“find the official rules governing the site you're studying for your final project”
I located a variety of “official” that are implemented to govern the sites I am studying (http://sejarahkita.blogspot.com/; http://www.polarhome.com/pipermail/nasional-a/2002-October/000051.html). The sheer amount of the documents was overwhelming and many of them were difficult to digest, which echoes what Grimes et al call the “obfuscated code.” By looking at the documents “in totality,” as Grimes et al do in their study of social games and role-playing games, it is possible to identify two broad patterns of administrative mechanism, as Grimes et al illustrate in their study. According to Grimes et al, “[t]he first mechanism for governance is through the use of source code, or the actual software itself. In the physical world, we are bound by certain laws of physics and nature. These types of laws cannot be changed or challenged; they simply exist.” One example of “source code” from polarhome.com may be a document entitled “GNU General Public License” (http://www.polarhome.com/service/COPYING.html). It outlines terms and conditions for software use, specifically concerning copying, distribution and modification. An example of source code from blooger.com could be “Blogger Feature” (http://www.blogger.com/features), which lists and describes technological features at users’ disposal.
The second mechanism of official rules, as Grimes et al suggest, falls into a broad notion of “civil code.” The authors note that “[i]n virtual worlds, civil code is determined by an elaborate mosaic of legal documents and policies. . . . These individual governing documents contain all of the written codified laws for a virtual world. The corpus of all of the governing documents for each particular virtual world creates the contractual framework for governance of that virtual world.” There are several examples of civil code that I have found. For instance, “Netiquette” on polarhome.com is basically a (situational) code of conduct for users to abide by when they have one-to-one communication and/or one-to-many communication (http://www.polarhome.com/service/netiquette.html). Another example of civil code might be versions of privacy statement that I found on both sites (http://www.polarhome.com/service/privacy.html; http://www.blogger.com/privacy). These documents provide a rough framework as to how the sites monitor personal information and clarify why the sites ask users to provide certain personal information (for authorization purposes).
Here are some other official rules I have looked at:
Legal notices http://www.polarhome.com/service/legal.html
Polarhome.com policy http://www.polarhome.com/service/policy.html
Sponsors http://www.polarhome.com/sponsor.php
FAQs http://www.polarhome.com/faq/cache/1.html
Blogger Feature http://www.blogger.com/features
Blogger: About Us http://www.blogger.com/about
Blogger Terms of Service http://www.blogger.com/terms.g
Blogger Content Policy http://www.blogger.com/content.g
What is the “Flag” button? http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42517
Digital Millennium Copyright Act: http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html
“Find three examples on the site where one or more rules have been broken, specifically in the form of interpersonal conflict (i.e. not just spam posts).”
I found this part of the exercise quite challenging. One reason for the difficulty I encountered might be that the sites (and content) I am studying for final project do not necessarily revolve around (or provoke) interpersonal conflict. My final project examines aspects of knowledge production in three social network site and how that compares to traditional (and peer-reviewed) equivalent in print. So far I have not observed any offensive behaviors to an extent that they might be equated with emotionally distressed “rogue users” in Gazan’s study or a violent “sociopath” in Dibbell’s study.
Madison identifies seven broad features of social software. I believe the sites I selected encompass at least three of such characteristics: open-source software (polarhome.com); weblog (blogger.com); and collaborative authoring technologies (Wikipedia). [Madison 161] For this part of the exercise, I decided to focus mainly on the weblog site. I did not choose polar.com because it primarily functions as a listserv thus does not always generate unless users decide to respond to one another through their postings (I have not come across any of such examples so far). I focused on blogger.com because out of the three, the site is most interactive in a sense that there are a number of comments threads generated by users of the blog.
The Kollock and Smith article points out “conflict” sometimes arises rather subtly (i.e. “freerider problems”) thus does not become as apparent as such an instance as the shooting debacle Dibbell discusses. I have come across a few instances that may reflect the subtle “violation” of the official rules on blogger.com, especially concerning content policy. Blogger.com’s Content policy reads:
IMPERSONATION: We do not allow impersonation of others through our services in a manner that is intended to or does mislead or confuse others [http://www.blogger.com/content.g; italics are mine]. What follows are examples of comments that I personally found confusing and misleading. The first example is a comment posted by a mysterious user, Donny Wijaya (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23220868&postID=5243843385212201672). His “comment” consists of a list of web links whose content does not seem to reflect that of the post he is responding to. The post excerpts passages from a 2005 commentary that talks about the significance of a political pamphlet from the 1940s in Indonesian nationalism written by a prominent intellectual at the time. Moreover, he does not offer any explanation as to why he posted the links to these sites. Another example of a puzzling comment comes from a user by the name of “the” (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23220868&postID=2954424863626470003). Similarly, “the” encourages the author of the blog to visit his/her blogs which have no bearing of the post she/he is commenting on. Lastly, there is a comment by “barb michelen” (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23220868&postID=7484466398330664858), who in response to an essay about a brief history of the Siliwangi unit of the Indonesian Army, brings up a topic of dieting and again provides a link to a site that helps users find work at home jobs (yourtypingbiz.info). Given my limited experience with social computing, I am not certain what the site administrators or software developers could do to monitor the posting of confusing and misleading information, although further refinement of the software might help scan or identify such information. At this level of interaction, it is probably up to the self-awareness of individual users as to what is considered respectable behavior. And perhaps confusing and misleading behavior is inevitable in interpersonal communication because, as Kollock and Smith suggest, there is an inherent tension, online or offline, between “individual and collective rationality” thus what an individual considers suitable may turn out odd and out of context in a group setting.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
I wasn’t quite sure how to approach this assignment but here I go. I made my best attempt to observe online identity of a site that I also plan to discuss in more detail in my final project. The site I selected is a blog entitled “Our History” (or Sejarah Kita in Indonesian original: http://sejarahkita.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_archive.html. This is a blog by an Indonesian historian, Rushdy Hoesein and further detail on his profile is available at: http://www.blogger.com/profile/11665498893483341677. [screenshot]
The site has been up since March 2006 and been updated fairly consistently, 1-3 times a month. The meat of the site is essays on selected topics on Indonesian history. Most essays are written by Rushdy himself (or if not written originally by him, at least compiled by him). I found this site when I worked on the previous assignment because one of the essays posted on the site concerns an event in Indonesian history whose knowledge production online and offline I intend to examine in my final project.
In observing online identity of the Blogger post, “Our History,” I tried my best to address the focus questions for this assignment: How do we know online identity when we see it?; How are online identities shaped and expressed through online interactions in this community? In doing so, I figured reading comments would be a starting point. I was pleasantly surprised to see the frequency of comments posted by readers (users), and in a few occasions, the author himself wrote responses. It seemed that close to 70% of the posted essays triggered comments of one form or another. To the best of my knowledge, I did not see any repeaters who left comments more than once.
One salient feature of the comments posted on the site is casual and informal conversations responses to the blog posts. The interactions falling into this category commonly start off by thanking the author for making information available and uncovering previously unknown episodes in their national history. Some users were drawn to the images and were quite amused by unseen images of historical figures and landscape (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23220868&postID=6657710124209854077). After reading through comments and looking at user profiles, I came to notice two broad patterns in the demographics of the uses. The first group posted by general (casual) readers, and as far as I could see in their profile, they do not identify themselves as historians, researchers, or academics. [screenshot]
In observing online identity of the Blogger post, “Our History,” I tried my best to address the focus questions for this assignment: How do we know online identity when we see it?; How are online identities shaped and expressed through online interactions in this community? In doing so, I figured reading comments would be a starting point. I was pleasantly surprised to see the frequency of comments posted by readers (users), and in a few occasions, the author himself wrote responses. It seemed that close to 70% of the posted essays triggered comments of one form or another. To the best of my knowledge, I did not see any repeaters who left comments more than once.
