NetDynam 2.0

Following from my previous post about methods for learning more about people encountered on the internet, The New York Times today features an article The Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Off-line (Laura M. Holson; NYT 5-8:2010).

While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.

They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

One interesting question raised by the article–but not addressed–concerns how investigations into online ‘reputation,’ are framed by investigators.

In this article from Septmeber 2009, How HR Professionals Analyze Your Facebook Profile, author Damian Davila Rojas mentions a key finding from a Harris Interactive poll of HR professionals,

The findings were more likely to get candidates rejected than hired: 35% of HR professionals said social networking content had caused them to eliminate a candidate, while only 18% reported deciding to employ someone based on a profile.

There’s a graphic presented to represent the negative reasons for rejecting a job candidate based in their online data.

Of more interest to me is the positive graphic because it begs the question of how positive data is framed.

Here are the top three categories:

50% Got a good feel for the candidate’s personality, could see a good fit within the company culture

39% Job candidate’s background information supported their professional qualifications for the job

39% Job candidate’s site conveyed a professional image

Item #2 is the only element subject to neutral verification. Whereas item #1 begs the question about framing and instrumental approach, and, item #3 does the same while pointing in the direction of normative practices. Also, item #3, with respect to Facebook, can only mean a professional image within the limitations set by Facebook. This includes all the data from friends which flows into the person’s Facebook home page.

Hiring practices vary greatly. They can be very subjective and are subject to hidden cognitive biases. For example, the hunch is more a problem to be eliminated than a valuable instinct in this area.

Social media presents data about a person’s social network. This is not off limits to the hiring professional. Yet, this realm of data raises interesting questions.

Suppose that internet users were differentiated using a descriptive vector consisting of, on one side, the trail of specific information they volunteer, on another side, their various utilization modes, and, on a third side, their estimation about what their attitude is toward the dissemination of their own data.

For example, in our email discussion group we discovered some users thought their personal musings brought into the mode of a text-only dialog were basically private because it was believed it was unlikely any user with a pernicious intent would invest their time in seeking out and data mining and re-deploying the data of the dialog.

So, this vector, once the data was triangulated, could report out the often contradictory attitudes upon which the internet thrives, as a useful source of (and for,) so-called user-data.

Posed against these differentiations are the various threats and deployments, about which many users are unaware. There could be illusions extant on this other side too.

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Meanwhile…the bust of google buzz happened so quickly that it barely has had time to pass into internet legend. How quickly?

Google Inc., owner of the most-used Internet search engine, was sued over allegations its Buzz social-networking service violated the privacy rights of users of the company’s Gmail service.

Buzz, introduced by Mountain View, California-based Google in February, automatically displayed to other users the customer’s contacts pulled from Google Gmail accounts. Google has said it modified the e-mail service after customers complained.

The complaint, filed April 5 in federal court in San Jose, California, follows a letter sent to federal antitrust authorities last month by 10 members of Congress. The lawmakers urged an investigation into whether Buzz compromised users’ privacy.

“Google has publicly admitted that its Buzz program presents privacy concerns, and Google has made several waves of modifications to the program,” according to the lawsuit. The changes “do not go far enough,” and the error “already caused damage because the Buzz program disclosed private user information the moment Google launched the service.” Google Sued Over Claims Buzz Violated Privacy Rights

Hmmm, this tickles my sense of irony.

2. Their is NO VALUE with Google Buzz as I mentioned earlier. Who wants something that has already been done before? As I said, it’s FriendFeed, but worse to every degree! I feel when using the platform that it offers a very messy experience. I don’t enjoy it. There’s so much going on that I don’t want to even bother checking it. Social Tech Zone: Google Buzz At This Point Is Google Bust

It is not simple to both protect privacy and promote the development of a healthy network. Facebook was the first to prove that privacy controls can foster the growth of social networks, but as the Beacon episode and Facebook’s recent privacy changes both demonstrated, even the most experienced social media companies can go sideways when it comes to privacy. When rolling out any kind of new social media platform or application, companies should always engage in extensive, privacy-centered user testing before releasing any social networking products to the public. Leslie Harris-Buzz or Bust?

Slashdot Thread

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Elsewhere, this news hit at the same time as happened the Google Buzz rollout.

Google Ultrafast Broadband May Shake Up Fiber Market

As I like to maintain, it helps to have a sense of irony.

I turned off Google Buzz for several reasons. The most important reason is that social apps such as Buzz and Facebook aren’t compelling in any awesome way for me. It could be said that I indulge Facebook. I spend less than an hour ‘there’ in a given week. It is not the best way, using the internet, to communicate with me. Basically, I can take it or leave it. Although reconnecting with old friends has been rewarding, real connection makes demands Facebook doesn’t support.

On the other hand, I like Facebook’s gallery feature, and, I like the feature that allows for publicizing blog posts, (where the feed automatically posts slugs from blog postings across my two personal blogs, and netdynam. Facebook would add more value if I leveraged it more in that direction. But, I do not.

So, Google Buzz, doesn’t trip my undeveloped social app triggers at all. It’s more intrusive in being tied into gmail, and, as it happened, I was forced to deprecate gmail its HTML interface because–in the aftermath of Buzz’s rollout, I discovered add-on java broke Gmail’s java as far as its advanced interface goes on OSX Tiger. between Tiger’s awful java implementation and Google’s hellish support, I was stuck.

I’m on Myspace-Musicians too. (Kamelmauz) Ugh.

