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.

When I meet a new participant, I immediately become interested in who they are; what they do; what are their interests; what are their publications; where are their internet tracks; what are their affiliations.

Often the forensics involved in uncovering this data is easy to accomplish. Given an email or wide use of a particular handle, a real name falls into place, and the traces and locations are quickly unfolded.

On the other hand, when neither email or handle lead to a real name, then the forensics often become formidable. There are give-aways, because the next step is use distinctive phrases and the brute text search capability of google.

This always works when the internet tracks are text-based and prolix. This doesn’t work when people don’t leave “text” tracks.

***

I prefer people do not compartmentalize their various aspects, when they’re willing to speak of the data but not say where it resides. Especially this is so when I find it “hidden” in plain sight.

This subject has come up at various times on the ND email list, in the back-channel, and even about this blog. This concern for how their own data is to be distributed, for me, is always in the context of my experience with rare people who are masters of concealment and most people who don’t understand what this mastery actually entails.

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.

The Geek Freaks – Why Jaron Lanier rants against what the Web has become.

By Michael Agger SLATE Sunday, Jan. 3, 2010

In Lanier’s eyes, there is no longer a middle realm in which musicians can make music according to their own standards, sell it directly to fans, and not starve. Musicians are either kids in vans making just enough money for the next gig or dilettantes with a vanity career. The Facebook generation gets its music for free and doesn’t expect to pay for it, and this has helped bring about a musical Dark Age. That’s not a crazy idea, but it’s just Lanier’s hunch. When you start to poke around for data, you get a sense of the landscape. According to this U.K. study, artists now make the majority of their money doing live performances, and the total revenue accrued by artists has increased. Today’s theoretical middle-class musician would probably have to travel more, but he or she could still make a living.

There’s also the problem of the counterexample: What great artist has been left unrecognized by the Internet? Who hasn’t found a niche? Lanier, to his credit, is not a simple pessimist. He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: “We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it’s accessed.” Again, not a bad concept, but a platonic idea that sounds great in theory. I don’t see the government opening an iTunes store anytime soon.

Lanier is a survivor and has good instincts: We need to be wary of joining in the wisdom of the crowds, of trusting that open collaboration always produces the best results, of embracing the growing orthodoxy that making cultural products free will benefit the actual producers of those cultural products. But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it’s Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.

The problem is that the Web is much bigger now, and both Jobs and the bedroom oud player must, in their own ways, strive for attention from the hive mind. And the results can arrive like lightning: Just a few weeks ago, a man in Uruguay was given a $30 million dollar movie deal after posting a sci-fi short on YouTube. No one likes to become obsolete or cranky, but my sense is that Lanier doesn’t want to play on this new field. The talents and insights of Lanier and his peers were aimed at a tech-savvy elite whose impact will never be the same again. The innovative momentum is now about democratizing the Web and its uses—Flickr, Twitter, and, yes, Facebook. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It’s time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.

Lanier appeared on PBS’s News Hour this week. My immediate impression was that he doesn’t have very developed television chops. In fact, I could personally relate to his rambling style and to his brave attempt to dare being expansive in the old medium. Lanier strikes a paradoxical position. On one hand he achieved one of the most public profiles of all those who could be said to represent the first wave of post-Mosaic web celebrity. (Howard Rheingold, Larry Lessig, Tim Berners-Lee, Meg Whitman, Sherry Turkle, and many many others achieved his kind of celebrity.) On the other hand, his pushing back against the ‘wild west’ of the internet is reactionary, is maybe even naive.

Mass behavior may be the most difficult-to-grasp impetus for internet trends. Being a social psychological phenomena, such behavior may especially befuddle the code warriors and technologists. That the behavioral and monetary costs have tended to depart from each other, with the former typified by how much time a user invests, while the latter in many examples approaches zero, do not constitute anything able to be put back in the box.