One salient feature of the comments posted on the site is casual and informal conversations responses to the blog posts. The interactions falling into this category commonly start off by thanking the author for making information available and uncovering previously unknown episodes in their national history. Some users were drawn to the images and were quite amused by unseen images of historical figures and landscape (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23220868&postID=6657710124209854077). After reading through comments and looking at user profiles, I came to notice two broad patterns in the demographics of the uses. The first group posted by general (casual) readers, and as far as I could see in their profile, they do not identify themselves as historians, researchers, or academics. [screenshot]
Another common thread of the interactions on the site were initiated by what might be called “professional” users, who identity themselves as researchers, scholars, and graduate students. [screenshots of a user profile and her blog tell us about her academic background]
As for user scenarios, I am still not sure how to go about after observing the interactions on the selected site and reading the sample scenarios (http://www.infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources/scenarios). But from what I observed, I could point to a possibly relevant situation in which a user might be drawn to the site (which may have missed the mark) but in any case, these situations would be: a) a lurker and/or blogger who is interested in reading about Indonesian history; b) a grade school student who is interested in history but does not always find lectures at school useful; b) a researchers/scholars/grad student who actively utilizes online resources for their projects.
One course reading that I could relate my observations to is perhaps the Whittaker article, “The dynamics of mass interaction.” Although the article focuses on a different type of online community with much heavier interaction (the largest newsgroup site, Usenet), I found their approach to the study of online interactivity particularly interesting. Two factors they studied in some depth are “conversational strategies” (e.g. how long is a typical message) and interactivity (e.g. how deep is a typical conversational thread, and how often are attempts to initiative conversation successful)? I believe my observations of communication patterns in the blog, “Our History,” may have touched on a fringe of these two factors.
On the question of “online identity,” one conclusion I could draw from this brief exercise is that “identity” can take many different forms. One characteristic of the blog, “Our History,” is its accessibility in a sense that it presents a poplar history of Indonesia and where traditional academic boundaries were taken off and users from various backgrounds visit and learn something about Indonesian history.
One course reading that I could relate my observations to is perhaps the Whittaker article, “The dynamics of mass interaction.” Although the article focuses on a different type of online community with much heavier interaction (the largest newsgroup site, Usenet), I found their approach to the study of online interactivity particularly interesting. Two factors they studied in some depth are “conversational strategies” (e.g. how long is a typical message) and interactivity (e.g. how deep is a typical conversational thread, and how often are attempts to initiative conversation successful)? I believe my observations of communication patterns in the blog, “Our History,” may have touched on a fringe of these two factors.
On the question of “online identity,” one conclusion I could draw from this brief exercise is that “identity” can take many different forms. One characteristic of the blog, “Our History,” is its accessibility in a sense that it presents a poplar history of Indonesia and where traditional academic boundaries were taken off and users from various backgrounds visit and learn something about Indonesian history.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Social knowledge production and services
In taking up this week’s assignment, I found the Duguid piece particularly inspiring. His research method seemed to resonate with our task at hand. His comparison and contrast (via cross-referencing) between “traditional” knowledge production (what he calls “most reliable sources” [15] or “traditional and professional equivalents,” to borrow Dr. Gazan’s words) and social knowledge production generated by various applications of Web 2.0 sheds valuable light on how the two forms of knowledge could inform one another in complementary ways. Hoping to make a similar case as Duguid’s, especially in his section on Wikipedia, I immediately picked the first of the four general areas of comparison: Peer production in online environments vs. in-person collaboration. And I attempted to make some observations about how “traditional” and “social” forms of knowledge could complement one another. My example comes from one event in Indonesian history known as the “Madiun Affaire,” which took place on 18 September 1948 in Madiun, a provincial town on the island of Java. This is also a topic I have written a paper about several years ago by relying solely on books and articles in print.
So, what do we learn about the Madiun Affair by using Web 2.0? Not surprisingly, I first turned to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madiun_Affair):
Having reviewed both entries, we learn that the Madiun Affair was a Communist uprising/rebellion against the Indonesian government in September 1948. This perspective is not so far-fetched from what you find in “traditional” resources in print. For instance, George Kahin, a leading political scientist and historian of Indonesia in 1950s-1990s, wrote a chapter on the Madiun Affair (256-303) in his Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952). Today many scholars in the field consider the book as a classic on Indonesian nationalism. And Kahin titled the aforementioned chapter, “The Internal Struggle for Power from Renville through the Communist Rebellion.”
At the same time, given its sheer volume, the chapter naturally offers more in-depth coverage of the turn of events, and we meet those individuals who were closely linked to the incidence. For instance, on the outbreak of the affair, Kahin writes:
“After consolidating its control over the villages, the Pesindo [Socialist Youth of Indonesia] and other PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] troops seized control of the towns and the city of Madiun. . . . This militant phase began at 3 A.M. on September 18 in Madiun with Sumarsono and Djokosujono leading the operation. . . .” (291).
Then, can we learn more about Sumarsono and Djokosujono through social computing? I turned to Google as most Internet users would do in this type of situation and conducted a plain keyword search, “sumarsono madiun.” Interestingly (and to my excitement), the search led me to a serendipitous encounter with two columns by Ibrahim Isa (
http://www.polarhome.com/pipermail/nasional-a/2002-October/000051.html; http://www.polarhome.com/pipermail/nasional-a/2002-October/000052.html). In the posts, Isa talks about a meeting held in the Netherlands in 2002, where dozens of participants, mainly Indonesians based in Europe, sat down with Sumarsono and shared his eyewitness accounts of the Madiun Affair. In my earlier reading of published sources, I have tracked a couple of his personal accounts about his involvement in the Madiun Affair (i.e. Hersri Setiawan, 2002). But this was the first time I have heard of the meeting, and his view expressed at the meeting seems to be in line with what he has said about Madiun in the published equivalents.
To turn to a technological side of the story, Isa’s posts are archived in a list serve called National-a Archives maintained by four moderators (http://www.polarhome.com/mailman/listinfo/nasional-a). The National-a Archive is a closed and a hidden list, which means that the list administrators screen our online “applications” and decide our status (approved/rejected). The list of members is available only to the administrators. The National-a Archives list is also included in www.polarhome.com Mailing Lists (http://www.polarhome.com/mailman/listinfo). I was able to review Isa’s posts because they were archived as “prior postings,” which were released at some unknown point for public viewing. I hope that with my somewhat haphazard attempt above, I was able to give some specifics to how traditional and social forms of knowledge could possibly inform one another.
At the same time, we are also reminded about limitations of social knowledge production and services, as Leibenluft writes about Yahoo! Answers:
“While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information.” (1)
On the other hand, Geisler and Burns are more optimistic about the usefulness of the growing web-based social tagging systems, particularly for digital video and moving image. In analyzing the mechanism of web-based social tagging systems, Lerman refers to Digg, one of the most successful social news aggregators, and suggests that the site’s success owes much to its reliable information filtering moderated by networks of “friends.” When it comes to issues of trust, the Haythornthwaite piece gives the topic a new twist by introducing three key dimensions of trust management; recognition, reputation, and reward. Finally, as Geisler, Burns, and Lerman do in their studies on social tagging systems, Gazan and Dempsey explore aspects of current innovations in social knowledge production, social annotations in digital library collections and the integration of mobile communication into library services, respectively.
So, what do we learn about the Madiun Affair by using Web 2.0? Not surprisingly, I first turned to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madiun_Affair):
The entry informs us that it was “a communist uprising in 1948.” Then, I went on to look into “Revision history of Madiun Affair.” There are seven different versions of the Madiun entry, including the current rendition. One thing that caught my eye was that the entry was originally created on 14 July 1948 “at the Indonesian Revolution” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_National_Revolution) and later (on the same day!) included into a broader category, “History of Indonesia” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indonesia).
The next step I took was to compare the Wikipedia entry to its equivalent in Encyclopedia Britannica, a peer-reviewed and reputable encyclopedia (i.e. Carol Tenpir’s “Quality Still Matters” succinctly compares errors in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica). But instead of turning to Encyclopedia Britannica via UHM Library (login required), I continued to use open-access resources online. The entry on “Madiun Affair” is about the same length as the Wikipedia counterpart, and the content, too, is not so different from the Wikipedia entry (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/355889/Madiun-Affair). For instance, the first sentence reads: “communist rebellion against the Hatta-Sukarno government of Indonesia, which originated in Madiun, a town in eastern Java, in September 1948.”
