illustration by mkandlez
social networking
Exciting new thesis on social networking
Dr Danah Boyd has successfully defended her very interesting PhD Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics (PDF) and of course the text is available online (under CC license). This is from the abstract
While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.
Danah is also a prolific writer and blogger with valuable insights in online life. She is also keen to get feedback about her text as she intends to rework and publish it in other formats- “The more feedback I get now, the better I can make those future document. So, pretty please, with a cherry on top, could you share your reflections, critiques, concerns? I promise I won’t be mad. In fact, the opposite. I would be most delighted!”
Run Fatboy Run
This post was almost called Run Forrest Run but the comedy Run Fatboy Run (it is a must see!) is more appropriate for several reasons – which will become obvious if you read on.
As a writer I am always slightly surprised and very flattered when someone says that they have read something I have written, it makes no difference whether the text is my blog or my PhD. When someone comments on my writing or responds to it the text becomes alive and an exchange of ideas begins. This is fun.
A few people seem to read my blog as a way of keeping track of me and what I am doing. To be fair this group mainly consists of my mother who likes to know where I am in the world (and occasionally why I am there) – Hello Mum!
With the dawn of social networking sites and microblogging more people are subjected to my shorter bursts of everyday information. Updating my status via ping.fm means that the trivial status line in facebook becomes a part of an ongoing background chatter. My friends can see what I am doing and some of them will comment on my actions. My comments on their comments will turn the whole thing into micro-conversations of massive trivia. Something is happening here – not sure what it all means… Yet.
Anyway this all came about when one of my work collegaues (and FB friends) dropped by my office and commented on the fact that many of my status updates on FB involved my running. She asked why this was. Suddenly all the little micro-comments had been harvested and analysed – in the nonchalant way in which the mind works and formulated into a question.
So it’s time to officially announce the fact that I am officially training for a specific goal. My running became vaguely serious in September last year when I succumbed to temptation and bought real running gear. I discussed this online too in a post called Slippery Slope to Spandex. Since then I have been running for fun and exercise.
Then a couple of weeks ago in a fit of misguided hubris I registered for my first ever race. And I mean EVER. I never even did sports as a kid. So now on the 16 May I shall be running a local half-marathon called Göteborgsvarvet. I will not be alone in this there are already over 36 000 runners registered.
So why write all this here? Well to paraphrase an aweful song which I haven’t been able to lose since my teenage years: it’s my blog and I’ll write if I want to. But in reality I want to write it down to increase the pressure, to make sure that I will go through with the whole affair. By placing this text online I am bringing to bear the tools of reputation and public shaming to make sure I will go through with this impluse decision.
Photo: Running man by Tleilaxus (CC BY-NC-SA)
All I can say is: run fatboy run…
Facebook profiles can be used to detect narcissism
In a study carried out at the University of Georgia the relationship between Facebook and narcissism has been studied. The study suggests that online social networking sites such as Facebook might be useful tools for detecting whether someone is a narcissist.
“We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others,” said lead author Laura Buffardi, a doctoral student in psychology who co-authored the study with associate professor W. Keith Campbell.
And the rest of us use everything from clothes to personal webpages to social networking sites as neutral tools. Yeah, right!
Undone by success
There is a growing trend in Facebook bashing (a type of conservatism claiming that the original versions of Facebook were best), Facebook criticism (Facebook would be better if only one detail or another were changed), Facebook denial (Facebook is never going to be useful/important/worthwhile), Facebook disbelivers (what is Facebook good for) and anti-Facebook purists (Never used, never will use FB).
Whether you are a FB believer or happy user or belong to a basher group it is difficult to ignore the fact that FB is being used to an amazing degree.
Some bashers, for example, Cory Doctorow: “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook“. (Nov 2007) explain that FB will collapse because eventually you will have to accept people you dislike to be your FB friends. Cory writes:
For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. ”
So I agree with these types of criticism eventually someone, or several someones, will demand to be added. We are back in the seventh grade playground and you are (once again?) no longer the center of your own world – which was the promise of a FB centric world.
My problem, and subsequently my form of FB bashing, is that it is not that the creepy people that concern me but rather all the nice, harmless, friendly, acquaintances that want to be my friends. At present I have just under 200 friends on FB, but the strange thing is that most of my “offline” friends don’t have FB accounts. In reality, and this may be a sad admission, I don’t have almost 200 friends. Many of the people who have befriended my on FB are acquintances (which is ok), online contacts (which is ok) but many are people whom I do not know – which is almost creepy.
Therefore to me the reason FB will fail is that it will never actually do anything. It’s goal, and measure of success is the amount of friends – but achieving this goal is not difficult if you do not care who you add as friends.
But I guess this argument rests on the foundation that Facebook has a point. If it is pointless then I don’t know.