It is sometimes claimed that young people today are more inclined to indulge in risky info-sharing behavior online. Well young people are online more certainly but I was also curious about how much of that difference was due to differences in overall online tech adoption and how much due to age-related privacy attitudes. I took Pew’s 2006 Digital Footprints survey and re-analysed it. I found that US people aged 18-24 were the most likely (6.7%) to report having had “bad experiences because embarrassing or inaccurate information was posted about you online” - compared to 3.6% in all age groups.

However, if you just look at bloggers across all age groups (using this as a proxy for overall use of information sharing technology) something interesting seems to emerge. Overall 13.9% of US bloggers surveyed said they had had these bad experiences but 12.8% of bloggers aged 18-24 encountered bad experiences from online revelations compared with 17% of 35-44 year olds and 25% of 55-64 year olds.

This might suggest that as we see more and more people in their 30s and 40s getting comfortable using blogging or Facebook we could see an explosion of embarrassing job or relationship-harming revelations.

Of course there are many flaws with this stat - perhaps older people are more sensitive to harms, and the number of bloggers sampled was small - there were only eight 55-64 year old bloggers for example. And this doesn’t contain stats on under-18s. Has anyone done anything better to examine whether older bloggers and/or social media users are in fact more cautious in their use of these technologies when they use them than younger ones and/or teens?

Robert Darnton is just the latest scholar to suggest this - this time in the NY Review of Books. But there’s a key assertion made which I don’t quite follow:

Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.

How is the position of a potential digitizer of orphaned copyright works (whether a commercial or not for profit venture) worse than before the Google suit? Google has set up a third party body that potential future entrants to the market can work with and has shown that it is possible to reach an agreement with publishers, at least in the US (something that was hitherto supposed to be entirely impractical). So if Google is successful they will encourage others to enter the market and if they are not commercially successful someone else may take up the challenge. Perhaps if it isn’t a commercial proposition Google could even be persuaded to hand over Google Books to a non-profit?

As I understand it nothing in the existing ruling gives Google a perpetual exclusive right to do what they are doing - they are just the only people to have tried (and they may be the only organization with the vision, the money and the technological skills to succeed).

Am I missing something?

I am re-visiting my literature review for my blogging-related thesis and I would like to make sure I have not missed anything important. I have uploaded my weblog-related references to citeulike here. I am particularly interested in qualitative approaches to blogging - especially interview-based work and in the study of personal/journal weblogs - sometimes dubbed “lifelogs” (as opposed to the study of weblogging for political, marketing or educational purposes). There seem to be very few such studies - those I have found I have pasted below.

So can anyone point me to important sources I have missed?

Update: I tried to do this using Citeulike but its importing from Endnote appears to leave something to be desired, so please comment here with your citations instead. I have pasted what I have found so far in the way of interviews with personal webloggers below (Thanks Lori for reminding of your contributions!).

(more…)

I am discussing different motives for starting and continuing blogging. Some are what I call ‘intrinsic’ - ‘I like writing, blogging is writing, therefore I blog’. Some are ‘extrinsic’ - ‘I blog because I want to raise my profile and improve sales of my book’. But there are some that are harder to fit. Like habit - ‘I blog now because it’s something I have gotten used to doing every day’. Or ‘I got started blogging because I read about it in a newspaper article and it seemed interesting’. Or ‘I had to have a blog to read my friends’ comments and once the space was there I couldn’t resist filling it.’ Is there a good way of grouping these alongside my other categories?

I have a very similar problem with the way that I look at what my sample of bloggers expect of their readers. Some are blogging to specific readers - eg friends and family (they don’t much care what they get back from them). I have called these monological blogs. Some are in a dialogue with readers they feel they know (dialogical), and some to or with readers they don’t really know (”telelogic” - because this is the kind of communication that CMC particularly enables.

So far so good - but what about those who blog and who like the idea of having an audience but aren’t thinking of anyone in particular as readers and don’t particularly need to hear back - eg “I blog because I like to write”? Or - in the extreme case - people who blog but though their blogs are open to the world they think of them as only for themselves? So far I am calling these “a-communicative” uses but that term doesn’t seem quite right to me.

My instinct is that there is a single term that spans these two cases, but I would be interested in hearing suggestions for terms for either case or both.

I just know there must be something out there in the HCI literature on how computer users are influenced by things like the size and position of buttons, or (of specific interest to me) by the size of text entry boxes. If you have a text entry box 6 lines long on a page and an otherwise identical page but with a 12 line long text entry box wouldn’t you expect the person writing in the bigger box to write more? (Even though in both cases the writer can in principle write as long as they like, with the text box developing scroll bars if they reach the end of the box)? I know that there is an interesting literature on the effect of defaults - I am hoping there is some similar research on this topic.

