Week 2 S10
From INLS 490
Week 2
Contents |
[edit] Video
[edit] Week 2
- Notes
- Syllabus changes
- Presentation signups
- Time Diary Assignment
- Guest Lectures
- Week 1 Notes
- This Week's Del.icio.us links
[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?
- Literally thousands of other SNS
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
- OSN profile contains:
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).
