Wednesday keynote:Social Media & Networked Technologies

KEYNOTE — Social Media & Networked Technologies: Research & Insights
danah boyd, Ph.D. student, School of Information at Berkeley, School of Information at Berkeley & Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Her Ph.D. research is in the area of how people negotiate a presentation of self in unknown audiences, such as facebook, etc. funded through the Macarthur foundation.

Wow! An amazing talk. I tried to catch as much as I could of danah’s many fabulous ideas as they flew past. Apologies for comments that don’t go far enough in explanation. if this interests you, I suggest you look at her website.

As much as possible of these notes are in the form of quotes from what danah said, or what flew by on powerpoint slides.

Web 2.0 means different things to different people. Some think it is a perpetual beta, but we see also that users affect the technology cycle (like in H. Rheingold’s talk). Web 2.0 came after the tech crash, and the silicon valley tech people and others saw this as a way to repurpose hope.

But web 2.0 has reshaped entirely how people use technology and think about the internet. From usenet to now, we have a complete reshaping of how people use the internet and communicate online. Now it’s all about friends and communication with other people.

Among the social network sites, there are several factors that are consistent among all of them. What makes them unique is not the chance to just meet new people, but how these systems [paraphrase] enable the connection to people in an ongoing way for basic communication.

Factors across all these systems:
A profile. You already have an ip address, but it doesn’t say much about you, and who can remember it? The profile gives a way to say who you are, a “digital body.” Many people lie about their age, including young people, who don’t see why age should matter. A profile is somewhat like a physical space that people decorate, such as their room, or house.
A set of friends: It’s awkward how you have the problem of who your friends are and who they are not. The term “friends” means different things. (a) a few friends (absolute true friends) (b) 300+ friends, the social network of friends (c) 1000+ collectors, as in politicians, 14 year old boys, celebrities, musicians. In the awkwardness of this friends situation, social network sites handle them differently. MySpace = you must choose your friends in ORDER of 1st, 2nd, etc. and this makes a difficult situation for young people especially. Facebook does not have this system, and you can organize friends in looser structures. Young people figure out ways around this problem.
The Comments: mostly trivia, such as “how are you” “what are you doing” but for young people, this is a form of greeting that is an important social ritual online and in person.
Status updates: these are short comments from friends about what they are up to, how they feel. Like twitter, status updates are a form of microblogging. This system creates a culture of physical awareness but in a digital framework. danah expects this to evolve in the next few years.

Why does all of this matter? Social networks are a place to gossip, to make sure everyone around them is ok, flirt, socialize. Online has become the place to “hang out” like the malls of earlier years, or other places. Online spaces have become this place partly as a result of decreased mobility – parents don’t want their children out around in the suburbs or city for safety. Keeping up with friends moves to online when physical mobility is restricted for whatever reason. Community gathering places have shifted to online. A climate of fear, overstructuring of kids’ lives, the lack of mobility for after school and evening socializing have contributed to the rise of these online networks for young people. In order to exist within peer groups, you actually need to have a presence online. Creating a presence online with artifacts of your existence (such as photos, music) is essential to be part of groups of friends in the physical world. This is the new public space, but not the same as what older generations grew up with for public spaces.

For educators, it’s really important to understand the properties of these systems.

• There is a persistent quality to online info. Facebook entries are meant to be ephemeral by people as they write them, but these writings are actually publications that stay around a long time.
• Replicability – there is a high frequency of copying an item from one place to another. But the context can change for an object when placed in a new site. You don’t know where the original is and where the copy is any longer, and this is confusing in itself, aside from the whole question of copyright.
• Scalability – what you post will be read by millions of people, so they say. But the average blog is read by 6 people. The internet has weird scalability issues: the potential to reach many, but the possible reality of reaching nobody. How do we deal with the viral nature of the internet, since it is an attention-driven medium? You (a person in a social network) need to deal with the intricacies of scalability and how you feel about the issues involved with access.
• Searchability: in the usual sense day to day you are not searchable in the physical world. But when you participate in the internet you are searchable, including by those people who you do not want to have this ability. This can be most deadly for those who hold power over you, such as parents, teachers, law enforcement.
• There are invisible audiences. In a physical sense, if you are in a group, you may not know your audience or those around you, but they are visible to you always. But online, you don’t know who your audience is, audiences are invisible. You don’t know who is there right now, later, by search, and who is the audience anyway? This is something that journalists have struggled with for years. Within social networks, those classified as your friends are the intended audience. You exclude others by profile settings, but if you have a public profile, your audience is unknown to you. This doesn’t just apply to young people: as a parent if you don’t include your children as online friends, you don’t intend them as your audience.
• Collapsed contexts and events. There are no walls online, so you have multiple audiences in an unscripted situation. Compare this to events such as parties, where you have a known environment, a known setting, and duration for time and place.
• Public vs. private spaces: You need to set the controls online: public access is completely out of your control for structure.

What does all this mean? We see these structures play into internet technology changes. Metadata tagging is an example of how organizational structure is in the process of change by the users of these systems, affecting more formal structures in turn. So we need to learn about this; how to do it.

Non-experts are creating content. What does this mean for authenticity and authority to create content? Wikipedia=the most transparent encyclopedic construction that has ever been created. You may not like everything that is created, but you can contribute and challenge it. danah is amazed that librarians are so horrified by it, but they are the ones who could really contribute quite a lot to wikipedia. It is fascinating how really large questions such as evolution are played out in different viewpoints, by different nations.
For media literacy, we need to teach young people about how online information is produced in social networks, and about the process of this form of communication.

We no longer have a distinct separation between consumption and creation. Ex. fan fiction comments online show this ability to creating new text. Young people are reading and creating new writing with fan fiction.

All the ways that we write are increasingly connected to technology.

We have an attention economy, in other words, what gets the most attention among readers shows up in visibility. How do we deal with an economy where attention effects visibility on the internet? (my note: we have this in the print world of course, with publishing for best sellers compared to visibility of more obscure titles)

Larry Lessig: 4 factors: social norms, the market, architecture of what’s possible, and the law. Law is the most conservative factor of these 4. Law is not changing to accommodate the other 3 factors.
How are social networks affected by these 4 factors?
- net neutrality: does your isp control what you have access to? We need to stop the problem of isps blocking access.
cannot get to most of what she would like to get to for research. If content is locked down in journals, or other forms of cultural content, this limits creation of new cultural artifacts. Cuts off ability for people to engage with text. We need balance of open access a – drm – control of information through locking down of journals, or other forms of blocking access. danahnd the original efforts of copyright to protect authors. How does fair use impact linking in web sites? danah has had a problem with this with publishers who have told her that she can use only 10 words only in a quote.

Web 2.0 is about to expand significantly through mobile access devices. Technology of web 2.0 is becoming more part of the mobile worlds, as with the i-phone and similar objects. Cluster effects don’t work as well for mobile technology as for they do for computers, since with both pcs/macs you can look at equivalent content. Mobile phone networks are a barrier to development since different apps work on each, without the equivalent forms of communication among them. China is beginning to solve this problem.

Delocatability: a goal of equivalent access through distributed physical space. No matter where you are you can bring friends with you by communication devices, uploading photos, etc.

Technology is radically changing physical culture. We are in a big melting moment that will shape how people interact with other people.