Take the example of music. The biggest challenge for the “sociopathic” consumer is managing their time, whereas the cost of content–in the world’s biggest record store–is already realized to be zero, free. Yet, at the same time, advertising space is utilized by, for example, global Fortune 100 companies in the form of pop-up and widgetized ads splashed at the very sites where the sociopathic takings are occurring.

We are a collaborative species. No single perspective could possibly cover every aspect of an issue, but together through the collage of our collective experience we wage war on the challenges of our reality. This is collective intelligence, an emergent characteristic of life that we see in many other social species like honeybees, ants, and migratory birds. At every level of complexity an individual’s best efforts could never compare to the magnitude of the seemingly intelligent behavior of the swarm.

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?’

Facebook Tries to Monitor Happiness
By Chris Crum – Tue, 10/06/2009 – 16:31

Reveals Data Regarding the Moods of Users

Facebook has revealed the United States “Gross National Happiness,” the results of a study on the collective mood of Facebook users. Facebook “data scientists” started a project earlier in the year to measure the overall mood of people from the US on the social network, based on what they said in status updates.

The measurements come from the numbers of “positive” and “negative” words used in updates. It is unclear what words are considered positive and which ones are taken into account as negative.

“When people in their status updates use more positive words—or fewer negative words—then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual,” says Adam D. I. Kramer, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Oregon and an intern on Facebook’s data team.

excerpt I.

But there is another level of primitive anxiety. Many people fear that they will be taken over, overwhelmed, invaded, flooded. They experience an email mailbox in their computer (actually the mailbox is at the internet provider, and you control when it is opened or whether or not to open any letter onto your screen) as a junk-mail salt mill grinding perpetually at the bottom of their unconscious or a sorcerer’s apprentice’s water well, endlessly overflowing. The fear is that it is inside your house, in your study, inside your private places, utterly invasive. I have been told this by a number of friends and colleagues who hate the very thought of email. It is as if all of the nearly forty million people thought to be on-line (no one knows how many there really are) will crawl straight into their orifices and along their neurones. I suppose I am omnivorous or perhaps greedy. Yet I don’t feel that way. If I don’t like the look of something or a whole string of things, I can just highlight and delete them without opening them, like throwing away unwanted brown envelopes. I have a form of software, Eudora Pro (whose manufacturer and dealers do not, in my experience, provide good back-up, but there is a friendly user email forum), which can automatically file things into different mailboxes inside my Mac. I don’t let it do it automatically. I let the titles come up and then select the ones to file away after opening the ones which look interesting or urgent or personally addressed to me.

What I am saying is that the technology is at my service, and I have mastered it enough to feel in control of the several hundred postings I receive every day and of the 327 megabytes of email information on my hard discs. Before you roll your eyes, I should say that I am the moderator of two email forums and am involved with several web sites and electronic journals and that by far the bulk of the messages sent to me are about administrative and software matters and don’t even get a glance unless I happen to be interested in the subject. Even so, I have friends and colleagues who will have nothing to do with computers or, if they have one, absolutely do not want to get onto the internet. I think that’s a pity and that they will change their minds just as people did about radio, telephone, tape recorders, video recorders and are doing so with respect to portable phones. The sheer convenience and utility and cultural benefits eventually outweigh the disinclination.

excerpt II.

One of the most striking features of email forums and letters is that people can experience almost no impediment to expressing themselves — for good or ill. They can say something which they would be very unlikely to say on the phone or write in a letter, largely, I think, because it all feels as if it its happening in the head. You do not even have the other person’s voice cues; no piece of paper, envelope, stamp or trip to the post is required. Cyberspace has a fantasy quality. As a result, people say the most intimate thing and the most horrid things with considerable ease. I have had postings from utter strangers about their breakdowns and sexual predilections. I have had insults unparalleled in my other experience. One follower of Thomas Szasz wrote of my attempt to engage him in debate as follows: ‘The ultimate rejection – to have your hand fall asleep while masturbating.’ Sometimes this sort of invective becomes widespread, and that’s called a ’flame war’. They can burn down whole forums.

excerpt III.

