Outstanding research questions.
From SocialSoftwareSymposium
We asked participants to brainstorm research questions about SNS or Social Tagging
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SNS Research Questions
- What are the social motivations of creating and maintaining online identity?
- Why do people use a particular SNS over others?
- What roles do SNS play as young adults transition from college to professtional life?
- How do young children use SNS and what role do their parents play?
- What is the effect of culture on the degree of personal information disclosure in SNS?
- Are we creating a grassroots surveillance society?
- How do users concieve of or operationalize their privacy across SNS?
- Does the same user differ in the assessments of relative privacy across different fora?
- What is a SNS particiants' understandability, perceptions, and attitudes of/regarding legal liabilities/limitations (i.e. copyright, defamation, etc)
- Gender differences - is social software going to be the killer app that tips the web into a mostly female tool?
- Will SNS make it more likely that we won't have to bowl alone?
- How long are people going to keep their identity on a particular site? What are they going to do when they no longer want it?
- What different aspects of offline social networks are expressed in SNS, cellphone address books, email inboxes and IM buddy lists?
- What are the privacy expectations?
- How can relevance be defined in social networks?
- How do we come up with a framework for identification and categorization of different identity claims in social networks? What are the conceptual frameworks guiding such an endeavor? What are the methodological issues that need to be taken into account (eg. issues of sampling, cultural psychology?)
- How do these different identity claims influence both impression formation and impression management? Are there differences in terms of how they affect both breadth (comprehensiveness) as well as intensity (magnitude) of impressions in CMC?
- How do SNS participants exit, or "move away" from a communite (i.e. Facebook, Myspace)? What rituals/practices do they perform (forwarding and address, providing notice)? Do we ever really completely leave a community we participated in? What are the artifacts of identity/involvement?
- What expectation of permanance is associated with SNS profies? Do users think profiles are being archived? Would user behave differently if everything people put on their profile was being archived?
- What are the interactions/relation between physical and online identities?
- How do we evaluate usability in SNS?
- Who is best positioned/motivated/incentivized to bring about federated, interoperable SNS?
- Who is Myspace? Facebook? the blogosphere? the webosphere? Why are they there?
- Who should keep the data? Where should they keep it? Who gets to see it?
- How do people's expectations about the value of online SNS differ from their expectations in physical SN's?
- What are SNS participants learning? Is there transfer of learning outside of these communitites?
- What types of group dynamics are occurring in these SNS's and what implications do these dynamics propose for teaching/learning?
- How are participants exploring their identity/possible selves within these communities? What do the cognitive processes look like?
- How are communities defined on the SNS/Tagging sites? What roles do the sites play in people's holistic lives?
- In what ways do particular SNS features elicit particular user behaviors?
- Do SNS function as information grounds? How?
- How is multifaceted identity supported/not supported in SNS? How can it be supported/expressed?
- What is the interaction between online and offline social networks in terms of attitudes and influence on behaviors?
- What is the nature of the artifacts people create in SNS? Which are permanent and which are transient? What are the edges of what we think of as ours?
- Are there generational/cultural differences in the way people use SNS? What is the role of place in SNS?
- What theories can best explain why individuals join and contribute to SNS?
- What are SNS uses expectations of profile audience/privacy/researchers use of info?
- What are the effects of specific features of SNS on how relationships or impressions are formed?
- How is user practice affected by site profit model? What factrs go into profile construction? How do site features affect this? How does this differ by A/S/L?
- Wat is the relationship between online/offline social groups and their representation online? How do people opt out? is there a social cost?
- In what ways do SNS facilitate new knowledge?
- What applicable frameworks can we use? From what disciplines?
- Longitudinal studies of how people change their profiles over time?
- Does SNS study generalize? What can SNS use tell us? What are the cultural boundaries between SNS?
- What are the social motives for SNS use?
- What drives use of a SNS site? How do we study these questions across sites and cultures?
- What do users concieve of when they share information in a SNS? Who do they expect they are sharing to?
- Does the Dunbar number apply to online SNS? Or do SNS allow greater networks to form in the monkeysphere?
- Created identity profile SNS compared to social tools where identity is shaped out of the content (FB vs LJ?)
- Difference of social interaction is a representation of a physical world interaction and where technosocial interaction is solely a digital relationship.
- What is the collective set of variables that have research interest?
- What tpes of information of levels should we as researchers consider taboo?
- If people do not de-friend each other in SNS, how is conflict played out on these sites?
- How do people transition from an SNS based around a school/university to another? Do they? What do they take with them?
- What do online social networks look like, and can we define/observe roles similar to those observed in past studies(i.e Alleh, technological gatekeeping)? Or are they a different thing altogether?
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Social Tagging
- How do we define effectiveness of tags?
- What do people use tags for?
- Tagging of non-text objects (pictures, videos, sound) similar to textual information?
- Are the motivations for tagging personal or social? Is it system dependent?
- How quickly do the meanings of tags decay?
- How would the availability of a large controlled vocabular affect willingness to tag?
- What types of tags are being applied? Are they of different genre? Are they being assigned for different purposes?
- Tagging as labeling? Does this enforce binaries, stereotypes, norms? On enrich identities? Open up spaces for moving further? Or nail us down?