A netydnam colleague emailed an interesting article from The New York Review of Books,

In the World of Facebook, by Charles Petersen; reviewing two books, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (by Ben Mezrich) Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (by Julia Angwin).

The article’s second paragraph:

What is “social networking”? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or “profile,” that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who’s crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet’s peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, “friending” them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.

If I wanted to look up the author, Charles Peterson, on Facebook, I would be unable to do so. His name is too common. It’s interesting: if you have a unique name you’re much more accessible on Facebook.

The article is fascinating and worth reading in its entirety. Still, here’s a Netdynamics-worthy clip:

But Facebook doesn’t want to simply branch out onto a few more Web pages; the site hopes, in a somewhat sinister but potentially very useful (and profitable) way, to begin following us around the entire Web. This is the ambition of “Facebook Connect,” a special service that members may activate, and that has enabled many popular Web sites, such as Netflix, YouTube, and the Huffington Post, to tie activity elsewhere on the Internet back to Facebook profiles. If you leave a response on a Huffington Post story, for instance, it can, via Facebook Connect, automatically be shared with your friends on Facebook; subsequent responses by Facebook friends could eventually appear both on your Facebook page and on the original Huffington Post story.

If Facebook Connect is widely adopted—and the service has been quite successful so far, with Yahoo and even MySpace signing up—we may begin to see changes to many of our basic assumptions about the Internet. Once a commenter knows that a vitriolic statement will be shared with a large and personal social circle—appearing more like a letter to a small-town newspaper than an anonymous outburst—the typically venomous atmosphere of online comments, for example, may well diminish.

‘Aggression‘ mitigation? Sure. It would be hard to conceptualize a Facebook driven by users identified by handles or nicks. Meanwhile, Buzz uses your address book–at the least. I haven’t investigated Buzz of course, yet I recognize it’s a slightly different experiment.

Having read resources offered by Frank, I’d like to elevate one. Clay Shirkey: Gin, Television and Social Surplus. April 23, 2008.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

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And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

Questions about how people use time, these days, may be framed (and analyzed,) within the rubric of behavioral economics. (I can’t do this myself, like Mr. Shirkey, I’m only able to offer phenomenological intuitions.) Still, I bring the frame of ‘time investment’ up because I suppose a finely differentiated analysis of how people actually deploy their time, with various internet utilities comprising part of the picture, would enrich intuitions.

For example, as I’ve mentioned before, a music fan can acquire more music (mp3s) than this fan can expect to deal with in the old sense of ‘dealing.’ This is true for other resources, such as ebooks, articles, movies, software; is true for any ‘object of potential interest’ discovered in the web, (or candy shop,) of intended and unintended distribution.

Time deployment exists in various contexts. These contexts can be described too. (I’m fairly sure Shirkey’s idealization doesn’t wash, were it to be suffer the details.) I wonder if cognitive surplus is accompanied in specific cases with its own surplus-derived stress?

What would constitute a robust conceptual ecology with respect to the factors of time investment and anticipation of benefit? Each of these is a very broad brush. For example how would time spent commenting on blog posts be accounted for were some benefit to figure into the account?

Another feature–these days–I term, truncation. Twitter exemplifies this, yet, also there are the short form messages tacked to Facebook walls, terse emails, blog and forum comments, abbreviated annotations of various sorts, and, of course, text messages.

I reckon truncation is not the result of having too much time.

What has the internet done to us?

Is Technology Dumbing Down Japanese?

Emily Parker, New York Times, November 5, 2009 | src

excerpt:

Now the Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. Americans may fret over the ways digital communications encourage sloppy grammar and spelling, but in Japan these changes are much more wrenching. A vertically written language seems to be becoming increasingly horizontal. Novels are being written and read on little screens. People have gotten so used to typing on computers that they can no longer write characters by hand. And English words continue to infiltrate the language.

MU Researchers Find Internet Search Process Affects Cognition, Emotion
Readers’ physiological responses to online content provides new insight for advertisers

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Nearly 73 percent of all American adults use the Internet on a daily basis, according to a 2009 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey. Half of these adults use the Web to find information via search engines, while 38 percent use it to pass the time. In a recent study, University of Missouri researchers found that readers were better able to understand, remember and emotionally respond to material found through “searching” compared to content found while “surfing.”

“If, as these data suggest, the cognitive and emotional impact of online content is greatest when acquired by searching, then Web site sponsors might consider increasing their advertising on pages that tend to be accessed via search engines,” said Kevin Wise, assistant professor of strategic communication and co-director of the Psychological Research on Information and Media Effects (PRIME) Lab at the University of Missouri.

In the study, the researchers examined how methods for acquiring news — searching for specific content versus surfing a news Web site — affected readers’ emotional responses while reading news stories. They monitored participants’ heart rate, skin conductance and facial musculature to gauge their emotional responses to unpleasant news. The researchers found that unpleasant content triggered greater emotional responses when readers sought the information by searching rather than surfing. In future studies, Wise will study the effects of acquiring pleasant content on readers’ emotional responses.

“How readers acquire messages online has ramifications for their cognitive and emotional response to those messages,” Wise said. “Messages that meet readers’ existing informational needs elicit stronger emotional reactions.”

The researchers also found that information was better understood and remembered when individuals conducted specific searches for information. In a previous study, Wise tested the effects of searching and surfing on readers’ responses to images and found similar results.

Univ.Mo.Bulletin November 4, 2009 Emily Smith

Pew Internet and American Life Project

Daily Internet Activity Survey – source

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