A BBC Radio series, Analysis, looks at how we tackle practical ethical questions from an unusual angle this week. Instead of trying to establish what our personal moralities should be logically, the scientists interviewed discuss what the biological and even neuroscientific processes are that appear to drive our moral senses (and show some provocative examples of how our moral instincts fail to coincide with logical moral reasoning). Grab it while the audio is still live (I think even non-UK people will be able to download the MP3 though I may be wrong).

A journal article I recently wrote with Sonia Livingstone appeared early this month on “early view”. It’s in Children and Society (which is not, alas, an open access journal) but here’s the address and abstract to give you a flavour of it:

On the Rapid Rise of Social Networking Sites: New Findings and Policy Implications

Social networking sites have been rapidly adopted by children and, especially, teenagers and young people worldwide, enabling new opportunities for the presentation of the self, learning, construction of a wide circle of relationships, and the management of privacy and intimacy. On the other hand, there are also concerns that social networking increases the likelihood of new risks to the self, these centring on loss of privacy, bullying, harmful contacts and more. This article reviews recent findings regarding children and teenagers’ social networking practices in order to identify implications for future research and public policy. These focus on the interdependencies between opportunities and risks, the need for digital or media literacy education, the importance of building safety considerations into the design and management of social networking sites, the imperative for greater attention to ‘at risk’ children in particular, and the importance of a children’s rights framework in developing evidence-based policy in this area.

We encourage comment and queries…

I would have loved to have shared more about my thesis findings here (and even make sample chapters available online as others have done, but was afraid of two things: first that a potential external examiner would read one or more chapters and then be ineligible for invitation to my viva and second that when I started to pitch a book based loosely on my thesis research the publishers would say “you’ve already given away the best bits online so we won’t take it”.

It turns out, however that I needn’t have worried, at least about the second point. I attended a “how to get your book published” workshop where about 8 publishers were on a panel and when I asked about this issue all of those who replied said they would be happy to publish a book where the thesis was available free electronically. Several went further and said that they felt that authors having a blog or a site about the book ahead of launch - even one that gave away some of the content pre-publication - would probably be a net benefit.

So once my thesis is complete (I hope as early as Monday if my viva committee don’t recommend corrections) I will let you all know where to download it and hope to engage in a conversation around its contents here and elsewhere. While you wait, I have linked to the abstract for my thesis, ‘As if nobody’s reading’: The imagined audience and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK - I will link to the full text there as well when it is available. Enjoy!

The BBC has been working with the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council on a number of research projects as a pilot project and this has been documented on the Knowledge Exchange blog. Now no fewer than 9 papers have been made available via the latest blog posting - really interesting!

The Media@LSE departmental research newsletter is now online in PDF form, featuring articles on Financial Journalism and Creative Commons & P2P in China, along with a summary of some of the work of our Early Career Researchers. If you want to keep up with the workings of the department you can also sign up to an email newsletter and if you want to be alerted by email whenever this blog is updated you can enter your email address below:

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its State of the News Media 2009 report. It features a mini-analysis of the economics of online advertising for news organizations and it doesn’t make encouraging reading. In particular:

Even before the financial credit crisis hit in September, Veronis Suhler Stevenson projected that for the two online ad categories most oriented to news, display and classified, spending would reach $16 billion by 2012. If news sites represented 20% of that, it would amount to roughly $3 billion, or less than one tenth of what newspapers alone took in during 2008.

It’s all very well for new media pundits to tell news organizations to trim their operations to sizes that can be supported by new media revenues but as a society can we really afford to lose 90% of newspaper journalists?

100,000 words summarised at a glance - click to see it full-sized.

Dr Aric Sigman’s recent comments have had wide media play - the BBC has interviewed him and some of the wilder reaches of the media have produced alarmist headlines like “Does Facebook Cause Cancer?“. Dr Sigman told the BBC:

interacting “in person” has an effect on the body that is not seen when e-mails are written. When we are ‘really’ with people different things happen,” he said.

“It’s probably an evolutionary mechanism that recognises the benefits of us being together geographically.

“Much of it isn’t understood, but there does seem to be a difference between ‘real presence’ and the virtual variety.”

All very interesting, so I got ahold of the paper in The Biologist he wrote that caused all the fuss (Sigman, A. (2009) “Well Connected? The Biological Implications of Social Networking”, Biologist, 56 (1), pp. 14-20.)

He starts by noting that most of us in the developed world are spending more time in front of screens. He mentions an editorial of the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine saying social network site use

encourages us to ignore the social networks that form in our non-virtual communities. The time we spend socialising electronically separates us from our physical networks.

He then provides a great deal of evidence whose persuasiveness I cannot assess that social isolation, lack of social support and loneliness are bad for your health. Where, though, is the evidence presented for a biological difference between face to face and online communication? Nowhere.

He does cite one piece of social psychological evidence - Kraut, R., et al. (1998) “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?”, American Psychologist, 53 (9), pp. 1017-1031. This study concluded internet use correlated with negative effects on social involvement and wellbeing. However this study while widely cited is now very controversial - indeed its lead author produced a followup Kraut, R., et al. (2002) “Internet Paradox Revisited”, Journal of Social Issues, 58 (1), pp. 49-74 which concludes that the opposite applies. More recently, studies are beginning to suggest that the use of Facebook helps people “maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of offline connection” Ellison, N., C. Steinfield and C. Lampe (2007) “The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (4).

There are of course different biologically-related points that can be made about excessive screen time being correlated with lack of exercise (which is bad for you) but that doesn’t enter into Sigman’s analysis. So until we can analyse some of the evidence that Sigman alludes to in his interview of a different biological response to face to face vs virtual contact I would suggest that his work can be used to assert that Facebook use (insofar as it may reduce loneliness) can be good for your health.

CBC radio presenter Jesse Brown provides a succinct (< 12 minute) and entertaining audio summary of the varying predictions available of the future of news - the latest episode of his long-running internet news podcast, Search Engine. This segment at least is well worth recommending to media or journalism undergrads as a talking point.

Kalev Leetaru has done a valuable bit of digging in this comparison of Google Books with the Open Content Alliance’s work. Conventional wisdom is that Google’s work is on a broader scale but restricted because of its commercial focus while the Open Content Alliance’s work is on a smaller scale but as “a partnership of libraries and corporate sponsors under the administration of the Internet Archive” they are thought to be the ‘good guys’, offering access “available without restriction to public access and enjoyment”. It appears however that the OCA allows its partners to (for example) prohibit unauthorised commercial use of scanned material even when that material is out of copyright, and it occasionally mis-labels out of copyright works as copyrighted (though in fairness Google may well make similar errors).

The piece provides rather more detail on the minutiae of digitization than most outside the book preservation community will find interesting, but those interested in the future of books online may find it an interesting read.