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?

I listened with interest to an interview with Steve Jones who co-founded the Association of Internet Researchers (AoiR). Towards the end of the interview he was talking about features the AoIR6 conference had that others should adopt. I think he was absolutely right about the value of face to face features like lengthy coffee breaks with coffee right there in the hallways to encourage informal discussion but I think he over-sold the benefits of accompanying the conference with various Internet communications options like the conference wiki and the IRC channels that were available. I have to note that both features were woefully under-used by participants. And if you can’t get a bunch of Internet researchers to use Internet tools to complement face to face interaction despite fairly frequent prompting then I have to question their utility in any but the most geeky of settings (though I gather some Internet technology gatherings have used ‘back channel chat’ successfully).

My experience as a virtual communities consultant has shown me time and time again that people will not invest the time and energy to try new forms of interaction unless there is a strong incentive to do so. This may also explain why the AoIR still relies on email mailing lists for communication when there are any number of sophisticated messageboard systems which would do a better job of structuring communication (eg Caucus, which is open source or WebCrossing). I’m afraid that no matter what the benefits of moving to one of these platforms there would be a sufficient number of people who would hang back that would make the move impossible. (Also, I would not suggest making such a move unless most current and likely members of AoIR had broadband Internet connections, as email is more suitable for narrowband users).

Neighbornode is an interesting new project that encourages neighborhood-based virtual communities by providing messageboards that are associated with local wireless networks. Nobody who is not actually connected to that wireless node can read what is on that bulletin board, but ‘nodes’ that are adjacent to each other are linked together.

I often thought that one of the things standing in the way of neighborhood-based virtual communities was simply the problem of 1) getting a "critical mass" of people in a neighborhood online and 2) making a space online where there was a reasonable likelihood that your neighbors would also hang out. This new scheme seems to neatly solve both problems…

The UK government is trying out a new service - the People’s Network Enquiry Service where you can ask (it seems) just about any question you like and a librarian either from the UK or somewhere else in the world (if you mail outside 9-5 Mon to Fri) will try to answer it. Will this encourage those not online to use it by providing an easy to understand alternative to surfing? Time will tell…

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To continue our discussion, some time ago, I came across this article, and the following summary (courtesy of info policy).

Now, this is an interesting paradox, censoring suicide. Death should be forbidden as well now. Dying is fine, but death. Any thoughts?

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Ourmedia (a spin-off of the Internet Archive) has just launched. This is a hugely ambitious project that the brilliant head of the Archive, Brewster Kahle, alluded to a year ago in a Notcon talk I blogged about. It has been spearheaded by J D Lasica and Marc Canter.

Their intention is to provide a place for anyone who has any kind of digital content to post it publicly, have it indexed, stored and made available online forever, for free, no matter how much of it there is. The price of camcorders has declined steadily and it is reasonably easy to turn video footage into digital files on recently-bought computers. But until now there has been no easy way for people to get their video stored unless they have connections to some kind of digital art organizations or can afford to pay - this is because each minute of full-screen video takes roughly 8Mb of space to store and streaming video over the Internet is a costly business. (Several commercial companies have come and gone offering some kind of video streaming for consumers - Streamload is one of the few I have found still around with a good free offering).

Flickr (which has just been bought by Yahoo) has already demonstrated that providing an environment where people can share picture content and easily form communities around it can enable fascinating and stimulating creative and social activity. Ourmedia lacks Flickr’s interface slickness (it is still in alpha, despite launching today) but it adds audio and video storage to Flickr’s pictures and text and while Flickr has a free offering it is not as capable as their paid subscription features.

With this service, one of the last technical/economic barriers to widespread personal Internet video broadcasting has disappeared. But broadband is still vital for uploading video files and almost as essential for viewing them - and only around 150m households worldwide have broadband.

The biggest overall barrier, however, remains a knowledge barrier. While on the surface using a video camera is simple - just point and shoot - understanding how to do it well to tell a story remains an art. And the software tools for video production available on computers remain difficult to use and time consuming. My father just finished producing a short video of our wedding but it took him two years to complete and a lot of frustration.

I have made an account on Ourmedia but I don’t know what I will do with it yet.

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As David Wilcox points out, there is a new site/service recently launched - the Digital Divide Network which offers an array of communication tools to practitioners from blogs to good old fashioned discussion boards as well as collections of articles.

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