News for the Week of December 30, 2007
Topping tech news this week is a look at how academic researchers are using the social Web to study how people interact - both online and off.
Social-networking scholarship
Social-networking sites are important Petri dishes. By studying the social Web, researchers are learning a lot about how people interact - not just about how they do so now and online but about human interaction in general. In fact, research in social-networking sites "may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because [it's] based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses," reports the New York Times, referring to a UCLA- and Harvard-based study of 1,700 Facebook users in the junior class of one northeastern US college.
Just one of the things researchers are looking at: "weak ties," those between, say, two classmates or people who meet at a big party. "Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family." According to the Times, "social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement."
Another important concept they're exploring is "triadic closure," "first put forth by the pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel . whether one's friends are also friends of one another. If this seems trivial, consider that a study in 2004 in The American Journal of Public Health suggested that adolescent girls who are socially isolated and whose friends are not friends with one another experienced more suicidal thoughts."
Oral culture online
You know how most communication, story-telling, and history used to be oral? Well, with social networking, humanity may be coming full circle. "Academic researchers are starting to [explore] the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies," the New York Times reports. "In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and 'friending,' they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication. The growth of social networks - and the Internet as a whole - stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like 'talking' than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates." The Times tells of cultural anthropology Prof. Michael Wesch at Kansas State University who at one time lived with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, "studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture." Dr. Wesch "applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users."
Growing research community
The Washington Post recently ran a gossipy piece about the fledgling social-media research community which got some reaction in the academic blogosphere (e.g., www.chutry.wordherders.net), but it does name a number of the individual researchers and projects working on the social Web right now, including ones at Cornell and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
In other news...
- Young adults: big library users. Americans 18-30 are public libraries' biggest fans. "And people are going to libraries not only for the Internet-enabled computers there but also for library reference books, newspapers and magazines," reports the Associated Press, citing a new study by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew/Internet director Lee Rainie told the AP that this age group is the generation that saw libraries going from book repositories to "information hubs," with database-accessing computers alongside reference bookshelves. Still, the findings were a surprise after an authoritative Benton Foundation report 10 years ago, which said 18-to-24-year-olds were the people least likely to view libraries as important. "That generation [now 28-34 in age] now uses libraries to solve problems at half the rate as the current 18-30 set, the new study found," the AP reports, adding that in the 10-year time period since the Benton report, library Internet access "has grown from about 44% of public libraries to more than 99%." But I suspect increased library connectivity is only part of the explanation. Internet literacy does not spell media literacy. My theory is that media literacy and critical thinking are needed in proportion to Net literacy. In other words, the more access young people (and all of us) have to information the more they need guidance from experts in media literacy, or information navigation (aka librarians).
- More Web playgrounds coming. Stories about kids' virtual worlds are becoming perennial because children 6-10 appear to be a growth market. Twenty million children are expected to be virtual-world members by 2011, up from 8.2 million right now, according to eMarketer figures cited by the New York Times. This latest article paints a pretty good landscape. There's Disney's new "Pirates of the Caribbean" world for kids under 11, with "worlds on the way for Cars and Tinker Bell, among others. Nickelodeon, already home to Neopets, is spending $100 million to develop a string of worlds. Coming soon from Warner Brothers Entertainment, part of Time Warner: a cluster of worlds based on its Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera and D. C. comics properties." I was glad to get an update from this piece on Neopets' protections for kids under 13 (in compliance with the US's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA): "Neopets restricts children under 13 from certain areas unless their parents give permission in a fax. Several Neopets employees patrol the site around the clock, and messaging features are limited to approved words and phrases."
- New features afoot at MySpace. MySpace plans to be people's dashboard for navigating cyberspace, USATODAY reports - the place "where they can check in on the activities of friends, peruse email, get the latest on news and weather, and post their favorite photos and videos." To deal with the growing threat Facebook represents to MySpace, USATODAY says, the latter is projecting itself as a place for self-expression rather than being the social "utility" it says Facebook is (Facebook declined comment for the story). Plans for 2008 include: giving members "the option of creating multiple profiles tailored to friends, family and business associates"; a service that lets MySpace members make free Internet phone calls through Skype; and a program that lets musicians showcase music on their pages and sell performance videos.
- Politician's profile deleted. It was Liberal Democrat Steve Webb, a British member of Parliament, whose Facebook page was deleted after someone sent in an abuse report calling it an imposter profile. Soon there was a Facebook group called "Steve Webb is Real!", CNET reports. His profile was shortly reinstated, to the satisfaction of his 2,500 Facebook friends and constitutents. But what's interesting about all this is that on the social Web it's sometimes as hard to prove there's a real person behind a profile as it is to prove there isn't.
