Social Networks Panel 2 Notes
From SocialSoftwareSymposium
Alice Marwick
-Political Economy of New Media: how commercial nature of products affects user behavior.
-Value-embedded paradigm
-Most people spend majority of time online in commercial internet structures
-Joshua Gamson on new media [citation?]
-SNSes make their money from advertising - profile fields are about consumables to better target
-Wikipedia vs. Wikia: the latter is focused on keeping people on the site, the former focused on bringing people together collaboratively
-People participate in SNSes to gain social capital - the SNSes convert this to economic capital
-What types of user practice are profitable? What types of user practice are therefore encouraged or discouraged?
Fred Stutzman
-Social motives: social intelligence is a motive for use of Facebook
-Different perspectives and uses for different networks and SNSes - do we have to develop a cross-cultural language for addressing these issues?
-Hard to get kids to talk about why they do stuff
-Majority of relationship bridging in Facebook is offline to online: an enmeshing of the life with the SNS - personal life management?
-We will see a decentralization of SNSes - users need to buy into a dominant condition, but some will want to establish spaces adjacent to them
-Inherent weirdness of the walled garden
-Communities are constructed based on the intentions of the designers
Addy Lee
-User behavior in online dating: what do they need? what are they doing?
-Real competition for online dating is coming from the free SNSes - which of them will do online dating in the future? How are they behaving the same or differently on SNSes as they would in online dating?
-What unique feature of SNSes is enabling dating? -Public display of connections: used to assess honesty -People feel users of SNSes are more honest and represent themselves more honestly -Friends know if you're lying in your profile and will give you shit for it (e.g., a glammed-up picture) -One subject admitted he would be embarrassed if his friends from friendster saw his Nerve profile -Top friends list is an assessment criteria: judgments are made by who those friends are, what they say -Top friends used as a validator for current relationship status - synchronous reciprocity
-People use top friends list in ways the designers didn't intend - the ordering and positioning are cues, and the changes are made with intention
-Isn't there a different way to represent the top friends list?
-The definition of "friend" has changed, and AIM, MySpace Top Eight, etc. are used as ways of explicating these relationships. the friends who are digitally close to us - near in thought, near in interest: that's local. Susan Gov
-Creating and managing identities across different contexts. People act differently in different contexts
-Architecture of the communities affects representation of identity
-Interaction with friends/non; thoughts on privacy
-Users have friends from multiple contexts; identity is highly managed.
-"Maybe I like the Backstreet Boys, but that's not something I want people to know."
-One user with blogs on MySpace, LiveJournal and a personal website: he's a goth on the SNSes but not on his homepage
-People don't always behave the same online as they do offline
-How do aggregators change the way people manage their identity?
-People have more professional images on Facebook, more personal ones on MySpace.
-How can aggregators be designed to help people better manage the different identities online?
-Cliff Lampe: From design perspective, want to be managing who sees the profile
-Fred Stutzman: Social rules enforce how we behave and the multiplicity of identities will be limited by them
-David Weinberger: de-friending is not too much work - it's too much work that is only negative
-Paul Jones: AOL has trademarked "buddy list", so nobody else can use buddy: so everyone uses "friend" even though it doesn't mean that
-Cliff Lampe: Further explicating social relationships just gets messy, and impolite.
-Zeynep Tufekci: Face-saving behavior research explains much of this
-Cliff Lampe: Are we over-thinking this? People seem to navigate these relationships just fine
