Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Who owns the group?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 07/18/2007 - 14:41There is a group of people that meet at a conference every year. For the past couple of years, it has been facilitated a certain set of people. This year, the conference organizers have selected someone else to facilitate the group. I know some of the people in the group. They are smart people who like to think about group processes, and recently they got into an interesting question about who owns the group.
Is the group owned by the organization that sponsors the conference? By the group facilitators? By the members of the group? What does a change in group facilitation do to the group? I thought it might be interesting and expand it a little bit.
First off, we are all members of many groups. Some are very informally organized. Others are very formally organized. There are the group of people who are reading this blog post. This group has subgroups, people who come to the site, and people who read it through some sort of feed reader. Each of these groups can be broken down into further subgroups such as what browser or what feed reader is being used, or how you found the site in the first place. These grouping are very informal. People in the group may not know one another or communicate with one another. As such, these groupings are less interesting to me, at least for this blog post.
On the other hand, on a site like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog, people can identify themselves as readers of this blog. On MyBlogLog, I can send messages to everyone who has identified themselves as a reader of my blog. Others can see who is in the community and read their blogs. Does MyBlogLog own that group? Do I? Do the members of the group?
In a similar sort of way, there are various people that gather to watch movies together because of some shared interest. The same questions apply about whether the organizers or members own the group. Yet in this case there is another possible owner of the group, the producers of the films being viewed. I like thinking about this because it perhaps brings us closer to one of the reasons why this is an important question. Ownership and leadership of groups affects the way communications take place and perhaps more importantly, the collective thoughts that emerge out of the group.
This might seem like a lot of theoretical words right now, but it can have some pretty immediate application. As an example, I was a member of a mailing list back in 2003, of people supporting Howard Dean for President. This group also met face to face from time to time. Who owned that group? The Dean campaign? They stayed away from any aspects of ownership, particularly for campaign finance reasons. There was the person who had set up the mailing list, who from Yahoo!’s perspective owned the group. There was a woman who was very active with the face to face meetings who tried to assert some sort of ownership of the group, and then there was the group itself.
During the power struggle between a couple of the people asserting ownership, I was drawn in. There were discussions about whether or not the group owned itself, and if so, how did it handle leadership and the administrative functions of the mailing list. In the end it split into two different groups which faded away after the campaign was over.
Within political blogging today, there are many mailing lists where bloggers congregate to plan their strategies. Who owns these groups? Who owns the progressive political bloggers or ‘the netroots’? Who owns the group of people that participate in DailyKos or are going to YearlyKos?
How do these ideas affect people stepping into the blogging? I know people who have resisted posting content online because they aren’t ‘bloggers’. They aren’t part of some group. They don’t feel qualified to join the group, or they don’t want to associate with some group.
By thinking about the nature of groups, perhaps we can learn more about what is going on around us in our blogs and mailing lists.
Impression formation in blogging communities
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/17/2007 - 08:37If you read my previous post about managing online identities, you might be thinking, “Okay, I see how all of the material online is searchable, persistent and being linked together, but how are impressions really being formed online?”
At Personal Democracy Forum, Thomas Friedman quipped, “Whatever can be done online, will be done, and the question is, will it be done by you or to you?” A friend of mine suggested that instead of, or in addition to “to you” the question might be will it be done for you.
So, how are impressions formed online? Years ago, I was active in an online community where an anthropology professor would bring his students for an introduction to field work online. One year they did research on how impressions were formed online and Professor Jacobson wrote up the experience in a paper, Impression Formation in Cyberspace: Online Expectations and Offline Experiences in Text-based Virtual Communities. (I was part of the study.)
In the text-based environment, the students did not have access to pictures, so they interacted with people and hypothesized what the people would look like. They were later shown pictures of the people they interacted with. It was interesting to see how the students viewed me.
In the MyBlogLog community, there are different clues that we pick up. Everyone has an image. Often they are portraits. Yet they could be of just about anything. The choice of image says something and as I surf, I make guesses about whether or not a site is one I’ll be interested in visiting based on the image. When you click on the image, you see a bunch of tags identifying the person. Many of these are submitted by the MyBlogLog members themselves, but they can be submitted by others. The lack of tags says one thing about people. People have commented about skipping past any user that has SEO in their tags.
There is also indicate about how frequently a person uses MyBlogLog. When did they first join? When was the last time they were logged in? How many Sites do they author? How many communities are they part of? How many friends do they have, how many people have joined their blogs community? What are the messages that have been left, and what additional information has been added by the user. People have commented about skipping past any user that has over a thousand friends for similar reasons that they skip people with SEO in their tags.
