Bernie Hogan

Reddit has posts of all kinds, and comments to follow. This includes its fair share of navel gazing. But reddit’s penchant for self analysis has no lack of thoughtful points alongside mere complaining and in-jokes. This is doubly interesting in a recent (ongoing) discussion about the state of the site. One user asked: Is “reddiquette” or etiquette on Reddit going the way of the dodo? The top conversation is a typical reddit trail of wisecracks (this time about Reddit being a hipster that is “too cool” for Reddit these days). But following that is a sustained discussion of different comparable websites, Eternal summer, and scaling issues. There’s an appeal to more participation and cynical retorts. One particular post on the general life cycle of online discussion forums usernametaken6767 summarizes this issue rather nicely:

I’ve been using the internet since the mid-90s. Every single awesome community or interesting subculture on the net that I came across has eventually turned to utter crap due to an influx of people.

It’s basically this: Regression toward the mean

combined with this: Eternal Summer

finally with a bit of this: Online disinhibition

edit: the only communities that haven’t turned to crap, I’ve found anyway, has been criss-crossing conversations on well-written specialist topic blogs. For instance, I’m interested in warfare. There are some excellent blogs and conversations on war out there that you would never find on digg, reddit, or other social voting type sites. This holds for most blogs I’ve read where the bloggers and the people discussing things have been specialists, authorities in the area, or “pro amateurs” from a variety of political and social positions. Free for all voting communities that are topically transient tend to eventually forment group think, whether blogs gathered around some topic tend to be more individualistic (individuals agreeing or disagreeing with each other).

But is it really that simple? People tend to do things online they wouldn’t otherwise, but this pushes people towards some general average. Those who resist, or have a pretty specific conception of the site tend to complain, but still participate. The best way to avoid a dull average gorup is to seek out smaller topic oriented forum or fragment that group into a smaller more ones where the mean is more aligned with their expectations.

Well, I guess that’s not that simple. But it’s classic Reddit, and reminds me a lot of my theory of Lowest Common Denominator culture. The above quote received at least 71 points.

We have extended our call for papers for the special issue of Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society. Please note the new dates. Feel free to contact either myself or Anabel with questions or requests for further information.

Best, Anabel & Bernie

REVISED CALL FOR PAPERS Special Issue on “Persistence and Change in Social Media” “You can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on to you.” Heraclitus.

Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society

ISSN: 0270-4676 eISSN: 1552-4183 http://bst.sagepub.com/

Submission deadline: November 1, 2009 Scheduled Publication date: May 2010

Guest editors: Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute Anabel Quan-Haase, University of Western Ontario

BSTS editor: Willem H. Vanderburg, University of Toronto

TOPIC OUTLINE We seek papers for a special issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society on the twin topics of persistence and change in social media. From ICQ to IM, Six-degrees to Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter, change seems to be a recurrent theme in social media. Not only are users willing to try out new tools, but they also continue using existing media. In light of the seemingly endless novelty in social media, how can researchers build a theory of social media practice, rather than local theories on a per-site basis? Which insights from one site can we apply to another? Which ones are due to period and cohort effects and which ones relate to the structure of social media generally?

For this issue we hope to publish papers that not only address a specific social media phenomenon, but also do so with an eye to the potential for constant change and the persistence in social media of trends and communication patterns. We will gladly accept papers studying a specific web site or online context, but we want to encourage submitters to frame their analysis in terms of wider shifts occurring theoretically, empirically or substantively.

Topics include but are not limited to: - Comparative analyses of multiple social media - Pan-site theories of interaction, self-presentation, privacy, disclosure, boundaries, and media usage - Change in user behaviors over time - Global differences in social media use patterns - Meta-analyses of articles on specific media sites or social media-specific topics - Shifting public concerns in the usage of social media - Evolution of specific online memes, events or practices - Evolving practices in privacy, communication, social networks, and friendship formation - Development and maintenance of community in social media

Methodologies include but are not limited to: - Multivariate statistical analysis - Virtual Ethnography - Social network analysis - Scholarly meta-analysis - Content analysis

Typical social media tools include but are not limited to: - Interpersonal Tools (Instant Messaging and Voice-Call tools): ICQ, Windows Live, Skype, AIM, etc. - Business Tools (Knowledge Exchange and Collaborative): IBM Sametime, Oracle Collaboration Suite, etc. - Large-Scale Social Network Sites (Friendship and Community): Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster, Coach Potatoes, etc.