What is now happening on the forum is that people are beginning to note and comment on the atmosphere of idealisation and denial and tentatively to acknowledge that no one really knew or (it seems hard to write) cared very much about the man before he died. One person has reported to me that about a month before his death she ’had accused him of holding up the process by shutting down on anything emotional’. I hasten to add that many felt his loss acutely and were eloquent in their expressions of how much their senses of loss taught them about how much he had, after all, meant to them. (I had a similar experience when someone died whose presence in my intellectual and political life I took for granted, the writer and critic, Raymond Williams. I’d had no idea of how important to me it was that he was there until he was gone. A line from a Paul Simon song has come to represent this discovery: ’Who’ll be our role model, now that our role model is gone?’) It has not yet been said that he was in control of and in some way responsible for the process of self-withholding and that it is therefore in no sense the group’s fault that they (notice that I did not say ‘we’) did not support him sufficiently to keep him going. As far as we know no one had the faintest idea that he was thinking of checking out. (A line from an Eagles song, ‘Hotel California’, comes to mind: ’You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’.) His ultimate distress was split off and concealed, while his best and most reasonable self was projected into the forum membership as an idealised community, perhaps even a virtual family.

At the time of writing, the forum is largely stuck on its members’ attempts to make reparation, while a minority risk severe criticism by trying to get it moving again. No one has yet drawn in any sustained way on psychoanalytic or group relations theory to probe the massive (I suppose it is to say fatal) split which was going on in the inner world of its founder and perhaps had its echoes in the group relations of the forum as a large group. I suggest that looking closely at the potential utility of the Kleinian concept of the paranoid-schizoid position (see Young, 1994a, pp. 77-78) and at the forms of basic assumption functioning (ibid., p. 157) about which Bion wrote might be a way forward .

In fact, after I delivered the first version of this paper, I found the following recent comments about him and about the group’s process written by an active forum member: ’Frankly, I think he was extremely ambivalent about conducting this research the way he knew perfectly well it needed to be conducted. It wasn’t his “style” to look too deeply into process and affect — I think it downright terrified him. As leader, he consistently directed our conversations (for such a non-directive type, believe me, he was directive), away from deep process work. I think he was also fascinated by this approach — but he consistently steered away from it.’ The same person made the following suggestion to two key members of the forum: ’Just for fun, imagine that your roles here were shaped by… projective identification of parts of himself (wanted or unwanted) onto you. What would those roles be?’ (for an exposition of the concept of projective identification, see Young, 1994a, ch. 7). There is reason to hope that something may yet be learned about net dynamics from this distressing set of events.

Adults have free will. Adults are autonomous. If you do not believe this you
are a whiner who likes to blame other people. If you admit that something or someone
is influencing you beyond physical force or a threat to your livlihood, you are
weak or perhaps crazy. This is why people hearing voices are considered crazy.
Not everyone hears what is there to begin with so if someone hears something differently big deal. It’s when they obey the voices or fall under their spell that they are no longer strong, competent, free adults. Please keep all this in mind.

What I’m about to tell you goes against the statements above: If you are on Facebook chances are very good that this nearly monopolistic social network is manipulating you, and even if you resist the manipulation you will feel its effects in the form of costs in time and energy.That feeling of something getting old fast is exhaustion you are spending in fighting something. Let’s give that something a name.

First, let’s remember that manipulation is not force. No one will make you do anything on Facebook that you absolutely don’t want to do and you are free to leave. No one will charge you money for not participating in certain activities. You will not be thrown out of groups usually though you may get unfriended, the unfriending will not spread across your entire network of friends. Facebook instead uses feed layout, bait and switch tactics, and social engineering to encourage you to accept third party applications which let unknown software developers view your profile. Facebook also uses feed layout and lack of user instruction to discourage you from finding and using alternatives to third party software.

Let’s start with my feed. I have blocked over two hundred third party applications on Facebook. Most of the games my friends play or quizzes they take can not send invitations to me. Still this is my feed.

In this image, real news as reported in the Atlantic and my friend’s African Safari sit side by side as if they are equally important. African Safari is a game. The issue with the banks is real. The pictures from the game are larger and more enticing than the message from the Atlantic.