Having reviewed both entries, we learn that the Madiun Affair was a Communist uprising/rebellion against the Indonesian government in September 1948. This perspective is not so far-fetched from what you find in “traditional” resources in print. For instance, George Kahin, a leading political scientist and historian of Indonesia in 1950s-1990s, wrote a chapter on the Madiun Affair (256-303) in his Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952). Today many scholars in the field consider the book as a classic on Indonesian nationalism. And Kahin titled the aforementioned chapter, “The Internal Struggle for Power from Renville through the Communist Rebellion.”
At the same time, given its sheer volume, the chapter naturally offers more in-depth coverage of the turn of events, and we meet those individuals who were closely linked to the incidence. For instance, on the outbreak of the affair, Kahin writes:
“After consolidating its control over the villages, the Pesindo [Socialist Youth of Indonesia] and other PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] troops seized control of the towns and the city of Madiun. . . . This militant phase began at 3 A.M. on September 18 in Madiun with Sumarsono and Djokosujono leading the operation. . . .” (291).
Then, can we learn more about Sumarsono and Djokosujono through social computing? I turned to Google as most Internet users would do in this type of situation and conducted a plain keyword search, “sumarsono madiun.” Interestingly (and to my excitement), the search led me to a serendipitous encounter with two columns by Ibrahim Isa (
http://www.polarhome.com/pipermail/nasional-a/2002-October/000051.html; http://www.polarhome.com/pipermail/nasional-a/2002-October/000052.html). In the posts, Isa talks about a meeting held in the Netherlands in 2002, where dozens of participants, mainly Indonesians based in Europe, sat down with Sumarsono and shared his eyewitness accounts of the Madiun Affair. In my earlier reading of published sources, I have tracked a couple of his personal accounts about his involvement in the Madiun Affair (i.e. Hersri Setiawan, 2002). But this was the first time I have heard of the meeting, and his view expressed at the meeting seems to be in line with what he has said about Madiun in the published equivalents.
To turn to a technological side of the story, Isa’s posts are archived in a list serve called National-a Archives maintained by four moderators (http://www.polarhome.com/mailman/listinfo/nasional-a). The National-a Archive is a closed and a hidden list, which means that the list administrators screen our online “applications” and decide our status (approved/rejected). The list of members is available only to the administrators. The National-a Archives list is also included in www.polarhome.com Mailing Lists (http://www.polarhome.com/mailman/listinfo). I was able to review Isa’s posts because they were archived as “prior postings,” which were released at some unknown point for public viewing. I hope that with my somewhat haphazard attempt above, I was able to give some specifics to how traditional and social forms of knowledge could possibly inform one another.
At the same time, we are also reminded about limitations of social knowledge production and services, as Leibenluft writes about Yahoo! Answers:
“While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information.” (1)
On the other hand, Geisler and Burns are more optimistic about the usefulness of the growing web-based social tagging systems, particularly for digital video and moving image. In analyzing the mechanism of web-based social tagging systems, Lerman refers to Digg, one of the most successful social news aggregators, and suggests that the site’s success owes much to its reliable information filtering moderated by networks of “friends.” When it comes to issues of trust, the Haythornthwaite piece gives the topic a new twist by introducing three key dimensions of trust management; recognition, reputation, and reward. Finally, as Geisler, Burns, and Lerman do in their studies on social tagging systems, Gazan and Dempsey explore aspects of current innovations in social knowledge production, social annotations in digital library collections and the integration of mobile communication into library services, respectively.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Week 4 Session 1
After completing the readings, I explored two online communities that to the best of my knowledge appear to implement different social trust mechanisms. The sites I visited are: Slashdot.com and Citizendium. I chose these communities to explore aspects of information control in Web 2.0, particularly the role of experts, and to tackle a broad question of “what is quality information.” I also plan to discuss these issues in my final project.
Since “trust” is a keyword here, I would like to briefly outline what I picked up about the concept from this week’s readings. I found the Massa piece particularly relevant. Massa employs a broad notion of “trust” and uses the term to indicate “different types of social relationships between two users, such as friendship, appreciation, and interest” (51). Moreover, "[T]hese trust relationships are used by the systems to infer some measure of importance about the different users and influence their visibility on the system.” (51)
Having called the current community of Internet users a “global village,” where users can make contact and communicate with one another from distant (and local) locations, this new situation necessitates “a decentralized collaborative assessment of the quality of the other unknown people, that is to share the burden to evaluate them” (53). The reliability of information is commonly assessed and measured by what Massa calls “trust statements,” in which “a user expresses her opinions about every other user, asking how much she finds her interesting and worth her attention” (53). Not surprisingly, more and more Web sites are giving “prominence to content created by trusted users” (53).
Then, Massa goes on to classify online systems into seven broad categories, each one of which implements different (and to some extent overlapping) trust mechanisms. These categories include E-marketplaces; Opinions and activity sharing sites; Business/job networking sites; Social/entertainment sites; News sites; The Web, the Blogsphere, and the Semantic Web; and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks (55). According to Massa, Slashdot.com is one of the representative “News sites,” where “users can write and submit stories and news they want to share with the community.” In this type of Web sites, “the users can rate other users’ activities (posted news and comments) and these ratings are used to give more visibility to posts and comments the other users appreciate and value” (56). As for Citizendium, although it is not discussed in the Massa article, on a general level, not every user can rate other users’ activities but those who are identified as “experts” can (I will discuss information control in Citizendium in more detail below).
To go back to my final project proposal, I got the initial inspiration in Carol Tenopir’s “Web 2.0: Our Cultural Downfall?” from week 1, where she discusses (by referring to The Cult of the Amateur written by a Web 2.0 skeptic, Andrew Keen) how Web 2.0 could potentially undermine the quality of professional research and scholarship. As Web 2.0 continues to grow and elaborate its applications, Keen fears that more professional researchers would act unprofessionally and start to rely on readily accessible online resources such as Wikipedia. Massa also mentions the same phenomenon (p. 52, referring to Coates, “The Mass Amateurisation of Everything,” 2003).
Although Tenopir’s concise piece does not discuss in great detail what evidence Keen used to support his skepticism about Wikipedia and other Web 2.0-generated resources (we basically need to read the book), some of the readings for this week bring up interesting insights. Eryilmaz et al note that “Wikipedia’s technical implementation does not provide a gate keeping function to ensure quality material is being contributed” (2).
The low barriers to entry on Wikipedia is in large part a product of what Gleave et al call “a collective concern for the quality of the resulting articles” (7). Gealve et al suggest that “social roles” on Wikipedia are defined by “informal, collectively defined roles” that are “organized around practices like fighting vandalism, copy editing, enforcing standard formats, welcoming new users, evaluating article quality, and writing tools to help the community” (7). In other words, on Wikipedia, “any reader may edit or contribute” (7) whether under real name or alias. The question of transparency about sources of information is one yardstick that many authors have used to differentiate Wikipedia from other wiki projects such as Citizendium (I will get back to this point below).
Pessimism notwithstanding, Keen, as Tenopir mentions, also sees a light in the future of information control in Web 2.0. He sees that Citizendium, the wiki encyclopedia launched by a co-founder of Wikipedia, could be a potential source of more reliable and higher-quality information (than Wikipedia) because the site implements a tighter information filtering system that “combines public participation with the guidance of experts” (Tenopir, 2007).
On the differences in information control in Wikipedia and Citizendium, Sundin and Haider write in “Debating Information Control in Web 2.0”:
“While WP [Wikipedia] claims not to attribute special status to any of its contributors, CZ [Citizendium] . . . intends to assign a decision-making role to subject experts. It is not CZ’s intention to change the collaborative approach, yet here contributors have to register and write under their real name. Also, there are meant to be different categories of users which differ in terms of their expert status. In contrast, in WP anyone can add a subject entry or edit an existing one anonymously” (2).
