Karrie Karahalios is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk entitled “Text and Tie Strength.” Karrie is a Berkman Fellow from the Univ. of Illinois.

[THE NEXT DAY: Ethan Zuckerman has posted his superior livebloggage. Please proceed there in an orderly fashion.

"What attracts people most is other people," said William H. Whyte. People want to sit and talk. But what is the equivalent of a seat in a virtual space. Her group studies visualizations of group interaction. She shows examples, including how voting changes interactions, and how conversations cluster around topics.

Karrie grew up in a small town in Greece. Every Sunday her father would call from America. The call would come to the one phone, which was in a tavern. The people around expected the call and would participate. People use communication media differently in rural and urban areas, she says. E.g., rural communities used to like party lines; it was like a sub-net. Urban folks didn't and the telephone companies moved to individual lines.

Her group sampled communication usage in rural and urban communities. They had five hypotheses. Rural people would have networks with:

fewer friends and comments

more women

more private profiles

friends are closer geographically

preference for strong ties over weak ties

The results showed that all but the last were true. In part this is because it's hard to quantify strong and weak ties.

She suggests: Maybe there are two MySpaces: Rural and urban.

To understand weak vs. strong ties, her group explored Facebook. It's quite binary: someone is either a friend or a stranger. The dog breeder who you met once has the same presence in your FB network as your husband.

Tie strength was invented by Mark Granovetter in the 1970s, in the book Getting a Job. Karrie says: "Strong ties are the people you really trust." They help people through difficult times. And if a strong tie is depressed, you might get depressed also. "Weak ties are merely acquaintances." Granovetter pointed out the utility of weak ties in "The Strength of Weak Ties."

Her group looked at FB and wondered how to map FB parameters to tie strength. They set up a set of questions with continua, e.g., "How strong is your relationship with this person." They assessed 2,184 friendships, from 35 university students and staff, along 70 parameters. E.g., friend-initiated wall posts, wall words exchanged, friend's status updates, inbox intimacy words, together in photos, age differences, political differences, mutual friends, groups in common, links exchange by wall, applications in common, positive and negative emotional words, and days since first communication.

Her model had seven elements of tie strength: structure, emotional support, services, social distance, duration, intensity, intimacy. Her findings showed the relative importance of each of these (which I've listed in order, from least to most). The most predictive FB element was days since first communication. This may be because the first people you first connect with are the ones you are most tied to, although you may then not use FB for much communication with that person.

Karrie finds it quite interesting when her model doesn't work. E.g., "This friend is an old ex" who was friended when they first began. She says that strong ties can be love or hate, although we tend to assume strong ties are positive; her model doesn't include negative strong ties. Also, there are times when someone else's account is used as a proxy for two others to communicate, e.g., neighbors who are feuding and only communicate through a three year old child's FB account; Karrie's model does not account for that.

How might this applied? Suppose you could organize your photos so your strong ties saw one set and your weak ties saw another? Trying to do this by hand is a nightmare.

They did this work in 2008. Then they wondered whether it applied to Twitter. The created wemeddle.com where you can see the people you follow on Twitter. It clusters them by the strength time. Photo colorization and size indicate strength. Karrie says she's been surprised to find that she's more interested in what her weak ties tweet.

Her group is studying the quantifiable data (e.g., server logs) but will also interview users.

Q: Your model users linear regression on Facebook?
A: Yes.

Q: How about a geo-map visualization?
Ethanz: Someone recently did this sort of thing for Facebook. There are areas with cross-national friendships and some without many.

Karrie wonders if there is a single model for strong and weak ties that applies to all social media.

Judith Donath adds that following links is a strong signal of a strong tie, which is information that the WeMeddle client could start tracking.

Karrie: In FB, we took advantage of reciprocity as an indicator of tie strength, but reciprocity for Twitter doesn't work.

Ethanz: Strong vs. weak is so murky. WeMeddle is a very nice provocation. Also: LiveJournal gives you valence, as opposed to FB that only lets you friend or not friend. At FB, every relationship is symmetrical. Twitter is more like celebrity: once you have over a few thousand people, you're broadcasting. It'd be interesting to look at tech that enables a strong-weak tie continuum.

Karrie: There's lots of lit on info flow, but not on how the strength of ties influences how you send info out across the network.

Judith: We're all fooled by the asymmetry of Twitter, which makes for a bizarre set of ties. WeMeddle and your model might help us make sense of it.