In addition, this particular game, African Safari, is deceptive. If I go to its cause page, it says it donates money to Nothing but Nets (Undoubtedly it does this because if it doesn’t it is committing fraud.), and every ten dollars raised saves a child’s life. Stop! Read this last sentence about the ten dollars carefully. Nowhere does it say that each game donates ten dollars. It does not even say that each game donates one dollar or ten cents. Nowhere in fact does it say how much each game donates. Usually, what these click through games donate is on a par with typical rates for impression advertising anywhere to a few tenths of a cent to a whole penny. Hey they are donating money and eventually they get to ten dollars for each net, but it just takes a while, but that is another story. It takes some careful reading and research to get past the pretty picture and charity appeal.

Let’s have another look at my feed.

As you can see, real news from my friends sits side by side with news of a friend’s gaming exploits. The gaming exploits are larger and more prominent, but they are just a game, and one that I’ve blocked by the way. My friend with the raspberry has no farm in real life, yet her gaming exploits loom larger than my friends’ real news.

None of this has to be this way. Facebook could simply report that my friend with the fake farm is playing Farm Pals and not show any illustrations. It could place gaming news separately from my friends’ status reports, notes, and link postings. It could choose not to advertise games in the feed if you are not a subscriber or offer a way to block games from the feed. It does none of these things.

Now let’s have some more fun with the feed. Friends’ birthdays are real news. I think we can agree with that. If I want to find them. I have to scroll to the BOTTOM of my feed and look on the right. A birthday is far smaller than a piece of gaming news.

If I want to see what is happening with my groups which are a native Facebook application, no group news appears in my feed at all! To find groups, I have to find a small icon at the top or bottom of my Facebook page and click it to go past the feed. Then I have to select a group of which I am a member and enter it. That is a lot of clicking. Perhaps Facebook would rather have me playing games.

Now, let’s take a look at how games propagate themselves between friends. A friend invites you to play, often by giving you a gift. The gift comes as a confirmation request that includes a wheedling message such as: &qot;BLANK has just sent you a special flower. I picked it out just for you…" or "BLANK has sent you a gift. Don’t ignore it or she will think that you don’t want it." This is social engineering at its worst. Ignoring a friend is rude. Sending back a gift unopened which is the equivalent of blocking an application is rude. Learning to be rude is the price of free will, and it is a very high cost.

A third tactic Facebook uses to spread third party software is bait and switch. You see your friends exchanging gifts and maybe you have a few gifts yourself. If your friends give gifts you want to give them too. You go to check out the gifts and find…

You thought Facebook was free! Fortunately, and according to your feed, your friends all send free gifts. Resistance is costly. All those little dollar gifts are going to add up very fast.

Now, before you stop and tell me about all the free alternatives there are to third party software on Facebook, I’ll tell you about the ones I know. First, there are occasionally free gifts. I’ve given them.

Second there are messages, walls, and notes. You can send an e-card to yourself and then place the link to pick up the card in a friend’s profile as a safe way of sending greetings. You can also keep a photo album of clip art and place links to the images on your friends’ walls. These get a big fat billing in the feed as an added bonus.

The downside of all of these alternatives is that they take either patience (Free gifts are not available every day.) or else some savvy. It takes work to bounce that e-card into your own box and then copy the link and paste it. It takes work to set up the clip art folder and the extra window and copy and paste. Third party software does it all for you and you can use it on impulse. Resistance costs.

So what are the alternatives and what can any of us do. Adults after all are powerful and autonomous and no one pushes us around because we have free will. Of course, one can leave Facebook, but that means leaving your friends who may or may not follow you. Also everyone seems to be there and people will constantly nag you to return. There do exist other social networks with better software and less third party manipulation, but getting your friends to follow you to Ning, Eons, MySpace etc… is hard.