[O. Sundin & J. Haider, “Debating Information Control in Web 2.0: The Case of “Wikipedia vs. Citizendium. Short paper to ASIS&T 07,” Joining Research and Practices: Social Computing and Information Science, October 18-25, Hyatt Regency Milwaukee, Wisconsin]
Citizendium’s quest for reliable and high-quality information is highlighted in the “About” page [http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:About].
Then what about Slashdot.com, the second online community I explored for this assignment? The Sundin and Haider article I mentioned above makes references to two discussion threads on Slashdot.com, “A Look Inside Citizendium” (June 2006) and “Co-Founder Forks Wikipedia” (October 2006), each of which assesses strengths and weaknesses of Citizendium (and Wikipedia) in the area of information control. One post in the latter caught my eye [see screenshot].
Not many of us would disagree with what “nlitement” says here in the last sentence: "In the end, it's really up to the end-user to weed out bad information." Web 2.0 is a user-oriented and user-generated communication tool. It is users who decide on what constitutes “good” or “bad” information. We reach out the community of Internet users to satisfy our information needs regardless of whether the needs are driven by our areas of interests, as we experimented on Week 2, or defined by impending tasks at hand like our experiences on Answerbag.
Insofar as my experience in Citizendium is concerned, I am not too impressed with the quality of information presented on the site. For instance, I looked up “Southeast Asia,” a topic I am familiar with, in both Wikipedia and Citizendium to test the water. In this particular instance, Wikipedia happened to offer more current and accurate information [see screenshots].
Note: East Timor, the newest nation in the region (since May 2002) is not included here.
The Wikipedia entry was last modified on 1 March 2009, whereas the Citizendium entry was last modified on 3 February 2009. I will see if information gets updated (corrected) in the coming weeks.
Are we being to critical of Wikipedia? We’ve been hearing a lot of criticism about the inaccuracy of information on Wikipedia. But what about proponents of utilizing Web 2.0 in professional research and what do they have to say? In evaluating the quality of information on Web sites, how do we take into account of what might be called advisory opinions expressed in an open-access forum like Slashdot.com and a scholarly commentary by an expert like Carol Tenopir (i.e. “Quality Still Matters”)? How do they compare? This is just a random list of (unanswerable) questions I am hoping to address in my final project.
Finally, just a random reflection on Williams, Allen et al and Ellison et al. Allen et al made a creative analysis of how “trust” is negotiated in a particular (and paradoxical) setting, where individuals collaborate to accomplish a task while playing against each other. The Williams article is a nice introductory piece on “social capital,” which the author sees as “a contentious and slippery term” (2). But a main idea behind “social capital” is, just like in financial world, “using it creates more of it” (2). The article nicely outlines two types of social capital. “Bridging” tends to be more inclusive and provide little emotional support, whereas “bonding” can be (mutually) exclusive and provide “emotional or substantive support for one another” (5). Ellison et al also focus on aspects of “social capital.” The authors suggest that participants in their survey (college students) use Facebook to “keep in touch with old friends and to maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of offline connection such as dormitory proximity or a shared class” (21). The use of Facebook in these manners forms a type of “social capital,” which the authors characterize as “weak ties” (21). I wish the authors elaborated a little more about social psychology of non-users: What motivates them to not use Facebook? Is lack of time a factor here?
Since “trust” is a keyword here, I would like to briefly outline what I picked up about the concept from this week’s readings. I found the Massa piece particularly relevant. Massa employs a broad notion of “trust” and uses the term to indicate “different types of social relationships between two users, such as friendship, appreciation, and interest” (51). Moreover, "[T]hese trust relationships are used by the systems to infer some measure of importance about the different users and influence their visibility on the system.” (51)
Having called the current community of Internet users a “global village,” where users can make contact and communicate with one another from distant (and local) locations, this new situation necessitates “a decentralized collaborative assessment of the quality of the other unknown people, that is to share the burden to evaluate them” (53). The reliability of information is commonly assessed and measured by what Massa calls “trust statements,” in which “a user expresses her opinions about every other user, asking how much she finds her interesting and worth her attention” (53). Not surprisingly, more and more Web sites are giving “prominence to content created by trusted users” (53).
Then, Massa goes on to classify online systems into seven broad categories, each one of which implements different (and to some extent overlapping) trust mechanisms. These categories include E-marketplaces; Opinions and activity sharing sites; Business/job networking sites; Social/entertainment sites; News sites; The Web, the Blogsphere, and the Semantic Web; and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks (55). According to Massa, Slashdot.com is one of the representative “News sites,” where “users can write and submit stories and news they want to share with the community.” In this type of Web sites, “the users can rate other users’ activities (posted news and comments) and these ratings are used to give more visibility to posts and comments the other users appreciate and value” (56). As for Citizendium, although it is not discussed in the Massa article, on a general level, not every user can rate other users’ activities but those who are identified as “experts” can (I will discuss information control in Citizendium in more detail below).
To go back to my final project proposal, I got the initial inspiration in Carol Tenopir’s “Web 2.0: Our Cultural Downfall?” from week 1, where she discusses (by referring to The Cult of the Amateur written by a Web 2.0 skeptic, Andrew Keen) how Web 2.0 could potentially undermine the quality of professional research and scholarship. As Web 2.0 continues to grow and elaborate its applications, Keen fears that more professional researchers would act unprofessionally and start to rely on readily accessible online resources such as Wikipedia. Massa also mentions the same phenomenon (p. 52, referring to Coates, “The Mass Amateurisation of Everything,” 2003).
Although Tenopir’s concise piece does not discuss in great detail what evidence Keen used to support his skepticism about Wikipedia and other Web 2.0-generated resources (we basically need to read the book), some of the readings for this week bring up interesting insights. Eryilmaz et al note that “Wikipedia’s technical implementation does not provide a gate keeping function to ensure quality material is being contributed” (2).
The low barriers to entry on Wikipedia is in large part a product of what Gleave et al call “a collective concern for the quality of the resulting articles” (7). Gealve et al suggest that “social roles” on Wikipedia are defined by “informal, collectively defined roles” that are “organized around practices like fighting vandalism, copy editing, enforcing standard formats, welcoming new users, evaluating article quality, and writing tools to help the community” (7). In other words, on Wikipedia, “any reader may edit or contribute” (7) whether under real name or alias. The question of transparency about sources of information is one yardstick that many authors have used to differentiate Wikipedia from other wiki projects such as Citizendium (I will get back to this point below).
Pessimism notwithstanding, Keen, as Tenopir mentions, also sees a light in the future of information control in Web 2.0. He sees that Citizendium, the wiki encyclopedia launched by a co-founder of Wikipedia, could be a potential source of more reliable and higher-quality information (than Wikipedia) because the site implements a tighter information filtering system that “combines public participation with the guidance of experts” (Tenopir, 2007).
On the differences in information control in Wikipedia and Citizendium, Sundin and Haider write in “Debating Information Control in Web 2.0”:
“While WP [Wikipedia] claims not to attribute special status to any of its contributors, CZ [Citizendium] . . . intends to assign a decision-making role to subject experts. It is not CZ’s intention to change the collaborative approach, yet here contributors have to register and write under their real name. Also, there are meant to be different categories of users which differ in terms of their expert status. In contrast, in WP anyone can add a subject entry or edit an existing one anonymously” (2).
[O. Sundin & J. Haider, “Debating Information Control in Web 2.0: The Case of “Wikipedia vs. Citizendium. Short paper to ASIS&T 07,” Joining Research and Practices: Social Computing and Information Science, October 18-25, Hyatt Regency Milwaukee, Wisconsin]
Citizendium’s quest for reliable and high-quality information is highlighted in the “About” page [http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:About].
Then what about Slashdot.com, the second online community I explored for this assignment? The Sundin and Haider article I mentioned above makes references to two discussion threads on Slashdot.com, “A Look Inside Citizendium” (June 2006) and “Co-Founder Forks Wikipedia” (October 2006), each of which assesses strengths and weaknesses of Citizendium (and Wikipedia) in the area of information control. One post in the latter caught my eye [see screenshot].
