surveyed.

Behavioral social networks. Behavioral social networks are the networks derived from encounters between individuals. In their efforts to measure personal networks, sociologists have often tried to get people to manually document encounters with others through diary studies. With new technologies in place, folks have gone on to generate behavioral social networks through the traces people leave behind. For example, a record of someone’s email exchanges provides a handy accounting of that individual’s behavioral network. New technologies introduces new opportunities for measuring behavioral networks. Many genres of social media let us see who communicates with who. GPS technologies let us see who shares physical space.

Behavioral social networks provide valuable insight into people’s practices and interactions, but they do not confer meaning. This is not to say that they don’t have value. I would love to find the strangers that I regularly share space with as I traverse Boston. But we cannot assume that these are my friends or acquaintances. Yet, there seems to be a tendency (especially among geeks of all stripes) to overlay meaning-laden terms on top of these networks, to assume that high connectivity means friendship. This is where trouble often arises. Just because I spend a lot of time with my physical therapist does not mean that she is more important than other people in my network who I see less frequently.

The other difficulty in measuring behavioral social networks is that, at least to date, we measure distinct channels of connection. This complicates our ability to do meaningful comparison across people. If I use AIM as my primary way of keeping in touch with Person A and email as my primary way of keeping in touch with Person B and you only look at one medium, you get a distorted picture of who I communicate with. As communication channels proliferate, this only gets messier. So even when we talk about behavioral social networks, we have to talk about them in across a particular channel.

Publicly articulated social networks. Articulated social networks are the social networks that you intentionally list. In some senses, this is what sociologists are eliciting, but people also articulate their social networks for other purposes. Address books and buddy lists are articulated social networks. So too are invitation lists. Most recently, this practice took a twist with the rise of social network sites that invite you to PUBLICLY articulate your social network.

At this point, I would hope that most of us would realize that Friends != friends. In other words, who you connect to on Facebook or MySpace or Twitter is not the same list of people that you would say constitute your closest and dearest. The practice of publicly articulating one’s social network can be quite fraught because there are social costs to the process of public articulation. Issues of reciprocity emerge and people find themselves doing a lot of face-work to navigate the sticky nature of having to account for their social relations in a publicly accountable way. Thus, the list of who you might list as a Friend is often a mix of friends, acquaintances, family members, people from your past, fans, professional colleagues, familiar strangers, and people you don’t particularly like but don’t want to offend. Oh and the occasional celebrity you think is interesting.

Relating Different Social Networks

These networks are NOT the same. Your mother may play a significant role in your personal network but, behaviorally, your strongest tie might be the person who works in the cube next to you. And neither of these folks might be links on your Facebook for any number of reasons.

Our instinct then is to ask: which is the “real” social network? Frankly, it depends on who you ask. Your mother may be cranky that you don’t talk to her as often as your colleague and she may resent your refusal to Friend her on Facebook, but this doesn’t mean you love her any less. Of course, this doesn’t stop her from thinking you don’t love her. If we’re trying to understand emotional affinity, the behavioral and publicly articulated social networks aren’t particularly helpful. But if you’re mother thinks that time is not only a proxy for emotional depth but a proof of it, your behavioral social network might really upset her. (Note: behavioral social networks have gotten people into trouble in the past. See Cobot.)

The truth of the matter is that there is no “real” social network. It all depends on what you’re trying to measure, what you’re trying to do with those measurements.

We do ourselves an intellectual disservice when we assume that these different types of networks are interchangeable or that studying one automatically tells us about another. Most scholars get this, even when they’re quoted out of context by journalists to suggest otherwise (see Cameron Marlow). But I get the sense that a lot of journalists, marketers, advertisers, politicians, and everyday folks don’t. This is a problem.

Those who treat different social networks interchangeably project properties onto the network they’re analyzing that don’t hold. People aren’t inherently cool or connectors because they have a lot of Friends on a social network site. Bus drivers and waitresses are much more likely to encounter more new people on a daily basis than executives, but this doesn’t mean that they have more social capital. People who email regularly do not necessarily have strong tie strength.

This is not to say that structural information in behavioral social networks or publicly articulated social networks may not work as a proxy for personal networks. Perhaps the networks derived from a particular social media tool or through a particular channel of communication do actually provide insight into a person’s personal network. There are great ways to empirically test this hypothesis involving the combination of structural analysis and interviewing. But you cannot simply assume that they are meaningful proxies just because they are both social networks.

There are also many opportunities for new research when we tease out different types of social networks. What if we overlay the different types of social networks? Can we get a better sense of how someone manages their social network? Can we see new structural properties that give us new insights into how people connect, share information, gather support, etc.? So many possibilities!

I’m super excited that so many people from so many fields are getting interested in social networks, but I’m also scared that there are a lot of assumptions flying around that make it difficult to make sense of people’s contributions to this emergent field. Increasingly, I see sociologists and computer scientists and mathematician and economists outright dismiss work outside of their field as “wrong.” I think that part of the problem is that we’re each failing to account for what we can and cannot say based on the types of analysis we’re doing. And I think that we often talk past one another because we’re all talking about social networks but we’re talking about different social networks. In accounting for three types of social networks here, I’m not trying to be all-inclusive, but I am trying to point out that there are differences and that we cannot assume transitivity either in terms of structure or theory. If we can find a way to better identify what kinds of social networks we’re talking about and when and where what theories apply, I think that we’ll go a long way in bridging different intellectual discourses.