Rexbot's Vox

This is odd... when I first read Rheingold's Smart Mobs when it came out, I assessed it as good but also somewhat self-evident. Going back and reading it now, four years later, it seems spectacularly precient, not so much in its characterization of mobile culture, but in the issues it raises in two other (non-mobile-specific) chapters: "Technologies of Cooperation" (chapt. 2) and "Always-On Panopticon" (chapt. 8). Both of these chapters have more to do with social networks than mobile, but more on that in a second...

Anyway, let's talk about mobs. Was anyone here involved in the Flash Mob phenom in the summer of 2003? For the newbies: Flash Mobs were spontaneous events in which large amounts of people would congregate in a public area and do... nothing. Or, if not nothing, then something weird. Why? There's no great answer to this. It was somewhat like performance art, but also just too random to really be labelled anything.

Here's how the event evolved: you would sign up on an email list. A few hours before the event, you would get a text message telling you to appear somewhere random (a mall, for example) and to look for someone wearing something noticable (a "This Devil Wears Prada" t-shirt). You would be handed instructions on what to do next ("appear at 5:43 in the atrium in front of Macy's and walk around like a robot for exactly two minutes and then leave"). A hundred people might show up and participate in this very same event.

Again, we might ask why? The guy who invented Flash Mobs -- an editor at Harper's, though no one knew that at the time -- has some fascinating answers, which have a lot to do with the nature of buzz creation. (I was the organizer of the second flash mob, which is talked about in that Harper's story.)

More importantly for this discussion, flash mobs were synchronous with two other events: 1) the rise of online social network (Friendster) and 2) the rise of mobile communication (texting). This, to me, is the power of Rheingold's thesis: mobile communication (technology) is nothing without the power of networks (sociology). It is a powerful tract, which I didn't realize until now predates so much of our thinking about how networks work.

I thought I'd approach today's readings by asking questions related to tagging:

+ Why does tagging seem to work better for some content than for other types of content? For example, del.icio.us' use of tagging is perfect for bookmarking the entire web and Flickr's tagging is exemplary in providing a social application around photos. But why has Amazon's use of tagging for products never taken off? Or why has YouTube's tagging system always seemed ancillary to its other organization schemas (users, groups, search, etc.)? And is the answer to this related to the type of content or the type of interface? And if it's interface, does that suggest there are more effective ways to organize content than tagging?

+ Doesn't it seem like one of the most interesting aspects of tagging has to do with the side-effects? Surely, there's a network effect in the success of del.icio.us and Flickr that may or may not have been planned, but there are also side-effects related to what can be done. For instance, there's Flickr Interesting, del.icio.us popular, and Digg Swarm.

+ Actually, that Digg Swarm app isn't really tagging -- it's Digg's thumbs up / thumbs down system. And isn't this interesting -- one of the most successful Web 2.0 apps of last year (still talking about Digg here) doesn't use tagging?

+ The design of my personal blog over has morphed over the years as I try to account for changes in how I perceive categories on the site. Most recently, I've realized that the problem with categories is that all the exciting things that are happening right now in internal/culture/technology tends to fall between the cracks. What would a between-the-cracks category system look like?

+ Gmail famously differentiated itself from other email applications by adding tagging (and search). Although I used Gmail constantly, I'm no fan of the "labels" (i.e., tags) as a replacement for a folder structure. I really like embedded folders within embedded folders, rather than this flat tagging system. Doesn't everyone?

+ Why does no one tag their blog posts here on Vox?

This week's reading were -- for me -- the best collection we've had so far. I'll try to cover each briefly:

Reputation Systems

Here was a key concluding graph for me:

Finally, there is also potential difficulty in aggregating and displaying feedback, so it is useful influencing future decision about whom to trust. Net feedback (positives minus negatives) is displayed at eBay; other sites, including Amazon.com, display an average. These numerical ratings fail to convey important subtleties of online interactions; for example, Did the feedback come from low-value transactions? What were the reputations of the people providing the feedback?

This is something I've often wondered about reputation systems on major sites: why don't they choose to display more of their data? They could easily visualize more of the information, but they seem to believe their current systems suffice.