Not many of us would disagree with what “nlitement” says here in the last sentence: "In the end, it's really up to the end-user to weed out bad information." Web 2.0 is a user-oriented and user-generated communication tool. It is users who decide on what constitutes “good” or “bad” information. We reach out the community of Internet users to satisfy our information needs regardless of whether the needs are driven by our areas of interests, as we experimented on Week 2, or defined by impending tasks at hand like our experiences on Answerbag.
Insofar as my experience in Citizendium is concerned, I am not too impressed with the quality of information presented on the site. For instance, I looked up “Southeast Asia,” a topic I am familiar with, in both Wikipedia and Citizendium to test the water. In this particular instance, Wikipedia happened to offer more current and accurate information [see screenshots].
Wikipedia
Citizendium
Note: East Timor, the newest nation in the region (since May 2002) is not included here.The Wikipedia entry was last modified on 1 March 2009, whereas the Citizendium entry was last modified on 3 February 2009. I will see if information gets updated (corrected) in the coming weeks.
Are we being to critical of Wikipedia? We’ve been hearing a lot of criticism about the inaccuracy of information on Wikipedia. But what about proponents of utilizing Web 2.0 in professional research and what do they have to say? In evaluating the quality of information on Web sites, how do we take into account of what might be called advisory opinions expressed in an open-access forum like Slashdot.com and a scholarly commentary by an expert like Carol Tenopir (i.e. “Quality Still Matters”)? How do they compare? This is just a random list of (unanswerable) questions I am hoping to address in my final project.
Finally, just a random reflection on Williams, Allen et al and Ellison et al. Allen et al made a creative analysis of how “trust” is negotiated in a particular (and paradoxical) setting, where individuals collaborate to accomplish a task while playing against each other. The Williams article is a nice introductory piece on “social capital,” which the author sees as “a contentious and slippery term” (2). But a main idea behind “social capital” is, just like in financial world, “using it creates more of it” (2). The article nicely outlines two types of social capital. “Bridging” tends to be more inclusive and provide little emotional support, whereas “bonding” can be (mutually) exclusive and provide “emotional or substantive support for one another” (5). Ellison et al also focus on aspects of “social capital.” The authors suggest that participants in their survey (college students) use Facebook to “keep in touch with old friends and to maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of offline connection such as dormitory proximity or a shared class” (21). The use of Facebook in these manners forms a type of “social capital,” which the authors characterize as “weak ties” (21). I wish the authors elaborated a little more about social psychology of non-users: What motivates them to not use Facebook? Is lack of time a factor here?
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Session 3 week 1
After I completed the readings, I did my share of lurking on answerbag.com. My initial impression was: “This site is huge.” As we can see in the extensive list of categories and subcategories, the site contains bits and pieces of information about pretty much anything and everything. So, what is anserbag.com? The site offers the following mission statement: “Ask questions and share your knowledge with the world here on Answerbag. Get the best answers where there are no duplicate questions and questions are always open - our community of over 864,000 will find your answer.” Then why do people participate in answebag? When and why do they post questions and answers? Ridings and Gefen pursue a similar question in their research (i.e. why people join virtual communities) and suggest overall, people join online communities for social support, recreation, friendship, and exchange of information. I believe all these motivations quite fittingly explain the group dynamics of answerbag.com.
One feature that caught my eye while lurking was “Leaderboard.” It shows the most recent ranking of top-rated answerbag members who have accumulated most points in both questions and answers. So, this competitive environment likely serves as a motivating factor for some AB members. In other words, some AB members stick around and perhaps enjoy being in competition to earn points and get recognized. (This echoes what Albrecht et al called “extrinsic reinforcement” – that some users are drawn to those online communities that offer “rewards like gifts, social recognition, and feedback.”)
Because our assignment was to actively participate in answerbag and meet certain goals by the deadline, I observed what types of questions and answers have been posted and have received high ratings/points (i.e. “Greatest Q&A”). I also randomly picked categories and observed their conversations and noticed that a number of interactions were built around topics related to “favorite” things. I tried this format (i.e. What/Who/Where is your favorite ---?) in several of my questions and had some success.
In crafting my strategy, I also remembered from one of the readings from session 2 (i.e. Weeks), suggesting that people are more responsive, online or off, to people “who sound they are in trouble.” So I tested this hypothesis in my interactions and posted a few questions asking for help and advice (both in somewhat real and hypothetical situations) in the areas of “cooking and recipes,” “health and fitness,” and “computers.” I used such phrases like: “I need help for a relative who has such and such disease...”; “I want to learn how to cook---.”; “I’m looking for---.” Most of my questions were returned immediately but did not accumulate enough points/answers to reach the target.
On a different note, it was amazing to see how quickly people responded to some of my questions. To a certain extent, some AB contributors (esp. regulars) perhaps share the “extroverted” personality discussed in the Schrock piece? – that they “desire for socialization with others . . . Extroverts are described as sociable, lively, active, assertive, care-free, dominant, venturesome and sensation-seeking.” This type of spontaneous and somewhat synchronous communication almost resembles aspects of user intentions in Twitter (i.e. daily chatter, conversations, sharing information) as Java and Finin et al highlight in their study even though AB and Twitter operate within quite different frameworks, i.e. openly accessible site versus personalized network of “friends.”
In a nutshell, I was able to meet one of the four benchmarks: One of your questions must draw 8 or more answers. Out of 44 questions I posted, 5 of them met this goal. My most successful questions were:
1) What goes best pie? (Dessert; 20 answers; 30 points)
2) Do you have to have coffee every morning? Why? Why not? (Food and Dining; 9 answers; 15 points)
3) What do you NOT like to add to your coffee? (Drinks; 8 answers; 23 points)
4) What would you do if you won the billion dollar lottery? (Finance; 8 answers; 17 points)
5) Which Asian food do you prefer: Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Indian? (Food and Dining; 8 answers; 7 points)
Why I succeeded: I found the following passage in Albrecht et al particularly relevant: “Proposition 10: Participants with high commitment to achieving a goal will likely work harder to achieve the goal than individuals with low commitment.” Having a goal to meet within a given timeline kept me going. I posted random questions persistently to complete the assignment.
Why I failed: How would I explain my underperformance then? Albrecht et al discuss in Proposition 5: “As ease of use and interesting content increase, more individuals will want to participate and contribute.” Here I am particularly looking at the “ease of use” part. Perhaps what happened was the opposite of what Proposition 5 suggests: I was not at ease with how answerbag operates and failed to, in some way, manipulate the system effectively to earn as many points as required: i.e. the complex and finely designed hierarchy in regards to the ranking and rating is still a puzzle to me; I haven’t quite understood what “Comments” and “Moderation” would do to my points.
Simply put, my questions and answers were not interesting enough, and in some cases I picked “wrong” categories. For instance, to test the water, I first picked a sub-category that I like talking about and know something about. But this category had a comparatively small readership (i.e. even the top-rated questions have accumulated about only 40 points, whereas “Greatest Q&A” in more popular categories I have visited has scored 100-200 points, or even more). Perhaps not the best (and most strategic) move if you are doing this exercise to reach the target point count by the deadline.
In addition, the site runs a thorough check on duplicates after questions were posted and automatically inactivates duplicates, when detected. This is how I lost four questions worthy of over 30 points a few days after they were posted. (I received e-mail notice, “Good news, we have an answer to your question.”)
One quick note on my behavioral pattern on answerbag.com: I kept going back to the same category, “Food and Dining.” By the second/third day, it became almost an automatic reflex to go straight to that category rather than taking different routes. What do I make of it other than just saying, “I like talking about food”? Ling and Beenen et al offer some insight from a social psychological point of view: “People will contribute more to online communities when they believe that they are similar rather than dissimilar to other in the group” (p 5). And this line of observation, linking the broadly termed “similarity” (i.e. common interest) and active participation, speaks for those online communities I have joined in the past few weeks. Perhaps the homogeneity (i.e. boyd and Ellison from Week 1), however it is defined, is one motivating factor behind the sustained and lively online conversations.