Paper length: Papers should be between 5,000 and 7,500 words (excluding references, tables, and figures).

Important dates: Papers due: November 1, 2009 Comments to authors: December 15, 2009 Final papers due: February 1, 2009 Expected publication date: Summer 2010

Submission Guidelines: Information about manuscript submission guidelines can be found online http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdManSub.nav?prodId=Journal200908. Formatting follows APA style.

Please send questions and papers to Bernie Hogan (bernie.hogan@oii.ox.ac.uk) or Anabel Quan-Haase (aquan@uwo.ca).

For me, presently the most impressive network in the world is not the network of email traffic, Facebook friends or cell phone calls. Both for sheer size and complexity, the personal network must surely take the cake. In many ways, it is not merely a superset of most communication networks. It is something different. It exists in minds. The rest is a proxy. This is the network of mutual acknowledgement, of individuals as particular beings, rather than as signifiers of something larger, such as a town, ethnic group or any classification. Like rebranding bank machines as “Personal Touch” machines, as Royal Bank did in Canada, rebranding this network of particular relationships as the personal network, we make it sweet and homely. It softly bumps up against community, and might mutter “sorry” for complicating terminology. It is anything but homely. It is not simply a friend when you’re feeling down or a neighbor to loan a cup of sugar; it is almost everyone who knows anyone.

In my work I show samples, like microscope slides, of this personal network. They are not perfect. But it is worth knowing that the people who try to access this network in a measurable way realize they are not perfect. But nor are they completely made up and hopelessly useless because of recall error. Firstly, it is not “error”, it is bias, and it is not noise, it is difference in how people understand the world.

Such samples, done through direct questioning are a snapshot of the world as is understood, rather than the world as made (via telephone calls, emails or twitter feeds). At a fundamental level, there is no need to be sneaky about this network, or seek to assert the primacy of the ‘communication network’ simply because it allows researchers to scale up their ventures more rapidly. The fact that humans presently cannot read each others minds, or directly access these minds should not be forgotten, or ignored. It is this limitation that prompts us to use representations like a call graph. But it is so obvious, or at least so taken for granted, that we often forget this network of minds is the real target. The fact that we cannot read minds means that we must infer them, not that data stands in for them, not that behavioral traces encapsulate them.

Of course, not every large scale network concerns the personal network. There are many designed systems that benefit from the understandings brought on by massive scale network analysis; we need efficient power grids, transportation hubs, waterways, commodity distribution systems and so forth. But that should not blind us to the fact that as humans, it is the relations to each other that matter most. The rest is just a proxy.

Not long ago when listening to the band Menomena I thought to myself, “I should look up more about them.” It’s a pretty mundane thought, in fact one I have pretty regularly through the day, not about Menomena, but about things in general, including books, people, musicians, movies and events.

I posit two interesting things about this thought:

The potential to act immediately: I can act on that thought now, by myself, and immediately. My capacity to search for information is limited only by my mental focus on another task (including the often extremely important task of paying attention to other co-present people). But, assuming I can switch my focus, I can do it almost immediately. I’m neither going to wait and ask my friends nor go to a library, record store or magazine rack. I just pick up my phone or type in my computer a search for “Menomena”. Often, I search specific storehouses of information, such as allmusic, metacritic or if it is something for which I don’t know the right site(s), just Google.