Group Dynamics In Cyberspace

I had dismissed Wallace's book in an earlier blog post, but I take it back after this chapter, which pulled together several examples into a cohesive group. The sections on conformity and group polarization serve as precursors (and, perhaps, responses) to Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds, which has served as the theoretical backbone to much of Web 2.0's thinking over the last couple years. Because of Surowiecki, we've come to believe in the potential of the masses to create a sensible middle-ground, but Wallace uses illustrations from studies that show how group dynamics create a polarizing -- not a mediating -- effect. It makes me wonder if what's happened in the intervening years has more to do with the advancement of good software than with an actual philosophical disagreement.

The Economies Of Online Cooperation

Kollock's essay served as a major entry point into my final paper last quarter. Here's part of the abstract:

Every day, millions of people edit Wikipedia articles, write Amazon reviews, contribute to niche message boards, upload photos to media websites, leave comments on blogs, and contribute in countless ways to innumerable Internet communities. They do this without any tangible financial reward. This paper poses one simple question: why?

We can assume that individuals get a perceived value from their contribution - but how? Is it personal expression? Is it a sense of community? Is it altruism

Kollock begins to lay out a theory to answer this question with four "motivations for contributing": 1) reciprocity, 2) reputation, 3) efficacy, 4) public good. Various virtual encounters will complicate each of these factors, but they are nonetheless good starting points for understanding the complexity of profiling online contribution.

First off, let's quickly modernize Herring et al's blog numbers from their 2003 study, Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs. Technorati, which is sorta the non plus ultra of blog indexes, releases quarterly statements on the state of the blogosphere, the most recent of which says that there are currently 57 million blogs and counting. If you dig into the numbers, you'll see a new blog is launched approximately every five seconds. Those numbers sound astounding, but there was some hubbub raised at the end of 2006 when Gartner released a study that suggested that blogging would peak in 2007, and that the number of new bloggers would level off.

The Gartner study annoyed me for a couple reasons -- the first of which being that 57 million is considered a shortfall. But more importantly, I think the study raises some problems that "Bridging the Gap" also raise, without it even necessarily being conscious of it. To wit, what exactly is a blog?

Herring et al spend a fair amount of time on genre definitions, which were all the rage at the time. At the outset, asking what a blog really is -- how it differed from a homepage, whether comments were required, how similar/dissimilar it is to journalism  -- seemed like heady conversation. Now, the factors seem somewhat accounted for and the debate settled, even if the answer of what constitutes blogging may be like that of pornography to the Supreme Court: I know it when I see it.

Or is it actually that simple? I honestly want to wash away those questions as nostalgic folly, but at the same time this Gartner study makes me ask the question all over again: what constitutes a blog? MySpace is a great example of something that's blog-like without exactly being a blog. (Of course MySpace has official blogging functionality, but beyond that, I've heard people refer to their profile pages as their blog. Which is jarring to me, but apparently commonplace.) Or take Twitter, a texting application that I'm completely obsessed with, which is sorta like nano-blogging. Or Flickr, which is used more and more as a blog-like medium. And then there's Stickam, a videocam community, which would be a stretch to call blogging because there is no text beyond chat, yet it is most certainly a way to broadcast yourself. Gartner, of course, doesn't account for any of these, and many more.

In the end, the exercise of "genre analysis" seems futile. We're inventing all these new forms of quasi-blogging to almost render the term meaningless. In some ways, a blog is become the place that aggregates all your other online activity that isn't blogging (flickring, tagging, bookmarking, calendaring.... blogging).

I was lucky enough to be an early adopter blogger, so my blog got the attention of a lot of early commentators. I remember being asked on a panel a couple years ago, "Is blogging just a fad." I thought about it for a moment and said, "I have no idea if blogging, strictly defined, is a fad. However, I'm certain that the opportunities for people to create virtual representations of themselves will never go away."

This one's for Drew... New York magazine has a story that argues we are witnessing the greatest generation gap since the invention of rock 'n roll, all because of MySpace/YouTube/LiveJournal/etc. It's long, but pretty great.

Since our topic this week is social networks, the link Mapping New Testament Social Networks seems appropriate. Never thought I'd say this, but Jesus was definitely a supernode. :)

This week's readings all pertain to communication -- mostly one-to-one exchange of information, but also some group communication theory. Recently, I've begun to wonder if new media has disrupted the field of "communication studies" so radically that we may not be left with anything to study.