If you happen to know of evidence for this (or someone else at least asserting the same) either in the academic literature (preferably) or in the practitioner literature please comment…

I presume there is literature out there taking a phenomenological view of what using a computer feels like but I am not sure where to start looking. I hope to use it to buttress a hunch I have about why people seem to have trouble in managing public vs private space online. My feeling is that it’s because typing stuff into a computer just doesn’t feel like you’re addressing a large crowd at that moment - it feels like you are talking to yourself (unless you are addressing it to particular named other people who you can then visualise). One can make a similar point about the long life of blog postings. They feel conversational, not like having something published and indexed.

Anyway the only relevant reference I have been able to dredge up from my memory and Endnote database so far is this

Le cahier est inerte, plat, il appartient a la nature inanimee, c’est un fantome de lettre, un ersatz de livre. L’ordinateur a plus de relief et de personnalite, c’est un organisme vivant qui s’allume et s’eteint, vous joue des tours, vous surveille… (LeJeune 2000, p. 20)

(Roughly translated: A notebook is inert, flat and inanimate… The computer has more personality. It is an organism which starts and closes down… and which looks at you.)

Lejeune, P. (2000) “Cher ecran– ” : Journal Personnel, Ordinateur, Internet, Editions du Seuil, Paris.

Can anyone out there point me to some relevant papers or books about this?

David Brake

I have been thinking about a methodological issue - online interviewing vs face to face. One issue is simply the likely amount of data one can reasonably get from an interviewee in a given time. If the average Internet user’s typing speed is 30-40 words per minute (based entirely arbitrarily on what Microsoft seems to think an “average user” might achieve) while the average speed of normal speech is 280 word per minute (again only rather loosely sourced) then given the same time commitment from your interviewee you’ll only get about 15% as much typed info as you would get face to face. Of course there are a lot of other variables in there to help you decide what method to use but I would still be interested to know if anyone can provide proper citeable estimates of typical typing and speaking speeds to use as rules of thumb. It strikes me that differential typing speed might be an under-measured index of the digital divide as well…

David Brake

I went looking just now for references to two highly influential books about the media - Thompson, J. B. (1995) The Media and Modernity : A Social Theory of the Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.

For the former, Google Scholar found 442 references. For the latter it found 486 references.

I also tried looking up references to those books in four leading academic reference databases – the Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s normally-excellent Scopus, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences and Communication Abstracts (all four require academic subscriptions to access).

Whether searching for author name or title, the first two found very few records, almost all of them to do with academic papers these authors had written rather than the books in question. The IBSS at least found some reviews of the books in academic journals which was some help and Communication Abstracts contained a short summary of the Meyrowitz book but neither was much help in finding books referenced by other books either.

Admittedly, these databases are primarily aimed at indexing and cross-referencing papers, but for better or worse much of the scholarship in media studies is published in books (or book chapters).

It could be that I failed to use the right syntax to bring up the references I needed – Web of Knowledge’s can be a little tricky in places - and the Google Scholar citations don’t give you as much information (eg abstracts) once you have found them - doubtless many of them are of little utility - but considering the short length of time Google Scholar has been working I am impressed at the speed with which it is closing the distance to its competition.

Is there a trick I have missed?

David Brake

I’ve been listening to this podcast of a conference presentation by Anil Dash at MeshForum 2006 where he (one of the earliest weblog developers) makes a number of interesting statements including this snippet relevant to my upcoming thesis about personal weblogging, 4 minutes, 57 seconds in to his talk:

You have to know who the audience is that you care about. One of the assumptions that a lot of us that have been in technology make is that if we just let them everybody would want to talk to 100 people around the world and tell them how they feel. That’s actually not true and for most people they consider those of us that do that to be somewhere between strange and psychopathic.

Now how would you cite that? At the moment I guess that it should be treated as a conference proceeding:

Dash, A. (2005) “Scale Social Networks and Livejournal.Com “. in MeshForum, San Francisco, California,May 7, IT Conversations. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1069.html

But that doesn’t tell you it is a podcast and crucially it doesn’t tell you that the part you want to hear is around 5 minutes in. This useful guide to Harvard citation says BS:5605:1990 (whatever that is) doesn’t include recommendations for electronic sources. Is there an advanced Harvard Style Lab somewhere coming up with standards for this stuff? What would you do? Should I just make up my own style?

David Brake

Who are the scholars who have written most about the social function of phatic speech? (For example, “turned out rainy again today” - a favourite British expression). I have a feeling it’s something Goffman or Garfinkel or Harvey Sacks might have studied but I am not sure which texts to look in. I am not so much interested in the structure of such speech but why people do it, what they expect from people who they talk to and perhaps something about the power relations implied.