Social Norms

What about the discrete glance?

The new iPhone doesn’t have a fingerprint reader to unlock.

Face ID on the iPhone X uses a “TrueDepth” camera setup, which blasts your face with more than 30,000 infrared dots and scans your face in 3D. Apple says this can “recognize you in an instant” and log you into your phone. (ArsTechnica)

While it is common to feel obstinate and antagonistic towards technical change there is one thing that this technical change will force.

Think about all the times and social settings where your phone is lying flat on a table and it’s socially awkward to pick it up. If you want to glance at the screen, maybe to check the time, a text, or even your emails. You simply press the home button and glance at the phone.

Do you now need to pick up the device? This micro-movement is huge, it open obvious and can even be a social slight.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Being Passive Aggressive on Facebook

How do you know when you’ve made a faux pas on a social network? If you let slip a politically incorrect comment in real life you should be able to tell that you have crossed a line by the pained expressions and the nervous squirms – but how do people squirm on social media?

This social squirming is important. It is a way in which we are schooled and taught the social boundaries of our world. Naturally some overly boorish person may actually say “we don’t accept that behavior here” but this is really unnecessary. We are usually good at picking up cues, the squirms are enough.

So how do people squirm on Facebook? Well they do so in the most passive aggressive way. Rarely do you find the boorish reproachful comment. Most often what we are met with is silence. Sure, offscreen it silence is a passive aggressive strategy but online it is the most commonly used.

Try it! Say something incorrect on FB and you will be frozen out of the social circle. Keep it up and people may begin to block you. Of course this means that the time nobody liked your post… it could have been that you crossed a social line.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Social Norms & Intellectual Property

(via Cybernormer) Måns Svensson & Stefan Larsson have released a report Social Norms & Intellectual Property – Online norms and the European legal development here is some information about what it’s about:

Research report in Sociology of Law (Nov 2009):
Social Norms and Intellectual Property – Online norms and the European legal development.
By Måns Svensson and Stefan Larsson

The study empirically examined, or rather examined the lack of, social norms opposing illegal file sharing. A total of over 1,000 respondents have answered the questionnaire. Along with the social norm indicators, the study maps out relevant questions regarding internet behaviour in this field, such as the will to use anonymity services and the will to pay for copyrighted content. These results are compared and contrasted with the legal development trend in European law in internet and file sharing related matters, as well as the Swedish implementation of this development, as a member of the European Union. This includes the Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive (IPRED), the Directive on Data retention as well as the implementation of INFOSOC.

The report consequently portrays the social norms on the one hand and the legal development on the other, and the overarching question of the report therefore addresses the correlation of these two. Do the social norms amongst 15-25 year olds match the legal regulation, as well as the regulatory trend on this field? If not, how can this be understood or explained? The study shows that the cybernorms differ, both in inherent structures and origin, from current legal constructions.

Posted on by mklang