One feature that caught my eye while lurking was “Leaderboard.” It shows the most recent ranking of top-rated answerbag members who have accumulated most points in both questions and answers. So, this competitive environment likely serves as a motivating factor for some AB members. In other words, some AB members stick around and perhaps enjoy being in competition to earn points and get recognized. (This echoes what Albrecht et al called “extrinsic reinforcement” – that some users are drawn to those online communities that offer “rewards like gifts, social recognition, and feedback.”)
Because our assignment was to actively participate in answerbag and meet certain goals by the deadline, I observed what types of questions and answers have been posted and have received high ratings/points (i.e. “Greatest Q&A”). I also randomly picked categories and observed their conversations and noticed that a number of interactions were built around topics related to “favorite” things. I tried this format (i.e. What/Who/Where is your favorite ---?) in several of my questions and had some success.
In crafting my strategy, I also remembered from one of the readings from session 2 (i.e. Weeks), suggesting that people are more responsive, online or off, to people “who sound they are in trouble.” So I tested this hypothesis in my interactions and posted a few questions asking for help and advice (both in somewhat real and hypothetical situations) in the areas of “cooking and recipes,” “health and fitness,” and “computers.” I used such phrases like: “I need help for a relative who has such and such disease...”; “I want to learn how to cook---.”; “I’m looking for---.” Most of my questions were returned immediately but did not accumulate enough points/answers to reach the target.
On a different note, it was amazing to see how quickly people responded to some of my questions. To a certain extent, some AB contributors (esp. regulars) perhaps share the “extroverted” personality discussed in the Schrock piece? – that they “desire for socialization with others . . . Extroverts are described as sociable, lively, active, assertive, care-free, dominant, venturesome and sensation-seeking.” This type of spontaneous and somewhat synchronous communication almost resembles aspects of user intentions in Twitter (i.e. daily chatter, conversations, sharing information) as Java and Finin et al highlight in their study even though AB and Twitter operate within quite different frameworks, i.e. openly accessible site versus personalized network of “friends.”
In a nutshell, I was able to meet one of the four benchmarks: One of your questions must draw 8 or more answers. Out of 44 questions I posted, 5 of them met this goal. My most successful questions were:
1) What goes best pie? (Dessert; 20 answers; 30 points)
2) Do you have to have coffee every morning? Why? Why not? (Food and Dining; 9 answers; 15 points)
3) What do you NOT like to add to your coffee? (Drinks; 8 answers; 23 points)
4) What would you do if you won the billion dollar lottery? (Finance; 8 answers; 17 points)
5) Which Asian food do you prefer: Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Indian? (Food and Dining; 8 answers; 7 points)
Why I succeeded: I found the following passage in Albrecht et al particularly relevant: “Proposition 10: Participants with high commitment to achieving a goal will likely work harder to achieve the goal than individuals with low commitment.” Having a goal to meet within a given timeline kept me going. I posted random questions persistently to complete the assignment.
Why I failed: How would I explain my underperformance then? Albrecht et al discuss in Proposition 5: “As ease of use and interesting content increase, more individuals will want to participate and contribute.” Here I am particularly looking at the “ease of use” part. Perhaps what happened was the opposite of what Proposition 5 suggests: I was not at ease with how answerbag operates and failed to, in some way, manipulate the system effectively to earn as many points as required: i.e. the complex and finely designed hierarchy in regards to the ranking and rating is still a puzzle to me; I haven’t quite understood what “Comments” and “Moderation” would do to my points.
Simply put, my questions and answers were not interesting enough, and in some cases I picked “wrong” categories. For instance, to test the water, I first picked a sub-category that I like talking about and know something about. But this category had a comparatively small readership (i.e. even the top-rated questions have accumulated about only 40 points, whereas “Greatest Q&A” in more popular categories I have visited has scored 100-200 points, or even more). Perhaps not the best (and most strategic) move if you are doing this exercise to reach the target point count by the deadline.
In addition, the site runs a thorough check on duplicates after questions were posted and automatically inactivates duplicates, when detected. This is how I lost four questions worthy of over 30 points a few days after they were posted. (I received e-mail notice, “Good news, we have an answer to your question.”)
One quick note on my behavioral pattern on answerbag.com: I kept going back to the same category, “Food and Dining.” By the second/third day, it became almost an automatic reflex to go straight to that category rather than taking different routes. What do I make of it other than just saying, “I like talking about food”? Ling and Beenen et al offer some insight from a social psychological point of view: “People will contribute more to online communities when they believe that they are similar rather than dissimilar to other in the group” (p 5). And this line of observation, linking the broadly termed “similarity” (i.e. common interest) and active participation, speaks for those online communities I have joined in the past few weeks. Perhaps the homogeneity (i.e. boyd and Ellison from Week 1), however it is defined, is one motivating factor behind the sustained and lively online conversations.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Social aspects of social computing
Galston proposes that the emerging online groups are by and large “paradigmatic examples of voluntary community.” Members join the groups by choice and are bonded by shared interests, “affective ties,” and a sense of “mutual obligation.” They may leave the group at will, since the majority of online groups operate on fluid membership. Galston also suggest that these principles of online community reflect two prevailing values in American society: “individual choice” and “the longing for community.” After reading the rest of the assigned articles, I began to wonder Galston’s notion of “voluntary community” may be overly idealistic that could cloud sometimes messy and unforeseen consequences of online communications.
Albrechtslund, especially in the section “Life after social networking,” offers an insight in regards to alarming consequences of social networking. The author points out that our personal history on social network sites could become an unexpected source of distress after our departure from online community. Referring specifically to careless online behavior of youngsters who reveal too much personal information, the records of their activity could be “embarrassingly accessible later on.” When it comes to risks of disclosing personal information on social networking sites, Rossen discusses another distressing situation that could impact the lives and careers of not only youngsters but adults. A survey conducted in 2006 shows that 40 percent of employers would refer to personal profile of candidates on social networking sites such as the Facebook in the hiring process. There were even cases in which employers called off their job offers after consulting job seekers’ online profile.
To turn attention to the Weeks and Rossen pieces, each focuses on the nature of human behavior in online environment and compares it to real-life counterpart. Overall, Weeks tends to highlight parallels between online and off-line behavior. For instance, regardless of online or off line, “people will respond to people who sound like they are in trouble.” Some of Rossen’s discussions, in contrast, illuminate the peculiarity of online communications. To take on example, many users disguise and shift their (true) identity and become “protean selves,” a concept she borrowed from Robert Jay Lifton.
The LaRosse piece, while focusing on online behavior, is an empirical study of correlations between the Internet use and depression. For “moderately depressed populations” with heavy use of the Web such as students, Internet communications could provide a means of social support thus alleviate depression. At the same time, Internet communications could cause depression for inexperienced users, who feel overwhelmed by technical difficulties of navigating themselves on the Internet.
When it comes to a tendency to stay out or opt out of the Internet, Bigge pursues the subject from a unique perspective. He examines a phenomenon called “neo-Luddite movement” whose aim is “to reduce or control the technology that is all around us and to question its utility.” He argues as more voluntary social network sites take up online space, users are left with two extreme and polarized courses of action to take: “the constant, self-generated surveillance” of such sites and “the self-negation” that involves complete avoidance of social networking.
The Hague piece makes a stimulating observation about the usefulness of “micromedia” such as web blogs, podcast, and vlog. Hague suggests the increasing use of micromedia undermines our creativity and our ability to think innovatively in business mainly because we are “fooled” and blindfolded by the premise of their “usefulness.” To highlight this point, the author observes how bloggers misuse and misrepresent the concepts and the language of economics. One illuminating example comes from a blog post by “Seth,” who lamented that “bloggers blog too much: they’re littering an “attention commons.”” The author takes issues with Seth’s comment because of the careless and mindless use of the economic concept, “commons.” In today’s online environment, as Hague points out, attention is “no longer a commons” because it is “about individual expectations and preferences.” When we have limited media to disseminate and absorb information, we would likely end up paying attention to things we are not even remotely interested in and sharing virtual space with others whose interests, values, worldviews are uncompromisingly contradicting with our own. Such a situation may find a parallel in the concept of a commons such as park, where people from all walks of life share that space. But online space has now become more personalized and individualized (thanks to an array of technological options of micromedia) that we could choose to not to share that space with complete strangers.