Beyond all of this, there are impressions to be formed when you visit the blog itself. Is it using a default format, or has it been updated? Does the blog allow comments? How many people are commenting? Is there a blogroll? What does the blogroll say about the person? People have commented about how I have links to conservatives mixed in with my progressive links and they aren’t sure what to make of it. (I want to promote dialog and deliberation). Then, there are all the meme graphics that people have up.
All of this before we even really get to the content. That is probably worth many blog posts in and of itself. I commit the cardinal blogging sin of writing on lots of different topics. Other people are incredibly focused on a single topic.
Yesterday I received a fascinating post from Joyce Hopewell who writes about ‘astrological psychology’. She wrote:
Hi Aldon, You wrote another thought-provoking post about authority. I'd been thinking along similar lines for a while now about blogs & considering what gives a blog authenticity. Where is the author coming from? Is it place of ego or service? Are they genuinely sharing or out to impress? What kind of quality or feel does the blog have? And how do I feel about it? (that was your final question, I believe). I guess I use my eyes and senses quite a bit when I read blogs and tend either not to hang around long/or go in at more depth based on this initial, and - in the context of astrological psychology! - Jupiterian impression.
When I read that the first time, I thought ‘Jungian interpretation’ instead of ‘Jupiterian impression’. While I’m more interested in the effect of our unconscious on blogging than the effect of my date of birth, I imagine that Joyce would suggest that my date of birth shapes my unconscious. We all have our own frameworks for making sense out of what we experience. What are yours?
Managing online identities
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/16/2007 - 15:52I’ve had some interesting discussions recently about online identities and how we manage them or fail to manage them. An example of this is that a friend of mine was taking a train home from work. He fired up his laptop and logged into Facebook. The young woman next to him said, “I can’t believe your on Facebook”. I suggested that he should have told her, “Yeah, a lot of us check out Facebook and MySpace profiles before we interview anyone.
Even people who think a lot about the searchability of persistent online data can be surprised what can be done with online data. During Gov. Dean’s campaign they explored using Friend of a Friend (FOAF) as a means of connecting supporters. People were surprised to find detailed information showing up about them in unexpected places, through the power of FOAF crawlers exploring the web.
Today, I spoke on the phone with another friend who was interested in promoting the use of open source social networks for political purposes. I walked him through some of the tools that are out there. We started at my Facebook profile. (You probably have to be a friend of mine to see much of anything there.) In it, I’ve added a social networks application that connects up with UpScoop.
UpScoop is a pretty amazing tool where you can upload your mailing list and search to see who on your mailing list is on which networks. It is very slick and amazingly powerful. Looking at my profile on UpScoop, it showed sixteen different networks I was on, including links to my profile on almost all of them.
As I explored this with my friend on the phone, we decided to follow the link to one network that was listed that I didn’t remember joining, RapLeaf. It turns out that RapLeaf is the underlying engine for UpScoop and that their goal is to provide reputation information, based on email addresses tied into various social networks. In particular they focus experiences other people have had with you as a buyer or seller on sites like eBay or CraigsList.
It looks like it will be a very powerful tool and helps drive home the importance of managing your online identity.
All that said, I have a lot of recommendations of things that I would like to see RapLeaf do. First, it would be great if they could add OpenId. There is already OpenID support in Ruby on Rails, so it should be easy to add to their site. RapLeaf is based on email identities and ties it into profiles on social networking sites. OpenID is based on website pages. The two are closely related and ideally should be linked.
Beyond that, it would be great if they could support XHTML Friends Networks (XNF). It would be a pretty simple change to add. All of the links in the social networks section of the page could simply have the rel=”me” tag and the friends at the bottom could have a rel=”friend” tag. This would facilitate tools that explore XFN.
Ideally, it would be great if the could search out blogging systems as well. For blogging systems that will reveal user information based on email address, they should be able to do this simply. However, most systems want to keep email addresses private.
To get around this many systems, including RapLeaf use an SHA1 hash as a method of checking email addresses without ever showing the email address. If systems like Drupal, Scoop, Soapblox and others would allow people to look up people by the SHA1 hash of their email address, these sites could be searched as well. Maybe I’ll add the ability to search for users by the SHA1 hash of their email address on Orient Lodge. It would be great if people added it to some other blogging systems.
There are plenty of other ways in which this could be used in politics. Anyone who is interested in this aspect should contact me offline.
