Week 3 F08

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Week 3

Contents

[edit] Video

Business tv Penny Power - why making friends online is easy

[edit] Week 3

[edit] Prompt readings

  • Stefanie Olsen: SocialMedia to unveil 'friendship ranks'
    • How useful is it to differentiate between "levels" of friendship online?
    • Do you differentiate between types of friends online?
    • Do you extend this differentiation into management/gatekeeping? Do you keep your good friends separate?

[edit] Name generator

On a sheet of paper, list 3 people (First name, Last initial) who match the following criteria:

  • Your best friends
  • Your best online friends (frequency/quality of communication)
  • People you've met offline, and continued the relationship online
  • People who you've met online, taking the friendship offline
  • People you keep up with who you wouldn't without technology

Interconnections:

  • Where is the overlap?
    • What accounts for the overlap?
  • What technologies are key in the management of scenarios 3, 4 and 5?

[edit] Social Capital Experiment

How many of your real life friends/contacts could you:

  • Crash overnight on the couch - if you were passing through town?
  • Borrow their car for a few hours?

How many of your real life friends/contact would:

  • Tell you about an interesting job opening?
  • Give you a restaurant recommendation?

How many of your online friends/contact could you:

  • Borrow 75 dollars?
  • Visit overnight on short notice (for example, if you were on a business trip)?

How many of your online friends/contacts would:

  • Tell you about an interesting job opening?
  • Give you a restaurant recommendation?

Interconnections:

  • Do your online friends support bridging or bonding capital?
  • What types of friends provide the most utility?


[edit] The Technologies of Friendship

Lecture Slides (PDF)

[edit] DiMaggio et. al. - The Social Impact of the Internet

High level questions - Internet's impacts on:

  • Community
  • Social Capital
  • Culture
  • Politics
  • Work/Groups/Participation
  • Defining Social Capital
    • Coleman, Burt, Bourdieu, Lin, Putnam
  • Does the internet help or harm personal relations?
    • Weiss - Are we just substituting? What would Shirky say?
    • Pew find the internet to be positively correlated with social interaction
    • Kraut found higher levels of internet use resulted in a substitution of weak ties for communication with family members, smaller social circles, increased loneliness and depression.
      • Where have we heard similar discourse?
      • Many years later, does the Internet Paradox hold up? Can we claim a main effect?
      • Internet Paradox Revisited: The negative effects dissapear, due to increased competence, greater utility and positive effects associated with local saturation
        • How does adoption affect our use of social tools?
  • How does the internet affect community and participatory relations?
    • Do you feel supported by virtual communities?
    • Do you receive social support from online communities?
      • Does local matter anymore? Or do we simply rely on personal networks? Wellman, Fischer
  • How does the internet reshape our sense of community?
    • Does the internet affect civic engagement?
    • Have you been engaged to action via the internet? In the current election cycle?
    • Does the internet affect your levels of engagement? Are meetups civic action?
  • How does the internet shape political engagement?
    • Internet lowers the behavioral costs of finding and sorting political information
    • Where do you get your political information?
    • How do you engage friends around politics? What role do technologies play?
    • Does the deliberative nature of the web give rise to true, deliberative discourse? Habermas vs. Sunstein
    • Does the internet replace the cultural commons of local media? Anderson
  • Internet impacts on culture
    • The internet democratizes the flow of information and production
    • Lower costs, more channels
    • Niche vs. mainstream interests
    • Castells: Two populations using the web - the interacting and the interacted - the first using the medium's full capacity, the latter limited to prepackaged choices.
  • The trajectories of social technologies
    • How are the trajectories of technologies shaped? Social informatics perspective
    • What has changed since the Web of DiMaggio et. al.?

[edit] Ling - Direct and mediated interaction in the maintenance of social relationships

  • Mediation technologies and relationships
    • Different media play different roles in relationships
      • Addressable vs. Non addressable technologies
  • Three types of relationships
    • Fully mediated
    • Quasi-Mediated
    • Combined
  • Relational development
    • Moving from the virtual to the real
      • The imagined person goes away - our sense of each other changes
      • How do we develop trust online?
  • What do we need to coordinate mediated relationships in everyday life?

[edit] Bargh and McKenna - The Internet and Social Life

  • The internet is fast becoming "natural"
  • Personal relationships motivate use - the killer app is other people
  • The Internet Difference
    • Relative anonymity
    • Lack of non-verbal cues
  • Three perspectives on computer-mediated-communication
    • Filter model i.e. Reduced Social Cues
    • SIDE Model - Goals/needs govern the process
    • SIP/Context Model
  • Identity and the internet
    • Can you be your real self online?
    • Internet partners tend to portray ideal qualities onto each other
    • What is the roles of context?
    • Group membership enabled by the internet
    • Stigmatized identities - internet allows these groups to come together
    • Are distinctions between the real and internet self meaningful?


[edit] Presentations

[edit] Quick Links

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