Donnie Dong: Could WeMeddle combine FB and Twitter?
A: Yes, it's possible. People would have to put in both logins.
Donnie: Twitter and FB are blocked in China. It'd be interesting to look at people who communities inside or outside the Wall.

Q: Have you looked at email? And have you looked at the connections among people twittering about disasters?
A: We haven't looked at either of those things. Disaster relief would be fascinating to look at.
Ethan: There's a report that during the Iranian uprising, there were only 60 Iranians tweeting, and the rest were Americans retweeting.

Q: Can you track how people gain trust, to move from outer circle to inner circle?
A: The trust problem is really hard. Trust with text — the literature hasn't been very complete. With 140 chars you don't get a lot of queues. On the other hand, looking at reputation systems might get you somewhere. I wish I had a better answer for you...

Q: [me] Doesn’t this suggest that strong and weak ties is too much of a polarity for the Web?
A: It suggests that trust doesn’t map to strong and weak. There may be several types of strong and weak ties.

Judith: Granovetter was really interested in homogeneous and heterogeneous ties.

Ethanz: Maybe look at John Kelly’s work on how blogs link to third parties. Look to see what everyone links to. You’ve got all the data, but if you grab the links people are linking to, you can imagine another way of clustering people.

Karrie: There’s lots of work recently about how information gets dispersed. E.g., to spread info quickly it’s better to have a network of people who believe things easily than having one large influencer. Also, it’d be very interesting to map people by complementarity, not just similarity. Overall, I’m really interested in how these ties evolve over time.

Wendy Seltzer: You could look at contextual work (a la Nissanbaum). E.g., do people name their groups at WeMeddle the same way, and how do people move people in and out of groups.
A: There’s a set of privacy questions. Suppose people publish the list of their inner circle. Why aren’t I on it? I don’t want to destroy any relationships with this work. What attracts people the most is other people.

5 Comments »

From the National Journal:

Sens. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., secured $30 million in federal funding for the State Department’s efforts to promote Internet freedom as part of the agency’s fiscal year 2010 spending bill. The program must be approved by the full Senate and the House before it makes its way to President Obama’s desk. The money would promote widespread, secure Internet use by individuals residing in countries practicing repressive Internet monitoring, censorship and control. The outlay is “a low-cost method of allowing people, especially those living under repressive regimes, to access all-source, uncensored, unfiltered information,” the senators said in a Friday press release.

“Tearing down these Internet cyberwalls can match the effect of what happened when the Berlin Wall was torn down,” Specter said. “This funding seeks to enable freedom of thought, expression and the unimpeded flow of ideas and information, and I am pleased my colleagues have recognized the program’s importance.” Brownback added the battle being waged in the streets of Iran and China is also being fought on micro-blogging site Twitter, social network Facebook and other platforms. “This is a pivotal moment for people living in oppressive regimes. The best way to ensure their ability to communicate and share their story with each other and the world is to keep the Internet open,” he said.

The House passed a State spending bill Thursday that did not include Web freedom funding but Energy and Commerce Committee member Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., earlier this week urged lawmakers to hold a hearing on the role of the Internet in giving a voice to those in repressive countries. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who in the 109th Congress chaired a high-profile Internet freedom hearing of the House subcommittee that oversees global human rights, has repeatedly introduced legislation that would prevent U.S. tech firms from working with nations that capture and convict citizens for engaging in democracy promotion and human rights advocacy online.

The NY Times reports on danah boyd’s kick-butt keynote at PDF09, in which she pointed to the class divisions in the Net:

Is the social-media revolution bringing us together? Or is it perpetuating divisions by race and class?

Many of us would like to believe the Internet is a force for unity, but danah boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thinks we’re deceiving ourselves.

Speaking last week at the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference that explores how technology is changing politics, Ms. boyd asked a packed audience of activists, political operatives, entrepreneurs and journalists to raise their hands if they use Facebook. Almost every hand in the place went up. Then she asked who uses MySpace, and barely a hand was seen.

How could that be? Sure, Facebook is growing much faster. But MySpace is far from dead. In May, Web-traffic tracker comScore reported that Facebook and MySpace are neck and neck in terms of U.S. visitors, with 70.28 million that month for Facebook, up 97% from a year ago, and 70.26 million for MySpace, down 5% from last year.

vMs. boyd got some answers from group of people she’s been hanging out with over the last four years: U.S. teens. During the 2006-2007 school year, her conversations with high-school students began showing a trend of white, upper-class and college-bound teens migrating to Facebook–much like the crowd in the conference hall has. Meanwhile, less-educated and non-white teens were on MySpace. Ms. boyd noted that old-style class arrogance was also in view; the Facebook kids were quicker to use condescending language toward the MySpace kids.

