NetDynam 2.0

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

Read the rest of this entry »

i’ve been citing ross williams’ 2002 unpublished conference paper on shaming in email in a couple of my own papers – there’s not much in my area on this topic, so it looks as if i’m going to have to look into journals of psychology in order to get reports of any studies done in the area of group solidarity, and interpersonal alignment and positioning in the context of online groups.

i’ve asked ross whether i can post it here as a link for any others to follow up. whereas i’d have placed it in the list anthro resources page previously, it looks as if this has been moved down a rank to post-only status – hence i am announcing the link here: “The dynamics of shaming in an email discussion group”.
it’s in PDF form and is quite short so will download onto your desktop fairly quickly. members of netdynam in february 2002 will no doubt recall the discussion that the paper engendered at that time.

a short excerpt follows:

‘We are deeply sensitised to the occasions of shame, for ourselves and others, and the rules of etiquette and face-saving work to preserve our social systems against the disruptive effects of shame when the gap between embodied and ideal selves threatens to be revealed inadvertently. Conversely, the threat to reveal this gap and subject the other to shame is a powerful tool in expert hands; and we are all experts.

Threats to the public face can arise so swiftly and be handled so automatically that they pass in a moment, almost unnoticed, and only a careful record of gestures, glances, phrasing and vocal inflections allows us to interpret an interaction as an instance of social control based on shaming. In this paper I will analyse a shaming
interaction in an e-mail group, partly because it is inherently interesting to discover familiar group processes in a novel setting, and partly because the text medium of the email group is so congenial to the hermeneutic endeavour; generating an interpretable text from a face-to-face group is intensely laborious and subject to serious error and omissions, even when one has the best audio-visual equipment available. With email, the work is done for you.’

here’s a link to the previous list anthropology post for further context on netdynam the list.

For my own purposes, I am known to speak of affectual topologies and affectual ecologies. (This having to do with memesis and anthropology–whatever.)

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts
New York Times
By ALEX WRIGHT
Published: August 23, 2009

(excerpts)

1.
Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.
This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

2.
Jodange, based in Yonkers, offers a service geared toward online publishers that lets them incorporate opinion data drawn from over 450,000 sources, including mainstream news sources, blogs and Twitter.

4.
Such tools could help companies pinpoint the effect of specific issues on customer perceptions, helping them respond with appropriate marketing and public relations strategies.

5.
While the more advanced algorithms used by Scout Labs, Jodange and Newssift employ advanced analytics to avoid such pitfalls, none of these services works perfectly. “Our algorithm is about 70 to 80 percent accurate,” said Ms. Francis, who added that its users can reclassify inaccurate results so the system learns from its mistakes.

Translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science, however. “Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,” said Seth Grimes, the founder of the suburban Maryland consulting firm Alta Plana, who points to the many cultural factors and linguistic nuances that make it difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. “ ‘Sinful’ is a good thing when applied to chocolate cake,” he said.

The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorize a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (“love” is good, “hate” is bad). But that approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions. Reliable sentiment analysis requires parsing many linguistic shades of gray.

“We are dealing with sentiment that can be expressed in subtle ways,” said Bo Pang, a researcher at Yahoo who co-wrote “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis,” one of the first academic books on sentiment analysis.

To get at the true intent of a statement, Ms. Pang developed software that looks at several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?).

For example, a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

As sentiment analysis algorithms grow more sophisticated, they should begin to yield more accurate results that may eventually point the way to more sophisticated filtering mechanisms. They could become a part of everyday Web use.

Code-swarm, anyone?