Putting the Hyper back in Hyper Local Journalism
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/14/2007 - 14:37I received two interesting emails yesterday. One was from Roch Smith encouraging me to list my blog at We101. The other was the daily news from Digital Media Wire which included a pointer to their article about Citizen Journalism Site Backfence Shutting Down.
The Digital Media Wire talked about Backfence shutting down its 13 hyperlocal citizen journalism sites after having raised $3 million last October. There are plenty of people providing plenty of explanations about why Backfence has shut down, however, the comment that makes the most sense is from Mark Potts, a co-founder of Backfence, over in a discussion the Poynter Online:
As all of us who have tried to create hyperlocal communities know, doing so is incredibly hard. Turning them into a successful business is even harder.
Bringing in a sufficient return on investment (ROI) on $3 million is a big challenge for any hyperlocal journalism effort.
On the Poynter site, people were hypothesizing whether or not the amount of community outreach was sufficient. One of the things that has always made local journalism successful has been the connections with the local communities and I’ve often thought that people who try to strategize about the future of local newspapers don’t focus enough on the value of the connections with the local communities and how to monetize this in new ways with digital media.
Whether or not Backfence made sufficient efforts to reach out to local communities, I’ve also often felt that this is one of the biggest hurdles for new hyperlocal journalism sites.
This is where Roch comes in. Roch got involved in the local blogging community in Greensboro, NC back in around 2003. While he has not been attempting to bring sufficient ROI on $3 million, the organic growth of the Greensboro blogging community has been successful. He’s now expanding this by trying to provide a platform where similar blogging communities can emerge and evolve. I’ve joined up in Stamford, CT. I would encourage any of, especially, those of you who blog that are committed to building community to sign up if Roch has set up the platform to serve a local community that you live in.
Volunteer viral community organizing may be part of the key to helping hyper-local citizen journalism sites become successful. So, I’m spreading the virus, and I hope you will too.
Questioning Authority Online
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/13/2007 - 10:19Yesterday, I asked “Why are you reading this blog entry”. I received several comments that I found particularly heartening. People were interested in “uncovering new ideas”. This is in distinct contrast to the concern that so many people have expressed. EPIC 2014 ends with a comment about “EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational.” This reflects a concern about citizen journalism, social media and the general direction of the Web that many people fear.
Andrew Keen takes up this theme in his book, the cult of the amateur. He talks about attending FOO camp which he describes as “a beta version of the Web 2.0 revolution” where “Everyone was simultaneously broadcasting themselves, but nobody was listening.” This comment particularly resonates with me. I often talk about how everyone wants to be heard, and no one wants to listen.
However, EPIC 2014 goes on to say, “It didn’t have to be this way” and it seems as if, at least from the responses I’ve been getting, it isn’t that way. Indeed, most of us are well enough socialized to listen to those around us, whether we are at a party or on the web.
Keen goes on to say, “The more that was said that weekend, the less I wanted to express myself. As the din of narcissism swelled, I became increasingly silent.” As therapist friends of mine are want to say, “Methinks he dost protest too much.” He certainly hasn’t been silent in writing or promoting the book. I have to wonder whose narcissism swelled and was injured.
Years ago, I attended various Group Relations Conferences. To use the language from the Group Relations Conference website where they describe a conference last May, as group relations conference is “an experiential conference in the Tavistock Tradition… designed for individuals who wish to study the exercise of authority in groups and understand more about their own reactions to exercising and encountering authority”
The ability for anyone to publish online challenges the some of the traditional authority structures and sources of authority. It seems as if this is what bothers Mr. Keen so much.
Through the MyBlogLog community, I stumbled across a way to virally promote the ‘authority’ of your blog, at least according to Technorati. Technorati views authority in terms of the number of people linking to your blog. This isn’t particularly a new idea. Authority in the academic world is based, at least in part, on how many people reference what you have written in their articles. A difference is that those articles typically undergo peer review before being published so it is more difficult to game the system the way the virally linking is gaming the Technorati system.
So, we have new communication tools which provide new ways of looking at, understanding and attempting to establish authority. We have authors like Andrew Keen trying to defend older methods of controlling who has authority. Perhaps what we really need are more people exploring the group relations’ tradition to better understand their own reactions to authority, especially as it now manifests itself online.
So, let me end this with a question for any readers that still remain. How do you experience authority online, both the authority of others, and your own authority? How do you determine the authority of websites you visit? How do you attempt to establish your own authority? And, to use the over used psychological cliché, how does it make you feel?
