Week 2 S10

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Week 2

Contents

[edit] Video

[edit] Week 2

[edit] Week 2 Organization

6:15-6:45 Notes, Signups, Time Diary
6:45-7:30 Lecture
7:30-7:45 Break
7:45-8:45 Lecture and Group Discussion

[edit] Surveying the Field of Online Social Networks

[edit] Lecture Notes

[edit] boyd and Ellison - Social Network Sites...

Definition of a SNS

  • Individual can construct a public of semi-public profile within a bounded system
  • Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection
  • View or traverse a list of connections within the system
    • What else might we add to this definition? Communication within the system? Interaction within the system?
    • What sites would be eligible under this definition? Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Tumblr?

Social Network Sites (or Online Social Networks)

  • OSN's are unique in they allow individuals to articulate their real world networks
  • These connections can discover or activate "latent ties"
  • OSN's often afford the creation of a profile, identity construction, enhancement of the self
  • There is a high degree of variation in affordance and audiences of OSN's.

History of OSN

  • Early years
    • Sixdegrees, AIM, ICQ, Classmates.com
    • LJ, BlackPlanet, Ryze, Tribe.net
  • Middle era
    • LinkedIn, OpenBC, Friendster, Fotolog, Cyworld
  • Modern Era
    • MySpace, Facebook, Dog/Catster, Twitter
  • Content trajectory of OSN
    • Object-centric and Ego-centric sites
    • Niche networks, limited-time networks

Previous Scholarship/Angles of study

  • Identity and Impression Formation
    • How do people create impressions in OSN, how are those impressions received
    • What are the strategies of impression formation, how does that affect the culture of a site
  • Networks and Network Structure
    • What are the dynamics of a particular network
    • How can the network be analyzed and how can those analytics be employed.
  • Online/Offline Networks
    • Effects on social interaction and social capital
    • Social networks in the workplace, organizations
  • Privacy
    • How much/what are individuals sharing, why?
    • Conceptions/models of privacy in online social interaction


[edit] boyd, Why youth heart...

Questions (pg. 120)

  • Why do teens use these sites?
  • What are they expressing on them?
  • How do the sites fit into their lives?
  • What are they learning from participation?
  • Are these online activities like face-to-face friendships or are they different, or complementary?

Users of SNS (121)

  • 55 percent of teens 12-17 have created a profile
  • 64 percent of teens age 15-17 (Lenhart & Madden, 2007)

Nonparticipants (121)

  • Disenfranchised teens: those without internet access, those whose parents succeed in barring them from participation, teens who primarily access the internet through schools and other public venues where OSN are banned.
  • Conscientious objectors: teens who protest site ownership, teens who comply with parental guidelines, marginalized teens, teens who are "too cool" for the sites.
  • Race and social class play little role in terms of access
    • For more on non-participants, see (Hargittai, 2007). Hargittai finds a limited significant difference for non-use by gender and parents educational attainment, but not by race. Study was a survey of a single campus, therefore of limited power.

History of OSN (121-122)

  • The "Big Three"
    • Friendster: Started in 2002, Friendster was modeled as a dating site, popular among the twenty/thirties urban professional crowd.
    • Myspace: Started in 2003 and competitor to Friendster, targeted at music (and other niche) markets.
    • Facebook: Started in 2004, focused on college networks.
  • Other networks
    • Literally thousands of other SNS
      • Hi5, Orkut, Cyworld, Xing, LinkedIn..
      • Today's networks - Twitter? Tumblr? Ning?

OSN Profiles (123)

  • Key element to SNS is the creation of a profile. See (Boyd & Ellison, 2007) for more.
    • OSN profile contains:
      • A description of the individual (text, images, videos)
      • Public list of connections
      • Running public/semi-public threads/interactions between individual and friends

Friendships (123-124)

  • "Friendship" vs. friendship
    • Friends are an articulated contact in the OSN
    • Privacy, security and interaction measures may key on friendship status
    • Friends serve as an indicator, an anchor, and a reference point for other contacts

Comments/Communication (124)

  • Friends can publicly comment on one another's profile
    • Wall messages
    • Picture tagging
    • Applications/games
    • Newsfeed elements/conversation
  • Comments generate conversation, leading to a semi-public interaction between members of the site (and building social capital, strengthening relationships, creating obligations)

Networked Publics (125-126)

  • Publics are places of interaction and discourse, a vital element of society
  • boyd's networked publics have four characteristics:
    • Persistence: Networked publics are "recorded for posterity"
    • Searchability: Social networks are flattened, we can find one another with the click of a mouse
    • Replicability: Our recorded actions can be copied/pasted
    • Invisible audiences: In certain configurations, we are unaware of those observing us.

Profile Creation (127)

  • Often, the profile creation process is collaborative (i.e. one individual directly passing practice to one another). This is often the case in terms of teen-centric networks.
  • The Myspace "CSS Bug" was a boon for this collaborative practice. Teens sat down with one another to share techniques for profile manipuation.
  • This initiation is part of larger social and cultural ritual.

Identity Performance (127-128)

  • Key element of OSN use is the management of one's identity - this can be very challenging.
  • Goffman (1959) describes stages, impressions given and impressions given off. In OSN all of our activities serve the purpose of writing ourselves into being (Sunden's nice phrase, via boyd).
  • Learning the management of impressions in OSN a critical practice and ritual - signals competence, control and belonging.

Writing Identity and Community into Being (129-131)

  • The profile is the representation of identity; the practice of identity signals belonging.
  • We appropriate code and special language to signal inclusion (i.e. ironic statements, Fakesters)
  • Profile is created to the "imagined identity" - the concept of the invisible audience used as a guideline for framing the presentation.

Privacy in public (131-132)

  • Are we really living in public? As boyd finds, teens engage in intricate strategies to protect their "privacy" (from strangers and parents). Techniques include:
    • Fabricated data (A/S/L, name, other)
    • Privacy settings (Friends only)
    • Mirror networks (i.e. the sanitized profile)

Social networks are refuge (134-138)

  • The decline of teenage publics and the police-state nature of parenting drive teenage socialization online (among other reasons - teenagers are also intensely social and the friend network is as much a family as the nuclear family).
  • Changes in society have shifted treatment of youth (Hine, 1999). The concept of the teenager is new and ever evolving.
  • Social networks provide places for teens to sort out their issues, experiment with identity production - good things, but at what cost (considering the "problems" of networked publics).


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