Say what? Let me unpack that:

There used to be these distinct principles called "publishing" and "communication." You picked up the phone to call your mom, you read the newspaper to gather information, you listened to your CD player to hear music. Nowadays, you read news on the same device that you make phone calls, you chat with people on the same software that you share music with, you play collaborative games on the same platform that you watch movies on. That's the big secret of this so-called media revolution--"publishing" (creating and distributing content) and "communication" (sharing one-to-one information) are becoming the same thing.

So that's my question: has something happened in the turning of private to public, in the transformation of communication tools into publication tools, in visualization of personal data... has something happened to suggest that "communication" is becoming synonymous with "publishing"?

Take blogs. Seemingly one of the most simple forms of new media, blogs get complicated when you ask yourself if blogging is a form of communication or publication. A blog is both personal and public, enclosed and open. Certainly, not all communication is public. But in an age of forwarded emails, BCC:ed exchanges, public LiveJournals, and exhibitionist web cams, doesn't it seem as though all communication is potentially public?

I realize we'll get into the publication/distribution/broadcasting/social applications soon enough in this class. But sometimes I wonder if everything has been tossed into the social sphere, and that "communication" is a dying concept.

Part I: Media Mahem

We all have our rarefied angles, our individualized perspectives, our nuanced subjectivisms that we bring to this class in order to study social media. I'll lay one of mine out on the table: I still strongly believe in the importance of the latter half of our object of study -- I want to put the media back in social media.

I work and socialize with a mix of journalists and engineers, bloggers and programmers, pragmatists and futurists. When the journalists hear me speak with terms like "credibility" and "balance" and "facts," they think they have found an ally, but they don't realize that I secretly believe they're about to lose their jobs if they can't figure out how to adapt to this new media landscape. And when sanguine futurists hear me speak of the future of media involving "collaboration" and "transparency" and "open-source," they think they have found a business partner in their attempt to lead the irreversible usurping of mainstream media, but they too are ignorant in their own way, usually in understanding how media works in our culture as a social and economic force.

The truth (or "the future"), of course, lies in the dialectical middle of this morass of pudding. Whether it's aggregated or recommended or remixed or socialized, media will survive, and big media most likely will survive with it (if nothing else, in the form of the aggregators, recommenders, remixers, and socializers).

Part II: Interface Culture

I like to ask classrooms this question: what are the technological innovations that have really changed media consumption in the past ten years? The list usually includes such things as TiVo, Google, iTunes/iPod, RSS, YouTube, eBay, and so forth. Then I ask this question: which of these things have given us something new (i.e., new content)? It's somewhat amazing to realize, but none of those new technologies have given us new content: no new tv because of TiVo, no new music because of the iPod, no new webpages because of Google, no new content because of RSS, etc. So if they didn't provide content, what did these new amazing technologies give us? They provided us with something else that that we never quite realized we needed: interface.

That is, these technologies provided us tools by which to sort, filter, manipulate, comment, and aggregate stuff that we already had. This has been a stupendous revolution, easily the biggest change in media since television, and possibly since Guttenberg. But it has also led to the surfeit of Web 2.0 companies who have realized the same thing: We don't have to make anything! [See Part I.]

Part III: Social Innovation

Does anyone else remember the Summer of Friendster? It was the summer of 2003 that Friendster became the single most important thing to me and my friends -- more important than the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, the new season of Veronica Mars, or Michel Gondry's Lost In Translation (my friends are a little culture-obsessed). Suddenly, there was this new device we were using to interact with people, reference people, comment on people, gossip about people.

Much has been said already about what Friendster did right and wrong, and I don't intend to go into all of that. But I intentionally bring Friendster up as a reference point for our readings this week -- in particular, "Social Translucence" and "Research In Social Computing", which both do an excellent job of circumnavigating the issues of the time, but which also leave me a little cold on the potential for innovation in social software. Both papers come to social software from the perspective of the social scientist -- people looking to craft online experience based upon the complexities of real-world social experience.

But this, I would content, overlooks the Summer of Friendster. What made Friendster marvelously (if fleetingly) important was that it performed tasks that I couldn't do offline. In particular, it provided a visualization of friendships, an extension of the mental model I had in my head of my social sphere.

This, I fear, is what we leave out when we study online networks as social scientists. When we attempt to reproduce society with social software, I wonder why we would set the bar so low.

My real blog, which aggregates various pieces of life: Fimoculous.com.