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.

Of course we all know that attention is unequally spread among bloggers - now it emerges that people’s blogs are being judged by the platform they choose to use to host them. In the interests of research I joined “PayPerPost” and I discovered that they have recently decided not to offer to pay people whose blogs are on certain services to post about products and services. The blog platforms in question are:

MySpace, Vox, Xanga, BraveJournal, LiveJournal, Yahoo360, and Blogsome

This decision was made based on the usability, navigability and overall quality that we have seen from blogs on these platforms.

Please understand that we do not mean to say that ALL blogs hosted on these platforms are bad blogs. However, the majority of these blogs are just not what the advertisers or our Marketplace are looking for at this time.

Of course some of these users will doubtless be delighted to find out that advertisers don’t think the people they speak to are worth marketing to or (more likely in the case of sites like LJ) that the norms expressed by users of these platforms are strongly anti-commercial.

How Wikipedia Works, a free-to-access book (also available in print) about all aspects of Wikipedia by some Wikipedia ‘insiders’ and
Is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia’s governance processes, a roundup of concerns from someone who has been both participating in it and studying it (inspired by this list of concerns by another critic, but adding links to specific cases).

I have not researched the subject sufficiently to have a view on the accuracy of the claims of problems but I was dismayed at the sheer number of allegations…

Ofcom (2008) “Social Networking: A Quantitative and Qualitative Research Report into Attitudes, Behaviours and Use”

As well as the new UK survey and qualitative information it provides, it contains a review of the literature on the social networking focused on potential harms co-authored by Sonia Livingstone and Andrea Milwood Hargrave with myself contributing. We would be interested to hear any reactions.

Facebook recently introduced “Pages” as an alternative to “profiles” for brands, companies and other collective entities to use. This fills a gap but alas their implementation is problematic. Just as you can only be a “friend” of a person (via their profile) on Facebook, the only relationship you can have with a “page” is to be a “fan” of it. I might want to register that I use, am part of or am interested in a company or organization with a page but that doesn’t make me a “fan”.

I suspect that Facebook did this so that brands like Nike would not have to deal with millions of people saying they were “enemies of” the page. Hopefully the API will enable third parties to make this kind of thing possible.

It is also worth noting that while they have announced to everyone that companies will be making “pages”, they don’t mention in that context that any individual or organization, non-profit as well as profit-making can make pages (you have to look in their “help” under “business solutions” - tellingly - to find the link).

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I have just been listening to NPR’s Technology podcasts and their coverage of the furore about strangers molesting children they first met through MySpace. I have some sympathy with the view that not enough had been done by the company to ensure the safety of children but some of the comments by those who are concerned make me worried as well.

Take for example the comments of Carl Berry, the attorney for a girl suing MySpace for letting an adult contact her “If they want to chat with each other that’s fine but I don’t see the social benefit of allowing children to talk to complete adult strangers online”, or those of Representative Diana DeGette (D) who told NPR, “we used to say to our children if a man comes up to you in the park or in the shopping mall don’t talk to them, run away. Now we have to translate that to the digital era.”

Are Americans really so terrified of each other? Fairly recent (2000) US research indicates only 7.5% of sexual assaults on children and adolescents were perpetrated by strangers (and quite a high proportion of assaults on teenagers are perpetrated by other teens, not predatory adults). The tens of thousands of ’stranger on pre-teen’ assaults in the US each year are terrible crimes but by far the majority of children will never face this danger. Is it worth creating a climate of pervasive fear and limiting childrens’ freedom to explore (and yes, even to make mistakes) in an attempt to tackle this? Just as adults’ civil liberties can be endangered in the ‘War on Terror’, those of children can be imperilled in the ‘War on Perverts’. And children arguably have even less of a chance to put their point of view than accused terrorists.
(Also see earlier posts Big Mother is Watching and The Death of Privacy).

David Brake

In a recent post on a new relationship capital group weblog - “Centrality”, Eszter Hargittai discusses how the limitations of sites which try to organize social networks constrain users’ connections - in the case she mentions because on Facebook you can only specify one school affiliation when many of us have three or four.

I have been complaining for years about a similar issue - the way American sites often make US-centric assumptions about their users (not bothering to specify when they don’t ship overseas, requiring a province/state as well as a city and country, etc).

But one of the bigger issues about social network software is not strictly technical and not fixable by a single firm. It is that with the proliferation of different social tools it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage who belongs in which groups and to get friends to sign up for them where necessary. I already have email mailing lists of my friends, Flickr profiles and more recently LJ friends lists to manage. They are not in sync and almost every time I add a new social software tool I have to get my (often technophobic) friends to sign up to that service too. So now I can’t remember who has access to what and who I have told what to where. It’s a problem that is only going to get worse unless social software companies get together and make it easy to build central profiles which people can use across different web applications.

Wasn’t the Liberty Alliance Project supposed to solve this problem? Or P3P? Or (heaven help us) Microsoft Passport? If this doesn’t get solved there may be increasing lock-in as it becomes easier to use, say, the Yahoo suite of applications like Flickr and Yahoo 360 just because you don’t have to remember multiple logins and neither do your friends…

Sue Thomas of the Writing and the Digital Life weblog brought my attention to a row that broke out a few days ago between Mena Trott (co-founder of a major weblog software developer) and Ben Metcalfe, leader of the BBC’s developer network. Mena was arguing that bloggers should be more civil in comments to other people’s blogs while Ben argued honesty was more important. This is an argument that will never be resolved because both sides seem to be trying to make rules applicable to all webloggers when all the evidence (including my research to date) seems to be showing that webloggers are performing a wide range of practices, each with their own appropriate norms and values.

Mena is arguably right that commenters should respect the norms of behaviour that appear to be present on a given weblog but Ben is right to suggest that in the subset of weblogs dedicated to rational critical discourse (a small subset of the whole), norms of politeness may be inappropriate and stifle debate. The real problem they are (unwittingly) identifying is not "how can we enforce or encourage a single norm of weblogging behaviour" but "how can webloggers signal what the ‘rules of engagement’ are for the spaces they create?" Perhaps bloggers could create "creative commons" style "licenses" around commonly-held behaviour norms?

P.S. In that case this blog might be labelled "comments encouraged, politeness not required, provision of evidence for opinions encouraged, statement of conflict of interest required where appropriate".

Thanks to Antonio Roversi I just came across an interesting piece about Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr which has attracted a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere (his piece is 2,500 words and the comments stretch for another 12,000 words - not counting 322 people so far who have discussed it on their own blogs). I won’t attempt to summarise it yet again but I encourage you to read it, though the author is occasionally as exaggerated in his "contrarian" rhetoric as the techno-utopians he criticises - eg:

Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die.

I think he’s right to point out the dangers but this is a little too apocalyptic. That said, his conclusion is spot on:

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral… it doesn’t care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let’s can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

I consider my own research as an extension of this - one of my more ambitious objectives is to look dispassionately at personal weblogging and to ask:

Is personal blogging really a liberatory technology (as almost all the scholars studying it seem to maintain) or is it just a potentially liberatory tool. If it is beneficial, for whom is it and how? And given the negative consequences of its use, what can we say about the net effect on society?