“What we’re seeing is a modern incarnation of white flight,” Ms. boyd said. “It should scare the hell out of us.”

More in the article, including research by Eszter Hargittai… [Tags: internet class social_class sociology politics e-democracy ]

1 Comment »

danah boyd has posted her doctoral dissertation online. Here is the abstract. (I haven’t yet read the dissertation, but I’m pretty confident it’s great.)

“Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics”

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices – gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices – self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties – persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability – and three dynamics – invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private – are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

[Tags: danah_boyd internet_sociology sociology teenagers social_networks networked_publics myspace facebook ethnographics berkman ]v

1 Comment »

Clay Shirky is giving his book talk. Here Comes Everybody was released today. It’s immediately necome #1 at two Amazon lists. [Note: I'm typing quickly, getting things wrong, paraphrasing, etc. For an accurate report of what Clay's book is about, please read Clay's book.]

The Internet isn’t a decoration on society. It is a challenge. It is important on the order of print and broadcast. Previous media either were two way or they didn’t create groups. Now we have a network that is natively good at group forming. And this medium contains the contents of the others. In a single bullet point his book says: “Group action just got easier.”

Humans are great at forming groups. But they get complicated faster as they get large. A workgroup of 10 has four times more connections than a group of five. There are native disabilities once a group passes a certain size. The typical answer has been to install a hierarchy. Now we’re seeing a set of tools that make it easier to create large groups: Ridiculously easy group forming. E.g., email unexpectedly became the dominant service used on the original Internet. That was because of the “reply all” button, a social feature.

But there’s been an enormous social lag. This tech has not transformed society as rapidly as it might. That’s because groups are innately conservative. No one wants a protocol that shuts out group members. It needed to become ubiquitous and boring. That’s when the social effects become interesting. Clay tells the story of his parents’ first date, a story that is not about internal combustion engines but that depends on the presence of them. We needed the Net to be always present and invisible for it to have its social effect.

Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action are rungs on a ladder: How much does an individual have to work to coordinate with the group?

Sharing. E.g., Delicious.com has urls, users and tags. It lowers the difficulty of sharing, so the social effects are practically unintended. It’s “me-first” collaboration (cf. Stowe Boyd).

Tagging systems let you share and then aggregate, reversing the traditional order. E.g., the mermaid parade in Coney Island. Since Flickr added tagging in 2005, you can click mermaidparade and get all the photos. The photographers weren’t coordinated ahead of time. Sharing has become a platform for coordination, rather than vice versa.

The next rung up the ladder is conversation, i.e., people actually synchronizing with one another. Clay shows a “communty of practice” at Flickr: High Dynamic Range photography at Flickr. Pre-Web, it would have taken 5-7 yrs from a pro photographer figuring it out to people in the street doing it. At Flickr, it took 3 months because when a photo went up, people could talk and ask how it was done. People post photos, etc. The medium becomes the platform for a community practice where people help one another get better. No commercial incentive.

That’s an example of “every url is a link to a community.” The discussion can turn into a group sharing resources. Clay points to bronzebeta.com, a Buffy site. It came after the Bronze bulletin board shut down. The fans raised money for new software to create their own bronze. They told the designers not to give it any features: no ratings, no identity mgt. They just wanted the system they used to have, a very basic discussion board.

He also points to Aegisub, a project that required a division of labor. It was a huge collaborative effort without a commercial motivation, or an anti-commercial motivation. Their success resulted in making themselves unnecessary.

The fourth rung is collective action. That’s coming. Three stories:

In Jan, 1999, a Northwest flight was stuck on the tarmac fo 7.5 hours. NW signs a toothless bill of passenger rights. Same thing happened last year and it resulted in legislation. What happened? Kate Hanni was on the second plane. She googled for articles about the flight. She comments on all of them, in detail. At the end of each comment, she asked others on the flight to contact her. She’s coopted the media and turned them into sites for coordination. She goes around to legislators’ offices. William James, the philosopher, once said “Thinking is for doing.” We have brains because we’re deciding between courses of action. Now publishing is for acting.