Going back to Hague’s discussion about the ill-fated impact of micromedia on creativity and ability to think critically, isn’t it too pessimistic to say that “usefulness [of micromedia] is the enemy of creativity”? If online environment gives users plenty of room to build personal and individual space based on their choices and preferences (remind me of Galston’s “voluntary community), could the same space also generate innovative, productive, and engaging interactions, and perhaps cultivate creativity? Isn’t it too simplistic to blame the downfall of creativity on the utilitarian thinking (believing that everything must be useful)? Isn’t it up to individual users to decide what is useful and what is not?
To pursue these questions, I joined two online communities of Southeast Asia enthusiasts, since this is a topic I am a little familiar with (my academic background is in Southeast Asia studies). I am still finding clue to respond to my questions, but here is what I have been observing in the last few days.
The first community I joined is a study group on Southeast Asia in general (available from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/southeast-asian-studies/; 32 members as of 1 Feb 2009). The second group (available from http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10760920401; 287 members as of 1 Feb 2009) focuses on archaeology and history. Hoping to relate my social networking experience to my broad interest in the use of the Web in academic research, I have also started to observe interactions in a blog group of academic librarians. The site is currently being renewed and scheduled to restart on February 1, 2009 with new features such as posting of a monthly discussion theme related to technology and information seeking (see screenshot). I have not seen any new blog post today. But I am planning to stay tuned and participate in upcoming discussions. On a different note, I located these groups in an academic blogging portal called BlogScholar.com.
.bmp)
As for the two online Southeast Asia groups, I have been part of these communities only for a few days and am still getting the feel of it. As a newcomer to the world of social computing, it has been quite a technical challenge to fully explore and utilize tools of communication (just like inexperienced users in the LaRosse piece). But one thing that caught my eye is that blog posts and discussion boards are not updated frequently. Some message board was not updated since March 2008 (see screenshot), and a lot of blog comments do not go beyond self-introduction.
But one resource that is current with substantial content is “Newsblogs” on topics related to archaeology and early history in Southeast Asia (see screenshot). The site is available from the archaeology-history group homepage and it does not require sign-up or login. Having read several newsblogs, I am finding this site quite resourceful and informative about Southeast Asian archaeology, if not nurturing creativity. For instance, I have just learned about a new website on ethnic populations in the region; a recent official dialogue between Thailand and Cambodia about the “smuggled artefacts” from Cambodia; current preservation projects in Burma etc. We don’t often get this kind of “raw data” from classroom readings. The coverage of the Newsblogs is broad, discussing most of eleven countries in the region, and the blog posts are updated almost daily and written professionally with relevant citations. I don’t know if other members have felt the same way, but if you get what you need by lurking, why bother blogging or even signing up for the facebook group...?
.bmp)
Albrechtslund, especially in the section “Life after social networking,” offers an insight in regards to alarming consequences of social networking. The author points out that our personal history on social network sites could become an unexpected source of distress after our departure from online community. Referring specifically to careless online behavior of youngsters who reveal too much personal information, the records of their activity could be “embarrassingly accessible later on.” When it comes to risks of disclosing personal information on social networking sites, Rossen discusses another distressing situation that could impact the lives and careers of not only youngsters but adults. A survey conducted in 2006 shows that 40 percent of employers would refer to personal profile of candidates on social networking sites such as the Facebook in the hiring process. There were even cases in which employers called off their job offers after consulting job seekers’ online profile.
To turn attention to the Weeks and Rossen pieces, each focuses on the nature of human behavior in online environment and compares it to real-life counterpart. Overall, Weeks tends to highlight parallels between online and off-line behavior. For instance, regardless of online or off line, “people will respond to people who sound like they are in trouble.” Some of Rossen’s discussions, in contrast, illuminate the peculiarity of online communications. To take on example, many users disguise and shift their (true) identity and become “protean selves,” a concept she borrowed from Robert Jay Lifton.
The LaRosse piece, while focusing on online behavior, is an empirical study of correlations between the Internet use and depression. For “moderately depressed populations” with heavy use of the Web such as students, Internet communications could provide a means of social support thus alleviate depression. At the same time, Internet communications could cause depression for inexperienced users, who feel overwhelmed by technical difficulties of navigating themselves on the Internet.
When it comes to a tendency to stay out or opt out of the Internet, Bigge pursues the subject from a unique perspective. He examines a phenomenon called “neo-Luddite movement” whose aim is “to reduce or control the technology that is all around us and to question its utility.” He argues as more voluntary social network sites take up online space, users are left with two extreme and polarized courses of action to take: “the constant, self-generated surveillance” of such sites and “the self-negation” that involves complete avoidance of social networking.
The Hague piece makes a stimulating observation about the usefulness of “micromedia” such as web blogs, podcast, and vlog. Hague suggests the increasing use of micromedia undermines our creativity and our ability to think innovatively in business mainly because we are “fooled” and blindfolded by the premise of their “usefulness.” To highlight this point, the author observes how bloggers misuse and misrepresent the concepts and the language of economics. One illuminating example comes from a blog post by “Seth,” who lamented that “bloggers blog too much: they’re littering an “attention commons.”” The author takes issues with Seth’s comment because of the careless and mindless use of the economic concept, “commons.” In today’s online environment, as Hague points out, attention is “no longer a commons” because it is “about individual expectations and preferences.” When we have limited media to disseminate and absorb information, we would likely end up paying attention to things we are not even remotely interested in and sharing virtual space with others whose interests, values, worldviews are uncompromisingly contradicting with our own. Such a situation may find a parallel in the concept of a commons such as park, where people from all walks of life share that space. But online space has now become more personalized and individualized (thanks to an array of technological options of micromedia) that we could choose to not to share that space with complete strangers.
Going back to Hague’s discussion about the ill-fated impact of micromedia on creativity and ability to think critically, isn’t it too pessimistic to say that “usefulness [of micromedia] is the enemy of creativity”? If online environment gives users plenty of room to build personal and individual space based on their choices and preferences (remind me of Galston’s “voluntary community), could the same space also generate innovative, productive, and engaging interactions, and perhaps cultivate creativity? Isn’t it too simplistic to blame the downfall of creativity on the utilitarian thinking (believing that everything must be useful)? Isn’t it up to individual users to decide what is useful and what is not?
To pursue these questions, I joined two online communities of Southeast Asia enthusiasts, since this is a topic I am a little familiar with (my academic background is in Southeast Asia studies). I am still finding clue to respond to my questions, but here is what I have been observing in the last few days.
The first community I joined is a study group on Southeast Asia in general (available from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/southeast-asian-studies/; 32 members as of 1 Feb 2009). The second group (available from http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10760920401; 287 members as of 1 Feb 2009) focuses on archaeology and history. Hoping to relate my social networking experience to my broad interest in the use of the Web in academic research, I have also started to observe interactions in a blog group of academic librarians. The site is currently being renewed and scheduled to restart on February 1, 2009 with new features such as posting of a monthly discussion theme related to technology and information seeking (see screenshot). I have not seen any new blog post today. But I am planning to stay tuned and participate in upcoming discussions. On a different note, I located these groups in an academic blogging portal called BlogScholar.com.
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As for the two online Southeast Asia groups, I have been part of these communities only for a few days and am still getting the feel of it. As a newcomer to the world of social computing, it has been quite a technical challenge to fully explore and utilize tools of communication (just like inexperienced users in the LaRosse piece). But one thing that caught my eye is that blog posts and discussion boards are not updated frequently. Some message board was not updated since March 2008 (see screenshot), and a lot of blog comments do not go beyond self-introduction.