The premise of action: I’m not a medical doctor, private investigator or stock broker. I’m not solving a problem when listening to Menomena, the way a doctor may wish to immediately look up information on a specific ailment, injury or drug. If I don’t look up information the music will still play, and I’ll be none the wiser. But nevertheless, consider listening to music on an Internet enabled device as contrasted with television or radio. An internet-enabled listening device is a sufficient condition of possibility for this sense that acting on this thought is possible and practical. It doesn’t create the thought, but compared to watching a one-way chanel or radio station, it clearly facilitates a different and engaged mode of consumption.

These two interesting points about the thought “I should look up more about X”, reminds me of childhood. When I was a child I enjoyed encyclopedias, dictionaries, price guides and compendiums. I suspect it was less what they contained then their experience as an object that allowed me to search for things. They implied a certain empowerment. I’ve met lots of people who were charmed by the encyclopedia, especially when they were young. I would pour over facts, scan pages and come up with questions that I hoped the encyclopedia might answer. I had friends who would create tables, on loose-leaf paper, of the population of major cities and countries. This was grade 4. I also know a lot of older people who have an encyclopedia in their house and may look something up as reference once in a blue moon. When asked why they purchased such a little-used set of books, they say it is for ‘the children’.

The encyclopedia experience is all grown up now, and it no longer lives in static pages stacked on living room shelves. But it is not just Wikipedia, it is searchable knowledge in general. I wouldn’t conflate this encyclopedia experience with Web 2.0 or a ‘network society’. It is merely one small slice of the attitude adjustment and difference in being-in-the-world that is suggested by the Internet. Certainly not a revolution, but why not consider it an evolution? The thought “I should look that up” is not mundane at all. It’s a sign of empowerment in the face of streams of one-way communication. It indicates social cohesion when it is premised on the idea that you can get accurate or at least “proper” information from outside, often community driven, sources. It indicates progress of some kind when the search results become increasingly coherent without being redundant. It’s a testament to freedom (along that very thin line between thought and action) when it is not followed up by “I better not”.

One of the overwhelming new features of digital culture is how objects persist on servers when we’re not tending to them. Facebook photos stay up, mail lie in waiting, pages representing not merely a mailbox, but ‘me’ persists waiting to present my digital self. A few months ago, I began to consider that client-side, “show it when I want to”, could make a resurgence. I would be the keeper of the master copy, not Picassa, not Flickr, not MySpace.

Today Opera, my personal browser of choice for over five years, fired the their first shot across the bow of cloud computing: Opera Unite. Their browser is now an on-demand server. Configuration is dead-simple, and despite a few usability hiccups, its a completely coherent and intelligible experience. And I think it is how I want to share my data.

Consider this scenario that happened to me recently: I am viewing houses for a friend of mine. Consequently, I have to take pictures of these places and send to him. These are other people’s private spaces. If I upload these pictures, they are copied to a server. But there are too many to email (at least in one go), and p2p through IM (sending one at a time) is a nuisance. Enter Opera 10’s Unite. I select a directory and Opera gives me a webpage and a password. Sending this webpage to someone else, they see a well-formatted page with thumbnails and the ability to view and download pictures. Dead-simple and takes place solely between me (& my data) and the person or people I want to share it with. I’ve heard some criticism of Opera Unite – who wants to do this? Why not place it in the cloud and be done with it? Moreover, Opera is still a gatekeeper vis-a-vis dyndns. Details. Ultimately, I only see one perennial problem – having the server under one’s control means that it is only on when the computer is on. This might waste power, processor cycles, bandwidth or time.

Other issues of usability and purpose will work themselves out over time. Personally, I think peer-to-peer, rather than cloud-mediated services will always have a place. In a perfect world, I would even like to see distributed social software that queries and aggregates from clients in such a way that the client is an intimate part of the process rather than mere sender of data. I want you to ask me, not Facebook, for my photos. Opera United is a fine first step in this direction.

I’m taking baby steps with this new blog and making sure I’ve got the tools I want all sorted out. But the short version is that I plan on using a Scrivener, TextMate, Markdown, Wordpress job herein. More details behind the cut. Continue reading ‘Baby steps’