Second, flash mobs started as a critique of hipster culture. The guy who started them said he could get people to do anything at all if you tell them that it’s a protest against the bourgeoisie. It spread to Belarus: They’d go to a square in Minsk eating ice cream in January. Cops arrested them. It was illegal to form groups in October Sq. The kids turned the joke on hippies into a genuine form of dissident action. They provoked the government into reacting, and documented it. Media led to collective action, and the action led to more media. They thought publicity would make a difference, but the West turned out not to care much about Eastern European dictatorships. The tools are very different when deployed in high or low freedom environments. (They’d also done a flash mob where people walked around October Sq smiling.)

Third, a group ran around Palermo putting up stickers protesting the prominence of the Mafia. It was a big story. Now they’re reversing it. They put up a Web site at which businesses can agree to refuse to pay the protection money. If an individual business were to do this, the Mafia would act. They also let citizens search the site for businesses who’d signed.

So, ridiculously easy group forming improves sharing, convesation, collaboration and collective action. Clay is watching now and in the future to see how collective action evolves, for that is the hardest but could be the most important.

Q: Privacy?
A: Privacy cuts across all of this. The higher up the ladder you go, the more important it matters. For sharing, privacy doesn’t matter much, but if we’re going to converse, I at least need a handle. To collaborate, I need to know more. But if we’re going to bind ourselves in collective action, then identity becomes really important. [Hmm. That last point seems wrong. In some collective action, we don't need to know much about others. E.g., a flash mob of kids eating ice cream.] Privacy isn’t all or nothing. Under what circumstances do we want people in a collective action to know one another, but not be known by others. The big change in privacy is not in opt-in or opt-out; it’s that we’ve lost “don’t ask.”

Q: Yochai Benkler is working on whether you can explain this other than by enlightened self-interest?
A: There’s a growing literature on explaining behavior via social motivations. Behavioral economics is unambiguous about the ultimatum game: People will refuse deals that seem unfair, even if they’re in their interest.
Q: But social cohesion is to my benefit …
A: What you’d really like to be in a group that produces public goods but not have to contribute. But the willingness of people to spend resources to keep social cohesion going cannot be rolled up just to individual enlightened self-interest. [Missed some of that. Sorry.]

Q: What are the downsides you see?
A: I used to be a cyber-utopian. That view broke for me. I was teaching a class at NYU on social software. One of my students was a community manager for a magazine for teenage girls. They were shutting down the health and beauty boards because we can’t get the pro-anorexia girls to shut up with tips about how to avoid eating. I was thinking this isn’t a side effect of the Net. It was an effect. Ridiculously easy group forming for anorexics. Now, we have to move to a publish-then-filter world. That pattern suggests we’re moving the media world from decision to reaction. We can’t stop the pro-anorexia groups from forming. All we can do is watch and act.

A: My nightmare is that the advertising budget for print shrinks and we lose newspapers in mid-size American cities. We lose investigative journalism. Every city under a million goes back to endemic civic corruption. The newspaper industry is not ready now to talk about how to save investigative journalism as we lost print.

Q: [couldn't hear it]
A: The social media being used in the presidential campaign is less social than before. Obama excels at fund raising, and public-created media. But no one has proposed a policy wiki. No one has proposed the lateral conversation among supporters. (I’m an Obama supporter.) There may be an opportunity in the first 100 days to do social production of shared ideas, which the campaign has not done so far. But I don’t think it can get there without creating a profound cognitive dissonance among the voters.

Have you looked at the mechanics of collective action?
A: The things that are working now are hard to fake, non-professional surprises. Someone has done something you couldn’t do with a fake grassroots campaign. Most email campaigns to the Senate are of zero value because they’re too easy to fake. [Hmm. It's not that they're hard to fake. It's that they had a cost.] The thing that worries most is the need to be surprising, because surprise is a wasting asset, because you can’t be surprising three times in a row.

Q: [me] Why did you choose the axis of groups that take actions? I can feel I’m a member of the Group That Likes Obama without actually doing anything…
A: I’m interested in the trade-off between individuals and groups. At what point can you not explain behaviors through individual psychology. I was irked by businesses that think they have communities instead of cusomters. The dividing line is between people who change their behavior because they’re in a group and those who don’t.

Q: Mobile streaming and virtual worlds. How do they fit into collective action?
A: The change in things we can do via mobiles will be far broader. And I don’t think there is such a category as virtual worlds. All successful virtual worlds are games. [Tags: berkman clay_shirky here_comes_everybody groups social_software sociology books ]

11 Comments »