Blocking third party applications is of course an option, but one pays a terrible price for resisting a constant barrage of social engineering, being branded, ungrateful or a killjoy. I’ve experimented for various strategies for dealing with this problem. Usually, if I would accept the gift (There are some invitations I turn down flat for a variety of reasons), I visit the recipient’s wall, leave a thankyou message and either a bit of clip art or an inspirational quote and a link to the quote’s source. This hopefully shows that it is possible to liven up a wall without resorting to third party software. Sometimes I mention that my return gift requires no invitation or third party software. In this way, I lead by example.

If there is a prayer request in the gift I have blocked, I write to the giver and ask via private message for a text copy of what she prayed. If there is charity fraud involved, I usually also inform the giver by private message.
All this takes time, but I need to sleep at night, and resistance costs.

The one element of Facebook’s manipulation that I can’t escape is a feed full of third party software advertisement in the form of large news items like the illustrations in this blog. It took me a while to realize: "This is not real news. This is not important. What is important to me with Facebook is not often on my front page." Still I step past this constant barrage every day. I wish I did not have to do it, but until organizations to which I belong decide to leave Facebook along with most of my friends, I am stuck there. I’m a captive audience and I spend way too much energy preserving my small bit of free choice.

Study says people don’t understand the emotional tone of emails, but think they do (source)

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

People only ascertain the intended tone on an e-mail message about 56% of the time, not much better than chance, according to a study led by Prof. Nicholas Epley (University of Chicago) and Prof. Justin Kruger (New York University). The research also found that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone 90% of the time.

Epley and Kruger discovered that not only were the receivers of the e-mails overconfident about their understanding of the message’s tone, but the senders were as well. About 78% of the senders thought that the receiver would correctly interpret the tone of their e-mail message.

Epley explained that “People in our study were convinced they’ve accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance.”

He observed that “people often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they ‘hear’ the tone they intend in their head as they write.” Kruger likened this to findings from previous research by Elizabeth Newton that people vastly overestimated their ability to convey a tune by tapping out its rhythm. “It’s impossible not to hear the song as you’re tapping away,” he said. “So you have a hard time separating yourself from your own perspective and realizing how impoverished the listeners’ data really are.”

Epley stated that similar misunderstandings of emotional tone play a major role in starting online flame wars.

The study has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

VB: What are some of the key skills required of team leaders and facilitators of virtual teams?

Jill Nemiro: Well, first of all, I would have to say that in virtual teams, team members are often required to play many different roles on multiple projects. So a person may be a team member on one project, and a team leader on another, but still be part of the same virtual team. Thus, the skills that team leaders need are really important for all team members. That being said, there are a set of eleven different team member and leader competencies that I lay out in Creativity in Virtual Teams as crucial for effective virtual teamwork.

The competencies include:

• Developing an awareness of yourself and how you interact with others;


• Developing and practicing supportive communication skills;


• Building the ability to communicate effectively across cultures;


• Resolving conflict effectively;


• Problem solving and decision making skills;


• Managing stress because virtual work schedules are often 24/7;


• Time management and personal productivity skills;


• Developing and motivating others – coaching and empowering;


• Utilizing positive political skills to push ideas forward;


• Knowledge management, data gathering, and information access skills; and


• Developing ways to advance one’s career in the virtual workplace.

What is interesting about the skills needed is that they function at many different levels – the individual team member and leader, the team, and the organization. It’s important for individual team leaders and members to be self-aware, manage stress, be personally productive, use positive persuasive and political skills, and develop ways to advance their individual careers in the virtual environment. At the team level, team leaders need to communicate supportively across cultures, collaboratively solve problems and make decisions, help to resolve potential and real conflicts between team members, and motivate and coach virtual team members. At the organizational level, there needs to be systems in place to help team leaders and members manage knowledge and information.

VB: If you were putting together a virtual team what weighting would you put on personality compared to skills? What kind of personalities are most suitable to achieving a highly creative virtual team?

Jill Nemiro: Not all individuals are comfortable, or even want to work in virtual teams. And of course there are many different forms that virtual teams take.