But one resource that is current with substantial content is “Newsblogs” on topics related to archaeology and early history in Southeast Asia (see screenshot). The site is available from the archaeology-history group homepage and it does not require sign-up or login. Having read several newsblogs, I am finding this site quite resourceful and informative about Southeast Asian archaeology, if not nurturing creativity. For instance, I have just learned about a new website on ethnic populations in the region; a recent official dialogue between Thailand and Cambodia about the “smuggled artefacts” from Cambodia; current preservation projects in Burma etc. We don’t often get this kind of “raw data” from classroom readings. The coverage of the Newsblogs is broad, discussing most of eleven countries in the region, and the blog posts are updated almost daily and written professionally with relevant citations. I don’t know if other members have felt the same way, but if you get what you need by lurking, why bother blogging or even signing up for the facebook group...?
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Sunday, January 18, 2009
session 1, week 1
The first sentence of the syllabus contains my thumbnail definition of social computing: Social computing is an umbrella term for technologies and virtual spaces that allow users to create, describe and share content, and for the communities that arise around them. Challenge this definition by making reference to the Session 1 readings. How does the term relate to others, such as social software, social networks, online community and Web 2.0? Conclude by crafting your own definition of social computing, and how it relates to topics you hope to explore in this course.
Boyd and Ellison give a good overview of the history of “social network sites” (SNSs) and trace the evolution of SNSs, from Friendster to MySpace. According to the authors, social network sites are, first and foremost, “web-based services.” They allow users to experience three types of services: 1) “construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system”; 2) “articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection”; and 3) “view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” Building on this definition, the authors discuss in some depth how and to what extent information is and can be shared in major SNSs. What they illuminate is that “sharing,” as practiced in SNSs tends to take place among “homogenous populations,” who often form “segregated” groups based on age, gender, educational level, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth.
The publication date (1993) of Dibbell’s piece first caught my attention. Although my memory is not serving well in recalling how prevalent computers and virtual reality (VR) sites, in particular, were in 1993, it is safe to say that technological innovations between then and now have certainly made computers and VR sites far more relevant to our daily lives. Yet, what this article explores – ethics in the world of virtual reality – is still very current today. Dibbell documents the Bungle Affair, a serial rape case in an online community called LambdaMOO, and how this incident stirred a series of interactive and participatory debates among users as to what legal measures, as if this was in real life, should be taken to penalize Mr. Bungle.
Beer and Burrows examine the genealogy of Web 2.0, which is defined as “a device to refer to a cluster of new applications and related online cultures.” In addition, Web 2.0 typically possesses “a conceptual unity only to the extent that it is possible to decipher some significant socio-technical characteristics that they have in common.” This article was informative and accessible for a social networking novice like me, as it outlines concisely various ways in which Web 2.0 are put into practice (e.g. social networking sites, blogging, wikipedia, operating software).
Nardi et al and Herring et al both focus on blogs; “blogging” and “weblogs,” respectively, to use their terms. The two articles examine blogs from two different angles. Nardi et al discuss the extent of interactivity in blogging, which is quite limited because of the “asymmetrical” relationship between bloggers and readers (227). As far as their research outcome is concerned, while select bloggers were fairly unconcerned about issues of privacy (they wouldn’t mind sharing), readers were more indifferent to what bloggers post. So there is a gap in the level of commitment and interest between bloggers. Herring et al are interested in classifying “weblogs” (or blogs), which are defined specifically as “frequently modified webpages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence” (1).
I found Tenopir’s piece particularly thought-provoking. She discusses how the spread of social networking and Web 2.0 could potentially undermine the quality of professional research and scholarship. She fears that even professional researchers are beginning to act amateurish and turn to, if not completely, open-access, online resources (online databases, in particular).
With myriad quick, easy, online references at researchers’ disposal, what makes professional research professional? What we learn in the web (via Web 2.0) and in books, for instance, are different from one another, and if so, how do they relate to one another? These are questions I am interested in exploring in this course and in my research.
Having gone through these readings, I still find the suggested working definition of social computing quite fitting – that it is “an umbrella term for technologies and virtual spaces that allow users to create, describe and share content, and for the communities that arise around them.” But what technologies and virtual spaces do we find under the umbrella of social computing? Building on the readings, we can perhaps elaborate this definition a little by adding specifics. For instance, social-computing technologies are commonly related to Web 2.0, and virtual spaces can be textual, audio-visual, and hybrid of both.
These basic conceptions of social networking prepare us for further exploration: e.g. how social networking operates, how its content is constructed (building on what sources of information, or can we know about sources?) etc. These observations certainly will help navigate my inquiry into the interplay and interface, if any, between online, web-based research and conventional, bookish equivalent.
Boyd and Ellison give a good overview of the history of “social network sites” (SNSs) and trace the evolution of SNSs, from Friendster to MySpace. According to the authors, social network sites are, first and foremost, “web-based services.” They allow users to experience three types of services: 1) “construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system”; 2) “articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection”; and 3) “view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” Building on this definition, the authors discuss in some depth how and to what extent information is and can be shared in major SNSs. What they illuminate is that “sharing,” as practiced in SNSs tends to take place among “homogenous populations,” who often form “segregated” groups based on age, gender, educational level, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth.
The publication date (1993) of Dibbell’s piece first caught my attention. Although my memory is not serving well in recalling how prevalent computers and virtual reality (VR) sites, in particular, were in 1993, it is safe to say that technological innovations between then and now have certainly made computers and VR sites far more relevant to our daily lives. Yet, what this article explores – ethics in the world of virtual reality – is still very current today. Dibbell documents the Bungle Affair, a serial rape case in an online community called LambdaMOO, and how this incident stirred a series of interactive and participatory debates among users as to what legal measures, as if this was in real life, should be taken to penalize Mr. Bungle.
Beer and Burrows examine the genealogy of Web 2.0, which is defined as “a device to refer to a cluster of new applications and related online cultures.” In addition, Web 2.0 typically possesses “a conceptual unity only to the extent that it is possible to decipher some significant socio-technical characteristics that they have in common.” This article was informative and accessible for a social networking novice like me, as it outlines concisely various ways in which Web 2.0 are put into practice (e.g. social networking sites, blogging, wikipedia, operating software).
Nardi et al and Herring et al both focus on blogs; “blogging” and “weblogs,” respectively, to use their terms. The two articles examine blogs from two different angles. Nardi et al discuss the extent of interactivity in blogging, which is quite limited because of the “asymmetrical” relationship between bloggers and readers (227). As far as their research outcome is concerned, while select bloggers were fairly unconcerned about issues of privacy (they wouldn’t mind sharing), readers were more indifferent to what bloggers post. So there is a gap in the level of commitment and interest between bloggers. Herring et al are interested in classifying “weblogs” (or blogs), which are defined specifically as “frequently modified webpages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence” (1).
I found Tenopir’s piece particularly thought-provoking. She discusses how the spread of social networking and Web 2.0 could potentially undermine the quality of professional research and scholarship. She fears that even professional researchers are beginning to act amateurish and turn to, if not completely, open-access, online resources (online databases, in particular).
With myriad quick, easy, online references at researchers’ disposal, what makes professional research professional? What we learn in the web (via Web 2.0) and in books, for instance, are different from one another, and if so, how do they relate to one another? These are questions I am interested in exploring in this course and in my research.
Having gone through these readings, I still find the suggested working definition of social computing quite fitting – that it is “an umbrella term for technologies and virtual spaces that allow users to create, describe and share content, and for the communities that arise around them.” But what technologies and virtual spaces do we find under the umbrella of social computing? Building on the readings, we can perhaps elaborate this definition a little by adding specifics. For instance, social-computing technologies are commonly related to Web 2.0, and virtual spaces can be textual, audio-visual, and hybrid of both.
These basic conceptions of social networking prepare us for further exploration: e.g. how social networking operates, how its content is constructed (building on what sources of information, or can we know about sources?) etc. These observations certainly will help navigate my inquiry into the interplay and interface, if any, between online, web-based research and conventional, bookish equivalent.
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