Some virtual teams are composed of people who never meet face-to-face, and some have varying degrees of face-to-face interaction involved. So that would be a variable that might influence the type of personality needed. For those individuals who require, as one of the team members I interviewed shared, “warm, human contact”, being on a team that is totally virtual may be somewhat isolating. On the other hand, another team member I interviewed said she did not require this type of social interaction from work colleagues, and actually rather enjoyed only having contact virtually with her fellow co-workers. She commented that there was less politics involved. So I suppose the degree of interpersonal connection one wants at work would be a factor.

What I think is even more important is a sense of self-discipline and responsibility. Virtual teams require team members who are self-driven, responsible, and proactive. So to go back to your original question about what do I think about personality versus skills in terms of a highly creative team, I’d say that it is extremely important to have members on virtual teams that are self-motivated – especially those in which the level of synchronous and face-to-face communication is limited.

Beyond that, I’d say that the development of the eleven skills I mentioned earlier are much more important than any other personality traits for developing a highly creative and effective virtual team.

Internet communication increases the range of possible social networks that a person can connect to, and adds elements of diversity that are very appealing to some (Wellman, 96). There is a “hyperpersonal aspect” to Internet communications, a way to be more selective about how one presents ones self. The kinds of differences between people that might inhibit relationship formation are hidden. This promotes a sense of group membership, one that is solely depended on the perceptions of the receiver. Control over impression formation is enhanced in written mediums. “Another component of the model, feedback, suggests that these heightened self-presentations and idealized perceptions magnify each other to a superordinal level, as users reciprocate each other’s partial and selective presentations.” (Walther, 96). This magnification factor of the hyperpersonal model is a theoretical formulation that could help account for the high rates of flame wars (arguments) and love affairs that happen on the net.  There is as yet no empirical evidence supporting the observation that flame wars and love affairs occure in open, interactive virtual communities at a rate higher than what one would expect, but there is a growing body of anecdotal reports of this and a widespread awareness of a high frequency of these extreme interpersonal cyberspace exchanges.

There can be a voyeuristic aspect to cyberspace participation, which may be more salient to some that others. People that “lurk”, participate in a read only mode, in chat rooms or email groups, are surreptitiously witnessing the ideas, feelings and interactions of the active participants. In the more academic discussion forums, where the social norm is the exchange of research ideas and the philosophic debate of social abstraction, this voyeuristic component is not a significant attraction. This is in contrast to some chat rooms where the suggested topics often invite flirtations, or the forums set up to provide emotional support for difficult personal problems. In these forums, lurking is a means of gaining access to very personal information in a manner that no real life forum can offer. This electronic eavesdropping is one possible source for the positive reinforcement that the nature of the Internet provides to those for whom it’s use has become pathological. This emotional stimulation is on a schedule of reinforcement called variable-ratio, as one can never predict just when some “juicy tid-bit” of self-revelation will come across one’s screen, and the actual exposure rate to this is dependent on the amount of time spent on-line.

The attributes of Internet communications that stand out as offering the potential for rewarding, stimulating emotional involvement’s include; it’s ease of access and 24 hour availability, the wide range of diverse personal connections possible, the hyperpersonal nature of interpersonal relationships, the ability to witness others interacting (with no risk) and the uninhibited nature of no risk relating. It is reasonable to assume that many people will find one or more of these factors reinforcing enough to become passionate about their Internet activities, at least for the initial period of time when they are still discovering the capabilities of new Internet social connections. These factors are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain true pathologic computer use. Some additional qualities inherent in the user must be present that differentiate those for whom Internet communications are a passionate past-time from those for whom this activity becomes a compulsion resulting in loss. The passion possible is understandable, as virtual community involvement’s dissolve geographic boundaries and expand the ability of people with common interests to share ideas important to them. However, the nature of addiction is to continue to pursue the initial excitement one received, at the risk of other social involvement’s and responsibilities.

EXCERPTED FROM:

Is the Internet Addictive, or Are Addicts Using the Internet? 

 By Storm A. King 

December, 1996